Britain and the Puzzle of European Union

Andrew Duff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000440249
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

This book is a study of the complex relationship between Britain and Europe from the Second World War to the present day.

Drawing on first-hand experience of British and European politics, the author highlights not only the dramatically shifting power play between London and Brussels but also the EU's own struggle to come to terms with its federal mission. He traces the important constitutional events that have fashioned the EU, of which the Brexit process is an outstanding example. The author proposes a number of constitutional reforms which, if carried through, would form the basis of a new entente between the EU and the UK. Both polities will profit from stronger democratic government of a federal type. The author advocates spanning the divide between NATO and the EU. He proposes installing a new class of affiliate EU membership, which may be useful for the whole European neighbourhood, including the UK.

Featuring the history, present and future of Britain's relationship with the European Union, the book will be of worldwide interest to students and practitioners of European integration, as well as diplomats and journalists. It is the first comprehensive manifesto for the future of Europe and Britain since Brexit.

1
Adrift

DOI: 10.4324/9781003202219-2

After the Second World War Britain lost its moorings. It happened very suddenly. Without the clarity of war aims, political solidarity crumbled. War does that. Having been at the epicentre of two world wars waged over a short period of 30 years, victory left the country greatly in debt, physically exhausted and socially restive.

Winston Churchill’s coalition government from May 1940 to July 1945 had made many plans for domestic reconstruction, including pioneering policies for education, health and social welfare that would transform the British state. But few apart from Churchill himself had formed a strategic view about Britain’s future in the world. Clearly it was necessary to share victory in Europe with Stalin’s Soviet Russia, and pressure to withdraw from Empire was becoming overwhelming. But these were essentially defensive postures. And what followed, in a hurry, was a series of international setbacks. The balance of payments deficit and sterling crises commanded the economic debate. Officials in Whitehall feared exclusion from mainland European affairs, just as they had done before 1939, but most baulked at getting too engaged in them. British leadership was formative in the recasting of the three Western Allied sectors of Germany as a federal republic, but London’s priority was to enable the Germans to shore up Western security against the Soviet Union.

The Foreign Office seems to have misread Britain’s changing relationship with its closest ally, the United States. At the Treasury, John Maynard Keynes, who certainly took a strategic view about UK participation in the European economic and political system, died, too young, in April 1946. Having been loyal members together of the wartime coalition government (and fatigued with it), Labour ministers in Clement Attlee’s government of 1945–51 and Conservative shadow ministers found themselves in collusion on the need to avoid new ambitious initiatives in Europe. By and large, the sceptical attitude to Europe of the British Establishment in business, academia and politics was bolstered by the popular press which, from Beaverbrook to Murdoch, was pointedly conservative and nationalist.

Ernest Bevin, who was Foreign Secretary from 1945 to 1950, worked heroically to ensure that Anglo-American leadership would prevail in Europe, saving France and Italy from falling to Stalinism and Germany from returning to Nazism. He organised the European response to Marshall Aid as well as putting in place the basis of a West European defence pact with the United States that lasted throughout the Cold War and lingers to this day. Churchill backed Bevin’s efforts and those of his successor, Herbert Morrison. Anthony Eden had served previously as Foreign Secretary in 1935–38 and 1940–45, and he was not expected to make radical departures when he returned to the post in 1951 – or when he at last succeeded Churchill at Number Ten Downing Street in 1955.

A Treaty of Dunkirk with France in 1947 was extended at Brussels to the three Benelux countries in 1948, and again to Germany and Italy in 1954 in the form of the intergovernmental organisation, Western European Union (WEU). Collective defence was reinsured under the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) established under American leadership in 1949. In 1955, West Germany joined NATO.

Dean Acheson, US Secretary of State 1949–53, worked in vain to get the UK to take economic cooperation with Western Europe as seriously as it did cooperation in military matters. Anglophile though he was, Acheson did not share the British nostalgia for its Empire. After 1945 the British Empire was a fast-diminishing asset, increasingly costly to maintain in economic, military and moral terms. Britain’s affinity with its current and former dominions was genuine enough, but as expressed in terms of Commonwealth tariff preference, wrong-headed. It was mainland Europe where Britain’s fastest growing trading partners were to be found – or lost. The UK underestimated the speed with which it would be outpaced, especially by West Germany whose economy grew at an average rate of 7 percent GDP throughout the 1950s. British exports to Germany shrank over this period while those of Germany’s mainland neighbours soared. The UK badly needed financial assistance from the United States to soften the impact of its wartime borrowing, but when Washington insisted that Britain would obtain no special privileges under the Marshall Plan, Bevin complained of being treated like just another European country.

Schuman Plan

Britain’s first rupture with the post-War reconstruction of Western Europe came after 1950 with the creation of the Economic Coal and Steel Community by France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. ‘The Six’ formed an optimum area for economic and political integration. Geographically contiguous, they shared much common experience, both historic and recent, including constitutional upheaval forged out of military defeat. Their leaders knew each other. More importantly, all the Six were desperate for economic revival by peaceable means and for collective security against the USSR. They were marshalled by Jean Monnet, who focused determinedly on ensuring joint action at the European level on the basis of shared sovereignty.

