Arthur Lord Cockfield was one of the unlikeliest political entrepreneurs of recent times. Described in Hugo Young's biography of Margaret Thatcher as 'eccentric, apolitical and unelected'' (Hugo Young, 1989, p.301), he was more of a policy enthusiast than a politician. His qualifications for national and European office included an improbable combination of jobs in industry, quangos, the civil service and voluntary associations. But not once did he ever hold an elected public position. He had been Chairman of Boots the chemists, an Inland Revenue Commissioner, Chair of the Price Commission and even President of the Statistical Society. He had sat on the Council of the Confederation of British Industry and on the National Economic Development Council. In so far as he can be said to have had a 'political career', it did not begin until he was 62 when he became a junior Treasury Minister in the 1979 Conservative Government. It did not take off until he was 65, when he was brought into the Cabinet as Trade Secretary, probably for no better reason than to 'keep a seat warm until Thatcher was better placed to shape her team as she wanted. And it did not reach its brief apogee until he was appointed, at the age of 68, for what was to turn out as a single four year term (1985-9) as one of Britain's two European Commissioners. At the time, some even regarded his appointment as a deliberate insult to 'Brussels' and there was some talk of a legal challenge on the grounds that a peer was caught by the Treaty rule that members of national parliaments could not serve as European Commissioners. Two things are, however, certain. First, Thatcher expected Cockfield to be 'her man' in the Commission. Geoffrey Howe recalls: 'Margaret looked for someone entirely after her own heart - for "one of us" in the familiar phrase' (Howe, 1994, p 405).
Second, Cockfield had served neither of the two apprenticeships that are generally considered essential preparation for membership of the Commission. It was not immediately obvious that he had either the brute skills at domestic politics that come from a lifetime fighting elections, wheeler dealing in political parties or handling cabinet and inter-departmental disputes, or the smooth silky talents at intergovernmental bargaining that come from long service in international organisations or frequent exposure to negotiations. During his fourteen months as Secretary of State for Trade, he had, by his own admission, only attended one meeting of the relevant Council of Ministers (Cockfield, 1994, p.22).
Yet, as Internal Market Commissioner, Cockfield was to put a distinctive personal stamp on the Single Market initiative that was to emerge as the 'policy core' of the present European Union. While playing down more grandiose claims that it 'marked the critical turning point between stagnation and dynamism', Helen Wallace and Masdair Young have remarked, 'the Single Market has drawn other European countries towards EU membership and changed the context in which many other policies are shaped' (H.Wallace & A.Young in Wallace & Wallace, 1996, p.126). By the time Cockfield arrived in Brussels, the decision to make the Single Market a priority for the 1985-9 Commission had already been taken in a round of consultations between Jacques Delors and the Heads of Government. In his first tour of the national capitals, the incoming Commission President supposedly offered four options for a relaunch of a largely stagnant and fractious European Community: 'institutional reform, monetary union, closer co-operation in defence and economic revival based on completion of the internal market' (Grant, 1994, p.66). The first was Delors' own preferred alternative but the last commanded the most consensus. However, Cockfield seems at least to have had a hand in the decision to lay down a deadline of 31 December 1992 for the completion of the market; and he can also be credited with persuading Delors to adopt the potentially high-risk strategy of framing a full Single Market programme in advance, rather than allowing it to emerge piecemeal: 'it was essential that we had a properly structured programme covering all the vital elements of the Internal Market. It was no good proceeding as previous Commissions had done. by picking out subjects that happened to catch the eye of particular member states. it had to be the lot' (Cockfield, 1994, p.29). In the brief interval between the Brussels (March 1985) and Milan (June 1985) meetings of the European Council, Cockfield and Delors managed to produce a massively detailed - yet elegantly shaped - programme of no fewer than 279 measures that they considered necessary to the operation of a 'frontier free Europe'.
This was, moreover, presented at a Commission press conference two weeks before the Milan summit, as might befit a body that considers itself to be an independent catalyser of public interest in European initiatives, rather than a mere secretariat for private and secretive intergovernmental proceedings. At a risk of some superficiality, the Single Market White Paper was an interesting blend of EC and British traditions of policy entrepreneurship. Its rapid preparation and very public announcement in a manner designed to shape the agenda and lock governments into consideration of something definite was reminiscent of Jean Monnet's preparation of the Schuman Plan in May 1950. Yet, the Schuman Plan had originally only run to a hundred lines. For all its Cartesianism, the White Paper format, which Cockfield later characterised as 'setting out a philosophy followed by a programme in detail. .every single proposal having its own time schedule', was a British import to Community usage (Cockfield, 1994, p.32).
