Profile : EC’s Trust-Buster Takes Heat : ‘You are never really loved if you are a policeman,’ Sir Leon Brittan concedes. But he relishes the challenge.

He is the scourge of some of Europe’s biggest industries, notably airlines and electronics. At one time or another his detractors have included many of Europe’s governments--particularly the French but even his own in Britain.

Arguably, anybody who has compiled such an enemy list must be doing something right. And this much at least is undeniable: Sir Leon Brittan, the European Community’s commissioner for antitrust policy, has made people all over Europe stand up and take notice.

Brittan--”Sir Leon,” as he is usually addressed by virtue of the title bestowed upon him three years ago by Queen Elizabeth--has the thankless job of telling European companies when they cannot merge with one another and notifying governments when they cannot slip a little financial aid to their favorite industries.

Hardly anybody loves Sir Leon. But then, his job makes that of the chief U.S. antitrust enforcer--the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division--look like a cakewalk.

“You are never really loved if you are a policeman,” Brittan said. “If you were, something would be very wrong.”

Brittan, like his U.S. counterpart, not only has to balance the competing interests of producers and consumers, but he also frequently has to take on the European Community’s own constituent governments in their role as defenders of their national industries.

A man of lesser intellect and ego might react less vigorously. But it is a challenge that Brittan relishes. He brings to it the zeal of a committed believer that free markets, unperturbed by monopolistic practices and government handouts, are the best markets.

He has an extraordinary mastery of the arcane legal issues that envelop antitrust law (or competition law, as the Europeans call it). And he flavors it with a uniquely British wit--verging on arrogance--that he honed as a debater during his university days at Cambridge.

It is not meant as a compliment when his opponents, including some of his colleagues at the EC Commission, call him “the ayatollah of competition.”

Brittan is a devoted European from a country that still harbors grave doubts about the wisdom of linking its destiny with the Continent’s. At a time when Europeans everywhere are accusing the bureaucrats in Brussels of empire-building, Brittan makes no apologies for his efforts to convert Europe into a single economic market and, at least for some purposes, a single political force.

“We must not sink into discouraged apathy and fearful immobility,” he said shortly after French voters on Sept. 20 narrowly approved the Maastricht Treaty on European economic and political union. “We must not just abandon all policy making in the face of anxiety.”

Brittan’s four-year term on the EC Commission expires at the end of this year. The British government has assured Brittan that he can return to Brussels with the new commission that will take office for the next two years.

But his portfolio will probably change. Brittan has been angling for the job of commissioner for external affairs--in U.S. terms, a sort of combination chief trade negotiator and, in much scaled-down form, secretary of state. He seems to have a good chance of getting his way when Commission President Jacques Delors reshuffles the responsibilities of his commissioners later this year.

If he does, the United States and Japan can expect a more aggressive Europe at the global trade negotiating table. Brittan does not hesitate to tell Americans and Japanese that they should do better--at least as well as Europe--in opening their markets to foreign competition.

Addressing the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations last April, for example, Brittan criticized the United States for its tendency “to enter into cozy bilateral side-deals with Japan” for guaranteed shares of the Japanese semiconductor and automobile parts markets. And in Tokyo two months earlier, he denounced the Japanese for closing their markets.

Brittan readily admits that the EC has been agonizingly slow to dismantle its own expensive program of agricultural subsidies, which gives European producers a competitive advantage and which is largely responsible for a 2-year-old deadlock in international negotiations aimed at liberalizing world trade.

But on the whole, Brittan insists, Europe is far ahead of its trading partners in opening its markets to foreigners. He cites the “EC 92” program, which will essentially turn the 12 EC countries into a single economic unit by the end of this year.

Gone will be most barriers between those nations to the movement of goods, services, money and people. As a result, Brittan argues, foreigners will find it as easy as Europeans to do business all over Europe.

“Europe is not a fortress,” he said. “It is generally a thoroughly open and permeable market.”

One reason, in Brittan’s view, is his dogged enforcement of antitrust policy. The European Community will not be a true single market, he says, if monopolies are allowed to develop or if national governments can prop up their favorite companies with subsidies.

That approach often puts him at odds with EC governments that believe European industry will be unable to go head to head with the Americans and Japanese unless it is sheltered from cutthroat competition at home. Brittan leaves no doubt about what he thinks of that view.

“Companies with a monopolistic position in the market will exploit that market and become flabby as a result,” he said. “They do not become world beaters. It is no coincidence that the Japanese companies that are so successful on the world stage engage in the fiercest competition in their own domestic market.”

For all his determination, he cannot always force his free-market views through the EC’s complex decision-making machinery.

But rarely does he suffer an outright defeat; more often, he backs off when the political deck is stacked against him. He did not interfere, for example, when the French government gave $1.3 billion this year to Groupe Bull, its ailing, state-owned computer maker. Nor did he try to stop France from investing $1.2 billion in Air France.

Many analysts believe Brittan was being careful not to arouse French antagonism toward Brussels before France’s Sept. 20 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. Brittan denies any such motive.

But he would rather talk about his triumphs. He has forced companies to give back billions in subsidies to their national governments. Even the British government of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher--in which he served as a Cabinet minister from 1979 to 1986--felt his sting when the EC Commission ordered it in 1990 to take back $80 million it used sweeten the sale of the foundering Rover auto group to British Aerospace.

Of the dozens of corporate mergers and takeovers that Brittan has reviewed, he has blocked only one. But that was a doozy.

Last year, Brittan mobilized a bare nine-member majority of the 17-member commission to prevent two EC aircraft manufacturers, Aerospatiale of France and Alenia of Italy, from buying De Havilland, a Canadian subsidiary of Boeing that makes turboprops. Brittan argued that the takeover would dangerously reduce competition in the EC’s market for short-hop commuter planes.

French and Italian officials went ballistic. Elisabeth Guigou, France’s minister for European affairs, called the decision a narrowly legalistic one that “risked gravely handicapping European industry” in global competition. French transportation minister Paul Quiles called the action “scandalous.”

As if mergers and government subsidies were not enough to keep him busy, Brittan has thrust himself to the forefront of EC efforts to scrape some of the regulatory barnacles from Europe’s most protected industries, such as airlines, energy, telecommunications and even postal services. Typically, he has met with considerable success--and ruffled many feathers.

“Brittan’s competition policy does not suit our industry,” said Karl-Heinz Neumeister, secretary general of the Assn. of European Airlines, in response to the EC’s airline deregulation. “They (the EC Commission) do not recognize that you have to be dominant at home to compete internationally.”

Nor is competition policy the sum total of Brittan’s portfolio. He is also responsible for creating a single European market for financial services--banking, insurance and investment services--and he has moved to open all three to competition from both within and without the EC.

In an interview, he listed that as one of the signal successes of his first four years in Brussels.

“In a more intangible way,” he added, “I hope I’ve played some part in getting the commission to adopt a more open attitude toward the outside world and adopt a more free-market agenda internally.”

Biography

Name: Sir Leon Brittan

Title: EC commissioner for competition policy and financial institutions

Age: 53

Personal: Lawyer by occupaion. Attennded Cambridge University and Yale University. Has wife and two step-daughters. Hobbies are walking, cricket, opera.

Quote: “I firmly believe that the (European) Community must accept those European states which wish to join and which are ready and able to do so. We have no right to regard ourselves as an exclusive and cozy club. . . . “