Dr Richard North Dr Richard North explains the The Reform Treaty and Why the people MUST have a vote! with Harold Hoffman Review on EU - THE EU SCEPTIC MOVEMENT AND EXIT STARATEGY FOR UK. Dr Richard North explains the The Reform Treaty and Why the people MUST have a vote! with Harold Hoffman
Review on EU - THE EU SCEPTIC MOVEMENT AND EXIT STARATEGY FOR UK.
E U Referendum
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E U Referendum
Click to ListenTHE GREAT DECEPTIONA Secret History of the European UnionBy Christopher Booker and Richard North
Introduction
The sovereign nations of the past can no longer solve the problems of the present: they cannot ensure their own progress or control their own future. And the Community itself is only a stage on the way to the organised world of tomorrow.
Closing words of Jean Monnet’s Memoirs.
This book tells the story of the most extraordinary political project in history. From small beginnings, it has developed over many decades to the point where, at the start of the 21st Century, it seems on the brink of bringing together more than two thirds of the nations of Europe under a unique form of government, like nothing the world has seen before.
Through most of that time it was not generally obvious that this was where this process was heading, not least because it was a cardinal principle of the project’s founders that, for a long time, its real nature and purpose should not be brought too obviously out into the open.
Even now, that system of government is veiled in such labyrinthine complexity that, although it has come to rule over hundreds of millions of people, few have any comprehensive knowledge of how it actually works, how it evolved or what an important part it has come to play in their lives.
Only in recent years has the project become so far advanced that its underlying purpose can no longer be hidden. That is why it is now of the highest priority that the peoples of Europe should realise at last what has been and is being done in their name.
It is impossible to understand the true nature of what came to be known as ‘the European project’ without appreciating how it was set in train by a single guiding idea; an idea which originally crystallised back in the 1920s in the minds of two men. One, eventually to become well-known, was a French former brandy-salesman, Jean Monnet. The other, whose name is now almost wholly forgotten, was his close friend Arthur Salter, an English civil servant.
When these two men first conceived their dream of a ‘United States of Europe’, absolutely central to it was the prospect of setting up an entirely new form of government: one which was ‘supra-national’, beyond the control of national governments, politicians or electorates. Nation states, governments and parliaments could be left in place: but only so that they could gradually become subordinated to a new supranational government which was above them all.
Long before there was any realistic prospect of putting such an audacious idea into practice, Salter dropped out of the story. But Monnet’s determination to bring it about never faltered. By the time in the 1940s when he had reached a position of sufficient influence to set their project on its way, he was aware it could never be realised if its true purpose was made too explicit. His ultimate goal could only be achieved if it was worked for by stealth, step by step, over many years, until enough of the machinery of the new form of government was in place for its purpose to be brought fully into the open.
Quite independently of Monnet, another man in the 1940s was also dreaming of a future ‘United States of Europe’. Languishing in a Fascist prison, an obscure Italian Communist Altiero Spinelli also recognised that, to bring his vision about, it would be necessary to conceal from the peoples of Europe just what was being done in their name until the process was so far advanced that it had become irreversible. Not least because Monnet disliked him, Spinelli was to remain relatively anonymous for many years until, in the last decade of his life, he emerged from the shadows to play a crucially influential role in shepherding the project towards its conclusion.
Apart from these three original visionaries, a fourth man, Paul-Henri Spaak, a prime minister of Belgium, also made his own crucial contribution. It was he who urged on his friend Monnet the idea that, initially, the most effective way to disguise their project’s political purpose was to conceal it behind a pretence that it was concerned only with economic co-operation, based on dismantling trade barriers: a ‘common market’.
Only after many decades was the project finally ready to declare its real intention. On February 26 2002, delegates from 25 countries gathered in the largest complex of office buildings in Europe, the headquarters of the European Parliament in Brussels, for the opening of a convention to draft the constitution for a ‘United Europe’. Explicit in many of their minds was a direct parallel between what they were doing and the convention which had gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to draw up a constitution for the United States of America. They were only too conscious of the thought that, like their American predecessors, they were present at an extraordinary moment in history: the crowning event in the creation of a new state.
When the 105 appointed delegates, watched by a host of functionaries and observers, took their places in the chamber of the Parliament, the huge glass and steel building in which they sat was named after Paul-Henri Spaak. It was overshadowed from next door by an even vaster office block named after Altiero Spinelli: the man who had first suggested sixty years earlier how drafting a constitution for the ‘United States of Europe’ should be the final symbolic act in its process of political integration.
No more than a handful of delegates had any proper understanding of the part played by these two men in the convoluted process which, over 50 years, had brought them to where they were; any more than did all but an even tinier fraction of the 500 million people across Europe in whose supposed interest all this was taking place.
It was also somehow appropriate that the one name not commemorated in the colossal structures where these events were unfolding was that of the man who more than anyone else had set this process on its way half a century before. Even though he had long since been honoured as ‘the Father of Europe’, Jean Monnet had always preferred to work behind the scenes, away from the limelight. He knew that, only by operating in the shadows, behind a cloak of obscurity, could he one day realise his dream. What he pulled off, as this book will show, was to amount to a slow-motion coup d’etat: the most spectacular coup d’etat in history.
Yet even as this process seemed to be nearing its completion, like the putting into place of the final pieces of some vast and complex jigsaw puzzle, fundamental questions were emerging. After fifty years of slowly and painfully assembling the puzzle, was it possible that the pieces were not in fact going to fit together after all?
It was one thing to dream of a continent in which nation states could be persuaded to surrender their power of self-government to a new type of supranational government. But, when it came to the final crunch, was that what their leaders and peoples really wanted?
It was one thing to dream of a Europe in which the richer nations of the west could at last be united with poorer nations to the east which for decades had suffered under Communism. But in practice could that effectively be achieved in a way which would leave all the parties feeling they had been fairly treated?
It was one thing to dream of a single government for a Europe of 500 million people of different nationalities, speaking different languages, coming from wholly different cultural and historical traditions. But in practice could such a government in any meaningful sense remain democratic? Indeed, did that matter?
It was one thing to dream of a Europe sharing a single political and economic system. But on the evidence of its record to date, what were the prospects of that system actually delivering on the promises that were made for it?
As the governments of Europe gathered in the autumn of 2003 to discuss the constitution intended to bind their nations irrevocably together, it was hard not to reflect that the process set in train by Jean Monnet fifty years before had amounted to an immense gamble, one of the most daring political gambles in history. The real question hanging over Europe at this time was: would that gamble come off? And what would happen if it did not?
In arriving at an informed answer to these questions, nothing could be more vital than to understand just how this fateful moment in Europe’s collective history had come about.
Hence the purpose of this book.
Chapter One
The birth of an idea: 1918-1932
Europe is being liquidated, and the League of Nations must be the heir to this great estate.
Jan Smuts (1918).
The United States of Europe must be a political reality or it cannot be an economic one.
Arthur Salter, The United States of Europe (1931).
On 11 November 1984, two portly middle-aged men stood holding hands in front of the largest pile of human bones in Europe. One was the President of France, François Mitterrand; the other the Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl. The reason why the two most powerful political leaders in western Europe were staging an act of reconciliation before tens of thousands of graves was that the site of this ceremony was the ossuary at Douaumont, just outside Verdun in eastern France. And if there was one historical event which more than any other inspired what was eventually to become the European Union, it was the battle which had raged around Verdun the First World War.
For the British the defining battle of that war was the Somme in the summer of 1916. For France and Germany it was the colossal battle of attrition launched in February the same year, when the French commander, General Philippe Petain, pronounced that the fortresses on the hills overlooking Verdun on the River Meuse were where the advance of German armies into his country would be brought to a halt. His legendary words ‘Ils ne passeront pas’ were endorsed the same day by France’s prime minister, Aristide Briand.
For nearly a year, the French and German armies battered each other to destruction in the most intense and prolonged concentration of violence the world had ever seen. French artillery alone fired more than twelve million shells, the German guns considerably more. The number of dead and wounded on both sides exceeded 700,000.
The impact of this battle on France was profound. Because of the way in which her citizen soldiers were rotated through the front line, scarcely a town or village in France was untouched by the slaughter. Among the two and a half million Frenchmen who fought in the battle were France’s future President, Charles de Gaulle, and Louis Delors, whose son Jacques would one day be President of the European Commission. Present for several months fighting for the other side was the father of Germany’s future Chancellor, Helmut Kohl.
So deep was the wound Verdun inflicted on the psyche of France that the following year her army was brought to mutiny. Its morale would never fully recover. And from this blow were to emerge two abiding lessons.
The first was a conviction that such a suicidal clash of national armies must never be repeated. The second was much more specific and immediate. It came from the realisation that the war had been shaped more than anything else by industrial power. As the battle for Verdun had developed into a remorseless artillery duel, trainloads of German shells were arriving at the front still warm from the factories of the Ruhr. The battle, and the war itself, became less a trial of men and human resolve than of two rival industrial systems. And the French system had been found sorely wanting.
Particularly inferior had been the heavy guns, many dating back to the 1870s, able to fire shells at only a seventh the rate of their German counterparts. More and better guns became vital. But, as France’s politicians found to their consternation, manufacturing them and the huge quantities of ammunition needed was beyond the capacity of an industry which compared equally poorly with Germany’s. This had since August 1914, under the inspiration of Walter Rathenau, been put on a fully integrated war footing, under the control of a War Raw Materials Department.
In the summer of 1996, therefore, a crisis-stricken French government gave an industrialist, Louis Loucheur, near-dictatorial powers to reform and develop the manufacturing base. Before the war, Loucheur had been one of the early pioneers in the use of reinforced concrete. In a national economy dominated by artisan manufacture, he was one of the few French technocrats familiar with the techniques of mass production.
With all the power of the state behind him, Loucheur succeeded in his initial task, even building new factories to make the new guns. But improvements in production precipitated critical shortages of steel and coal, exacerbated by the German seizure in the first weeks of the war of around half France’s industrial base in the north-east of the country.
Remedying these shortages required massive imports from Britain, and then from the United States. In turn, this placed considerable demands on shipping. All this required unprecedented economic co-operation between the Western Allies, leading Loucheur to conclude, like Rathenau before him, how far success in modern warfare demanded industrial organisation.
Thus, Loucheur came to reflect, industrial organisation was the key to waging war. From this he developed the idea that, if key industries from different countries, above all their coal and steel industries on which modern warfare so much depended, were removed from the control of individual nations and vested in a ‘higher authority’, this might be the means of preserving peace.
Building the world anew
When the Great War ended on 11 November 1918, much of the pre-war world which had brought it about had already slipped into history. Four great empires had fallen apart: that of Germany itself, and those of Austria-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman Turks who had ruled over so much of the Middle East. There followed a general sense that the world must be rebuilt, in a way which might ensure that such a catastrophe could never be repeated. But this determination took two competing forms: one was idealistic, the other vengeful.
Post-war idealism was symbolised by US President Woodrow Wilson, whose country’s intervention in the last year of the war had finally tipped the military balance against Germany, bringing about her political collapse. Wilson’s famous ‘Fourteen Point Declaration’, supporting the right of peoples to self-determination, guided the post-war settlement agreed at the Paris peace conference in 1919. New nations arose in the former lands of now-defunct empires, their borders supposedly guaranteed by Wilson’s supreme embodiment of post-war idealism, the League of Nations. This would keep the peace, by providing a forum for resolving disputes and, if this failed, a mechanism for collective intervention.
In the early stages of the post-war era, however, this mood of idealism was undermined by two rude shocks. The first, following opposition from the US Senate and Woodrow Wilson’s succession by President Harding, was the USA’s withdrawal from the League. America’s retreat into isolationism left the new international forum largely a European body, dominated by Britain, France and Italy (neither Germany nor Russia, now locked in the civil war which followed the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, were initially admitted as members). The second was France’s determination to wreak vengeance on Germany, the country held chiefly responsible for the catastrophe, and to ensure that it would never again be strong enough to endanger the peace.
Largely as a result of French pressure, therefore, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed on defeated Germany fearsome punishments. She lost more than an eighth of her land area and all her overseas empire. Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France in perpetuity, along with the Saar, rich in coal and iron, pending a plebiscite after fifteen years. The Rhineland was to remain under allied occupation. Germany’s army was limited to 100,000 men and she was prohibited from producing heavy guns, tanks or military aircraft. Most damaging of all, she was required to pay crippling reparations to the Western allies, in money and goods, amounting eventually to £6.6 billion. Germany was to be humiliated and emasculated.
In January 1923, the screw was tightened still further. Taking as excuse the late delivery of a small quantity of timber for telegraph poles due under the reparations settlement, followed by a default on deliveries of coal (at a time when coal was in surplus), France and Belgium sent 70,000 armed men to occupy the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland.
The French contingent included a large number of colonial troops who were allowed to run amok. Their activities triggered a widespread campaign of passive resistance, which the French countered by deposing or imprisoning the ringleaders and expelling nearly 150,000 people from the district. These included over 46,000 German officials and their families. Confronted by non-cooperation and episodes of sabotage, the French authorities resorted to hostage-taking and collective fines. They also conducted aggressive house searches, identity checks and summary executions.
The effect was catastrophic. Industrial output collapsed, causing mass unemployment. When the German government guaranteed the wages of workers dispossessed by the Franco-Belgian action, hyper-inflation ensued. By November 1923, this had so devalued the currency that a single US dollar could buy 4.2 trillion German marks. This led to widespread unrest and disorder, attempts at revolution, an unsuccessful putsch in Bavaria by Adolf Hitler and his followers, and moves to create a separate Rhineland republic, the latter financed by French agents, using money stolen from German municipalities.
Few details of this episode, which sent a wave of shock across the non-French world, survive in modern textbooks on European history. At the time, it was clear that French policy was directed at destabilising the German nation. The French occupation force actively interfered in German civil administration, in violation of Versailles Treaty, and sponsored the deliberate wrecking of Germany’s infrastructure, particularly its railway system. An American academic at the time, Professor Schevill, who held the chair in modern European history at Chicago, observed:
France… is the spoiled child of Europe, privileged to indulge her most capricious desire. Her European allies and friendly America may offer a mild remonstrance over unreasonable and wilful actions of which they do not approve, but they lack the heart to be severe. Since 1919 France has therefore had her way. She alone has made the pacification of Europe impossible.
Nevertheless, the speed of Germany’s recovery from this catastrophe was one of the miracles of 20th Century history. Its hero was Gustav Stresemann, founder and leader of the German People’s Party, who on 13 August 1924 became Chancellor of a coalition government. Although he held office only until 23 November, in those one hundred days he dealt firmly with an insurrection in Saxony, restored order in Bavaria after Hitler’s putsch, ended the passive resistance in the Ruhr, and began the task of stabilising the currency.
On 30 November, the French government agreed to an inquiry, presided over by an American general Charles Dawes, into the whole question of German reparations. Under what became known as the Dawes Plan, not only was Germany’s debt drastically reduced, she was also given a huge foreign loan, raised mainly in the USA. This enabled her to meet her payments (a deal for which in 1925 Dawes was awarded the Nobel peace prize and became US vice-president under Calvin Coolidge).
So highly regarded was Stresemann that his successor as German Chancellor in November 1924 chose him as foreign affairs minister, an office he was to hold with distinction under four governments. He established a warm friendship with Aristide Briand, now France’s foreign minister, and with him, in 1925, became co-author of the Locarno Treaty, supported by Britain, Italy and Belgium, which guaranteed mutual security for France and Germany. For this achievement, the two men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Thus did western Europe emerge into what Winston Churchill was to describe as ‘the pale sunlight of Locarno’.
The following year, 1926, Germany was admitted to the League of Nations. A week later Stresemann and Briand, celebrating over a private lunch, ‘waxed expansive over Stresemann’s favourite theme of Franco-German economic collaboration’. It was no accident that both men had become active supporters of a movement which had lately become remarkably fashionable, calling for a ‘United States of Europe’.
The age of the utopians
By the mid-1920s there was a heady sense that the shadows of the previous decade had at last receded. Mankind seemed to be moving forward into a new world, in keeping with technological innovations – the radio, the cinema, motor cars, aeroplanes - which were marking out the twentieth century as different from anything seen before.
In America it was Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age, a time of unprecedented prosperity, of soaring skyscrapers, Henry Ford’s ‘Model T’, ‘flappers’ and the Charleston, the first heyday of Hollywood, and on Wall Street the start of the greatest stock boom in history. In the new Soviet Union the triumphant Bolsheviks, having torn down almost every vestige of the old aristocratic, religious autarchy of Tsarist times, seemed to be constructing an extraordinary new society, based on the radiant vision of a Communist Utopia.
In Paris a young Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, was gripped by a quite different Utopian vision, but one which was also to have profound influence on the twentieth century. As he argued in Towards A New Architecture (1924) and The City of the Future (1925), the true social revolution would come from having the courage to tear down the dirty, unplanned cities of the past, which were making humanity unhappy and unhealthy, to replace them with the ‘radiant city’ of the future, planned down to the tiniest detail: gleaming tower blocks standing amid trees and grass, constructed from the building material of the new age, reinforced concrete.
Amid this euphoria and idealism, all over western Europe leading politicians, businessmen and intellectuals were also becoming seized by another heady vision: that of building a ‘United States of Europe’. In 1918, even before the war had ended, the Italian industrialist, Giovanni Agnelli, founder of the Fiat empire, had published a book entitled ‘European Federation or League of Nations’, arguing that the only effective antidote to destructive nationalism was a federal Europe. But the young man who truly caught the mood of the moment was Count Richard Coudenhove Kalergi, born in Tokyo in 1894 to a diplomat in the Austro-Hungarian embassy and a Japanese mother.
In 1922, still in his late twenties, he published his book Pan Europa, launching a movement under the same name. His vision, like that of Louis Loucheur, was that, to maintain peace, the German coal and French steel industries should be merged into a single ‘pan-European’ industry. They would form the basis for a federal ‘United States of Europe’ on the American model. Two years later he developed this by supporting the suggestion of a French economist, Charles Gide, that Europe should form a customs union. However, Coudenhove was emphatic that the purpose of his federation would not be to eradicate national identities or reduce the sovereignty of its members, but to celebrate the ‘spirit of Europe’ by providing a framework in which they could co-operate for the common good.
The speed with which Coudenhove’s vision attracted the support of many of Europe’s leading figures was remarkable. Among them were Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and French writers such as Paul Valery, Guillaume Apollinaire and St. John Perse. Businessmen and left-wing thinkers joined the cause, including, in Italy, Giovanni Agnelli and Professor Luigi Einaudi, a left-wing lawyer who had formerly edited La Stampa; in Holland Edo Fimmen, chairman of the International Transport Workers’ Federation; and in Germany, Karl Tucholsky, one of the leading left-wing intellectuals of the Weimar Republic.
However the most significant headway made by Coudenhove’s campaign was among Europe’s politicians: not only those already in senior positions, but others, such as the mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, who would play a crucial role in shaping Europe in the future. One influential convert was Gustav Stresemann, co-author of the Locarno Pact, whose party in the same year agreed to adopt support for a ‘United States of Europe’ as its official policy. Another in France was prime minister Edouard Herriot, who had briefly been munitions minister during Verdun (in 1931 he was to publish a book, The United States of Europe). Another convert later to become prime minister was Leon Blum. But Pan Europa’s most committed supporter was France’s foreign minister, Aristide Briand, who had been France’s prime minister eleven times and who was now with Stresemann the co-author of the Locarno Pact.
It was the sight of these two major figures joining in support of the ‘pan-European’ vision which, on 24 June 1925, inspired Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to tell members of the House of Commons, as he later recalled, how:
…the aim of ending the thousand-year strife between France and Germany seemed a supreme object. If only we could weave Gaul and Teuton so closely together economically, socially and morally as to prevent the occasion of new quarrels and make old antagonisms die in the realisation of mutual prosperity and interdependence, Europe would rise again.
In October 1926, Coudenhove’s vision enjoyed its moment of greatest triumph when, at the age of 32, he staged a European Congress in Vienna, attended by more than 2,000 politicians, academics, businessmen, representatives of the professions and journalists. Among them was Briand, who in 1927 became Pan-Europa’s honorary president. In the same year, as a fervent supporter of the League of Nations, he proposed to the US Secretary of State Kellogg a ‘non-aggression pact’, whereby their two countries would renounce war as an instrument of policy forever. Kellogg’s response was to propose what became known as the ‘Kellogg-Briand Pact’, under which, in 1929, fifteen nations, including France and Germany, signed up to similar terms. On 7 September that year, following discussions with Stresemann, at which he cited the ‘menace of American economic power’ as one of the greatest threats Europe now faced, Briand presented the League of Nations with a dramatic new proposal. ‘I think’, he said,
that among peoples who are geographically grouped together like the peoples of Europe there must exist a kind of federal link… Evidently the association will act mainly in the economic sphere… but I am sure also that from a political point of view, and from a social point of view, the federal link, without infringing the sovereignty of any of the nations taking part, could be beneficial.
On 20 May 1930, three days after French troops began their final evacuation of the German Rhineland (under the Young Plan), Briand circulated the governments of Europe with a ‘Memorandum on a European Federal Union’. He proposed that, ‘in the interests alike of the peace and of the economic and social well-being of the continent’, Europe should be given ‘something in the nature of a federal organisation’. This would be implemented within the framework of the League of Nations and would ‘respect national sovereignties’. But it would centre on ‘the conception of European political co-operation’, subordinating ‘the economic to the political problem’, and it should be concerned with co-operation on ‘economic policy, transport, finance, labour, health and intellectual co-operation’.
Briand’s proposal had already received its warmest welcome from Winston Churchill, now out of office, who told readers of the New York Saturday Evening Post on 13 February 1930:
the mass of Europe once united, once federalised or partly federalised, once continentally self-conscious, would constitute an organism beyond compare…
But then, as later, Churchill saw no place in such a federation for his own island, with its world-wide empire. Speaking for Britain, his article went on:
We are with Europe but not of it. We are linked but not comprised. We are interested and associated but not absorbed. And should the European statesmen address us in the words which were used of old, ‘Wouldest thou be spoken for to the King, or the captain of the Host?’, we should reply with the Shunamite woman. ‘Nay sir, for we dwell among our own people’. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America must be friends and sponsors of the new Europe.
Of the responses eventually received from twenty-six European governments, almost all ‘expressed full agreement with the idea of closer European co-operation’. Only Britain rejected Briand’s proposals outright. All the states except Holland insisted that such an association must be ‘on the plane of absolute sovereignty and of entire political independence’.
Despite its support, Briand’s initiative failed. By now it was clear that the mood of Europe was changing. The previous autumn, only weeks after the death in October of Briand’s closest ally, Stresemann, the Wall Street crash had heralded the slide of the world’s economies into their greatest slump in history. In Germany’s elections of 14 September 1930, fuelled by soaring unemployment and continuing nationalist resentment at the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty, votes for the National Socialist Party had soared from 810,000 to six and a half million. Hitler won over 100 seats in the Reichstag. The following year the Japanese invasion of Manchuria was to expose the League of Nations as no more than a talking shop.
Those brave Utopian dreams of the 1920s were fading rapidly. But all this time a much smaller group of men, watching the events of the 1920s at close quarters, had begun to think that, if the goal of a United States of Europe was ever to be achieved, it would require a different strategy altogether.
Enter the supranationalists
One thing the Utopian visions of the 1920s all had in common, from the League of Nations itself, to Pan Europa and Briand’s European Federal Union, was that they were all based on the idea of nations coming together to co-operate on an ‘intergovernmental’ basis. This was the road to universal peace: governments should learn how to work willingly together for the common good, but without abandoning their sovereignty.
Curiously enough this posed a problem which had already exercised one of the finest minds Europe has ever produced, six centuries earlier. In 1308, exiled from his native Florence, the poet and statesman Dante Alighieri had, in his treatise De Monarchia, addressed the question of how Europe might overcome the endless wars and conflicts produced by a multitude of nations and city states. As an admirer of the Holy Roman Empire, he suggested that there must be one ‘empire’ above them all, with the power to control their actions in the common interest. Such a power would be ‘supranational’.
Over the following centuries, many thinkers offered further proposals for the political unification of Europe, from Leibniz, Kant and the Dutch lawyer Grotius, to Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham and Victor Hugo. The French King Henry IV’s minister, Sully, suggested that Europe should be divided into fifteen states, governed by a council, and with a European army of 100,000 men to keep the peace. William Penn, who gave his name to Pennsylvania, proposed an ‘Assembly of the United Europe’, taking its decisions by what would later be called ‘qualified majority voting’, weighted accorded to national population sizes and economic importance. In the 18th Century, the French Abbe de Saint-Pierre suggested rule by a ‘European Senate’, also with a form of qualified majority voting according to size and the power to summon a European army. In the 19th Century the Comte de Saint-Simon proposed a political union of Europe based on the union of England and France, with a bi-cameral parliament, the upper chamber chosen by governments, the lower elected by universal suffrage. The French revolutionary Proudhon, at the end of his life, published The Federal Principle (1863), attacking nationalism as the supreme evil which leads inevitably to war, and arguing not only that nation states should be welded together in a European federation, but that the states themselves should be broken up into regional governments.
What all these proposals had in common, with the possible exception of the last, was that they were all ultimately ‘intergovernmental’, based on the willing co-operation of sovereign states. The first formal example based on Dante’s principle of an authority which was ‘supranational’ (apart perhaps from the mediaeval Papacy) was put forward in the 1920s by Louis Loucheur.
During the Paris peace conference of 1919, Loucheur acted as chief economic adviser to the French prime minister Clemenceau. Drawing on the lessons of trying to integrate France’s military production during the war, he urged that the key to peace would be to integrate the economies of France and Germany, particularly those industries central to waging war, coal and steel. In the early days of the reparations programme, its secretary-general, a British civil servant Arthur Salter, later recalled how Loucheur and his wartime opposite number Walter Rathenau had tried to use German skilled labour to help rebuild the French economy; only for their efforts to be sabotaged by French industrialists.
Finally in 1925, just when the vogue for ‘intergovernmental’ European co-operation was reaching its height at Locarno, Loucheur’s vision of integrating Europe’s coal and steel industries was given practical expression, by Emil Mayrisch, head of the giant Luxembourg-based steel combine, ARBED. He brokered an ‘International Steel Agreement’, covering the steel industries of France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Saar. This was hailed by Gustav Stresemann as ‘a landmark of international economic policy, the importance of which cannot be overestimated’, not least because it had the power to reduce over-capacity by imposing production quotas for each member country. It also had a central ‘treasury’ with power to levy surcharges on members who broke the rules.
Loucheur’s steel agreement had created Europe’s first, albeit embryonic ‘supranational’ authority. Mayrisch hoped it would be a model for similar schemes. It would certainly later be remembered by Konrad Adenauer and others as the model for the European Coal and Steel Community which was to be the embryo of the European Union. Loucheur himself, before his death in 1931, would in 1927 propose at a League of Nations-sponsored conference the setting up of an ‘economic League of Nations’ based on a customs union or ‘common market’.
But it was not Loucheur who would one day be remembered as ‘the Father of Europe’. That title would be reserved for a younger man who watched what Loucheur was doing in the 1920s, but who alone would crack the secret of how to get that ‘United States of Europe’ finally launched on its way.
Enter Monsieur Monnet
Among the senior figures in the League of Nations at its foundation were two who were already close friends. One was Arthur Salter, the British civil servant who ran the Reparations Commission. His friend Jean Monnet, younger by seven years but appointed aged only thirty-one to be the League’s deputy-secretary general, was a small, self-effacing Frenchman with a moustache, who decades later would be described as looking like Hercule Poirot.
So crucial a part was Monnet to play in this story that it is relevant to know something of his origins. He was born in Cognac in 1888, the son of a wealthy brandy-maker. He left school at sixteen without academic qualifications, to work in his father’s firm, J. G. Monnet. After a short apprenticeship, from 1906 to 1914 he represented the firm abroad, spending more time in North America, England, Scandinavia, Russia and Egypt than in France.
In 1914, the outbreak of war found Monnet, at the age of twenty-six, back in France, but unfit for military service. What he did then was to set in train a sequence of events which was to change the course of European history. But, as was to become typical of Monnet, the exact circumstances remain obscure. There are two versions, one set down sixty years later in his memoirs, the other reconstructed from other sources.
According his memoirs, a month after the start of hostilities the young man realised that the Allied supply system was breaking down. Through his father’s company lawyer, he sought ‘out of the blue’ an interview with France’s prime minister, René Viviani, meeting him in September 1914 in Bordeaux - to where the French government had fled from the approaching German armies. Monnet proposed a plan to co-ordinate the use of Allied ships bringing supplies to beleaguered France. As a result, he was sent to London to help set up an International Supply Commission, which organised an Anglo-French pool of ships to supply the Allied forces.
The alternative version of these events is rather murkier. One of Monnet’s chief pre-war customers had been the Hudson Bay Company of Canada, which bought large quantities of brandy from him, much of which was then sold on to the native Indians, a trade prohibited by law. Monnet was grateful for this, since he found it hard to compete in the legal market with better-known firms such as Hennessy.
As the prospect of a European war loomed in 1914, Monnet had discussed with the Hudson Bay Company the vital and potentially lucrative role that could be played by a major international trading concern. According to this version, it was Hudson Bay which arranged through its influential French contacts for the young man to meet France’s prime minister. Certainly when Monnet was sent to London to set up his shipping pool, he arranged a huge £150 million contract for Hudson Bay to ship 13,000,000 tons of goods from Canada to France, on which the company would take one percent commission. Monnet received no payment, but it placed the Hudson Bay Company in his debt, in a way which would later be handsomely repaid.
By 1916, the year of Verdun, Monnet was working in Paris as chef de cabinet to France’s economics minister Clementel. Later, he recorded his shock at finding just how disorganised were France’s shipping arrangements, at much the same time as Loucheur was finding similar chaos in her munitions production. The French government had not even managed to acquire powers to requisition ships for the war effort, and Monnet recalls how he became determined to see the organisation of shipping turned into ‘the nerve centre of the Allies’ economic organisation’.
In 1917 a number of meetings were arranged in Paris to discuss how this could be achieved, and here Monnet met up again with Arthur Salter. Their first encounter had been in London in 1914 when Salter had been put in charge of requisitioning merchant shipping for the Admiralty. He was later to recall the central part the two of them played in finding a solution, and how the key decision was taken ‘at a small dinner discussion in October 1917’. The outcome was the setting up of the Inter-Allied Maritime Transport Council, charged with co-ordinating the use of Allied shipping, relying on the co-operation of the British, French and American governments. Monnet had wanted to go further. Instead of relying on co-operation, he pressed for the creation of an ‘international council’ with full authority (pleins pouvoirs) to dictate the Allied shipping arrangements. Even though he did not get his way, for the first time in his life he had conceived of a body which was ‘supranational’. It was an idea he found particularly appealing.
One of Monnet’s skills throughout his life was to make influential friends. He was a born behind-the-scenes operator, persuading others to help advance projects on which he had set his heart. Salter was one such friend, and when the war was over, and the statesmen and civil servants of the victorious powers gathered in Paris for the peace conference, Monnet made many more who would become useful allies, including a young American lawyer John Foster Dulles. After tireless lobbying, when the new League of Nations was established, the young Frenchman became its deputy-secretary-general, under the British head of its secretariat, Sir Eric Drummond.
For three years Monnet worked at the centre of the new organisation. With its Secretariat, its Council, its Assembly and its new Court of International Justice, he was initially highly optimistic that the League could impose its benevolent will on the world ‘by its moral force, by appealing to public opinion and thanks to customs which would ultimately prevail’. He admired the internationalist idealism of his colleagues (‘Drummond had decided from the outset that the Secretariat of the League… was not to consist of national delegates but of international servants whose first loyalty was to the League’); and one with whom he worked closely was his old friend Salter, who was now administering German reparations through the League.
But increasingly Monnet became frustrated by one particular feature of the League: every member state had the power of veto, so decisions could only be taken unanimously. As he was later to put it ‘the veto is the profound cause and at the same time the symbol of the impossibility of overcoming national egoism’. He summed up his feelings:
…I was impressed with the power of a nation that can say no to an international body that has no supranational power. Goodwill between men, between nations, is not enough. One must also have international laws and institutions (our italics). Except for certain practical but limited activities in which I participated, the League of Nations was a disappointment.
In 1923, Monnet was prevailed upon by his sister to rescue the family business from a financial crisis. He resigned from the League and called in the favour owed him by the Hudson Bay Company, asking it for a loan. It advanced him two million francs, which he was told he could treat as a gift (he did repay it, seven years later, but in a devalued currency worth less than forty percent of the original loan plus interest). Having restored the family business, Monnet moved to America, to become a partner in the New York merchant bank Blair and Co. There he made a fortune, but lost much of it in the Wall Street crash. To stay solvent, he again relied on the HBC. Sir Robert Kindersley, a former HBC governor, arranged for him a large, unsecured loan from Lazards Bank, which Monnet was able to repay fully only thirty years later.
In 1932 his role as banker took him for a year to China, where he arranged finance for the reconstruction of the railways. In the freewheeling and corrupt world of Shanghai in the 1930s, Monnet negotiated substantial loans to influential backers of the Chiang-Kai-Shek government, some of whom were distinctly ‘shady’. But as he watched the League of Nations stand impotently by as China slid towards chaos – not least after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 - he reaffirmed his conviction that, ultimately, international peace and security could only be guaranteed by supranational institutions. One old friend of like mind whom he had followed to China was Arthur Salter, who had advised its government on reorganising the railways.
If Monnet’s mind had for some years been largely on other matters, Salter had become increasingly preoccupied with how a ‘United States of Europe’ might be established. In 1931 he published a collection of papers under the title The United States of Europe, in which he addressed the possibility of building a federal Europe within the framework of the League of Nations itself. Because the League, had become largely a regional organisation, Salter saw that it might be adapted to provide a framework for a politically united Europe. In an essay entitled ‘The United States of Europe’ Idea he drew on the model of how Germany had been politically united in the nineteenth century, through establishing a Zollverein, a ‘common market’. His ‘United States’ would work in the same way, raising its funding through a common tariff on all goods imported from outside. This, like Germany, would need ‘a political instrument to determine how the distribution [of those funds] should be made’. He went on to say that:
the commercial and tariff policy of European States is so central and crucial a part of their general policy, the receipts from Customs are so central and substantial a part of their revenues, that a common political authority, deciding for all Europe what tariffs should be imposed and how they should be distributed, would be for every country almost as important as, or even more important than, the national Governments, and would in effect reduce the latter to the status of municipal authorities.
‘In other words’ he went on, ‘the United States of Europe must be a political reality’. Its organisation could be based on that of the League of Nations, with a Secretariat, a Council of Ministers, an Assembly and a Court - but with one crucial proviso. The central source of authority in this new body, Salter urged, must be reserved for the ‘Secretariat’, the permanent body of international civil servants, loyal to the new organisation, not to the member countries. The problem with giving too much power to a Council was that they would always remain motivated primarily by national interest:
In face of a permanent corps of Ministers, meeting in committees and ‘shadow councils’, and in direct contact with their Foreign Office, the Secretariat will necessarily sink in status, in influence, and in the character of its personnel, to clerks responsible only for routine duties. They will cease to be an element of importance in the formation or maintenance of the League’s traditions.
The Secretariat, Salter argued, would be above the power of national ministers, run by people who no longer owed any national loyalty. ‘The new international officer needed for the League’s task’ he wrote, ‘is something new in the world’s history’.
What Salter was describing, of course, was precisely the ‘supranational’ principle by which nearly three decades later Monnet would inspire the setting up of the European Economic Community, deliberately intended as an embryonic ‘United States of Europe’. He even envisaged that another way to erode nationalism might be to split up its member states into regions. The only term in Salter’s blueprint which needed changing was ‘Secretariat’; and as it happened, in describing reactions to Briand’s proposal in 1930 for a ‘European Federal Union’, he was able to record that the League of Nations had already set up a ‘European Commission’.
By now, however, as Europe plunged into the Great Depression, the shadows were gathering over such dreams: 1932 saw the death of Briand himself, the most distinguished champion a ‘United States of Europe’ had yet won to its cause. The next year brought the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. His idea of how Europe might be united was very different.
Chapter Two
The Nazi Cul-de-Sac: 1933-1945
We are perhaps more interested in Europe than other countries need to be.
Adolf Hitler, speech at Nuremberg Rally, 1937.
On 13 December 1941, when Hitler’s armies were at the gates of Moscow, the magazine Picture Post, then in its heyday as Britain’s leading mass-circulation weekly, gave prominence to an article by its proprietor Edward Hulton headed ‘How The Nazis Promise Europe a New Heaven’.
In his article, Hulton reported on how a ‘grand assembly of puppet powers’ had recently taken place in Berlin, to be told that it would be the Nazis’ purpose after the war to unite Europe as the richest economic entity in the world. ‘Up to now’ a senior Nazi economist Werner Daitz had proclaimed, ‘Europe has not been able to take advantage of her wonderful natural opportunities. This because her different states have refused to work together’. But under the Nazi ‘New Order’, a united Europe would ‘use her economic strength as a political lever’ to assert her proper influence in the world. To illustrate the Nazi plan for a ‘new Europe’ the magazine published a map of the trans-continental railway system, quoting Josef Goebbels: ‘a Europe without frontiers can make proper use of its communications’.
Half a century later, in the 1990s, a number of books appeared by British Eurosceptics arguing that the origins of the European Union lay in ideas put forward by the Nazis during World War Two. This belief arose because their authors had noted what appeared to be a striking resemblance between some of those ideas and features of the ‘European project’ as it had developed in the decades after the war. In particular they were struck by Nazi references during the war years to setting up a ‘European economic community’ and a single European currency.
The very fact that such an argument could be put forward was in itself a testament to the remarkable lack of knowledge, both among Eurosceptics and Europhiles, as how the post-war ‘European project’ actually came about. In particular it reflected a near-universal failure to understand how directly that ‘project’ stemmed from ideas which long predated the rise of Nazism, and which were already well-established in the minds of men such as Salter and Monnet before the end of the 1920s. Certainly the re-emergence of the campaign to built a ‘United States of Europe’ in the years after the Second World War owed a great debt to ideas developed during the years of Hitler’s dominance. But these drew nothing from the Nazis. They were developed by men fiercely opposed to Nazism: not least by some of those whose thinking had already been moving in this direction for over twenty years.
There was only one moment when it had seemed possible that the Nazi Party might embrace the cause of a ‘United States of Europe’. This long preceded the Nazis’ arrival in power in 1933, happening during the only period in the party’s history when Hitler himself faced a serious rival for his leadership. In 1924, he had been imprisoned in the castle of Landsberg for his part in the previous year’s abortive Munich putsch and, in his absence, his deputy Gregor Strasser, a talented organiser, had led the party to its first electoral success, winning 32 seats in the Reichstag.
Strasser was insistent that the Nazis must broaden out their base from Bavaria to other parts of Germany. In particular he won support from the then-young, left-wing-inclined Josef Goebbels, for his view that the National Socialist Party must become both more national and more socialist in its appeal. In 1925 when the two men drew up a party programme, this reflected the cause then being promoted by Stresemann and Briand by calling for a ‘United States of Europe’, including a proposal for a single European currency.
In 1926, however, Hitler re-asserted his authority over the party, during a conference in Bamberg. Goebbels switched his loyalty from Strasser back to Hitler; Strasser’s ‘Programme for National Socialism’ was rejected. Hitler was to eliminate his erstwhile rival in ‘the Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934. He himself never showed the slightest interest in any idea of a ‘united Europe’, other than one united under his own leadership by force of arms. Once he had risen to power in 1933, the only value he attached to the concept of ‘Europe’ was as the matrix of German culture, illustrated by his declaration at the Nuremberg Rally of 1937:
Our country, our people, our culture and our economy have grown out of general European conditions. We must therefore be the enemy of any attempt to introduce elements of discord and destruction into this European family of peoples.
Embodying that desire to re-assert his nation’s identity which was an inevitable reaction to the humiliations forced on Germany by France at Versailles, Hitler had already reversed one of those humiliations by marching his troops into the ‘demilitarised’ Rhineland in 1936. He was about to introduce further ‘elements of discord’ into the European family by his expansion into those other legacies of Versailles, Austria and Czechoslovakia, in 1938-9. In September 1939, he advanced across another Versailles frontier, into the former German lands ceded to Poland in 1919. By the following spring and summer, as his armies swept through Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and France, he was well on the way to building a ‘united Europe’ by means which would have had those 1920s idealists Stresemann and Briand recoiling in horror.
The twilight years of ‘Europeanism’
As the twin shadows of Nazism and Fascism lengthened over Europe in the immediate pre-war years, the futility of the League of Nations had become ever more cruelly exposed, firstly by its failure to prevent Japan attacking Manchuria and China, by Italy seizing Abyssinia and then Hitler marching into the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Coudenhove nevertheless continued his campaign for a ‘United States of Europe’ until a few months after the German-Austrian anschluss in 1938. Two years later, after the war had begun, he took refuge in New York, where he was to spend the war years proselytising for European unity, in a way which was to have considerable influence on post-war American attitudes to Europe.
In Britain some of the old League of Nations insiders who had been most enthusiastic for a ‘United States of Europe’ in the 1920s remained in close touch. Salter, who continued to work for the League until 1930, became in 1934 the Gladstone Professor of Politics at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls. In 1937 he was elected an independent MP for Oxford University. One close friend, since they met at the Paris peace conference of 1919, was the economist John Maynard Keynes; and he was later to recall how, during the 1930s, they had both been members of a ‘small and secret committee’ of leading economists which continued to advise successive prime ministers up to the outbreak of war.
When the war started, Salter recalled, Keynes held weekly meetings at his house where they were joined by William Beveridge, the civil servant who was to shape the post-war expansion of the welfare state, and Walter Layton. He was economist, who in the early 1920s had been director of the League of Nations’ Economic and Financial Section. From 1923 to 1939 Layton had been an influential editor of the Economist and a fervent enthusiast for a federal Europe, a crusade he was to continue into the post-war era.
A like-minded friend of this circle was Lionel Curtis, who had been a leading member of the British delegation concerned at the Paris conference with setting up the League of Nations. At that time, he had invited a number of British and American delegates, mainly from Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations team, to form an Anglo-American society, out of which had come two ‘think tanks’, each destined to play an important behind-the-scenes role in lobbying for European integration over the following decades. In London in 1920 Curtis set up the Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House. Its Washington counterpart was the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
In 1940, when Coudenhove arrived in the USA as a refugee, it was the CFR which arranged for him a position at New York University, where he held graduate seminars on the problems of European federation. Through CFR contacts, he was given regular coverage in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, whereby the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’ was during the war years to become increasingly familiar to influential American opinion.
Another old friend with whom Salter was re-united shortly after the outbreak of war was Monnet. Following his lucrative spell in China, Monnet’s career as a merchant banker had continued to be murky. On his return to America he had been investigated for tax evasion. In 1938 his company had even come under suspicion by the FBI for having laundered Nazi money, although this inquiry was called off without any charges being laid.
At the outbreak of war in 1939, however, Monnet was back in Europe, where he was appointed chairman of the Franco-British Economic Co-ordination Committee, with the task of arranging contracts for war supplies in America and their shipment across the Atlantic. His vice-chairman, as parliamentary secretary to the new Ministry of Shipping, was Arthur Salter. Just as in 1914, the outbreak of war had brought the two men together in London and again for a very similar purpose.
In the spring of 1940, their task was made suddenly more urgent by the blitzkrieg launched by Hitler, first on Denmark and Norway, then on 10 May on Holland, Belgium and France. That morning Churchill became Britain’s prime minister. Three weeks later came the Dunkirk evacuation and by mid-June it was clear France was about to fall. At this critical moment, Monnet came to play a central role in one of the more curious episodes of the war.
On 14 June, General Charles de Gaulle, France’s under-secretary for war, had arrived in London to arrange for shipping to transport the French government and as many French troops as possible to North Africa, to enable them to continue the war. There he met Monnet, who came up with the even more daring proposal that, to symbolise their determination to fight on, France and Britain should declare ‘a Franco-British Union’. The two nations should be joined indissolubly as one, complete with a single government, joint armed forces, common citizenship and even a single currency.
The two men, along with Monnet’s colleague Rene Pleven, had discussed this proposal with Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent head of the Foreign Office. The following day Vansittart, the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and others put the plan to Churchill over lunch at the Carlton Club. Churchill was far from convinced, but when he raised it at Cabinet later that afternoon, he was surprised ‘to see the staid, stolid, experienced politicians of all parties engage themselves so passionately in an immense design whose implications and consequences were not in any way thought out’.
The following morning, 16 June, the Cabinet met again to discuss the collapse of France, which was becoming more alarming by the hour. At any time, it seemed, the French government might surrender, and not least of the Cabinet’s concerns was that this might give Hitler control of France’s naval fleet, the fourth largest in the world. By the time the Cabinet reassembled that afternoon, Churchill had seen de Gaulle, now wholly behind Monnet’s proposal and viewing such a dramatic gesture as the only hope of strengthening the hand of the French prime minister Paul Reynaud in stiffening his government’s resolve. Halifax reported that Vansittart had again been in consultation with de Gaulle, Monnet and Pleven, and that they had produced a draft declaration, which de Gaulle was ready to take back that night to present to the French government.
Churchill’s War Cabinet discussed the draft ‘proclamation of an Anglo-French Union’. Only one substantive change was made to a text which had originated largely from Monnet, with Salter’s assistance. Churchill struck out his reference to Britain and France adopting ‘a common currency’. But otherwise the declaration was much as Monnet originally conceived it, including a provision for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies. The two countries would have ‘a single War Cabinet, and all the forces of Britain and France, whether on land, sea or in the air, will be placed under its direction’.
After the draft had been approved by the War Cabinet, Churchill describes how he took it into the next room, where de Gaulle was waiting with Vansittart. ‘The General read it with an air of unwonted enthusiasm’, and communicated it by telephone to Reynaud at Bordeaux. If the French government approved, Churchill was ready to fly out with senior colleagues to discuss it the following day. But Reynaud’s colleagues, led by Marshal Petain, reacted with violent hostility to what they saw as a trick to reduce France to the status of a mere ‘British dominion’. A wave of anti-British feeling had swept official circles and public opinion in the wake of Dunkirk. ‘We would rather have Hitler than be the slaves of England’, some shouted in the halls of the prefecture of Bordeaux, again the temporary seat of the French government.
