The European Rescue of the Nation State

Alan Milward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1999
• eBook ISBN: 9781134606306
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This newly revised and updated second edition is the classic economic and political account of the origins of the European Community. On one level it is an original analysis of the forces which brought the EC together, on another it is an explanation based on historical analysis of the future relationship between nation-state and the European Union. Combining political with economic analysis, and based on extensive primary research in several countries, this book offers a challenging interpretation of the history of the western European state and European integration.

1
History and theory

Our lives in western Europe^* for almost two hundred years have been moulded by the nation-state. It is now commonly said and written that this organization has had its day. Indeed, for forty years some western European states, including those with the most celebrated historical traditions, have openly discussed the possibility of eventual political unification. This has not been merely the indulgence in abstract political debate and utopian speculation about European unity which at the level of political elites goes back more nearly four hundred than forty years. It has been accompanied by real changes in political structures, whose proclaimed purpose has been to bring that unity nearer. It is not merely that a long-running abstract political debate has been recently democratized, like so many other physical and intellectual pleasures. Changes have occurred since 1945 which give citizens of European countries real cause to ask whether national government, which has so long shaped the basic organizational framework within which they live, will continue to do so.

Since the agreement on the Treaty of Paris in 1950 when six western European governments, in agreeing to create the European Coal, Iron and Steel Community (ECSC), declared their intention ultimately to achieve some form of political union, there has grown an actual, rather than merely an abstract, political alternative to government from the national centre. The same six nations reaffirmed that intention in the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The number of adherents to that treaty has since grown to twelve. Several others now wish to adhere. The institution of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Economic Community in the 1960s, the election of the European Parliament, the Single European Act in February 1986, and the Treaty of European Union (Treaty of Maastricht) in 1992, pointing the way to monetary and then political union, have re-emphasized the existence of that alternative. From the moment of its creation, the political machinery of the successive European Communities has consistently maintained the ideological position that it is an embryonic supranational European government. Since becoming president of the European Commission M.Jacques Delors has publicly maintained that one consequence of the Single European Act will be that four-fifths of those decisions presently taken in national capitals will eventually be taken in Brussels.

That these nation-states, some of them of the most ancient lineage, with their distinctive histories and cherished myths, on which have been nurtured generations of citizens, should declare their intention of voluntarily achieving political unification is a political and historical change of the first magnitude. Yet it remains one of the most ill-understood aspects of recent history and present political life. For this lack of understanding much blame must lie with the absorption into popular discussion of an assumption which underlies most of the theoretical and scholarly writing about the European Community, the assumption that it is in antithesis to the nation-state.

The word which is commonly used to describe the evolution of the European Community, ‘integration’, is itself a reflection of that assumption. It implies that the economies, societies and administrations of these national entities become gradually merged into a larger identity. Defenders of the nation-state, those for whom it remains an indispensable form of organization, politically, economically, culturally or even psychologically, therefore clamour for a halt to the process of integration. The most ardent supporters of the European Community in return denounce the nation-state as an anachronistic barrier to the final achievement of a more advanced stage of government and society, the supranation. This antithesis between the concepts of nation-state and Community has frequently been emphasized by the European Community’s interpretation of its own history. Homage has always been required to the idea that the Community represented the birth of a new historical epoch, in which the nation-state would wither away. Lord Cockfield, rumoured to have been originally appointed as a European Commissioner by the British government because of his alleged scepticism about the Community, summed up his views after his replacement by saying ‘The gradual limitation of national sovereignty is part of a slow and painful forward march of humanity.’¹ Against such an argument only a similarly categorical statement is likely to serve. Thus opponents of the European Community demand that a finite limit be drawn now to the process of integration in order to save the nation.

But is there in fact an antithesis between the European Community and the nation-state? Does the evolution of the Community imply the replacement of the nation-state as an organizational framework and its eventual supersession? It is the argument of this book that there is no such antithesis and that the evolution of the European Community since 1945 has been an integral part of the reassertion of the nation-state as an organizational concept. The argument goes, however, beyond this, because the historical evidence points to the further conclusion that without the process of integration the west European nation-state might well not have retained the allegiance and support of its citizens in the way that it has. The European Community has been its buttress, an indispensable part of the nation-state’s post-war construction. Without it, the nation-state could not have offered to its citizens the same measure of security and prosperity which it has provided and which has justified its survival. After 1945 the European nation-state rescued itself from collapse, created a new political consensus as the basis of its legitimacy, and through changes in its response to its citizens which meant a sweeping extension of its functions and ambitions reasserted itself as the fundamental unit of political organization. The European Community only evolved as an aspect of that national reassertion and without it the reassertion might well have proved impossible. To supersede the nation-state would be to destroy the Community. To put a finite limit to the process of integration would be to weaken the nation-state, to limit its scope and to curb its power.

