Castilla combatant

Date: 13/02/1997

ASK friends and colleagues to describe Manuel Marín and their replies will be sprinkled with the words “controversial”, “impatient” and “misunderstood”.

The most senior member of the current European Commission team after President Jacques Santer is also the youngest, and one who attracts a mixture of admiration, jealousy, criticism and confusion.

It was perhaps almost inevitable that Marín would arouse such mixed feelings when he came to Brussels a decade ago.

The 47-year-old wonder comes from the heart of Castilla, the land of Don Quixote, and the boy from a middle-class family in a mid-sized town in the middle of Spain (as one compatriot put it) has had a rocky ride with the European institutions.

As a very young man negotiating Spain's accession to the European Community, he caused hilarity when, trying to be cautious and add a clause which would protect Spain, he literally translated the Spanish colloquial expression for 'just in case' - 'por si las moscas' - which actually means 'if for the flies'.

Marín has learned a lot since then.

This weekend (13-15 February), he will represent the Commission at two vital meetings of EU foreign ministers and their counterparts from south east Asia, China, Japan and South Korea.

Marín launched the Asia-Europe meeting a year ago with a plea to both sides to understand each other's disparate cultures. Given his history in Brussels, he might be tempted to deliver the same speech to his own European colleagues.

Culture clashes have been a key source of Marín's troubles since he arrived in Brussels in 1986.

When the Commission's Director-General for development Dieter Frisch quit in 1993 rather than continue working under Marín, the clash made newspaper headlines.

Most colleagues attribute it to the absence of a meeting of minds between a Spaniard and a German. “They were just out of communication with one another,” says one. “It was a culture clash which had gone on for some time.”

The event marred Marín's reputation, but colleagues say it was not entirely his fault.

“People in the Commission had not studied the culture when Spain joined. At the Commission, they assume that as soon as you join the European Community you become European. It is not true. People still behave in Greek, Spanish or Portuguese ways,” explains one.

“Marín is Spanish, very Spanish. The cult of the boss in Spain is very special. Marín has the Spanish trait of taking pride in being the boss. He does not enjoy having to give an account of himself. He does not feel accountable to the press, to non-governmental organisations, to civil servants, even to the European Parliament - to no one but his peers.

“He has a problem getting his ideas across. He needs a translator, not literally, because his French is fluent and his English has improved remarkably, but because his terms are unusable.”

Once behind the cultural curtain, however, even non-Spanish colleagues find in Marín an able politician and an honest man.

“His basic political concepts are always sound,” says a former close colleague. “Even if he is impatient with the details, his political judgement, on the broad lines, is good. He is a splendid, opportunistic negotiator. He is a master at winning a fight in the Commission.”

Marín is known for frequent turf battles with Foreign Affairs Commissioner Hans van den Broek. “Relations between the two are not excellent,” cabinet members admit. But aides say he gets on well with the other Commissioners holding external affairs dossiers - Sir Leon Brittan (trade), João de Deus Pinheiro (development) and Emma Bonino (humanitarian aid).

Marín has also won admirers on the European scene through his devotion to their causes.

Brazilian Ambassador to the EU Jório Dauster says the Commissioner has been “a major force in strengthening and driving relations with Latin America”.

That force, Dauster feels, comes not only from Marín's dedication to the task, but from his almost unique knowledge of the Commission from the outside as well as in.

Marín made his name in Spain by negotiating his country's entry into the EC. The young negotiator struggled for four years over the dots and dashes of accession conditions, and experienced first-hand the frustration of being an outsider attempting to make sense of the place and trying to get in.

“It gives Marín a perception that others lack,” says Dauster. “He knows how frustrating it can be to negotiate with the big structure.”

Marín does not give Dauster and his colleagues advice on how to deal with the monolith, but his sympathy is all-important, Dauster says. “It is not so much advice as feeling. What Marín brings is experience and understanding.”

The Commissioner also gives freely of his time. He holds regular (although not too frequent) working lunches with South American ambassadors during which they often hammer out tricky points. “This is almost a conspiracy of like-minded people,” says one official.

Marín also impresses the ambassadors - and his own colleagues - with his command of the dossiers in his portfolio.

Friends say Marín has very little social life and is uneasy on the cocktail circuit. He spends what free time he does have with his two daughters, aged ten and 13, both in French-speaking schools. Rather than attending a social engagement, the Commissioner prefers to help his older daughter with her arithmetic homework.

Marín is “pessimistic by nature”, says a colleague, but adds that this is not necessarily a bad trait - it makes him cynical about his surroundings and prevents him from losing himself in Euro-speak. “He is cynical in the good sense. He hates empty rhetoric.”

There are many witnesses to the Commissioner's impatience and temper. But intimates say Marín has calmed down in recent years and attribute much of the change to the fact that he has much more autonomy under Jacques Santer than he did under Santer's predecessor, the brilliant but tyrannical Jacques Delors.

One anthropologist characterises Marín as having “a sort of paranoia, which is that everybody hates him and is plotting his downfall”. But that is perhaps understandable given his early experience as a politician. Marín began his career during a risky period in Spain. The Franco regime, although not as strong as it had been in the Fifties and Sixties, was still antagonistic towards the burgeoning Socialist Party. The party was small, and early on Marín became a close friend to Felipe González, although he never joined González's group.

Marín joined the ranks of the anti-Franco Socialists in Europe. He completed his law studies outside Spain, taking a degree in EC law at the Université de Nancy, and then went to the College of Europe in Bruges. There he worked actively with Spanish migrant workers, organising collectives.

When Spain held its first democratic elections in 1977, Marín went home to become the youngest member of his country's parliament.

After the Socialists won power in 1982, he was named secretary of state for European affairs and spent the next four years negotiating his country's accession to the EC.

He was the obvious choice for the job of Commissioner when Spain joined in 1986, but had to make do with the relatively minor dossiers of social affairs and education. In 1989, he took charge of fisheries policy - vital for Spain, but more a job for a fireman than for a man who considered himself a thinker - and development.

For the past two years, Marín has had responsibilities more in keeping with his own loves - the Mediterranean, Latin America and the developing countries in Asia.

“He is much more in his element now. He is very happy with his dossiers and he can make long-term strategic decisions,” says a colleague.

But he tends to keep his distance from those around him at work. “Marín arrived in the Commission suspicious of the people who had kept him waiting, mostly on his knees, for half a dozen years,” says one long-time associate. “People say he is paranoid, but you would be too. He lived in a world of undercover activities, betrayal and persecution. That is a very difficult training for a politician and it has certainly marked Manuel Marín.”