Petain himself described it as ‘fusion with a corpse’: the corpse in his eyes being a doomed Britain. Admitting defeat, Reynaud resigned. He was succeeded by Petain, who promptly sued with Germany for a humiliating peace. It was thus Monnet’s proposal which provided the final catalyst for France’s surrender.
Following France’s fall, Monnet threw himself into transferring French contracts with America to the British war effort. Although he was now technically an ‘enemy alien’, Churchill appointed him as a member of the British Supply Council in Washington, personally signing his passport to give him entry to the USA. There he was able to continue liaising with Salter on arranging contracts for war supplies in America for the British government.
In 1941 Churchill appointed Salter to head a British mission to Washington, to press on the Americans the need for a vast programme of new shipbuilding (this would eventually lead to the ‘Liberty ships’ which were to provide Britain with such a vital lifeline). Between 1940 and 1943 (and again in 1944-5) Monnet was based in Washington, where his talent for ‘networking’ soon won him influential friends in the US establishment, from Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court to Dean Acheson, later to become US Secretary of State. Both men would lend active support to his European integrationist campaign in the post-war era. While in Washington in 1941, he met Paul-Henri Spaak. To him, he expounded his underlying philosophy for a united Europe and explained in rough outline plans for a European coal and steel union.
As the tide of war swung in the Allies’ favour, Monnet’s attention turned increasingly to the shape of the Europe he wished to see emerging in the post-war era. At the end of February 1943, after the Allies had retaken French North Africa, he was sent by President Roosevelt to Algiers to arrange for arms shipments to the Free French forces. Here he found bitter rivalry developing between the two French generals who could claim to act as leader of the Free French, de Gaulle and Giraud. In his efforts to resolve this dispute, Monnet formed a close alliance with the politician sent out by Churchill to act as the British Cabinet’s Political Representative in the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan.
Macmillan records how he and Monnet had extensive conversations about the future of France and post-war Europe, and despite their reservations about de Gaulle’s high-handedness, agreed he was the only man of sufficient stature to lead a government in exile. Between them they laid the foundations for what amounted to a provisional French government, the Comité Francais de Libération Nationale (CFLN), to be led by de Gaulle. Monnet was co-opted as a member, and for one of its early meetings, on 5 August 1943, he produced a memorandum which declared:
There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty with all that implies in terms of prestige politics and economic protectionism. If the nations of Europe adopt defensive positions again, huge armies will be necessary again. Under the future peace treaty, some nations will be allowed to re-arm; others will not. That was tried in 1919; we all know the result. Intra-European alliances will be formed; we know what they are worth. Social reform will be impeded or blocked by the sheer weight of military budgets. Europe will be reborn in fear.
The nations of Europe are too circumscribed to give their peoples the prosperity made possible, and hence necessary, by modern conditions. They will need larger markets. And they will have to refrain from using a major proportion of their resources to maintain ‘key’ industries needed for national defence and made mandatory by the concept of sovereign, protectionist States, as we knew them before 1939.
Prosperity and vital social progress will remain elusive until the nations of Europe form a federation of a ‘European entity’ which will forge them into a single economic unit… Our concern is a solution to the European problem. The British, the Americans, the Russians have worlds of their own into which they can temporarily retreat. France cannot opt out, for her very existence hinges on a solution to the European problem. Developments on the European scene in the wake of imminent liberalisation, will inevitably prompt the three major powers to protect themselves against Europe and hence France. For no agreement into which France might be drawn with Britain, America or Russia could cut her off from Europe, with whom she has so many intellectual, material and economic ties.
Again Monnet was developing his vision of a Europe which could achieve lasting peace only if organised under a supranational authority sufficient to overrule the fractious impulses of national sovereignty. This would forge the member states into a ‘single economic unit’, based on integrating those ‘key industries needed for national defence’, such as coal and steel. It would also be a Europe in which he no more imagined the direct involvement of Britain than that of America or Russia.
Festung Europa
In the late summer of 1942, Europe was politically more united than she had ever been. From the North Cape to the Mani in southern Greece, from the fishing ports of Brittany to the snowcapped peaks of the Caucasus two thousand miles to the east, an unprecedented area was under the sway of a single political system. But within Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’ three different groups of people were discussing the value of a ‘united Europe’ which might emerge after the war, each for their own reasons.
Hitler himself regarded talk of post-war European unity as a ‘presumptuous irrelevance’. He had loathed the early European unity movement, despised the Briand-Stresemann policy of rapprochement and dismissed Coudenhove as ‘everybody’s bastard’. He had banned ‘European unity’ associations as soon as he had the chance, together with the Esperanto language.
Lower down the Nazi hierarchy, however, there were some who spent the war years conceiving plans for the kind of unity to which Europe might aspire when the war was over. One such was Werner Daitz, a leading Nazi economist. He launched a Society for European Economic Planning and Macroeconomics (Grossraumwirtschaft), and produced a book, What the New Order in Europe Brings to the European Peoples. He was also one of many ideologues of the time who attacked the ‘outmoded’ notions of national sovereignty and the nation state. In 1938 Daitz had declared that the idea of the state derived from British political theory and the French Revolution. He held the nation to be small and selfish compared with the ‘great common undertaking’ which was Europe. ‘The common interests of Europe take precedence over the selfish interests of nations’, he declared.
Another enthusiast for European unity was Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. In late 1942, he headed a Committee on the Restructuring of Europe, giving a number of academics and politicians free reign to create different scenarios for Europe’s future development. In March 1943 he proposed inviting all heads of state of the occupied countries, along with Franco’s Spain, to sign an instrument setting up a ‘European confederation’. But he did not represent official Nazi thinking. Hitler’s contemptuous response was to issue a decree requiring that ‘the planning, preparation and execution of demonstrations of a European or international kind… must cease’.
A third Nazi functionary to favour European unity was Hitler’s finance minister, Walther Funk. Like Daitz, he held that ‘common interests’ had to take precedence over particular ones. ‘There must be a readiness to subordinate one’s own interests in certain cases to that of the European community’, he declared. He was charged with planning the reconstruction of the post-war economy within the framework of a ‘New European Order’ and a new world economy. To this effect he chaired a committee which produced a series of essays, which were still coming out as late as January 1945. These set out ideas for a Europaische Wirtschaftgemeinschaft (European Economic Community), strictly under German leadership and including a proposal for a single currency.
Funk’s proposals were widely publicised in the occupied countries, to persuade their peoples that co-operation with Germany could reap economic benefits in the future. There was no evidence, however, of any systematic attempt to put them into practice. Indeed any attempt to impose on Europe a common currency would have caused Germany serious problems. The occupied countries were being charged the costs of their occupation: in the case of France twenty million Reichsmarks per day. Repayments were calculated at a much-devalued exchange rate, magnifying the debt to such an extent that forty-two percent of the total foreign contribution to the German war-time economy ended up coming from France. A single currency would seriously have undermined this advantageous arrangement.
Whatever the rhetoric of some of his followers, Hitler had not the slightest intention of giving up control. As Goebbels put it: ‘It is only right and just that we take the leadership of Europe definitely into our hands… The German people… have actually won the hegemony of Europe and have a moral right to it’. Nevertheless, as the Germans came to terms with having to wage a prolonged war, Goebbels recognised that the rhetoric of ‘Europeanism’ could serve a useful propaganda purpose. He wrote in his diary on 12 April 1943:
It is a curious fact that we shun the phrase ‘European co-operation’, just as the devil shuns Holy Water. I can’t understand why that is true. So obvious a political and propaganda slogan ought really to become a general theme for public discussion in Europe. Instead, we avoid it wherever possible.
The purpose, as he conceived it, was to create a sense of ‘European identity’, to make ‘Europeans’ aware of their collective difference from the alien cultures with which they were at war, those of Britain, the United States and above all Stalin’s Soviet Union. The further the tide of war turned, the more prominent this theme became, projecting Germany as the protector of the ‘European’ culture against the barbarians from the east. But such professed enthusiasm for the ‘European ideal’ was simply a device to encourage occupied countries to ‘volunteer’ their young men to join the Waffen-SS and to mobilise their economies against the Bolshevik hordes in what was increasingly styled a ‘European war of liberation’.
The propaganda had its effect. In June 1944, Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s Secretary of State, affirmed: ‘We will help Germany on every front and in every way to preserve the West, its enlightenment, its culture, its traditions’. Admittedly this came from a man known before the war as a ‘crook with an irresistible love of money’, who, as the Allies invaded France in 1944, escaped to Germany with four million francs in bank notes and a sizeable quantity of jewellery. He was executed by the French in early 1947. Nevertheless, in the end, 50,000 non-Germans from every part of occupied Europe fought on the Eastern front, under the banner of the Waffen SS. Many believed they were defending ‘Europe’, rather than serving the interests of Germany.
Fascists and collaborators
Despite the tendency of some post-war writers to see the Nazis and their various allies across Axis-dominated Europe as a homogenous entity, the many disparate groups had their own distinct ideologies and ambitions. Nevertheless running through their rhetoric on the theme of European unity were two persistent themes. The first was a desire to proclaim the end of the nation state and its absorption into a greater European identity; the other a sense that the emerging ‘New Europe’ could now recover its old self-confidence and compete with any power in the world.
In 1943, for instance, Mussolini’s education minister Giuseppe Bottai wrote of nationalism being ‘the ossification of a political principle that has served its time… it acts as a hindrance to the general advance of civilisation’. Italy’s finance minister Alberto de Stefani wrote:
Nationalities do not form a sound basis for the planned new order… there is only hope for peace by means of a process which on the one hand respects the inalienable, fundamental patrimony of every nation but, on the other, moderates these and subordinates them to a continental policy... A European Union could not be subject to the variations of internal policy that are characteristic of liberal regimes.
Stephani’s reference here to ‘liberal regimes’ was essentially a code for Britain and America. Thus he was simply reiterating the general line of Fascist propaganda, dressed in ‘European’ clothes. This is more evident in the views of another Fascist opponent of the nation-state, Camillo Pellizzi, editor of the magazine Civilita Fascista. He believed the Fascist principle would overcome the ‘particularism’ of Europe’s nation-states, writing:
The Axis is, or can be, the first definite step towards surmounting... that typically European phenomenon which we call the nation, with its inevitable, one might say physiological corollary of nationalism... One cannot ‘create Europe’ without the nations or against them: we must create it from the different nations, while subduing national particularism as far as may be necessary.
In the occupied countries, many politicians and intellectuals who had advocated the cause of European unity since the 1920s now convinced themselves working with the Nazis was the way to achieve it. Thus, one of the leading collaborators in Vichy France, Jacques Benoist-Mechin, secretary of state for Franco-German relations from June 1941 to September 1942, declared that France’s policy of collaboration required ‘the abandonment of old illusions’. She would be able to join the new Europe, he asserted, ‘only when she abandons all crumbling forms of nationalism - which was itself in reality only an anachronistic particularism - and when she takes her place in the European community with honour’.
Similarly, another ardent Vichyite, the writer and philosopher Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who had been a strong supporter of European unity since the early 1920s, espoused the Fascist cause. He argued that ‘it is the only way of defending Europe against itself and against other human groups’. However, before committing suicide at the time of the liberation of France, he wrote, ‘Perhaps all this is a lot of eyewash: the truth may be that I’m scared of being kicked around by the police’.
In Belgium, the Walloon collaborator Léon Degrelle, a leader of the Fascist Rexist movement, saw his country becoming part of a recreated Burgundy (the ‘middle kingdom’ between France and Germany) and a full partner of the Third Reich. Yet his original pre-war credo had been ultra-nationalistic and he had became overtly Fascist only in 1939. Under the Nazi occupation his brand of Fascism mutated into unashamed collaborationism, proclaiming a pan-European vision of the New Order. Another Rexist leader, Pierre Daye, in 1942 wrote a tract, Europe for the Europeans, in which he saw Nazi Europe not as a political entity in its own right but more as a bastion against Communism and the divisive foreign policies of Great Britain.
Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian collaborationist leader, argued that Europe would be strong and peaceful only if united: ‘We must create a Europe that does not squander its blood and strength in internecine conflict, but forms a compact unity. In this way it will become richer, stronger and more civilised, and will recover its old place in the world’. He wanted to see a Pan-Germanic Federation with a federal flag and the Fuhrer as president.
Nothing in all this flood of rhetoric, however, provided any practical model for the type of political integration which was to emerge after the war. As one historian put it:
Such pan-European illusions were actively fostered by the Nazis themselves. Clearly the bulk of the Third Reich statements relating to pan-Europeanism disseminated by the Nazis in the occupied territories can be dismissed as cynical propaganda calculated to encourage, if not the active co-operation, then the passive acquiescence of the new vassals. Neither Hitler, nor many of his leading hierarchs such as Goebbels, had the slightest intention to compromise absolute German hegemony through the creation of a European confederation, ‘subsidiary’ or otherwise.
Thus, the collaborationists’ real purpose was to clamber onto the sledge of Europe’s ruling power in the hope of being given a share in the spoils. There was nothing in their rhetoric which would spill over into the movement for European integration as it was to develop in the post-war years. Nazi thinking was an ideological cul-de-sac. The practical steps to realise the dream of a ‘United States of Europe’ would derive their inspiration those who, during the war, regarded themselves as the Nazis’ sworn enemies. Some of those ideas were to emerge from within occupied Europe itself, from those who spent the war years most obviously at odds with everything Nazism and Fascism stood for.
The resistance
Outside the grip of the Nazis and their allies, the inter-war dreams of European unity did not die. They went underground. In each occupied country resistance movements emerged. If this movement as a whole had any unifying philosophy, it was a determination to seek a new beginning in the post-war reconstruction of Europe. Central to this was the concept of a united Europe. In common with the pre-war ‘Pan-Europeanists’ (and that of the Nazis when it suited them), they held nationalism and national pride to be responsible for past European wars. The prevailing ethos supported the creation of new structures to transcend historical boundaries.
This much was openly declared, long before the end of the war, by resistance groups in Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Yugoslavia, and even in Germany itself. But the most strident supporters of European unity were the Italian Communists, who were at the core of the anti-Fascist movement.
In this respect the major figure to emerge during the war years, who was eventually to make a very significant contribution to the development of the European Union, was the Italian, Altiero Spinelli. Born in 1907, he joined the Communists at the age of seventeen and had been active in opposing Mussolini’s Fascism. In 1928, he was arrested and imprisoned, spending twelve years in jail before eventually being sent to a prison on the Mediterranean island of Ventotene, thirty miles west of Naples. While in prison, he broke with Communism and embraced the cause of European unity, composing in 1941 what became known as the ‘Ventotene Manifesto’, under the title Towards a Free and United Europe. This was to become one of the basic texts of the European federalist movement.
Spinelli’s text addressed the familiar theme of creating a ‘federal’ Europe, but now in terms of exploiting the continent-wide chaos which he predicted would inevitably arise when the war was over. Like so many others, Spinelli wanted to see ‘the definitive abolition of the division of Europe into national, sovereign states’. To achieve this, he called on his followers to foment revolution. True to his political ideology, he proclaimed, ‘the European revolution must be socialist: i.e., its goal must be the emancipation of the working classes and the creation of more humane conditions for them’.
Spinelli was coy about the structures of his ‘European federation’ but definitely had in mind an all-powerful, supranational authority. This he saw developing into a ‘United States of Europe’, with its own constitution and armed forces. It would have the power to ensure that its ‘deliberations for the maintenance of common order are executed in the individual federal states’. In turgid prose, he argued that this state would only retain the autonomy it needed ‘for a plastic articulation and development of political life according to the particular characteristics of the various peoples’. His views on the part played by democracy, however, were very clear: ‘During revolutionary times, when institutions are not simply to be administered but created’ he insisted, ‘democratic procedures fail miserably’.
For a model of how Spinelli’s ‘European Federation’ would come about, one need look no further than this passage of the Ventotene Manifesto:
During the revolutionary crisis, this movement will have the task of organising and guiding progressive forces, using all the popular bodies which form spontaneously, incandescent melting pots in which the revolutionary masses are mixed, not for the creation of plebiscites, but rather waiting to be guided.
It derives its vision and certainty of what must be done from the knowledge that it represents the deepest needs of modern society and not from any previous recognition by popular will, as yet non-existent. In this way it issues the basic guidelines of the new order, the first social discipline directed to the unformed masses. By this dictatorship of the revolutionary party a new State will be formed, and around this State new, genuine democracy will grow.
In other words, ‘the people’ were not to be involved in the construction of the new state. Popular assent would be sought only when the project was all but complete. At that moment their ‘crowning dream’ would be the calling of a ‘constituent assembly’, to ‘decide upon the constitution they want’. The drawing up of the constitution would be the final act in the emergence of the ‘United States of Europe’. Only then, within the framework of the new state which had been brought into being, would ‘democracy’ be permitted to resume.
In July 1941, Spinelli’s manifesto was smuggled to the mainland. His ideas came to be adopted by the Communist-dominated Italian Resistance as a whole, leading to the formation in 1943 of the European Federalist Movement. This spread the message to groups in other countries, giving rise to a series of meetings in neutral Switzerland, culminating in a major conference in Geneva in July 1944, attended by activists from Denmark, France, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. There was even a representative from a secret anti-Nazi group within Germany itself.
At the Geneva conference, the collective resistance movements produced a declaration which claimed that their wartime struggle would give their countries ‘the right to take part in the reconstruction of Europe on the same basis as the other victorious powers’. In those countries, they declared, ‘the life of the peoples which they represent must be based on respect of the human individual, on security, on social justice, on the complete utilisation of economic resources for the benefit of the whole and on the autonomous development of national life’.
These aims, the conference considered, ‘cannot be fulfilled unless the different countries of the world agree to go beyond the dogma of the absolute sovereignty of the state and unite in a single federal organisation’. However, injecting a faint note of reality, the declaration went on: ‘The lack of unity and cohesion that still exists between the different parts of the world will not allow us to achieve immediately an organisation that unites all civilisations under a single federal government’. This meant that, in the immediate post-war period, ‘the European problem must be given a more direct and more radical solution’.
This ‘direct solution’ would consist of a European ‘Federal Union’. Only thus could the German people be allowed to participate in the life of the new Europe without endangering the rest. As before, the ‘Union’ would have its written constitution and a supranational government directly responsible to the peoples of Europe. It would control its own army, with no national armies permitted. It would also have its own court, with sole jurisdiction over constitutional matters and exclusive rights to arbitrate in conflicts between the central authority and member states.
It would be another forty years before Spinelli would make his central contribution to the shape of the European Union as it finally emerged. But the ideas on which this was based were all there in the declaration of 1944, originating from the few pages he had scribbled in his island prison, at a time when Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year Reich’ had seemed the undisputed master of Europe.
Chapter Three
Two Tries That Failed: 1945-1949
More than ever we are convinced that we are right in proclaiming the necessity for complete European Union. But… it is a disgrace that Europe had to wait for a word of command from the other side of the Atlantic before she realised where her own duty and interest lay.
Dr. Henri Brugmans, Chairman of the European Union of Federalists, August 1947.
The official history of the European Union, as can be seen from the European Commission’s Europa website and any number of other publications, invariably begins with the period immediately after the Second World War. The Commission’s version opens with the historic speech made by Winston Churchill in the Great Hall of Zurich University on 19 September 1946. After painting a typically robust picture of the ‘plight to which Europe has been reduced’ by the ‘frightful nationalistic quarrels originated by the Teutonic nations’, Britain’s revered wartime leader held out his vision of how the hundreds of millions of inhabitants of this unhappy and ruined continent might ‘regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living’. To achieve peace, freedom and an end to ‘all the crimes and follies of the past’, he said, ‘we must build a kind of United States of Europe’.
Churchill was to renew his message in three more major speeches in the years that followed, in London in 1947, at The Hague in 1948, and in Strasbourg in 1949. These rallying calls by Europe’s only statesman at that time of world stature would later be claimed as having been the inspiration for the steps which eventually led to the European Union: a project in which it would also be claimed that Churchill wished Britain to play a central part. In every respect this is based on a misreading of the facts.
For a start there was a crucial distinction between the type of united Europe envisioned by Churchill and that which would begin to take shape in the 1950s. He made this clear by his references at Zurich to the ‘pan-European union’ which had been worked for by that ‘famous French patriot and statesman Aristide Briand’, and to that ‘immense body which was brought into being amidst high hopes after the first world war – the League of Nations’. At all times, Churchill was essentially looking back to that internationalist idealism of the 1920s, associated with Briand, Stresemann and Coudenhove: a ‘United States of Europe’ based on an alliance of sovereign states.
As we shall see, however, it was precisely this type of ‘intergovernmentalism’ which the founders of what was to be the European Union regarded as their greatest obstacle. Indeed, when their project was finally launched, the man chiefly responsible for it was openly dismissive of Churchill’s type of ‘United Europe’. Monnet was convinced that the goal could only be reached in a wholly different way.
Secondly, as Churchill consistently made clear both at Zurich and later, he saw any ‘united Europe’ rooted in ‘a partnership between France and Germany’. There was no question of Britain’s direct participation. ‘In all this urgent work’, as he put it,
France and Germany must take the lead together. Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America, and, I trust, Soviet Russia… must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe, and must champion its right to live.
In 1947, at the Albert Hall in London, he conjured up his vision of a ‘Temple of World Peace’, which would have ‘four pillars’: the USA; the Soviet Union; a ‘United States of Europe’; and, quite separately, ‘the British Empire and Commonwealth’. Ironically, this was almost the only point on which Churchill and Monnet were agreed. If a ‘United States of Europe’ was to be brought about, it would be without Britain.
However, the most fundamental misconception about how the European Union came into being stems from the myth that its intellectual genesis emerged after the Second World War. All the essential ideas which lay behind the moves to unite Europe at that time had in fact been conceived in the 1920s, before the rise of Hitler, as a way to prevent a recurrence of the First World War. In that sense they had already failed in their original purpose, in that they had been unable to prevent World War Two.
More significantly, by the time these ideas were disinterred after 1945, the political balance of Europe and the world had changed out of all recognition. The chief problem they were designed to solve, the national rivalry between France and Germany, paled into insignificance beside a new, much greater threat, identified by Churchill in his other famous speech of 1946, given at Fulton, Missouri. Then he spoke of how, from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, ‘an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’. In that respect, the efforts to dissolve Europe’s ancient national enmities in a new union were specifically addressed to solving a problem which no longer existed.
The Golden Age of Inter-Governmentalism
As the world emerged into an uncertain peace, following the dropping of the first nuclear weapons on Japan in August 1945, there was a general mood of cautious optimism, expressed above all in a renaissance of internationalist idealism. The defeat of the Axis powers had required international co-operation on an unprecedented scale. Reflected in the famous picture taken in February that year at Yalta, showing Stalin seated alongside the dying President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, the world political scene was dominated by what were known as the ‘Big Three’, the three powers which had played the leading role in the allied victory: the USSR, the USA and Britain with her Commonwealth.
The end of World War Two was to act as even more a spur to schemes of international co-operation than the end of the Great War twenty-five years earlier. Many of the international institutions which were to provide a framework for the post-war world were called into being at this time. Foremost among them was the United Nations, set up in 1945 to replace the League of Nations (which was only formally dissolved in 1946).
The first UN General Assembly was held in London in January 1946 under the presidency of Belgium’s foreign minister Paul-Henri Spaak. From the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, as instruments of post-war financial and economic reconstruction, came the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In October 1947, indirectly through the UN, came the signing of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) designed to work for the progressive liberalisation of world trade.
All these were intergovernmental structures based on co-operation between sovereign governments. As with the League of Nations before them, their prime mover, closely supported by Britain, was the United States of America. But, this time, there was to be no American retreat into isolationism. The US was firmly committed to play a central role, as was symbolised by the fact that the permanent headquarters chosen for the new United Nations was not in neutral Switzerland, like that of the defunct League. It was in the heart of New York (where its General Assembly building on the East River was to be designed by that most Utopian of all 1920s architects, Le Corbusier).
There was of course one reason above all why the USA was to find it impossible to repeat its 1920 retreat into ‘splendid isolation’. The Second World War had produced a complete reshaping of the balance of power. At the start of that war the leading western European nations, with their imperial possessions scattered across every continent, were still powers which, politically and militarily, were of world-rank. But by the war’s end, the world was bestridden by the two new super-powers, the USA and the USSR: one already armed with nuclear weapons, the other soon to possess them, representing two political ideologies in potentially deadly conflict. Nowhere was this more obvious than on the continent of Europe which, far from being the centre of world politics, was to become merely the central cockpit in which that greater rivalry was acted out.
However, it was not yet evident just how deep this division of Europe was to become. Initially, it had been agreed at the Moscow conference of October 1944 that most of central and eastern Europe, then being liberated from Nazi occupation by the Red Army, would fall after the war into ‘the Soviet sphere of influence’. But when hostilities ended several of Europe’s pre-war democracies, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania, re-established democratic, multi-party forms of government. Only in Bulgaria were the political intentions of the Communists, under the shadow of Soviet occupation, already more obvious. Yugoslavia was placed under one-party Communist rule by Tito, then still Stalin’s ally. Albania followed suit, and played an active part in promoting an attempted Communist take-over of Greece only narrowly averted by Britain’s armed intervention in the Greek civil war of 1944-5.
The immediate task confronting the western half of the continent, including all those occupied countries which had been liberated by the Western allies, was to re-establish self-governing institutions and to rebuild their economies. Here too, there initially seemed grounds for optimism, despite the presence in Italy and France of large Communist parties, which were to provide a constant reminder of how fragile the re-born democracies of western Europe might prove if economic recovery was not successful.
An early reflection of that optimism was contained in a confidential paper presented to the British Cabinet in the summer of 1945 by none other than Arthur Salter, who had now become Churchill’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the post-war ‘caretaker government’. His chief task had been to report on the state of the economies of ‘liberated Europe’.
Salter’s conclusions were surprising. After touring western Europe, he reported that ‘the material destruction is much less, and the resources available for restoration are much greater, than could have been anticipated’. Except in ‘the limited areas of actual conflict’, he had found the industrial infrastructures of France, Holland, Belgium and even Germany itself still surprisingly intact. In general, western Europe had enough food, coal, port facilities and other raw materials to meet its essential needs. The most serious obstacle to recovery was the breakdown of the distribution system, in particular the extensive damage to railways. This, he suggested, could be overcome by use of surplus army trucks. ‘All that liberated Europe needs’ he concluded, ‘represents an effort, in terms of manpower and materials, which is small by comparison with what was required by actual combat’.
Scarcely had Salter presented his report, however, than the government to which he belonged was replaced in the electoral landslide which, in July 1945, dismissed Churchill from office. The Labour victory, on the most radical Socialist programme ever presented to the British electorate, was itself a vivid expression of the post-war mood of idealism. The vision held out to the British people was that a new and better world could now be created, based on international co-operation and, at home, a massive expansion of state ownership and state controls. Its aim was to build a ‘better, fairer and more efficient society’. The peace was to be ‘planned’ just as had been the victory.
Britain’s new government, under Clement Attlee, launched a radical restructuring of Britain’s economy, based on the belief in centralised planning and nationalisation. The Bank of England and a wide range of basic industries, including coal, iron and steel, the railways and public transport, were taken into public ownership.
An equally ambitious and in some ways very similar programme was being launched in France. The man in charge was Salter’s old friend, Monnet. As a member of de Gaulle’s National Liberation Committee, in 1943 he had been appointed as ‘Commissioner for Armament, Supplies and Reconstruction’. On 30 August 1944, when General de Gaulle set up a provisional French government in newly-liberated Paris, Monnet was full of ideas on how to restructure the French economy.
After VE Day in May 1945, he realised that a key would be American financial help. He therefore returned to Washington for some months, where, by effective lobbying, he talked the US government into providing a loan of $550 million dollars. A useful ally in this was a young Washington lawyer, George W. Ball, who in the years that lay ahead was to become one of his closest and most useful collaborators.
Armed with this aid, Monnet was able to return to France in November 1945, in charge of the new Commissariat du Plan, set to implement a four-year programme of reconstruction and modernisation. As in Britain, the ‘Monnet Plan’, as he himself called it, was based on state planning, controls and wholesale nationalisation, starting with the Bank of France and the railways. After de Gaulle stepped down as France’s President in January 1946, Monnet had become arguably the most powerful man in France.
However, fully engaged in reconstruction as they were, in the first two years after the end of the war, there was little talk of bringing about ‘European unity’ from the governments of western Europe. The exception was a plan agreed by the governments-in-exile of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, to set up a common customs area between their three countries, Benelux. The idea had been inspired by Monnet’s attempt at Anglo-French union in 1940, and was finally ratified on 29 October 1947.
During these two years, however, the vision of creating a ‘United States of Europe’ did break into the headlines, from two unexpected directions. One was the speech made in Zurich in September 1946 by Churchill himself, now out of power and not averse to creating a stir on the international stage. He came up with a startlingly unconventional proposal: the setting up of a ‘Council of Europe’. The other, not dissimilar proposal came from the country which over the next few years was to play a key part in promoting Europe’s political integration: the United States of America. That it should have come from America itself was partly the result of the inter-war idealism when a group of internationally-minded Americans had set up the Council for Foreign Relations in 1920.
The CFR prospered during the years of America’s isolationism, perversely, as a consequence of the State Department’s withdrawal from world affairs. This had led to serious under-staffing and the CFR begun to fill the gap with a series of position-papers addressing major foreign policy issues of the day. Generously funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and other industrial corporations, it had carried out detailed examinations of ‘mechanisms for the economic integration of Europe’. Over 120 influential figures, including academics, business leaders, politicians and civil servants drawn from across the Roosevelt administration, were involved in this programme, holding 362 meetings and producing no fewer than 682 documents.
In 1939, it set up a series of ‘War and Peace Study Groups’, and when Coudenhove Kalergi had arrived in New York as a refugee from Hitler, the CFR arranged for to spend the war years teaching ‘European integration’ at New York University.
The cause of European unity was also actively promoted in Washington in the early war years by Monnet. Not only did he win sympathy from such key US establishment figures as Dean Acheson, George Kennan and Justice Felix Frankfurter, but several times met President Roosevelt himself.
As peace approached, and Washington began to think about how Europe might be rebuilt, politically and economically, the ‘Europeanists’ had succeeded in convincing established liberal opinion that the solution to Europe’s post-war problems would lie in some form of political unification. There was, however, an important proviso: the USA would not be prepared to support continued European colonialism. Europe had to learn to live within her own boundaries.
All this was reflected when, in 1946, one of the CFR’s study teams, headed by David Rockefeller and Charles M. Spofford, a senior lawyer, produced a paper entitled ‘The Reconstruction of Europe’, which was widely circulated in US government circles. In March 1947, after active lobbying by Coudenhove, two Senators, William Fullbright and Elbert D. Thomas, piloted a resolution through both houses of the US legislature that ‘Congress favours the creation of a United States of Europe’.
To attract public support for the resolution, CFR members orchestrated an intensive media campaign. On 17 March, Life magazine, whose publisher, Henry Luce, was a leading CFR member, proclaimed: ‘our policy should be to help the nations of Europe federate as our states federated in 1787’. Sumner Wells (CFR) of the Washington Post, owned by another CFR member, Eurgen Meyer, wrote: ‘Europe desperately needs some effective form of political and economic federation’. Boston’s Christian Science Monitor, another strong CFR supporter, advised: ‘the US could hardly impose federation on Europe, but it could counsel… It could mould its leading and occupational policies towards upbuilding a single continental economy’. The New York Times, the most influential CFR mouthpiece of all, produced on 18 April a magisterial editorial proclaiming: ‘Europe must federate or perish’; while the St. Louis Post Dispatch declared that ‘for Europe it is a case of join – or die’.
However, what gave the real impetus to American support for European integration was the darkening international climate, and it was this which was bring the United States fully into the European arena.
The Marshall Plan: the first try that failed
The trigger for US interest was primarily its fear of Communist take-overs in Italy, and France, where the Communists briefly became the largest single party in the Assembly. At its root was the economic dislocation caused by the unusually severe winter of 1946-7, which undermined that initial post-war optimism about the potential for recovery of western Europe’s economies. Washington began to sense serious concern over Communist ambitions in Europe.
Ironically, however, the first country to run into real economic crisis was Britain: over-stretched by her still enormous military commitments and by the efforts her people had made through six years of war, much of it financed by huge American loans under the wartime ‘Lend-Lease’ programme which had cost the USA $48.5 billion.
No sooner had the Japanese war come to an end in August 1945 than the US government abruptly terminated Lend-Lease. The impact on Britain’s economy was compared by John Maynard Keynes to that of ‘a financial Dunkirk’. Keynes himself, then the most respected economist in the western world, was dispatched to America to negotiate a replacement. In December 1945, he managed to secure loans of $3.75 billion from the US and a further $1.25 billion from Canada. But the terms were harsh, demanding that sterling be made freely convertible with the dollar, thus seriously undermining Britain’s special trading relationships with her colonies and Commonwealth.
In the first year after the war, Britain’s adverse trade balance soared to a then-enormous £298 million (the following year it was to rise still further, to £443 million). So grave did the situation become that, over that freezing winter of 1946-7, the Labour government was forced to export coal to reduce the balance of payment crisis. Yet fuel stocks in England were so low that power stations had to cut back drastically on generating hours or shut down altogether. Factories producing goods for export had to stop work or curtail production. For the ordinary citizen, the austerities of everyday life were now even more exacting than they had been during the war, the drastic rationing of clothing and food now being extended even to bread.
Already, as this financial crisis mounted, a government committee had reported in July 1946 that the cost of supporting the British zone of Germany in the year 1946-7 would be over £80 million, a sum Britain could not afford. The only remedy was economic integration of the occupation zones. The British and US authorities had already begun the rebuilding of German self-government centred on the Länder, the regional divisions of Germany dating back to the Weimar Republic. They now agreed that the British and American zones should be fused, creating the so-called ‘bizone’ from 1 January 1947, with the US paying for three-quarters of its financing.
Further burdened by the costs of her military and political responsibilities in the Eastern Mediterranean, Britain then informed Washington on 21 February 1947 that she could no longer continue providing financial aid to the governments of Greece and Turkey (in addition to her substantial military commitment to Palestine, where the British mandate was now coming under severe strain from the campaign by Jewish nationalists and terrorist groups to set up a state of Israel).
This precipitated crisis meetings between members of Congress and State Department officials. Their outcome was a statement by Truman’s Under-Secretary of State Dean Acheson propounding what would later become known as the ‘domino theory’. Facing the possibility of a Communist take-over in both Greece and Turkey, he declared that more was at stake than just those countries. It they fell, Communism might spread south to Iran and even perhaps to India.
A support package was hastily devised and, addressing a joint session of Congress on 12 March 1947, Truman asked for approval for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey. ‘It must be the policy of the United States’ he declared, ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’. He thus established what became known as the ‘Truman Doctrine’, which was to guide U.S. diplomacy for the next forty years.
This also marked the beginning of America’s cold war foreign policy, at a time when the fragile détente between the Western allies and the Soviet Union was visibly crumbling. The events of 1947 were to mark a decisive turning point in the relations between Communist ‘East’ and non-Communist ‘West’. As local Communist parties registered significant gains in elections in Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, it had become clear that Stalin had every intention of turning the countries of central Europe into a Soviet empire. In October a Warsaw conference was to set up the ‘Cominform’ (Communist Information Bureau), to co-ordinate the activities of all Europe’s Communist parties. The so-called ‘Big Three’ negotiations between America, the Soviet Union and Britain on the future of Germany were getting nowhere, and in December 1947 the talks were to collapse irrevocably, over Soviet demands that Germany should pay massive reparations.
It was against this background of a Europe rapidly polarising between Communist and Western camps that the US Secretary of State George Marshall early in 1947 organised a team of officials, led by one of his most senior advisers, George Kennan. His task was to map out an ambitious new strategy for Europe’s economic support. Three of the key figures in putting together this study were members of the Council of Foreign Relations, Dean Acheson, Will Clayton, and George Kennan. In particular Kennan and Clayton had extensive consultations with the man now in charge of France’s economy, their wartime Washington friend Jean Monnet. From their combined efforts came the European Recovery Programme, better known as the ‘Marshall Plan’. This was announced by Marshall on 5 June 1947, in a speech at Harvard University. Crucially, to avoid any appearance of the US dictating European policy, Marshall couched the offer of help in these terms:
It is already evident that, before the United States government can proceed much further in its efforts to alleviate the situation and help start the European world on the way to recovery, there must be some agreement among the countries of Europe as to the requirements of the situation and the part those countries themselves will take in order to give proper effect to whatever action might be undertaken by this government. It would be neither fitting nor proper for this government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a programme designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European programme and the later support of such a programme so far as it may be practical for us to do so. The programme should be a joint one, agreed by a number, if not all of the European nations.
In response to Marshall’s declaration, sixteen European nations agreed to attend a conference in Paris on 12 July 1947, to form a group known as the Committee for European Economic Co-operation (CEEC). The CEEC’s chairman was a British civil servant, Oliver Franks. But its key figure was his vice-chairman Jean Monnet, aided by his deputy Robert Marjolin and his former Washington lawyer George Ball, who had come to Paris in August to work for Monnet, advising how the CEEC case for economic aid could most effectively be presented to Washington. The result of their work was a report on 12 December that, to cover the period 1948-51, the sixteen nations would need $19.1 billion. Seven days later, on 19 December, after making provision for emergency aid to France, Italy and Austria, President Truman submitted to Congress his ‘European Recovery Bill’, requesting $17 billion over four years.
The Marshall Plan has generally been viewed as an altruistic gesture by the USA to help its impoverished Western allies in their hour of need. However, also underlying it were strong commercial interests. Europe represented for America ‘an enormous market, of several hundred million persons’ which she could not afford to lose. Economic support for Europe thus represented an opportunity for US manufacturers and suppliers desperate to find outlets for their production after orders for war materiel had dried up. As with the earlier Truman package for Greece and Turkey, the proffered aid was by no means solely financial. It included grain, machinery and vehicles produced in America.
Additionally, US corporations had recognised that there was an opportunity to buy up valuable European assets at knock-down prices: a form of intervention at which de Gaulle expressed particular alarm. Europe’s economic weakness might also enable the US government to exert pressure on European governments to adopt more ‘liberal’ trading rules, thus easing the path for American exports.
An even more significant element in the Marshall Plan, however, was that, from the outset, it included a major political component. Despite its apparent ‘hands off’ approach, the conditions imposed on recipient countries were deliberately designed to promote a federal Europe, the creation of which had for the State Department now become a Holy Grail. At one bound, thanks not least to effective lobbying by the CEEC’s vice-chairman Monnet, the most enthusiastic integrationist power in post-war Europe had become the United States.
No sooner had the Marshall Plan been announced than it was greeted with particular excitement by many groups which, since Churchill’s Zurich speech in September 1946, had been evangelising for the cause of European political and economic unity. In Britain itself, on 14 May 1947, Churchill had launched at the Albert Hall his all-party United Europe Movement, with his son-in-law, Duncan Sandys MP, as its president, and a committee which included two members of the Labour Cabinet and several future Conservative Cabinet ministers, among them Macmillan. Churchill repeated his call for a ‘United States of Europe’, of which the USA, the Soviet Union and Britain could be sponsors, and advocated the re-integration of Germany into the Western world.
Similar associations had been formed in France and Germany. A European Union of Federalists had been set up, under the chairmanship of a leading Dutch Socialist and pacifist, Dr. Henri Brugmans. Its objective was to bring together groups in Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland, under the aegis of a new committee, the International Co-ordination of Movements for the Unification of Europe Committee.
When Marshall announced his Plan in June, support for it was quickly orchestrated across western Europe. Among those most active in this operation were several figures who had been enthusiasts for the integrationist cause since they were wartime exiles in London. These included Paul van Zeeland, more than once Belgium’s prime minister, and Joseph Retinger, a Polish émigré, who early in 1947 had formed an Independent League for Economic Co-operation (ELEC). In March 1947, ELEC’s leaders, headed by Van Zeeland, had already met in New York to discuss closer links with the United States, and they were now recruited to promote the Marshall Plan. A memorandum supporting the Plan was approved by ELEC on 30 June 1947 in Paris and sent to all European governments.
Another prominent advocate for the Plan was Brugmans, who, addressing a conference of his Union in August 1947, said, after referring to the Marshall Plan:
More than ever we are convinced that we are right in proclaiming the necessity for complete European Union. But… it is a disgrace that Europe had to work for a word of command from the other side of the Atlantic before she realised where her own duty and interest lay.
Within months Brugmans’ speech was being widely circulated among ‘European federalists’, updated with a reference to the three events of 1947 which had ‘determined international life: the Marshall Plan, the breakdown of the Conference of the Big Three and the setting up of ‘Cominform’.
Citing Proudhon’s plea of 1866 that ‘to end the irreparable abuse of sovereignty’ what was needed above all was ‘the dismemberment of sovereignty’, Brugmans called for the setting up of ‘supranational’ authorities. They would administer hydro-electric power from the Alps, the European railway system and ‘the first nucleus of autonomous European administration of coal and heavy industry’. This call was echoed in a foreword to the British edition of Brugman’s speech by Arthur Salter’s friend Lord Layton, who wrote that ‘the whole of Western Europe can in fact be regarded as a single, highly interdependent industrial unit’ crying out for supranational control.
Despite this orchestrated support from Europe and intense lobbying in Washington, the US Congress remained hostile to Marshall’s proposal. Again it was pressure from events elsewhere which turned the tide. In February 1948, the ‘Prague coup’ established complete Communist control over Czechoslovakia. This event had profound repercussions throughout the Western world, lending substance to Acheson’s ‘domino theory’. Congressional resistance to the Marshall Plan collapsed. On 13 March, it was supported by the Senate and on 2 April it was approved by the House of Representatives with a massive 329-74 majority. Nevertheless, Congress refused to write a blank cheque. Aid was limited to $5.3 billion for one year, at the end of which approval had to be sought for continued funding.
For pro-integrationist lobbyists on both sides of the Atlantic, an important lesson had been learned: rhetoric on protecting Western Europe from the threat of Communism was likely to be the most effective shaping American opinion. John McCloy, soon to become US High Commissioner for Germany (and later chairman of the CFR, from 1953 to 1970), admitted: ‘one way to assure that a viewpoint gets noticed is to cast it in terms of resisting the spread of Communism’. The French also found the Communist threat highly advantageous. Mendès-France commented: ‘The Communists are rendering us a great service. Because we have a ‘Communist danger’, the Americans are making a tremendous effort to help us. We must keep up this indispensable Communist scare’.
The chief instrument chosen by Washington to promote its new policy of European integration was a new organisation, formed on 16 April 1948, to administer the distribution of Marshall Plan funding. This was the Organisation of European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). The French government, heavily influenced by Monnet, pushed for the new body to be given an executive council with supranational powers and a permanent secretariat. The committed integrationist Paul Henri-Spaak, now once again Belgium’s prime minister, was appointed its director general. This was vociferously opposed by the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, supported by Sweden and Switzerland, who also had serious reservations about the ‘political’ components of the plan.
Through their efforts, the OEEC remained strictly intergovernmental, controlled by a ‘Council of Ministers’ making decisions on the basis of unanimity. Monnet’s verdict could not have been more withering: ‘the OEEC’s nothing: it’s only a watered-down British approach to Europe – talk, consultation, action only by unanimity. That’s no way to make Europe’. The first serious attempt to set up a large-scale supranational European organisation had failed.
The Council of Europe: the second try that failed
In 1948, following the breakdown of the ‘Big Three’ talks on the future of Germany, relations between ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Europe seemed to be worsening by the month. Less than a month after the ‘Prague Coup, on 17 March, Britain, France and the three ‘Benelux’ countries signed a mutual defence treaty in Brussels. Three months later, in June, the great powers were to be plunged, over Berlin, into their most serious crisis since the end of the war.
Before the eruption of this crisis, however, came another significant landmark in the campaign for European political unity. In May 1948, Brugmans and his European Union of Federalists organised in The Hague a vast ’European Congress’, which to their delight was chaired by Winston Churchill. Among the 800 delegates attending were several former and future prime ministers, including Alcide de Gasperi of Italy, Robert Schuman of France and Harold Macmillan of Britain; twenty-nine former foreign ministers; and even a delegation from west Germany, led by the man soon to become its first Chancellor, Dr. Konrad Adenauer.
Taking up Churchill’s proposal in Zurich, the congress called for the creation of a Council of Europe, to draw up plans for the political and economic integration of Europe. The congress was too large and unwieldy to reach any firm decision on the composition of such a Council and no formal proposals were adopted. One thing, however, was agreed: that a European Movement should be set up, to co-ordinate on an international basis the different groups now promoting European integration, its task to ‘break down national sovereignty by concrete practical action in the political and economic spheres’.
This decision was indirectly to trigger one of the more curious episodes in the history of the European integration movement. Shortly after The Hague Congress, two of the most active campaigners for integration, Josef Retinger and Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys, went to America to lobby for support for their campaign for European unity. Here they met two key figures, William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, founder in 1947 of the CIA, and his colleague Allen Dulles, later to become head of the CIA under President Eisenhower (and whose brother John Foster Dulles was to be Eisenhower’s Secretary of State). These two very senior members of the US intelligence community had recently joined in support of Coudenhove to form a Committee for a Free and United Europe. But, as a result of the meetings with Sandys and Retinger, Coudenhove, who considered that he alone should lead any unity movement, was now dropped, amid some acrimony. A new organisation was set up, the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE).
From this time on, as recent academic research has established, the ACUE was used as a conduit to provide covert CIA funds, augmented by contributions from private foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Institute, to promote the State Department’s obsession with a united Europe, in what one historian has called a ‘liberal conspiracy’.
Over the next few years, ACUE funding was secretly channelled to a range of individuals and organisations working for European integration, from politicians such as Paul-Henri Spaak and trade unions to such influential British magazines as Lord Layton’s Economist and the intellectual monthly Encounter. However, the major beneficiary of ACUE funding was the European Movement. Between 1949 and 1960, it was kept afloat almost entirely on $4 million of CIA money, these contributions amounting to between half and two-thirds of the Movement’s income.
Even while these negotiations were secretly afoot in Washington, however, the eyes of the world were suddenly focused in June 1948 on the most serious international crisis since the Cold War began. In January 1948, the British and US authorities in Germany had proposed that western Germany must move towards full self-government, based initially on the German-run economic council they had set up in their bizone, with a second chamber consisting of representatives of the Länder.
To meet French objections to this move, a six-nation conference was called in London, attended by representatives of the three occupying powers and the Benelux countries. On 7 June, it agreed to proposals for west Germany’s political development on a federal system, based on the Länder, along with a new single currency, the Deutschmark. On French insistence, it also agreed to an International Ruhr Authority, to control the coal and steel industries of the Ruhr.