The state became the dominant form of political, economic and social organization in western Europe from the sixteenth century, when the territorial limits of centres of political power became more sharply defined by rulers and their armies and courts. Its political dominance was reinforced by its apotheosis into the representative of the nation and the people in the French Revolution, and by the subsequent identification of the nineteenth-century state with linguistic, ethnic and cultural nationalism. People, language and culture, nationalist movements argued, had a right to a separate organizational unity overriding the rationales of political expediency and local power which had first defined the frontiers of states. The concept of a central parliamentary representation of the people, the ‘national assembly’ as it has continued to be called in France, meant that the development of parliamentary democracy sanctified the nation-state as the legitimate basis of political organization, until in the Treaty of Versailles ethnic and linguistic unities were seen as the indispensable foundation of political stability on the European continent.

Nevertheless, while greatly strengthening the political claim of the nation-state to be the dominant form of organization, these nineteenth-century tendencies did not substantially add to the extent of its functions, its powers, and its obligation to its citizens. The rights and powers of the state apparatus to raise and control armed forces, to raise taxes, to mint money, and to enforce a national law remained not only the core but also the greater part of its organizational activity. It is only in the late nineteenth century, and then only on a small scale, that any important additions to these functions can be discerned. Together with the popularization and educational dissemination of a mixture of national history and myth designed to increase the sense of ethnic and cultural collectiveness, these limited functions and obligations still enabled the nation-state to exercise remarkable claims on the loyalties of its citizens. Under its banners men were to die in terrifyingly large numbers, many for causes that in retrospect appear far from just.

From this relatively simple mechanism of national governance, to which allegiance was obtained through a mixture of power, myth and the protection of property, can be seen emerging from the end of the nineteenth century a different conception of the nation-state as a more complex network of mutual political obligations of rulers and ruled. The world wars accelerated this tendency. In both, the nation-state was required to undertake feats of organization on a scale far greater than anything it had previously attempted. At the same time it was forced to call on the allegiance of its citizens to a degree which it had not previously attempted. To inflict on such huge numbers the experience of relentless war fought with murderous modern technology was not possible without an extension of the state’s obligations to them, nor without the changes in the political system which that implied. Through these changes came other demands forcing the state to take a wider interest even in peace in the human condition. Few European nation-states found themselves able in the inter-war period successfully to make the transition to a new form of governance securely founded on this larger pattern of obligations.

Between 1938 and the end of 1940 most of them proved incapable of fulfilling even their oldest and primary duty, the defence of the national territory and the protection of their citizens. Of the twenty-six European nation-states in 1938, by the close of 1940 three had been annexed, ten occupied by hostile powers, one occupied against its wishes by friendly powers, and four partially occupied and divided by hostile powers. Two others had been reduced to a satellite status which would eventually result in their occupation. The only one which had extended its power and triumphantly dominated the continent offered as little hope to mankind as any political organization which had existed.

The rescue of the nation-state from this collapse, which appeared to mark the end of its long domination of European history, is the most salient aspect of Europe’s post-war history. The development of the European Community, the process of European integration, was, so runs the argument of this book, a part of that post-war rescue of the European nation-state, because the new political consensus on which this rescue was built required the process of integration, the surrender of limited areas of national sovereignty to the supranation. The history of that surrender is but a small part of the post-war history of the nation-state, though it may eventually seem to have been the most significant. What is described in the detailed studies in this book is the reassertion of the nation as illuminated by the history of the construction of the European Community. Ultimately this will have to take its part in the greater history of the post-war nation-state, a history whose beginnings are only now appearing. It seems essential, though, that this greater history should not start from the widespread theoretical assumption of an antithesis between nation and Community, for were it to do so it would be myth.

The assumption that there is a fundamental antithesis between the nation-state and the Community was set in circulation by academic discourse. It has lain at the heart of virtually all attempts to construct comprehensive theoretical explanations of the evolution of the European Community, as well as of the early attempts to write its history. Much of the theory which has sought to explain the process of European integration is in fact constructed on a historical foundation, deriving from conclusions about long-run historical trends which historians, perhaps by the default of silence, have allowed to become established.

Sometimes it is derived from very long-run historical trends indeed. It is not uncommon to find the argument in works about European integration that all of Europe is a common culture, formed at first by the influences of classical Greece and the Roman empire and reshaped by the common experience of Christianity, so that national differentiation was never more than a temporary aberration imposed by the localization of secular power. It is not however with any such conservative conceit, whose usual purpose has been to uphold the political domination of governing elites, defined by an ability to master dead languages and to misinterpret past cultures, that the argument of this book deals, but with a much larger body of political analysis which relates the process of European integration to more recent historical trends.

