To get to speak Robert Madelin, director-general at the European Commission for DG Connect, you have to go to a more unappealing part of the Brussels. Far away from the quartier européen the final stop of my bus is between a car park and industrial buildings, and then I have to walk almost a kilometer, crossing numerous big roads. This area boasts anything but a powerful, impressive EU bureaucracy.
Once in, I just have twenty minutes for the interview as Madelin is running late, and of course I left my list of questions in the bus. ‘But not to worry’, reassures his secretary. ‘Once Robert sits down he fires away immediately.’
And so he does. The top level ‘eurocrat’ has been in Brussels since 1988, first as a British diplomat and then as fonctionnaire for the Commission. Madelin has worked on issues like trade, health and consumer policies, and since 2011 he manages the EU’s Digital Agenda – helping Europe’s economy and society to deal with the digital revolution.
A high watermark of cooperation
What’s the current state of the EU, aren’t we at the height of the integration level? Madelin is decisive. ‘When you look back you’ve come a long way. Being a historian and looking at longer trends being a habit, I am still an optimist about the European Union experiment.’ The first decade of Cold War was a ‘high watermark of global cooperation’ and also in the early 2000s Europe took an ‘enormous series of steps in a relatively short time’, from cooperation in the areas of monetary union to health, from foreign and security policy to home and justice.
Europe is so strong, argues Madelin, but this continent also has some serious challenges. ‘We are special because we are extremely rich by global standards, we are different from other rich bits in the quality of investments. Europe is a strong global player, because we are ourselves experimenting internally. The reason we are very powerful advocates of global economic integration, is because we have been experimenting with the single market, including services, including value added network services. We were miles ahead of others, theorizing and doing international economic openness. And it’s still true.’
On the other hand, Europe is lagging in the quality of education, and an ageing population will make us look like Japan. There is one more challenge: ‘we are a mature, relatively secure set of democratic peoples. As a result we are bored with the right to vote. I was in South Africa a few weeks ago. These guys remember when they didn’t have the right to vote, and the coming elections are crucial. We do not remember how crucial elections can be. The biggest political challenge is not constitution making and treaty refinement, but engaging people with something they know they need to support, for their own sake. We don’t have this kind of commitment yet for the European political process. What we do need, and there is a lack of it on a global scale, is seriously effective political leadership.’
Defending the Digital Agenda
From the world, back to Robert Madelin’s work: the Digital Agenda. Commissioner Kroes has proven a staunch defender of Europe’s strategy to digitize the continent – which is ironic because ‘Steely Neelie’ is 72. But not all of the strategy has been successful: budgets for creating a Europe-wide digital high-speed network were slashed, to keep money flowing to agricultural and regional funds. Also her Telecom package to basically abolish roaming costs, is not going to make it in the European Parliament. And digital strategies are cut up in ‘silos’: European institutes, national ministries aren’t cooperating or sharing information that much.
Still, Madelin remains optimistic. ‘ICT and innovation budgets are increasing even in times of austerity. The mandate to operate in terms of IT driven modernization of public goods is increasing, we drive up apprenticeships and skills [in a coalition with businesses and educational institutes]. The Barroso-II Commission wanted to lead with digital. They made it our only business, and that was a huge success factor.’ But still, the budget was slashed? ‘The piece they didn’t want at European level was investment in 100 Mb per second fiber-to-the-home connection. That doesn’t mean we are not pursuing other ways to getting that investment.’
The whole sausage
The fonctionnaire is careful not to make any predictions on the next European Parliament, though he doesn’t expect massive policy changes as an outcome. More important for Madelin is the connection with Europe’s 500 million citizens. ‘We have to take the trouble to come up with the story of what citizens think they want. You’ll have to show them the whole sausage. Typically bureaucracy takes the sausage, which is people’s lives, and slices it into very fine slices, and shows them one or two slices a time. That’s not very enticing. All we want is the whole sausage.
In a way the Maslow pyramid discipline is a way of saying: don’t tell me about hyperfast networks without telling me in the same breath how this improves my self-fulfilment. How does it give me agency. How does it feed me. I think we miss that. We assume people understand why we are saying a hundred megabits, we have to get the whole story.’
Check out the whole interview with Robert Madelin here (17 minutes):