Interviews with EU insiders. Some quotes
A couple of months we have walked the streets of Brussels now. Talking to folks working in the Brussels bubble brings new insights. We have talked to a correspondent, a freelance writer, a IT coordinator and a lobbyist. The coming weeks you can expect two more conversations. One with a lobbyist, and one with somebody who is trying to monitor this lobbying business.
To give an oversight, down here a collection of quotes from our interviews so far. You can read the interviews in full, with more context, by clicking on the link at the end of the quote. The idea is to focus on the media and lobbying sector for the coming months. From there, we will see what happens. My guess is these sectors are pretty important to pay attention to right now.
Everyday a lobbyist can postpone legislation, he earns a million more for the company. Their own bonuses continue as well. Its a game of delaying. A couple of months more, a year more, two years maybe. Its a game. – Lobbyist, working in Brussels.
You have a couple of big banks with one goal: world domination. In 1981 the Americans cut AT&T in pieces. There comes a moment when this happens to the banks as well. Its just a story of competition. That is what’s going on in Brussels right now as well. – Lobbyist, working in Brussels.
You have a couple of intellectuals, but most of them just think about the next election, their constituents and hopefully not to much about their own bank account. But, also those folks are present. – Lobbyist, working in Brussels, on politicians in Brussels.
One of the positive notes on the lobby and PR sector is that the sector and its budgets have been growing enormously. If you look at the big companies in the transparency register, some of them are not making big profits, but the majority of them show growth and some of them even doubled their budgets. It’s now or never. If you can’t sell your case right now, you are worth nothing. – Lobbyist, working in Brussels.
Its the only thing we have right now. You are not obliged to register yourself, so in that sense you can raise questions about it. But making it manditory doesn’t solve the problem either, my guess is. There is no capacity to do something with all the information. – Lobbyist, working in Brussels, on the transparancy register for lobbyists.
First of all you have people from different kind of administrative cultures here. Second, you have people who were used to work in other structures, like that of the Commission or the Council. Then you have people who where transferred directly from their Ministry into this building. You have people who have been put into leading positions without any training. All these different cultures with different languages are mixed up together. What a Frenchman says in English, is not what a Dutchman or Spaniard would say. So, you have a problem of interpretation as well. – IT coordinator, working in Brussels.
EU Insider in Brussels. A chat with a lobbyist, part 2.
We continue where we left of yesterday. A conversation with a lobbyist about the culture of lobbying, moral guilt, life in Brussels and more. You can read part 1 of this interview here.
Was there one specific moment that made you decide to step out?
There was not one specific moment. I had set an ultimatum for myself. If it’s not improving, I thought, I would go looking for something else. At first, I didn’t find anything. I was offered a couple of jobs as well, but rejected them. In the financial world you have a couple of organizations where heavy conflictual situations are not part of the daily routine. The world of creditcard companies for instance is completely different than the world of investment banks who are in the business of making money with money. On a certain moment I just stepped out. My backup plan was to pick up my studies again. In the end I found my spot at an organization with refreshing ideas.
How would you describe the lobby culture in the financial world?
It’s changing, but within the financial world you have a lot of alpha males with high levels of testosterone. Its a certain character of people. When you look at backgrounds in terms of education its quite arbitrary. People start working in the business when they are 25 years old and their salary is high. You go home with the idea that you’ve lost 1 billion Euros, but can compensate it by making the same amount next day. You lose every feeling of its value, of what a society should be and what important is in life. Its about making money. The bonuses they receive are not particular spend wise, so to say. At an investment bank the formula is simple. Bonuses are divided according to three factors. Yourself, the team and the company. Very meritocratic. Often 30 procent is for the individual. It stimulates the competition. It influences the atmosphere. Not meant in a positive way.
EU Insider in Brussels. A chat with a lobbyist, part 1.
What is lobbying exactly? How do we define it? The Oxford dictionary describes lobbying as follows:
Mid 16th century (in the sense ‘monastic cloister’): from medieval Latin lobia, lobium ‘covered walk, portico’. The verb sense (originally US) derives from the practice of frequenting the lobby of a house of legislature to influence its members into supporting a cause.
