Why should people go for training at ENA?

ENA has an objective of excellence and a European objective thanks to its knowledge of the evolution of political systems and to its geographic location. Since it has been in Strasbourg, ENA has even further confirmed its European vocation. The analysis that we make of the evolution of the political and administrative system is that, in each of the member states, the European Union’s role is extremely important, that it is more and more important, that it is more and more complex, richer and richer and more and more original in the sense that we are in the middle of building a system that is no longer a copy of a national system but which is a new system. It is an “unidentified administrative system,” was how a former Commission President, Jacques Delors, would have put it. ENA is therefore faced with two challenges: a very big need to train leaders and an evolving and complex situation. It is the combination of these two phenomena which means that ENA can respond to the problems more easily than others. If it was only about training leaders in known techniques, there are consultants, universities and training centres for that. The ENA model is based both on very thorough research, which is not to be found at ENA itself but in a network in Europe and that we know how to mobilise, be that in universities and think tanks, and on players who are players in business, placed at the heart of issues, who do not only know what has happened but who know what is happening and how they want things to happen in the future. In our educational system, these are not analysts, historians or observers – even if they can be – but are actors who are centre stage. That is why ENA is extremely at ease when a complicated issue develops, when a regulation has not been finalised or a reform has not been finished. We are capable, before texts are produced, to train leaders of the continent to adapt themselves and to have rules adapted.

What is your clientèle, your main target?

They are leaders, from the public and private sector, in Europe, in the broadest sense, because the European model is a global model and it has a vocation to spread to countries in the neighbourhood and other regions in the world who want to reproduce it. The director-general of DG Internal Audit of the European Commission has just given a speech to us in front of a Korean delegation. He told me on this occasion that the Chinese had adopted, without changing it, the European internal audit model. The Chinese are in reality more advanced than the European Union, as the model is, for the EU, an objective while, for them, it has become the standard. Because it is original, because it is built on a compromise, which is such that it satisfies completely diverse and even contradictory demands, the European model can be ‘sold’ to the whole world.

Do you tend to approach public officials?

No. You know very well that there is no EU administration outside the three capitals of Strasbourg, Luxembourg and Brussels. So, from the outset, the European Union relies on networks that can be political, institutional or which are also the representations of groups of private interests and expertise. All these partners, political, institutional, administrative, diplomatic, from the private sector, from the trade union world, from the press, have a vocation to be leading actors in European integration. Without them, there will be no-one to replace them because there will be no ‘public service’ of the European Union who can do it instead of them. So they are all put on the same footing. Of course, each one has their role: there are negotiators in the Council, judges, actors who transpose and who implement regulations; there are those who come up with regulations, make strategy, who reflect on institutional evolutions, etc. All of them have a key role to play that the EU cannot fulfil in their place. These people are in the public or the private sector. That depends on the countries. They can also make a career move from one to the other. That is one of the issues that we are reflecting on, that of European careers. We are trying to understand what a European career covers. We note that, often, actors who have a European career have had a varied career path. They have held different posts in the Council, the Parliament, the Commission, at national level and in the private sector. That is a very mobile milieu, which, as a point of reference, has interest for European issues.

What is the percentage from the public and private sectors?

With us, for EU affairs, it’s half and half.

And how many people does that amount to?

We train 5,000 people per year: 2,500 come from the public sector and 2,500 from the private sector. Of course, there are ENA students too. Eighty are recruited every year in France. With forty or so foreigners, there are 120 and, with the schooling lasting two years, we always have 240 students at ENA. They are civil servants. Some come from the private sector and have a vocation to be civil servants. The students follow a six-month course on European issues. It is the longest course in this area that exists in administration schools in Europe. There is no other. This long course is based around very intense individual and group exercises in Strasbourg, and a long four-month internship in or around the EU institutions. Of the 5,000 people trained every year, there are 240 students present at the same time who do six months of Europe but there are also people who only do a day. We have a whole range of possibilities. Between the two, there is an annual session of the cycle of post-graduate European studies, which covers 42 people and lasts 30 days.

What is, today, the geographic origin of people trained by ENA in European affairs?

We have, it has to be admitted, firstly French people then people from the European Union and thirdly people from neighbouring countries and, finally, those from countries further afield, mainly Asia for the moment. It is the citizens of the emerging countries in Asia who are the most interested in European issues and who have the means to come here too.

Is that not an epiphenomenon?

No. We have hosted four seminars for Korea in 2010 and we have been invited to go to Seoul. Korea is an increasingly important partner, which has a real interest in European integration because it considers itself to be in a situation that is comparable to that of European Union countries 30 or 40 years ago. The Koreans have the same problems. And they have the means to be interested in European issues.