Membership of the European Commission provides a distinctive context for the exercise of political leadership. At one level, there are few political institutions whose mission is more explicitly linked to entrepeneurship. The role of the Commission is most developed in relation to the innovationary aspects of governance, as opposed to decision-making and implementation. The whole of the EU's political system is constructed around the rule that it is for the Commission to propose and the Council to decide ( with such separation of powers as exists at the EU level following this principle, rather than classic distinctions between executive and legislature). Those who designed the EU's institutions expected the Commission to construct Europe from within, cultivate 'spill-overs' from one initiative to another and earn its passage as an embryonic government for the new Community. The prospects for integration were seen to depend as much on the capacity of the Commission to 'supply' useful ideas as on the 'demand' of governments and non-state actors for policies that might usefully be made at the European level. Haas, 1958; Lindberg, 1970; Tranholm-Mikkelsen, 1991). Less sympathetic perspectives - such as rational choice approaches -would likewise predict that once a supranational tier of governance was in being, it would be permanently on the prowl for opportunities for policy entrepeneurship; though, they, of course, would give more weight to the 'private utility functions' of officeholders seeking to expand the bureaucratic influence of their own institution, rather than any public utility to be gained by making policy at a new transnational level (Vibert, 1994). Either way, policy solutions would tend to chase economic and social problems, as much as the other way round (Peters in Richardson, 1996, p.70).
Yet, the Commission's right of initiative is both contested and constrained. Slender administrative resources mean that it is a long way from being a self-sufficient political entrepreneur with a capacity to gather all the information necessary' for meaningful decision-making. Tight financial resources (with a budget of only 1.26% of EU GNP most of which is committed in advance to policies that have already been established) limit its ability to use the power of the purse to oil its coalition-building or compensate losers from innovation. Even those with an optimistic view of the political autonomy of the Commission, point to what is problematic in the notion that a body can have the power of agenda-setting without those of decision and implementation. For, unless these are all of a piece, there is a danger that the Commission will tend to rouse expectations that it cannot meet, as well as insulate itself from the normal 'feedback loops' in policy making. Above all, the Commission is painfully aware that it lacks its own direct source of political legitimacy. This frequently puts it in on the defensive in its relationships with the member states and compels it to channel its political entrepeneurship into areas that can be portrayed as 'technical' rather than 'political': to wait either for a clear mandate from the member states or, failing that, for an overwhelming consensus amongst public opinion and non-governmental actors for change. In this connection, Thomas Christiansen points to the central contradiction between a body that is at once supposed to be intensely political by 'stirring up change' - with all that means for dividing actors into 'winners and losers' - and to function as a source of impartial administration (Christiansen in Richardson, 1996). After all, the effective use of its administrative powers - and especially those that concern the supervision of implementation -will often require the co-operation of the very same actors who feel aggrieved by the manner in which the Commission has exercised its powers of innovation. Under these circumstances, the monopoly right of the Commission to make new proposals for Union policies exists more clearly in law than in political practice Nugent, 1994). The Commission often follows and anticipates, rather than leads, the political preferences of others. And in a sure sign of its limited self-sufficiency, it frequently prefers to promote the interpenetration - even fusion (Wessels, 1992) - of supranational and intergovernmental processes to insisting on its institutional integrity. This makes it hard to disentangle the relative contributions of the following to any single act of political leadership: the six monthly meetings of heads of government in the European Council; individual member states who frequently make proposals in the form of single or joint papers; the permanent representatives of the member states (COREPER) who are often used by the Commission as a sounding board for new initiatives (Hayes-Renshawe and Wallace, 1996 ); non-governmental actors who increasingly lobby both the Commission and member governments and whose influence is especially important in specialist areas of policy-making (Mazey and Richardson, 1993); and, of course, the Commission itself
The notion that an individual Commissioner such as Lord Cockfield might make a difference is even more problematic. The Commission operates according to a strict principle of collegiality in which all policy has to be adopted on a majority vote of all Commissioners -14 in the first months of Cockfield's term and 17 after Spanish and Portuguese accession in 1986 - and no individual has the final say in the handling of his or her own portfolio. Given that it is also a transnational bureaucracy fragmented into fiefdoms colonised by particular nationalities and personalities, without clear command structures and a tendency towards all-consuming turf battles, (Schink, 1992 & Egeberg, 1995), the Commission has a notoriously quicksilver character in which it is often hard to trace the origins of an idea or to link actions to outcomes with the predictability implied by the notion of political leadership. In the absence of clear hierarchies and plausible administrative demarcations, two opposing schools of thought have emerged as to the preconditions for successful policy initiation within the Commission. The first suggests that an inspirational or ruthless Commission President can turn confusion to his own advantage by substituting personalised authority for the direction that cannot be achieved through structures. As George Ross has put it, 'Unless Commission resources could be mobilised to produce proposals, argument and momentus few results would be possible. Manufacturing such things inside the Berlaymont involved 'presidentialising" the College. Delors was the key (Ross, 1995, pp. 231-32). The contrasting view is that the Commission only achieves cohesion where socially defined policy networks or 'epistemic communities' (shared values, commitments and cause-effect assumptions) emerge to unite individuals into coherent action. These allow effective co-ordination to be achieved across otherwise unworkable administrative structures (Heclo, 1978, pp. 103-4). However, neither these two approaches - Presidentialism or consensus -suggest that single Commissioners are very important in promoting change.
