The Conservative Party and European Integration since 1945

At the Heart of Europe?

N.J. Crowson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415400220
• eBook ISBN: 9781134147038
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume provides an up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to British policy in Europe.

By exploring the schisms within the party over Europe, through primary source-based history and theoretical discourses of political science, N.J. Crowson gives the reader the best sense of understanding of how and why the Conservative party's policy attitudes to European integration have evolved.

The Conservative Party and European Integration since 1945 adopts a thematic line based around two chronological periods, 1945–75 and 1975–2006, and uses different methodological approaches. It explores the shifting stances amongst Conservatives within an economic, political and international context as the party adjusted to the decline of Britain's world role and the loss of empire. Crowson analyzes Britain's role and relationship with Europe together with the study of the Conservative Party, and deals with economic, commercial and monetary issues, successfully bridging a serious gap in any discussion of the UK's relations with the European Union and appreciation of the political world in which Conservative European policy has been framed and pursued since 1945.

This book is recommended for background reading in undergraduate courses in British politics and European history.

1 Conservative moves towards Europe, 1945–75
‘Like chasing a girl’¹

British entry into the EEC and Edward Heath are indelibly linked. On 22 January 1972 in a ceremony in Brussels he signed the Treaty of Accession on behalf of Britain. At the third British attempt a Conservative prime minister had succeeded in taking Britain into Europe. It was a personal triumph for Heath, who had played a central role in negotiations for over a decade and appeared to conclude a process initiated by Winston Churchill in 1946. It represented a substantial milestone for the Conservative Party, which against its natural hesitations and core ideological values had been convinced that entry was both necessary and welcome. This conversion had taken nearly a quarter of a century, it had been uncertain, but in the event the Conservatives had become the party of Europe. How, and why, did the party decide it should join Europe? Moving chronologically through the earliest proposals for European unity to the creation of the EEC to British entry and confirmation of membership in 1975, this chapter explores the reaction of the Conservative Party, which for much of this period was the party of government. What makes this transformation all the more significant is that at face value it appeared as though involvement in Europe ran contrary to the party’s heart and yet its leadership had managed to convince the head.

The opposition years: the Council of Europe and the Schuman Plan

Pushed ignominiously into parliamentary opposition in July 1945, the Conservative Party morbidly sought to look for a suitable medicine to stabilise the slide towards political oblivion. Whilst the likes of Anthony Eden, Rab Butler and Lord Woolton attempted to resuscitate the party on the domestic front with organisational and policy reviews, the ever-restless Winston Churchill, now demoted to being a mere party leader, sulked on the international stage. His particular rallying call became a united Europe, something enthusiastically received by the continental political establishment of Western Europe and encouraged by American presidents anxious that Europe should quickly re-establish her democratic and economic credentials and play an active role in the containment of Communism. In a series of speeches, most famously at Zurich University in September 1946, he called for a ‘United States of Europe’. Churchill’s ‘vision’ was for a more united continent able to resist Soviet Russia via increased economic and political strength. Britain would act as a sponsor, enabling her to retain a world role, sustain the Anglo-American alliance and avoid risking disloyalty to the traditions of Britain’s Empire and Commonwealth.²

Suitably enthused, his son-in-law Duncan Sandys launched the United Europe Movement (UEM), which quickly became a Europe-wide propaganda organisation propagating the Churchillian message of a united Europe.³ Its inaugural meeting at the Royal Albert Hall on 14 May 1947 heard Churchill question whether ‘the states of Europe [are] to continue for ever to squander the first-fruits of their toil upon the erection of new barriers, military fortifications, tariff-walls and passport networks against one another’. It was time for Britain and France to take a lead.⁴ Sandys, and the UEM, then convened the Hague Congress, 7–10 May 1948. It was attended not only by European politicians, but also representatives of industry and literature. From the Congress emerged the desire to seek a form of European parliamentary assembly. Churchill was the ‘central figure’ at the Congress, acting as President d’honneur.⁵ In his address to the Congress he spoke of the need not just for economic and political co-operation but also ‘a parallel policy of political unity’.⁶ But much of Churchill’s European rhetoric was symbolic, lacking in specifics: the details and practicalities were for others to sort out. When challenged by his longstanding political ally Robert Boothby as to what was meant by ‘a kind of United States of Europe’, Churchill refused to be drawn but declared: ‘We are not making a machine, we are growing a living plant’.⁷ As well as Boothby, Churchill was accompanied to the Hague by other Conservative stalwarts like Anthony Eden, Peter Thorneycroft, Harold Macmillan, David Maxwell-Fyfe, Peter MacDonald, David Eccles and Walter Elliot, many of whom were also members of the UEM. Churchill had the attention of not only his party colleagues, but also many of the political establishment of Western Europe.