What marks you out from other public schools of administration in Europe?

We work together. We are in the middle of building a network of European schools of administration that would have the vocation of responding in particular to calls for tender from the institutions. To acquire a common culture, we see each other very often, whether it be in the meetings or at European meetings in Strasbourg that are organised every year in May in the European Parliament under the patronage of its President, Jerzy Buzek, and with the participation of personalities such as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 2010. We see each other two or three times per year to reflect together on the training needs of leaders of the European Union in the coming years.

Then we specialise. On European issues, ENA wants to specialise on five subject areas. The first is the preparation of the rotating Presidency of the Council. The second is the future of the financial regulation policy. The third is sustainable development and agriculture. The fourth is cohesion policy, its design and the management of Structural Funds. And the fifth is the construction of an area of freedom, security and justice. In these areas, we have the ambition to bring together research, studies, networks and pedagogy to be players that cannot be missed in Europe. Of course, we are also working on European careers, as I said, as we want to make Strasbourg, ourselves and our local partners, in particular the University of Strasbourg, the capital of European careers.

Will going via Strasbourg be a must?

Not necessarily. That may be the case. But we want to build here research and training teams that are the best placed to accompany all those who want to make a successful European career. We want to be capable possibly to train trainers because we cannot necessarily make everyone come to Strasbourg. We move around very often, we go to give training sessions in Brussels, in Luxembourg and in the capitals of member states. Doing training is not complicated in itself. What is complicated is to do it very well. And we want to do it very well. We want to be at the cutting edge of the evolution and that requires a lot of research and study work. We want Strasbourg to be a point of reference, the head of the network for everything that concerns research and studies in the area of European careers.

What are the specialisations in terms of public administration in Europe?

ENA has the advantage of being an extremely big school as it covers legal careers – the Court of Auditors, the Council of State, administrative tribunals, the regional audit chambers –, audit and control, via inspection bodies, general administration, civil administration and territorial administration via the prefectoral body, not to mention diplomacy. ENA covers the widest range of professions for administrators and civil servants that exists in Europe. The schools that are our partners in the federal states have federal competences and not federated competences. In other centralised countries, the schools are sometimes ministerial or pluri-ministerial but not totally horizontal like ENA. So the schools which are our partners specialise at the federal level or on policies to which they have a vocation to prepare.

As your network reflects on training, do you have the feeling that the elites are well enough trained?

During a recent lunch with several members of the European Parliament, in particular a colleague from my ENA year, Sylvie Goulard, we noted that Europe is unfortunately a speciality for the time being. That is to say that the subject is sufficiently difficult and complex from the point of view of relations, from the linguistic point of view and from the point of view of content so that European competence should be recognised as a real expertise. That also means that we have not yet managed to spread this general knowledge of Europe to all the different layers of the population. That poses the problem of European citizenship, which is a traditional problem on which we have been working hard for ten years – not necessarily us, we are not leaders on it - because it is a subject of great difficulty.

The positive aspect for a school is that there is a lot of training work to be done. But we sometimes feel a bit ill-equipped faced with the scale of the needs. I am simply going to take the example of the construction of the area of freedom, security and justice, which is a crucial area for the daily lives of citizens and inhabitants of the European Union. We estimate that more than a million middle managers would need to be trained for this justice, freedom and security policy, which is mainly but not only based on mutual recognition, to be able to work. We can see that the task is superhuman and that one needs to set priorities. That is what we are working on, also in liaison with the European Commission, as part of the EU meetings in Strasbourg. The question is: how do we try to prioritise in this particular training faced with such a huge public that does not know that it has a role to play in this policy?

Are solutions emerging?

Yes. It is clearly to build networks in Europe, with continuity in pedagogical investment, ie that we need to avoid schools and universities flitting from one subject to another. We would need to try to build poles of skills in Europe that are articulated together and that are set for the long term. Fundamentally, even if everything changes every year, we would need to avoid training programmes changing every year. We need training teams to be signed up in the long term because, once one has built teams which have a skill here or there – it takes several years to do that – we do not want these teams to be permanently renewed with excessive mobility because that would water down the quality of the service. And for them to be understandable is necessary because we need citizens and leaders of the EU who need information to know who they are addressing. We must not think that we can address any training centre on European issues for any question. That is no longer possible for specific subjects. There is a need for the centres to be more understandable and your special edition is going to help get this visibility to emerge. I think that this is a beginning and not the end of a process.

“We want to make Strasbourg the capital of European careers”