Given everything that is so problematic in the notion of Commission rights of initiative, the emergence of the Single Market is often explained in a manner that that leaves little room for political leadership. One school of thought has accounted for it in terms of the 'convergent domestic political interests' of the principal member governments (Keohane and Hoffman, 1991; Moravcsik, 1993). The British Government was apparently eager to 'export Thatcherism' and secure its domestic revolution by embedding it in the international trading regime that most affected the UK's immediate economic environment. In the run up to the 1986 elections to the National Assembly, Mitterrand was looking for a high profile European initiative that would paper over the failure of the domestic programme on which he had himself secured the French Presidency in 1981. Kohl needed an external economic stimulus to hold together his fractious three-way CDU/CSU/FDP coalition and remove the prediction that continued membership of the government would lead to unacceptable levels of electoral punishment. A 'foreign policy success' would also help him consolidate his shaky personal authority in a context in which he was not widely regarded as the most obvious politician from the three governing parties to hold the Chancellorship (Financial Times, 11 June 1985).
A second view is that the Single Market programme was the more or less inevitable product of pressures from the international system. West Europe was faced with the exhaustion of the 'national champion strategy' by which each government had attempted to foster its own producers. Political discourse at the time was obsessed with 'competitiveness', 'Eurosclerosis', the wasteful fragmentation of markets, and the notion that Europe was caught in a pincer movement between American and Japanese technology on the one hand and low cost production from newly industrialising countries on the other. The OECD warned that Europe was been driven towards more 'downstream production' and at least one indigenous multinational - Phillips - made the remarkable claim that it was considering relocation to another continent. As one piece of contemporary press comment put it the weekend after Cockfield issued his White Paper: 6 'Dazzled by the brisk euphoria of the US economic advance and the relentless industrial advance of Japan, Europe has been wondering why it has been left out of the party. .many industrialists blame Europe's missed opportunities on its patchwork of national markets. .in most countries, the pace of innovation is controlled by self-regulatory monopolies. national champion strategies have produced companies more geared to winning favours than winning markets. .their international competitiveness depends upon being sheltered from the full rigours of competition at home. The leaders of Europe's protected industries now acknowledge that they are living on borrowed time (Guy de Jonquieres, Financial Times, 17 June 1985).
Already burdened with competitiveness problems, EC countries also interpreted a spate of US-Japanese bilateral trade deals as an attempt by the two economic leaders to stitch up the international trading system between themselves. European countries needed a Single Market initiative as a source of negotiating leverage and cohesion, and they needed to get it under way before the opening of a new round of GAT'T talks for which the Reagan Administration was pressing. Against this background, corporate interests organised to promote a major regime change in market regulation. In 1983 twenty-five of the EC 'S largest multinationals formed themselves into the European Round Table of Industrialists (Cowles, 1995). With the Single Market programme and the Single Act, the European political system adjusted to these shifting producer interests.
