Here is an elegant bit of work by Jonathan Golub (golub means pigeon in Serbian, by the way) attempting to measure which EU member states are better at getting their way within the system.

I could add all sorts of glosses, but read the whole thing and see for yourself how he reaches his conclusions (one of which is that the UK is in fact pretty effective as compared to some other EU Bigs):

My statistical analysis shows that many of the smaller states including Finland, Sweden, Luxembourg, Denmark, Ireland and Austria tended to enjoy significantly more bargaining success than either France or Germany or Italy. Even in the fields where one might have expected them to excel — France in agricultural policy, Germany in internal market policies — neither beat the smaller states. Of the large states, only the UK’s bargaining success matched these much smaller overachievers.

Why small states achieve such relative success is not entirely clear. It helps that they concentrate their efforts on a limited number of proposals and avoid taking extreme positions that leave them marginalised. But even after we control for these factors, French and German performance lags considerably.

He is looking at data from 1995-2002, but I’d expect the trends to be maintained going forward towards the present.

My own reasons for the relative success of the smaller EU states? Thus: 

–   they find it easier to muster a national elite consensus to pursue (or try to block) a given EU outcome – larger states have just that many more people in their system and outside it bickering over what to do and what priority to give it

–   the decks are deliberately stacked against the larger states via vote-weighting. The whole point of the EU system is for the Bigs to do relatively less well. As the Bigs lumber around trying to get through bigger things they want, they scatter concessions to the Smalls to buy support – it’s easy for the Smalls to play this game well, once they get the hang of it

– Smalls also do pretty well in getting ‘their’ people into EU jobs – it’s almost a national priority, as big bucks flow to them if they do it well

In the UK’s case, we have one huge advantage compared to other Bigs (and maybe most Smalls too): Whitehall encourages information-flow and discourages information-hoarding. E-swarms of officials across the UK bureaucracy including our Embassies round the world can be mobilised almost literally in minutes to come up with views and ideas, giving us a huge advantage in generating ingenious proposals or finding good reasons to delay things. In many other continental systems, the tradition of keeping things secret from one’s own colleagues is alive and well, and/or procedures are simply too top-heavily hierarchical/clumsy to let dynamic work proceed.

In other words, a lot of explicit and implicit skills are needed to manoeuvre around the EU labyrinths – as ever it’s partly about one’s absolute weight, but much more about how cunningly one deploys whatever weight one has. Technique, in short.

Food for thought as we mull over the UK’s future in this magnificent construction?