EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson is fighting for a breakthrough in the Doha Round of trade negotiations.
Mandelson Faces EU Ministers’ Ire” was a newspaper headline the day I walked into the EU trade commissioner’s Brussels office. “I am always in trouble with some of them,” says Peter Mandelson, with what looks like a little smirk of enjoyment. “The main brunt is taken by my agriculture commissioner [Mariann Fisher Boel]. She keeps a restraining hand on me and I am prudent. I don’t think I am exceeding my mandate but I have to push the envelope.”
A majority of the 27 farm ministers at a meeting in Brussels late in January said that 54-year-old Mr Mandelson had gone too far in his attempt to kickstart the Doha trade round by saying that the EU could offer cuts in agricultural tariffs close to the 54% demanded by emerging countries if the US cut its farm subsidies.
Farm ministers accuse Mr Mandelson, he says, of giving away too much, too often and too early. France, meanwhile, has said 39% should be the maximum for farm tariff cuts.
Complex brief
Sounding noticeably posh – a definite no-no for someone coming from the UK’s Labour Party aristocracy, as he does, with grandfather Herbert Morrison a post-war Labour deputy prime minister – Mr Mandelson is currently busy flying all over the world, negotiating into the early hours of the morning, juggling a panoply of conflicting interested parties and an infinitely complex brief. But, he says, it “looks like fairly easy going” compared with his experience in modernising the Labour Party in the 1980s, which left “scars over my body”.
As the Labour Party’s director of communications from 1985, member of parliament from 1992 and head of the party’s 1997 election campaign, he was one of the principal architects of New Labour which, embodied in prime minister Tony Blair, is still in power.
In response to a question about whether he likes being nicknamed the Prince of Darkness, Mr Mandelson, who is much better looking in person than in photographs where he appears gaunt, notes that many men have been called Princes of Darkness over the ages and that they have tended to be “effective, well meaning, misunderstood and occasionally misinterpreted, so I don’t mind joining the club”.
Translation: he relishes it.
He adds: “In the context of the Labour Party, the forces of darkness were destroying the Labour Party and preventing us from winning elections… I was fighting in every trench and every barricade. I have no regrets about what I was doing on that front line.”
War on protectionism
He is now on the front line of the war against protectionism. But it is a more complex one, where the forces of good and evil are not that clear-cut. Take the EU itself. Generally blamed for intransigence on agriculture, it has made great strides in this field with a series of continuing reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy starting in 2003. And Mr Mandelson’s suggested offer in farm tariff cuts is comparatively generous. However, his wanting to lay the blame on the US, which in 2002, he says, “put in place the most trade distorting farm bill and has not agreed how to reform it”, is contentious. The world’s two largest trading blocs are both protectionist in different sectors, using different instruments – health and safety, for instance – that make absolute comparisons difficult, say trade experts. Meanwhile, generous headline numbers on tariff cuts can be misleading due to the existence of exceptions, of which there can be many.
Master of detail and diplomacy
That makes Mr Mandelson’s mastery of detail important, as well as his negotiating skills. Looking trendily cosy while sitting in a black leather armchair, dressed in a dark purple jumper with a purple tie, black suede shoes and pinstripe trousers, he takes note of the anecdote about losing his temper in a trade negotiation and throwing his glasses on the table. “I was exasperated and for some small theatrical effect I threw my glasses and she [Malaysian trade minister Rafidah Aziz] has teased me about it [ever since],” he says.
“That was in Hong Kong where no-one was conceding, moving, and once again the EU was being asked to make the move to make the meeting a success,” he says. “I thought, ‘fine’, perhaps we can and should, but shouldn’t the US, the bigger emerging economies make a move. I did feel frustrated and angry. It was not only a piece of theatre.”
Mr Mandelson, the UK’s former secretary of state for trade and industry and former secretary of state for Northern Ireland, then goes on to say that if he were undiplomatic, he would talk about intransigent negotiators. But Mr Mandelson is a master of diplomacy. A member of the British parliament who has dealt with him over many years says his every action is very calculated: “You don’t know where he is trying to get to but you know it is all part of the broader picture of what he wants to achieve.”
It is tempting to call him Machiavellian, but the Italian author of the manual on how to rule would not have made the sort of silly mistake that cost Mr Mandelson his first cabinet job in 1998: not disclosing taking a six-figure loan from a ministerial colleague that was used to buy a house in London’s fashionable Notting Hill area. He left the cabinet a second time in 2001 on the back of allegations relating to UK passport applications for a couple of Indian-born captains of industry. He was later cleared of any wrongdoing.
Trade effort
What he is seeking to achieve now is a successful conclusion of the Doha Round of trade liberalisation, which has as its primary goal helping developing countries in a way that, arguably, other rounds such as the Uruguay Round have not.
What will be crucial, says Mr Mandelson, is to ensure a breakthrough on some of the tariff cut numbers so that US president George W Bush can get an extension of his fast-track negotiating authority from US Congress before it expires at the end of June. With this, the trade agreement must be approved or rejected in its entirety. Without it, Congress could propose endless amendments.
“Also, as negotiators with the US, we don’t want Congress micro-managing negotiations,” he says in his mellifluous tones. At the time of the interview, Mr Mandelson did not believe Democratic Party control of Congress would prove an insurmountable obstacle, despite the party’s protectionist rhetoric.
Having written my undergraduate thesis on the often contradictory effects of trade and aid for developing countries, it was heartening to hear Mr Mandelson – who mentions in his official CV the formative experience of living in Tanzania for a year post-Oxford as having led to “life-long impressions of Africa and the challenges of fighting poverty” – say he is “passionate” about the topic. He believes that trade is the driver of economic growth in a way that aid and debt relief are not, but that there is a need to distribute gains more evenly through policies to support those who suffer from the adjustments that come from liberalisation.
“If you have one without the other, you are going to fail,” he says.
But many non-governmental organisations argue that the EU’s current attempts to sign economic partnership agreements with some of the poorest countries in the world will cause unparalleled harm to local producers, even more so because the EU insists that aid should be kept separate from prospective trade deals.
Too many populists
Mr Mandelson is also adamant that, although business needs to help explain the benefits of free trade to electorates who are fearful of its effects, the main responsibility lies with politicians, who are too accustomed to ducking the issue and being populist, rather than being “clear and honest”.
Mr Mandelson sadly refuses to discuss British politics. As Mr Blair’s time in office comes to an end with his legacy overshadowed by the UK’s involvement in Iraq and fears that chancellor and probably successor Gordon Brown has a hidden Old Labour agenda – and is incapable of winning an election – there are rumours amid the corridors of parliament that Mr Mandelson is part of a clique that is still trying to find an alternative leader to take on the prime minister’s Third Way mantle.
For, as I said to Mr Mandelson, people like me who voted for Tony Blair the first time round will not vote for Mr Brown. What is he going to do about that?
“I hear what you are saying,” he said, heading off to his desk and muttering something about not being involved in UK politics.