What provoked the crisis was the decision of the three allied powers to introduce the Deutschmark into West Berlin. In those pre-Wall days, access to the different zones was not restricted. The Soviet authorities, fearful that the new currency would soon come to be used throughout the city, and aware that control of a currency brought economic control, imposed a blockade, cutting off road and rail access to the three western zones. Disaster for millions of West Berliners was only averted by the Allies, who for nearly a year would manage to keep the city’s population alive by flying in immense quantities of food, fuel and other vital supplies in what became known as the Berlin airlift.
This first ‘Berlin crisis’ confirmed how serious the Soviet threat at the heart of Europe had become and triggered negotiations on a comprehensive solution to the whole question of Western Europe’s security. Even the French government recognised that the Soviets presented a greater threat than a resurgent Germany, and pressed for greater US involvement in the defence of Europe. This was to lead to the signing in Washington on 4 April 1949 of the North Atlantic Treaty, committing the USA, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, the Benelux countries and four other western European nations (Norway, Denmark, Portugal and Iceland) to set up an integrated military organisation for the defence of non-Communist Europe.
It the resultant organisation, Nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, with its headquarters in Brussels, which was to guarantee the peace of Europe for the next forty years. And its successful establishment was above all a triumph of intergovernmentalism: independent nations co-operating in a way which did not detract from their sovereignty.
While the Nato negotiations had been proceeding, active steps had also been taken to set up the Council of Europe called for by the conference of The Hague. This was the first time since the 1920s that a proposal put forward by Europe’s various federalist groups had been taken up at government level when, in January 1949, the governments of France, Great Britain and the Benelux countries, together with Denmark, Ireland, Italy Norway and Switzerland, began talks on the form such a Council might take.
Ernest Bevin and the British government were extremely sceptical of its overall aim, and the discussions were led by the French, aided by the European Movement, with discreet off-stage encouragement from Monnet’s old friend Dean Acheson. Himself a fervent integrationist, he had succeeded Marshall as US Secretary of State on 7 January. Britain sought to dilute the proposals, arguing instead for a permanent conference of foreign ministers. In order to encourage British participation, which was regarded as essential, not least by Washington, a compromise was reached. The Council would divide its role: one part would be a Committee of Ministers, meeting behind closed doors, the other a Consultative Assembly, drawn largely from members of existing national parliaments, meeting in public.
On 5 May 1949, the Statute of the Council was signed in London by the ten governments of the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In the same month the European Movement formally came into being. Duncan Sandys and Leon Jouhaux of France became co-presidents; Josef Retinger its secretary-general.
The first session of the Council began in Strasbourg on 10 August 1949. It was attended by senior politicians from each of the participating countries, including leading members of the British and other governments. The star was indisputably Churchill, who was given the freedom of the city and made a memorable speech to a rapturous crowd of 50,000 in Strasbourg’s main square (telling his fellow-delegate Harold Macmillan ‘this is the best fun I’ve had for years and years’).
The first president of the Assembly was Spaak, who had resigned as Belgian prime minister after a defeat in the general elections only a week before the first session. He took his seat to preside over a series of discussions on how the Council could further the cause of integration, keen on the one hand to promote integration but, on the other hand, anxious not to lose touch with the British. With the exception of Richard Mackay, an Australian-born Labour MP, none of the British delegation advocated British entry into a Federal Europe.
In the second session, the ‘federalists’ launched a ‘major offensive’, seeking to establish supranational authorities in the ‘key sectors’ of defence, human rights, coal, steel and power. But it was from the debates that clear divisions began to emerge, with sustained opposition to integration from British and Scandinavian delegates. Macmillan, then one of the Conservative delegates. explained that the British opposition was, above all else, ‘a matter of temperament’, a preference to work empirically when dealing with practical problems, rather than setting out ‘general principles’ which were then applied to practical issues. The British took the view that those who wished to take the federal path should do so, but they had no intention of following. At that stage, Spaak avers, the idea of ‘little Europe’ took shape, comprising France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries.
By the third session, in the autumn of 1951, when the Conservatives had succeeded Labour and Churchill had replaced Attlee, there were some hopes that his party might be more ‘Europe-minded’. But, in power, the Conservatives proved no more enthusiastic for integration than their predecessors. Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe (later to become Lord Kilmuir) broke the news. The Churchill government was ready to give its friendly support to the movement for European integration, but there was no question of the British taking an active part. Spaak finally concluded that the Council would never be anything more than a talking shop and came to realise that ‘we must do without Britain’s support if we were to make any headway’. He resigned as president on 11 December 1951, by then sharing Monnet’s view that Britain would not consider joining until a united Europe was created.
Already, a third bid to give Europe a supranational government was under way; and this one would succeed.
Chapter Four
‘An Almost Mystical Conception’: 1950-1
Not just a piece of convenient machinery. It is a revolutionary and almost mystical conception.
Harold Macmillan on Monnet’s ‘Schuman Plan’.
Through the late 1940s, one man had stood more or less apart from the abortive efforts to set up a ‘government for Europe’. Monnet was now nearing the end of implementing his four-year plan for the ‘modernisation’ of France. But, as he was to recall in his memoirs two decades later, he had watched the successive failures of the OEEC and the Council of Europe with a sense of resigned detachment, only too certain that neither of them could
…ever give concrete expression to European unity. Amid these vast groupings of countries, the common interest was too indistinct, and common disciplines were too lax. A start would have to be made by doing something more practical and more ambitious. National sovereignty would have to be tackled more boldly and on a narrower front.
If Monnet was sure that something much ‘more practical and ambitious’ was needed to achieve the desired goal, however, then events in the late spring of 1950 conspired to create precisely the opportunity he was looking for.
During 1949, West Germany had finally emerged to self-government under the Chancellorship of Konrad Adenauer. Under its Basic Law, passed on 8 May 1949, the new Federal Democratic Republic, or FDR, was based on a federation of the eleven highly decentralised Land governments which, on British insistence, retained considerable power, guaranteed by a constitutional court. In crucial respects the federal government, centred in Bonn, could not act without the consent of the Länder. In particular, all international treaties had to be ratified by the Länder through their legislative assembly, the Bundesrat. The largest and most powerful of the Land, Bavaria, had actually voted against the new constitution, for not reserving even greater power to the Länder. Decades later, this structure was to play a part in the history of the European Union that no one could have foreseen.
At the time, however, the new Germany, under the guidance of Ludwig Erhard, was already showing signs of a remarkable economic recovery. This raised the question of how the new nation should be assimilated into the western European community. At the Council of Europe in August 1949 Churchill had shocked many delegates by proposing that she should be given the warmest of welcomes. Two of the western occupying powers, the USA and Britain, wanted to see her continue on the road towards full economic recovery and nationhood as soon as possible. But this had provoked a deep rift with France, which wanted to continue exercising control over the German economy, for fear that she might once again become too strong a political and economic rival.
The argument centred on that old bone of contention, the coal and steel industries of the Ruhr, heartland of Germany’s economy and formerly the arsenal of her war machine. In 1948, France had demanded the setting up of an International Ruhr Authority, which would enable French officials to control Germany’s coal and steel production and ensure that a substantial part of that production was diverted to aid French reconstruction. It was a curious echo of France’s policy after the First World War. Naturally the new West Germany was bitterly opposed to such an authority. Equally so were the other two occupying powers, America and Britain.
For over two years this dispute had festered, without resolution. But in the spring of 1950 the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson finally lost patience. He issued France with what amounted to an ultimatum. On 11 May there would be a foreign ministers’ meeting in London; and unless the French could offer a satisfactory compromise proposal, the USA would impose a solution on all parties.
This gave Monnet the opportunity for which he had been waiting. For years he had dreamed of building a ‘United States of Europe’, beginning by integrating the coal and steel industries, and setting up a supranational authority to run them. This was the idea first put forward in the 1920s, by Coudenhove and Loucheur, and partly implemented by Mayrisch in 1926. It was the idea Monnet himself had outlined to Spaak in 1941 and in his Algiers memorandum in 1943. But what Monnet had in mind was that the coal and steel industries, not just of France and Germany but of other western European countries, should be placed under the direction of a supranational authority: just as over dinner in Paris in 1917 he and Salter had come up with a similar plan for the control of allied shipping.
When Monnet came to commit his plan to paper, he was obviously troubled by how much he dare reveal of its real underlying purpose. Before getting to its final stage, it went through nine separate drafts. In the first, the pooling of coal and steel was regarded as ‘the first step of a Franco-German Union’. The second opened it up to the ‘first step of a Franco-German Union and a European federation’. By the fifth draft, this had been changed to ‘Europe must be organised on a federal basis. A Franco-German Union is an essential element is this’. The seventh demanded that ‘Europe must be organised on a Federal basis’. But, by the final draft, almost all this was missing. All he would allow himself was a reference to the pool being ‘the first step of a European federation’, a vague term which could mean different things to different people.
Although what Monnet really had in mind was the creation of a European entity with all the attributes of a state, the anodyne phrasing was deliberately chosen with a view to making it difficult to dilute by converting it into just another intergovernmental body. It was also couched in this fashion so that it would not scare off national governments by emphasising that its purpose was to override their sovereignty.
Once his memorandum was complete, Monnet’s next problem was how to get it adopted. He could not act as the champion of his own plan. As a natural behind-the-scenes operator, his style was always to act indirectly. He needed to win over very senior support in the French government. His initial thought was the prime minister, George Bidault, and he therefore handed his memorandum to Bidault’s closest aide, asking for it to passed on. In the memorandum, Monnet wrote of the ‘German situation’ becoming a cancer that would be dangerous to peace. For future peace, he wrote, the creation of a dynamic Europe is indispensable:
We must therefore abandon the forms of the past and enter the path of transformation, both by creating common basic economic conditions and by setting up new authorities accepted by the sovereign nations. Europe has never existed. It is not the addition of sovereign nations met together in councils that makes an entity of them. We must genuinely create Europe; it must become manifest to itself…
Alas for Bidault, who thereby missed his chance of immortality, the memorandum did not reach him. Frustrated, because time was short, Monnet looked around for another candidate. On 4 May, he lunched with Bernard Clappier, chief assistant to Robert Schuman, France’s foreign minister. The meeting was fortuitous. Clappier and his master were well aware that the foreign ministers’ meeting set for 11 May was only a week away, and Schuman still had no idea of what to offer, to placate Acheson. His own officials had only been able to offer a version of that solution to the ‘Ruhr problem’ which had been imposed in 1919. Monnet knew that, if Schuman could be presented with a more imaginative proposal, he might welcome it with huge relief.
As a potential advocate, Schuman had other advantages. Born in 1886 in Luxembourg to a German mother, he was fluent in both German and French, having read law at the universities of Berlin, Munich and Bonn. He had then moved to Alsace Lorraine when it was under German rule, which meant that in 1914 he had been recruited into the German army. Yet in the Second World War, when Alsace Lorraine was again part of Germany, he had, as a French citizen, been arrested by the Gestapo. He was thus a perfect witness to the need to resolve the Franco-German conflict.
Clappier agreed to pass Monnet’s memorandum to his minister as soon as possible, catching him while he was sitting in a train on his way to Metz for the weekend. When Schuman returned to Paris, after studying the document, he had adopted the plan wholeheartedly. It had now become the ‘Schuman Plan’, although in reality it was not his at all. In the final analysis, he was not even committed to it, except as a device to get him off a hook.
Once Schuman had agreed, the contents of the Plan were passed by his office in great secrecy to the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, in the hope of securing his provisional agreement. Other governments, especially the British, were not told. According to Professor Bernard Lavergne, a prominent political commentator of the time, who was to publish a highly critical study of the plan:
The curious thing was that M. Bidault, the Premier, was – at least, at first – not at all favourable to the Plan which, in early May, was suddenly sprung on him by his Foreign Minister, M. Schuman. And oddly enough – though this was typical of M. Schuman’s furtive statesmanship and diplomacy – neither was M. François-Poncet, the French High Commissioner, nor the Quay d’Orsay, or even the French Government, properly informed of what was going on during the days that preceded the ‘Schuman bombshell’ of 9 May.
However, ‘as a result of a curious coincidence’, Dean Acheson was already on his way to the summit in London, and had decided to go via Paris to confer informally with Schuman. By another ‘coincidence’, Monnet was present at their meeting. As Monnet disingenuously put it, ‘courtesy and honesty obliged us to take Acheson into our confidence’. The Plan was also presented to the French Cabinet, but only in a most perfunctory way:
Only three or four ministers were informed about it (the Plan), and when, finally, on 8 May, the Council of Ministers met, no serious discussion took place at all. Schuman gave them a rough sketch of the Plan, and, without really knowing what it was all about, they gave it their blessing.
Schuman then took an audacious step. He would announce ‘his’ plan by appealing directly to the peoples of Europe, through the media. In a radio broadcast on 9 May 1950 – today officially commemorated as ‘Europe Day’ – he revealed Monnet’s plan to the world. ‘World peace’, he began.
…cannot be safeguarded without the making of creative efforts proportionate to the dangers which threaten it. The contribution which an organised and living Europe can bring to civilisation is indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations. In taking upon herself for more than 20 years the role of champion of a united Europe, France has always had as her essential aim the service of peace. A united Europe was not achieved and we had war.
Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity. The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany …
With this aim in view the French Government proposes that action be taken immediately on one limited but decisive point … it proposes that Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organisation open to the participation of the other countries of Europe. The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe.
After describing how ‘the solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’, he went on to say that this would help simply and speedily to achieve ‘that fusion of interest which is indispensable to the establishment of a common economic system’.
This was the ‘Schuman Declaration’ which now occupies pride of place on the EU’s Europa website as the document ‘which led to the creation of what is now the European Union’. Yet, according to one historian, although the plan was immediately greeted with great excitement by the press, the curious thing was that literally nobody knew exactly what it was about, not even Schuman.
According to a much later account by Roy Denman, a senior Foreign Office civil servant and apologist for the European Union, the British prime minister Clement Attlee ‘received the French proposal with ill-grace’. In fact, of course, the British government did not ‘receive’ it at all. They had been sent a summary only hours before the public broadcast and learned of the full text only from the broadcast. Attlee was extremely annoyed, and had every right to be. Not only was France’s behaviour wholly undiplomatic, after an earlier incident, Attlee had specifically asked that no decisions involving Germany be taken before the foreign ministers’ conference in London, which was about to begin two days later. Furthermore, when he heard that Acheson had been informed about the plan in advance, he suspected – not without justice – that the Americans and the French had been colluding.
Yet, on the basis of these deceptions, what Monnet called his ‘silent revolution’ had started. There could now be no turning back without massive and adverse political consequences.
The wider response
As Monnet anticipated, Adenauer endorsed the plan. There was little else he could do. To reject what appeared to be a magnanimous offer from the French would have not been politically astute, and there were compelling reasons for its acceptance. Monnet was correct in his assumption that Adenauer saw in the plan a way Germany might reassert partial control of its industry. And, as Monnet also well knew, Adenauer was highly sympathetic to the idea of European unity. In 1948 he had attended the United Europe Congress in The Hague, where the Congress had declared: ‘European nations must transfer and merge some of their sovereign rights so as to secure common political and economic action’. Afterwards, Adenauer had observed: ‘In truth, in [the unification movement] lies the salvation of Europe and the salvation of Germany’. Then, in March 1950, Adenauer had proposed, during an interview with a journalist, that France and Germany should unite as one nation. Their economies would be managed as one, their parliaments merged, their citizenship held in common.
Adenauer’s extravagant proposal had not been taken seriously; but two months later came the Schuman Plan. In ensuring a favourable response Monnet’s tactics had been immaculate. In fact Adenauer’s initial enthusiasm cooled somewhat when he learned that Monnet was behind the Plan, fearing that the real aim was to promote French interests at the expense of Germany. However, during a meeting between the two men on 23 May, Monnet assured him of absolute equality between nations. Only then did Adenauer relax, declaring, ‘I regard the implementation of the French proposal as my most important task. If I succeed, I believe my life will not have been wasted’.
Germany would at this stage have welcomed the participation of the British, as a counter to possible French dominance; and a formal invitation was extended to the British government to take part in talks on what was described as ‘a plan to have a plan’. Even Schuman would probably have preferred British involvement. But that was the last thing Monnet wanted.
Without prompting, Britain’s prime minister Attlee had in any case decided there was no way in which Britain could accept that ‘the most vital economic forces of this country should be handed over to an authority that is utterly undemocratic and is responsible to nobody’. The Cabinet minutes of 2 June 1950 stated:
Our position was different from that of the other European countries by reason of our Commonwealth connections, and we should be slow to accept the principle of the French proposal… especially as it appeared to involve some surrender of sovereignty.
The Treasury’s view was, ‘It is not in our interests to tie ourselves to a corpse’. Labour’s National Executive Committee asserted that Western Europe lacked the ‘civic and administrative traditions’ essential to democratic socialism. A formal note was sent to the French government, stating:
…it remains the view of His Majesty’s Government that to subscribe to the terms of the draft communiqué… would involve entering into an advance commitment to pool iron and steel resources and to set up an authority, with certain supreme powers, before there had been a full opportunity of considering how these important and far-reaching proposals would work in practice. His Majesty’s government are most anxious that these proposals should be discussed and pursued but they feel unable to associate themselves with a communiqué which appears to take decisions prior to, rather than as a result of, intergovernmental discussions…
This was precisely the response Monnet had expected. On the basis of Britain’s past record and commitment to intergovernmentalism, he had anticipated that they would oppose the supranational element which was the very core of his plan. He had thus deliberately engineered Britain’s exclusion, by the simple expedient of making joining the talks conditional on accepting the supranational principle as non-negotiable, and by setting an impossibly short deadline of 2 June, during the Whitsun holiday, for agreeing to this condition.
History records that, as the deadline approached, Attlee and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, were out of London and could not be contacted. Herbert Morrison, as acting-prime minister, was tracked down to a restaurant after having spent the evening at the theatre. Asked for a decision, he had famously remarked: ‘The Durham miners won’t wear it’. A thinly attended Cabinet confirmed Morrison’s reaction.
In that context, only the previous year the government had nationalised Britain’s iron and steel industries. It would seem curiously untimely then to hand over their control to another body, which had no concern for it to be run in Britain’s national interest, and wholly unrealistic to expect that a government which had as one of its main priorities full employment to have handed industries employing a total of 1,179,000 workers over to the control of a supranational authority.
Furthermore, the defence ministry was concerned that the Plan might affect the war potential of the country. Bevin agreed, fearing that, if Europe was over-run, and Britain’s economy had gone too far down the road of economic integration, she might not be able to function independently. Manny Shinwell, then defence minister, endorsed this concern. The risk of relying on pooled western European resources, some of which might be lost to an invader, was too great. Thus, the central objective of the Plan which made it so attractive its advocates – eliminating the independent war-making capability of member states – was anathema to the British. In view of her Second World War experience and the real possibility of a Soviet land invasion of Europe, the lack of enthusiasm was far from irrational.
Britain was by no means alone in having reservations about ‘Le Plan’. French Socialists shared the British concerns; the Communists feared it might allow French industry to be smothered by the Germans, with resultant unemployment. A widely held view, cited by Lavergne, was that:
From the moment Britain, with her 220 million tons of coal and her 16 million tons of steel was unwilling to join, it should have been a matter of the most elementary prudence for M. Schuman to abandon his Plan.
However there was one British MP who was unequivocally in favour of Britain joining the talks. A day after Communist North Korea’s armies swept over the frontier into South Korea on 25 June, thus precipitating another major Cold War crisis, the new young Conservative Member for Bexley gave his maiden speech in the House of Commons. Ignoring the convention that such speeches should avoid controversial matters, Edward Heath averred that for Britain not to join the talks on the Schuman plan would be a grave error. By standing aside, ‘we may be taking a very great risk with our economy in the coming years – a very great risk indeed’.
Another enthusiast for Britain’s involvement was a young Cambridge undergraduate, Geoffrey Howe, destined one day to become Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor and then Foreign Secretary. Writing to a friend on 7 July 1950, he argued that ‘active British leadership in a more positive form of European union is essential politically’. This, he added, ‘would have the subsidiary advantage of ensuring that any such body that is set up without our help will not be Germany-dominated’.
What neither Heath nor Howe appeared to recognise was that the skill with which Monnet had deliberately managed to exclude the British from the negotiations. It was regarded by many of his colleagues as one of his greatest triumphs. Nor did they seem to take into account the broader strategic, and especially the defence implications.
But many British ‘Europeanists’ argue to this day that Britain made a fundamental and tragic error in not joining the negotiations, thereby seeking to influence them. Dean Acheson himself was later to describe it as ‘the greatest mistake of the post-war period’. Their views, however, are refuted by none other than the British official history of the period, its author writing:
The conversations and correspondence with French officials and with Schuman between 9 May and 2 June can lend some credence to the idea that the United Kingdom might have obtained an acceptable treaty, meaning one with no subjugation to a High Authority as a promise of closer union… Nevertheless, the outcome of the negotiations suggests that there was no treaty which would have given Britain the economic and political advantages identified by officials, without a supranational authority as embryo and symbol of a European federation. Acceptance of Monnet’s non-negotiable principle did require a change of national strategy… It would have meant a commitment of political support… to a reconstruction of the pattern of political power in Europe in which the United Kingdom… could not share.
In any event, British involvement was precisely what Monnet wanted to avoid. Correctly reading the psychology of the British government, he created a situation it could not have accepted.
Another myth that countless people prefer to believe (as can be seen, for instance, from the Commission’s Europa website) is that the plan really did originate with Schuman, who has thus become honoured as one of the ‘Founding Fathers of Europe’. In fact the historical record unequivocally shows that it was all due to just one man: Jean Monnet. It was an extraordinary testament to his peculiar talents that he had been able to seize the moment to move his project to the centre of the agenda with such dazzling success.
Monnet’s ‘one-man show’
Launching his plan was only the start of Monnet’s achievement. Invitations to discuss it had also been extended to representatives of the three Benelux countries and Italy. By 3 June they had all agreed to take part. Particularly enthusiastic was the Italian premier Alcide de Gasperi. Thus were brought together what were to become known as the ‘Six’.
By the time the talks began, Monnet had already engineered another coup. Not only did he get agreement that he should chair the negotiations; he had also managed to convince a French inter-ministerial committee that he should be France’s representative at the talks, with power to appoint his own advisors. Thus came about the extraordinary situation whereby, in what were to become one of the most important negotiations in its history, France was represented by a man who was not even a member of its government.
To get the negotiations under way, Monnet produced a document de travail, which meant that, in addition to organising the talks, chairing the sessions, and representing France, he also set the agenda. The ‘one-man show’ was to continue. Nevertheless, it was July before Monnet could produce a working draft for consideration by the governments of the Six, not least because of the incoherence of his original document. Belgian prime minister, Paul van Zeeland, described that as ‘so vague on essential details that it was impossible to speak definitely about it’.
When it was ready, a summary of Monnet’s July text was given to the press, in which he was ‘careful to include the following stipulation’:
The withdrawal of a State which has committed itself to the Community should be possible only if all the others agree to such withdrawal and to the conditions in which it takes place. The rule in itself sums up the fundamental transformation which the French proposal seeks to achieve. Over and above coal and steel, it is laying the foundations of a European federation. In a federation, no State can secede by its own unilateral decision. Similarly, there can be no Community except among nations which commit themselves to it with no limit and no looking back.
After that, wrote Monnet, ‘no one could any longer doubt our ambition and our determination’.
Nevertheless, each of the representatives involved sought to extract the maximum advantage for their nations. Part of the price was a two-percent turnover tax imposed on German collieries to support the decrepit Belgian coal mines; and a preferential ore supply arrangement for Italy, with subsidies for the importing of coal, and special tariffs and quotas to protect its steel industry. These concessions breached Monnet’s original concept of ‘equal treatment’ but they were needed to get agreement.
There were other concessions. Monnet’s original plan had focused on that component closest to his heart: the supranational power to be given to his ‘High Authority’. At the behest of the Belgians, a Court of Arbitration was added, to adjudicate in case of disputes. The French finance minister had then proposed the inclusion of an Assembly, which would retain the ultimate power to dismiss the High Authority, much as a shareholders’ meeting has the power to dismiss a board of directors.
Monnet’s supranationalism now came under further attack from those who disliked the idea of his High Authority being free from control by elected politicians. The Dutch chief negotiator, Dirk Spierenburg, called for an intergovernmental ‘watchdog’ to supervise the High Authority. Monnet resisted this strongly but, in face of continued Dutch insistence, reinterpreted the proposal. He accepted it so long as there was majority voting and no ‘veto’, insisting that the ‘watchdog’ should be a ‘forum’ through which the High Authority could ‘play an educating role viz-a-viz the governments’.
Thus was born the ‘Council of Ministers’. Monnet then set about devising a voting formula, which meant that the combined power of Germany and France could not outvote the remaining members, a system which was to become known as ‘qualified majority voting’. Finally, he secured a crucial agreement that, although the Council of Ministers could take part in decision-making, it could not instruct the High Authority. Monnet’s ‘Authority’ was to remain supreme, immune from the interference of nation states. Supranationalism had survived its greatest challenge.
In the first months after Monnet’s Plan had been launched, amongst those who had praised it was Macmillan. To the Assembly of the Council of Europe on 15 August 1950, he had described it as being ‘not just a piece of convenient machinery. It is a revolutionary and almost mystical conception’. As someone who had enjoyed lengthy discussions with Monnet on his views on the future of Europe during their time together in Algiers in 1943, Macmillan perhaps had a shrewder understanding than most of the intentions which lay behind it. However, in the same speech, he made it clear that it was not for Britain, telling the delegates:
At all events, one fact is certain, and we had better face it frankly. Our people will not hand over to a supranational authority the right to close down our pits and steelworks. We shall not permit a supranational authority to reduce a large section of our fellow citizens in Durham, the Midlands, South Wales and Scotland to unemployment. These fears may be imaginary, but their existence is a fact, and a fact moreover, which no British Government can afford to ignore.
Then, after the negotiations had meandered on for some months, several British delegates to the Council of Europe, including, Macmillan, sought to reassert the intergovernmental agenda. They put to the Assembly that the Coal and Steel Community be made an agency of the Council rather than an independent, supranational authority. As always, Monnet reacted sharply. In a letter to Macmillan he strongly denounced the proposal, complaining that it would not offer the creation of a new economic community, ‘but merely a mechanism for co-ordination among nation states’, precisely what he was most anxious to avoid.
But this British intervention turned out to be no more than a side-show. By then, the momentum of the Six was unstoppable. Final agreement was reached and formalised by the Treaty of Paris, signed on 18 April 1951, creating the European Coal and Steel Community. It was not until December 1951, however, that the Treaty was ratified, ‘in an atmosphere of doubt and resignation, and a good deal of indifference’. The Gaullist deputy Jacques Soustelle thought the Plan was not ‘European’ but ‘anti-European’:
We are all in favour of a European confederation, comprising Germany… But what worries us about the Coal-Steel pool is that instead of bringing us nearer to ‘Europe’, it is taking us away from it. Instead of delegating our powers to a democratic Assembly, we are asked to abandon an important sector of our economy to a stateless and uncontrolled autocracy of experts.
Professor Lavergne expressed concern about the project’s alarming lack of democracy in another respect:
The French public could not make head or tail of the subsequent negotiations. Parliament, for its part, was presented with the project only very late in the day, and apart from twenty or thirty deputies and senators with sufficient general knowledge to form an opinion of the Plan, few grasped its meaning… In most cases the thing was looked at through the distorting prism of a few slogans or electoral prejudices; in many cases, most of the deputies voted with their eyes shut, and simply obeying the decisions taken by their party.
But Monnet had got what he wanted. His great project was at last launched. Unsurprisingly, he was also appointed as the new High Authority’s first president, based in Luxembourg. As for where it might all lead, he himself left little room for doubt. Addressing the first session of the Community’s new assembly, he told the delegates that they were taking part in ‘the first government of Europe’.
Chapter Five
The Rocky Road to Rome: 1950-57
Our Community is not a coal and steel producers association. It is the beginning of Europe.
Jean Monnet.
Nobody after the first two years of Monnet’s presidency at the High Authority would again talk of it or its equivalents as ‘a European government’… the idea of a Europe in some sense above the nations was no longer stated in the open.
François Duchêne.
One remarkable feature of Monnet’s triumph was that, despite the protracted arguments about how his ‘government of Europe’ should be constructed, the model which finally emerged was almost identical to that outlined by Salter twenty years earlier. Adapting the structure of the League of Nations, Salter had proposed that the government of a ‘United States of Europe’ should be made up of a Secretariat, with supranational powers; a Council of Ministers representing national governments; an Assembly representing national parliaments; and a Court of Justice. This was precisely the structure, changing ‘Secretariat’ to ‘High Authority’ which came together to in the Coal and Steel Community. In due course the same model would be extended to run the ‘European Economic Community’ and the European Union.
Yet, in previous accounts of the history of the ‘European project’, this has been overlooked. In vain does one look for any reference to Salter. There is scarcely a mention of the crucial developments in the 1920s, when the key ideas emerged. There may be perfunctory references to Coudenhove Kalergi. But, as with Salter, the name of Loucheur has vanished.
The reason for this is that the ‘project’ soon came to evolve its own mythology, to explain how it originated. One of the project’s central needs was to portray itself as having emerged from the years after 1945. This allowed it to promulgate the myth that it had put an end to European wars, and also allowed it to present itself as a progressive creation of the modern world, rather than as a failed dream of the 1920s. Only as a post-war ideal could it be projected as new and forward-looking, which was perhaps the unconscious reason for writing its true genesis out of the script.
Thus, in the official histories, the project’s origins became increasingly veiled in the kind of hagiography accorded in previous ages to saints. Monnet would come to be presented as a visionary figure who had happened to emerge at the right moment after 1945, and whose only concern had been to achieve lasting peace. Spinelli, for all his talk of dictatorships and revolution, would be presented as the man who made the EU democratic. Schuman would be honoured with a reverential plaque in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, describing him as the ‘Father of Europe’, when his only real contribution had been to act briefly as Monnet’s ‘front-man’.
This re-writing of history was to become even more glaring when British historians reconstructed the events surrounding Britain’s involvement in the project. Two accounts published in the 1990s, to which frequent reference will be made in these pages, were those by Guardian journalist Hugo Young and Sir Roy Denman, a former senior civil servant in the Foreign Office.
Young claims that, had Britain pressed for it, Schuman would have been willing to dilute the principle of supranationalism in ‘his’ proposed High Authority. He thus misses the point that the driving force was not Schuman but Monnet, who was absolutely insistent that the supranational character of his High Authority was non-negotiable. Denman’s account of the Schuman Plan negotiations only mentions Monnet once, again falling for the fiction that Schuman was the prime mover. Similarly, though for different reasons, John Laughland in his attempt to ascribe the origins of the EU to Nazi ideology, The Tainted Source, only makes four brief references to Monnet, without recognising his pivotal role.
What makes such misunderstanding perverse is that Monnet soon cast off his anonymity as the project’s real author and came to London to discuss his plan with civil servants and ministers. As Young himself records, Monnet then made it crystal clear that the autonomy of his High Authority would mean ‘the surrender of national sovereignty over a wide strategic and economic field’.
Few at the time had any illusions about this. Con O’Neill, then a young diplomat in Bonn, later recalled, ‘The idea that there should be a body with real authority over the decisions of national governments was something we felt was grotesque and absurd’. Given Attlee’s comments about the ‘lack of democracy’ in Monnet’s project, there can be no doubt that its nature was clear to the British government, which was why Britain could not accept it. Yet some accounts continue to present the Schuman Plan as something the British government could have modified, if only it been sensible enough to attend the talks.
This was to become a persistent theme of the mythology surrounding Britain’s involvement with ‘Europe’ through the decades which followed. It rests on the need to portray the founders of the project as reasonable and open to ideas, whereas the British must invariably be shown as obdurate and lacking in vision. The central, implicit message behind this version of history is: ‘Europeans - positive, forward-looking, good; British - negative, backward-looking, bad’.
Nevertheless, despite Monnet having brilliantly pulled off the first step of his grand design, he was now to overreach himself. As a result, the next six years were to prove a rocky road. He would not eventually achieve his goal until his allies had impressed on him the need for their most daring strategy yet: to cloak the ‘project’ in deceit.
Monnet takes a fall
When the president of the new ‘government of Europe’ first came before the Assembly of his European Coal and Steel Community, he was quick to tell the ‘deputies’:
We can never sufficiently emphasise that the six Community countries are the fore-runners of a broader, united Europe, whose bounds are set only by those who have not yet joined. Our Community is not a coal and steel producers’ association: it is the beginning of Europe.
For all his sense of triumphalism, however, events were catching up with M. Monnet. Having so far unfolded his plan so deftly, he now made a near-fatal mistake.
The cause of his near-nemesis was the Korean War, which had broken out on the Sunday after negotiations on the ECSC had opened. Monnet immediately feared that the pressure of this major new Cold War crisis, threatening possible Soviet aggression in Europe itself, might lead the Americans to strengthen their demands for German re-armament. This might reduce the attraction to Adenauer of the Schuman plan, as he might now be able to achieve this key objectives without having to place Germany’s coal and steel under the control of the High Authority.
To regain the initiative, Monnet had decided that the original Schuman plan should be widened to include defence, and set about planning what was to emerge as a proposal for a European Defence Community (EDC). This provided for a European Army, run by a European minister of defence and a council of ministers, with a common budget and arms procurement. While all other members would be able to maintain separate forces, for colonial and other purposes, Germany would only be allowed to participate in the European Army.
For his advocate this time, Monnet by-passed Schuman, who was strongly opposed to German rearmament. Instead, he sought out a man who had been his assistant during his somewhat murky days as a merchant banker - Rene Pleven. He had also been with him in London in 1940 during that exciting time when he had put to Churchill the plan for Anglo-French union. Fortunately for Monnet, his old subordinate was now in a position of some authority: he had become France’s prime minister.
Again the familiar deception was repeated. Although the proposal was entirely Monnet’s, he kept in the background and his idea became the ‘Pleven Plan’. Pleven outlined it to the French Assembly on 24 October 1950, where it won approval by 343 votes to 220. Nevertheless, during the debates, Pleven made clear that negotiations would not start until the Coal and Steel Treaty had been concluded, thus safeguarding Monnet’s original scheme.
Unlike the Schuman Plan, this plan was not well received abroad. The Germans, in particular, were highly suspicious, preferring their forces to be part of Nato. They had good reason for their suspicion. Monnet intended his EDC to be ‘a government capable of taking the supreme decisions in the name of all Europeans’. Yet, for that very reason, the Italian premier, de Gasperi, supported the new plan, proclaiming that ‘The European Army is not an end in itself; it is the instrument of a patriotic foreign policy. But European patriotism can develop only in a federal Europe’.
Again, the Americans intervened, this time in the form of General Eisenhower, now the first supreme commander of Nato land forces. Meeting with Monnet on 21 June 1951, he agreed that Franco-German reconciliation could only be achieved through a European Army. The Korean War, following the intervention of Communist China, had entered a critical phase. As anticipated, American pressure for German rearmament had intensified, giving Adenauer a powerful negotiating hand. He chose to exploit it, offering in return for his support of the EDC a ‘general treaty’. This would recognise West German sovereignty, accept German contingents into the EDC on equal footing, allow West Germany into Nato, end the remnants of allied occupation of his country, and conclude a peace treaty. Ambitious though this proposal was, it was quickly agreed by the Allies and by the end of November 1951 a draft treaty was ready.
In the final stages of the treaty negotiations, the British government had changed. On 25 October 1951, after a general election, Labour had lost to the Conservatives. Churchill was again prime minister, with Anthony Eden as foreign secretary. But the new government was immediately plunged into a balance of payments crisis and economic disaster loomed.
Despite some initial hopes that the ‘pro-European’ Churchill might reverse the Labour’s view of the Six’s moves to integration, his view that Britain should remain aloof from direct European involvement remained intact. Britain, in Churchill’s view, was still one of the international ‘Big Three’, with her special relationship with America. Although anxious to co-operate with his European neighbours, his policy rested on ‘overlapping circles’, whereby Britain remained between Europe and the USA.
In opposition Churchill had claimed to favour the idea of a ‘European Army’, without ever spelling out what this might mean in practice. Back in power, however, orthodoxy re-asserted itself. Now the supranational element of the plan had become clear, he brushed aside any idea of a European army, calling it a ‘sludgy amalgam’, adding, ‘What soldiers want to sing are their own marching songs’. De Gaulle took a similar view.
According to Hugo Young, on 28 November 1952, Eden told a press conference in Rome that no British formations would be available to the new army, which Young describes as an example of British ‘perversity’. But the record shows that the new Conservative government did its best to be constructive. At a meeting with Schuman in February 1952, Eden assured the French of a close association with the Defence Community. British forces on the continent would co-operate very closely with ‘European forces’. In a further effort to be helpful, Eden proposed in March 1952 that the two Communities of the Six should come under the aegis of the Council of Europe. Monnet, predictably, saw this as a challenge to his supranationalism.
Although nothing further came of Eden’s initiative, the French themselves had considerable reservations about the idea of a European army. What most concerned them was the possibility of Germany seceding from the Defence Community, allowing the German units raised to be reconstituted as a national army. Paris therefore pressed for an Anglo-American guarantee against any member’s secession. London’s response was obliging. Under the 1948 Brussels treaty, Britain was already pledged to give assistance to France and the Benelux countries in the event of war. The Six now asked, on 14 March 1952, that she should extend that guarantee to West Germany and Italy. Responding in a broadcast on 5 April, Eden said it was the duty and intention of the British government to help the people of Europe towards the idea of a united Europe. Great Britain could not join an exclusive European federation, but she could give support and encouragement to both the Coal and Steel and the Defence Communities.
Ten days later, he followed this up with a firm proposal. In the event of an armed attack on any member of the European Defence Community, Britain would give full military and other aid in accordance with article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This offer was well received by the Six. In Germany it was hailed as ‘one of the most important political developments of recent times’.
However, this was not an Anglo-American guarantee. The Americans were still putting their faith in the EDC and refused to co-operate. As a result, on 19 May, it was announced that Washington and London were unable to provide a joint guarantee and would instead make a ‘declaration of intent’. Talks then became bogged down in arguments about the German contribution to the European defence budget, until the French Cabinet, still dissatisfied by the lack of commitment from the British and Americans, against German withdrawal from the EDC, decided it would not sign the agreements.
Efforts were made to satisfy the French by re-wording the declaration of intent. The USA and Britain finally agreed to regard any action which threatened the integrity of the European Defence Community as a threat to their own security. It was enough. The European Defence Treaty was signed on 27 May 1952, along with a general treaty which effectively restored German sovereignty. This was far from what Monnet had envisaged, with the budget subject still to national veto. Even so, there was still so much opposition in France that her prime minister Antoine Pinay signed the treaty without intending to seek immediate ratification.
It was over ratification that Monnet’s scheming began to unravel. Opposition in the French Assembly, far from diminishing, had been hardening. The Socialist group wanted a ‘more democratic’ EDC, with a European Assembly elected by universal suffrage. This was to prompt Monnet’s most daring initiative so far, in concert with the man who over the next few years would be his closest ally, Paul-Henri Spaak.
Spaak proposed setting up a European Political Community (EPC), as a ‘common political roof’ over the Coal and Steel and the Defence Communities, creating ‘an indissoluble supranational political community based on the union of peoples’. Schuman and Adenauer welcomed this, as did Italy’s prime minister de Gasperi, who went even further, proposing that a future EDC assembly should prepare a draft European constitution.
In September 1952, Spaak’s proposal was jointly endorsed by the foreign ministers of the Six, along with the assemblies of the ECSC and the Council of Europe, and the ECSC Assembly was asked to study the question of creating a ‘European Political Authority’. The result, from an ad hoc committee under Spaak, was a ‘Draft Treaty Embodying the Statute of the European Community’. This was nothing less than the first formal attempt to give Europe a constitution. It was submitted by Spaak to the foreign ministers of the Six on 9 March 1953 and to the ECSC Assembly the following day, which approved it by 50 votes, with five abstentions. Introducing his draft ‘constitution’ to the ECSC Council, Spaak began with the opening words of George Washington’s address in presenting the American Constitution to Congress in 1787, going on to express his conviction that, ‘with the same audacity’, Europe could hope for the same success.
This latest Monnet-Spaak initiative could go no further, however, while the EDC itself was still attracting opposition. Part of the plan was to apply supranational controls on any production of nuclear weapons, which caused the French Atomic Energy Commission, Gaullist in sympathy, to wake up to the implications, should France wish become a nuclear power. By October, deputies in the National Assembly were expressing concern that the treaty gave too many advantages to Germany, which would come to dominate the Community. Objections were also raised that the Treaty was presented as a fait accompli, to be accepted or rejected without alteration.
Thus, while the rest of the Six went on to ratify the Defence Treaty, French politics were to prevail. So great did opposition become among both Socialists and Gaullists that the Pinay government was brought down. A new government was formed under Rene Mayer, with Gaullist support, and the ‘Europe of Jean Monnet’ became almost a term of political abuse. Then, after four months, Mayer was replaced by Joseph Laniel. In the despairing words of Monnet, he ‘did nothing’. Despite intense pressure from the United States, with President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles threatening to cut US aid, France’s ratification process had come to a halt.
Outside Parliament, opposition was at least as strong. Army leaders were against it, intellectual groups detested it and de Gaulle, in November 1953, declared himself implacably hostile to it, referring to ‘this monstrous treaty’ which would rob the French Army of its sovereignty and separate the defence of France from the defence of the French Union. It would go against all her traditions and institutions, and deliver her soldiers to an organism over which France had no control. He blamed this ‘and other supra-national monstrosities’ on ‘the Inspirer’, M. Jean Monnet. In a bitter parody of Monnet, he declared, ‘Since victorious France has an army and defeated Germany has none, let us suppress the French Army’. He went on:
After that we shall make a stateless army of Frenchmen and Germans, and since there must be a government above this army, we shall make a stateless government, a technocracy. As this may not please everyone, we’ll paint a new shop sign and call it ‘community’; it won’t matter, anyway, because the ‘European Army’ will be placed at the entire disposal of the American Commander-in-Chief.
What finally brought matters to a head was a quite separate event, the fall to the Communist Viet Minh on 7 May 1954 of the enclave in Dien Bien Phu, in French Indochina. This disaster brought down the government. By 17 June, Laniel had been replaced by Mendés-France, a radical nationalist. He was ambivalent towards the EDC and sought to dilute its supranational element, proposing this to the Six in Brussels on 3 August. Adenauer rejected this out of hand. Spaak, who chaired the conference, made an almost hysterical plea to Mendès-France to support the treaty, clasping him by the arm while telling him that:
France will be completely isolated… You will be alone. Is that what you want?.. We must, must make Europe. The military side isn’t everything. What matters is the integration of Europe. EDC is only the first step in that direction, but if there is no EDC, then everything falls to the ground.
Brushing aside Spaak’s accusations that he was not being ‘a good European’, Mendès-France also ignored entreaties from the Americans and even Churchill, from whom he sought, unsuccessfully, guarantees of British involvement in the EDC. He thus brought the treaty before a hostile Assembly on 30 August 1954 without endorsement. After a stormy debate, in which the supranational issue predominated, it was rejected by 319 votes to 264. Mendès-France’s government abstained. The triumphant majority burst into the Marseillaise. The EDC was dead. The idea of a Political Community soon faded into obscurity. Monnet and his supranationism had suffered a resounding defeat.
Still the problem of German rearmament remained. Eden stepped in to propose an extension of the 1948 Brussels Treaty, bringing Germany and Italy into its scope. This would set up the Western European Union (WEU), organised on an intergovernmental basis. Although for decades it would remain little more than a shadow, since its functions were largely exercised by Nato, the undertaking from Britain that her troops would not leave the continent without agreement from the other members was enough to satisfy French fears of unchecked German power. These fears had in any case lost much of their force. Le Monde, which had been strongly opposed to the idea, conceded that ‘twelve German divisions mattered little in a world of atomic strategy’. The WEU was soon ratified by all members.
With that, it seemed that progress towards supranational integration had been all but blocked. Intergovernmentalism had triumphed. In December that year, to complete her success, Britain signed an agreement of ‘association’ with the European Coal and Steel Community, committing her to no more than friendly co-operation.
The new strategy: deceit
The effect of the EDC rejection was to be profound and long-lasting. Quite simply, it was at this point that the ‘project’ went underground. According to Duchêne:
Nobody after the first two years of Monnet’s presidency at the High Authority would again talk of it or its equivalents as a ‘European government’… Awareness that the French would have to be coaxed into further progress introduced caution into the European vocabulary. The word federal was reserved as the political equivalent of Latin for the rare religious occasion. Even supranational… tended to be used only when another fig-leaf could not be found. The idea of a Europe in some sense above the nations was no longer stated in the open.
What had been to date a series of tactical deceptions now became a deliberate attempt to conceal. So far-reaching was this change of strategy to become that, in 1965, when the ‘Merger Treaty’ was agreed between the Six, combining the executives, councils and assemblies of the three ‘Communities’ – ECSC, EEC and Euratom – Article 9 of the Coal and Steel treaty, which originally read:
The members of the High Authority… shall refrain from any action incompatible with the supranational character of their duties.
would be modified to
The members of the Commission… shall refrain from any action incompatible with their duties…
Monnet’s more immediate reaction to his crushing defeat was to resign as president of the Coal and Steel Community. This meant that arrangements had to be made to fill his post, requiring a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Six. This was originally set for 8 February but, in the interim, Mendès France’s government fell, delaying the meeting. The new French government was led by Edgar Faure, less hostile to European integration.
This gave Monnet some encouragement and he decided that something less ambitious might work. He settled on his earlier strategy of building his ‘Europe’ through the progressive integration of other economic sectors. In late 1955, from various options, he had chosen as his next target the nuclear industry, then in its early stages of development. It seemed to offer distinct advantages. While coal and steel represented the past, the ‘power of the atom’ could position ‘Europe’ as forward-looking and modern. Furthermore, the scale of investment required to develop the industry was so huge that Europe-wide co-operation could be made to seem a logical step.
