Outside the EU

Options for Britain

Martin Westlake

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788213134, 9781788213127
• eBook ISBN: 9781788213158
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Handel & Tarife

In the debates about the UK's future relationship with the European Union, all sorts of possible alternatives have been bandied about, from "Singapore on the Thames" to "Canada Plus", from "Switzerland" to "Ukraine", from "Norway" to "Australia". But what do these alternative relationship models really consist of and would they be viable for the UK?

Martin Westlake brings together distinguished contributors to examine these various options, real and potential, and to consider whether they would offer a workable solution for the continued relationship between the EU and post-Brexit Britain.

These essays offer expert insight into the scale and challenge of the practical issues facing Britain as it seeks to establish a new future with its largest trading partner.

1

LESSONS FROM THE PAST? THE 1954 ASSOCIATION AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE UK AND THE EUROPEAN COAL AND STEEL COMMUNITY

Christopher Lord

INTRODUCTION

It was one of the strangest cabinet meetings in British political history.¹ Yet it was also one of the most important. The three leading members of the government – the prime minister (Clement Attlee), the foreign secretary (Ernest Bevin) and the chancellor of the exchequer (Stafford Cripps) – were absent, either on holiday or in hospital. It was thus a depleted cabinet that decided on 2 June 1950 to decline the invitation to participate in the talks which led to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).

The meeting was chaired by the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Herbert Morrison, who would later say that the “Durham miners would not wear” participation in a ECSC.² Still, a full cabinet would probably not have decided differently. Although the UK was not being asked at that stage to accept a coal and steel community under an independent supranational authority, it was being asked to confine any talks to that option. Given that Bevin had earlier described the Council of Europe in a magnificently mixed metaphor as a “Pandora’s Box full of Trojan Horses”³ he was unsurprisingly also opposed to any “ultimatum on pooling the coal and steel industries of Great Britain with those of other countries”.⁴

A common interpretation⁵ is that the UK stumbled into a fateful self-exclusion from what would become the European Communities through a mixture of accident, conceit, incompetent preoccupation with the internal politics of the Labour Party (“the Durham miners will not have it”) and suspicion of forms of European integration with supranational institutions and federal ambitions (“a Pandora’s box full of Trojan Horses”). That suspicion may also have been self-defeating. Had the UK accepted the invitation to the talks it might have bent them to its own preferences for a more intergovernmental form of cooperation. As Edmund Dell put it, the UK might have “sucked the federalism” out of the ECSC had it remained in the talks⁶ (after all, even without the UK the ECSC emerged with a Council of Ministers that had not been a part of Jean Monnet’s original design of the Schuman Plan).

Instead, the UK ended up with a modest Association Agreement with the ECSC, agreed in December 1954. The association, as we will see, was useful. Yet it is little remembered. Nor is it much discussed in the literature on the UK and European integration.⁷ Both the UK and the Six soon turned their attention to other initiatives. By 1955 the Six were already discussing plans to supplement the sectoral ECSC with a more general-purpose European Economic Community (EEC), which would be agreed in the Treaty of Rome (1957), and a European Atomic Energy Community (which, together with the ECSC, were known as the European Communities). In 1958 the UK responded with a plan for a wider European Free Trade Area of 15 members of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation. When that initiative failed, the British government concluded in 1961 that it had little alternative but to apply for full membership of the European Communities.⁸

However, for fear that any negotiation with the UK might unravel the Communities, and aware of how difficult it had been even to negotiate those Communities between themselves, the Six famously insisted that the UK should accept all existing institutions, policies and commitments (the acquis communautaire) unchanged. “Swallow the lot and swallow it now” was how the official in charge of the 1970–1 negotiations, Con O’Neill, described what was expected of the UK.⁹ That meant the UK joined in 1973 on largely disadvantageous terms that only made sense on the assumption that the costs of continued self-exclusion would be even higher than the costs of inclusion. Policies it could have shaped by joining in the 1950s – rather than settling for a modest association agreement – became burdens of late entry in the 1970s. Thus began a sour relationship.¹⁰

Now the UK is once again a non-member, it is worth revisiting the Association Agreement of 1954. Looking forwards, does it have any lessons for any future association between the UK and EU after Brexit? Looking back, might it have been a mistake not to stick with association, rather than seek full membership after 1961? Those questions might seem a hopeless mixture of the speculative and the anachronistic. The UK and the European Union of the 2020s are both hugely different from their equivalents of the 1950s. Yet, there are constants: first, in the reasons why the UK then, as now, found itself a non-member; and second, in what it means to be a non-member and in options available to democracies that are closely affected neighbours of a European Community or Union without being a member of it.