One part of this analysis, which underlies much of the writing about European integration, links the whole process of modern economic development since the eighteenth century to a gradual weakening of the nation-state. It relies on the observation that national economies, as they develop economically, become more interdependent, so that the nation-state consequently loses much of its capacity for independent policy formulation and for control over its own destiny. Some argue that the same process actually renders the nation-state meaningless as an organizational entity, so that it will have to be replaced by some more effective form of political organization. Among the trends cited are the following: the dependence of modern economies on an ever-greater quantity of imports and exports of goods, capital, ideas and people; the immediate and severe impact of national economic policy decisions in large economies on smaller ones; the evolution of modern technology in transport, communications and warfare; the growing difficulty of controlling even the national physical environment. All these are used to illustrate and predict the growing inappropriateness of national frontiers as boundaries of organizational activity.

There has been a strong tendency to assume that the explanation for the process of European integration is to be found in these long-run economic trends. Because it is only in western Europe that the process of modern economic development has brought to a high level of per capita income a cluster of territorially small, contiguous nation-states, it is there that the nation-state first and most has had to come to terms with the problems of interdependence and there consequently that the increasing incapacity of national government should be first and best observed. Sometimes this assumption is taken even further and integration is explained as the end of an unavoidable linear continuum originating with the process of modern economic development. As the steam locomotive in the 1840s made the borders of a state such as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha meaningless, because it could travel through the whole territory in half an hour, so have successive stages of technological advance, it is argued, rendered the frontiers of larger states similarly pointless. A fast-flying aircraft traverses Belgium in less than the time it took the train one hundred and fifty years ago to traverse Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. A spy satellite traverses Belgium in even less time. Furthermore, even highly developed states, it is correctly pointed out, no longer have the resources to master technologies which might be regarded as fundamental to their survival as separate national entities. The production of nuclear armaments and effective methods of delivering them, for example, might take so disproportionate a share of national resources as to have to be renounced as national policy even by a country with a very high relative level of GNP per capita. Certain areas of industrial production of the kind which European nations have previously thought it in their own interests to foster in order to remain in the forefront of technological advance, the manufacture of large long-distance passenger jet aircraft for example, or equipment for exploring space, appear now to require technological cooperation between all but the largest economies before they can be achieved at a politically acceptable cost. Recently it has become the fashion to argue that reducing pollution and averting an ecological catastrophe is far beyond the financial, as well as organizational, capacities of national government.

The impact of technological innovation both on manufacturing and transport in the nineteenth century was the immediate cause of an increase in international trade in commodities which shows no signs of slowing. Exchanges of goods across frontiers have reached such proportions that the satisfaction of the consumption needs of national citizens depends on imports, which in turn depends on the facility with which the nation itself can sell goods and services abroad. The development of international commerce in manufactures on such a scale was only possible because of an increase in international flows of capital and the international provision of financial services. As manufacturing has been replaced in highly developed economies by the service sector as the main contributor to the growth of national income so, it is often argued, does the dependence of the national unit on the rest of the world in this most modern stage of development become even greater, because it has always been much more difficult for the state to regulate the movement of capital and services across its frontiers than that of commodities. Whereas the control and taxation of commodities on national frontiers is almost as old as the state itself and a universal attribute of it, the control of capital crossing national frontiers has proved an altogether more difficult task, rarely and only briefly done with any effectiveness. As the structure of large firms has become increasingly international, and as some of them achieve an annual turnover almost as great as the annual revenues and expenditures of smaller states, the organization of their markets and the disposition of their investments and profits escape the control of the nation under whose flag they are legally constituted and whose government seeks to levy revenue from them.

By the 1950s, the period with which this book is mainly concerned, more than 40 per cent of the national income of the Netherlands was earned outside the national frontier. The Netherlands does indeed emerge in this book as a good example of the constraints imposed on the liberty of national policy choice by the process of modern economic development. So, too, does Belgium, more than a third of whose national income in the same period also came from outside the country. The decision of both countries to enter a customs union, at first with each other under the terms of the wartime Benelux agreements and later the common market of the European Economic Community, although a great many other causes were more important, did reflect a background recognition that their sustained economic development required a larger market for their goods and services than that offered by the narrow confines of their national territories.

But observations of this kind are far too general to serve as explanations of the specific phenomenon which distinguishes the European Community, the voluntary surrender by the nation-state of specific areas of national sovereignty to the Community’s own political structures. It is this surrender of national sovereignty which is the new and specific phenomenon with which the book deals and there is nothing in the observation of the general trend towards greater interdependence associated with the process of mod...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• Key to Archival References
• 1. History and Theory
• 2. The Post-War Nation-State
• 3. Coal and the Belgian Nation
• 4. Foreign Trade, Economic and Social Advance, and the Origins of the European Economic Community
• 5. The Europeanization of Agricultural Protection
• 6. The Lives and Teachings of the European Saints
• 7. Britain and western Europe
• Envoi
• Bibliography