To present his new plan for what was eventually to become ‘Euratom’, Monnet, in a pattern now familiar, needed a front-man, a new Schuman or Pleven: particularly since he had now made so many enemies. His choice was his closest ally, Paul-Henri Spaak. This proved sound. The new French prime minister Faure proved receptive to overtures from Belgium’s respected foreign minister. On 4 April 1955, Spaak sent Monnet’s proposals – which encompassed not just nuclear but all forms of energy and also transport – to Adenauer, Pinay - now France’s foreign minister - and Italy’s foreign minister, Gaetano Martino. In an accompanying letter Spaak suggested the time had now come for a ‘re-launch’ (relancer) of the ‘European idea’.
There was one highly significant omission from Spaak’s letter. Although he and Monnet had already discussed the possibility of a ‘customs union’ or ‘common market’ among the Six, Spaak did not mention it. Monnet feared that to raise it so soon after the collapse of the EDC might be going too far.
The German response was no encouraging. Rather than pooling resources through Euratom, Erhard thought Germany would be better off buying technology from the US or Great Britain. France’s reaction was even less positive. In a message delivered orally to Spaak via the Belgian ambassador, her foreign minister replied that to ‘supranationalise energy and transport might produce another EDC in France’. He added: ‘take care! Edgar Faure does not like Monnet’.
The only positive response came from the Dutch foreign minister, Johan Beyen. He proposed the very idea Monnet had rejected, a ‘common market’. Crucially, he suggested that this should not be a free trade area, but a customs union. Duties levied on goods traded between member states would be progressively reduced, then abolished, while a common external tariff wall would be erected against non-members.
All of this precipitated an internal battle between senior political figures of the ‘Six’, from which three options emerged. One, favoured by Erhard, was a free trade area, using the infrastructure of the intergovernmental OEEC. The second was Beyen’s ‘common market’. The third was Monnet’s strategy, whereby integration would be achieved sector by sector.
Quite how this issue was resolved is not clear. But on 18 May 1955 the Benelux foreign ministers offered a document to their ECSC counterparts known as the ‘Benelux Memorandum’. This linked the Beyen and Monnet strategies, in what was to become known as the junktim, suggesting that a working group should be set up to draft treaties for a ‘common market’. The integration of transport, energy, nuclear energy and social legislation would all be included. Erhard’s views had been ignored.
This memorandum had, in fact, been composed by Spaak, based on a draft prepared by himself and Monnet. After Spaak had amended Monnet’s version, he sent it back with the note ‘Ici votre bébé’ (‘herewith your baby’). The most significant change was that the words ‘United States of Europe’ in Monnet’s original had been struck out. Spaak was careful to give more emphasis to the idea of an ‘economic community’.
Thus did the central deception of the whole story become established. From now on, the real agenda, political integration, was to be deliberately concealed under the guise of economic integration. Building ‘Europe’ was to be presented as a matter of trade and jobs.
Messina: a close run thing
France was attracted to Euratom, which would enable Germany’s nuclear industry to be controlled, and might also assist in the as-yet undeclared objective of producing a French nuclear bomb. On the other hand, with the highest tariffs of the Six, and many other protectionist rules, she was hostile to the idea of a common market. Nevertheless she agreed that there should be ‘exploratory discussions’ of the Benelux memorandum, during talks on who should replace Monnet as head of the Coal and Steel Community. The Germans had considerable reservations as to whether to proceed at all.
The venue chosen for the talks was Messina, in deference to Italy’s foreign minister Martino. He was facing an election in Sicily and needed to be near his power base. The dates of 1-2 June 1955 were agreed. A British representative was invited, but Messina was considered too far to go, for what was, ostensibly, only a meeting of Coal and Steel Community ministers.
Before the meeting, Monnet learnt that the French were preparing to bury the Benelux Memorandum under pious resolutions. Conscious that his presence might inflame the situation, he therefore decided not to attend. Spaak, acting as Monnet’s front man, chaired the conference. At first, for the supranationalists, the meeting went badly. Monnet was on the telephone constantly, seeking to instruct Spaak. Max Kohnstamm, the Dutch secretary to the High Authority, who had taken a number of calls from Monnet, was eventually driven to tell his old boss: ‘please understand, they are not here to make Europe. They are here to bury you’.
But late at night Spaak had gone to the hotel room of the French foreign minister Pinay. When he emerged in the early hours of the morning, some kind of agreement had been reached. It was enough for Spaak to order a bottle of champagne and greet the dawn with a rendition of O sole mio. That morning, ministers adopted a resolution that accepted much of the Benelux Memorandum, some of it word for word. However, the resolution only committed the Six to set up an intergovernmental committee to study how to put the Memorandum into action. The future was far from certain as there was still considerable opposition to the proposals. The French had not assented but simply agreed ‘not to oppose a continuation of talks’.
Interestingly, Luxembourg’s representative, Joseph Bech, said the most significant thing about the meeting was its lack of any ‘smell’ of a High Authority, Schuman-style, to ruffle French concerns over sovereignty. The deception was continuing.
A translation of the Messina communiqué was despatched to London by the British Embassy in Rome, on 11 June. An accompanying letter from assistant under-secretary, John Coulson, reported ‘it looks as though the Ministers had difficulty in reaching agreement on any specific action’, adding:
The Germans were keenly interested in transport, while Benelux wanted to expand the scope of the authority. The Italians went all out for a common market, while the French views were not clear. It is evident that the final communiqué went as far as possible to repeat the views of all the participants without taking any decisions of principle. It will be noticed that all the questions are to be ‘studied’, but there is no indication of how this is to be done.
The Foreign Office, in fact, had considerable difficulty in finding out what had happened. In a letter to the new foreign secretary, Macmillan, on 15 June, the UK ambassador in Paris referred to the communiqué as ‘lengthy but not very informative’ suggesting that it was an accurate reflection of the vagueness that had prevailed at the conference. ‘There is some evidence for the theory that the six Ministers were unable to get to real grips with the problems they discussed’, he wrote. Noting the lack of clarity, he added:
…the Europeans are having to proceed very cautiously. Their opponents on the other hand, or many of them, do see advantages in some of the schemes now being considered. The practical differences between the two camps are therefore much narrower than the ideological differences. Therefore when M. Pinay says that the new schemes are to be supranational and the Gaullists say they are not, both sides are using contradictory words to express roughly the same issues. M. Boegner, when asked to explain M. Pinay’s language, said that he might well be thinking of organisations which had powers of decision (and were therefore supranational) but whose decisions would be reached unanimously (and were therefore intergovernmental). I am aware that this is a quibble. But this sort of double talk does seem to keep the Europeans quiet and if it serves to quieten a largely useless quarrel it has some justification.
Press coverage was meagre. The Italian newspaper, Il Tempo, described the communiqué as ‘another unnecessary document’ and Le Monde reported ‘the governments have implicitly abandoned the idea of supranationality’. Macmillan later observed ‘the official view seemed to be a confident expectation that nothing would come out of Messina’.
This was to reckon without Monnet. He was working on creating a platform from which he could continue his campaign. This culminated in his setting up an ‘Action Committee for the United States of Europe’, which issued its inaugural manifesto on 15 October 1955. With funding from the Ford Foundation, arranged by ACUE, its immediate objective was ‘to ensure that the Messina resolution… should be translated into a genuine step towards a United States of Europe’. An important adjunct was to give Monnet a ‘permanent visiting card’ to any head of government. Very much in character, his new role would provide
…him and his organisation with the advantage of being able to influence political élites directly without having to face the disadvantage of public scrutiny. Europe was being constructed by a remarkably small élite; while public support was welcomed, it was never a prerequisite for Monnet’s Europe.
Thus Spaak would be kept in the limelight, chairing the intergovernmental committee set up at Messina, while Monnet continued to work in the shadows.
The Spaak Committee
The complex drama just beginning, the historical consequences of which were to be immense, essentially involved two separate plots. One was the discussions in Brussels directed by Spaak, mainly conducted through the work of four technical committees. The other centred on the response of Britain, still Europe’s most powerful nation and not directly involved.
By this time the principal roles in the British government had changed. The ageing Churchill had retired, succeeded by Anthony Eden, who led his party to election victory in May 1955. Macmillan became Foreign Secretary.
Eden’s Cabinet considered the Six’s invitation to join the talks just beginning in Brussels. Despite rejecting British participation in any supranational organisation on principle, it decided on 30 June to send Russell Bretherton, an under-secretary of the Board of Trade. Much would later be made that only a civil servant rather than a minister was sent, but the talks were intended to be technical discussions rather than negotiations.
When they began, Bretherton made it clear, under instructions from London, that Britain did not subscribe to the ‘Messina goals’. He pursued his government’s traditional intergovernmental line, attempting to steer the Six towards a limited alternative, under the aegis of the OEEC, warning that much of what was being proposed would duplicate the OEEC’s work. Spaak objected to the OEEC alternative as a ‘much more modest enterprise’ which ‘offered no prospect of a European political union’.
Representatives of the OEEC were present at the talks and the conduct of the meetings alarmed the head of the UK delegation, Hugh Ellis-Rees, who sent a letter of complaint to Macmillan. Stating that warnings of a conflict with the OEEC’s work had not been heeded, he wrote:
…the Secretary General has been made to feel most unwelcome… until representations by Her Majesty’s Government to the six Governments concerned brought about a better atmosphere and an opportunity of regular attendance. But there has never been any consultation on the avoidance of duplication: in fact, when a suggestion of this kind was made on one occasion by the United Kingdom observer, it was brushed aside by M. Spaak on the grounds he was obliged to carry out the directives of the Messina Conference. All the evidence here suggests that the OEEC’s position will not be considered.
In a seven-page letter, Ellis-Rees gave numerous examples of how the committee’s objectives might duplicate the OEEC’s work or cut across it, noting that:
The whole proceeding has been unusual… It may be asked… why the six Member countries did not raise the issues in the Organisation, if they were dissatisfied with the speed of progress… It would indeed have been courteous if one of their representatives at the Messina Conference had explained to the Council of Ministers of the OEEC, who were meeting a few days afterwards, what they were proposing to do.
Ellis-Rees then offered an explanation as to why the organisers of the Messina conference had behaved so oddly. It seemed they had ‘political objectives’:
It is clear that both the French and German representatives on the Preparatory Committee have no other object in view, since they represent those elements in their respective governments who are in favour, or at least want to appear to be in favour, of European integration; and we are frequently told by representatives of Belgium and the Netherlands that the whole impetus behind this, so far as the Benelux is concerned, can be labelled ‘political’ rather than ‘economic’.
From Spaak himself, in his memoirs, came an admission that confirmed this impression. With his colleagues, he wrote, ‘we realised the political implications of our goal and knew that what we were about to achieve was nothing short of a revolution’. Yet it was clear the British were not alone in having reservations about the talks. The German finance minister Hans Schäffer, took the view that:
…partial or functional integration in the style of the Iron and Steel Community (sic) should not go further, since it was necessarily bound up with supra-national authorities. Instead one should aim for a gradual process towards full integration, making progress, if possible, on many subjects but in every case by co-operation between governments and without developing any further supra-national authorities.
The note added that it was not possible to judge what sort of agreement was likely to be reached on the setting up of a common market. There were clear ‘signs of conflicting interests’:
The Germans, who have been very active in Brussels in supporting the movements towards further integration, have nevertheless been unwilling to make many concessions in the field of agriculture, which, of course, must be a matter of prime concern to the Dutch and the French. There are also signs that the French will be extremely reluctant to go very far very fast in the direction of true integration through dismantling of tariffs… and may try to create a diversion by suggesting integration in particular sectors, notably in transport, energy and the development of atomic energy.
In parallel with the common market talks, details of the proposals for an ‘Atomic Community’ were also being discussed, and it emerged that the new organisation would require all fissile materials, including supplies of uranium, to be placed in a common ‘European pool’ under ‘Euratom’s full control and ownership. A central intention was to prevent military programmes using them. This was wholly unacceptable to the British, as Europe’s only nuclear power, and it was clear that her interdependent civil and military programmes would not fit into this European mould. On 7 September 1955 therefore, Britain had no option but to withdraw from the Euratom talks.
Spaak was formally notified of the reasons for this in a letter from the British Ambassador in Brussels, George Labouchere. Informing Spaak that the UK government recognised ‘the strong impetus towards multilateral co-operation in Europe’, he pointed out that Britain’s civil nuclear operations were so closely integrated with her military programme that there would be ‘overriding difficulties in the defence field. These would prevent the UK from putting her resources, including supplies of nuclear material, into the European pool’.
As discussions ground on, Bretherton was told how Spaak intended to organise the final stages of the committee’s activities. In late October, there would be a meeting of delegations to hear reports from the committees, restricted only to the Six. Spaak then intended to set up a small drafting group to write the final report, and to hold a meeting of heads of delegations in November, from which Britain would also be excluded. Between these meetings there would be a meeting of the full steering committee, to keep everyone informed of progress. To this Britain was invited.
Britain was to be excluded from the drafting group because it was felt it might thus be possible for the Six to go further than Britain would wish. Her presence ‘might in some way act as a brake on the others’. In conclusion, Bretherton was told:
Monsieur Spaak felt that it was unrealistic to expect that the United Kingdom would become an equal member of the Common Market, which, with the Atomic Energy proposal, represented the most important elements of under consideration. He felt, however, that it was highly desirable that we should be associated with whatever Common Market arrangements emerged… we should not feel that we were being in any way excluded from the community. The fact that we were not expected to be present at the restricted meetings of heads of delegations was solely designed to ensure that the Six reached as great a measure of agreement among themselves as possible.
The steering committee meeting was held on 7 November 1955. It was at this meeting that Bretherton announced that Britain was to withdraw from the talks on the common market. The way in which he communicated this has become a legendary episode in the history of Britain’s relations with ‘Europe’, subject to the most bizarre historical disagreement. According to the account offered by Roy Denman, Bretherton asked for the floor and spoke ‘in the following terms’:
The future treaty which you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed, it would have no chance of being ratified; and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain. You speak of agriculture, which we don’t like, of power over customs, which we take exception to, and institutions which frighten us. Monsieur le president, messieurs, au revoir et bonne chance.
Bretherton then apparently walked out. But to support his version of what happened, Denman, curiously, cites only a secondary source, a book by Charles Grant published in 1994, nearly forty years after the event. Grant, in turn, can only cite as his own source Jean François Déniau’s L’Europe Interdite, quoted in Le Monde in October 1991.
Hugo Young also offers this version of the incident, giving a slightly different wording, citing Déniau as his source (referring to him as ‘J.-F Denian’). Young claims that Bretherton’s text was drafted in Anthony Eden’s own hand. But Wolfram Kaiser, a respected German academic expert on European integration who writes in detail about Britain’s role in the EU, believes the speech to have been ‘a Foreign Office statement’, which Bretherton read out ‘word for word’. As to the alleged ‘walk-out’, Young concedes that ‘there is no documentary evidence that anything so exciting occurred’.
Nevertheless, according to Young, after Bretherton delivered his speech, ‘Spaak just blew up’, saying: ‘I am astonished and very hurt at this. You are just sticking to your guns. England has not moved at all, and I am not going to move either’. Kaiser gives a very different account:
The Six were not surprised. Spaak commented ironically that some governments could not understand the new context for European integration that had been created by the Messina conference, but separation was peaceful – as long a Britain refrained from torpedoing the Messina initiative.
While Denman has it that Bretherton walked out and did not return, Young had Bretherton denying that he made ‘the spectacular exit legend attributed to him’. In any event, he could hardly have ‘returned’, since this was the committee’s final session and Britain had already been told that it was not invited to the final drafting session. Nor could the Six have had anything to be surprised about. Bretherton had made Britain’s position abundantly clear from the outset.
Still more oddly, neither Young nor Denman refer to the account of Miriam Camps, a US State Department observer, although they both cite her as a source elsewhere and list her book in their bibliographies. Young calls her book ‘the most authoritative history of the time’. Yet, at the closing meeting of the committee, Camps describes Spaak as having decided to ask for comments only from those who had not accepted the principles of the Messina resolution: ‘that is the British representative…’. Bretherton, ‘when asked for his comments’ indicated, ‘on instructions from London’, that his government ‘could not take a definite position on the common market until it knew all the details of the plan’: an entirely reasonable point, since the committee had yet to produce its report.
This is echoed by a Treasury memorandum dated 17 November 1955, recording notes of a meeting with Spaak. This stated ‘we cannot join Euratom’ and then observes viz-Ã -viz British membership of the common market that, until Spaak had produced his report, ‘it would be impolitic for us to take a formal position’. It concludes: ‘It would indeed be a major reversal of UK policy to say that we should join a common market and the Europeans would be very surprised if we did’. Spaak himself, who does not mention the Bretherton incident in his memoirs, dates Britain’s withdrawal from the common market from a memorandum dated 19 December 1955, addressed to the German government. It declared that ‘…it is our view that Britain cannot join such a project’.
Yet despite Camps’s account and all the other evidence, Bretherton’s departure is the point at which Denman insists that Britain ‘walked out of Europe’, and which Young describes as her ‘self-exclusion’. Yet Britain had already withdrawn from Monnet’s supranational Euratom because she was being asked to accept terms to which she could not possibly agree. And when the proposed treaties on Euratom and the common market became linked, Britain would have found it impossible to proceed. By leaving the Euratom talks, as she had to, Britain had, in effect, been excluded from the common market because of the way the treaties were subsequently linked.
Nevertheless it is important to recognise that - contrary to the version given by Young, Denman and others – Britain made it clear that in every other way she wished to continue co-operating with her European neighbours. On nuclear power, Spaak had been told:
the United Kingdom would not wish to do anything which would hinder the creation of Euratom if the six Messina countries should decide that their interests would be so met. Her Majesty’s Government would in fact be fully prepared to conclude a separate agreement with the European organisation.
In October 1955, the UK Atomic Energy Authority had already proposed an Anglo-German joint civil nuclear programme and, largely at the behest of Britain, the OEEC had set up a working party on the possibilities of wider nuclear co-operation. Labouchere referred to this, stating that this body:
seems likely to recommend a flexible system of multilateral co-operation …the working party may well propose that within the organisation there should be room for agreement on specific projects or for specific purposes between groups of countries which would be neither binding on other countries in the organisation nor subject to their veto. Under such a scheme the countries more advanced in atomic energy could co-operate closely on joint research projects...
The OEEC working party reported in December. It advocated the establishment of an OEEC directorate for nuclear energy, to co-ordinate national research and prepare joint projects. A key proposal was to build a plant to give Europe self-sufficiency in enriched uranium. But this was to be an intergovernmental venture, as opposed to Monnet’s supranational plan and, although welcomed by Erhard, it created a crisis for Spaak. The combination of Britain’s departure, the OEEC proposals and splits in the German delegation put not only the Messina agenda at risk but also Monnet’s supranational ambitions.
Nothing better illustrates the gulf between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism than Monnet’s response. Instead of welcoming Britain’s generous offer, he called on his ‘Action Committee’ in January 1956 to adopt a declaration emphasising the supranational nature of Euratom and calling on the parliaments of the Six to give it their support. Adenauer also intervened. Unlike Erhard, he strongly favoured the customs union aspect of the common market and, although less keen on Euratom, regarded this as necessary to gain French support for the market. To counter the opposition of Erhard and others he, on 19 January, demanded from all his ministers ‘a clear, positive attitude to European integration’, stating that the Messina resolution had to be implemented without alteration and delay.
At Monnet’s request, President Eisenhower then took a hand. To the end of December, on Monnet’s advice, the US had maintained a friendly distance from Euratom. He was conscious that too active a role might upset the French government, which had also seen the project as means whereby Europe might match the industrial power of the United States. Eisenhower now, on 22 February 1956, announced that the US would release twenty tons of enriched uranium (equivalent to forty million tons of coal) for peaceful use by friendly states. He made it clear that the uranium would be offered on more preferential terms to Euratom than to any individual state. The condition was that Euratom had to have ‘effective communal authority and could undertake duties and responsibilities similar to that (sic) of national governments’. Again America had backed supranationalism.
Even in Washington, however, signs of division were appearing. According to the British embassy, there was now more enthusiasm for European integration in the State Department than among US economic policy makers, who feared the new common market might discriminate against imports from the dollar area. For the moment, however, Monnet’s State Department supporters continued to prevail.
Franco-German Musical Chairs
Through the first ten months of 1956 the two main players in the European drama, France and Germany, lumbered through elaborate shifts of policy, ending in each reversing the positions they held at the start of the year. The resultant impasse threatened to bring the whole process to a halt.
The year began with a major upset in French domestic politics when, at a general election on 2 January, the Gaullists lost 100 of their 120 seats in the Assembly and most of their influence. The new Socialist prime minister, Guy Mollet, was a committed supranationalist, having been president of the Council of Europe assembly, a delegate to the ECSC assembly and an active member of Monnet’s Action Committee. His foreign minister, Christian Pineau, was of like mind.
Despite this, the new French government, now also preoccupied with the rebellion in its Algerian colony, still believed it would have difficulty selling a common market to the French public. On 7 February, Pineau told the American Ambassador that ‘a common market would not be possible… without a great deal of education in France’. The pair therefore agreed the two ‘communities’ should be separated, allowing Euratom to proceed. This, they thought, would better serve French interests. Germany, however, although still unenthusiastic about Euratom, favoured the common market.
On 21 April, the Spaak Committee finally published its report. Running to 84 pages on the common market and 24 on Euratom, it largely followed the line of the Messina resolution. Crucially, the elements of Euratom which would have made British acceptance impossible remained.
At Monnet’s insistence, in the wake of the EDC debacle, the report made no mention of a ‘High Authority’, or ‘supranational’. It proposed that the new governing authority should be given the more neutral title of ‘commission’. According to Camps:
…great care had been taken to present proposals which could be accepted by the French government without, at the same time, abandoning any of the points of principle to which the ‘Europeans’ attached real importance. Words and phrases such as ‘supra-nationalism’, which in the post-EDC atmosphere were certain to generate unfavourable emotional responses were abandoned in favour of phrases that were neutral emotionally and logically defensible. Thus, on the most difficult aspect of them all, that of institutions, the Benelux memorandum side-stepped the acrimonious ‘intergovernmental-supra-national’ argument but, at the same time, firmly established the central point, that is, that an institution endowed with real power would be required.
One highly significant new element in the package, added on French insistence, was a common agricultural policy. ‘One cannot conceive the establishment of a general Common Market in Europe’, said the report, ‘without agriculture being included’. The reason for this was that farming, still mainly on peasant smallholdings, accounted for a quarter of France’s workforce and was over-represented in parliament. If it was necessary to sell the idea of a common market, a common policy offering French farmers the prospect of a new outlet for their increasing surpluses of grain and sugar beet might be vital.
Nevertheless, France remained opposed to a common market in principle. Her government thus pushed for the two treaties to be ‘decoupled’, hoping that the common market negotiations could stagnate. Germany could not agree. On 9 May, Adenauer’s Cabinet confirmed that the two treaties must be linked. At a foreign ministers meeting in Venice at the end of May, the Germans, with Italy and Benelux, reiterated that the treaties were interdependent and must be negotiated together. The junktim became a central feature of the talks, with the reluctant agreement of the French.
France then insisted on another ‘linkage’ - between the reduction of tariffs between members in a common market and the harmonisation of social costs: overtime, length of paid holidays, and equal pay for men and women. Pineau further proposed that the treaty’s scope should be extended to member states’ overseas territories. These proposals seemed calculated to provoke disagreement. It was an early example of a French negotiating tactic which was to become only too familiar in the decades ahead whereby, if France wanted to stop something – in this case the common market, it would make demands it knew to be unacceptable. These would provoke a breakdown of negotiations, for which others could be blamed.
Nevertheless, the foreign ministers agreed that negotiations should begin. They would be held at the Château Val Duchesse near Brussels, and Spaak’s report would provide the basis for discussion.
Histories of these negotiations tend to focus almost entirely on the common market aspects, but the central issue was actually the differences over Euratom. As a recent study by the European Parliament put it:
The Euratom treaty is often overlooked in the history and operation of the European Union. This neglect is unwarranted. Its tactical pairing with the EEC was a crucial factor in initially persuading and eventually convincing a sceptical French government to engage with European integration after the embittering experience of the aborted European defence community… At the time, in 1955 and early 1956, however, it was widely believed in many quarters that the Euratom proposal held the greater promise of success, while the EEC negotiations faltered.
Initially, though, it was the Euratom talks that got bogged down. The sticking point was the ‘military question’, whereby Euratom, as proposed, would prevent France pursuing a military nuclear programme. Although France was already working on a covert nuclear weapons programme, the socialist Mollet was unconcerned. He was happy to renounce nuclear research for military purposes, a position endorsed by Monnet’s Action Committee. But the prospect of a prohibition so angered France’s nationalists that any Euratom treaty looked destined to follow the EDC. French ratification would never succeed if the impression was given that the treaty would stop France becoming a nuclear power.
By early July, Mollet was forced to tell the National Assembly that Euratom would not stand in the way of French ambitions. With this he secured a vote of 322 to 181 in favour of pursuing negotiations. But that, in turn, strengthened a growing lobby against Euratom in Germany, which now believed it could allow France to restrict Germany’s own nuclear ambitions, while pursuing her own. This supposed discrimination now threatened ratification by the Bundestag.
The German situation was complex. In June, rumours that Soviet leaders would be invited to Washington DC by Eisenhower had fuelled German fears of a US-Soviet détente, the neutralisation of West Germany and the withdrawal of American troops from Europe. On 13 July, The New York Times revealed a plan drawn up by Admiral Radford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, which proposed reducing US conventional forces in Europe by 800,000 men. They were to be replaced with tactical nuclear weapons. Adenauer, already nervous about American intentions, had become determined that Germany should now have its own nuclear weapons. Despite the opposition of some of his Cabinet, led by Erhard, he now welcomed Euratom as a means of acquiring them.
To Adenauer’s frustration, the majority of his Cabinet supported Erhard’s wish for a free-trade association rather than a common market. Although not an adept politician, Erhard was now a highly respected figure in Germany, because he was identified with the astonishing economic recovery, already known since 1954 as the wirtschaftwunder or ‘economic miracle’, which was rapidly making West Germany the richest and most dynamic country in western Europe.
Adenauer, therefore, had to make tactical concessions. On the common market, he retreated from the concept of Monnet’s ‘United States of Europe’ in favour of Erhard’s free market solution. Meanwhile, Monnet himself, as it happened, was doing his best to ditch the common market idea altogether. At a meeting in Bonn on 12 September, he told Adenauer that the French Parliament might not ratify such a treaty. Therefore, Euratom should be the priority. On 20 September, Monnet’s Action Committee called for Euratom to be ratified by the end of the year, ahead of any treaty on the common market.
Against this fractious background, on 25 September formal negotiations on both Euratom and the common market began in Brussels. Adenauer, under Erhard’s influence, made a speech to the Grandes Conférences Catholiques in Brussels, arguing that the first period of European integration had been successful in preventing war in Europe and that any further integration should be ‘flexible and elastic’. On 5 October, he went further, telling his Cabinet that Euratom would allow West Germany access to the technology necessary to produce atomic warheads as quickly as possible. But the only way to get Euratom was to agree to a ‘common market’ on Erhard’s terms: namely a free trade area.
Perversely, the French had by now begun to warm to the original idea of a full common market, but based on a customs union. The leaders of France’s farmers and key French industrialists had come out in favour. But they demanded a price. If high social welfare standards were to be imposed on employers, as France had suggested in the Venice conference as a ‘wrecking’ tactic, they must be ‘harmonised’ throughout the new ‘community’, to avoid the other five member states, especially Germany, gaining a competitive advantage. Predictably, this was entirely unacceptable to the Erhard faction.
Thus, from the beginning of the year, the positions of the two main players had become almost wholly reversed. The French, having first supported Euratom and opposed a common market, now opposed Euratom and favoured a common market. The Germans had now moved to the position abandoned by France.
This provoked a crisis so serious that, at a meeting of the foreign minister of the Six in Paris on 19-20 October, no way forward could be found. Euratom looked doomed. With an impasse on the harmonisation of social policies it seemed the common market would follow. Erhard, for one, was confident that the ‘distasteful common market project’ was dying, and that the prospects for his chosen alternative, a free trade area, were now looking distinctly hopeful.
At that very moment, however, great events were to rescue the ‘project’ from oblivion. The irony was that the country whose actions were about to put it firmly back on the rails was Great Britain.
Britain’s ‘destructive embrace’
Despite Britain’s seemingly confident refusal to get drawn into any supranational experiments, some in her government were becoming alarmed that a successful ‘customs union’ of the Six, based on common tariffs, might be used to exclude British trade.
Following the collapse of the attempts to set up ‘Defence’ and ‘Political’ Communities, it had not been unrealistic for the British government to believe that the Messina initiatives would fail. The French Fourth Republic was already a byword for political and economic instability, with twenty changes of government in ten years. The value of the franc was plummeting, and there was France’s humiliating failure to keep control over Indochina, and the running sore of Algeria. In Germany, there was the serious rift between Adenauer and Erhard. Furthermore, following the failure of the EDC, Eden had brought off his triumphant intergovernmental solution with the WEU, enthusiastically accepted by the Six. If the Euratom and common market negotiations failed, there was no reason to believe that British alternatives, based on intergovernmental structures, might not also be accepted.
Nevertheless the British government had given serious thought to the advantages and disadvantages of British membership of a common market, and these had been studied by a working group, set up in June 1955 under a senior Treasury civil servant Burke Trend. When this group submitted its internal report in October 1955, it reflected the dominant British view that a free trade area was preferable to a customs union. Only this option allowed Britain to retain national autonomy in foreign trade policy and to safeguard its Commonwealth preferences. Conscious of the danger of British exclusion from a ‘customs union’, the report did, however, offer that ‘it can be argued, with some reason, that the disadvantages of abstaining would, in the long run, outweigh the advantages’.
The response of the Foreign Office was simply to argue that membership of a common market would be incompatible with Britain’s role as a world power. But it also believed that, as with the EDC, the Messina initiative would collapse as a result of French obstruction.
Macmillan accepted the Foreign Office view. But in the autumn of 1956, with the prospect of a more ‘Europe-friendly’, centre-left government being elected in France, there seemed an increasing chance of a common market succeeding. The civil servants of the economic ministries became more concerned about the dangers of exclusion from ‘Europe’. In October 1955, just as the Spaak talks were drawing to an end, it was agreed they could no longer ‘count on the project collapsing of its own accord’. They therefore decided that the common market should ‘if possible, should be frustrated’.
This represented a significant change in British policy, from the previous stance of ‘benign neglect’. The Foreign Office decided to force the issue with a diplomatic offensive. The intention was to divert the ‘common market’ initiative into the orbit of the OEEC, where the British government could dilute it into something more intergovernmental. The term given to this strategy was ‘destructive embrace’, taken from a note appended to a memorandum by Gladwn Jebb, Britain’s Ambassador to France.
In pursuit of this strategy, letters from Macmillan were sent to the US and German governments, stressing British displeasure with the Messina initiative and particularly the plan for a customs union. On 14 December 1955, while he was on a visit to Paris to attend a WEU ministerial council and then a North Atlantic Council meeting, Macmillan was still convinced the Messina initiative would fail. He recorded in his diary:
The French will never go into the ‘common market’ – the German industrialists and economists equally dislike it, although Adenauer is attracted to the idea of closer European unity on political grounds. This, of course, is very important, and I made it clear that we would welcome and assist the plan, although we would not join.
Inevitably, at the WEU meeting, Macmillan was roundly attacked by the Six, with Spaak ‘leading the charge’. Nobody had expected British participation, Spaak had said, but neither had they foreseen a frontal assault by the British government.
The response from the US government was predictably unhelpful. On 12 December Secretary of State Dulles simply affirmed support for the common market. Macmillan aborted his offensive. At the end of 1955 all British embassies were instructed to offer reserved diplomatic support for the common market, to avoid conflict with Washington. According to Kaiser, all Britain had achieved by this ‘attempted sabotage’ was ‘the creation of justified suspicion among the Six as to the British motives in Western Europe… and to raise among the Six the traditional unpleasant spectre of perfidious Albion’.
On 21 December 1955, Macmillan was, somewhat unwillingly, transferred from the Foreign Office to the Treasury. Because of its economic implications, however, he kept some control of the European agenda. And by then he was having serious concerns about the possible success of the ‘common market’. ‘What then are we to do?’, he asked.
Are we just to sit back and hope for the best? If we do it may be very dangerous for us; and perhaps Messina will come off after all and that will mean Western Europe dominated in fact by Germany and used as an instrument for the revival of power through economic means. It really is giving them on a plate what we fought two wars to prevent.
Despite the failure of his first attempt to subvert the common market, therefore, he sought to regain the diplomatic initiative, instructing his officials to form an inter-ministerial working group to develop possible alternatives. This group was chaired by R B W Clarke, a former Financial Times journalist, now head of the Overseas Finance Group in the Treasury. In the spring of 1956, before the ministers of the Six had met in Vienna to agree to formal negotiations, Clarke’s committee had produced a number of options, plans ‘A to G’. That chosen was ‘Plan G’, a Free Trade Area (FTA) for manufactured goods only.
Parliament was told what was happening in July 1956, when Sir Edward Boyle, economic secretary to the Treasury, announced that the government was engaged in a major reappraisal of its policy towards the emerging common market. On the European front, approaches were made to the OEEC and, later that month, the OEEC Council responded with a decision to establish a working party to study possible forms of association between the Six and the OEEC, including a possible Europe-wide free trade area.
The new strategy looked promising. The European powers were broadly sympathetic. Erhard was enthusiastic. This was so much closer to his own ideas than any dirigiste common market. Macmillan reported that Washington was ‘surprisingly positive’. Even Commonwealth leaders were not hostile, seeing in it an opportunity for increased trade with Europe. Duchêne conceded that the FTA was ‘a genuine attempt to adapt British interests to the common market’.
Work on ‘Plan G’ continued through the summer and, to minimise the institutionalisation involved, it was proposed that the FTA be integrated into the existing structures of the OEEC. Formal OEEC negotiations were launched in Paris in October 1956. By that time, common market negotiations looked irretrievably stalled. Erhard was confidently predicting the death of the idea. The Six were in disarray. At that moment, the great events intervened.
Suez: the watershed
On 26 July 1956, Egypt’s new leader Colonel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal, since its opening in 1869 under Anglo-French ownership. Through the remaining weeks of summer, amid an atmosphere of growing international crisis, Britain and France had assembled a military task force to seize it back. The problem was that this might be viewed as an act of ‘colonialist aggression’ by the international community, including the USA.
On 23 October, amid intense secrecy, Britain’s prime minister Eden therefore sent his foreign secretary to rendezvous in a French villa at Sevres with Mollet, Pinay, Israel’s prime minister Ben Gurion and his chief of staff, General Dayan. Between them they agreed a plan. Israel would invade Egypt. Anglo-French forces would then intervene in a ‘police action’ to separate the combatants and seize back the Canal. Nasser would be toppled.
The scheme did not work. On 29 October, Israel invaded Egypt, as planned. But when the following day Britain and France issued an ultimatum, demanding a cease-fire, this provoked a storm of international protest, only complicated by a crisis now blowing up over the Soviet Union’s military invasion of Hungary, to suppress the first major popular rising against Communist tyranny in eastern Europe.
This suddenly explosive international situation, possibly threatening a European war, convinced Adenauer more than ever that Germany must have nuclear weapons. In Cabinet on 31 October he put to Erhard that Euratom was now vital to West Germany’s security interests. He then added that the only way this treaty could be agreed was if Germany accepted the common market. On 4 November, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, where thousands were to die in street battles. Invoking his constitutional right as Chancellor to make policy on matters of national interest, Adenauer bludgeoned his Cabinet into agreeing that he should go to Paris to negotiate, on his own terms, a final settlement on both Euratom and the common market.
Through one of those accidents of history, Adenauer was on the overnight train to Paris on 5 November as the news broke that British and French paratroops had landed in the Canal Zone. When he arrived in the early hours of 6 November at the Gare de l’Est, he found half the French Cabinet waiting for him at the station. Adenauer immediately gave his unconditional approval of French actions, thus instantly strengthening Franco-German relations.
As that day unfolded, however, the British Cabinet was also in crisis session over a report from Macmillan that massive selling of sterling had led to an unprecedented collapse in Britain’s currency reserves. Washington was furious at Britain’s action. So was the Soviet Union, whose prime minister Nikolai Bulganin threatened to shower London and Paris with nuclear missiles. Eden caved in. Unilaterally he decided to abort the Suez campaign. When he telephoned his French opposite number to convey his decision, Mollet was furious at what seemed like betrayal. Seizing the moment, Adenauer advised him to ‘make Europe your revenge’.
The Suez crisis, ending in such fiasco, changed everything. In its aftermath, while the Canal remained blocked, oil in Western Europe was in short supply, petrol had to be rationed, roads emptied. This brought home Europe’s dependence on Middle East oil, underlining the need for alternative sources of energy. Euratom, with its promise of abundant nuclear power, seemed suddenly an urgent necessity. So dramatic was the impact that a colleague of Monnet suggested, only half-jokingly, that a statue should be erected to Nasser, ‘the federator of Europe’.
Progress was now rapid. The contentious issue of social harmonisation became a mere trifle. Adenauer removed this previously insurmountable obstacle by agreeing ‘in principle’ to the French demands and, on 24 January 1957, the Germans also agreed to exclude military installations from Euratom control, clearing the way for the French nuclear weapons programme. By then, Adenauer had already achieved his own nuclear ambitions. In December, a Nato military committee, in a secret directive, had stipulated that twelve West German divisions on the front to the east would be equipped for nuclear warfare. It was assumed that America would supply the firepower, but Adenauer was now satisfied that the way for West Germany to acquire nuclear weapons was clear.
However, the way for the common market was still not entirely open. There were still two issues to be resolved: the problem of overseas territories and the decision-making mechanisms of the two new communities. The key was the overseas territories question. Bled dry by wars in Indochina and Algeria, France could not afford vital modernisation programmes in its territories without German financial support. Post-Suez, Adenauer was willing to contribute nearly half the needed funds. Final agreement was reached in February when any restrictions on the use of fissile material supplied by Euratom were removed.
The Euratom and common market treaties were signed by representatives of the Six governments on 25 March 1957, at a venue carefully chosen for its symbolic significance: the Capitol in Rome, the city which for two thousand years, under the Roman Empire and the Papacy, had stood at the centre of European history.
The preamble to the treaty setting up the European Economic Community opened with a declaration that it expressed the determination of the ‘High Contracting Parties’ to ‘lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe’. In many respects, what followed took the form not so much of a treaty as of a constitution, defining the institutions of a new type of government, with definitions of their purposes and powers. This centred on a new ‘European Commission’, more an executive than a civil service, which alone would have the right to initiate legislation. Alongside it was to be a ‘Council of Ministers’, representing the governments of the member states; an ‘Assembly’, made up of delegates from their national parliaments; and a ‘European Court of Justice’, with appointees from each member state, entrusted with adjudicating on matters of Community law, in particular where it conflicted with the laws of member states.
The model for this new form of government was already familiar. It was adapted from the Coal and Steel Community. This in turn had been adapted from the League of Nations blueprint sketched out at the end of the 1920s by Monnet’s friend Salter in his proposal for a supranational ‘United States of Europe’. Crucially, the rule of unanimity which, according to Spaak, had been ‘responsible for the bankruptcy of the League of Nations’ had been heavily circumscribed. The authors of the Treaty (of which he was one) had been aware of the dangers of unanimity and had held that ‘the will of the majority should as a rule prevail and that unanimous decisions should only be mandatory in exceptional circumstances’.
Interestingly, Monnet was not invited to Rome for the signing of the new treaties. Both the Bundestag and the Assemblée Nationale ratified them in the first week of July. Mendès-France voted against ratification. In an earlier debate, he had cautioned, ‘France must not be the victim of the Treaty. A democrat may abdicate by giving in to an internal dictatorship, but also by delegating his powers to an external authority’. The last to ratify was Italy, the following December. The European Economic Community was finally born.
It had been a close run thing.
Chapter Six
‘A Triumph For Monnet’: 1958-61
Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.
Dean Acheson, speech to West Point Military Academy, 5 December 1962.
No matter how much Macmillan privately asserted that entry into Europe was an act with wide-ranging political consequences, he presented it to the British people as an economic move dictated by commercial imperatives.
George Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern.
According to one historian, the governing bodies of the new ‘European Economic Community’ started work in Brussels on New Year’s Day 1958. This was unlikely, and not just because it had been a bank holiday throughout Europe. In what was to become a characteristic of the Community’s decision-making process, the foreign ministers of the Six, meeting in Paris on 20 December, had failed to reach an agreement on nominations for the key post of president of the Commission and had adjourned their meeting.
By the time ministers reconvened on 6 January, the decision had been made. The first president was to be a former German law professor, Walter Hallstein. His priority was to turn the Commission, comprising nine members, into an executive body that would ‘breathe economic and political life into the product of the Treaty authors’.
The choice of Brussels as headquarters was accidental. Monnet himself still hoped a single site could be found to house all three institutions of the ‘Communities’, the ECSC, Euratom and the EEC. ‘We are building Europe, brick by brick’, he wrote. ‘Europe needs a focus to make it tangible and real to people’. He wanted an equivalent to the USA’s District of Columbia, giving ‘Europe’ its own capital. One suggested location had been Compiègne, near Paris, where the 1918 armistice had been signed, and where Hitler humiliated the French government in 1940 by forcing Petain and his colleagues to sign a surrender document in the same railway carriage. In the event, Luxembourg’s foreign minister had partly decided the issue, by insisting that ECSC staff stayed in his country while refusing to accept any more Eurocrats apart from the new European Court of Justice. Brussels ended up as a ‘provisional’ site for the rest, leaving the ECSC in Luxembourg. In the manner of things, ‘provisional’ was to become permanent.
Initially, the Commission was financed by a loan from the High Authority of the ECSC, which gave it freedom to develop its own agenda. Briefs to individual commissioners were allocated in ten weeks, the key agricultural portfolio going to a Dutchman, Sicco Mansholt. A crude organisational structure had emerged three weeks later and, by the end of 1958, a thousand officials were at work.
Hallstein was very much in charge, insisting on the right to choose his own staff and resisting pressure from national governments to accept appointees. He enjoyed the trappings of power, receiving emissaries from foreign governments in royal style. One visiting American, Clarence Randall, was heard to complain that Hallstein’s officials were ‘getting a little stuffy’, falling into the habit of addressing each other as ‘Your excellency’. Randall recorded that he was tempted to say in a loud voice, ‘Nuts!’.
One problem was the provision of staff for the Council of Ministers. This need had not been foreseen in the treaties, but member state governments demanded their own permanent staffs in Brussels. On 26 January 1958, therefore, the Six decided to create the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) to prepare the work of the Councils. Coreper soon began to carry out most of the routine work of examining and discussing Commission proposals, ‘preparing’ decisions so that they would only have to be ‘trimmed’ at the full meetings of the Council. Initially, Coreper meetings absorbed much of Hallstein’s time until he secured agreement that he could delegate this work to his own directors-general. The Community bureaucracy had developed a life of its own.
Then there was the language problem. It had been agreed that the languages of the member states should be used, although the Commission had rejected a request to treat Dutch and Flemish as separate languages. The very first Council regulation, on 15 April 1958, established French, German, Italian and Dutch as the official languages of the Communities. Nevertheless, French soon became the dominant language. But this multi-lingual approach came at a price. Translation services accounted for approximately thirty percent of the entire staff expenditure.
On 19 March 1958, the 142-member European Assembly, made up of delegates from national parliaments, convened for the first time in the Council of Europe building in Strasbourg, electing Robert Schuman as its president.
Through those early days of the EEC, Monnet avoided direct involvement in the affairs of the new ‘government’. But he was far from idle. Through his Action Committee, he searched for ways to extend the scope of his ‘Communities’, in pursuit of his eventual objective of a ‘United States of Europe’. One idea which particularly excited him was monetary union. The trigger for his interest had been France’s continuing financial crisis, and the plummeting value of the franc, exacerbated by the Algerian war. As always, the solution had to be within a ‘European framework’. ‘Via money’, as Monnet put it in September 1957, ‘Europe could become political in five years’. The following year he wrote to a Dutch politician, suggesting that:
…the current communities should be completed by a Finance Common Market which would lead us to European economic unity. Only then would… the mutual commitments make it fairly easy to produce the political union which is the goal.
Monnet had already suggested a common financial policy to one of France’s many prime ministers of the period, Félix Gaillard, yet another of his former assistants who had worked for him in 1945. But Gaillard was to last only five months in office, and no progress was made. Monnet was undismayed. ‘There are no premature ideas’, he wrote. ‘There are only opportunities for which one must learn to wait’.
As it happened, the chaos of France’s finances was about to be brought to a sudden end. The Fourth Republic was in its death throes, torn apart by insurrection in Algeria. On 1 June 1958, in a legal coup d’état, brought on by rumours that the Fourth Republic was about to treat with the Algerian independence movement, de Gaulle returned to power, to exercise what Clement Attlee was later to call a ‘temporary, semi-dictatorship’. By Christmas, de Gaulle had imposed a series of crisis measures, one of which was to convert every 100 francs (then standing at 1300 to £1) into one. The psychological boost given by the ‘New Franc’ and other measures transformed France’s economy with remarkable speed.
By this time, Monnet had already found another focus for his energies. With his ‘supranational government’ in place, he felt the need to tackle the only major power in Europe which he thought could pose a threat to it, with its unrepentant belief in ‘intergovernmentalism’. He wanted to solve what he saw as the problem of Britain.
The supranationalists’ revenge
The political disaster of Suez had dealt Britain’s self-confidence a shattering blow. The crisis had fatally weakened Eden, who resigned, pleading ill-health, to be succeeded on 10 January 1957 by Macmillan. By the time the new prime minister was able to re-focus on European affairs, the situation had changed irretrievably. Britain’s prestige had suffered a massive blow and the re-orientation of European politics was already well advanced. This was not immediately recognised by Macmillan, who later conceded that he failed to recognise the depth of Franco-German reconciliation.
Despite this, Macmillan did make adjustments. With the Common Market and Euratom now looking inevitable, the OEEC had been asked to research options available for Britain’s proposed Free Trade Area. In late January, a working party reported that it would be technically possible to establish such an area that would include the Six as a single bloc. Thus, Macmillan, previously having seen the FTA as an alternative to the Common Market, now began to think of it as a ‘trade roof’ over all the OEEC countries, including the EEC.
