Austria’s éminence grise

Date: 03/09/1998

MANFRED Scheich is one of those supposedly backroom boys who, on closer investigation, turns out to be sitting in the hallway handing out entrance tickets to the house.

Austria's diminutive ambassador to the EU may be a civil servant but, like Hans Tietmeyer or Armand Richelieu, this hardly begins to tell the whole story.

In many ways, Scheich, who will chair meetings of the EU ambassadors' group Coreper until the end of the year, has been more influential in post-Cold War Austrian political history than many top politicians.

As the 12 member states of the then European Community began bargaining over the Single European Act in the mid-Eighties, Scheich and his allies spotted an opportunity.

Fresh back from a three-year stint in Brussels as Austria's ambassador to the EC, the head of integration and economic policy for his old friend and Foreign Minister Alois Mock pounced, with the aim of changing the terms of the debate over Europe.

In the winter of 1986, he and Mock put together what they termed a new “global approach” to Austria's relationship with the EC. Their report to the grand coalition under Socialist Prime Minister Franz Vranitsky concluded that the country should shun its hitherto sector-by-sector approach to integrating with the Communities.

They had to be careful. The notion of membership was still anathema to many in a country which had been under Soviet occupation after the Second World War and where many people equated 'neutrality' with 'independence'.

Scheich slipped a question into the report. Which is more independent, he asked, a country which keeps its hands clean by staying out of key regional decision-making or one which accepts this responsibility?

The word 'membership' did not appear once. Scheich has admitted what his aim was. “Talking about the institutional aspects would have got us into all sorts of problems, but the report created a political logic,” he explains.

The Soviet ambassador got wind of what was afoot and paid regular visits to Scheich at the ministry. “We understand why you would want the benefits of the EC's internal market,” he would say repeatedly, “but member-ship ...?”

After all, this was a time when European leaders were again toying with the idea of forming their own security alliance.

Scheich had a form of words for these occasions. Membership would, he said, take fully into account “the consequences arising from our neutral state”. Austria would never participate in non-defensive war, would never accept foreign bases on its soil and would not join a military alliance.

Austria was neutral and Moscow liked it that way. With the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev and his Georgian Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze in power, the climate changed just enough to tip the balance in favour of membership.

Mock went to Moscow in September 1988 with Scheich at his side. Shevardnadze restated his government's long-held reservations about Vienna and EC membership but crucially, as far as the two Austrians were concerned, these were put to them as questions rather than statements.

This was essentially the green light. Scheich, a committed advocate of EC membership, was elated. He also knew that Mock and Vranitsky would tap him to be their chief negotiator - a prospect which worried some people back home given his well-known Euro-enthusiasm.

This was rooted in his past. Scheich was born in the Sudetenland, a then German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia, five years before Adolf Hitler ordered his troops into the area. Nevertheless, his parents, both doctors of Catholic stock but of a liberal and humanist bent, always thought of themselves as Austrians. His father fought in the Austrian army during the First World War.

When the 2 million Sudeten Germans were kicked out of Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, the 12-year-old Scheich and his sister were bundled into a car by their parents and driven to Vienna.

Scheich studied economics, which included a dissertation on the comparative willingness of labour to move in the US and EU, at Vienna University and then got a job at the chancellery, where he worked on the administration of the Marshall Plan, the huge US aid programme to postwar Europe.

In 1958, he won a postgraduate scholarship in European studies at Johns-Hopkins University in Bologna and then returned to the chancellery in the European integration department.

While there, Scheich was involved in the negotiations over UK Trade Minister Reginald Maudling's abortive plan to create a free trade zone between the six EEC founders and a group of reluctant outsiders.

When this foundered, the European Free Trade Association was the result and Scheich headed off to Geneva at the ripe old age of 27 to become second in command at Austria's EFTA delegation.

It was there he met his Swedish wife, who was working on the EFTA bulletin.

After a nine-year diplomatic stint first in Bern and then in Algiers, Scheich returned to the foreign ministry in the late Seventies to head up the European integration unit - the springboard for his career as chief Austrian negotiator on the country's application to join the European Economic Area and later the EU, and finally as Austrian ambassador.

“He was not a tough negotiator,” recalls a former political colleague. “His approach was to advise his political masters fully and let them take the controversial decisions and crack the real problems. He applies a little bit of charm, but he has an individual negotiating style. He is not very outspoken, but on the other hand he sets clear objectives and he knows what he wants.”

As Vienna's chief envoy to Brussels, Scheich is known as a big-picture rather than a details man - a fact his officials have had to get used to.

“He's a nice guy,” says one EU official. “But he's not the most straightforward of people. He has a slightly baroque way of putting things. He has a gentle way of speaking. He will never speak to the point, but circumnavigate the subject or skirt around a problem.”

Some fellow ambassadors admit to being driven to distraction and even sleep by Scheich's circumlocutory style. “He never attacks from the front, but always envelopes what he wants to say,” says an official.

But his friends are quick to defend him. “He gets passionate about certain things and, when he does, he can start to lecture you,” explains one.

Scheich's discretion pleases his masters, but can irritate those who have to negotiate with him. “He prefers to cooperate with a small group and not with the whole embassy,” says one official “One gets a lot more out of him bilaterally than in a large group. But a lot of people do hold this against him. They resent the fact that he seems to hold facts back.”

“The difference compared with the previous Austrian ambassador could not be more striking. He was always breezing along the European Commission corridors even when there was not much going on, putting his head round the door, saying 'what's cookin', boys?' and that kind of thing. He used to do that once a week, and drop into the cafeteria as well, but Scheich would die rather than do that.”

His friends attribute this to discretion rather than snobbishness and point to Scheich's love of the southern rather than the 'reserved' northern lifestyle. The ambassador, who dubs himself a “Mediterranean manqué “, had a house built for him in Provence where “there is a certain freedom in the air which northern people lack”.

BIO