A third view is that the Single Market programme had been long maturing within the EC's institutional framework and that all Cockfield had to do was to un-cork some fine vintages that had already been laid down by his predecessors. Desmond Dinan remarks that Cockfield was able to put such an 'extensive compilation together in record time' because most of the items that made up the White Paper already lay around the Commission in draft form (Dinan, 1994, P.139). Of vital importance to the simplification of the Single Market was a series of pre-1985 developments that allowed the Commission to soften its regulatory touch and improve the prospects of consent and compliance. The perfection of the 'directive' as a legislative instrument allowed the EC to limit itself to stipulating goals or a broad range of acceptable solutions, while member states were free to decide details and methods of implementation for themselves. Since the 1970s, both the drafting and implementation of regulations had been in the hands of three-way consultative committees, made up of the Commission, member governments and private addressees of EC law. By the mid 1980s, the member states were already practising an informal moratorium on new national regulations, so that common standards could emerge as new products replaced old ones. Above all, the European Court of Justice had established the all important simplifying principle of 'mutual recognition' in the Cassis De Dijon case of 1979. From now on, products that met standards in any one member country would be acceptable anywhere in the Community. This meant the EC could abandon the impossible task of harmonising all regulations and concentrate on a minority of cases where regulatory negligence by one member state could pose unacceptable risks to others. More broadly, the Single Market programme can be seen as a spill-over from the original Common Market that had been put in place between 1957 and 1970. The removal of tariffs had only encouraged the proliferation of non-tariff barriers and the member states were now confronted with a choice between abandoning the original goal of market integration or Europeanising the myriad features of domestic policy-making with a capacity to distort trade and investment: state aids, rules for public procurement, product standards and so on (Pelkmans and Winters, 1988) Moreover, it was arguably necessary for the member states to go through the frustration of repeated policy failure before they were ready to accept the two institutional preconditions for the enactment of Cockfield's programme: first, that the Commission's right to use its power of initiative with boldness and creativity should be acknowledged (as it had been in the days of Walter Hallstein before De Gaulle's empty chair policy of 1965-6); and, second, that member states qualify their veto rights and consent to the Single Market being passed by majority vote. This was a vital rule change that unblocked the Council, freed governments from domestic veto groups and greatly expanded the Commission's power of initiative, now that did not have to worry about every possible objection from each of the 12 member states. By mid 1985, even the British Government was proposing an elaborate 'gentleman's agreement' to allow the Single Market to be passed by majority voting (though it was less keen on writing this into the Treaty!). As George Ross has put it, 'Something extraordinary happened in the mid 1980s. The context around Community institutions began to change, the willingness of member states to contemplate European solutions to their problems increased and, most importantly, the European Commission came alive to assert its claim as the proposition force'. (Ross, 1995, P.26)
Yet even a political opportunity structure' as promising as that described in the last section left room for Cockfield to place a distinctive personal stamp on the programme. The obvious shortcoming of accounts that stress systemic pressures making for some new European initiative is that they fail to explain why pride of place should have been taken by the Single Market programmes as defined by Cockfield: why this emerged as it did and when it did, not to mention with the sustainability that was to carry it to completion in almost unamended form. Closer inspection of the historical record shows that Cockfield White Paper faced some tough competition for dominant place on the political agenda that it eventually secured. Delors' personal preference for monetary over market integration had not entirely disappeared as late as April 1985, when the Commission President gave evidence to a hearing of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Senate. Indeed, a commitment to Monetary Union was to appear in the Single European Act itself (December 1985) and it could conceivably have become more salient under three conditions: first, if it had engaged more directly with current US-led initiatives to push the advanced industrial countries towards more 'managed' exchange rates; second, if the connection between 'one market' and a 'single money' had been made more quickly; and third if France and Germany had been more prepared in the mid 1980s to take the risk of leaving Britain out of the next phase of European integration. Another possibility is that the EC might have been relaunched around a proposal for a tighter and more comprehensive collaboration in the development of new technologies. Several technology projects were under discussion in 1985, including the RACE programme to promote compatibility between European telecommunications industries, European space co-operation, the European joint fighter aircraft and what were to become the Eureka and Esprit programmes to promote networking between producers and researchers in different EC countries. In addition, the West Europeans had to find some response to Reagan's invitation to participate in the research side of the Star War's project. They were also under pressure to cut the costs that duplication of technological development and procurement imposed on their own defence budgets. A final possibility' is that in place of a credible Community-wide initiative of the kind launched by Cockfield, the EC countries could have edged towards greater co-operation through a series of bilateral agreements. For example, France and Italy announced four bilateral agreements including the relaxation of border controls the same week that Cockfield unveiled his own White Paper (Financial Times, 17 June 1985).
