Britain's Failure to Enter the European Community, 1961-63

The Enlargement Negotiations and Crises in European, Atlantic and Commonwealth Relations

George Wilkes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780714646879
• eBook ISBN: 9781136307072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The essays collected here outline a number of factors which made the EC too young to be able to assimilate Britain's important interests, and the British over-optimistic in their approach to negotiations with the Community. The role of conflict over Western strategy and European political union in the breakdown of the negotiations is re-assessed, and the negotiations over agriculture and the Commonwealth are revealed in an entirely new light.

1
The first failure to steer Britain into the European Communities: an introduction

George Wilkes

The collapse of negotiations aimed at bringing the United Kingdom into the European Communities (EC) in January 1963 was a bombshell which devastated the plans of the leaders of the Atlantic alliance. Instead of exploding, however, it went off with a whimper.

The scale of the disappointment caused can be seen more clearly now that the archives of most governments with an interest in the negotiations at Brussels have been opened, underscoring the belief of all of the parties involved that British entry would transform economic and political co-operation within the EC and throughout the entire Western bloc. The negotiations consequently proved far more important to the development of the EC than is suggested by the rubric 'Community enlargement' of traditional EC historiography. Equally, the UK government's decision to join the EC turns out to have been more far-reaching than is captured by the common view that it was no more than a tactical shift in pursuit of fundamentally 'un-European' goals. The phrase which became common in Britain, the 'Brussels breakdown', aptly sums up the collapse of the aspirations widely attached to the development of an enlarged European Community in 1963.

At the time, the French government bore the brunt of the anger of the other negotiating parties, having provoked the breakdown. Two of its main adversaries in the diplomacy surrounding the negotiations, the British and the US, also shared the main burden of criticism for the situation which de Gaulle was believed to be reacting to. The studies in this book detail a growing number of factors and actors which are now seen to have been involved in the collapse of the negotiations. The latest research underlines both the daunting nature of the task which lay before the negotiators, and the inadequacy of the tools they had to work with.

The tempers of January 1963 dampened down surprisingly quickly, and after a few weeks the ambitions of the previous year already appeared to have been dropped. The archival research presented in this book suggests that the decision to tackle the breakdown of negotiations in a relatively low-key manner was in large part prompted by the very magnitude of the problems with which the negotiators were presented. Though threats to break up the EC were widespread, the UK and France's partners saw they had no option but to accept the French government's veto. The enormity of the failure was thus deliberately obscured at the time of the breakdown, in order to salvage what remained of the European policies of the major players.

The purpose of the present volume is to review some of the standard characterizations of the causes and consequences of the Brussels breakdown. By 1963, for instance, much of the British political elite acknowledged that the British application to join the EC appeared to have come too late, an argument which has been generally accepted ever since. Given the fact that the UK was not a founding member, Britain's first application now seems to have been, if anything, too early to be successful. With the benefit of more in-depth studies of the problems surrounding the Brussels negotiations, the extent to which British interests still fundamentally diverged from those of the EC member states is now being more thoroughly assessed than has hitherto been the case. The aim of the studies presented here is not, however, to replace old cliches with new ones, but to focus on the deeper forces at work in shaping the relationship between Britain and the EC. Even if a definitive, non-controversial characterization were appropriate for a crisis which had such a deep and lasting impact on relations between Britain and its Western European partners, it could still not be made before Britain's role within the European Union ceases to be so clearly marked by the conflicts which ended its first attempt to join the European Communities.

This collection of articles thus offers a preliminary foray into government archives in Europe, across the Atlantic and from the British Commonwealth, addressing a range of issues which determined the fate of Britain's 'turn to Europe' in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Based on papers given by leading historians from across Western Europe at a conference in Cambridge in July 1993, the chapters which follow draw on commentary made at the conference by 'eye-witnesses' involved in the diplomacy surrounding the Brussels negotiations - testimony which is weighed in depth in the final chapter - and by some of the writers whose seminal accounts have shaped our views of the causes of the breakdown. Their findings open some new perspectives on the motives of the key actors involved, on the problems they faced during the negotiations, and on the impact which the negotiations had on the course of European integration. The three sections into which the book is divided focus on each of these three aspects in turn.