After the signing of the Rome treaties, however, Britain’s FTA was viewed by the Six without enthusiasm. London therefore offered substantial concessions, not least in allowing the ‘supranational’ principle of ‘majority voting’. Then, in October 1957 the other OEEC members agreed to set up an intergovernmental committee to develop the project further. By now, however, suspicion of the British verged on paranoia and, by February 1958, the French were demanding wholly unacceptable conditions, not least that Britain ended its preferential trading agreements with the Commonwealth.
With the accession of de Gaulle, things got worse. While Erhard, had sympathised with the idea of a free trade area, de Gaulle, brokered a ‘non-intervention’ deal with Adenauer, as a result of which, on 14 November, France was able to reject the British plan. The Times thundered ‘France the Wrecker’, but to no avail. The initiative had collapsed. Never again would a free trade proposal on the scale of the FTA become a serious challenge to the Six.
The collapse rocked British industry. Leaders of the Federation of British Industries (later to become the Confederation of British Industry or CBI) now feared they might also be excluded from a second customs union taking shape in Scandinavia, and called on the government to set up a separate European Free Trade Association (EFTA). A new plan was rapidly conceived to group what became known as the ‘outer seven’, with a format remarkably similar to the abortive ‘Plan G’. Negotiations were wrapped up by November 1959, with the initialling of the Stockholm Convention. Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Portugal and Switzerland had created their own free trade association. Europe was now, literally, at ‘Sixes and Sevens’.
Meanwhile, Monnet turned his attention his remaining rival, the OEEC: the jewel in the crown of European intergovernmentalism. As long as it existed, under British chairmanship, it could provide a rallying point for further dissident schemes. It had to be destroyed.
Monnet set about this task in his usual meticulous and devious way, devising as neat an assassination as can be imagined. But nothing of this found its way into his memoirs. The outline of what happened can be reconstructed from Duchêne, with additional detail from Camps. Their accounts give a remarkable insight into the workings of a shrewd, skilled, and ultimately ruthless political operator.
To start the destruction, Monnet used Hallstein to draft a paper on the EEC’s policy on external economic relations, stating that there should be no ‘regional’ association with the FTA. Instead, the EEC should treat all non-member groups and countries on an equal basis, thereby enabling members to be played off against each other, minimise the chances of Britain mobilising yet another coalition against the Common Market. The Council of Ministers adopted the paper on 16 March 1959.
Then, on 27 May, Monnet was in Washington to attend the funeral of his old friend John Foster Dulles. He took the opportunity to see another friend, Douglas Dillon, now Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. Next day he lunched with Eisenhower. Back in Paris on 9 June, he had a long talk with John Tuthill, economics minister at the US embassy. The ground had been prepared.
What Monnet had in mind was a ‘reform’ of the OEEC, by which he meant its neutralisation or abolition. To dilute Britain’s influence, he suggested to Tuthill that the US and Canada should also become members. Ostensibly, this would allow the economic problems of the ‘free world’ to be discussed on a wider canvas, but the real objective was to weaken Britain’s grip on the OEEC.
In his own version of ‘shuttle diplomacy’, Monnet crossed the Atlantic again, to give Dillon a paper entitled A New Era in Atlantic Relations. Then, in July he learned that the US and Canada would join the OEEC. Back in Paris, Monnet saw Tuthill again, this time with a plan to replace the ‘discredited’ OEEC altogether. On 27 July, Monnet handed a revised version of his original paper to Pinay, now finance minister. Omitted was any reference to the OEEC. He simply proposed an organisation for ‘permanent consultations’ including the Common Market, the US and Great Britain. True to form, Monnet chose proxies for his idea, suggesting that this proposal should be put jointly by de Gaulle and Adenauer.
In December everything came together. Dillon arrived in Europe for a North Atlantic Council meeting. While in Europe, according to Camps, he ‘informed himself’ first-hand of current thinking on European trade. The impression gained in London was that he was ‘cool to an OEEC-wide free trade area’, and ‘becoming increasingly concerned at the prospect of friction between the two European groups’. However, he seemed to have agreed with British officials that the OEEC ‘was the right forum for discussions on European trade’, although, without knowing the background, Camps wrote:
…it seems clear that the Commission of the Community, M. Monnet, and the French government all made it plain during his subsequent discussions with them that they disliked the OEEC as a forum, particularly as a forum for the discussion of European trade questions.
Coincidentally, the leaders of the four western powers – Eisenhower, de Gaulle, Adenauer and Macmillan held a summit in Paris on 19-21 December 1959, at the end of a Nato council. What clearly was unknown to most commentators was that, prior to this meeting, Monnet had written to Eisenhower. In his letter he had suggested setting up a committee to establish a new ‘Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’ (OECD), stressing how important it was that the Commission was represented on that committee.
Thus was the ambush prepared. During a meeting supposedly about East-West relations, Camps reported that ‘rather unexpectedly’ trade questions were discussed, ‘particularly in the corridors’. She noted that the subsequent communiqué had ‘all the marks of a highly negotiated document’. The result was that, on US initiative, a ‘Special Economic Conference’ was held in January 1960. Before it had even started, the balance had been tilted against the OEEC. Nearly half the OEEC’s representatives were excluded, yet the Commission, United States and Canada were included. Furthermore Douglas Dillon took the chair, annoying the British with his ‘obvious support for the French’. When business turned to what was the real reason for the meeting, Dillon suggested that
The twenty governments who were members or associates of the OEEC should examine the question of whether there should be a ‘successor’ organisation to the OEEC which should continue those functions of the OEEC that still seemed important, take on appropriate new functions, and be so constructed that the United States and Canada could become full members.
Now the ambush had been sprung, Dillon then suggested that the OEEC itself should not examine the question. The task should be delegated to a group of three experts, one each from the EFTA countries, the EEC and the USA. Not surprisingly, because of the ‘similarity’ in the views between the US and the EEC, the Seven thought this group would be ‘unbalanced’. The word ‘rigged’ might have been more appropriate.
Thus, Dillon did not wholly get his way. The committee convened with a Frenchman, an Englishman, an American and a Greek. The conference communiqué, however, gave testament to the underlying power struggle. Wrote Camps:
To the more ardent ‘Europeans’ the OEEC was the embodiment of the British concept of European unity: co-operation without political commitment. This kind of unity they believed to be inadequate and they feared that if it were allowed to flourish it would undermine the European Community.
Unsurprisingly, when the expert committee reported, as Camps put it, ‘it had not been easy for the Four to find a common view’. The upshot was another committee, chaired by the secretary-general designate of the OEEC’s replacement organisation, the OECD. The major United States objective, ‘fully shared by the French and to a considerable extent by the Six, had been achieved’. The OEEC, and with it Britain’s power base in Europe, had been destroyed. Monnet’s revenge was complete.
EFTA - the coup de grace
One of the myths assiduously fostered about Britain’s post-war attitude towards Europe, before she supposedly showed herself to be more ‘outward looking’ by joining the Common Market, is that until that time she had somehow remained condescendingly aloof from continental affairs. But the record shows the very opposite. From the moment when her armies had played a vital part in liberating western Europe in 1944-5, Britain had remained as profoundly involved in the affairs of Europe as she had been for hundreds of years, seeking to assist and co-operate with her nearest geographical neighbours in every conceivable way.
The only reason why this myth of her insular lack of concern later came to be promoted was that it reflected the divergence between those two sharply opposed views of how international co-operation in Europe should best be pursued. Britain’s opposition to ‘supranationalism’ stemmed from a different vision of how Europe should be brought together. Favouring the alternative of ‘intergovernmental’ co-operation, that was why she had consistently supported or led the way in setting up every kind of intergovernmental organisation, from Nato and the WEU, to the Council of Europe and the OEEC itself.
Another area in which Britain showed tireless zeal for intergovernmental co-operation was civil aviation, where her aircraft industry was still a world leader. She was active in setting up the European Civil Aviation conference in Strasbourg in 1953, which led to the Europe-wide system of air navigation safety known as Eurocontrol (agreed in 1960). In 1956, through the setting up of a Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee, she took the first steps which were to lead eight years later to a Franco-British agreement to build the world’s first supersonic airliner, the Concorde.
To ‘supranationalists’, these forms of co-operation were viewed with suspicion because they depended on preserving that principle of national sovereignty they so despised. This was why they viewed with particular suspicion the idea of ‘free trade’, as expressed in the new European Free Trade Area, because it was based on a denial of their credo. And the final step in sabotaging Britain’s attempts to maintain European co-operation on an intergovernmental basis came in 1960 when Hallstein masterminded what was to become in effect EFTA’s coup de grace.
The Treaty of Rome had laid out a programme for harmonising external tariffs between the Six in three four-year stages, during which time duties on what was called ‘intra-community trade’ would be abolished. The first stage was due to end on 31 December 1961. But Hallstein proposed that the process should be speeded up. This would mean that low-tariff countries of the Six would have to levy much higher duties on their imports from the outside world, including the EFTA members with whom they did substantial trade,
Decided unilaterally without consulting EFTA, this, as was intended, threw the organisation into disarray, as it had planned to phase its own tariff reductions in line with the EEC. Member states had difficulties in agreeing to match the cuts and, compared with the EEC, the Seven were thus shown to be weak and uncoordinated.
Eventually, the EFTA members came into line, but not until six months after the EEC changes had come into force, and after Britain had fruitlessly invested considerable diplomatic capital in an unsuccessful bid to pressure Hallstein into reversing his acceleration programme. The delay was a major defeat for the British, who were perceived to be unable to match the cohesion of the EEC. The very future of EFTA seemed in doubt. Relations between Britain and the Six had sunk to an all-time low.
Britain’s crisis of confidence
At the start of the 1960s, Macmillan and his colleagues were having to think hard about Britain’s position in the world. In the fifteen years since the end of the Second World War, this had changed dramatically. In 1945, politically, economically and militarily, she had still been unmistakably a world power. Her empire, including the great English-speaking dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, stretched round the globe. The Union Jack still flew over more than a quarter of the human race. The peoples of a fifth of the world’s land surface looked to London as the centre of their government. Her influence was supreme across the Middle East. After the USA, she was the second richest nation in the world. In terms of manpower, the contribution of Britain and her Commonwealth to the war effort had been even greater than America’s, and her navy was still the second most powerful in existence.
But, in those first post-war years of rationing, austerity and endless economic crises, Britain’s real weakness had been cruelly exposed. As a first major step in dismantling her empire, she had in 1947 given independence to the vast Indian sub-continent, including Burma. In 1948, under intense pressure, she had walked away from her UN (formerly League of Nations) mandate over Palestine, allowing the establishment of the state of Israel. In 1949 she was forced into a thirty percent devaluation of sterling, still one of the world major’s trading currencies.
In 1951, Britain had been a leading shipbuilding nation. Her car, textile and coal industries were still the largest in Europe. In the early 1950s, as rationing ended and Britain again enjoyed modest prosperity, celebrating the Coronation of a new young queen, she became the world’s third nuclear power and pioneered the world’s first jet airliner, the Comet. She still took her place at international conference tables as one of the world’s ‘Big Three’. But all across her empire and spheres of influence troubles were multiplying, as a new spirit of nationalism was on the march in Kenya, Cyprus, Malaya, Persia, Iraq, Egypt.
Then came Suez, which finally brought home to Britain that she was no longer a ‘Big Power’, scarcely even a power of world rank. In 1957, by granting independence to Ghana, she launched on the process of abandoning her remaining colonies. Within little more than a dozen years, the transformation of the old British Empire into a Commonwealth was complete. At home, the British discovered ‘affluence’ and their new prime minister, hailed as ‘Supermac’, in 1959 won a landslide election victory. But behind the seeming façade of economic well-being, the British were beginning to wake up to some uncomfortable realities.
At the end of 1958 the economic editor of The Observer, Andrew Shonfield, published a book called British Economic Policy Since The War. Beginning with the question ‘why does Britain’s wealth grow so much more slowly than the wealth of countries on the continent?’, it compared the percentage increases in national output in the countries of Six with Britain, between 1952 and 1956. Production in Germany had risen by 38 percent, in the Netherlands by 27 percent, Italy 26, and France 20. Britain, at a mere 15 percent, beat only Belgium and Luxembourg.
The reasons offered for this by Shonfield, were complex. They ranged from the strain of having to support sterling as a world currency and the military expenditure needed to support her global political commitments, to trade union obstructionism and lack of investment in basic industries.
His underlying message, to be repeated by countless less sophisticated books and press articles over the next few years, was that the British were doomed unless they went through a profound change of attitude. They had to give up global commitments they could no longer afford and they needed to rediscover from their continental neighbours the secret of economic success. For many observers (though not Shonfield in his book), the moral was clear. In abandoning her fading imperial dreams, Britain had to merge her destiny with that of her more dynamic neighbours. By joining their Common Market she might be able to share in their success.
What came to be overlooked in later years, however, was that the success of the Six was unrelated to their membership of the Common Market. Shonfield’s figures covered the four years before the Treaty of Rome had been signed. The revival in the fortunes of Germany, Italy and France, helped enormously by Marshall aid and the OEEC, had taken place before the launch of the Common Market.
Thinking the unthinkable
In the early months of 1960 Macmillan’s thinking began to move in a direction which even six months before would have seemed unthinkable.
Shortly after the speech in Capetown on 3 February, when he spoke of ‘the wind of change’ beginning to blow through Africa, he decided to re-examine the validity of the Churchillian doctrine of three interlocking circles, and the assumption that too close a relationship with Europe would necessarily weaken Britain’s relationships with the Commonwealth or the United States.
As part of the process, he instructed that the committee originally set up to supervise the FTA negotiations should be renamed the ‘European Economic Association Committee’. Macmillan took the chair. Changes were also made to the Whitehall committee structures, from which emerged an Economic Steering (Europe) Committee, chaired by the joint permanent under-secretary to the Treasury, Sir Frank Lee. This was to be exclusively responsible for matters of European integration. In March 1960, a supporting committee was set up called the European Economics Questions (Official) Committee, comprised of middle-ranking civil servants. It was to conduct a wide-ranging review to cover a whole spectrum of possibilities, from abandoning attempts to find accommodation with the Six to joining them.
The workhorse of the process was Lee’s Economic Steering Committee. On 23 May 1960, on the basis of its deliberations, Lee made a presentation to a special sub-committee of the Cabinet, chaired by Macmillan. His analysis was largely neutral. There were both political and economic advantages in joining the Community, and they would better be obtained by joining the EEC than by some form of ‘association’, which in any case was unlikely to be offered.
A memorandum was circulated to the Ministerial European Economic Association Committee, appraising the options, including joining the Community or ‘near identification’ with it, and the consequences which might arise from each. This was discussed at the Committee on 27 May 1960, when Macmillan summed up by saying:
The basic choice for the government… was between initiating a dramatic change in direction in our domestic, commercial and international policies, and maintaining our traditional policy of remaining aloof from Europe politically while doing all we could to mitigate the economic dangers of a divided Europe. This would be another of the historic moments of history and would need much careful thought.
The officials were then instructed to consider further questions ‘to be indicated by the prime minister’.
There was another reason why Britain might now be reconsidering her involvement with the new ‘European Economic Community’. Since the appearance of France’s new president in 1958, it seemed the character of the new ‘Europe’ might be evolving away from dogmatic emphasis on supranationalist technocracy.
Furthermore, in 1958 and 1959 a serious international problem had been arising over the future of Berlin, still occupied by the four ‘powers’. The Soviet Union, under its new leader Nikita Khruschev, seemed determined to use the city as the central pawn in his desire to make permanent the separate existence of the USSR’s Communist puppet state in East Germany, the German Democratic Republic.
Under what was known as the ‘Hallstein doctrine’, named after the Commission president from the days when he was Adenauer’s foreign minister, West Germany claimed to speak for all Germans, in the hope that one day Germany would be reunited. As tension mounted over this issue, at the end of a Nato council meeting in Paris, de Gaulle organised a meeting on 19 December 1959 between himself, Eisenhower and Macmillan, representing the three Western occupying powers, to discuss Berlin. The exclusion of West Germany infuriated Adenauer. He was even more displeased when his three supposed allies agreed to meet Khruschev at an East-West summit the following May, to settle the most important question affecting his country’s future.
Thanks not least to de Gaulle’s new assertiveness on the international stage, reinforced by France’s explosion of her first nuclear device on 13 February 1960, relations between the two leading members of the EEC came under intense strain. As it happened, just two weeks before the arranged summit, on 1 May, an American U-2 ‘spy plane’, flying at 80,000 feet over Sverdlovsk in the heart of the Soviet Union, was shot down by a SAM 2 missile. Amid the resulting furore, an apoplectic Khruschev demanded the summit be postponed until Eisenhower had left the US presidency.
This crisis left Franco-German relations at their lowest ebb since the war, a state of mutual suspicion and hostility which was to last for many months and to lead to both countries threatening to withdraw from Nato. The lowest point of all came with a speech given by de Gaulle at Grenoble in October, when he declared that the only reality in Europe was that of the nation state. This coincided with a visit to Bonn, by France’s prime minister and foreign minister. Such was the froideur that an official banquet at the Palais Schaumburg had to be delayed for an hour by a blazing row. During the ensuing dinner hosts and guests were scarcely on speaking terms.
This breakdown in relations provided an opportunity for Britain and, against this background, through 1960 and amid intense secrecy, Macmillan and his colleagues meditated on whether to take Britain into ‘Europe’. A clue as to his intentions came in a Cabinet reshuffle in July when he appointed the Earl of Home as his foreign secretary, moving his Chief Whip Edward Heath to a new post at the Foreign Office, with responsibility for ‘European affairs’. Ever since entering Parliament in 1950, Heath had been a committed ‘Europeanist’ and an enthusiast for supranationalism. Two other enthusiastic ‘Europeanists’ were appointed to posts which would be important if Britain applied to join. Duncan Sandys, former president of the European Movement, became Commonwealth Secretary; Christopher Soames, Minister of Agriculture.
One central question was how far they should commit Britain to a ‘supranational’ form of government, over which Britain might have influence but ultimately no control. When, following the Lee report, civil servants responded to Macmillan’s further questions. They qualified their answers with two reservations. The first was that many of the policies of the Six were not yet settled, ‘notably on matters left open in the Treaty of Rome’. Secondly, they maintained, if the UK joined the Six, this would ‘undoubtedly influence… the development of these policies’, although adding, ‘it is not possible to judge how great our influence would be’.
So much about where this European project might lead was inevitably unknown. Thus, while some argued that there would be economic advantages to Britain in joining it, these rested on unpredictable factors. At the time, contributions to the EEC budget could not be estimated. What was to become the Community’s biggest single expense, initially accounting for over 90 percent of that budget – the Common Agricultural Policy – had yet to be defined. For similar reasons, it was impossible to predict the effects on British agriculture or trade.
Yet Macmillan and his colleagues were in no doubt that the ‘Communities’ as they stood were intended to lead to full political and economic union. Even before the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, the Foreign Office had been briefed that its six signatories intended ‘to achieve tighter European integration through the creation of European institutions with supranational powers, beginning in the economic field … the underlying motive of the Six is, however, essentially political’.
In the summer of 1960 Sir Roderick Barclay, head of the UK delegation to the European Commission in Brussels, sent a despatch to the Foreign Office stressing that the aim of the Community was not merely harmonisation but ‘the unification of policies in every field of the economic union, i.e. economic, social, commercial, tariff and fiscal policy. That this was not just ‘pie in the sky’ needed to be made clear to the politicians’.
When Heath, as minister of state for Europe, visited Hallstein in November 1960, his report on the meeting noted how Hallstein had emphasised that joining the Community was not just a matter of adopting a common tariff ‘which was the essential hallmark of any “State” (and he regarded the EEC as a potential State)’. It would be necessary, Hallstein had insisted, for any new entrant to accept that the EEC was intended to evolve into something much deeper, ‘some form of Federal State’, which was what the Commission was working towards.
Particularly revealing in this context was the reply given in December 1960 by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, to a request from Heath, for an opinion on the constitutional implications of signing the Treaty for Britain’s sovereignty. Kilmuir responded that loss of sovereignty would in several respects be considerable: by Parliament; by the Crown in terms of Britain’s treaty-making powers; and by the courts, which to an extent would become ‘subordinate’ to the European Court of Justice. On the making of laws, Kilmuir said it was clear that:
the Council of Ministers would eventually (after the system of qualified majority voting had come into force) make regulations which would be binding on us even against our wishes… it would in theory be possible for Parliament to enact at the outset legislation which would give automatic force of law to any existing or future regulations made by the appropriate organs of the Community. For Parliament to do this would go far beyond the most extensive delegation of powers, even in wartime, that we have ever experienced and I do not think there is any likelihood of this being acceptable to the House of Commons.
As for the subordination of Britain’s courts to the ECJ, Kilmuir wrote:
I must emphasise that in my view the surrenders of sovereignty involved are serious ones, and I think that, as a matter of practical politics, it will not be easy to persuade Parliament or the British public to accept them. I am sure that it would be a great mistake to underestimate the force of the objections to them. But these objections should be brought out into the open now because, if we attempt to gloss over them at this stage, those who are opposed to the whole idea of joining the Community will certainly seize on them with more damaging effect later on.
From the evidence now available, it is clear that Macmillan and his Cabinet were fully aware of the political implications of the decision that lay before them.
But there was still one other consideration which might have to outweigh everything else. If there was one factor above all which set Britain apart from her continental neighbours it was her ‘special relationship’ with the United States of America. It was on that, and on the fact that, since detonating her first H-bomb in 1957, she had become the world’s third thermonuclear power, that Britain’s dwindling prestige and influence in the world now rested.
If she were now to throw in her destiny with ‘Europe’, would all this have to be thrown away? As it happened, this question had suddenly become more acute than ever. The cause was that same incident which brought such an abrupt end to the East-West summit that had in turn provoked such bitter feuding between Germany and France: the shooting down of Gary Powers’s U-2 by a Soviet missile.
America lets Macmillan off the hook
To no one did this come as more of a shock than Britain’s defence planners. Britain’s nuclear deterrent had since 1956 had depended on her force of high-altitude V-bombers. If Soviet ground-to-air missiles were now capable intercepting aircraft at 80,000 feet, any deterrent value had vanished. The only alternative would be a missile, and Britain had been developing two. But the first, Blue Streak, had been cancelled only three weeks before the U-2 incident, because of cost over-runs and, being liquid-fuelled, it was in any case obsolete. The other, Blue Steel, a clearly inadequate air-launched missile with a range of only 100 miles, would be cancelled later in the year. This left Britain with only one hope of preserving her ‘independent’ deterrent: to buy missiles from the USA - either the air-launched Skybolt or the new Polaris, which would require building a fleet of nuclear submarines. Either solution required Washington’s agreement.
With 1960 nearing its end, Macmillan’s old friend President Eisenhower was soon due to leave office. His successor, elected in November, was the charismatic young senator John F. Kennedy, to whom Macmillan was related by marriage. As the new administration prepared to take office, Macmillan’s most urgent priority was to discuss with the new president the two issues at the top of his agenda: ‘Europe’ and Britain’s deterrent.
A US-British ‘summit’ was fixed for 4 April 1961. Before it took place, much behind the scenes groundwork was necessary. In Washington this centred on a man who had now become one of Kennedy’s most trusted advisers, George Ball, his Under-Secretary of State with special responsibility for European affairs. Kennedy had picked him as a key member of his team after hearing him address a conference in New York in January 1960, when Ball spoke of the need for further progress towards political integration in Europe.
Ball was, of course, one of Monnet’s closest and most committed allies. They had been working closely together since 1945, not least during the early stages of the Marshall Plan. Although he then returned to private law practice, their close association continued. With the establishment of the ECSC, Monnet had appointed Ball as its legal representative in Washington. In 1954, after the French Parliament had failed to ratify the EDC, Monnet had been so concerned at the effect of this on the US government that he asked Ball to set up a publicity office in Washington. With the advent of the EEC in 1958, this became the Commission’s Washington base.
In Ball’s, Monnet had one of his own men at the heart of the new administration, guiding a president who knew little of contemporary European politics. What was just as significant was that, by this time, Monnet was now convinced that de Gaulle’s brand of nationalism required the counter-weight of Britain’s membership in his fledgling Community. With this in mind he visited the United States twice in the early months of 1961, when he met Ball and other members of the new administration, and, at Ball’s instigation, ‘had a long talk with the President’.
Ball himself was by now playing an active part in pushing for British membership. Prior to the planned ‘summit’ between Macmillan and Kennedy, he flew to London where, on 30 March, at the suggestion of Sir Frank Lee, he met Heath. The three men met in the house of the Earl of Perth, son of Sir Eric Drummond (later the 16th Earl of Perth) who had been Monnet’s immediate boss when he was the first general secretary of the League of Nations. Ball intended to encourage Britain to take the plunge. According to his own lengthy account of the meeting, Heath began by confirming that, provided an overall settlement could be found to take care of the Commonwealth, agriculture and EFTA problems, the UK was ‘ready to accept a common, or harmonised, tariff’.
In Heath’s temporary absence, Lee put the direct question, ‘does the United States want the United Kingdom to join the Common Market?’. Ball in his reply emphasised that the EEC’s institutions should
not become mere technocratic bodies, they should continue to develop politically. If Britain joined the EEC, it should be on the understanding that the present institutions did not form a completed edifice, but would continue to evolve and that the Rome Treaty was not a ‘frozen document’ but a ‘process’.
Lee’s response, according to Ball, was that he fully understood the significance of this, and that although ‘the movement towards political federation in Europe’ had been temporarily checked, ‘he himself did not shrink from the idea of full political union’. When Heath returned to the meeting, Lee summarised what had been said. Heath ‘seemed impressed’. Ball ‘emerged exhilarated’ that ‘both Heath and Lee had gone much further than I expected’.
Given the importance of this meeting, and the significance of what was discussed, it may seem strange that Heath was not to mention it in his autobiography: especially as it underlined the expectation that the EEC should eventually evolve into a ‘European federation’.
Five days later, on 4 April, Macmillan arrived in Washington for his bilateral summit. When the two men met for their first discussion, sitting across a table with their advisers, ‘almost the first question Macmillan asked the President’, according to Ball who was sitting with Kennedy, was ‘how he and the American government would react if Britain applied to join the European Community’.
President Kennedy responded briefly, then said ‘I’ll ask Under-Secretary Ball to reply to your question’. I then repeated what I had said to Heath in London – that America would welcome it if Britain should apply for full membership in the Community, explicitly recognising that the Rome Treaty was not merely a static document but a process leading towards political unification. I elaborated upon this theme at some length, noting the dangers of a mere commercial arrangement that would drain the EEC of political content. The Prime Minister seemed on the whole pleased and satisfied.
Macmillan in his memoirs merely records that he was left in no doubt that a decision to join the Six would be welcome. He makes no reference to political unification. Ball recalls that at dinner in the British Embassy next evening, Macmillan twice took him privately aside, seeming ‘excited’. ‘Yesterday was one of the greatest days of my life’ he said with apparent emotion, ‘you know, don’t you, that we can now do this thing and that we’re going to do it. We’re going into Europe’. The only obstacle left was de Gaulle, but Macmillan was convinced ‘we’re going to do it’.
If Macmillan was elated, he had every reason for so being. Although he had been moving towards the idea of joining the EEC, this might seem to conflict with the ‘three circles’ doctrine, in that Britain’s ‘entry into Europe’ would detach Britain from the United States. Furthermore, it might rule out any hope of US agreement to supply Britain with missiles, eliminating Britain’s ‘independent deterrent’ and all the prestige which went with it. Suddenly, however, that obstacle had been removed. Kennedy’s enthusiasm for Britain’s entry presented Macmillan with an almost miraculous answer to what had seemed an insoluble problem. Far from entry to the EEC being an obstacle to close relations with the US, it now seemed as if it would strengthen their alliance.
Macmillan’s last hurdle was the Cabinet. Back in February Heath had warned Macmillan that its earlier opposition had been so pronounced because, in July 1960, the prime minister had allowed a free debate. Instead, Heath advised, he should now organise the policy-making process in such a way as to lead to the conclusion that the EEC application was ‘inevitable’. In the last days of June, therefore, the Cabinet was asked to decide. Macmillan opened the discussion by pointing out that the first question they needed to consider was that ‘if we were to sign the Treaty of Rome we should have to accept its political objectives, and although we should be able to influence the political outcome we did not know what this would be’.
He conceded that a decision to enter would ‘raise great presentational difficulties’. On the one hand, it would be important to convince the Six that ‘we genuinely supported the objectives of the Treaty’. On the other, ‘we should have to satisfy public opinion in this country that the implementation of the objectives of the Treaty would not require unacceptable social and other adjustments. The problems of public relations would be considerable’.
The chief way in which these ‘problems of public relations’ might be overcome would be to stay as quiet as possible about the ‘political objectives’ of the Treaty, and to sell British membership of the ‘Common Market’ as if it was primarily a matter of economics: improved trade, more jobs, greater prosperity. It would be yet another victory for that central strategy of deception dating back to 1955, when Spaak had struck out from the ‘Benelux memorandum out any references to a ‘United States of Europe’ and played up the importance of creating an ‘economic community’.
The Cabinet voted for entry. To general public astonishment, on 31 July Macmillan announced the decision in the Commons. According to Duchêne, citing a conversation with Camps, the key part played by the US President in bringing about this volte face had been no accident. ‘There was a “Monnet effect” on Ball and then a “Ball effect” on Kennedy, and then a “Kennedy effect” on Macmillan. It was a triumph for Monnet’.
Chapter Seven
Why de Gaulle Kept Britain Out: 1961-69
The French did not wish the British to be at the table taking part in the formative discussions on the CAP, for fear that we might disrupt the very favourable arrangements they otherwise had every reason to expect.
Edward Heath.
The importance of the CAP to de Gaulle cannot be overestimated.
Professor Andrew Moravcsik.
It is familiar fact of history that, during the 1960s, de Gaulle was to slam the door against Britain’s entry to the Common Market, not just once but twice. What has only recently come fully to light, however, is just why he found it imperative to do so, as a central plank of his domestic policy for France.
From a British point of view, the generally accepted version of events during these years begins with the formal acceptance of Britain’s application to join by the EEC Council of Ministers on 26 September 1961. Over the next year, as this version has it, Heath showed himself highly skilled in negotiating Britain’s terms of entry. But the talks then became mysteriously bogged down. In January 1963, de Gaulle then startled the world by announcing his personal decision to veto Britain’s entry, claiming that Britain was not yet sufficiently ‘European’ in her outlook, and still too closely tied to the USA. This came as a great blow to Macmillan, at the beginning of a year which was to see his government disintegrating amid a welter of scandals.
In 1965, after a Labour government had taken over under Harold Wilson, Heath became leader of the Conservative Party: not least thanks to the reputation he had won as Britain’s negotiator in Brussels. When Wilson made a second bid to join the Common Market in 1967, de Gaulle again blocked British entry, for similarly idiosyncratic reasons. Only when in 1969 de Gaulle departed from the stage and was succeeded by Georges Pompidou, this version concludes, did France’s attitude change. Largely thanks to the ‘personal chemistry’ between Pompidou and Heath, when he became prime minister in 1970, Britain’s third application proved successful.
This construction on what happened turns out to be not just highly misleading in detail but to have missed the single most important factor in the whole story. It is true that the key role in the EEC throughout the 1960s was played by de Gaulle. But what most historians have so far almost totally overlooked is the central underlying reason why France could not yet afford to allow Britain into the Common Market. Yet no sooner was this problem resolved than she then needed Britain to join as soon as possible: for reasons, it turns out, which had nothing whatever to do with the personal views of Heath and Pompidou.
‘The Commonwealth problem’
On 16 October 1961, Heath went to Brussels to make an opening statement on why Britain now wished to join the Common Market and three weeks later, on 8 November, the formal negotiations for British entry began.
A common misunderstanding about the ‘negotiations’ which take place when a new nation joins the European Community is that the applicant country may seek to change the rules to suit its particular needs. But one of the most fundamental principles on which Monnet had established his ‘government of Europe’ was that, once the supranational body has been granted a particular power or ‘competence’, this can never be returned. Power can only be handed by individual states to the supranational entity; never the other way round. Once those powers or ‘competences’ are ceded, either by treaty or by passing laws over a particular area of policy, they constitute the Community’s most sacred possession: the so-called ‘acquis communautaire’. This represents the sum of the treaties and the accumulated laws which have been ‘acquired’ over the years as the Community’s ‘inalienable possession’. The whole point of the acquis is that it is non-negotiable.
All that accession countries can achieve, therefore, are temporary ‘derogations’ or transitional concessions, designed to make it easier for those country to adjust to the requirements of the acquis, with which they will eventually have to comply in full.
When Heath arrived in Brussels on 16 October there was no doubt that the greatest difficulty would be in securing transitional arrangements for the Commonwealth. Addressing the Six, he told them, ‘I am sure you will understand that Britain could not join the EEC under conditions in which this trade connection was cut, with grave loss and even ruin for some of the Commonwealth countries’.
Already, when announcing his decision to apply for entry back in July, Macmillan had pledged to the House of Commons that Britain would only join if satisfactory arrangements could be made to meet the special needs of the United Kingdom, of the Commonwealth and of the European Free Trade Association.
By far the greatest problem was the system of ‘imperial preference’ which had prevailed in Britain’s empire and Commonwealth for sixty years and more. Through this, Britain and her Commonwealth partners had established a much larger proportion of their trade with each other than with other countries. In 1961, 43 percent of British exports went to the Commonwealth, as against only 16.7 percent to the Common Market countries and 13.1 percent to her six partners in EFTA. In 1960, Britain had taken more than half New Zealand’s exports and a quarter of those from several other Commonwealth countries, including Australia and India. Yet the essence of joining the Common Market was that Britain would now have to raise tariff barriers against these imports, while her new partners would soon be able to export their goods to Britain tariff-free.
This posed difficulties which no other Common Market country had faced. As the price of Britain’s entry, she and her Commonwealth would now be expected to abandon much of their existing trade with each other. In the weeks before his announcement in July of Britain’s intention to join, therefore, Macmillan sent several of his Cabinet ministers, led by Duncan Sandys, round the Commonwealth capitals, pleading for their agreement to what he was about to do. These were countries which, less than twenty years before, had sent some four million of their citizens to fight alongside Britain in World War Two. Now they were to be dealt a harsh economic blow.
The response from Ottawa typified the sentiment: ‘the Canadian ministers indicated that their Government’s assessment of the situation was different from that put forward by Mr Sandys’; and ‘expressed grave concern… about the political and economic effects which British membership in the European Economic Community would have on Canada and on the Commonwealth as a whole’.
The main task confronting Heath as he began formal negotiations in November was to ensure that the damage inflicted on Britain’s Commonwealth partners was at least softened. His top priority was to persuade his prospective new partners to grant ‘derogations’. These would extend for as long as possible the period in which imports from the Commonwealth could continue on terms which might protect its producers while they searched for new markets. But, as he got down to detailed, day-by-day argument over arrangements for imports of New Zealand butter or Australian beef, Canadian wheat or West Indian sugar, it was not long before Heath was forced to realise that his new partners were not prepared to make many concessions. The reason was simple. For the Six this was precisely the test of Britain’s willingness to abandon her old, traditional role in the world and to demonstrate her willingness now to develop a wholly new loyalties.
What Heath did not realise was that there was one member of the Six not only reluctant to make any concessions at all but actually opposed to Britain’s entry even before the talks began.
De Gaulle plays his own game
President de Gaulle was unlike any other national leader post-war Europe had known. As Churchill’s proud ‘Constable of France’, he saw himself as the man who had saved his country twice. The first was at the end of the Second World War when he had joined with the Western allies in liberating his country from the Germans and restoring her national government; then again in 1958. Then he had rescued France from the chaos of the Fourth Republic to set up his new ‘Fifth Republic’, the regime which would restore French national self-respect. But with the continuing threat of internal instability being exported back across the Mediterranean from the fearful civil war in Algeria, de Gaulle was aware that any time France might again be plunged into violent chaos. In his eleven years in office he faced no fewer than 34 assassination attempts, more than any other statesman in history.
For these reasons, de Gaulle also saw the ‘European Communities’ and his country’s place in them very differently from any other of their leaders. One of his first acts on becoming France’s president in July 1958 had been to arrange a meeting with Adenauer, which took place in September at de Gaulle’s home in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. They announced that close co-operation between France and Germany was the foundation of ‘all constructive endeavour in Europe’, and that this should be put on an organised basis. In 1959, de Gaulle’s prime minister Michel Debré took this idea forward in a speech proposing that the Six should be aiming not only at economic but also political union. The way to this should be paved by frequent consultations between their leaders. By 1960, both publicly and privately, de Gaulle was canvassing the idea not merely of regular meetings of the Six heads of government but of ‘standing commissions’ to co-ordinate policies on political, defence and cultural issues, with their own secretariat.
What de Gaulle was here evolving was his vision of a new kind of integration among the Six, shaped not on supranational but intergovernmental lines: his vision of what he was to call a ‘Europe des Etats’. De Gaulle had never been an enthusiast for what he regarded as Monnet’s supranational obsessions. As he once remarked ‘we are no longer in the era when M. Monnet gave the orders’. Not only did de Gaulle himself seem unsympathetic to Monnet’s ideas, but his prime minister Debré so detested them that he would allegedly pass Monnet with averted gaze. A later commentator noted that ‘the European reformation had scarcely begun, and the counter-reformation was installed in Paris’.
The impression thus conveyed in 1960, that ‘Europe’ might now be moving away from supranationalism towards a more intergovernmental approach, had a significant impact part on Macmillan and his advisers. It held out the possibility that, by skilful negotiation of her terms of entry, Britain might use her influence to help redirect the EEC onto the path of intergovernmentalism.
In February 1961, de Gaulle’s proposals for ‘closer political co-operation’ were discussed at a summit meeting of the Six in Paris, which set up a committee under Christian Fouchet to consider them. These talks had been preceded by a private meeting between de Gaulle and Adenauer, intended to patch up their bitter disagreements the following year over the abortive East-West summit on Berlin.
Adenauer had wanted to clear the air about de Gaulle’s seeming desire to emasculate the Community, and also to discuss France’s plans regarding Nato. He appeared sufficiently satisfied to agree to de Gaulle’s wish for more ‘political co-operation’. At the subsequent meeting with their EEC partners, despite a Dutch protest that the rest of the Six should not always be bound by what was agreed between Germany and France, it was resolved that the Fouchet committee should report on further political union. This would not, however, involve any further supranational elements, and would respect national sovereignty with full right of veto.
Fouchet’s recommendations were considered at two more heads of government meetings in Bonn, one in May, the second in July. Under discussion were two rival proposals: a ‘Union of States’, proposed by the French, and a ‘union of peoples’ preferred by the rest of the Six. Monnet himself had high hopes for the July meeting, noting in his memoirs that ‘The first steps towards a European currency now also seemed to be practicable’. His optimism was misplaced, and in his memoirs he plaintively asked why at this time France should have been trying ‘to bring back into an intergovernmental framework what had already become a Community?’
Nevertheless the Six did agree on what became known as the Bonn Declaration, announcing on 18 July their decision ‘to give shape to the will for political union already implicit in the Treaties establishing the European Communities’. This was just thirteen days before Macmillan announced to the world Britain’s decision to apply for entry.
Franco-German rapprochement
From now on, over the next seventeen months two quite different dramas were to unfold simultaneously: in public, it seemed, wholly unrelated, but behind the scenes, in important respects, linked.
The first drama, little understood in Britain, was the coming together of de Gaulle’s France and Adenauer’s Germany in a new and much closer alliance. It was based on a sense that they shared a European identity in a way which set them apart from the British and even more from the Americans. A powerful trigger for their new sense of common identity was the immense international crisis which blew up on Sunday 13 August 1961, when East Germany sealed off West Berlin’s borders with the GDR and began to build the ‘Berlin Wall’. The long-simmering East-West tension over Berlin had at last come to a head. When the initial response of the Kennedy government was slow and uncertain, as was that of the British, this reinforced the suspicions of Adenauer and de Gaulle that Anglo-US support could not be relied on.
On 19 October 1961, the French delegation on the Fouchet committee presented a draft treaty to establish a union between the countries of the Six. This proposed severing Europe’s dependence for military security on the Atlantic Alliance and the USA, reflecting de Gaulle’s wish for Europe to be more self-reliant, centred on a Franco-German alliance. De Gaulle further proposed a radical reconstruction of the EEC, turning it into a voluntary union of independent states. Its secretariat would be based in Paris and there would be extensive national veto powers over all common policies. Effectively, the proposals envisaged a drastic dilution of the powers of the Commission and Council of Ministers, and the subjection of Community law to national law. This was the supreme expression of de Gaulle’s vision of a ‘Europe des Etats’. Predictably, the reaction of the other five governments was hostile.
Early in the New Year of 1962, tensions were further exacerbated when the French put forward ‘a revised draft treaty’ which, far from taking account of the objections of the others, seemed to be worse in many respects than the original. According to one authority, the amended plan had been drawn up in de Gaulle’s own hand.
Shortly afterwards, on 9 February 1962, de Gaulle asked for an urgent meeting with Adenauer to discuss his ‘Fouchet proposals’ and European security. The Chancellor had only recently suffered a heart attack, and was frail, ‘tetchy and bad-tempered’, although his illness had been kept secret, even from de Gaulle. They met in a hotel in Baden-Baden, where Adenauer refused to support de Gaulle’s idea of a looser EEC structure. But the meeting marked a distinct warming in the relationship between the two leaders, not least as they were able to agree on their mistrust of American and British attitudes towards the Soviets, and the absolute necessity of avoiding another Franco-German war. Most importantly, de Gaulle was completely at one with Adenauer on the importance of not making deals with the Soviets on Berlin. They shared concern that the Americans and British were prepared to make concession to placate Khrushchev. Adenauer was beginning to look to France as his only reliable ally.
De Gaulle’s real agenda
During this time, the negotiations for Britain’s entry into the EEC were continuing in Brussels, as if none of these fundamental shifts in thinking about the future of ‘European project’ were taking place. Yet the greatest irony was that, at the very time when it seemed de Gaulle was moving away from the concept of supranationalism, he was in fact looking to the supranational mechanisms of the EEC to solve a problem which threatened the very existence of the State.
Nowhere in the mainstream histories of that time or the memoirs of politicians is there any real understanding of just how important to France had become her agriculture, which in 1961 still accounted for 25 percent of all her employment, against only four percent in the United Kingdom. In the years immediately after the war all European countries had introduced state subsidies to their agriculture, to avoid any repetition of the food shortages of the wartime period or the farming depression of the 1930s. But no country had come to regard the subsidy system as politically more important than France.
The effect of subsidies on French agriculture had been a huge boost in output. But this had led to persistent downward pressures on prices, which in turn threatened the economic viability of the mass of French farms, many of them small, inefficient peasant holdings. This aroused in the minds of France’s politicians a nightmare: the thought of millions of small farmers being displaced from the land and gravitating to towns and cities which could offer them neither jobs nor accommodation. The fear was that they would lose their naturally conservative political allegiances and become a fertile breeding ground for discontent. In a country where the Communist Party was the largest single political grouping, the spectre of the Communists sweeping to power on the votes of dispossessed agrarian workers was terrifying. Even armed revolution could not be ruled out. In France’s highly unstable political structure, it was vital to the very survival of the State that the farmers and their families should be kept on the land.
To that effect, the Fourth Republic had spent ever-increasing sums on farm subsidies, so much so that the expenditure threatened to bankrupt the State. Yet the subsidies themselves only exacerbated the problem. They drew into production marginal land, while increased income encouraged investment in machinery. In 1950, the number of tractors in the Six as a whole had stood at only 370,000, while, by 1962, the number had grown to 2,300,000. Wheat production in the mid-1950s increased by eight times. Sugar and wine production rose by over three hundred percent. Ever-larger government-funded stockpiles and export subsidies were needed.
Furthermore, by the early 1960s, production was still increasing at a rate of twenty percent per annum. Eleven million of the twenty-four million dairy cows in the Six were French, each producing less than a quarter of the milk yield of Dutch animals. Dairy subsidies alone were costing the French taxpayer 1.35 billion francs (equivalent to £3 billion a year at 2003 prices), of which 70 million were used to dump powdered milk on the Indian and Mexican markets. Huge further sums were spent on storage and processing, while the surplus ‘butter mountain’ stood at 200,000 tons. French farm policy was clearly unsustainable. Politically, however, it was essential.
Only forty years later, in a meticulously researched academic paper, did an American professor, Andrew Moravcsik , finally bring to light just how crucial this issue had become to the future not just of France but of the entire European Community. When de Gaulle took power in 1958, France’s agricultural surpluses had already reached crisis point. Attempts to reform the subsidy system had met with stiff opposition, which presented a dangerous threat to his electoral base. De Gaulle was being forced to continue payments on a scale the French government could simply no longer afford. At a crisis Cabinet meeting in August 1962, with the Algerian crisis now largely over, he was to call the ‘stabilisation’ of agriculture the ‘most important problem’ facing France. If the problems are not resolved, de Gaulle declared, ‘we will have another Algeria on our own soil’.
De Gaulle and his advisers realised there were only two ways to remedy this crisis. The first was to find new export markets for France’s massive surpluses. The other was to find an additional source of finance for the subsidies. The EEC provided a possible answer. What had become vital, they concluded, was to use it to set up an agricultural policy which could give French farmers access both to external markets and also to additional funding, primarily from Germany. But it was vital was that the policy met France’s needs. Thus, despite his overt dislike of supranational institutions, de Gaulle came to regard the EEC as the most essential instrument in furthering France’s national interest.
The idea of a ‘Common Agricultural Policy’ went back to the Spaak report in 1955, and the outlines of such a policy had been included in Articles 38 to 45 of the Rome Treaty. But this amounted to no more than vague declarations of contradictory principles, such as the commitments: ‘to ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community’; ‘to increase agricultural productivity by promoting technical progress’; and ‘to ensure the availability of supplies’. There were no indications as to how these ends should be achieved. In 1958, a conference had been held in the Italian town of Stresa to develop such a policy. But it was to be nearly eleven years before full agreement was reached on the details and the all-important financing arrangements; and this was because the driving force throughout that period, ensuring that these met her own needs above all, was France.
A start had been made in 1960 when the agriculture Commissioner Sicco Mansholt produced a 300-page document, with a deadline for agreement at the end of 1961. The ‘Mansholt Plan’ proposed replacing all direct national subsidies to agriculture with a system of variable levies and support prices, under the centralised control of the Commission. But, for the next two years, Germany consistently blocked attempts to agree the details. German farm subsidies were the highest in the Six and any attempt to rationalise and harmonise the support structure would disadvantage her farmers. Only on 14 January 1962, after what Hallstein famously described as ‘137 hours of discussion, with 214 hours in sub-committee; 582,000 pages of documents; three heart attacks’, did the Germans finally agree to give legal effect to the CAP. The clock was ‘stopped’ for two weeks and the conclusions back-dated to meet the symbolic 31 December deadline.