One of the problems with the 'domestic political convergence hypothesis' is that it is by no means clear that it did suit all heads of Government to have Cockfield's initiative capture the political agenda in the way it did. Mitterrand's political entourage was apparently worried that 'in this decisive moment in European history, the liberal conceptions of Bonn and London had come together to the detriment of the Franco-German couple. what emerged was only a modest result in relation to French ambitions. .it was more of a Europe of free exchange than one of grand harmonisation political, economic and social' (Favier & Martin-Roland, 1991). Meanwhile a typical comment from the serious press of the time was that 'there is something in the White Paper to make every government shudder. There will have to be a quantum leap in each government's acceptance of standards applied by others. governments will have to lose a great deal of freedom in the way in which they raise indirect taxes. Britain has a historic preference for border controls as a means of maintaining internal security. .France and Italy will worry about the free trade bias of the document. (Financial Times Leader, 17 June 1985).' Another difficulty is that of explaining why Cockfield's programme was implemented almost in its entirety over the next seven years ( with enlargements and elaboration's but very few subtractions from the original scheme). In all, 264 of the original 279 measures would be enacted by the end of 1992 (HMSO, 1993). Of two answers that are often given, one suggests that the rule change on the Council to QMV was more important in holding the programme together than Commission guidance and the other that the Commission sustained the programme through strealth as much as honest and open political leadership. However, the first argument confuses the direction of causation. For, the British Government only changed its position on writing majority voting into the Treaty after the publication of Cockfield's White Paper made it clear that there was an attractive and credible opportunity to create a Single Market that could be lost without a rule change. In other words, the act of Commission leadership came first. The 'stealth argument', on the other hand, is simply wrong. Members of Delors' Cabinet would later talk about the 'Russian doll strategy' whereby governments would keep on finding that there was a further and unexpected doll inside the last that would need to be opened if they were to keep the Single Market on the road. But in the case of the Cockfield White Paper the approach to political leadership was one of almost reckless frankness in which the costs, risks and spill-over implication were put up front. Cockfield told the press conference 'they (the governments) have asked for it; they have got it' and, as the Financial Times leader on the subject put it:
there is a real danger that the Commission's vision has been portrayed too honestly and that governments will challenge the basic premise that frontier controls have to be removed. .Cockfield has rightly exploded the fallacy that it is possible to enjoy the benefit of a Single Market of 320 million people without concessions to national sovereignty. .the White Paper shows that the internal market offers no painless way to develop the Community (Financial Times, 17 June 1985)'
If we dismiss the views that Cockfield's role was marginal or based on stealth, his example allows us to illustrate the importance of individual European Commissioners to two very different approaches to political leadership. The one portrays the initiatory powers of the Commission as being very important but limited, none the less, to the efficient realisation of state interests. In other words, the Commission is the 'agent' and the Council is the 'principal' (Marks et al, 1996, p.356). The other suggests that it is a far more political -rather than technical - actor. Through the exercise of its leadership role it actively shapes the political preferences of governments (Risse-Kappen, 1996); it 'breaks up existing equilibria' and provokes realignments (Majone in Richardson, 1996, p 272 discussing Riker, 1986, p.64); and it changes the balance of political forces by mobilising new actors into the political arena, particularly sub-national ones. By any one of these means, it can dramatically shift the constraints on policy change without expending considerable resources.
The core of the argument that Cockfield's role was important but limited to the realisation of a given set of state preferences is that governments were only prepared to acquiesce in an independent source of initiative because this lowered the bargaining and other transaction costs attached to goals they wanted to attain ~ To see why these savings may have been considerable we need, first, to observe that the White Paper was an enormous package deal of 283 measures. If there was something in it for everyone, there were also costs and II risks for all governments. The British and Irish Governments (which, uniquely, had zero rating for VAT that covered up to half of goods sold) felt that indirect tax harmonisation was politically 'too hot to handle' (Lawson, 1992, pp.895-98); most Governments apart from the British were deeply, concerned about the implications for banking supervision of applying the principle of mutual recognition to financial services; almost everyone was worried about the removal of frontier controls; and, of course, a genuine Single Market with constraints on state aids always had the potential to trigger a painful period of corporate restructuring and transitional unemployment (Jacquemin and Sapir, 1991). Governments would no longer be able to adjust the costs and risks of market regulation to the rhythms of the electoral cycle. Yet, in spite of these difficulties, the programme was widely acknowledged to be coherent, feasible and likely, in the round, to leave all member states better off The obvious question was whether they would have been able to reach such a solution by negotiating each item 'bottom up' between themselves. As Cockfield was himself to put it, 'under the terms of the Treaty, the Commission has the sole right of initiative. The reason is simple: if all member states had the right to institute legislation, the right would be total confusion with everyone proposing what suited them with scant regard to what suited others or the Community as a whole (Cockfield, 1994, p.98).
