The European Community was created with two main purposes: to find a solution to Europe’s German problem and to make its members richer and more influential in the world as partners than they could be as separate states. In the background to these aims lay Europe’s history as the creator of the sovereign state and the home of its most suc-cessful examples. The principal obstacle to the development of a European union was the engrained strength, psychological and institutional, of nationalism.
From Bismarck’s time to Hitler’s Germany was, with only brief intervals, the state which most Europeans most feared. In a European states system Germany was
inescapably the most powerful state, for although it was twice defeated in war and might be curbed in the immediate aftermath of defeat, its resources and skills ensured its resurgence. Its neighbours moreover, although they might fear it, depended on a prosperous Germany for their own prosperity. Even before the end of the Second World War a few Europeans, notably Dutch and Belgian, confronting this dilemma of reconciling their economic dependence on German recovery with their fear of German military might, envisaged a new European order in which the sovereign nation state would no longer be paramount. Whereas a states system by its very nature encouraged national aggressiveness, in a partnership each nation – including the German – might develop its resources and preserve its identity and cultivate its pride in a context more conducive to co-operation than aggression. Opinion in the more powerful states – France, Britain – was unsympathetic to anything so radically restrictive of their formal sovereignty and independence, but within a few years of the war’s end French leaders became converted to ideas for a western European association which, in economic affairs, would maximize commerce and output and, politically, would circumscribe Germany’s predominant power and redirect its ambitions. France abandoned the policy, entertained both in 1945 and 1919, of weakening Germany by partition and disarmament in favour of a policy of supporting and sharing in German recovery.
Britain, on the other hand, although – or because – its own economic recovery from the war was at first more emphatic than France’s, failed to perceive either the economic advantage or the political calculation behind the movement towards a partnership which would make the sovereign state less than sovereign. British attitudes were partially reversed in the 1960s and 1970s when governments of both the right and the left came to fear the consequences of exclusion from a western European economic association, but in the 1980s Thatcher personified and inflated British atavistic aver-sion to political association with the result that Britain was cast in the role of a disgruntled, even subversive, member of the Community whose development was bedevilled rather than strengthened by Britain’s adherence to it.
On the continent the prestige of the nation state suffered during the war. National governments failed to prevent nation states from being battered or their citizens from being killed, tortured and enslaved. In Britain, however, the institutions of the state were not diminished; they remained intact and functioned with remarkable efficiency and fairness. In British eyes the separation from the continent by the English Channel remained axiomatic. The British were uninterested in giving the lead towards that strong and more permanent association which Britain, uniquely in 1945, had the strength and prestige to offer. The British still thought of themselves as a maritime power and a world power, only peripherally European, unthinkably less than sover-eign. For two and a half centuries Britain had had no land frontiers, since even its trou-bles in Ireland lay beyond the sea. Its principal preoccupations were the freedom of the seas, the movements of commerce, and peace. The first two of these objects it pursued by maintaining a naval lead over the combined strength of other substantial naval
powers and by ensuring so far as possible that the European nations which dominated the world should include a number of land powers of the first rank but only one such naval power. In this context the continent of Europe was a place to which negative principles applied: it must not be allowed to distract or threaten Britain, it must not fall under the dominance of one among its principal land powers. British diplomacy was directed to maintaining a balance and preventing a hegemony in Europe; if British diplomacy failed, then British arms had to shoulder the task which, though in a sense negative, was also vital to British interests as they had evolved since the Tudors had laid the foundations for a kind of British power altogether different from the continental imperialism of the Plantagenets. The British therefore developed a state of mind which drew no distinction between the near and the far. Geographers might talk of the ‘Far’
East and measure the distance to India in thousands of miles, but to many an Englishman Delhi and Singapore and Hong Kong were psychologically no further away than Calais; they were often more familiar, and they were, of course, more British.
In 1945 Britain’s innate inattention to European affairs was enhanced by the for-tunes of war and the prospect of peace. During the war every continental European combatant, including the USSR, had been overrun and at some point defeated or almost defeated. Britain had been terribly hard-pressed and had been bombarded from the air, but it had not been invaded or occupied or defeated. Its victory vindicated its right to go on as before, since it is the prerogative of a victor to retain its past, whereas its shattered and disillusioned European neighbours were looking for a new start and not for a restoration of an old order which had failed. The British and continental atti-tudes to the past were therefore completely different, and continentals who expected British sympathy for radical political experiment in Europe were overlooking not only Britain’s separate historical development but also its postwar psychology, the intent to repair and improve the structure of British life but not fundamentally to alter or find fault with it.