With the basic principles agreed, however, the next step was to work out the all-important financial mechanisms. At France’s insistence, levies on imported goods were to be the main source of income, a provision which particularly favoured her system, as – if her overseas departments were included – her imports of commodities were minimal.
This was where France would need to play her hand with infinite subtlety and ruthlessness. Not only would the system ensured the maximum contribution from other members, it would ensure that Britain, which imported a much higher proportion of her food than any of the Six, mainly from the Commonwealth, would be a major contributor. Furthermore, as this source of supply was eliminated, she could provide French farmers with their biggest export market of all.
The central problem for France, however, was that Britain, with the much higher productivity of her own farming sector, would be unwilling to take on the burden of paying for French agricultural support. Furthermore, after 1966, it had been agreed that decisions on the future of the CAP would be taken by qualified majority voting. If Britain was allowed to enter before the financial arrangements for the CAP had been settled, she would therefore be likely to side with Germany to block France’s proposals. At all costs, Britain had to be excluded from the EEC until those final agreements on the CAP were in place. Therein lay the explanation for the dramas to come.
De Gaulle prepares to veto
By the spring of 1962, de Gaulle had three issues at the head of his agenda. The first was his ‘Fouchet proposals’ for political union of the Six. On the grounds that these would seriously influence the nature of the union Britain was seeking to join, Heath had made a belated bid for Britain to be involved in the discussions. At a WEU meeting on 10 April, he made plain Britain’s assumption that the existing Communities would be the foundation on which ‘Europe would be built’, but that he hoped their work could be ‘knit together with the new political structure in a coherent and effective whole’. There was little need for his concern, because shortly afterwards the proposals collapsed, when France’s partners could not agree a way forward.
De Gaulle was anyway by this time becoming more preoccupied by his new alliance with Adenauer. In the same month of April, Adenauer’s worst fears about American policy seemed to be confirmed when the US Secretary of State Dean Rusk came up with a new plan for Berlin, which seemed to be proposing de facto recognition of the GDR. Given only forty-eight hours to respond, Adenauer had no option but to reject it, and at his request, de Gaulle followed suit. When Kennedy endorsed Rusk’s action and criticised Adenauer, affirming that negotiations with the Soviet Union over Berlin would continue, relations between Adenauer and Kennedy became frigid. With this unprecedented rift having developed between West Germany and the United States, de Gaulle moved in to cement the Franco-German axis. He invited Adenauer to make a state visit to France two months later, in July.
The third item on de Gaulle’s agenda was Britain’s application to join the EEC. By now he was certain Britain would have to be kept out. On 19 May, Macmillan recorded in his diary that the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Pierson Dixon, conveyed the impression that de Gaulle ‘has now definitely decided to exclude us’. Macmillan forlornly noted: ‘others (and I am one) do not feel that de Gaulle has definitely made up his mind’.
Throughout, Macmillan remained wholly oblivious to the hidden element in de Gaulle determination to keep Britain out. He was still convinced that the key to changing the General’s mind lay in finding some way to offer him help with nuclear weapons: perhaps by talking the Americans into assisting the French (although it had already been made clear to him that this was very unlikely). An alternative was an Anglo-French arrangement for ‘joint targeting of nuclear forces’, without the direct involvement of the United States.
In pursuit of his fantasy, on 2-3 June, Macmillan met with de Gaulle in a beautiful small chateau near Paris, Champs, once the home of Madame de Pompadour. He described his host as playing ‘the role of a stately monarch unbending a little to the representative of a once hostile but now friendly country’. But de Gaulle ‘repeated his preference for a Six without Britain; first, because British entry would entirely alter the character of the Community’. Only secondly did de Gaulle offer the view that ‘Britain was too tied to America’.
The French Ambassador to London, de Courcel, who was present at the discussions, recorded that Macmillan made a direct offer of Franco-British nuclear collaboration as an implied quid pro quo for France supporting British EEC entry. But contrary to British expectations, de Gaulle did not react. Instead, he emphasised France’s absolute need to export her agricultural surpluses and insistently raised the issue of Commonwealth imports, which he insisted was the ‘most fundamental’ issue.
Throughout the discussions, Macmillan, completely failed to understand what was at stake. Responding to de Gaulle’s demand that Commonwealth imports should be limited to tropical products only, he insisted on transitional arrangements, confirming de Gaulle’s worst fears. And when Macmillan tried to shift the conversation away from agriculture, de Gaulle kept returning to it. Coming away without the first idea of what had transpired, Macmillan later reported to the Queen that ‘the danger of the French opposing a resolute veto to our application has now been avoided, at least for the time being’.
The following month Adenauer paid his state visit to France, the first by a German Chancellor since the war. The six day visit culminated on 8 July with the two leaders attending High Mass in Rheims cathedral, after having taken the salute at a parade of French and German troops outside the city. It was the first time since the battle of Leipzig in 1813 that French and German troops had been on the same side. In their private discussions, de Gaulle expressed his doubts about Britain joining the EEC. When Adenauer did not disagree, the General knew he had his backing. This had been de Gaulle’s real purpose in so assiduously cultivating the alliance with Adenauer. With his flank secure, he now felt able to instruct his negotiators in Brussels to take a harder line with the British.
There were now only four weeks left before the marathon talks in Brussels broke up for the summer. Already the negotiators for the Six had been startled by how many concessions Heath had been prepared to make on Britain’s behalf, particularly over Commonwealth imports and even on issues formerly thought to be ‘non-negotiable’. This had provoked a joint statement by the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, on the eve of Macmillan’s visit to Champs, highly critical of Britain’s new readiness to abandon imperial preferences.
It was all to no avail. At the final session of the talks, during the night of 4-5 August, when everyone was exhausted, the chairman from Luxembourg, Eugène Schaus, had collapsed at two in the morning. Yet the session had continued with Spaak in the chair and, as Heath was to record:
A little before 4 a.m., the French unexpectedly demanded that we should sign a paper on financing the CAP, committing us to an interpretation of the financial regulation favourable to the French. They wanted a new tariff arrangement on imports from outside the EEC which would maintain the price of domestic produce. The action was self-evidently dilatory in intent, and I refused to be bounced into a snap judgment on such a complex matter. I was supported in this by the Germans and the Dutch, who were as interested as I was. The French redrafted the document twice, but this only hardened my resolve. This was no way to carry on such an important negotiation, and I was having none of it. In response, Couve de Murville said that he would reserve his position regarding food imports from the British Commonwealth, a matter which I had thought to be fully resolved.
It was a classic negotiating ambush, of a kind which in the years ahead was to become only too familiar. With no agreement possible, the talks had to be adjourned until the autumn. Then the French had made it clearer than ever that they had no intention of allowing Britain’s application to succeed.
The following month, on 5 September, President de Gaulle began a triumphant state visit to the German Federal Republic, regarded as even more successful than his host’s visit to France. In their private talks, they agreed that Britain must be excluded from the EEC, and de Gaulle continued the courtship with a six-page memorandum, suggesting a solemn agreement between the French and German governments to co-ordinate their foreign policy and defence. Without even referring to his own Cabinet, Adenauer signalled that such an agreement would be the first priority of his policy.
The Denouement approaches
In Britain that autumn the Common Market issue briefly moved to the centre of the political stage. Although the Brussels negotiations had been dragging on for a year, they had never attracted much public interest. Now, as one historian put it, they seemed to be ‘inexplicably dragging out as if scripted by Kafka. Hours and even days were being taken up by discussion of the tariff on Indian tea or Australian kangaroo meat’.
Belatedly the newspapers published turgid supplements, trying to explain in laborious detail what joining the Common Market would entail, many to be thrown away unread. Apart from the super-patriotic, right-wing titles owned by the ageing Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, a long-standing champion of the ‘Empire’, most of the press supported British entry, without showing any understanding of its deeper implications. As the government wanted, the issue was presented almost entirely in terms of economics and the supposed benefits that would follow from British industry being exposed to the ‘icy blasts of competition’ from the more ‘dynamic’ economies of the Six.
The greatest enthusiasm for Britain’s involvement with ‘Europe’ was expressed by a group of younger writers and politicians representing what came to be dubbed the ‘What’s Wrong With Britain school of journalism’. These publicists, such as Michael Shanks, author of a best-selling paperback The Stagnant Society, or the Labour MP Anthony Crosland, a regular contributor to the intellectual monthly Encounter, enjoyed contrasting what they saw as a stuffy, tradition-bound, class-ridden, obsolete, inefficient Britain, lost in nostalgia for the days of empire, with what they saw as the newly energetic, innovative, efficient ‘Europeans’. These paragons of virtue did not have licensing laws which prevented drinking after 10.30 at night and had discovered the secret of economic ‘dynamism’ which Britain had so obviously lost.
This mind-set in turn reflected a much deeper shift in social attitudes which was now evident at all levels of British society. It had first appeared in the late 1950s, in the rise of a new ‘youth-culture’, centred on rock ‘n roll, an obsessive new fashion-consciousness and a sense of rebellion against everything which seemed identified with Britain’s imperial past, from Establishment institutions such as the monarchy to sexual morality. The 1960s had brought a sense that Britain was moving rapidly towards a new kind of society, where all the conventions of belief and behaviour associated with Britain’s traditional view of herself suddenly seemed out of date.
Politically this expressed itself in the striking change which had come over the image of Macmillan who, at the time of his election victory in 1959, had been identified with the social changes which were carrying Britain into a new age. But in 1961, with his languid aristocratic style, he had quite suddenly come to be seen as a tired, Edwardian grandfather-figure, particularly when measured against the young and ‘dynamic’ new President Kennedy across the Atlantic. By a new generation of satirists, in the revue Beyond The Fringe, in the new magazine Private Eye, and in the BBC’s television show That Was The Week That Was, Macmillan was now ridiculed. He was an antediluvian relic of a past age, out of touch with the ‘exciting’ and ‘irreverent’ new world now taking shape around him.
Then in early October, the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell electrified his party’s conference at Brighton with a speech wholly dedicated to the Common Market. Lasting one hundred and five minutes, it was arguably the most remarkable speech made to a party conference in the post-war era. He began by observing that the level of debate in the media over this ‘crucial, complex and difficult issue’ had not been high. He then, for more than an hour and a half, ranged in magisterial fashion across all the individual issues raised by Britain’s application, analysing each in turn, putting the arguments on both sides with devastating clarity, lit by flashes of humour.
He began by discussing at length the economic implications of joining a protectionist trading bloc and abandoning Britain’s main trading partners in the Commonwealth and EFTA, although, as he noted, these were now showing a more impressive rate of economic growth than the Six. He pointed out that, as even Heath was now being forced to admit, as an ‘essential part of the Common Market agricultural policy’ now taking shape, Britain would be obliged ‘to import expensive food from the continent of Europe in place of cheap food from the Commonwealth’.
He addressed the by-now familiar claim that, by joining the EEC, would have a ‘home market of 220 million people’, pointing out that some of the most successful and efficient economies in Europe belonged to small countries, such as Switzerland and Sweden, which did not have large home markets. He dismissed the more extravagant claims being made for the economic benefits of joining the EEC as ‘rubbish’, explaining that Britain would not find a solution to her economic malaise simply from joining the Common Market. Ultimately she would only be able to solve it by her own internal efforts.
Gaitskell then turned to the political aspects of merging Britain’s destiny with Europe. Here he challenged Macmillan for being nothing like frank enough with the British people. ‘We are told’, he said, ‘that the Economic Community is not just a customs union, that all who framed it saw it as a stepping stone towards political integration’. But Macmillan was keeping remarkably quiet about the ‘serious political obligations’ this might imply. What the move towards ‘political’ or ‘federal’ union meant, Gaitskell explained, was that powers would be taken from national governments and handed to the new federal government. If Britain was to become part of this, she would be ‘no more than a state… in the United States of Europe, such as Texas and California’. If this process was ultimately to lead the British people to hand over all the most important decisions on economic and foreign policy and defence to a ‘supranational system’, to be decided by a Council of Ministers or a ‘federal parliament’, Britain would become no more than ‘a province of Europe’. It was this which prompted Gaitskell to the most famous passage in his speech, where he said:
We must be clear about this; it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state… it means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say ‘let it end’. But my goodness, it is a decision which needs a little care and thought.
Gaitskell ended by pointing out that Macmillan had no mandate for what he was proposing. Indeed it ran wholly contrary to everything the government had been telling the British people during the previous general election campaign. Yet they were now, in effect, being told that they were ‘not capable of judging his issue – the government knows best, the top people are the only people who can really understand it… the classic argument of every tyranny in history’. The Labour Party proposed that the only honest, democratic way to proceed was to see what terms emerged from the negotiations, then put the most important decision the British people had ever faced to the test of an election. The speech received a tumultuous ovation.
However, not all the Labour delegates were impressed. Dennis Healey thought the argument exaggerated. He found it ‘inconceivable that the Common Market would acquire supranational powers in any major area, still less become a federation’. He did not share Gaitskell’s ‘romantic chauvinism’ and thought the whole issue ‘a futile distraction’. In any case, ‘It was certain that de Gaulle would veto Britain’s entry’.
Macmillan’s response when the Conservatives met for their own conference at Llandudno the following week was to ignore Gaitskell’s detailed analysis, and to resort to ridicule. Referring to his passage on the moves towards political union, he said:
Mr Gaitskell now prattles on about our being reduced to the status of Texas or California. What nonsense!… Certainly if I believed that I would not touch it on any terms… there can be no question of Britain being outvoted into some arrangement which we found incompatible with our needs and responsibilities and traditions.
But the headlines were reserved for Macmillan’s quotation of an old music hall song, in which he sought to contrast his own decisiveness with Gaitskell’s lack of courage:
She wouldn’t say ‘yes’, she wouldn’t say ‘no’.
She wouldn’t say ‘stay’, she wouldn’t say ‘go’.
She wanted to climb but she dreaded to fall.
So she bided her time, and clung to the wall.
The four thousand Tory delegates, most of whom sported ‘Yes’ badges, laughed heartily. They then gave Macmillan an ovation of his own, to show their backing for a policy which all but a handful of them two years earlier would have rejected as an unthinkable betrayal of their country, the Commonwealth and a thousand years of British history.
The irony was that, although none of those hearing these speeches were aware of it, the die against British entry had already been cast. The day after Macmillan’s speech, pictures taken by an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft identified nuclear-capable Soviet missiles on the Communist island of Cuba, only 90 miles off the Florida coast. So began the ‘Cuban missile crisis’ which, by 25 October had escalated to the point where nuclear war had seemed imminent. What emerged was evidence of America’s willingness to pursue her own interests, irrespective of the effects on her allies, even to the brink of nuclear war. One effect of that was to cement the Franco-German relationship.
On 15 December 1962, Macmillan met de Gaulle at Rambouillet. Six weeks after the end of the Cuba crisis, Macmillan was more determined than ever to maintain Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, but he had just learned that the US had cancelled the missile he hoped to buy - the Skybolt. Macmillan told de Gaulle that, as a replacement, he planned to ask Kennedy for Polaris. But de Gaulle, seemed wholly preoccupied with the difficulties at the Brussels negotiations. ‘In the Six, France could say ‘no’, even against the Germans; she could stop policies with which she disagreed, because of the strength of her position. Once Britain and all the rest joined, things would be different’, he later reflected.
This came as a shock to Macmillan. With ‘indignation’, he accused de Gaulle of putting forward ‘a fundamental objection to Britain’s application’. He was right. De Gaulle had already decided to turn this ‘fundamental objection’ into a veto, which he explained to his own Cabinet a few days later, on 19 December 1962:
If Great Britain and… the Commonwealth enter, it would be as if the Common Market had… dissolved within a large free trade area… Always the same question is posed, but the British don’t answer. Instead, they say, ‘It’s the French who don’t want it’… To please the British, should we call into question the Common Market and the negotiation of the agricultural regulations that benefit us? All this would be difficult to accept… Britain continues to supply itself cheaply in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc. The Germans are dying to do the same in Argentina. The others would follow. What will we do with European, and particularly French surpluses? If we have to spend 500 billion [francs] a year on agricultural subsidies, what will happen if the Common Market can no longer assist us? These eminently practical questions should not be resolved on the basis of sentiments. [Macmillan] is melancholy and so am I. We would prefer Macmillan’s Britain to that of Labour, and we would like to help him stay in office. But what can I do? Except to sing him the Edith Piaf song: Ne pleurez pas, Milord.
Still failing to recognise de Gaulle’s real concern, Macmillan pursued the acquisition of Polaris during a bilateral summit with Kennedy at Nassau on 18-21 December 1962, when he asked Kennedy to make the missile available to both Britain and France. Kennedy was only prepared to say, delphically, that the two countries might be given Polaris on ‘similar terms’. He knew that Britain was in a position to make her own thermo-nuclear warheads while France was not; which meant that, even if Congress could be persuaded to approve, there was no way France could be given the missiles. But the point was anyway irrelevant.
On 14 January 1963, under the crystal chandeliers of the largest, most ornate room in the Elysée Palace in Paris, and without warning his partners in the Six, de Gaulle announced in front of the world’s press that he intended to veto Britain’s entry. In the most-quoted passage of his 1500-word statement, followed by planted questions from the audience, he declared:
England, in effect is insular. She is maritime. She is linked through her trade, her markets, her supply lines to the most distant countries. She pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities and only slightly agricultural ones. She has, in all her doings, very marked and very original habits and traditions. In short England’s nature, England’s structure, England’s very situation differs profoundly from those of the Continentals.
This part of the text has often been interpreted as simply as a nationalistic attack on Britain. Commentators have used it to argue that Britain was not ready to be ‘European’, going on to argue that de Gaulle vetoed the British application because of Macmillan’s deal with Kennedy over Polaris. This is cited as evidence of Macmillan’s ‘Atlanticism’ and his preference for the ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Certainly this weighed heavily with de Gaulle, as he saw the whole philosophy of the British and the Americans as quite different from that of the ‘Europeans’, characterised above all by France and Germany.
Rarely quoted, however, are the preceding paragraphs, in which de Gaulle could hardly have revealed his real concern more clearly. He referred to the vagueness of the Treaty of Rome on agriculture, and stated that, for France, this had to be ‘settled’:
It is obvious that agriculture is an essential element in our national activity as a whole. We cannot conceive of a Common Market in which French agriculture would not find outlets in keeping with its production. And we agree further that, of the Six, we are the country on which this necessity is imposed in the most imperative manner. That is why when, last January, consideration was given to the setting in motion of the second phase of the Treaty – in other words a practical start in its application – we were led to pose the entry of agriculture into the Common Market as a formal condition. This was finally accepted by our partners, but very difficult and very complex arrangements were needed and some rulings are still outstanding.
In this, de Gaulle signalled his concern for the consequences of Britain being allowed to take part in the negotiations before detailed arrangements for the CAP had been finalised. This is confirmed by de Gaulle’s own memoirs. Referring to Britain’s initial antagonism to the Common Market, and her attempt to set up a rival to it in EFTA, he says that, by the middle of 1961, the British had ‘returned to the offensive’:
Having failed from without to prevent the birth of the Community, they now planned to paralyse it from within. Instead of calling for an end to it, they now declared that they themselves were eager to join, and proposed examining the conditions on which they might do so, ‘provided that their special relationship with their Commonwealth and their associates in the free trade area were taken into consideration, as well as their special interests in respect of agriculture’. To submit to this would obviously have meant abandoning the Common Market as originally conceived… I could see the day approaching when I should either have to remove the obstruction and put an end to the tergiversation, or extricate France from an enterprise which had gone astray almost as soon as it had begun.
The inescapable inference is that de Gaulle was convinced that Britain’s entry would have meant ‘abandoning the Common Market as originally conceived’, threatening the very core of his survival strategy. She could not be permitted to join until the financial details of the CAP had been settled. And, at last, it seems, Macmillan begun to understand. On 11 February 1963, he told the Commons, ‘The end did not come because the discussions were menaced with failure. On the contrary, it was because they threatened to succeed’. In his memoirs, Heath also recognised that agriculture had been a crucial issue, noting that
…the Community had agreed, largely under pressure from the French, to sort out the framework of the new policy before entering into serious discussions with us on the arrangement for our entry. The French did not wish the British to be at the table taking part in the formative discussions on the CAP, for fear that we might disrupt the very favourable arrangements they otherwise had every reason to expect from their partners.
Despite this, Heath never acknowledged that this very issue lay at the heart of the French veto. After the first three month of negotiations, he expressed his suspicions to one of his senior civil servants that the French seemed to want to drag out the talks as long as possible. He gave three reasons:
The French expected that opposition would grow in the UK the longer the negotiations progressed; that our own desire to reach an agreement would weaken; and, finally, that something else would turn up to prevent the negotiations being successfully concluded.
The third reason, Heath suggested, was to prove the most crucial. The French suspected that our position was becoming progressively weaker economically, politically and militarily, viz-Ã -viz both the Six and the US. In their view, the longer matters were drawn out, the greater the opportunity for securing better terms for the Community and themselves in particular.
There is something of the incurable ‘little Englander’ in these explanations. Heath’s view of the negotiations was totally Anglocentric. To be fair, wrapped up in the narrow, sterile world of the Brussels negotiating circuit, he could hardly have been expected to have grasped the bigger picture. For that, he was totally reliant on his officials. Yet the officials themselves had no better knowledge. A report on the negotiations prepared by the UK delegation was to admit that, during the period between Britain’s application and the start of the negotiations, in contrast to the ‘intense consultation and discussion’ London had enjoyed with Commonwealth countries, contacts with the Six and the Commission had been minimal, and confined only to ‘questions of procedure’:
there was very little knowledge in London of the manner in which the Member Governments, and the Institutions of the Community, were interpreting the provisions of the Treaty of Rome. It is at least possible that, if we had initiated during this period preliminary consultations on matters of substance with Member Governments, and still more with the Commission, we might have acquired information on which we should have been able to base a more informed judgement.
The real failure, therefore, lay with the Foreign Office. Informed analysis would have indicated that a British application could not succeed. The signals were there. Low-key warnings were given. But entirely lacking from the tortuous analyses presented to Macmillan and the Cabinet by the officials was any recognition of the true French agenda. Later commentators such as Denman and Young were to suggest that, if Macmillan’s approach had not been so timid and Britain had come forward with more concessions before the 1962 summer break, the negotiations might have succeeded. Of Macmillan, Young writes:
The only future for Britain, it soon turned out, was the one Macmillan sought to bring about. His problem was that he did not try hard enough to achieve it. Even as he plunged towards the future, he was besotted and ensnared by the past.
Denman and Young praise the prescience of Sir Frank Lee, in ‘convincing’ Macmillan that Britain should apply to join the EEC. Their books are peppered with praise for the ‘brilliance’ of the various civil servants who had the ‘vision’ to appreciate how Britain’s way forward lay with ‘Europe’. At heart though, both civil servants and commentators were ‘little Englanders’. Like Heath, they viewed the continent from an entirely Anglocentric perspective, assuming that, just because Britain wanted to join, the Six would roll over to admit her, failing completely to understand why French rejection was inevitable.
When this insular strategy failed and Britain’s application was finally rejected, the ‘little Englanders’ put the blame on the politicians (though not on Heath, whose ‘negotiating skills’ continued to win admiration). Yet the failure to understand the vital importance of agriculture to France, and how the CAP was then to be weighted so massively in France’s favour, led all those responsible for Britain’s application to overlook how greatly disadvantaged Britain would be when she was finally to enter. At their door must lie a great deal of the responsibility for the eventual problems in British farming, which by the late 1990s had become a major social and economic crisis. The fabled ‘Rolls-Royce minds’ of the Foreign Office and the Home Civil Service had failed in their tasks.
As for the other item at the top of de Gaulle’s agenda, only a week after he had shocked the world with his veto, Adenauer arrived in Paris for the final negotiations on their planned Franco-German treaty. On 20 January, while Adenauer was dining at the German Embassy, Monnet, Hallstein and the Dutch Commissioner, Blankenhorn, burst in to plead with him to link the Franco-German treaty with an assurance that negotiations with Britain should continue. Here de Gaulle’s assiduous courtship paid off. Adenauer refused. On 22 January the two men the signed their treaty, in the same Elysée Palace where de Gaulle, nine days earlier, had announced his veto. According to an official summary of the Elysée Treaty:
It laid the institutional groundwork for biannual summits of heads of state and government, regular consultations at the ministerial level, and generally systematic efforts by French and German policymakers to co-ordinate policies as well as to overcome differences of opinion, to achieve mutually acceptable compromise solutions. The different meetings still go through various fields of work: defence, education, youth affairs and so on, and stand therefore as the milestone of the Franco-German relationship.
This grand symbol of reconciliation was to be Adenauer’s swan song. He had initiated it without consulting his Cabinet and, when it was presented to the Bundestag for ratification, it had been accepted only with the addition of a long, rambling preamble – written by Monnet - which effectively nullified the treaty. This was the last straw for his Christian Democrat Party which, supported by the Free Democrats under Erhard, forced Adenauer to announce his retirement. The following October, at the age of 87, he reluctantly handed over the reins to the minister who had presided over West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’.
De Gaulle, when he was told of the treatment of the treaty was reported to have greeted the rebuff with a verbal shrug: ‘Treaties are like maidens and roses, they each have their day’. In securing Adenauer’s support for his veto, the treaty had, in fact, already served its purpose.
Into the twilight
The Six formally confirmed Britain’s rejection on 28 January 1963. The news came as Britain was enduring the harshest winter of modern times. Much of the island was covered by deep snow from the beginning of January to March. For weeks London was obscured under a thick layer of freezing fog. It helped Hugh Gaitskell to a sudden death, from a rare chest disease, at the age of only 56. He was succeeded as Labour leader by Harold Wilson.
Thus began a year in which the mood of English life was to become ever more febrile. Already wild rumours were circulating in London of some immense scandal hanging over the government, which finally broke into the open in June when Macmillan’s war minister, John Profumo, admitted he had lied to the Commons about an affair with a girl who was also the mistress of a senior Soviet spy. The headlines were dominated for weeks by further revelations and rumours which threatened to incriminate famous names across the British Establishment.
Equally hypnotic at the same time was the excitement surrounding the emergence of the Beatles, the supreme ‘dream heroes’ of 1960s popular culture. Their ‘irreverence’ and ‘classlessness’ seemed to epitomise the social revolution which had been engulfing Britain since the late 1950s, expressed in everything from the sexual ‘new morality’ to the rise of ‘satire’. The culminatory shock in a year of almost unbroken hysteria in English life was the news on 22 November from across the Atlantic of the assassination of that other supreme 1960s ‘dream hero’, President Kennedy.
After the dramatic international events of the earlier years of the decade, with the two greatest crises of the Cold War over Berlin and Cuba, the mood of the world itself now changed. America, through the middle years of the 1960s, became increasingly preoccupied by race riots in her cities at home and her ever greater involvement in the Vietnam war abroad. In the Soviet Union in October 1964 Khruschev was overthrown. In Britain, a strange unreality seemed to settle over national life, as ever more obsessive attention came to be paid to the new ‘pop culture’ and the hailing of London as ‘the most swinging city in the world’.
Equally unreal seemed the bubble of make-believe surrounding the new government under Wilson, which in October 1964 scraped into power on the promise of creating a ‘dynamic’ and ‘classless’ ‘New Britain’. Scarcely noticed but with almost frenzied speed, Britain was now freeing herself of almost all her remaining colonies across the globe. When in January 1965 Churchill died at the age of 90, his spectacular state funeral seemed like the nostalgic requiem for a Britain that had already faded into history.
Meanwhile, away from the headlines, in Brussels and Luxembourg the technocrats of Western Europe’s new supranational institutions were gradually finding their feet.
The supremacy of EC Law
By 1963 the number of European Commission officials was rising towards 2,500, and they were now planning for themselves one of the largest office blocks Europe had ever seen. The immense Berlaymont building on the eastern side of Brussels, designed as ‘a symbol of Europe’, to provide nearly two million square feet of office space to house 3000 officials on thirteen floors, would not be ready for occupation until 1967.
In the meantime, however, the Commission’s first task, to weld the Six into a single trading bloc by creating a common tariff structure against the outside world, was by 1963 almost complete. One of the year’s more controversial issues was a new Washington-inspired drive under GATT to lower import duties across the world, to be agreed through talks known as the ‘Kennedy round’. This was meant to be the first time the EEC acted as a single entity in international negotiations. But the US proposals split the Six between the ‘free traders’, led by Erhard, who supported tariff cuts, and the ‘protectionists’ led by de Gaulle. The result was a weak compromise.
The Commission’s next task was to set about promoting ‘ever closer union’ between the Six by proposing new laws. In so doing, it employing what came to be known as ‘the Monnet method’, a process of gradually extending its ‘competences’ over ever more areas of economic and social activity. Every new initiative would deprive the member states of the right to make their own laws in that area and thus would the Commission strive continually to enlarge what became known as the ‘occupied fields’. These made up those areas of policy in which it alone had the right to propose legislation. Regardless of the immediate need cited for introducing any new law, its real purpose was always to transfer ever more power from national parliaments to the supranational centre.
Under the Treaty of Rome, the Community was empowered to pass three main types of law. The first was known in English as a ‘directive’, although the original French term is simply loi or ‘law’. This was a general set of instructions which each member state then had to ‘transpose’ into a national version of its own. The second was the ‘regulation’, which immediately had the force of law throughout the Community, exactly as issued. The third was the ‘decision’, directed to a specific situation, industry or country within the Community, applicable only to those to whom it was addressed. But what these all had in common was that, in keeping with the supranational principle, the right to propose any piece of legislation lay solely with the Commission. Subject to this crucial rule, most laws would then be negotiated between officials of the Commission and those of national governments, for final approval by the politicians on the various Councils of Ministers. But in most cases, thanks to the complexity of much of the legislation going through the system, this political approval was merely a formality. Furthermore the Commission itself would increasingly develop the capacity to issue edicts in its own right, using powers delegated to it by the Councils.
An urgent requirement at this early stage of the Community’s development was to establish its legal authority, which the drafting of the Treaty had left ill-defined. This was achieved through the new European Court of Justice based in Luxembourg, the central role of which was to be to extend and reinforce the supranational authority of the Commission. One of the Court’s first objectives was to confirm the supremacy of Community law, which it brought about through two historic judgments in 1963 and 1964.
Both these landmark judgements arose from seemingly trivial cases. The first, known as the Van Gend & Loos case, upheld the claim by a Dutch transport company that the Dutch customs authorities had been in breach of the Treaty by raising a duty on imports from Germany. The second, by which the ECJ confirmed its earlier ruling, arose from Italy’s nationalisation of her electricity industry in 1962. A shareholder, Mr Costa, protested that the transfer of his shares to the National Electricity Board (ENEL) had deprived him of his dividend. He therefore refused to pay an electricity bill for 1,926 Italian lira, then equivalent to just over £1 sterling. When Mr Costa claimed that the nationalisation infringed the EC Treaty, the case was referred to the ECJ. Again the court seized this opportunity to confirm the supremacy of EC law, stating that:
By contrast with ordinary international treaties, the EEC Treaty has created its own legal system which... became an integral part of the legal systems of the Member States and which their courts are bound to apply. By creating a Community of unlimited duration, having its own institutions, its own personality, its own legal capacity and capacity of representation on the international plane and, more particularly, real powers stemming from a limitation of sovereignty or a transfer of powers from the States to the Community, the Member States have limited their sovereign rights... and have thus created a body of law which binds both their nationals and themselves.
The ECJ’s conclusions could not have put more clearly where power now lay:
It follows… that the law stemming from the Treaty, an independent source of law, could not, because of its special and original nature, be overridden by domestic legal provisions, however framed, without being deprived of its character as Community law and without the legal basis of the Community itself being called into question. The transfer by the States from their domestic legal system to the Community legal system of the rights and obligations arising under the Treaty carries with it a permanent limitation of their sovereign rights, against which a subsequent unilateral act incompatible with the concept of the Community cannot prevail.
This ruling, not agreed unanimously by the judges, was years later to be described by one expert observer of EU affairs as a ‘coup d’état’. He recalled that a proposal that Community law must be accepted as superior to national law had actually been rejected in the final drafting of the Treaty of Rome. But now this principle had been established by these two historic cases in the ECJ, it was to provide the foundation on which the whole edifice of supranational government could subsequently be built.
The CAP: the battle continues
There was still one central issue on which the Six were divided. Following his veto of British entry, de Gaulle had become increasingly agitated about the slow progress of the CAP negotiations. At a press conference in July 1963 he warned that unless the Six could meet a new deadline for finalising the budgetary arrangements, the Common Market ‘would disappear’. In November, therefore, the Commission tried to force the pace with two proposals, which became known after their author, the agriculture Commissioner, as Mansholt I and II. What emerged from these was the Commission’s acceptance that farming subsidies should be paid centrally from Community funds.
Although this proposal was intended to break the impasse, negotiations immediately stalled, resulting in chaos and confusion. When attempts to introduce standard Community farm prices failed, member states began to make their own bilateral agreements. The different subsidy schemes were still largely financed by national governments and only partly from their contributions to the Community, with no proper budgetary control. Farm surpluses continued to rise.
Monnet, who had not involved himself in the detail of all these negotiations, had become increasingly depressed. By 1965 he felt his Community was stagnating. ‘Everywhere’ he wrote later, ‘there was the danger of a return to separate policies and bilateral agreements; and Germany might well be strongly tempted to compete with France in the quest for national advantage’. But, in December 1965, French presidential elections were due and de Gaulle’s attacks on the Community had generated far more opposition in France than expected, especially among farmers.
Capitalising on de Gaulle’s weakness, Hallstein proposed that a settlement on CAP finances should be linked with contentious proposals to establish the Community’s own resources, and stronger powers for the Assembly, all in one package. He believed that, under pressure from the other member states, de Gaulle would be forced to accept the whole package. The Six had already agreed that the decision on CAP finance would be made by the Council of Ministers by 30 June at the latest but, before the meeting due in Brussels from 28-30 June, Hallstein made another tactical error. He submitted the package to the Assembly, which enthusiastically endorsed it – unsurprisingly since it was calculated to increase its own importance – asking for it to be implemented.
When the package was presented to the Council on 28 June, the French demanded immediate agreement on the CAP funding, as a resolution had been promised, only to find that the Germans, Dutch and Italians, not wishing to ignore the Assembly, called for all three of the issues in the package to be tackled as a whole. In the short space of the 72 hours scheduled for negotiation, this would have been impossible, and effectively amounted to a postponement of any agreement. The French therefore insisted that the CAP funding question should be considered separately, but the other members refused to agree to this. Right up to the deadline, the stalemate persisted, but when the Commission proposed resorting to the now familiar technique of ‘stopping the clock’, the French representatives would not play. After they had reported back to Paris, de Gaulle ordered his permanent Brussels representatives to leave Brussels and announced a French boycott of all EEC meetings concerned with new policies. The Community had entered what became known as the ‘empty chair’ crisis.
As France’s presidential elections approached, Monnet turned openly against de Gaulle, announcing he would vote against him. The combined pressures put de Gaulle in the humiliating position of winning less than 44 percent in the first round. Monnet then endorsed Mitterrand, the opposition candidate, and de Gaulle only scraped home with a margin of 55 to 45 percent, far short of the huge majorities he preferred.
Once re-elected, de Gaulle set out an ambitious price for France’s co-operation with the Community. His government called for the Commission to change its name; refrain from running an information service; abandon diplomatic missions; cease criticising member states’ policies in public; submit proposals to the Council before publicising them; and to draft vaguer directives. Most of all, however, De Gaulle demanded explicit recognition of the right of member states to veto any decision arrived at by qualified majority voting (QMV) when they considered their ‘vital interests’ to be at stake.
The power to override national vetoes lay at the very core of supranationalism and a shocked Monnet wrote in his memoirs how, behind calls for reform of the Commission,
…could be glimpsed the desire to prevent majority voting becoming normal practice in the Community from January 1966 onwards, as the Treaty laid down. I suspected that this was a goal on which de Gaulle was irrevocably bent…
Yet, despite de Gaulle’s overtly nationalistic stance through the crisis, it was significant that his officials only boycotted discussion on new policies. They continued to participate in the EEC’s work on existing policies, including the negotiations on the CAP. In fact the effect of the ‘empty chair’ policy was to draw the Community more tightly together. Consensus, hitherto elusive, suddenly became possible, and the impasse on QMV was resolved in January 1966 with an agreement between France and the others, known as the ‘Luxembourg Compromise’. This informal agreement acknowledged that any government which considered its ‘vital interests’ to be threatened by EEC legislation could prevent a decision being taken.
Another price extracted for de Gaulle’s return to co-operation was the resignation of Hallstein. But his real victory was the protection of ‘vital interests’, because the particular vital interest de Gaulle had in mind was France’s agriculture, as he was to confirm in his memoirs:
I may say that if, on resuming control of our affairs, I embraced the Common Market forthwith, it was as much because of our position as an agricultural country as for the spur it would give our industry. Certainly I was fully aware that, in order to integrate agriculture effectively into the Community, we should have to work energetically on our partners, whose interests in this matter are not ours. But I considered that this, for France, was a sine qua non of membership.
De Gaulle made clear his conviction that, without a settlement designed to suit France’s needs, her agriculture ‘would constitute an incubus which would put us in a position of chronic inferiority in relation to others’. Thus he felt obliged to put up ‘literally a desperate fight’, sometimes going so far as to threaten to withdraw membership.
Moravcsik points out that de Gaulle’s confidential discussions and speeches at the time revealed ‘a man obsessed with the possibility that QMV might be exploited to undermine carefully negotiated arrangements for fiscal transfers to French farmers’. He repeatedly stressed the need to retain control over three types of votes: those on CAP financing, on GATT negotiations, and on any possible free trade area. His reasoning was simple. Even with the progress already made, the CAP was not yet safe from reversal through the combined efforts of West Germany, Britain, Denmark - and the United States, working through GATT. The result might, de Gaulle feared, allow the Americans to swamp the European market with their agricultural produce. He further predicted that, if QMV remained in place, within a year Erhard’s West Germans would be sure to call everything into question by calling for a majority vote on the CAP, and France ‘would be unable to do anything’. With the Luxembourg Compromise, he could now protect the CAP agreements. The development of the EEC could continue.
Britain’s second rebuff
By 1967, the ‘project’ seemed to be making steady progress. By the so-called ‘merger treaty’, signed in 1965, the EEC, Euratom and the Coal and Steel Community were now brought together as ‘the Communities’. In Brussels the new Berlaymont building was opened and immediately filled by 3000 Commission officials. On a French initiative, the EEC agreed to adopt a new form of indirect taxation, value added tax or VAT: a percentage of which could be directed to the Commission to provide an additional source of revenue for the CAP. And the output of EEC legislation unmistakably quickening. In the early years of the decade, the annual production of new directives and regulations had run at around 25 a year. By the middle of the decade this reached 50. Now it was topping 100.
Many of these early directives were dedicated to ‘market organisation’, requiring the standardisation and grading of a wide range of produce, from eggs to bananas and tomatoes. Everything was geared to promoting uniformity and consistency: an ideology designed to encourage large-scale production but highly damaging to smaller, individual producers.
Then, quite unexpectedly, came a new application to join the ‘Common Market’ from Britain. In March 1966, Wilson, hitherto a supporter of his predecessor Hugh Gaitskell’s opposition to British entry, had won a landslide election victory over the Conservatives, now led by Heath. So unlikely was it that the Wilson government would launch an application to join the EEC that, during the election campaign, Nigel Lawson, then editor of The Spectator, commented: ‘Europe is the supreme issue at this election… no one who genuinely believes in a European Britain can vote Labour’. Wilson’s parliamentary private secretary, Peter Shore, later recalled that he still seemed as hostile to British entry as his predecessor Gaitskell.
In July 1966, however, only four months after Wilson’s election victory, Britain’s chronic balance of payments problem came to a head in a major crisis. In the eight years between 1956 and 1964, Britain’s economic performance had been lamentable compared with her continental neighbours. The yearly increase in her industrial production had averaged just 2.8 percent, against West Germany’s 7.3 percent, Italy’s 8.2 percent, France’s 6.2 percent. The growth of national per capita income had shown Britain similarly lagging behind, her 26.2 percent increase dwarfed by West Germany’s 58.2 percent, Italy’s 58.3 percent and France’s 47.5 percent. With the pound now under extreme pressure, Wilson introduce a series of panic counter-measures, including a surcharge on imports, which threatened to bring even this pitiful growth to a halt. His familiar, cheery optimism vanished. He began to look around in desperation for some more dramatic solution.
Another factor in his thinking was the growing frustration of his dealings with the Commonwealth. Since the white supremacist regime in Rhodesia had unilaterally declared independence from Britain in 1965, relations with his fellow Commonwealth leaders had become increasingly painful. In addition, as Peter Shore recalled, Wilson had been ‘got at’ by some of his closest advisers, who were fervently ‘pro-European’, notably his private secretary, Michael Palliser and his Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, who in the summer of 1967 Wilson was to make chancellor.
In face of all these pressures Wilson made a remarkable volte face. By October 1966 he had decided that Britain should make its second application. Although his Cabinet was sharply divided, with ministers such as Denis Healey, Barbara Castle and Douglas Jay strongly opposed to entry, a majority supported his change of policy, on the promise that Wilson and his new Foreign Secretary George Brown should make a ‘Grand Tour’ of the capitals of the Six to sound out opinion.
The tour started on 15 January 1967, when Wilson was described by his Euro-sceptic back-bencher Michael Foot as trotting round Europe ‘like Don Quixote, his Sancho Panza at his side’. The Italians and the Germans supported British entry. But de Gaulle appeared noncommittal. Wilson and Brown nevertheless came away from meeting him optimistic, recommending to their Cabinet colleagues that entry should be pursued. A revealing insight into Wilson’s thinking came from his Cabinet colleague, Richard Crossman. He wrote in his diaries that the prime minister, just back from Adenauer’s funeral on 26 April, had admitted to Kissinger that there were ‘economic disadvantages in entering the Common Market but they are being overlooked by the British Government because of the tremendous political advantages’.
On 30 April, the Cabinet voted in favour of applying, by 13 votes to 8. On the BBC’s Panorama, Wilson described the application as ‘a great turning point in history’, stating that he believed, on balance, ‘it will be right economically, but the political argument is stronger’. Britain’s role in joining was ‘to make Europe stronger, more independent, more decisive in world affairs’.
Monnet’s Action Committee had already declared itself ‘unanimously in favour’ of British entry. In Strasbourg on 9 May, when the European Parliament discussed Britain’s application, Fernand Dehousse, a Belgian socialist, declared that it had ‘rejoiced our hearts’. But the Gaullists were silent. Then, on 10 May, Britain’s entry was discussed by the French Cabinet. Georges Gorse, the minister of information, said afterwards:
France in the past has sufficiently deplored British insularity not to rejoice over any trend in the opposite direction. I think General de Gaulle will speak about this at his press conference and will be in a position to express the satisfaction provoked in French public opinion by the movement which is pushing Britain towards Europe – a movement we have always hoped for – and the difficult problems raised by a candidature of this importance with everything that implies.
On 16 May, de Gaulle delivered his verdict: ‘Le Grand Non’. Denman, quoting from the end of his statement, records the president saying that Britain’s entry would only be possible when
this great people, so magnificently gifted with ability and courage, should on their own behalf and for themselves achieve a profound economic and political transformation which could allow them to join the Six continentals.
What he omitted, however, was the long earlier passage in which, by referring to ‘the agricultural regulations’, de Gaulle gave another coded indication of his real motives. Britain, he said, ‘nourishes herself, to a great extent, on foodstuffs bought inexpensively throughout the world and, particularly, in the Commonwealth’. If she was to submit ‘to the rules of the Six’, then her ‘balance of payments would be crushed’ by the duties on her food imports. She would then be forced to raise her food prices to continental levels, causing her even greater problems. But, de Gaulle continued,
if she enters the Community without being really subjected to the agricultural system of the Six, the system will thereby collapse, completely upsetting the equilibrium of the Common Market and removing for France one of the main reasons she can have for participating in it.
Just as in 1963, de Gaulle had laid out with consummate clarity for those with eyes to see why British entry at this stage was out of the question.
Wilson, like Heath and Macmillan before him, showed no signs of understanding de Gaulle’s objections. He tabled Britain’s application in July 1967, only for this to be formally vetoed five months later. Shore, however, records how Wilson then instructed that preparations should be made for another application in the summer of 1970.
In July 1968, Monnet came over to England to meet Wilson, later writing ‘rarely had I seen him so determined and so pleased to commit himself to Europe’. Before he left London, Monnet secured agreement from all three main political parties that they should join the Action Committee. Responding to Monnet’s formal letter of invitation, Wilson wrote:
The aims of the Action Committee are in close conformity with those to which the Labour Party subscribes. Our Party believes that European political, economic and technological integration is essential if Europe is to fulfil her great potential and make a unique contribution to secure and maintain world peace.
Had Wilson won the general election which took place two years later, his conversion to the ‘European’ cause now seemed so complete that he might well have been the man who took Britain into the EEC.
De Gaulle’s final battle
Yet de Gaulle still had not secured his main prize - the financing system for the CAP which would guarantee subsidies for millions of his farmers, with much of the bill picked up by Germany, as the richest country in the Community. Germany would also absorb France’s agricultural surpluses. Only then could France allow the admission of Britain. Under the right conditions, this would be highly favourable to France. Importing fifty percent of her food, Britain would be cut off from most of her Commonwealth suppliers - the import duties making their produce too expensive. She would have to buy huge quantities of food from her new partners, foremost among them France.
However, the genius which lay at the heart of the budgetary structure was that, since the EEC was a ‘customs union’, the income from levies on imports would have to be paid to the EEC as its ‘own resource’. Once Britain was in, the import duties she collected would be paid straight to Community funds, to help finance the CAP and therefore the French farmers who would be the chief beneficiaries.
Before he could secure this prize, de Gaulle unexpectedly found himself faced with two more crises, one from Brussels, the other nearer home. In May 1968, Paris was taken over by crowds of rebellious students, triggering off a wave of strikes and unrest which paralysed the French economy. De Gaulle fled his capital, appealing for support from his army. Invoking fears of a Communist revolution, he called a snap election and won an overwhelming victory.