Various related arguments show how an. independent source of political leadership can help governments move closer to their 'pareto frontier'. All of these were present to some degree in the case of Cockfield's Single Market initiative. First, time and information are precious resources, and, in any case, governments are not well placed to gather it together in a global impact assessment at European, as opposed to national, level. Second, many mutually profitable agreements may fail to be struck because there is a lack of mutual trust in the absence of an independent enforcement mechanism. Asymmetries of information and lack of simultaneous performance will provide opportunities for deception and cheating (Keohane, 1984). Third, policy programmes may involve governments in 'incomplete contracting'. Where they are only be able to go some of the way towards specifying an agreement in advance, they may find it convenient to delegate powers to an impartial agency to 'fill in the detail' (Williamson, 1985). Fourth, one reason why governments may find it difficult to negotiate something like the Single Market initiative 'piecemeal' and from the bottom up' is that they are often precluded from coherent trade-offs by domestic political capture' in particular policy sectors. Where, on the other hand, they are confronted by a completely defined package of supranational origin, they may gain greater autonomy from domestic constraints. They are better placed to play 'winners' off against 'losers', if the preferences of the latter are prevented from becoming too salient in the policy process before the former can see what they have to gain from an initiative. Fifth, any movement towards a pareto efficient solution will always involve a mixture between 'creating value' (enlarging the cake) and claiming value' (slicing the cake). Very often negotiations that should have succeeded break down because the parties get so heated about distributional conflicts that they lose sight of their common interest in co-operation (Sebenius, 1992). An independent agency can lessen problems such as these by just stipulating what it considers to be a fair solution. Put technically, governments may find it easier to reach pareto efficiency frontiers where they do not have to argue about which of an infinite number of possible points on the frontier (each with its own distributional implications) they are going to aim at.
This last point would explain why Cockfield's solution proved a durable one: although each government disliked individual items in the package, it knew that any movement away from the 'Cockfield equilibrium' could be unstable, because it would reopen an endless stream of distributional conflicts that would prevent the Single Market meeting its already tight target for completion by 1992. As for the other points, the Cockfield initiative clearly did provide heads of government with a valuable economy of time that allowed them to concentrate on other things. A study of the European Councils of June and December 1985 shows that they were primarily concerned with an overall 'systems transformation' of the Community's institutional structures and arrangements for foreign policy co-operation. Following the publication of the Cockfield White Paper, the Single Market was largely assumed to have been a done deal, so long as the other components of a Treaty change could be put together. The importance of 'incomplete contracting' can be seen in Cockfield's repeated use of the mandate his programme had received from the Heads of Government in the European Council to support the passage of particular directives and unblock Councils of lesser ministers: 'the public endorsement by the European Council on this and subsequent occasions was not only valuable in public relations terms but of the utmost value in dealing with the Council of Ministers. It enabled me to argue that the principle had been decided by their Heads of Government and their concern was not to decide the principle but to deal with the legislation that implemented the principle' (Cockfield, 1994, p. 100).
Meanwhile, Governments, for their part, were quick to use the Single Market programme to increase their autonomy from domestic actors. For Socialist Governments in France and Spain, in particular, it was to be an important political resource in loosening constraints of parties and interest groups on the marketisation of domestic policies; while the UK Government was able to use the prize of market integration to negotiate the only trouble free passage of Treaty legislation to strengthen EC jurisdiction in the twenty-five years of British membership to date. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the benefits of supranational entrepeneurship described in this paragraph were there for the taking. Many are only available to Commissioners with a reputation for independence. As his appointment evoked Dc Gaulle's image of Britain sending 'chevaux de Troie' into the centre of Community - and he wanted to promote a programme that could so easily have been portrayed as an assault on the 'European model' of mixed economies and social consensus - Cockfield was initially regarded with suspicion. In his own memoirs, Geoffrey Howe suggests that Cockfield's 'inherent integrity of personality' and loyalty to whatever institution he was asked to serve eventually impressed itself on other governments and members of the Commission (Howe, 1994, p.405). From the point of view of easing his policy entrepeneurship with a reputation for independence and impartiality it was, however, also useful that Cockfield fell out so quickly with his original sponsor. Re shrewdly judged that the one person he did not need to please to secure the passage of the Single Market programme was Thatcher. His own reappointment to a second term after 1989 would be another matter.