The advent of a Labour government in Britain in 1945 should have revealed the dif-ference, for the Labour Party, although a reforming party, was no less traditionalist than the Conservatives. It consisted of pragmatic radicals and socialists who wanted to make life happier for the lower classes by continuing the gradual and non-revolutionary adaptation of Britain’s social structure to modern notions of social justice. It had no intention of overturning the British apple-cart and not much interest in other people’s apple-carts. It was a hard-working middle-of-the-road administration which was trying, in exceptionally difficult economic circumstances (aggravated by the end of Lend-Lease and American insistence on the premature convertibility of sterling), to restore the British economy and reform British society and it did not wish to be diverted from these tasks by unprofitable foreign entanglements. The continent was chaotic and impoverished and, as the transfer of Britain’s commitments in Greece and Turkey to the United States showed, could better struggle out of its troubles with American rather than British aid. Moreover, the new leaders in Europe were (quite
5.1 Growth of the European Union
apart from being foreigners) mostly conservatives and Roman Catholics; opponents, it was wrongly thought, of planned economies, uncomfortable partners for British socialists. In so far as they were attracted by federal ideas, these leaders were regarded as unpractical visionaries. For the British the nation state was one of those bits of the past which practically nobody questioned. That this state had come into existence by a sequence of federal agreements was comprehensively ignored.
Winston Churchill had told the British during the war that they operated in three circles – the Anglo-American, the British imperial and the European – and that this triangularity gave Britain special opportunities and a unique position in the world.
Until Harold Macmillan applied in 1961 to join the European Economic Community the European circle was the one which seemed to offer Britain the least. The most important was the Anglo-American. Britain – or at any rate Ernest Bevin, who became foreign secretary in 1945 – saw that the consolidation of Europe under the aegis of a single power could no longer be prevented by British diplomacy or British arms alone, and that if this bugbear of British foreign policy was to be avoided the Americans must be made a European power. NATO was the outward and visible sign of his success, but his endeavours to create an Anglo-American thrust in European affairs, in the place of the expired British power to intervene and rectify, made him suspicious of continental federalists who might hanker after an independent European power to the exclusion of the Americans. Their policies were at best irrelevant, possibly damaging, to his aim of bringing in the New World to create a balance in Europe. Furthermore, those in Britain who were hostile to the United States or wary of its preponderance were not for the most part European federalists. In so far as there was a party in Britain which was thinking in terms of a ‘third force’ in world affairs, it conceived at this period a third force provided by the Commonwealth rather than by a united Europe. The Commonwealth, together with nuclear weapons and the pound sterling as an interna-tional currency, would keep Britain in a separate category.
Britain’s change of heart did not begin to occur until some 10 to 15 years after the end of the war and even then it manifested itself more fitfully than the compar-able revolution in continental thinking which had been imposed by wartime defeats.
Britain continued to think of itself as a worldwide, even if no longer an imperial, power – a somewhat uncritical adjectival substitution. One of the most striking consequences of the war was the British departure from India in 1947 (followed more rapidly than was expected by departure from Africa), but this abnegation of empire took place in such an atmosphere of self-congratulation that the attendant loss of power was over-looked. The loss of India was regarded as a victory for British commonsense, which it was, but not as a curtailment of British power, which it was too. For generations Britain had been a world power because it possessed in Asia an area where it could keep, train and acclimatize armies for use in distant parts of the globe, and this reserve of power was at least as important as the command of the seas in making Britain what it was in the world. The departure from India, coupled with the loss of wealth and strength
during the war, sapped Britain’s staying power in the Middle East and made Australia and New Zealand turn to the United States for their security. (Britain was not a party to the tripartite Anzus Pact of 1951 which confirmed this lesson of the Second World War and was one of the world’s most equable alliances until the 1980s when the return of anti-nuclear Labour governments in both Australia and New Zealand created dif-ficulties over naval exercises. In 1984 New Zealand banned from its ports all nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed vessels.)
