A new culture club for the Commission

Date: 02/09/1999

Romano Prodi has so far appeared to favour taking an Anglo-Saxon approach towards reforming the Commission. But, as Simon Taylor reports, he is in fact acutely aware that there is no one 'off the shelf' model which can be used to put the institution back on the straight and narrow

EVER since Romano Prodi emerged as the leading candidate to succeed Jacques Santer as European Commission president in March, the Italian appears to have been locked in a warm embrace with Anglo-Saxon culture.

His pro-market economics won him UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's enthusiastic support, and Prodi reciprocated by putting Briton Neil Kinnock in charge of tackling the new Commission's most important challenge: internal reform of the discredited institution.

When the incoming team first outlined its plans to clean up the Commission at a meeting just outside Antwerp before the summer break, it seemed to be using a textbook on Anglo-Saxon values as its guide. The proposed new code of conduct for Commissioners, which includes the creation of a new panel to vet the career plans of departing Commissioners, was seen as a classic example of this, borrowing as it did from tough UK rules for outgoing ministers.

Many people, both inside and outside the Commission, have blamed what is seen as the institution's French-dominated culture for the events which led up to the Commission's mass resignation in the spring, not least because of French Commissioner Edith Cresson's key role in the affair. What was therefore needed, they concluded, was a dose of British "playing by the rules".

But those first impressions were deceptive. For as the committee of wisemen pointed out in their interim second report, published just before the summer break, there is no one 'off-the-shelf' model which can be used to put the Commission back on the straight and narrow. Instead, Prodi and Kinnock will have to create a hybrid of the best features of each EU member state's national culture to reflect the unique job their institution performs.

It has also become clear that Prodi will have to do more than simply bring in a set of new brooms to sweep the corridors of power clean. He will also have to tackle the legacy of 40 years of failure to groom an immensely powerful and complex political beast for the 21st century.

As Prodi stressed in his speech to the European Parliament in July, the Commission was in need of reform long before the March crisis which underlined the case for change. "The world has moved on and the Commission has not kept pace. Not enough effort has been made in modernising the institution itself," he told MEPs.

Despite Prodi's apparent enthusiasm for all things Anglo-Saxon, he and Kinnock know that simply importing the UK's civil service rules and culture would not work because of the combination of tasks which the Commission performs. "The UK civil service is not a model because the Commission is sui generis. No other organisation has its mix of executive, legislative and policy-proposing powers including the right to initiate legislation," explains Kinnock's chief advisor Andrew Cahn.

Cahn stresses that while some of the plans for reforming the Commission which are due to be finalised by early next year will draw on the British model, Kinnock's team will look very carefully at practices in all member states, north and south.

He also rejects suggestions that the Commission's internal mindset is still dominated by the French way of doing things. "In the Fifties and Sixties, the Commission was run along French lines but things have changed radically since then," he maintains.

However, other high-level Commission staff point out that the 'House' (as insiders call it) has retained some features of the French school of public administration. There is of course the opaque terminology of cabinets, habilitations and chef de file. But more importantly, the Commission has a multi-layered hierarchy which sits uneasily with modern Anglo-Saxon attempts to disperse power and strip out unproductive layers of middle management.

Many believe it is the Nordic system of public administration, with its emphasis on openness and private sector-style managerial efficiency, which provides the best and most obvious model for reform. A senior Finnish official said there were three principles of the Nordic approach which could serve Prodi and Kinnock well: empowerment, which gives greater responsibility to individual officials and avoids the cumbersome channels of a multilayered bureaucracy; transparency and openness; and the use of modern management techniques.

Helsinki officials stress the importance of practices such as "activity-based budgeting", under which financial and personnel resources are allocated simultaneously to a project. They say this approach would have prevented the problems highlighted in the wise men's report which arose when the Commission did not have enough staff to carry out work it was being asked to do, leading to a reliance on outside contractors and an inevitable loss of control over spending.

But the Finns and Swedes who began working in the Commission after their countries joined the EU in 1995 complain that there has been significant resistance to their way of doing things. They point out that many officials were initially hostile to the MAP 2000 initiative to improve internal management simply because it was seen as a Nordic system, although this opposition has since been overcome.

Commission insiders say the biggest mistake in the development of the 16,000-strong institution has been to concentrate on policy-drafting at the expense of managerial ability. This, they maintain, inevitably led to problems such as the lack of accountability and failure to take responsibility which brought the last Commission down in the spring.

According to one senior official in the institution's secretariat-general, which acts as the Commission's nerve-centre, the institution developed this blind side because "for the 15-20 years after 1958 everyone saw their task as to deliver the product - policy initiatives - and not to deal with daily procedures".

He concedes that efforts to tackle the problem of weak internal management only began in the mid-1990s with initiatives such as the SEM system of financial control and MAP 2000 - and managerial ability has only recently become an important consideration in making senior appointments. "Until recently, internal job advertisements made no mention of managerial ability," he points out, adding that appointments had all too often been made on the basis of candidates' intellectual ability and as a reward for how well they did in their previous jobs rather than on how suitable they were for their new posts.

In a bid to tackle this weakness, Kinnock has already announced plans to introduce training courses in management skills for all senior officials, starting with all those at head of unit level and above but eventually taking in everyone with a management role.

But despite the value of such initiatives, almost everyone working in or with the Commission agrees that a fundamental change in culture is needed - and that this cannot be achieved overnight.

Newly elected European Parliament President Nicole Fontaine concedes that "there is no magic wand" which can be waved to solve these problems, adding that a lot of work will be needed to change attitudes in the Commission. "A change in the administration's organisation can only be effective if there is a change of administrative culture," she insists.

The most important thing for Prodi's team, she insists, is to show that it has learnt the lessons of the crisis which brought down its predecessor. Fontaine has welcomed the pledges made by the incoming Commission president so far, but warns that the Parliament "will be watching very carefully to see that transparency continues to apply when Prodi starts work".

Professor John Hunt, who advises multinational businesses and organisations on cultural change, has some sympathy for Prodi and Kinnock as they embark on their epic voyage to change the Commission's culture. "It can take five to ten years to create a new culture," he says, drawing on on his experience in working with big companies in the oil and financial sectors.

Hunt believes that Prodi's success will depend on the personal example he sets his staff. "In an organisation where there is no dominant national culture, you need an example from the top," he insists.

Major feature. Romano Prodi has so far appeared to favour taking an Anglo-Saxon approach towards reforming the Commission. But he is in fact acutely aware that there is no one 'off the shelf' model which can be used to put the institution back on the straight and narrow.