A still more ambitious account of the Commission's leadership - that it actively shapes the likes and dislikes of governments, rather than just provides the technology for their fulfilment - assumes that governments approach European negotiations with only an inchoate and partially formed set of political preferences. This might follow from a variety of factors: the 'bounded rationality' of decision-makers under conditions of great uncertainty and complexity; the game structure of the EU as a field of strategic interaction in which no one party can calculate what is in its own interests until it knows more about the preferences and likely behaviour of others (Sandholtz, 1996); and norms of EU negotiation that require governments to justify points of view and leave some room for mutual learning and persuasion, rather than approach negotiations from inflexible positions (Richardson in Richardson, 1996). Bounded rationality in turn means that creative agenda-setting - or the ability to frame the social and political construction of an issue will often be as important to its overall determination' - as the decision to consider it all (Peters in Richardson, 1996, P.61). There is, once again, evidence of all these conditions in the case of the Single Market initiative. Several of the Governments seem to have been remarkably imprecise in their thinking until the programme was well under way. Cockfield reveals that when Delors visited London in October 1984 even the British Government, which supposedly saw the Internal Market as a priority, only gave it seven lines in a nine page briefing (Cockfield, 1994, pp. 37-8). Lord Young recalls 'being surprised' when he became Trade and Industry Secretary in June 1987 to discover that 'we were the lead Department' on the Single Market initiative Young, Lord, 1990, p.241). On the other hand, Cockfield was aware that, by moving quickly, he could decisively shape the way others conceptualised the Single Market project. Perhaps a little immodestly, he remarks in his book 'it was the sheer speed with which I produced the White Paper that allowed "the tide" to be taken at the flood' (Cockfield, 1994, p.54). And by publishing the White Paper two weeks before the European Council he hoped to 'give heads of Government sufficient time to read the document and appreciate the immense importance of the opportunity being opened up. But it did not give their officials enough time to pick it to pieces (Cockfield, 1994, p.49).
Apart from directly changing the political preferences of member governments, the Commission may change outcomes by introducing new actors to the game in a manner that constrains existing players and alters the identity of winning coalitions. The argument that the Commission is tightly constrained by the structure of inter-governmental preferences is a good deal less convincing when it is recalled that each of those governments is - in turn - a complex, non-unitary, actor, whose bureaucracy consists of several departments with non-identical views of the national interest and whose political leadership is a coalition of political parties or at least of individuals with conflicting ambitions and values (Sandholtz, 1996). In forming a coalition for change, the Commission is, therefore, by no means constrained to treat each member state as an entity and may, instead, form alliances with particular ministries and political tendencies within governments. It may go even further and form alliances with non-governmental actors (Marks et al, 1996). This will be especially important in matters of economic governance, where governments have their own resource dependencies on co-operative relationships with leading companies. There is little evidence that tactics such as these were a conscious aspect of Cockfield's policy entrepeneurship. As seen above, several major corporate actors were already agitating for the Single Market and did not, therefore, need to be mobilised into the European arena to lend extra support to Cockfield's initiative. However, a transformation to the Commission's advantage of relationships with non-governmental actors, and particular sections of governments, rapidly became an important dimension of the Single Market programme. The sectoral Council of Ministers concerned with the Internal Market programme gelled as a 'policy network', as Cockfield's White Paper provided a focal point for a convergence of analysis and commitment. It helped that the ministers and departments responsible for its enactment rapidly gained a stake in its success, for the whole enterprise raised their status and power within their own governments. Meanwhile Cockfield's success in establishing 1992 as the deadline and the White Paper as a definite agenda roused public expectations. It also ensured that it was the Commission that set the measure of any backsliding or policy failure from which the popularity and governing credibility of individual governments would not be immune. Finally, Cockfield's approach intensified the mobilisation of economic interests into the European arena, beyond anything that had helped produce the programme in the first place. The passage of what was to turn out to be more than 500 Single Market measures required a far more systematic institutionalisation of consultation mechanisms that reached beyond those large multinational organisations that had previously cared to organise themselves at the European level (Wallace and Young, 1996). Meanwhile the Treaty changes that owed so much to the enticement of Cockfield's White Paper, transformed the logic of lobbying to the Commission's advantage. Now that regulations could be determined by majority voting it would no longer be sufficient for economic interests to concentrate their efforts on single governments in the hope that these might veto unwelcome decisions. They also had to ensure that favourable proposals emerged from the Commission in the first place (Panebianco in Bell and Lord, 1997). Through mechanisms such as these, the Commission built up its own 'client relationships with sub-national economic actors (Wallace and Young, 1996). It also transformed the game by offering these actors a choice of political arenas and a competition of regulatory regimes (European and domestic), where national decision-making had previously held a monopoly (Sandholtz, 1996).