In Brussels the same year, agriculture commissioner Sicco Mansholt had become seriously disturbed by the way the half-formed version of the CAP was running out of control, with subsidies continuing to soar and food surpluses increasing. As a Dutch free trader, he had originally wanted a liberal, market-orientated CAP, which would encourage major structural changes to western Europe’s agriculture, leading to greater productivity and a substantial drop in employment. What had so far had emerged had been the opposite: high support prices with no spending limits and maximum protection, with prices harmonised at the highest levels, bolstered by subsidised exports of surpluses which were flooding world markets. Thanks above all to de Gaulle, the CAP was more protectionist than the sum of member state policies.
In desperation Mansholt decided to counter attack. He began work on a major reform, the first of what would become many, producing in 1969 the ‘second Mansholt Plan’. This concluded:
The Community is now having to pay so heavy a price for an agricultural production which bears no relation to demand that measures to balance the situation on the market can no longer be avoided…
He proposed halving the number of farmers; slaughtering millions of farm animals; and turning over seven percent of all agricultural land to forestry. Hundreds of thousands of farmers rioted in Brussels and other capitals and two died. Mansholt’s own life was threatened. The Six’s agriculture ministers, led by Germany, rejected his proposals out of hand. De Gaulle had now almost completely got his way. France’s peasants could stay on the land. The Community, and eventually Britain, would pay the price.
Final victory
In April 1969 de Gaulle held a referendum asking for the French people to approve a tranche of radical reforms. When he lost he retired from office, to be succeeded by his prime minister, Georges Pompidou. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing became the new premier. It was this succession which was later to be credited for the shift in French policy which allowed Britain, after Heath’s victory in the 1970 general election, to make her third and successful application to join the EEC. Another factors attributed to Heath’s eventual success was the arrival of Willy Brandt, a supporter of British entry, as the new German chancellor.
But there was still one vital detail to be settled before Pompidou could allow a further application from Britain or the other three potential applicants - Ireland, Denmark and Norway. He first needed that guarantee on CAP financing. At his first presidential press conference on 10 July 1969, he declared that he had no objection in principle to British accession, but the Six first had to ‘reach agreement amongst themselves’. At the same press conference, Pompidou agreed to a summit which had been called for by Brandt and other leaders of the Six, to be held at The Hague in December. There, Pompidou hoped, the arrangements would be finalised.
There was also another very important issue on the Six’s agenda. There had been a sharp revival of interest among the Six in the idea that the EEC should move towards economic and monetary union, first mooted by Spaak in his report setting out the framework for the Treaty of Rome. In the early 1960s this had again been advocated by Monnet and Luxembourg’s prime minister, Pierre Werner; then again by the European Assembly and the Commission in 1965. Furthermore, the Council of Ministers had already laid the foundations for a common economic policy, by setting up various committees to discuss monetary and economic issues. The most important was Ecofin, at which the Six finance ministers held monthly meetings.
In January 1968 Werner formally proposed that the Six should move to full economic and monetary union. This was followed by proposals from Giscard d’Estaing and the Commission. Momentum had now built up to such a degree that Pompidou proposed that The Hague summit, fixed for 1-2 December, should link the negotiations on the budget and the CAP with talks on monetary integration and ‘enlargement’.
When the summit began, Brandt immediately turned the tables on Pompidou, with a thinly veiled threat that, unless there was ‘fair play’ for the applicant countries, there would be no agreement on the budget. Piet de Jong, the Dutch prime minister, then proposed that the Six should discuss enlargement. According to Kitzinger,
Pompidou, in pained surprise, countered that farming must come first. This was agreed. Everyone knew by this time that that was France’s price for lifting the veto.
Thus the Six agreed to deal with the financial package first. Farm subsidies would be funded not only from levies on imports from outside the EEC but also from a percentage of VAT receipts levied by each of the member states. This was so radical that it needed a new treaty (to be signed in 1970 as the Luxembourg Treaty).
With that, France agreed to the Six opening negotiations with the four would-be applicants, led by Britain. France did, however, insist on the crucial condition that they would not be allowed to alter the terms of that all-important financial package. As it was later put by one of the leading Foreign Office civil servants engaged in the subsequent negotiations:
…the French continued to attach the highest importance to them, and to getting them concluded and ratified by all the existing member states before we could appear on the scene. It was thus a crucial point of the policy with which President Pompidou went to the Hague Summit meeting in December 1969 that, if he had to accept the opening of negotiations on our application, he must ensure that the negotiations did not begin until the Six had completed their agricultural finance regulation, and did not conclude until they had all ratified the resulting Treaty. This was the factor which produced the link, in the Hague Communiqué, between ‘the completion of the Community’ (achèvement) and its enlargement… élargissement was made clearly conditional on achèvement.
In other words, the transition from de Gaulle to Pompidou made no difference to French policy. Throughout the 1960s, it had remained constant. There could be no enlargement until the CAP financial arrangements were in place.
Nevertheless, the budgetary arrangements were not the only unfinished business. The summit’s other aim was to plan for further integration: to which effect the heads of government recognised that the Community had now reached a turning point:
Entering the final phase of the Common Market is not only in fact putting the seal on the irreversible character of the work accomplished by the Communities, it is also preparing the way for a united Europe capable of assuming its responsibilities in the world of tomorrow… Consequently, the Heads of State or Government desire to reaffirm their faith in the political objects which give to the Community its whole meaning and significance, their determination to carry the enterprise through to its conclusion, and their confidence in the final success of their efforts.
If there had ever any doubt as to where the Six intended to go, there now could be none. To help it on its way, they commissioned two reports. The first, by Pierre Werner, would be on ‘economic and monetary union’. The subject of the other, by the Belgian foreign minister Etienne Davignon, was ‘political union’. All this had been set in train before Heath applied for entry to what he was consistently to describe to the British people as a ‘Common Market’.
Chapter Eight
The Real Deceit of Edward Heath - 1970-5
There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified.
Edward Heath, prime ministerial TV broadcast, January 1973.
The bedrock of European union is the consent of the people.
Edward Heath, The Course of My Life.
In April 1970 a Gallup poll showed that only fifteen percent of the British electorate were in favour of a further bid to join the Common Market. Nearly three voters in five were opposed. A month later Wilson called a general election which, on 15 June, unexpectedly resulted in Heath becoming prime minister.
The Common Market played virtually no part in the campaign. Sixty-two percent of Conservative candidates made no reference to the EEC in their election addresses and only two percent declared strong support for British entry. Even Heath devoted only three percent of his speeches to the Common Market. And his party’s manifesto contained only a one-line promise ‘…to negotiate, no more, no less’. In television and radio coverage, the Common Market did not even rate among the top twelve issues.
It might therefore have come as something of a surprise to most voters to learn that, within two weeks of the election, two of Heath’s senior ministers would be in Brussels to begin Britain’s negotiations for entry and that, within three years, without any electoral mandate, Britain would have become a full member of the European Communities.
‘Swallow it whole, and swallow it now’
It was indeed just two weeks after Heath had become prime minister, on 30 June 1970, that his Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home went to Brussels with his Foreign Office colleague Anthony Barber, to open Britain’s negotiations for entry into the EEC. In the presence of delegations from the three other applicant countries, Ireland, Denmark and Norway, Barber explained that Britain was now ready to accept the Treaties establishing the three European Communities in their entirety, and all ‘the decisions that have flowed from them’. As Sir Con O’Neill, the civil servant leading Britain’s negotiating team, was to record, this ‘had far-reaching implications’.
It was true that, as in 1961, Britain had little choice but to accept the acquis communautaire, but the situation was now ‘fundamentally altered’. In 1961, the acquis had consisted of little more than the treaties themselves. Since then, an ‘almost inconceivable flood’ of new laws had been enacted, amounting to some 13,000 pages, for many of which the official translations would not be completed until after the treaty of accession had been signed. The acquis, O’Neill was to recall, ‘haunted us throughout the negotiations’:
Everything, beginning with the Treaties themselves, on which any of the three Communities, through any of their institutions, had ever reached agreement in any form, even if it had never been published, was, provided it had not clearly lapsed or been rescinded, a part of it. And we were asked to endorse, accept and be bound by it all.
O’Neill himself summed up Britain’s negotiating policy: ‘swallow the lot, and swallow it now’. The negotiations, therefore, were no more than a façade, to conceal the fact that Heath was determined on entry at almost any price.
As in 1961, Britain could only negotiate transitional concessions or ‘derogations’. These centred on the size of Britain’s contributions to the Community budget; the difficulties faced by members of the Commonwealth when barriers went up to their exports, notably New Zealand and the Caribbean islands; and what Barber tactfully called ‘certain matters of agricultural policy’. Together with fishing and the role of sterling as a world reserve currency, these issues would define the main scope of the negotiations.
Barber himself was not to lead the British delegation much longer because, following the death in July of Iain Macleod, Heath appointed him as Chancellor of the Exchequer. His place was taken by Geoffrey Rippon QC who led the top-level negotiations in the formal setting of the Council of Ministers chamber in Luxembourg. Detailed day-to-day haggling was conducted by officials meeting in Brussels. O’Neill described the scene:
In a large room, equipped with simultaneous interpretation, the British Delegation sat at one end of a long hollow rectangle of tables. Opposite them sat the President and the Secretariat. The two longer sides of the rectangle were occupied by the Delegations of the six Member States and of the Commission. There was no lack of people present. In a Ministerial meeting, those present in the room often amounted to one hundred or more; attendance at Deputies meetings fluctuated around seventy or eighty. There was room for about fifty at the table; the rest sat behind. These large groups of people assembled to listen to a stilted form of dialogue, or rather a series of short and stilted dialogues, between the President of the Community Delegation and the British Delegation.
The vexed issue which was to dominate the first months of negotiations was Britain’s contribution to the Community budget. Thanks to the arrangements for CAP funding devised by the French, her contribution would be out of all proportion to the size of her national income. And, with no less than 91 percent of the EEC’s £3 billion budget was taken up with funding the CAP, easily the largest share of which went to France, that contribution was likely to be substantial.
Both Britain and the Six were aware that, for political reasons, it might not be advisable for Britain to be seen having to pay her full share immediately: particularly since the shift to more expensive imports from the continent, would be increasing food prices in Britain. As Heath himself put it:
We resolved that we should assume our obligations gradually, because too large a contribution at the beginning, before the dynamic benefits of membership had come through, would have damaged both Britain and the Community as a whole. It would have jeopardised the smooth passage upon which the enlarged Community’s successful progress in the first few years would depend.
Initially, therefore, the Community demanded that Britain should pay 11.5 percent of the Community budget in the first year, rising to 21.5 percent after five years. Even this, the British thought excessive, but it was not until Christmas 1970 that they came back with counter-proposals.
Thus ended the first phase of the negotiations, in which little had been achieved. Elsewhere in Brussels, however, as agreed at the Hague summit, work had been proceeding on the two reports by Werner and Davignon on ‘economic and monetary’ and ‘political’ union. As their findings emerged, they threatened to cause Heath considerable embarrassment.
‘A federal state with a single currency’
Even before the accession negotiations had started, the Werner committee had, on 20 May 1970, published an interim report bringing about ‘economic and monetary union’. When the final report emerged on 8 October, there could be no doubt that an immense leap forward in political integration was its target.
Werner noted that monetary union would mean an irreversible freezing of exchange rates between the EEC’s currencies. The introduction of a ‘sole Community currency’ was optional but ‘considerations of a psychological and political nature militate in favour of the adoption of a sole currency which would confirm the irreversibility of the venture’. The economic policies of member states would be centralised in stages, to be completed by 1980, which would also mean centralised co-ordination of regional and structural policies. Werner himself was explicit about the major sacrifice of national sovereignty this would involve. The ‘centre of decision for economic policy’ would have to be exercised supra-nationally; and ‘in view of the fact that the role of the Community budget as an economic instrument would be ‘insufficient’, the Community’s ‘centre of decision’ would have to be able to influence national budgets. This ‘Community institution’ (foreshadowing the future European Central Bank)
…will be empowered to take decisions, according to the requirements of the economic situation, in the interests of monetary policy as regards liquidity, rates of interest, and the granting of loans to private and public sectors. In the field of external monetary policy, it will be empowered to intervene in the foreign exchange market and the management of the monetary reserves of the Community.
Werner conceded that such a massive ‘transfer of powers to the Community level from the national centres of decision’ would raise ‘a certain number of political problems’. These were not lost on Whitehall. The Foreign Office (now the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or FCO) produced an urgent internal report for Heath, copied by the Treasury, noting that:
…the (Werner) plan for economic and monetary union (EMU) has revolutionary long-term implications, both economic and political. It could imply the ultimate creation of a European federal state with a single currency… All the basic instruments of national economic management (fiscal, monetary, incomes and regional policies) would ultimately be handed over to the central federal authorities. The Werner report suggests this radical transformation of the present communities should be accomplished within a decade.
Monetary union, the FCO noted, ‘could become a central point of negotiations over entry... since it will arouse strong feelings about ‘sovereignty’ and provoke vigorous discussions of its implications for future policy...’. In some areas, such as taxation, Britain might find it hard to make more compromises than other countries. Nevertheless, the FCO argued, ‘we see no real reason why UK interests should significantly suffer’. ‘Any problems’, it added optimistically, ‘ought not to be incapable of agreed solutions within the community’. But it had to be faced that EMU would lead to the UK and the other EEC countries becoming as
…interlocked as those of the states of the US. Indeed it could be argued that the independence of the members would be less than that of the (US) states, for the latter have more autonomy over their budgets. The degree of freedom which would then be vested in national governments might indeed be somewhat less than the autonomy enjoyed by the constituent states of the US. There would be relatively little surrender of national sovereignty in the economic field, though as the first stage (of EMU) progressed, sovereignty would pass steadily towards the centre. At the ultimate stage economic sovereignty would to all intents and purposes disappear at the national level and the Community would itself be the master of ... economic policy.
Crucially, the FCO warned, ‘there must be no mistake about the final objective; the process of change is ‘irreversible’, and the implications, both economic and political, must be accepted from the outset’.
For Heath and his advisers privately to accept such a plan was one thing. But at a moment when the British people were being assured that the Common Market was really little more than a trading arrangement, any hint that the powers of its member states might be reduced within ten years to less than that enjoyed by a state of the USA could be political dynamite.
Geoffrey Rippon hurried over to Luxembourg for a personal interview with Werner on 27 October. He congratulated him on his report, assuring him that it ‘well stated our common objectives’. But, alarmed at how such a radical step might be received by the British public, he asked that political and economic union might be achieved through a ‘step by step approach’. It was ‘natural for people to be afraid of change’ and ‘part of his problem in Britain was to reassure people that their fears were unjustified’.
If Werner’s proposals were not enough, three weeks later the foreign ministers of the Six adopted the Davignon Report, on ‘the problems of political unification’, in what became known as the ‘Luxembourg Agreement’. This too was radically integrationist in tone, as Davignon, ‘to ensure consistency with the continuity and political purpose of the European design’, proposed nothing less than a single European foreign policy. To express ‘the will for a political union’ it was necessary ‘to bring nearer the day when European can speak with one voice’. The governments of the Six had to develop as a common foreign policy in order to ‘achieve progress towards political unification’. To implement this plan, the foreign ministers agreed to hold twice-yearly meetings, to co-ordinate the Six’s foreign policy, while a committee of senior officials would confer at least four times a year to lay the groundwork for these meetings. Governments undertook to consult on all major foreign policy issues and to ‘pursue work on the best way to achieve progress towards political unification’.
In view of the revolutionary contents of the two reports, it must have come as a considerable relief to Heath that virtually no one in Britain noticed them.
A coup de theatre
The resumed negotiations in January 1971 continued to move with glacial slowness, and the focus remained on the size of Britain’s budget contribution. At a press conference on 21 January, Pompidou was asked his opinion of the British position. He replied: ‘One must admit that the British have three qualities among others: humour, tenacity and realism. I have the feeling that we are slightly in the humorous stage’. So little had been achieved that O’Neill found it necessary to convey to the officials with whom he was negotiating his ‘concern at the pace at which this conference is proceeding’.
The reason, of course, for the slowness was that the ratification process for the 1970 Luxembourg Treaty was not yet complete. Until that was safely part of the acquis, the French were determined not to risk any upset. Thus, even by the beginning of May little progress was perceptible. Then, suddenly, there seemed to be movement, with simultaneous concessions on both sides. Rippon conceded that British markets would be opened to Community goods from day one of Britain’s accession: what was known as ‘Community preference’ (in contrast to Britain’s traditional ‘imperial preference’). The French agreed ‘associated status’ for developing Commonwealth countries. As O’Neill put it, the negotiators began to believe there had been a ‘decisive move’ towards success.
What only a handful of people were aware of was that this ‘decisive move’ had come as part of a carefully orchestrated strategy. O’Neill’s later account of how and why it had come about gives a striking glimpse of how elaborately international affairs can be stage-managed.
Back in January, when there had seemed so little progress, the British embassy in Paris heard reports that senior French officials were speaking freely of a need for a personal ‘summit meeting’ between Heath and Pompidou. One of Heath’s first acts on becoming prime minister the previous June had been to summon the British Ambassador in Paris, Christopher Soames, a fervent ‘Europeanist’, to ask him to stay on through the negotiations for British entry. Now, in late February 1971, Soames had a long talk with Pompidou’s right-hand man, Michel Jobert. He came away persuaded that such a meeting would be useful. But, on 25 February, Soames met Pompidou himself. He said nothing about a possible meeting but stressed that the UK should be paying a higher percentage of the Community budget after the end of the transitional period than it had so far proposed, and that ‘Community preference’ must apply from the first day of UK accession. These were France’s ‘priorities’.
On 1 March Soames met Heath in London. On their agenda was a briefing drawn up the previous July by O’Neill’s special assistant, John Robinson, in which he had advised on tactics for negotiation over the thorny question of the Community budget:
We cannot expect to get a satisfactory settlement of this issue within the context of the negotiating procedures which the Community are offering us… the breakthrough will come, if it comes at all, as a result of an appeal to the Six on Community finance at the highest level. This points to a suggestion from our side at the appropriate moment for a summit meeting to settle this issue in principle. It would be important that Pompidou himself should attend such a summit.
Through Jobert, Pompidou was told that a meeting between himself and Heath ‘would be an important element in the negotiations’. By similar circuitous means, the principle of a meeting was agreed, subject to appropriate timing and the effect it would have on the negotiations. It was felt that it would be undesirable for the meeting to take place at a time when the negotiations were deadlocked. This would give the impression that it was a last resort. It would be ‘more fruitful’ if movement could be seen to have been taken place in the negotiations before the meeting was announced. It was therefore agreed with the French that the summit should be after the ministerial talks in May, which ‘should if possible be the occasion of significant progress’. This was why Rippon offered his concession on Community preference while the French gave way on the Commonwealth issue.
But the ‘significant progress’ still had to be stage-managed. The ministerial meeting on 10 May was deliberately dragged on into the night and beyond, for thirteen long hours, before the ritual concessions were made, allowing Rippon to emerge beaming into the daylight to tell a dawn press conference, ‘If I were you, I would bet on success’. The French foreign minister, Maurice Schuman, readily agreed, declaring ‘without a shadow of doubt’, a major breakthrough had been achieved. The news was spread far and wide, even percolating down to Southampton’s Southern Evening Echo, which proclaimed in bold, front-page headlines: ‘On the way to market - Britain and France agree’.
Following this pre-arranged ‘success’ Pompidou passed the word through ‘usual channels’ that he was determined his summit with Heath would succeed. It was no coincidence that the Treaty laying down the financial arrangements for the CAP had now been ratified by all the member states and was therefore untouchable.
None of this is reported in Heath’s memoirs. He merely observes that the news of his impending summit must have ‘contributed to the substantial progress’ made in the negotiations. It perhaps shows just how little we should rely for an understanding of history either on political memoirs or on contemporary reporting by the media.
The great ‘summit’ itself finally took place on 20 and 21 May in the Elysée Palace. Heath was to wax lyrical in his memoirs about the guard at the gate springing to attention on the crisp May morning, and how it was difficult to think of more attractive surroundings in which to conduct talks. Yet to the actual contents of their discussion he gives just part of one paragraph, amid two-and-a-half pages of description:
…Pompidou had stressed that what he felt was needed was an historic change in the British attitude. Britain was really determined to make this change, France would welcome us into the Community. He regarded his own country and Britain as the only two European countries with what he termed a ‘world vocation’ and said quite explicitly that, if the political and intellectual prestige and authority of Britain were added to those of the Six, the Community would be greatly enriched. My task was to convince him that this was also what we wanted to see… Our purpose was a strong Europe, which could speak with one voice … and could then exert effective influence in different parts of the globe.
Such was the view of the meeting the media were intended to swallow. Heath had managed to convince Pompidou that ‘Britain was genuine in its desire to enter the European family’, culminating in a press conference on the Friday evening, when Pompidou gave his own version:
Many people believed that Great Britain was not and did not wish to become European, and that Britain wanted to enter the Community only so as to destroy it or to divert it from its objectives. Many people thought that France was ready to use every pretext to place in the end a fresh veto on Britain’s entry. Well, ladies and gentlemen, you see before you this evening two men who are convinced to the contrary.
For Heath, this was a ‘wildly exciting moment’. He felt it was ‘an historic occasion’. But behind all this fluff was the real agenda, only hinted at in the official communiqué: a terse document entirely devoid of flowery rhetoric. Its key passage, the significance of which was missed by almost everyone, declared:
The President of the Republic and the British Prime Minister considered the range of economic, financial and monetary problems which could arise as a result of enlargement. They also discussed the progress of the European Community towards economic and monetary union, and its implications for existing financial relationships. The Prime Minister reaffirmed the readiness of Britain to participate fully and in a European spirit in this development.
This was the true, hidden purpose of the meeting: for Pompidou to win Heath’s support for his plans to propose the setting up of a common currency. Unknown to all but a very few British, Heath was not just sympathetic. He was eager to participate.
The communiqué did nevertheless arouse suspicion that some secret deal had been struck at the summit, to which effect Heath was forced to make a statement to the House of Commons. In what he claimed ‘fully explained our position’, he told the House:
We have said that as members of the enlarged Community we would play our full part in the progress towards economic and monetary union. That was confirmed in my talk with President Pompidou… But let me make it clear that we have given no undertakings as to how fast or by what means these developments could or should be brought about. These would be matters for discussion after our entry, when we should be a full member of the Community with all the rights of a member.
Despite his protestations, Heath was being far from candid. He was asked two questions by Harold Lever: ‘What are our intentions on sterling? Could he also clarify whether any question of the parities and fixed parities was decided upon or discussed with the President?’ Heath carefully directed his reply to the second part of Lever’s question:
On the subject of sterling, there was no discussion of parities or items of that kind. It was accepted that this matter only arises in the context of co-ordination of currencies inside an enlarged Community, if we become a member, and is obviously concerned with whatever progress is made on the co-ordination of policies.
In fact, the deal had already been made. The following year, shortly after Parliament approved Britain’s entry, word came from Paris that Pompidou was proposing that member states should make a solemn agreement to ‘move irrevocably to economic and monetary union by 1980’. In the 1995 BBC documentary The Poisoned Chalice, Sir Roy Denman, present at the time, recalled the foreign secretary, Douglas Home, looking askance at this news. He said to Heath, ‘The House isn’t going to like this’. ‘But that’, Denman recalled Heath replying, ‘is what it’s all about’. When Heath himself was asked in 1995 by the BBC whether he could really have said such a thing, he made no attempt to deny it. His only response, after an unsmiling pause, was, ‘well, that’s what it was about’.
Despite the massive implications of what Heath had now secretly agreed with Pompidou, these never emerged from behind the veils of secrecy during Britain’s ‘Common Market’ debate. When in the 1990s Heath came to be challenged over having concealed his support for a single currency at the time of British entry, his defence was that he had made no secret of his views. His evidence was a Commons speech made at the time of Wilson’s application to join in May 1967, when he had declared that ‘there can be no doubt that the logical conclusion in a complete market is to move de facto or de jure to a common currency’. Thus did he dismiss ‘those who claim never to have heard of my policy on the matter’.
Shortly after the summit, on 7 June, Geoffrey Rippon told the ministers of the Six: ‘we shall be ready to discuss after our entry into the Communities what measures might be appropriate in the context of progress towards economic and monetary union in the enlarged Community’, adding that, to this end, Britain would be prepared after accession to envisage ‘an orderly and gradual run-down’ of her sterling balances. Again, the significance of this was almost universally missed.
The negotiations are ‘successful’
Following the Pompidou summit, French support for British entry was now assured. Considering how little had been achieved in the first nine months, the speed with which all outstanding issues were resolved seemed almost miraculous. But the timing of this had nothing to do with the Heath-Pompidou summit. The most important factor had been the ratification of the Luxembourg treaty. Now the formerly intractable problem of Commonwealth imports could be resolved, with special concessions given for New Zealand butter, although O’Neill reckoned that the terms on which these were granted would add an extra £100 million a year to Britain’s budgetary contribution (at 1972 prices). No concessions at all were made for Australia and Canada, although some Caribbean sugar and bananas would still be allowed into Britain under preferential arrangements.
What was looked on as the key meeting took place between 21 and 23 June, when agreement was finally reached on New Zealand dairy products and Britain’s contribution to the budget. The ‘back of the negotiations was broken’ and, after two all-night sessions, when the last meeting ended a little before 5 a.m. on 23 June, ‘all were convinced that the negotiations would succeed’. The price was extremely high, but to Heath the agreement was a ‘favourable compromise’. Britain was to pay 8.64 percent of the Community budget in year one, rising to 18.92 percent after the transitional period. Even after that there would eventually be no limit to it rising higher. Britain’s massive disadvantage was now locked in, leaving her the second highest net contributor after Germany.
Heath recognised this and his answer was to suggest a ‘regional policy’, through which Britain might win back much of her deficit through subsidies to the regions. It was not to be. But, years later, Heath’s promotion of a ‘regional policy’ was to have unforeseen consequences.
‘Fair and reasonable’ terms
With one crucial exception, negotiations were concluded at the June meeting of the Council of Ministers. Heath had achieved the goal on which he had set his heart. The cost to Britain had been enormous. She had been saddled with an enormously expensive CAP, already costing as much each year as the Americans were spending on reaching the moon, and which, with its in-built bias in favour of France, would eventually come to damage so much of British farming.
She had agreed to comply with 13,000 pages of legislation which she had no part in framing, and was now committed to enact accept all future legislation passed by the Community, whether or not in her interest. She had agreed to subordinate her courts to a higher court against which there was no appeal. In anticipation of economic and monetary union, Heath had undertaken to undermine sterling’s position as a reserve currency. And, while securing minimal concessions for a few Commonwealth countries, he had committed Britain to make a hugely disproportionate contribution to the budget.
None of this prevented the government setting out to sell its ‘achievement’ to the British people. The first move came in July 1971 with the publication of a White Paper, The United Kingdom and the European Communities (Cmnd 4715). A shortened version, after going through innumerable drafts to ensure that its message was crafted as persuasively as possible, was distributed to every household in the country.
Although the 16-page booklet claimed to set out ‘the difficulties as well as the opportunities’ of joining, its tone was relentlessly upbeat, starting with a boast that Britain’s negotiations had been ‘successful’. The essential choice offered was between better security and more prosperity, against having ‘in a single generation… rejected an Imperial past and a European future’ and ‘found nothing to put in their place’. Membership ‘would enable Britain to achieve a higher standard of living’.
Many of the document’s claims would become only too familiar in future decades, such as that membership of the Community ‘would mean that British manufacturers will be selling their products in a home market five times as large as at present’. Not mentioned was that their continental competitors would be just as free to sell their products in the British market. As for British industry, it was claimed simply that ‘the effects of entry will be positive and substantial’.
There was no mention of economic and monetary union. There would be no loss of national identity. Britain’s monarchy, parliament and courts would all remain exactly as they were. The legal system would ‘continue as before’, apart from ‘certain changes under the treaties concerning economic and commercial matters’. And in a sentence often quoted later, it was stated that:
There is no question of Britain losing essential national sovereignty; what is proposed is a sharing and an enlargement of individual national sovereignties in the economic interest.
Nowhere in the document was there any mention of the word ‘supranational’. But there was one further anomaly in the White Paper which at the time attracted little notice. No fewer than three times it made reference to one issue on which final agreement had still to settled. Under ‘Fisheries’, the people of Britain were told:
The Government is determined to secure proper safeguards for the British fishing industry. The Community has recognised the need to change its fisheries policy for an enlarged Community of Ten, particularly in regard to access to fishing grounds.
This was untrue. The Community had ‘recognised’ no such thing. On fishing, as the Heath government was already uncomfortably aware, Britain had been very badly caught out.
The great fisheries scandal
With disarming candour, O’Neill was to record that ‘when our negotiations opened on 30 June 1970, the problem of fisheries did not exist. It came later the same day. From then on fisheries was a major problem’. What lay behind his words was the most bizarre episode of the negotiations, politically so embarrassing that much of it was kept secret for three decades.
At the centre of what is indisputably a scandal lies the certainty that, some time in the months that preceded the applications for entry by Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Norway, a representative of the Six – all the evidence suggests that he must have been French – realised that the four new applicants would bring with them the richest, best-conserved fishing waters in Europe.
Furthermore, there was already international pressure for a major revision of the international law of the sea, to extend national control of fisheries to 200 miles (or the ‘median line’ between two nations). When this took place, the waters of the four applicants would contain well over 90 percent of western Europe’s fish, some 80 percent of the total in seas controlled by Britain. It was Nye Bevan who had described Britain as an ‘island made of coal, surrounded by a sea of fish’. Potentially, these waters could bring a valuable resource to augment over-fished seas off France, Holland, Belgium and Germany.
What is also evident is that persons unknown within the Community instructed the Service Juridique of the Council of Ministers to ascertain whether a way could be devised to take over the fishing grounds of the applicants as a ‘common resource’, giving a right of ‘equal access’ to every member state in the Community. This much emerged from the Foreign Office files in the year 2000, which refer to a legal opinion produced by the Service on 18 May 1970. The point which its lawyers were asked to address, described as ‘extremely delicate’, was whether a ‘judicial base’ could be established on which could rest a ‘regulation to give equal access’.
The record indicates that the lawyers first considered Article 38 of the Treaty of Rome, because it mentioned ‘fisheries products’, the only reference to fish anywhere in the treaty. But ‘strict exegesis’, they concluded, showed that the article could not ‘cover anything outside the products of fishery and not fisheries themselves’. They then turned to Articles 39-43, on agricultural policy, but were forced to conclude that, since these referred only to agriculture, they did not ‘constitute perhaps the most appropriate juridical basis for the measure’. The other articles they consulted seemed even more irrelevant. Articles 52 to 58 on the ‘right of establishment’ had to be ruled out. To use Articles 59 to 66 on ‘services’ would not be ‘absolutely satisfactory’, because this would require ‘un gros effort d’interpretation’.
Returning to Article 7, which outlawed discrimination between nationals of different countries, they concluded this did not seem, on its own, to ‘furnish a sufficient base’. Finally they referred to ‘catch-all’ Article 235 which permitted passing laws which complied with the ‘objectives’ of the Treaty but were not specifically authorised elsewhere in the Treaty. ‘If one considers that 38-43 of the Treaty do not provide a sufficient legal basis for the Common Fisheries Policy (and the others are unsuitable)’, they concluded, ‘what about 235?’ Given the lack of mention of a fisheries policy, it would be difficult to claim it as an ‘objective’ of the Treaty.
On the basis of this evaluation, it was evident that the Treaty offered no justification for what was clearly being considered, and therefore any regulation enacting it would a legal base. Nevertheless, a regulation was drafted to define the ‘equal access’ principle, with the intention of placing it in the acquis before the four would-be entrants lodged their applications. It would then have to be accepted by them, without argument. By any measure or description, this was a trap, aimed at appropriating the applicants’ property in order to share it between the Community members.
At a hastily arranged meeting of agriculture ministers on 30 June, the principle of equal access to ‘Community’ fishing waters, ‘up to the beaches’, was thus agreed, with the intention that a regulation to that effect would follow later. That same day the four entrants lodged their applications.
What was to follow is recounted in dry Foreign Office files, released in 2000 and 2001. Initially the only country fully alive to the implications of the move was Norway. It had already asked to be consulted before the proposal was finalised and been brusquely rebuffed. For months the Foreign Office did not seem to focus on the issue, or make any efforts to ascertain what its consequences might be for Britain’s fishermen. Internal notes in July recorded there was ‘real doubt about the right of the Community… to regulate access to fishing grounds’. There was ‘nowhere any indication that it was the intention… [to] vest in the Community the right to exercise extra-territorial competence’. The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries told Con O’Neill they could ‘not believe the equal access proposals are serious’ and suggested they ‘must be a basis for bargaining’.
The first warnings were sounded by a trickle of letters from MPs for coastal constituencies, alerted by their local fishermen. Kent and Essex fishermen were warning that, ‘if Britain joins the Common Market and French fishermen are given access to inshore waters, they will clean them out’. Throughout the summer such letters continued to arrive, to be side-stepped by Geoffrey Rippon with replies such as ‘there is as yet no Common Fisheries Policy in the European Community’, or ‘we made our interest clear at the start of negotiations on 30 June’ (even though a note from O’Neill dated five days earlier had said ‘we see no requirement for a special marker to be put down as regards fisheries policy’).
In October an FCO briefing for the Permanent Under-Secretary, who was due to meet Heath at a top-level Sunningdale conference, claimed that the legal basis for the CFP was ‘Article 38 of the Treaty’. This was despite the EEC’s Council Regulation 2141/70, enacting the equal access, having by then been published. Its preamble showed the ‘judicial base’ was Articles 7, 42, 43 and 235 of the Treaty. Two of these had originally been ruled as irrelevant by the judicial services; the other two had not been considered ‘sufficient’. The regulation made no mention of Article 38. Nevertheless, the canard that Article 38 was the legal basis for the Common Fisheries Policy became lodged firmly in the official mind and was repeatedly cited over the years by authorities ranging from Con O’Neill to Heath himself.
By now, the MPs’ letters were becoming increasingly aggressive in tone. Patrick Wolridge-Gordon, an Aberdeenshire MP, wrote to Rippon on 30 October that there was ‘not a fisherman who does not think that if territorial limits are to be abandoned, it means the end of an extremely successful and worthwhile industry for the whole coastline of Scotland. It is indeed unacceptable’. Robert McLennan, MP for Caithness and Sutherland, wrote that the only major herring stocks left in European waters would be ‘swept away within a few weeks by their so intensive methods of fishing that have cleaned out the stocks from their own waters’. Jo Grimond, leader of the Liberal Party, MP for Orkney and Shetland, and a keen ‘Europeanist’ wrote
I am perturbed to say the least of it about what is happening over the fishing policy of the Common Market and the curious light it sheds on British diplomacy. I went to Brussels a year ago was told that there was no final policy on fishing but that the Commission would be receptive to the needs of Britain, Norway, Denmark etc. Since then I have been questioning both the Labour and Conservative governments… all I got was flannel.
The government’s response was to work out a formula whereby the protests might be defused. In a memo drafted by D. K. Rowand of the Scottish fisheries department on 9 November, he admitted that the damage to Britain’s fishermen would be considerable but argued that Britain could not afford to spend its ‘limited negotiating capital’ on resisting. He therefore suggested that replies to further letters or Parliamentary questions should indicate that the government was ‘aware of the anxieties of the fishing industry’ and would ‘bear them in mind in the negotiations’. But it was vital not to go into any detail:
The more one is drawn into such explanations, the more difficult it is to avoid exposing the weaknesses of the inshore fisheries position, the only answer to which may be that in the wider context they must be regarded as expendable.
From then on, replies to letters by Rippon and others repeated the same formula: ‘I can assure you that the Government will take proper account of the importance of the inshore fishing industry to the British economy as a whole’. By this means it was concealed from the public that Britain’s fisheries were indeed ‘expendable’.
Through the spring of 1971, while the negotiations were still being stalled by France, the FCO was dealing with other issues. But by June, as the deadline for the end of negotiations approached, O’Neill and his team suddenly realised the seriousness of the problem. Ministers took the view, O’Neill was later to record, that the ideal solution would be for the Community to suspend its fisheries policy, pending agreement on a suitable regime after British accession. This was ruled out so Britain sought a compromise, suggesting that the Community could control waters between six and twelve miles off the coast, as long as British fishermen could enjoy exclusive fishing rights out to six miles. Again the Community insisted on control right up to the beaches, offering only a temporary derogation, whereby all member states could keep an exclusive six-mile zone for five years, possibly to be extended to ten, with ‘a review’ thereafter.
It was on this basis that, with all other issues agreed, the government put out its White Paper in July claiming that ‘the Community has recognised the need to change its fisheries policy…’. Not for the last time on fisheries, the British public was being seriously misled.
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The ‘great debate’
Having already agreed to join, without having revealed the details of what was involved, the Heath government’s next objective was to launch a massive publicity campaign on the merits of entry. Ostensibly this was a campaign to sell the ‘Common Market’ to the British people, advertised as ‘the great debate’. Its real purpose, however, was not to win over the people. In the words of the official appointed as the campaign’s co-ordinator, it was ‘to convince Members of Parliament that the tide of public opinion was moving in favour of joining the EEC’, and thus to win approval for the entry terms from Parliament’.
The first serious move in the campaign was the shortened White Paper, circulated at a cost of £2 million to every home in Britain (anti-market Labour MPs asked how taxpayers’ money could be spent on what they described as mere ‘propaganda’). Ministers were despatched all over the country to sell the ‘benefits’ of the Common Market on any platform that could be arranged. Between July and October 1971 nearly three hundred such speeches were made, Rippon alone making over fifty.
One novel feature of the operation was the way pro-market lobby groups were co-ordinated under the umbrella of the European Movement, part-funded by the European Commission, to act as an integral part of the government campaign. Government ‘information’ services, funded by taxpayers, thus co-ordinated activities with the Trade Union Committee for Europe, the Conservative Political Centre, the Labour Committee for Europe, the Confederation for British Industry and many other organisations, including the National Farmers Union, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and the British Council of Churches.
A key part was played in the campaign by weekly ‘media breakfasts’ held at the Connaught Hotel, presided over by Geoffrey Tucker, a senior advertising man who had helped to ‘sell’ Heath and the Tory Party during the 1970 election. Funded by the European Movement, these meetings enabled politicians, representatives of industry, Foreign Office civil servants and influential sympathisers in the media to develop suitable tactics and ‘story lines’ for the campaign. Journalists were invited to meet the men ‘who were actually negotiating in Brussels’ and offered ‘exclusives’ to promote the cause.
The journalists were able to tell the European Movement and Whitehall frankly what they thought of their public relations efforts and how they could be improved – that such and such a line of argument was too airy-fairy, or that it needed quite a different speaker to put it over if it was ever to get across. Party politicians and industrial representatives would suggest lines of argument for the press to explore.
Another strategy was a carefully organised campaign based on letters to The Times, then still regarded as Britain’s most influential newspaper. Pre-written letters were circulated, to be signed by ‘top name’ individuals or groups of businessmen, to be sent in as if they were entirely the signatories’ own work. Particular efforts were made to woo the BBC. One regular breakfast guest was Ian Trethowan, a former political correspondent and now head of BBC Radio. Another was Marshall Stewart, editor of the Today programme. Tucker himself later claimed that he had engineered the dismissal of the programme’s popular chief presenter, Jack de Manio, a Eurosceptic, to be replaced by the more sympathetic Robert Robinson. ‘Nobbling was the name of the game’, as he later put it.
For all this campaigning the European Movement needed money and it did not run short. In the year ending 31 March 1972, it disbursed £550,000, more than five times its normal budget. But its income, mainly from unnamed donors, reached £915,904, helped by an assurance that the government would increase its annual grant from £7,500 to £20,000.
No attempt was made to give the public objective or factual information. Instead, the Movement used market research to identify issues which might sway public support in favour (the technique later associated with ‘focus groups’). The aim was to discover what people wanted to hear, then use it to shape the campaign’s propaganda.
In general, the public seemed remarkably ignorant about the EEC and what entry might involve. At one Women’s Institute conference, seven hundred delegates entered a competition to answer five simple questions about the EEC. Only eleven got all the answers right.
The Parliamentary campaign
Having negotiated the terms of entry, all Heath wanted was a rubber-stamp from Parliament. He even considered asking it to endorse membership before the summer break. However Francis Pym, the Conservative chief whip, counselled against being seen to rush MPs. Heath thus settled for a ‘take note’ debate before the summer recess, followed by a full debate and vote in October.
In what was again to become a familiar pattern, the ‘pro-Marketeers’ went to great lengths to present support for their cause as an issue that transcended party divisions and loyalties. Thus, in defiance of normal practice, Rippon maintained informal contacts with prominent ‘pro-Europeans’ in the Labour Party, pre-eminently its deputy leader, Roy Jenkins. Labour was deeply divided. Wilson had initially equivocated but, in May, the issue was forced by Jim Callaghan, who famously declared ‘non, merci beaucoup’. To avoid a terminal split in his party, Wilson finally had to take a stance. Despite a private lecture from Jenkins on the advantages of sticking to the ‘pro-European position’ he had taken in government, Wilson chose to not challenge the principle, but merely the terms of entry.
The Conservatives, with an overall majority of only 25, also included a sizeable number of dissenters. After calculating that at least 38 of his MPs could not be relied upon, Heath decided on the tactical device of a free vote, hoping to recruit Labour pro-marketeers. His resolution was reinforced by the Conservative conference at Brighton on 14 October 1971. Enoch Powell, the most eloquent Tory Euro-sceptic, had pleaded with delegates to reject entry:
I do not believe that this nation, which has maintained and defended its independence for a thousand years, will now submit to see it merged or lost. Nor did I become a member of a sovereign parliament in order to consent to that sovereignty being abated or transferred.
His speech prompted Heath to call for a vote, which resulted in a huge majority of 2,474 to 324 in favour of entry.
The Commons debate itself was scheduled for six days, culminating in a vote on 28 October. Opening for the government was Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who asked the House to approve the decision to join, ‘on the basis of the arrangements which have been negotiated’ (even though MPs had still not been given a chance to examine the terms in full). He reminded the House how twice before it had instructed Conservative and Labour governments to negotiate entry, and suggested that, if it were now to change its mind, the international community would look at Britain askance.
Addressing fears of a ‘federal Europe’, he acknowledged that ‘some people might still like to pursue this idea’, but claimed that ‘political change’ in the Community had to be unanimous, and that there was no way any country could be ‘dragooned or coerced into a pattern of political association’ it did not like. There was no mention of economic and monetary union, or of the Luxembourg agreement committing the Six to work for a common foreign policy. Instead Douglas-Home offered the prospect that, once she was in, Britain could play a part in shaping a new regional policy, which could bring lavish subsidies to boost the poorer areas of the country.
Denis Healey led the attack for Labour, but his speech betrayed a naiveté which was to become all-too familiar. He limited his case purely to economic arguments, on the assumption that the Common Market was ‘after all an economic community and nothing more’. Wilson also steered firmly away from the political implications of entry. He stuck to attacking the terms Heath had negotiated, giving notice of how a Labour government would respond if it came into office after accession:
What we should do… would be immediately to give notice that we do not accept the terms negotiated by the Conservatives and, in particular, the unacceptable burdens arising out of the CAP, the blows to the Commonwealth, and any threats to our regional policies. If the Community then refused to negotiate… or if the negotiations were to fail, we should sit down amicably with them and discuss the situation (laughter). We should make it clear that our posture, like that of the French after 1958, would be rigidly directed towards the pursuit of British interests and that other decisions and actions in relation to the Community would be dictated by that determination, until we had secured our terms. They might accept this, or they might decide that we should agree to part; that would depend on them. That is our position.
After six days of debate, Heath wound up on 28 October. ‘Tonight’, he told a packed House,
…the world is …watching Westminster, waiting to see whether we are going to decide that Western Europe should now move along the path to real unity – or whether the British Parliament, now given the choice, not for the first time but probably the last time for many years to come, will reject the chance of creating a United Europe.
To their intense frustration, none of the leading Labour pro-marketeers were allowed by the Speaker (in consultation with party managers) to take part. As Roy Jenkins commented later:
This was supposed to be the great debate of the decade (at least) and we were leaders of one-eighth of the House of Commons … and, because we were the hinge, were going to make the biggest difference …Yet of more than one hundred speeches which filled the six days we were not allowed to contribute one.
Just before the vote, Heath was able to announce that the House of Lords had endorsed his terms by 451 votes to 58, a majority of almost 400. Jenkins led 69 Labour MPs through the ‘aye’ lobby and with 20 abstentions, Heath amassed an unexpectedly large Commons majority of 112. Without the support of the Labour pro-marketeers, entry would have been rejected by 36 votes. The result was greeted with pandemonium. Teddy Taylor recalled this as the only time he ever heard bad language openly used in the House. One Labour MP called Jenkins a ‘Fascist bastard’, and friends advised him to depart quickly, for his own safety. That evening he had the dubious pleasure of reading the Evening News front-page headline: ‘Witch hunt for Labour traitors’.
After the vote, Heath called in briefly on a private party, where he received warm congratulations from his friend and mentor, Jean Monnet, who had been watching the vote from the public gallery. He then returned to his private sitting room at Number 10, where he played the First Prelude from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier on his clavichord. That night, Macmillan presided over the lighting of a bonfire on the cliffs of Dover. Next morning, the Sun newspaper proclaimed in bold capitals on its front page: ‘IN WE GO’.
Fisheries: the lie direct
Before Heath could fly to Brussels to sign the Treaty of Accession, there was still fishing to deal with. After having accepted Community control over the fishing waters between six and twelve miles from her coast, Heath still hoped to retain exclusive rights to the six-miles zone. On 18 June, Ireland let it be known that she could not accept the Community’s proposals. The Norwegians had followed suit three days later. Having given away so much, Britain’s negotiators feared that the Community might now offer the other countries concessions which it was too late for her to ask for.
The situation became increasingly fraught as Norway passed a law limiting the size of vessels allowed within her 6-12 mile limit, thus excluding British deep-water trawlers from one of their most rewarding fishing grounds. Iceland had unilaterally extended its limits to 50 miles, excluding British vessels from another favoured ground. Pressure began to build for Britain to seek concessions similar to those demanded by the Norwegians. But the political situation was becoming so explosive that O’Neill’s team decided to defer further demands until after the Parliamentary debate, lest awkward questions were by Labour front-benchers. Because the fisheries problem had only come up since Labour’s application in 1967, it was the one issue over which Labour spokesmen felt no inhibitions in attacking the government, since they could not be accused of reneging on terms they had been prepared to accept four years earlier.