What is lobbying according to my interviewee? It´s my first question sitting on a sunny terrace in the centre of Brussels. She (or he, who knows?) lobbied for the financial world quite some time and is now busy with a project ‘ to let the financial world work for society again, and not the other way around’, as the interviewee calls it.
This is part 1 of a conversation about what lobbying is, moral guilt, transparancy and the culture of the Brussels based lobbying scene. Tomorrow we will publish part 2.
What is lobbying according to you?
I would describe it as the interaction with policy makers with the goal to influence them. You have three elements: policy makers, interaction and influence. About all of them you can say a whole bunch of stuff.
Sometimes lobbying is portrayed as something ‘bad’ or shadowy.
Well, what is the bad or shadowy part then? Often, if you continue the conversation, people tell you indeed they find it sometimes shadowy. It becomes like that if you are not transparent. Or, they tell you it’s all wrong and corrupt. I don’t know anybody in my profession who is either corrupt or ‘wrong.’
In the meantime:
The guy who’s walking there is working for the glass industry. He’s not bribing people. And he doesn’t go to restaurants or whorehouses to bribe policy makers or business people. Thats corruption, something totally different.
It also has to do with your own political position. You have to be aware that lobbying is something huge. It covers a lot of topics. You can go to a meeting, you can write a piece in the newspaper or you can write an online article. There are so many ways of influencing people. Both direct and indirect. If you are able to write a Letter to the Editor in the Financial Times, you know for sure MEP’s will read it. The letter probably has a bigger impact then to take them out for lunch. Both of them you do with the intention to influence him or her. The question is, what do you want to forbid? What is the alternative if this work is ’wrong’? You are not voicing your own opinion, but from somebody you are working for. Its your boss. I get payed by the one who asks me to influence somebody. Is that wrong? If you have problems with this kind of work, you should decline doing it.
I once had a situation with a former employer, a client from the tobacco industry, a sensitive subject. The question was if there was somebody willing to take on this job. If you felt it was not your cup of tea, you could decline. Normally it doesn’t work that easy, but this time they asked the question head on. The same counts for the weapon industry. If you think its something you don’t want to do, decline. If you are a vegetarian, you shouldn’t go out and lobby for the Society of Slaughterhouses. You have to define your own limits. Right now, I don’t feel like lobbying for the financial industry, so I decline to do that. If somebody else has no harsh feelings about it, he or she is free to take on the task.
In eveything you do, you should always do it transparant and in the right proportions. You have to make sure there are forces who control you and know who’s doing what. If that’s not the case then corruption and shadowy behaviour can indeed come in.
Next to a bunch of interviews out of the field, this page called ‘The Ivory Tower’ collects long reads, videos or other media that could give interesting perspectives from a theoretical point of view. Smart people enough on the internet, right.
This time a talk from Tomáš Sedláček. Find more about him on his own website, or Wikipedia. He calls the (EU) crises manic depressed. The current situation is not a crisis of capitalism, but speaks about it as a crisis of growth. His argument is that the science of economics these days is putting to much emphasis on methods without paying much attention on substance. The short intro is in Dutch. Tomas speaks English.
If you have another video or link from a smart economic professor with an opposite view? Share it.
Getting the right numbers: Who´s covering Brussels
Two weeks ago, I asked the accreditation office at the Commission for some numbers on the amount of media present in Brussels. The week after I asked them if they could give me some more info on the countries these media where from. I received the list today. Down here you can see where these media come from. The numbers are related to media outlets (not individual journalists) who have received an accreditation (according to the last known data of july 2013).
On the map you can see a general outlook. Green tells you that no media from that country has an official accreditation in Brussels. Light and dark blue equals a ´average representation´. Light and dark Red equals a ´high representation.´
85 Media outlets are classified as ´International European.´ According to the office these are media outlets who are not related to a specific country, like for example Euronews.