However, the success of Cockfield's policy initiative depended as much upon establishing a dominant position within the Commission as on reasserting the leadership potential of the institution itself As we have seen, the ability of Commissioners to make coherent policy is usually reduced by the fragmentary character of the Commission. It is difficult to arrange portfolios so that each Commissioner has clear control of any one policy area and the right to command all the administrative resources necessary to get things done. Cockfield softened this difficulty by making a remarkable 'land-grab' in the carve-up of responsibilities that takes place at the beginning of each new Commission. Re persuaded Delors to give him 'not only the internal market portfolio (the most important part of DO-Ill). but also financial institutions and company taxation (the major part of DO XV) .the Customs Union and Indirect Taxation (subsequently DO XXI):.. 'it was, I said, impossible for me, if I was to do the job properly and quickly, to be put in the position of having to argue with other Commissioners and officials (Cockfield, 1994, p.30)'. In addition to making a move that must have further reduced the prospects that all his colleagues would receive meaningful responsibilities, Cockfield resisted the formation of explicit policy linkages between his programme and those proposed by other Commissioners (Cockfield, 1994, p.46). Rather than alter the design of the Single Market, he preferred pre-empt colleagues and lock them into success of his own initiative. The decision to 'gain early mover advantage' by announcing the Single Market programme so publicly in the life time of the new Commission meant that colleagues had little choice but to support an initiative that was publicly associated with prospects for the overall revival of their institution. Other Commissioners were reduced to shaping their hopes for progress in their own policy areas around spill-overs from the Single Market initiative. However, if he was not particularly solicitous of his colleagues themselves, Cockfield was careful to work two vital networks that he correctly perceived to be the real vertebrae of the College of Commissioners: those of the Secretary General and the chefs de cabinets (heads of Commissioners' personal offices).
This was vital because the principle of shared responsibility for all policy areas in the college of Commissioners only works through the briefings Commissioners receive from their Cabinets. Indeed, a matter will not even go to the full College if the weekly, meetings of the Chefs de Cabinets feel confident to pass it as an A point'.
A perception that he was emerging as an over-mighty subject' could, none the less, have fatally compromised Cockfield's powers of initiative by provoking conflict with Delors. The relationship with Delors was an indispensable political resource for the successful completion of the Single Market. The Commission President is the sole personal link with the European Council and key heads of government (the Delors-KohI-Mitterrand axis was of legendary importance); he structures the agenda for meetings of the College which need to pass proposals by a simple majority before they can be presented to the Council; and, in the case of Delors, the President's personal Cabinet emerged as a cross between 'think tank' and 'hit squad' at the centre of the Commission. In fact, the two men were shrewd enough to form an axis in which they effectively pooled their political resources. Some observers have even suggested that subsequent Delors Commissions (1989-93 and 1993-5) were less successful than the first because there was nothing to match the rapport between Cockfield and Delors (Grant, 1994). Contrary to predictions that they were an 'odd couple' fated to clashes of personality and ideology, the two men were remarkably compatible. Like Cockfield, Delors had spent a lifetime indulging his enthusiasm for policy-making, while doing his best to avoid party and electoral politics. He had only ever been elected to the European Parliament (1979-81) and his attacliment to the Parti Socialiste had not been of sufficient fervour to prevent service as Chef de Cabinet to a Gaullist Prime Minister (1969-72). If, moreover, these two men of mutually sympathetic political biographies came together in the 1985-9 Commission, their appointments were, by a further irony, the joint product of the same guardedness towards supranational political leadership. For, both men owed their positions to Thatcher (who had vetoed Claude Cheysson in favour of Delors).
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