Britain did not, however, draw the conclusion that the end of empire and of defence commitments in Asia, Africa and Australia had converted Britain into a primarily European state. The empire had been replaced by the Commonwealth, a more elevat-ing concept perhaps but one of less substance since it lacked the empire’s bonds of alle-giance to the British Crown, government by a ruling class which regarded itself as all one kin, mutual comprehension through a prodigal exchange of secret telegrams, and a British commitment to the defence of all its territories. The Commonwealth became an association of monarchies and republics of widely differing traditions and inclina-tions, requiring above all development capital which Britain could not provide, and pursuing independent and even contradictory foreign policies on the basis that this permissive latitude was a necessary price for a continuing association which was still worthwhile. And so perhaps it was, since the Commonwealth proved to be an interna-tional organization which worked up to a point. But it contained within itself racial conflicts which posed tests of statesmanship which the British governments of this period failed to pass. In Rhodesia Britain was credibly accused of dealing softly with rebels because they were white and at home the same government exposed itself to even more serious charges. In 1963 Britain had given Asians in Kenya the right to opt for British citizenship, which many of them took. In 1968 the most important element in this right – the right to enter Britain – was summarily removed from them by a govern-ment which, in its ignorance of the true facts and figures about coloured immigration, allowed itself to be panicked into slamming the door against some of its own fellow citizens. This unprecedented act, grounded in colour prejudice in a section of British society and in racial discrimination by the government, made nonsense of the Com-monwealth ideal – and was later challenged and condemned in the Council of Europe.
Even if Britain had in the past thought of the Commonwealth as a source of political strength, Britain’s rulers from the 1960s were finding it as much an embarrassment as a support.
Unofficial pressure groups in favour of a European union had been encouraged, not least by Churchill, who spoke more than once during the war of the need for European unity and advocated in a famous speech at Zurich in September 1945 a Council of Europe. These groups organized a convention at The Hague in May 1948 which was held under the sponsorship of many of Europe’s leading figures, including Churchill, and which succeeded in persuading the five Brussels powers to set up a Council of Europe consisting in the first place of themselves and Norway, Sweden, Denmark,
Ireland and Italy – to which were shortly afterwards added Iceland, Greece, Turkey, West Germany and Austria. The members were required to respect the rule of law and fundamental human rights. The constitution was a hybrid, an assembly without legislative powers yoked to a committee of ministers; the members of the assembly were appointed by national parliaments, in practice in accordance with the party rep-resentation in each parliament; the committee of ministers, which was included in the constitution on British and Scandinavian insistence against the more federalist wishes of other members, ensured that any authority which the Council of Europe might exercise should be subject to the control of national ministers responsible to national parliaments. The assembly never acquired any real authority and at the end of 1951 its president Henri Spaak resigned in despair.
But another and more substantial initiative was under way. In May 1950 the French foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Although multinational in scope, this was an essentially Franco-German ven-ture with political as well as economic aims. It marked the conversion of France to a partnership with Germany which became one of the principal features of postwar Europe. Coal and steel were at the heart of Franco-German economic and military competition and by proposing to place these industries under joint international con-trol France was, openly, burying the hatchet and, privately, acknowledging the foolish-ness of trying to compete: to this degree it accepted, consciously or not, that in the new Europe it would be a junior partner with Germany and that being a junior partner was more sensible than trying to be an independent actor. Britain was sceptical on prin-ciple and mildly hostile because it hoped that British steel would undersell European steel. There has been argument about whether Britain refused to join the ECSC or France made it impossible for Britain to do so; the one view does not exclude the other.
In April 1951 six states (France, West Germany, Benelux (3), and Italy) signed a treaty establishing the ECSC, which came into existence in the following year. It consisted of a High Authority of nine individuals acting by majority vote with power to take deci-sions, make recommendations, make levies on enterprises, impose fines and generally control production and investment in the six countries; a court of justice empowered to pronounce upon the validity of the High Authority’s decisions and recommenda-tions; a council of ministers; and an assembly entitled to censure the High Authority and by a two-thirds majority to enforce the resignation of the council of ministers. In the late 1950s, when the demand for coal declined, differences arose between the High Authority and the council of ministers, and the High Authority suffered some attenu-ation in practice of its supranattenu-ational competence.
By the early 1950s the Council of Europe had been joined on the European stage by the Coal and Steel Community and by an incipient Defence Community, and in 1952 Eden proposed the amalgamation of these three bodies and their parallel institutions.
The Council of Europe appointed an ad hoc assembly to work out a scheme on these