In what follows, then, I trace the winding path between the decision in June 1950 not to participate in the Schuman talks, and the Association Agreement of December 1954. I distinguish respectively the constitutional, foreign policy and political economy dimensions of the UK’s search for an association with the ECSC, before concluding with some tentative questions and observations for speculative debates about association after Brexit and the counterfactual debate on whether the UK might have done better to seek further associations rather than full membership after 1961.

ASSOCIATION AS A CONSTITUTIONAL SOLUTION

With all the normal caveats about nothing being historically inevitable, there is something of a continuous storyline from the cabinet meeting on 2 June 1950 to the vote to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016. Many members of the British governments – both Labour (1945–51) and Conservative (1951–64) – which rejected fuller participation in the ECSC would have recognized the central argument of the Leave campaign in 2016 that the UK should not participate in any form of European Community in which it did not have full control of its own laws.

Attlee claimed in the House of Commons debate on the Schuman Plan that his government was “enthusiastic about European Unity … but it was no good being enthusiastic for the wrong method”; and the High Authority proposed in the Schuman Plan was, in Attlee’s view, decidedly the wrong method. As he put it, the Authority was “utterly undemocratic and responsible to no one”.¹¹ Sir Anthony Eden made a similar argument on taking up responsibility for questions of European integration on his return to the Foreign Office in the new Conservative government (1951–64): “Much of the criticism of our policy stems from a failure to distinguish between cooperation in Europe and the federation of Europe … It is only when plans for uniting Europe take a federal form that we cannot take part, because we cannot subordinate ourselves or the control of British policy to federal authorities.”¹²

What, though, made institutional and constitutional questions fundamental was that they shaped the relationship the UK did form with the ECSC as well as reasons for not participating as a founding member. During 1950–1 the British government defined, but did not publish, the intergovernmental form of coal and steel community in which it might have been prepared to participate.¹³ In the meantime it expected “to find means of associating with whatever organizations may emerge from successful schemes of integration”.

So, all eventualities seemed to be covered: if the ECSC negotiations failed, the UK would be ready with an intergovernmental proposal of its own; if the negotiations succeeded, the UK would seek to associate with any ECSC. Association would just be a standard international agreement. It would be limited to cooperation to mutual advantage. The UK would not be bound by the decisions of supranational institutions or committed to a process of further integration. The Schuman declaration had been clear; the ECSC was supposed to be the first step in a continuing process of federation. Hence, Foreign Office officials warned, the UK should only join if it was prepared “to be hustled along the road to full federation through the creation of supranational institutions controlling a widening range of functions”.¹⁴ Otherwise it should just associate.

Once, however, the ECSC negotiations succeeded, tensions emerged on just what the UK government meant by association.¹⁵ A joint declaration in September 1951 of the foreign ministers of France, the UK and the USA claimed that “the UK desires the closest possible association with the European continental community at all stages of its development”.¹⁶ Yet a cabinet meeting two months earlier had not only rejected the option of partial membership that the Six had intriguingly and unexpectedly included in the draft treaty. The cabinet also rejected any formal i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Foreword by Pascal Lamy
• Introduction
• 1. Lessons from the Past? The 1954 Association Agreement between the UK and the European Coal and Steel Community
• 2. From the European Free Trade Association to the European Economic Community and the European Economic Area: Portugal’s Post-Second World War Path
• 3. Norway and the European Economic Area: Why the Most Comprehensive Trade Agreement Ever Negotiated Is Not Good Enough
• 4. Switzerland: Striking Hard Bargains with Soft Edges
• 5. The Customs Union between Turkey and the European Union
• 6. Ukraine: The Association Agreement Model
• 7. Canada and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement
• 8. The World Trade Organization Model
• 9. “Singapore on the Thames”
• 10. The United Kingdom and the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership
• 11. Australia (and New Zealand) after the 1973 “Great Betrayal”
• 12. What Future for the Crown Dependencies, Overseas Territories and Gibraltar?
• 13. The Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland: A Flexible and Imaginative Solution for the Unique Circumstances on the Island of Ireland?
• 14. EU–UK Security Relations after Brexit
• 15. The UK Still In Europe? Is the UK’s Membership of the Council of Europe In Doubt?
• Afterword
• Index