Monnet’s initiative was launched on 9 May 1950 by French foreign minister Robert Schuman at the Quai d’Orsay. It was a seminal moment:

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. Any action taken must in the first place concern these two countries… . By pooling basic production and by instituting a new High Authority, whose decisions will bind France, Germany and other member countries, this proposal will lead to the realisation of the first concrete foundation of a European federation indispensable to the preservation of peace.

The negotiation and then ratification of the Treaty of Paris were tough, particularly with regard to questions of governance and the relative weight to give the supranational High Authority, on the one hand, and the intergovernmental Council of Ministers, on the other. By the end of the negotiations all of the Six had found their way to compromise, not least because Monnet set an example of leadership in the common interest rather than working for the narrow national interest of France. Jean Monnet believed that success in developing functional common policies between the Six would lead them to accept the need for a stronger central government of a united polity.

Federal and confederal

When talking of things federal it is important to define terms. The British habitually make assumptions about federalism and confederalism, almost all of them wrong. A federation should be thought of as a durable covenant built on a pooling of state sovereignty and a wide conferral of competence on common supranational institutions. The centre of common power governs the affairs of the federation within the limits established by a treaty of a constitutional type. A federation is more democratic and less diplomatic than a confederation. A plural citizenship is shared between the state and the federal level. A federation inclines to a stronger unity – “ever closer union”, indeed, not only of its states but also of its peoples. A member state should leave the federal union only with the consent of the others on terms to be agreed. Successful federations would require wise leadership sustaining an advanced sense of comity, as well as regular endorsement by representative institutions and public opinion.

A confederation, by contrast, is a close alliance or league of states which come together for certain limited but defined purposes. It is run by consensus between the governments of those states. Confederate states loan their sovereignty to the joint enterprise on a basis determined by treaty recognised in international law. The common competences of the confederation are strictly delimited and reserved only for the matters in hand. Citizenship remains with the states. The common budget will be small. A confederation is unlikely to be permanent: it is a league for its time. A state can leave when it wants to. A confederal union is governed by intergovernmental consensus by institutions with limited powers where decisions are subject to national veto. Confederations are difficult to run, usually promising more than they deliver.

Needless to say, government of a federation also has its complications, but being locked into a federal pact heightens the propensity of member states to act together in a centralised manner. The EU is in a perennial quandary about how centralised it should be. A well-run federation should respond to the principle of subsidiarity in which decisions are taken, and usually implemented, at the lowest most effective level. Indeed, the EU treaties have been adjusted over the years to try to give expression to subsidiarity. The Treaty on European Union now asserts in Article 1:

This treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen.

Article 5(3) attempts a definition of subsidiarity:

Under the principle of subsidiarity, in areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Union shall act only if and in so far as the objectives of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States, either at central level or at regional and local level, but can rather, by reason of the scale or effects of the proposed action, be better achieved at union level.

Such a legal formulation, of course, leaves a wide scope for political debate about the appropriate type and level of executive or legislative action. As the EU’s federal system is neither complete nor rigid, powers can fluctuate from time to time according to expediency. In the 1970s, for example, the energy crisis enabled the Community to expand its activities in that sector. The financial crash in 2008 sparked a centralisation of EU powers over bank supervision. The economic crash caused by the current coronavirus pandemic is stimulating moves towards a more centralised common fiscal policy.

In constitutional terms, the EU is a hybrid, trying to achieve federal ambitions by confederal means. It runs well enough in good times but can be paralysed in bad times. Under the guise of its historic mission of ever closer union, tempered by the federalist principle of subsidiarity, both intergovernmental and supranational modes of operation have contributed to shaping the Union we know today. Yet the compromise can be uneasy and tension between the two modes of government has often blunted the pace of integration. As we explore in this book, the variance between confederal and federal, escalated especially at times of treaty revision, has sometimes caused paralysis. “Ever closer union” has never been clearly defined. The fact that its constitutional endpoint lacks clarity has allowed nationalists to challenge the Union’s legitimacy. The advocates of Brexit, resenting the sharing of national sovereignty, exploited in populist ways the often weak and sometimes clumsy way in which the EU was run.

The federalists

Jean Monnet’s conversion to federalism was shaped by his work at the League of Nations in the inter-war period. He lamented:

At every meeting, people talked about the general interest, but it was always forgotten along the way: everyone was obsessed by the effect that any solution would have on him – on his country. The result was that no one really tried to solve the actual problems: their main concern was to find answers that would respect the interests of all those around the table. In this way, the whole organisation fell into the routine of mere cooperation.¹

The experiment of the League of Nations stimulated an interest in European federalism, particularly in Britain where federalists were strong in academic circles as well as amongst the ranks of the Imperial civil service. Many British federalists were also Liberals who had been schooled in the Home Rule debates under William Gladstone, but who took the search for the good governance of the Empire’s dominions much further in the federal direction. The outstanding example was Philip Kerr, Marquess of Lothian, who transferred his pre-1914 ideas of imperial federation on to the European plane after working with Prime Minister Lloyd George at the Paris peace talks. Lothian was scornful of those leaders he had witnessed at close quarters. “Leagues of governments”, he argued, “are n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Adrift
• 2 Engaged
• 3 Moored
• 4 Retreat
• 5 Deluge
• 6 Article 50
• 7 Secession
• 8 Neighbourhood
• 9 The State of Britain
• 10 The State of Europe
• 11 Détente
• Appendix: summary of recommendations
• Glossary
• About the author
• Index