In terms of geographics, the African continent counts a lot of green, just like the Middle East and South East Asia. Canadian media have no accreditations. Australia and Brazil both have one media outlet with accreditations.
| Germany | 120 |
| United Kingdom | 111 |
| Int. European | 85 |
| Belgium | 68 |
| Spain | 63 |
| France | 57 |
| Italy | 47 |
| USA | 44 |
| China | 43 |
| Netherlands | 23 |
| Russia | 16 |
| Poland | 15 |
| Japan | 15 |
| Austria | 14 |
| Albania | 13 |
| Greece | 13 |
| Denmark | 12 |
| Sweden | 12 |
| Portugal | 11 |
| Swiss | 10 |
| Hungary | 10 |
| Croatia | 9 |
| Ireland | 9 |
| Turkey | 9 |
| Romania | 8 |
| Bulgaria | 8 |
| Czech Republic | 7 |
| Finland | 7 |
| Norway | 6 |
| Ukrain | 5 |
| Macedonia | 4 |
| Georgia | 4 |
| Luxembourg | 4 |
| Malta | 4 |
| Slovenia | 4 |
| South Korea | 3 |
| Kazakhstan | 3 |
| Lithuania | 3 |
| Maroc | 3 |
| Mexico | 3 |
| Pakistan | 3 |
| Egypt | 3 |
| Serbia | 3 |
| Vietnam | 3 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2 |
| Estonia | 2 |
| Kosovo | 2 |
| Qatar | 2 |
| Moldova | 2 |
| Slovakia | 2 |
| Senegal | 2 |
| Taiwan | 2 |
| United Arab Emirates | 2 |
| Estonia | 2 |
| Rwanda | 1 |
| Palestine | 1 |
| Kuwait | 1 |
| Latvia | 1 |
| Tunisia | 1 |
| Australia | 1 |
| Congo | 1 |
| Iceland | 1 |
| Azerbaijan | 1 |
| Belarus | 1 |
| Bosnia Herzegovina | 1 |
| Brazil | 1 |
Jaka’s Cartoon: Syria
While Barack Obama is lobbying behind the scenes for more support, the French are on the front seat and the Turkish can’t wait, Jaka passed his cartoon through congress in a blink of an eye.
The Ivory Tower: A new German question.
Next to a bunch of interviews out of the field, this new page called ‘The Ivory Tower’ collects long reads that could give interesting perspectives from a theoretical point of view. Smart people enough on the internet, right.
Its aim is to have a collection of articles from different political perspectives. But, since we are always biased ourselves, we can always use the help of you.
So, if you have an interesting article to share, post it in the comments section directly. Or, if you think it deserves more attention then a spot in the comments section, e-mail it to insideeuropeblog [at] gmail.com. All e-mailed articles will be published, including the e-mail itself without your name or e-mail address. (to give it some context on the ‘why’ it should be published.
Today, an article from British historian Timothy Garton Ash on the new German Question, published in the New York Review of Books:
There is a new German question. It is this: Can Europe’s most powerful country lead the way in building both a sustainable, internationally competitive eurozone and a strong, internationally credible European Union? Germany’s difficulties in responding convincingly to this challenge are partly the result of earlier German questions and the solutions found to them. Yesterday’s answers have sown the seeds of today’s question.
Read more here.
Image: Angela Merkel; drawing by James Ferguson
Getting the right numbers: the Brussels press corps
To get a better grasp of the amount of journalists covering ‘EU’ related topics, I searched my way around the Internet and found several articles about the decline of the press corps. Here and here for instance. According to the International Press Association (IPA) in Brussels, the number of accredited reporters shrunk from some 1,300 in 2005 to 964 in 2009 (source).
Numbers are always a great way to tell juicy stories. Leave the context out, tweak it a bit, and you can make several stories out of the same numbers. To start my little investigation on the numbers, I asked the accreditation office at the European Commission what their numbers are, and I received this list:
The increase between March and July is partially due to a number of journalists being accredited temporarily for replacing their colleagues during the summer holidays, according to the office.
Jaka’s Cartoon: the world of lobbying.
The coming weeks we will publish two conversations. One with a lobbyist and one with an ex-lobbyist, both working in the Brussels bubble. Our cartoonist Jaka has his own views on the world of lobbying.
Inside Europe Blog 