This introductory chapter sketches a historical context for the contributions which follow, concentrating on four areas of debate between historians over the UK's European relations.

First, it addresses some questions relating to the diplomatic performance and the motivation of the UK government which run through the history of British relations with the six founder members of the European Communities, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg (also known as 'the Six'). The reinterpretations of the first British application for EC membership advanced here can thus be seen in the light of the work of historians who, over the past 15 years, have opened up a debate over the goals and methods of British European policy-makers since 1945. Where earlier analyses were often most struck with the number and magnitude of the failures of the British government in Western Europe, some more recent accounts have given more weight to the fact that many of these setbacks were caused by events beyond the UK's control, not by problems it created.

Second, it outlines the impact of the development towards more integrated European institutions on the course of Britain's 'turn to Europe'. Analyses of the state of the EC in this early stage of the development of its structures and goals are still few and far between, and many basic questions have yet to be tackled. Whether or not the Brussels breakdown was more a product of the economic and political successes of the EC than of its continued weaknesses is, for instance, still very much a matter for debate. And while a number of British historians play down talk of 'missed opportunities' for Britain to have joined the Community earlier, historians of the EC have been unearthing more evidence that the failure to bring Britain into the Community weighed heavily on the minds of other Europeans throughout this period.

Third, the chapter assesses the relationship between the enlargement and wider Cold War politics, which since 1947 had played a much-vaunted role in cementing a political will to integrate in Europe. The Cold War's impact on the Brussels negotiations, however, appears in a very different light as studies of the growing power struggle between the Western powers show that East-West developments created as much instability in Western Europe as they did solidarity.

Fourth, relations with the British Commonwealth and empire have appeared in the past to have been the greatest obstacle to a settlement between Britain and the Six. It is argued here that there has been so little study of the problem that we cannot yet say that this was the case. Indeed, the fact that 'the Commonwealth' became an obstacle to British European policy may have been as much due to the lack of vision in British Commonwealth policy as it was to the inflexibility hitherto imputed to the Six or the Commonwealth.

The United Kingdom’s Relations with Other Western European States

The ‘failure’ of British European policy

The history of the policy of the United Kingdom government towards the European Communities seems today to be, above all else, a history of failures, miscalculations and misfortune. All attempts to describe the UK government's first attempt to join the EC, for instance, must account for the fact that it failed, as had a succession of UK proposals for European co-operation before it. Since then, too, Britain has frequently been isolated over institutional and policy problems facing the Community, and it is often argued that the UK's approach to European integration might have been different had it been able to influence the EC in its early stages, from the inside.

The weight given to the UK's mistakes in historical accounts has had some unfortunate side-effects: historians have tended to pass quickly over important episodes in British-Six relations which did not involve conflict, and have often been more concerned to explain the inadequacy of the motivation or vision behind British European policies than to analyse their causes and effects thoroughly. Historical research on British policy towards European integration slowly began to take off in the mid-1980s and, though there is now a sizeable literature on the field,¹ it is still in its adolescence in terms of what we know about and how we approach the subject. Some historians - as will be seen below - have given suggestions of other themes for histories of British European policy to follow, notably the development of distinctive British visions of or attitudes towards a united Europe, or the replacement of an empire-orientation with a European-orientation in the political elite.² Nevertheless, since evading the significance of these failings is one of the key charges levelled by critics³ against British policy-makers, the history of British European policy is unlikely to be understood differently until its limitations have been discussed in more depth.