By the time negotiations were resumed, they became ‘so intense, intricate and continuous’, according to O’Neill, that he gave up trying to record a step-by-step account. . Fisheries had been raised briefly in the debate, prompting Rippon to make the misleading claim that there was now ‘a clear understanding’ that there would either have to be a wholly new fisheries regulation or the Community would have to accept ‘the status quo’.
On 9 November, the Community came up with another minor variation on its earlier proposal, offering member states a ‘derogation’ adding control up to their 12-mile limits in certain geographical areas. These arrangements would still be subject to review after ten years, but the decision as to whether they could continue would have to be unanimous. Although O’Neill described this as ‘in many respects entirely unsatisfactory’, it was to be the basis on which agreement was eventually reached.
The Norwegians were even less happy. Meeting with Rippon, they rejected any solution that was only temporary, insisting that national limits must be permanent. They were unimpressed by his remark that ‘it was better when dealing with the Community to go round a problem rather than deal with it head on’. O’Neill regarded the Norwegians as ‘stubborn’. Their stance was to bring their relations with the Community to crisis point.
By now Rippon was under almost continuous fire in the Commons, to which he could only respond with evasive or ambiguous answers. As he and his colleagues tried to extract further minor concessions from the Six, centred on those areas where they wanted to retain a 12-mile limit, the Norwegians remained adamant that they must have a permanent 12-mile limit for the whole of their coastline.
Heath was now worried that, unless the issue could be resolved, his timetable for entering the Community on 1 January 1973 would have to be abandoned. On 29 November, ministers were due to arrive in Brussels for a final marathon session. That morning Heath sent an urgent message to the Norwegian prime minister, Trygve Bratteli. ‘You will know’, he wrote, ‘that it is very important that we present this question in a manner that will appear satisfactory to our fishing interests’. But Heath went on to say that he was now ‘seriously concerned’ by the way negotiations were dragging on. If Norway kept up its ‘stiff’ and ‘intransigent’ attitude, the Community might lose patience.
It was only because he believed it was of ‘the utmost importance’ that Norway should join the European Community, wrote Heath, that, ‘I dare send you this message today’. It was a great mistake, when dealing with the EEC, he suggested, to make demands ‘of a permanent nature’, because this ‘touches a principle which the EEC considers as fundamental’. If Mr Bratteli could only accept a time-limit, ‘subject to revision’, Heath suggested, then in practice he would surely find that the EEC would be understanding, and ‘will give you the essential concession which you expect’. In other words, so long as the Commission got what it wanted on paper, Heath was sure it would privately allow Norway the de facto permanence she wanted. After pleading with Bratteli to instruct his negotiators to give way, Heath ended by threatening, ‘with very much regret’, that, unless Norway conceded, the other candidate-countries would have to join without her.
When this message was received in Oslo, its contents were swiftly leaked, and word of Heath’s intervention soon reached Brussels - just as the crucial meeting was beginning. From the high-handed attitude of the French foreign minister, Maurice Schumann, it was more obvious than ever that the real driving force behind the ‘equal access’ policy was France. As can be seen from the FCO files, the rest of the Six had all at different times privately indicated unhappiness at the ruthless way this policy was being forced on the applicants. The evening after the Brussels talks ended, the German ambassador to London confessed to Rippon’s secretary Crispin Tickell at a private dinner that Schumann’s behaviour in Brussels and France’s subsequent blocking tactics had been ‘deplorable’. ‘As seen from here’, he said, ‘the Community had behaved at its worst’.
After the fiasco of the Brussels talks, a further meeting was scheduled for Saturday, 11 December. By now the British government’s only real concern was to get a formula covering the 12-mile limit which would somehow enable it to defend the policy in Parliament. By Sunday morning, wrote O’Neill, ‘we got almost everything we wanted’. The Norwegians still refused to agree.
The following day, 13 December, Rippon made a statement to the House on the outcome of the final meeting. He claimed that ‘outstanding problems’ on fisheries had been resolved. The Community had been persuaded of the need to protect Britain’s vital interests, both by conserving fish stocks and by protecting ‘the livelihoods of our fishermen’. He then said, ‘it is clear that we retain full jurisdiction of the whole of our coastal waters up to twelve miles’.
This was untrue. Firstly, British boats would only have exclusive right to fish out to 6 miles, and control over access between 6 and 12 miles would be limited. Secondly, this was permitted only under a ten-year derogation, to expire on 31 December 1982, after which it could only be extended by unanimous agreement of the member states. The derogation could thus be ended by a single veto. Thirdly, Britain had given away entirely the most important principle of all: namely, the Community’s power to control her fishing waters, up to the beaches. Even within the 6-mile limit, fishermen would still have to comply with Community rules. And when the 200-mile limit came in, the world’s richest fishing waters would have been given away in toto.
Desperate to hide how much had been conceded, Rippon then said: ‘I must emphasise that these are not just transitional arrangements which automatically lapse at the end of a fixed period’. This claim drew fierce challenge from Denis Healey and Peter Shore, both of whom suspected he was lying. What neither had yet seen was the wording of the accession treaty, which MPs would not be allowed to examine until after it was signed a month later. Only when this became available was it was clear that Rippon had told a blatant lie.
The Norwegians continued to refuse the demands of the Six and were to be offered substantial further concessions before they reluctantly reached agreement on 15 January 1971. Their fisheries minister resigned in protest, and this was to play a significant part in rejection of the terms in the Norwegian referendum, when on 25 September 1972, the ‘noes’ cast 52.7 percent of the votes, against the 47.3 percent who wanted to join.
Parliament hands over its power
On 22 January 1972, Heath arrived in Brussels for the signing ceremony. He was joined by Alec Douglas-Home, Geoffrey Rippon, Con O’Neill, Harold Macmillan, Christopher Soames, Jeremy Thorpe and George Brown. Wilson went to a football match. At the foot of the stairs in the Palais d’Egmont, Heath was attacked by a young woman who pushed through the crowd to hurl a bottle of ink at his head. It splashed all over his suit. She was merely protesting at the failure of a business transaction in Covent Garden. It was not enough to prevent the signing of Britain’s Treaty of Accession.
The next great task was to frame the legislation needed to enact the acquis into UK law. On the face of it, this seemed an awesome prospect, with 13,000 pages to be incorporated. Then there were the future Community laws.
How this problem was to be solved was given to Heath’s Solicitor General, Geoffrey Howe. To work himself into the job, he recalled that he spent a weekend re-reading Enoch Powell’s arguments against the legitimacy of the whole exercise. ‘Did we’, he asked himself, ‘really have the authority of the British people to effect such a change. Had we been sufficiently candid about the implications?’ In the end, he concluded that these had been fully explained, in documents beginning with those published by the Wilson government in 1967. Apparently ignoring the fact that the British people had been offered no choice in the matter at the 1970 general election, he concluded that the electorate had endorsed the principle of membership. Thus, he believed, the final, crucial stage could properly be entrusted to Parliament.
For the very sovereignty of Parliament entitled that body to manage or deploy that sovereignty, on behalf of the British people, in partnership with other nations on such terms as Parliament itself might decide.
Only then did Howe address himself to how this was to be done. Already there had been speculation that any Bill might have to run to thousands of clauses, which Labour’s leading dissident, Tony Benn, claimed would never get through Parliament in time for 1 January 1973, when the accession treaty was due to come into force. However, with the help of his senior parliamentary counsel, John Fiennes, Howe produced what he himself described as a coup de théâtre: a ‘European Communities Bill’ of just twelve clauses and four schedules, in a mere thirty-seven pages.
At its heart was one short passage, Section 2, sub-section 2. This used a long-standing device in British law-making, the ‘enabling Act’ whereby Parliament delegated to ministers the power to enact law directly, without a laborious passage through Parliament. Howe’s inspiration was to borrow this device to allow any relevant minister to enact directly into British law any item of Community legislation. In purely constitutional terms, this represented by far the greatest accession of power to the executive in history. As that internal Foreign Office paper on ‘sovereignty’ had predicted, it would place unprecedented powers in the hands of unelected officials, both in Brussels and Whitehall, who were now in effect being given the right to make laws with only a semblance of democratic accountability.
Howe’s next challenge was to persuade Parliament to accept what in effect was its own redundancy ticket. Heath’s chief whip, Francis Pym, knew that even one amendment could negate the whole accession treaty, putting her entry in jeopardy. In addition, Heath’s government had by now become highly unpopular. Inflation was rising rapidly. Wracked by industrial unrest, Britain was in crisis over a miners’ strike. Trade union power had become one of the most conspicuous features of national life. ‘The stakes’, Pym declared, ‘couldn’t have been higher’.
The debate on the second reading lasted four days, from 16-19 February. Wilson accused Howe of imposing, ‘literally at a stroke’, an alien system of law. With his unrivalled understanding of the constitutional implications, Enoch Powell added a careful analysis of how the Commons was about to lose its supremacy.
Heath knew the vote was always going to be difficult, because the Labour Party was officially committed to oppose the Bill, and he could not rely on his own back-benchers. However, faced with the possible collapse of their government, most of the Conservative ‘anti-marketeers’ gritted their teeth and walked through the ‘aye’ lobby. Despite that, 15 Tories voted with the opposition. But Heath still got his vote, but only by a wafer-thin margin: 309 to 301. The issue had been decided by the four Labour MPs and five Liberals who voted with the government. The hardest part, however, was still to come, as the House embarked on the Committee stage, debating amendments which would involve no fewer than ninety-two divisions. Again, defeat of any one might negate the treaty.
The story of how the government came through this ordeal was not to emerge for more than twenty years, when several of the MPs involved took part in a BBC documentary. They recounted an unprecedented secret collaboration between the Conservative whips and Labour ‘pro-marketeers’, who arranged, when necessary, to find pressing engagements elsewhere which would mean their absence from the division lobby. In the words of Shirley Williams:
…people disappeared. They went to the films, they just didn’t show up, and so forth… There was quite a bit of quiet understanding that there were certain amendments where it was better for people to just find themselves… you know, speaking at a meeting at Little Ainsborough or something, so they wouldn’t be there.
At the heart of the plot, according to The Poisoned Chalice, was a red book kept by Labour whip John Roper, a ‘committed European’. He guaranteed there would be just enough Labour abstentions for the government to win every vote. But to stop the vote-rigging being noticed, and creating embarrassment for the Labour Party, the voting record was kept in Roper’s red book so he could vary the abstentions. Francis Pym recalled, looking somewhat uncomfortable: ‘it was a secret arrangement. Everybody knew it was happening. How it was happening, nobody quite knew. And that seemed to me very satisfactory’.
After thirty-nine days of debate, the Bill passed its third reading on 13 July by a majority of 17. The way was clear for the United Kingdom to join the EEC. For Howe and Heath it was a triumph. Enoch Powell despaired. ‘I don’t think people understood’, he said. Tony Benn was more forthright. ‘It was a coup d’état’, he declared, ‘by a political class who did not believe in popular sovereignty’.
Chapter Nine
Britain Stays In: 1973-5
Do you think that the United Kingdom should stay in the European Community (the Common Market)?
Referendum question put to the British people, 5 June 1975.
The result showed conclusively that the British people… wholeheartedly backed the decision taken in 1971 by the British Government, over which I presided, to join the Community.
Edward Heath, The Course of My Life.
In 1975 I campaigned as a Conservative parliamentary candidate for a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum that kept us in the EC. In retrospect it is abundantly clear that I campaigned on a prospectus that was sufficiently false to ensure that, if the issue had been a public offer in securities, I would face prosecution under the provisions of the Companies Act and I would lose.
Tom Benyon, letter to The Times, 29 May 2003.
To celebrate ‘the entry of the United Kingdom into the European Community’ on 1 January 1973, the lawyer Lord Goodman, a former chairman of the Arts Council, was invited by his friend Mr Heath to organise a series of nation-wide events under the title ‘Fanfare for Europe’. At a gala evening at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, prosperous bankers were regaled with operatic hits and guffawed at snippets about foreigners read by actors, while a special arrangement of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ modulated into a piece of pseudo-jazz by Michael Tippet. In a darkened room, the Victoria and Albert Museum put on show a tastefully lit selection of art-objects from each member state, such as a pair of Bronze Age wind instruments from a Danish bog. A concert was given in York Minster by the Great Universal Stores Footwear band. The Whitechapel Art Gallery staged an exhibition of sweet-wrappers. Gas and electricity showrooms across the country featured demonstrations of continental cookery.
For many, however, their first experience of ‘belonging’ to the Common Market came with the arrival of VAT, possibly the most bureaucratic tax system ever devised. Introduced by the EEC in 1967, its advantage to the state was that for the first time millions of businesses would have to act as unpaid tax collectors, charging their customers 10 percent on the cost of all goods and services supplied, then subtracting all the VAT paid to their own suppliers on items not ‘zero-rated’ or exempt, and sending the difference to the government.
As a reflection of the new system of government the British people were now about to live under, it was a foretaste of much that was to come.
A ‘provisional European government’
Anglo-centric histories of the ‘European project’ usually glide from the signing of Britain’s accession treaty in 1972 straight to the attempt by a new Labour government under Wilson in 1974 to renegotiate Britain’s terms of entry, leading to the 1975 referendum. Between these events, however, came two developments which were each to have profound long-term significance for the future of European integration.
The first of these began with the Paris summit on 18 October 1972, the day after Heath’s European Communities Bill received Royal Assent. The idea for this summit, to celebrate the ‘enlargement’ of the ‘Six’ to the ‘Nine’, originated with Monnet. Pompidou feared it would be merely a public relations exercise, but Heath assured him that it would be a serious occasion where real decisions could be taken: ‘for example, that there could be substantial progress towards economic and monetary union’.
Heath also had another objective. Two things were weighing on his mind. The first was the imbalance of the Community budget in favour of agriculture. A second was the rundown of Britain’s traditional heavy industries, such as shipbuilding. Germany and other countries had used their Marshall aid after the war to modernise and re-equip, which was one reason why their economies were now so obviously outperforming Britain’s. An answer to both problems, thought Heath, would be for the Community to create a proper ‘regional policy’, whereby Britain could receive subsidies on a scale commensurate with what other countries, such as France, gained for their agriculture. As Heath put it in his memoirs:
Much time was spent in the Cabinet Office trying to devise a European policy which would help our budgetary imbalance by spending more in the UK than in any other member states, differentiating between our problems of declining industries and high unemployment and the problems faced by other countries. By taking the lead in the development of a Community regional policy we could also demonstrate our avowed intention to play our full part in building up and strengthening the enlarged Community.
When Heath received Pompidou’s draft declaration for the summit, he replied that he ‘had always admired the lucidity and clarity of French literature’. He agreed with Chancellor Willy Brandt that Germany and the UK ‘would meet Pompidou’s wish to underline progress towards monetary integration, provided that the French accepted our wish to give priority to regional and social problems’. On 18 October, Heath met Pompidou before the summit to ask for his support for a ‘regional development fund’:
He listened to what I had to say and then remarked that it was not a cause he wished to espouse, because France did not need help. ‘Moreover’, he added, ‘you have sent me a map showing where the funds would go. I immediately turned my eyes to my own country and looked at my own home, Auvergne, only to find that it would not be getting a penny or a franc. So there is nothing in it for us’.
It is a measure of Heath’s single-mindedness that he merely promised to send Pompidou ‘a fresh memorandum on the subject… together with a new, improved map’, which he was sure his French colleague would find more acceptable.
In his opening speech at the summit Heath called for ‘a clear timetable for economic and monetary union’. He also hoped for commitments on the Community’s regional policy and ‘a common foreign policy’. The summit’s main outcome was an affirmation by the heads of government of their intention to ‘transform their relations into a European Union by the end of the decade’. They agreed that ‘a European Parliament, elected by universal suffrage, would have to be associated with the development of the European construction’. They also agreed to the setting up of a Regional Development Fund, to be financed by the Community, supported by the European Investment Bank (EIB).
Heath regarded the acceptance of his idea for a Regional Development Fund as a ‘major negotiating success’. But by the time it came to be formally approved in December 1974, the funds allocated were only 4.8 percent of the Community’s budget, compared with 90 percent for the CAP. Britain was to receive 28 percent of this tiny sum, Italy 40 percent. So much for Heath’s ‘success’.
Another person dissatisfied by the summit was Monnet. He felt it had lacked focus and, more importantly, mechanisms for carrying its resolutions forward. His great regret was that it had not established ‘a supreme body to steer Europe through the difficult transition from national to collective sovereignty’. By the end of August 1973, therefore, he had produced another of his famous plans, outlining a structure for a ‘Provisional European Government’. To carry forward the Paris programme, this body would draw up a plan for ‘European Union’, to include a ‘European Government’ and an elected European Assembly. This ‘provisional government’ would meet regularly. Those taking part would keep its deliberations secret.
Monnet came over to England to discuss his proposal with Heath at Chequers on 18 September 1973, telling him ‘we must give public opinion the feeling that European affairs are being decided: today, people have the impression that they’re merely being discussed’. Heath readily agreed, but had a reservation about making the proposal public ‘Let’s just do it’, he told Monnet. He also worried about the term ‘provisional government’. ‘That would get me into great difficulties’, he said.
When Monnet approached Pompidou and Brandt, they were equally enthusiastic. Neither shared Heath’s reservations about the title, although Pompidou warmed to the name ‘European Union’. A member of Pompidou’s staff was heard to inquire of a close confidant of Pompidou what this phrase meant. The reply came ‘nothing… but then that is the beauty of it’.
In late September, Pompidou mentioned Monnet’s proposal at a press conference. Heath then took up the baton at the Conservative Party conference on 13 October. ‘I believe’, he said,
that already some of my colleagues as Heads of Government feel the need for us to get together regularly without large staff so that we can jointly guide the Community along the paths we have already set. I would like to see the Heads of Government of the member countries of the Community meeting together, perhaps twice a year, as I have said, alone and without large staffs, with the President of the Commission being present, as he was at the Summit …our purpose in meeting together would be to lay down the broad direction of European policy.
Heath failed to mention that he was talking about what was being called a ‘provisional government’, and said nothing about it being intended to steer Europe through the ‘transition from national to collective sovereignty’.
Two weeks later, on 31 October, Pompidou told his Cabinet that regular meetings of heads of states were needed ‘with the aim of comparing and harmonising their attitudes in the framework of political co-operation’. He wanted the first meeting to be held before the end of 1973. Monnet was now confident that, despite the turmoil into which the world had suddenly been plunged that autumn by the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East, his plan was back on track. Then, as he was to recall, ‘when all seemed well, everything was thrown into turmoil’. In the aftermath of the war, the price of oil had quadrupled, threatening chaos to western economies. The governments of the Nine rushed to strike individual deals with the oil sheikhs. Heath was later to write that, at this moment, the Community ‘lost sight of the philosophy of Jean Monnet: that the Community exists to find common solutions to common problems’.
Each member state drifted back to seeking its own, unilateral solutions. So we all had to relearn painfully that there is no solution if we act on our own.
Despite this, Monnet continued to make progress with his plan. By March 1974 he was circulating another paper, proclaiming:
Existing European practices have proved inadequate as a means of enabling our countries to organise themselves for collective action… We must break out of this vicious circle, in which the common interests of the Community countries are inadequately served. The existing European institutions are not strong enough today to do it on their own.
Then, in the three leading Community states, there were changes at the top table. In a general election in Britain, Heath was replaced by Wilson. In Germany Brandt retired, to be replaced in May by Helmut Schmidt. The same month in France, after Pompidou had died, he was replaced by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. But the old alliance between Pompidou and Brandt was soon replaced by a similar friendship between Giscard and Schmidt. The two new Franco-German leaders soon agreed that there should be ‘no more separate national actions, only European actions’. They accepted Monnet’s ‘provisional government’, giving it the title ‘European Council’. The new body was approved at an informal meeting of heads of government at the Elysée on 14 September 1974.
The Council’s first meeting was held in Paris on 9-10 December 1974. For Britain, Wilson agreed with his fellow heads of government that:
The Heads of Government having noted that internal and international difficulties have prevented in 1973 and 1974 the accomplishment of expected progress on the road to EMU affirm …their will has not weakened and that their objective has not changed…
The heads of government also confirmed their determination to work toward a common foreign policy and agreed to ‘renounce’ the practice, based on the Luxembourg Compromise, of making agreements conditional on unanimous consent. A working party should be set up to study the possibility of introducing a uniform passport for Community citizens.
The main business, however, was to make the Council a permanent institution. Giscard pointed out that there had only been three ‘summits’ between the heads of government in five years. They had to become ‘more organised’ and regular, as Monnet had proposed. Nothing appeared in the communiqué about the Council becoming a ‘provisional government’, but one of its first actions was to ask the Belgium prime minister, Leo Tindemans, to draft a report on how further integration could be achieved. Giscard brought proceedings to a close with the words ‘The Summit is dead. Long live the European Council’.
Despite this landmark in the evolution of what was now becoming known as ‘European construction’, journalists and others were to continue to refer to meetings of the Council as ‘summits’. Even today few realise the significance of what had happened. Monnet himself, however, had no doubts:
…the European institutions were in charge of immense sectors of activity, over which they exercised the share of sovereignty that had been delegated to them. But if they were to work effectively, the governments had to have the same European will and be prepared, acting together as a collective authority, to transfer the additional sovereignty required to achieve a true European Union. The creation of the European Council supplied the means for reaching that essential decision. A major step had been taken.
It was, effectively, Monnet’s last great coup. Retiring to write his memoirs, he was called back to the public stage only once more when, in April 1976, by resolution of the European Council in Luxembourg, he was awarded the title ‘Honorary Citizen of Europe’.
The ‘sham’ of ‘re-negotiation’
British politics had by now been through turmoil. In the winter of 1973-4, Britain’s ailing economy had been plunged into chaos by industrial unrest and a second miners’ strike, leading to major power cuts and the ‘three day week’. Soaring wage demands and the quadrupling of world oil prices had led to galloping inflation. Heath called an election for 28 February, on the slogan ‘Who Governs Britain?’ (not, of course, meaning Westminster or Brussels, but himself or the unions). Although Heath and Wilson were both unpopular, Labour edged ahead of the Conservatives, by 301 seats to 297. Wilson returned to power. ‘Grocer’ Heath departed, never again to take centre stage as a national leader.
When Wilson walked into Downing Street in March 1974, for his second term as prime minister, he carried with him the baggage of an aggressive Labour manifesto which pledged ‘fundamental renegotiation’ of Britain’s entry terms:
A profound political mistake made by the Heath government was to accept the terms of entry to the Common Market, and to take us in without the consent of the British people. This has involved the imposition of food taxes on top of rising world prices, crippling fresh burdens on our balance of payments, and a draconian curtailment of the power of the British Parliament to settle questions affecting vital British interests. This is why a Labour government will seek a fundamental renegotiation of the terms of entry.
Wilson had not promised this from any sense of conviction. He was worried about divisions in his party over the Common Market, even a challenge to his leadership, and because opposition to the Market was strong on the left of the party, he wanted to secure its support. As Bernard Donoughue, then Wilson’s senior policy advisor, was to explain, his proposal of a ‘renegotiation’ was a stratagem to suppress internal party divisions. Now Labour was back in power, he had to deliver.
With Machiavellian skill, he chose Callaghan, his new Foreign Secretary, as the chief negotiator. Regarded as lukewarm on the Community, and an Atlanticist, Callaghan was the leading potential leadership challenger. His direct involvement in the negotiations would make it difficult for him to use the Common Market issue as a stick to beat his leader.
Clearly, what were already known in the Community the ‘so-called renegotiations’ were not Callaghan’s idea of pleasure. His experiences of negotiating with Europe as Chancellor had not impressed him. Giscard d’Estaing in particular he found offensively arrogant. When John Cole, the BBC’s political editor, suggested that European politics might be fun, Callaghan replied: ‘What? Haggling with the French? The French are awful’. According to Cole,
He recalled his experiences in OECD and other gatherings. He knew it sounded bad, but he feared the French would run rings around the British in the common Market. He had not enjoyed his hours in the couloirs, while French politicians or diplomats blew cigar smoke over him. Then, when you believed you had agreed on something during the lunch-break, you got back into the meeting to find the French had changed their minds, and though the Germans, Italians and Dutch might talk behind their hands, they would all go along with the French in the end.
Instructed by the Cabinet to give the impression of taking a tough line, when Callaghan arrived at the Council of Ministers on 1 April 1974 he wanted to read out the aggressive passage from Labour’s election manifesto. His officials dissuaded him - this might be impolitic - so it was merely entered into the record. He did, however, declare that the British government reserved the right to propose changes to the treaties as an essential condition of Britain’s continued membership, and the right to withdraw if satisfactory terms could not be agreed.
By the time the negotiations proper began on 4 June, Giscard had taken up the French presidency. Brandt had been replaced by Schmidt, with Hans Dietrich Genscher as his foreign minister. The Germans were both sympathetic to Britain’s position and supportive of moves to reform the CAP. The mood had therefore changed, and Callaghan softened his tone. He laid four items on the table: Britain’s budgetary contribution; access for Commonwealth produce; CAP reform; and the right of member states to give state aid to industry and the regions without Community interference.
Some progress had already been made on the Commonwealth issue through Judith Hart, minister for overseas development. Although she had opposed British membership, she had brokered what was to become the Lomé convention, signed on 28 February 1975 between the EEC and forty-six developing countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP). This replaced the earlier Yaoundé agreements, by which the lion’s share of EEC overseas aid had gone to French-speaking Africa.
On CAP reform and state aid, Britain predictably got nowhere. The most contentious issue, however, was the budget contribution. The Treasury had estimated that by 1979, if nothing changed, the British share would increase to 21 percent of the budget, against her 14 percent share of Community GNP. Professor Stephen George, a leading advocate of the ‘Britain as an awkward partner’ school, records that the Commission declined to endorse these calculations and refused to consider any estimate of future contributions. The French refused to recognise levies and tariffs as national contributions, on the grounds that the EEC was a customs union. All such duties must be regarded as the Community’s ‘own resources’ (even though the bill would have to paid by British consumers in higher prices for imported goods). They refused, therefore, to consider any question of a rebate. Despite this, the Commission did propose a form of rebate, but of such complexity that it was not acceptable either to France or Britain.
As the negotiations stalled, the Labour Party held its annual conference, delayed by the year’s second general election in which Wilson was returned to power with 319 seats against 277 for Heath’s Conservatives. The anti-marketeers narrowly carried a resolution laying down eight conditions for Britain’s continued membership, including ‘the right of British parliament to reject any European Economic Community legislation, directives or orders, when they are issued, or at any time after’. Next day, however, the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt charmed delegates with a plea for socialist solidarity, calling on them not to leave the Community. Schmidt then spent the weekend with Wilson at Chequers, where a deal was hatched. Wilson would agree to keep Britain in the Community, and Schmidt would ensure that enough concessions were made at the forthcoming Paris European Council to sustain a claim that renegotiation had succeeded.
In Paris, on 9-10 December, Wilson had other ideas. This was his opportunity to show his public that he was looking after their interests. Before leaving London, he had made strong statements about how he ‘would accept no nonsense from other member states on the two vital issues yet to be agreed’. But, when discussion turned to the budget, Giscard would not yield an inch. Wilson, ‘who had already been very rough on his opponents round the table, said he saw no point in going on’. At dinner that evening, ‘d’Estaing softened’, thanks to the mediation of Schmidt who, honouring his Chequers promise, persuaded his fellow ministers to examine a formula suggested by British civil servants for ‘a ‘correcting mechanism’ in relation to the EEC budget’.
After three more months of what Callaghan described as ‘fraught’ negotiations, Wilson headed for the next Council in Dublin on 10-11 March 1975, confident that he was in sight of a settlement he could sell to his party and the British public. On the first day, hours were spent discussing ‘a complex and incomprehensible German proposal for implementing the budget correcting mechanism’, followed on the second day by similarly arcane debate over complex formulae relating to import quotas for New Zealand butter and cheese. The Belgian prime minister complained about heads of government being reduced to the level of auditors of a supermarket chain.
Nevertheless, a semblance of agreement was reached, enough for Wilson, as planned, to declare the negotiations a success. After lengthy discussions with his Cabinet on 17-18 March, he told his ministers that the negotiating objectives had been ‘substantially achieved’, the Community had changed de facto and de jure and the attitude of the Commonwealth had changed too. The Commonwealth ‘wanted us to stay in’. The Cabinet voted sixteen to seven for staying in. Thus, on 18 March Wilson announced to the Commons that his government would now recommend the electorate to vote in what would be Britain’s first-ever referendum, for continued membership on the new terms. Anyone who knew how little had really been achieved would have agreed with Heath’s verdict that the renegotiation ‘was a sham’. All evidence suggests, however, that the British public were sufficiently impressed by it to achieve the decisive shift in opinion Wilson hoped for.
The people must decide
Holding a referendum on Britain’s membership of the Common Market had been first mooted by Tony Benn in 1970 but, at the time, Wilson had flatly rejected one. On 27 May 1970 he told the BBC’s Election Forum, when asked whether he would ever change his mind,
The answer to that is ‘No’. I have given my answer many times, and I don’t change it because the polls go either up or down.
Benn’s cause, however, was aided by the unlikely figure of Pompidou who, on 16 March 1972, announced a referendum in France on EEC enlargement. Buoyed by the proposition that what the French people would get should also be given to the British, Benn took his proposition back to the NEC, winning on 22 March 1972 a majority of two for a referendum.
Wilson still opposed the idea. But faced with the Shadow Cabinet favouring the idea, not for the first time on a major issue, he changed his mind. A referendum option was approved by eight votes to six. Jenkins resigned as deputy leader, in disgust. ‘This was no way to run an opposition’, he said later, ‘chopping and changing from… week to week. And not on any grounds of changed beliefs but on grounds purely of opportunistic politics’.
There the matter rested. But when, in October 1974, Wilson decided to go back to the country in the hope of a larger majority, the option of a referendum was included in Labour’s manifesto. Until now opinion polls had for some time been showing sizeable majorities in favour of Britain leaving the EEC. But, by November, the polls were beginning to show a significant shift. According to Harris, 53 percent of the electorate said they would be happy to remain in the Community ‘on the right terms’. In January 1975 this was even more dramatically confirmed by Gallup. Although a simply majority was in favour of leaving, when respondents were asked whether ‘new terms… in Britain’s interest’ would make a difference, 71 percent now preferred to stay in. Only 29 percent wanted to leave.
With that, on 23 January, Wilson announced his intention to hold a referendum, more than two months before the renegotiation had been concluded. By the time he returned from Dublin to announce that the government would be recommending a ‘Yes’ vote, the balance had swung decisively in favour, by 66 to 34: almost exactly what the vote three months later.
When the Referendum Bill was published on 26 March, Heath was strongly opposed, on the grounds, as he explained in his memoirs, that the UK ‘had a fully effective parliamentary system for debating and deciding crucial national issues’. He did not explain how the British public could have express its views through that system when, since 1964, all three main political parties had supported EEC membership.
Nevertheless Heath was no longer Conservative leader. He had been deposed and replaced by Margaret Thatcher, and it was her role to lead opposition to the Bill on 11 March. ‘There is no power’ as she put it,
under which the British constitution can come into rivalry with the legislative sovereignty of Parliament… to subject laws retrospectively to a popular vote suggests a serious breach of this principle… the implications for parliamentary sovereignty are profound.
Despite his pique at being replaced, Heath warmly approved Thatcher’s ‘impressive speech’. Yet the remarkable feature of the view shared by Thatcher and Heath was that, although they were both reluctant to share decision-making (i.e. ‘sovereignty’) with the British people, they seemed quite happy to share it with an unelected law-making body in Brussels.
Battle lines are drawn
Swallowing his objection to the referendum, Heath announced on 19 March that he planned to play a full part in the campaign, on behalf of a new ‘all-party’ organisation called Britain in Europe, which was publicly launched on 26 March. In December 1974, the long-established European Movement had put its own campaign into abeyance, placing all its resources at the disposal of BiE. The new title was chosen because it seemed ‘crisp’ and ‘fresh’, and because it emphasised that the campaign favoured remaining with the status quo. Britain was ‘in’. The ‘outs’ were trying to upset things.
BiE was designed as an umbrella organisation, encompassing the separate Conservative, Labour and Liberal campaigns, along with a Trade Union Alliance for Europe. Its Labour president was Roy Jenkins. Several of its senior staff were seconded from the Labour Party. Its chairman was Sir Con O’Neill, who had retired from the Foreign Office in 1972. Heath was made a vice-president, along with the former Liberal leader Jo Grimond, William Whitelaw MP, Lord Feather, former general-secretary of the TUC, and Sir Henry Plumb, president of the National Farmers Union.
As the referendum approached, the Labour Party’s fragile unity had begun to unravel. Left-wing MPs, led by Joe Ashton, Tony Benn’s PPS, and Ian Mikardo had strongly criticised the terms of the renegotiation and were even calling for the party to campaign for withdrawal from the EEC.
On 22 March, the Scottish Labour Party voted against staying in by 346,000 to 280,000, with Mikardo and others making speeches that bordered on personal abuse of leading members of their own party. Next day, five Cabinet ministers, Benn, Barbara Castle, Michael Foot, Shore and Silkin, issued a statement opposing the government line. Wilson was losing control. He solved the problem by allowing Labour MPs, including ministers, to campaign according to their consciences.
In late March, the government produced a White Paper on the renegotiations, and in a debate on 7-9 April recommended Parliament to approve Britain’s continued membership on the terms set out. Wilson won by 396-170, a majority of 226. But 145 Labour MPs, including 38 ministers, had voted against their own government, with only 137 in support. The day was carried by Conservative MPs, including Heath, only eight Tories voting against. The Referendum Bill had an easier passage, receiving Royal Assent on 8 May.
One bewildering feature of the battle which followed was that, in addition to the official ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns, there were also ‘Yes’ campaigns for each party. Labour’s ‘Campaign for Europe’ was launched on 8 April, with Shirley Williams as president, and included 88 MPs, 21 peers and 25 trade unionists.
The Conservative ‘Yes’ campaign was launched by Thatcher on 16 April, at a dinner at the St. Ermin’s Hotel. She could not have spoken more fervently for the cause:
It is a fact that there has been peace in Europe for the past quarter of a century, and for that alone I am grateful – grateful that my children have not been embroiled in a European conflict as was their father and as were the children of the two previous generations. We should not take that peace which has been secured too much for granted, for it has not been secured by the conscious and concerted effort of nations to work together… It is a myth that the Community is simply a bureaucracy with no concern for the individual. The entire staff of the Commission is about 7,000 – smaller than that of the Scottish Office. It is a myth that our membership will suffocate national tradition and culture. Are the Germans any less German for being in the Community, or the French any less French? Of course they are not.
Despite the Tories having their own ‘Yes’ campaign, Britain in Europe also relied heavily on the Conservative Party, because it had ‘the only effective machinery for putting on a national campaign’. BiE was nevertheless at pains to present itself as an all-embracing body, run by a council of thirty-seven well-known names, including every living ex-prime minister, every ex-foreign secretary (barring Selwyn Lloyd, who as Speaker of the House, had to stay neutral), and other public figures ranging from the television mogul Lew Grade to the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey. The church was heavily involved, thanks to the efforts of a young Conservative would-be MP, John Selwyn Gummer, who claimed to have the support of over one-quarter of all clergy of all denominations, including almost every Anglican bishop. ‘Prayers for Europe’ were said in many Anglican churches and supportive items were placed in parish magazines.
Mammon was also well-represented, notably by the enthusiastic support of the Confederation of British Industry. A survey carried out by The Times on 9 April showed 415 out of 419 chairmen of major companies wanting Britain to stay in the EEC, and the CBI set up its own European Operations Room, distributing over a million documents.
As during the ‘great debate’ four years earlier, raising money proved to be no problem for the ‘Yes’ campaign. Together with the European Movement, BiE were to spend some £1,850,000 on the campaign, nearly fourteen times more than the £133,000 available to the ‘No’ camp.
The ‘No’ campaign also organised under an umbrella organisation, with the uninspiring title of the National Referendum Campaign (NRC). As most anti-Market groups came from extremes of left and right, it represented an uneasy coalition, covering a wide divergence of individuals and organisations often at odds with one another, as when Tony Benn refused to appear on any public platforms with Conservatives. Tory anti-marketeers were in fact notable by their absence from the ‘No’ camp. Of the 41 Tory MPs who had defied the whip in 1971 to vote against entry to the EEC, only five played an active role in the NRC, including Richard Body and Teddy Taylor. The rest stayed silent. The few other prominent figures actively supporting the ‘No’ campaign included the historian Sir Arthur Bryant; journalists Paul Johnson and Peregrine Worsthorne; Patrick Neill QC, a future Warden of All Souls; the economists Lord Kaldor and Robert Neild; and a recently retired permanent secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, now director of the National Trust, Sir John Winnifrith.
They could scarcely hope to compete with the galaxy of public figures supporting the ‘Yes’ bandwagon, which was now ready to roll.
The referendum campaign
A feature of the referendum campaign often overlooked is that it coincided with the worst economic crisis Britain had faced since the war. In June 1975 the inflation rate hit 27 percent, the highest level ever recorded. Public spending was out of control and government borrowing was heading towards a record £11 billion. Britain’s trade deficit had also reached record levels, not helped by the deficit which since 1973 had opened up in Britain’s trade with the rest of the Common Market. This was now running at a yearly rate of £2.6 billion, against the modest surplus Britain had enjoyed before entry.
None of this impinged on the campaign. In fact, the country was almost eerily detached from the mounting financial crisis. Even on 30 June, more than three weeks after the vote, Wilson would still be waving aside any talk of a ‘crisis’ and dismissing the need for what he called ‘panic measures’.
The most tangible evidence of the campaign was the three official booklets sent to every household in the country: two, from BiE and the government, calling for a ‘Yes’ vote; the third putting the case for a ‘No’.
The ‘No’ leaflet listed benefits which had been promised if Britain joined the Market, from a rapid rise in our living standards and higher investment to more employment and faster industrial growth. In every case, it claimed, government figures showed the opposite result. It tried to evoke the dangers facing Britain from having handed over ‘the right to rule ourselves’, as her laws increasingly came to be made by ‘unelected Commissioners in Brussels’. It claimed that the Market’s ‘real aim’ was eventually to become ‘one single country, in which Britain would be a ‘mere province’. It rejected the ‘scare-mongering of the pro-Marketeers’, who claimed that British withdrawal would lead to economic disaster, and called for Britain to negotiate a free-trade agreement with the EEC, like that now enjoyed by Norway, Switzerland and the other members of EFTA.
The BiE case began with simple bullet points summing up the ‘real advantages’ of staying in. It made ‘good sense’ for ‘our jobs and prosperity’, for ‘world peace’, and ‘for our children’s future’. But it was the emotional pitch of the BiE case that stood out. Conjured up was how lonely and isolated Britain would be if she was foolish enough to withdraw. Everyone else in the world, it claimed, wanted Britain to stay in, from the USA and the Commonwealth to ‘our friends’ in the European Community. Outside, ‘we should be alone in a cold, harsh world’. Claims that Community was undemocratic and wanted to eliminate national identities were ridiculous. ‘All decisions of any importance must be agreed by every member’. Apart from a few new laws needed for ‘commercial and industrial purposes’, Britain would still retain the rest: ‘Trial by jury, presumption of innocence remain unaltered’. The leaflet ended by quoting Heath: ‘are we going to stay on the centre of the stage where we belong, or are we going to shuffle off into the dusty wings of history?’.
The government leaflet, A New Deal in Europe, emphasised how the re-negotiations had brought ‘significant improvements’ in Britain’s terms of membership. Under the heading ‘Will Parliament Lose Its Power? What Are The Facts?’, voters were again assured ‘we cannot go it alone in the modern world’. Membership of ‘groupings like the United Nations, Nato and the International Monetary Fund’ had not deprived the British of their national identity. It was ‘the Council of Ministers’ which took all the ‘important decisions’ in the Common Market, not officials. ‘Inside the Market’, it concluded, ‘we can play a major part’ in deciding policies which will ‘affect the lives of every family in the country’; ‘outside we are on our own’.
The press was almost unanimously in the ‘Yes’ camp. But inevitably, television set the pace of the campaign. Public meetings, although numerous, were relatively sparsely attended. Their primary function, for both camps, was to provide news ‘hooks’ on which media coverage could be based. This helped to give the campaign an air of suffocating unreality, where ‘debate’ was reduced to little more than slogans and soundbites, a process deliberately encouraged by the tacticians for the ‘Yes’ camp, who were far more effective than their opponents in setting the level on which the battle was fought. As one commentator observed:
On both sides, the committed would have liked a political debate about patriotism, sovereignty and federalism, which is what had moved them to work hard for many years to get Britain into Europe, or keep it from the clutches of Brussels. But, especially on the pro-Community side, practical politicians and campaigners moved in to steer the debate in which prices, income levels and economic security dominated… The familiar bread and butter issues of a British general election took top place in the minds of the publicity men and in the answers pollsters obtained about what the referendum question meant.
At the centre of the ‘Yes’ campaign was a unit set up by Jim Callaghan in the Foreign Office, holding daily meetings with his team which, as a senior civil servant Sir Michael Butler was later to recall, included Shirley Williams, head of the Labour ‘Yes’ campaign, the Head of the News Department, and the Head of the News Department at Number 10, plus one or two other ministers, together with one or two officials. The daily strategy for the campaign was laid down at this meeting.
This unprecedented grouping (Butler himself called it ‘an interesting innovation’) broke protocols by directly involving civil servants in a partisan exercise, although this was presumably excused by those involved by the fact that support for ‘Europe’ was regarded by many senior civil servants as an issue transcending partisan politics.
Another ‘regular’ at Callaghan’s meetings was the market researcher Bob Worcester, head of Mori International, who played a central part in guiding ‘Yes’ campaign tactics. In a memorandum to Jim Callaghan on 16 May, he advised the campaign to focus on prices and the cost of living. With inflation heading for 27 percent, the message should be ‘that the government will have a better chance of keeping prices down if we stay in the Common Market than if we get out’. He concluded:
We must not scatter our shots – let the Opposition talk about sovereignty, independence, Britain’s role in the world, defence, etc. If they spend two days on this and three days on that between now and the 5 June (polling day), this is the best thing that could happen to us.
In Worcester’s subsequent analysis, he attached particular significance to the public perception of each side’s leading figures. Here, it was obvious that the ‘No’ campaign suffered a marked handicap. Based on subtracting the percentage of the public who liked each figure from the percentage who disliked them, only one of the six leading ‘anti-market’ personalities registered a small plus rating: Enoch Powell (+2). He compared with Jack Jones (-5), Michael Foot (-9), Tony Benn (-15), Hugh Scanlon (-17) and the Rev. Ian Paisley (-59). The six leading ‘Yes’ campaigners scored big plus ratings: Reggie Maudling (+12), Wilson (+19), Heath (+21), William Whitelaw (+25), Roy Jenkins (+25), Jeremy Thorpe (+29). With the pro-marketeers occupying the centre ground, there were few figures in the ‘No’ camp who could be presented as moderate, establishment figures. The media, anyway, focused on the two figures who seemed to middle-ground opinion most extreme: Powell and Benn.
After the poll, a Conservative campaigner who had been in the thick of the action, commented on this effect:
What was notable was the extent to which the referendum… was not really about Europe at all. It became a straight left versus right battle with the normal dividing line shifting further over than in general elections – hence the Labour split and their discomfiture. In all the speeches I made to Conservative audiences the trump card was always – ‘beware of Benn, Foot and Castle’. It was this, more than anything, which …increasingly negated the efforts of the anti-EEC Conservatives.
The ‘antis’ were never going to succeed. The greatest strength of the ‘pros’ was the status quo: ‘If we leave, Britain will be isolated’ was their central theme. In addition there was the near-unanimity of establishment opinion in favour of remaining in, with every major national newspaper expressing pro-market views. The opposition was fatally split and the leading figures of the ‘Yes’ campaign were vastly more credible than their opponents.
Unsurprisingly, when 5 June came, the public voted to stay in, by a two-to-one majority. On a turnout of 29,433,194 electors (64.5 percent), 17,378,581 (67.2 percent) voted ‘Yes’, 8,470,073 (32.8) voted ‘No’. Every part of mainland Britain registered a ‘Yes’ majority, the only exceptions being Shetland (where 56.3 percent voted ‘No’) and the Western Isles (70.3). After the result had been declared, Thatcher declared:
The message of the referendum for the government is that the people have looked at the really big issues… They have looked at what really counts and they have voted that way.
But it was not only Eurosceptics who would come to question the outcome. Roy Hattersley, in a BBC radio interview many years later, thought it had been ‘wrong for us to deal superficially with what Europe involved’. ‘We’ve paid the price for it ever since’, he said, ‘because every time there’s a crisis in Europe, people say, with some justification, ‘well, we wouldn’t have been part of this if we’d really known the implications’.
The really significant lesson of that referendum vote, however, was reflected in the fact that, only six months earlier, the opinion polls had consistently been showing majorities in favour of Britain leaving the EEC. What undoubtedly swung public opinion, as the pollsters themselves discovered, was that so many people genuinely believed Wilson had won a better deal.
The campaign itself was in this sense wholly irrelevant. The result on 5 June reflected almost exactly what the polls had been showing back in March, after voters had first started telling the pollsters that, if the government now assured them it was in Britain’s interest to stay in, they would change their minds. Wilson had swung them round with re-negotiations which everyone who understood them agreed were a ‘sham’.
******
On 22 November 1974, a piece of history was made in a British court, when for the first time a case had been decided entirely on the basis of the Treaty of Rome. Lord Denning had ruled in favour of a German company which had demanded an English customer should settle his disputed bill in Deutschmarks. In a lower court the company had already been given judgment in sterling, this being previously the only currency in which an English court could legally make an award. But the German firm had appealed because, by then, sterling had been substantially devalued against the mark. Finding for the plaintiff, Denning said:
This is the first case in which we had actually to apply the Treaty of Rome in these courts. It shows great effect. It has brought about a fundamental change… It has already made us think about our own laws.
The trouble was that very few others were doing any serious thinking. Britain was sleepwalking into an entirely new situation, the nature of which her people could not yet begin to comprehend.
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