All that now needs to happen is for the College of Europe to get its act together and make the place a lot better… That, I suspect, will take quite a lot longer than a BIS u-turn.

There is one line I really dislike in the FT piece though:

Based in Bruges, it has for 60 years fed prospective civil servants an unabashedly federalist diet of courses for a post-graduate degree in political studies.

Oh come on folks, is that the best that FT journalists can do?

Of course the College of Europe by its very nature is not going to a bastion of opposition to the European Union. The fact that people are motivated to go there means, almost by definition, that they have an interest in EU politics and think that the EU is important in some way. But that does not equate to federalism, be that either the twisted British use of the word, or the correct political science definition of it.

The College of Europe in my experience was a rather practically orientated, non-ideological place. I would certainly count myself as one of the most forcefully ideologically motivated people who was there during my year in Bruges 2003-04. I was even criticised for having views that were too concrete and too stridently expressed.

No, the College of Europe is a place that fills students heads with facts about how the European Union works, and also equips them with some of the skills and approaches in order for them to deal with the EU’s machinery in Brussels. For a start the College’s own bureaucratic morass is a good training for the bureaucratic treacle that greets anyone in the European Commission.

Bruges is also a good place to meet people who will be in the corridors of power and to hence find a job in Brussels. If anyone’s in any doubt that’s a means of motivating people then see the enormous amount of comments on my posts about Commission jobs here and here (more comments there than on the rest of my blog put together) – a secure job is a much greater motivation that federalism is ever going to be.

But of course British journalists need to fit any EU story into the well-worn (and now increasingly broken) eurosceptics versus federalists frame. Problem is that the College of Europe does not fit the frame.

The decision to look at this was prompted by an open letter to all UK alumni of the College of Europe (I have a MA from Bruges, 2004), informing us of the decision of the UK government to stop funding the 28 annual scholarships for Brits. I’m not sure exactly how the cash allocation is worked out, but the total cost of this will be something in the region of £300000/€350000 a year.

David Lammy, the BIS minister responsible, gives some flimsy legal reason for why the funding cannot be maintained (more in the letter), but essentially it must be that they are looking for ways to cut the Higher Education budget, so why keep funding scholarships to small colleges in Belgium and Poland that train people who mostly end up working as eurocrats…

But hold on a moment. Haven’t I heard that recently? That Brits are underrepresented in the institutions? Hence the European Fast Stream scheme has been re-introduced within the UK civil service, promising a posting to Brussels and enhanced training to allow participants on the scheme… to become eurocrats.

Indeed it’s obligatory to participate in any concours for which you’re eligible when on the scheme (see the bottom of the page here). It’s hard to estimate the cost of the new EFS, but the cost of recruiting one Fast Stream civil servant is around £10000, plus there will be training costs on top – £200000 a year for the reintroduction at a rough guess? (Just to underline my EU-übergeek credentials I should say I was on the original European Fast Stream in the civil service between 2004 (after Bruges) and 2007).

So what does the EFS do, what do Bruges and Natolin do, that might be worth the UK government financing?

Essentially the answer is the creation of networks of expertise that overlap between London and Brussels, and cross between government and the private sector, and hence greatly smooth UK-EU relations. Friends of mine from Bruges work in Brussels and London, for government and the private sector, but almost all of them in EU matters. Friends from EFS work in EU jobs across UK government and the EU institutions, and a few have even made the leap to the private sector or academia, but almost all are still engaged in EU affairs. And most of us are still in contact, part professionally and part on a personal basis, with people we met through either route. Getting things done in Brussels is not as easy as learning the rules and going and getting on a Eurostar – it’s just not that simple, and EFSers or College of Europe graduates understand how to play the game.

It’s also worth underlining that neither the College of Europe nor the EFS are bastions of federalism or integrationalist thinking – in fact I had rather hoped to meet some more ideologically minded people when I studied at Bruges! Also remember it was Thatcher who established the EFS in the first place back in the 1980s.

In short, whatever you think about European integration, any EU Member State needs well trained and knowledgeable people to help oil the wheels of the machinery, and half a million pounds a year to manage to make that happen (i.e. keeping College of Europe funding going too) should not be an exorbitant price to pay for that.

(Note: there are serious shortcomings of both the EFS and the College of Europe – those will be the subject of some later posts if I find time!)