Historians have two approaches to this task at their disposal. The first, and most, common, is to evaluate British policy in a wider perspective, contrasting the flawed judgements of policy-makers with changing political and economic realities in Western Europe and elsewhere. From general assertions about international interdependence or about the decline of Britain's global influence, historians have turned to more tangible or well-defined factors, Alan Milward highlighting the divergent financial policies of Britain and its OEEC partners, Sabine Huth (Lee) underlining the impact of the Franco-German rapprochement of the 1950s on European power politics, and other historians - Alistair Home, for example - exploring the declining credibility of Britain's nuclear force as a factor influencing British European policy.⁴ In Chapter 2, Richard Griffiths pinpoints some of the major failings of British diplomatic reactions to the creation of the EEC, underlining UK officials' persistent inability to understand the political and economic factors pushing the Americans and other Europeans into support for the development of a customs union tailored to French interests. Though the collapse of negotiations in 1963 was prompted by developments largely beyond the UK's control, the chapters by Oliver Bange and Piers Ludlow suggest different ways in which tactical mistakes made by British policy-makers before launching the application bid created problems which would have been difficult to rectify during the negotiations.

The second approach, of which Christopher Lord's latest book, Absent at the Creation, is a good example,⁵ focuses on different 'levels of analysis' of the understanding and behaviour of policy-makers. Judging policy-makers according to international 'realities' they did not recognize naturally poses difficulties: once these wider forces have been identified, the reasons that policy-makers reacted as they did at specific junctures in the development of UK-Six relations still need to be defined. Thus, the decision to stay out of the European Communities before 1961 was, in the views of Eden, Macmillan and the most influential policy-makers, the most reasonable option for Britain to take: if it reveals a 'failure' to forecast changes in the international environment correctly, nevertheless at least until 1955 it was successful in enabling Britain to influence and associate with the EC without the responsibilities of full membership.

Some recent studies have concentrated more on psychological factors prejudicing British responses to developments in Western Europe, rooted in the upbringing or personal experience of policy-makers, or in their collective decision-making process. To take one example, Macmillan's European policy as Prime Minister was partly conditioned by his wartime experiences, as some of his speeches suggested, partly by his attachment to the European Movement in the 1940s and early 1950s, which his diaries and memoirs elaborated on more, and partly - as sceptical observers such as Alistair Home and Wolfram Kaiser have suggested⁶ - by isolationist traditions within the British policy-making community overriding whatever pro-European enthusiasm he still held. Griffiths' chapter below hints at a new view of the failure of the UK's diplomacy in the latter half of the 1950s: not only were British policy-makers prone to take an aggressive approach to their European partners, but their reactions to French diplomacy were so excessive that in lesser mortals they would be characterized as paranoid.

The failure of the first British attempt to enter the EC underlies much of the analysis in this volume. A number of chapters suggest that the contribution of flaws in British policy to the breakdown of UK initiatives in Europe was considerable. At the same time, they show that a number of criticisms of the motives and strategy of UK policy-makers have been misplaced. The British approach to European co-operation was, for instance, not purely focused on 'economic' gains, as a number of contemporary critics saw it, though nor should the centrality of economics in the UK government's political calculations be ignored, as has recently been the tendency. Nor did the government, for most of this period, aim to obstruct the creation of the EEC. That this should have appeared to be the case to many Europeans is most clearly understood by reference to the preceding history of relations between Britain and the rest of Europe.

The influence of ‘traditional’ UK policy on British responses to the EEC

To understand the approach to Europe of the leading British politicians and diplomats in the 1950s and 1960s, many 'pro-Europeans' in Britain and elsewhere looked back to what they saw as a traditional British aloofness from the rest of the continent, preferring, as Winston Churchill claimed to, the open seas and the empire over taking sides in the power politics of 'the Continent', the term most Britons still use to describe mainland Europe, Britain's historic strategy of keeping a 'balance of power' in Europe, intervening only when it became necessary to combat the threat of other powers dominating Europe, was believed by many - notably the German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer - to explain the limits to the UK's commitment to Western Europe after 1945. This view of traditional...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The first failure to steer Britain into the European Communities: an introduction
• PART I THE KEY ACTORS AT BRUSSEL
• PART II OVERCOMING BRITAIN'S PROBLEM
• PART III THE BREAKDOWN AND EUROPEAN UNIT
• Chronology
• Select bibliography
• Index