EUROPE : Banana Tiff: EC Slips Up on Basic Democratic Practices

The issue sounded tame enough: whether the European Community should erect barriers to banana imports. But when the EC legislative body grappled with it one cold day last February, the meeting stretched into the wee hours of the morning and tempers flared out of control.

The British screamed at the Dutch. The Germans denounced the British. The British threatened the Danes.

Long after the dust had settled and the protectionist scheme approved that night had taken effect, those who follow EC decision-making were still astonished by the name-calling and personal attacks.

But hardly anyone actually saw what had happened. This meeting, like all decision-making sessions of the EC’s legislature, was a private affair for members and their staff only. Blow-by-blow accounts were strictly secondhand.

Although Europe’s democratic roots are arguably the oldest in the world, the chief institutions of pan-European government are decidedly non-democratic. As University of Pittsburgh political scientist B. Guy Peters wrote in a recent Brookings Institution book, “Europe is some distance from being a parliamentary democracy.”

The EC’s “democratic deficit,” as it is called here, has become a source of considerable embarrassment to some community members, notably Germany. And at the grass roots, public resentment toward the EC’s closed-door policy contributed to the near-majorities in France and Denmark against the 1991 Maastricht Treaty on European union.

But for most of the community’s decision-makers, the status quo is so comfortable that efforts to shed more daylight on decision-making have had little effect.

Germany has sought, mostly in vain, to transform the European Parliament, the EC’s only elected body, from a largely advisory institution to one with real decision-making authority. To its dismay, the Maastricht Treaty took only small steps in that direction.

That left most responsibility where it has always been: with the EC’s Council of Ministers. The council consists of one minister from each of the 12 EC countries: the prime ministers for the biggest decisions; the foreign ministers for international affairs; environmental ministers for matters of pollution control, and so on.

Until this year, the council met strictly behind closed doors. When Denmark took over the rotating EC presidency on Jan. 1, it made a gesture toward greater openness by allowing television cameras into some council sessions to record ministers’ speeches.

But the cameras were ushered out long before decision time arrived. And Belgium, which succeeded Denmark to the EC presidency on July 1, has all but eliminated cameras in council meetings, arguing that they did little more than encourage ministers to make windy speeches for consumption back home.

Last February’s meeting of agriculture ministers on imported banana tariffs was entirely in private.

Until this year, some EC countries, notably Britain, France and Spain, protected their banana markets from most competitors. Their policy was to buy mostly from their overseas territories (France’s Guadeloupe and Martinique, Spain’s Canary Islands) or from former colonies (Britain’s St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Vincent and Dominica).

Other EC countries, particularly Germany, bought the best bananas they could find for the best price, a policy that usually led them to Ecuador and other South American countries.

That dual system could not survive the EC’s single market, which leveled most trade barriers at the EC’s internal national boundaries as of Jan. 1. Britain, France and Spain would no longer be able to keep out cheaper and generally tastier South American bananas imported via Germany.

That’s what all the shouting was about when the EC’s agriculture ministers met far into the night last February.

In the end, the ministers adopted a policy preserving much of the entire EC market for the favored suppliers of Britain, France and Spain.

No reporter or lobbyist saw it as it happened.