Inspired by these Churchillian flourishes, governmental representatives from ten countries agreed the creation of the Council of Europe in May.⁸ It comprised two components: a committee of ministers and a consultative assembly, which would be made up of political delegates from the signatory nations. It was quickly evident that expectations differed between countries. The Benelux bloc and Italy tended most to favour the idea of adopting a federalist institutional model with executive powers being granted to the Parliamentary Assembly. France accepted the Assembly but looked to integration as a means of constraining Germany, whilst Britain, Ireland and the Scandinavian nations were determined to avoid any loss of national sovereignty and emphasised the intergovernmental nature of the Council. To European federalists it was a disappointment. Power rested with the Committee of Ministers, where a single national ministerial act of veto could scupper any action. It also controlled the Council’s budget and secretariat, decided on new members and appointments and dictated the size of a member nation’s delegation and budgetary contribution. The Assembly was purely consultative, able only to make recommendations to the Committee of Ministers and, whilst permitted to discuss matters of European unity, was precluded from any discussion relating to defence. As a consequence, ‘having asked for a magic carpet’ European federalists ‘felt they had been forced to settle for a straight jacket’.⁹ The Council Assembly may have been purely an advisory body but it introduced a whole generation of Conservatives to the concept of closer European co-operation. It became a form of adult education for a succession of young parliamentarians.¹⁰ Many, such as Duncan Sandys and Peter Thorneycroft, who had seen service as Tory Strasbourgers, were to become involved in later British governmental attempts to join the EEC. For the first three decades of its existence it comprised purely Western European members and was concerned with Western European issues, but during the 1980s and 1990s it took on a new role in the democratisation of Central and Eastern Europe as its membership swelled to forty-five nations.

The format of the Council of Europe was very much shaped by the British as a non-federalist, intergovernmental organisation. The active participation of Churchill, Macmillan and other Conservatives at the Assembly’s inaugural session in 1949 raised expectations about the likelihood of a positive British European policy as and when the party returned to government. Yet when the Tories returned to office in 1951 the Tory Strasbourgers proved surprisingly impotent at imposing a European agenda on the Churchill government, despite many holding middle-ranking to senior ministerial positions within the British Cabinet. The question that consequently baffled so many political observers and frustrated continental politicians was why did the Conservative Party after 1951 fail to deliver upon the expectations and promise offered by Churchill over the previous five years? Some European politicians, perhaps typified by Spaak’s resignation as president of the Council of Europe Assembly in 1952, felt frustrated that the British, having created the vision, failed to provide the practical leadership.¹¹ This encouraged them to look for alternative means of securing their economic and political goals, which led to the creation of the EEC, with its European Parliament, which has overshadowed the Council of Europe ever since, ensuring it is ‘no longer enormously important’.¹²

So why was the Churchill peacetime administration lukewarm to the moves towards European unity? The answer can be found at several levels. First, and most importantly, Churchill had recognised that Europe was an issue that afforded him easy opportunities to embarrass the Labour government, as exemplified by the attacks on Labour’s handling of the 1950 Schuman Plan negotiations.¹³ Europe was an arena where he was feted as the saviour of liberated Europe, and proved a distraction from the drudgery of domestic opposition politics. Furthermore, it enabled Churchill to present himself as a major national leader above being purely a Conservative Party leader. There is a sense in which Churchill tried to present his European vision as a ‘national’ policy, rather than a specifically Conservative one, and that it was for the party to consider the merits of adopting his agenda. It was also an area where the rhetoric was more important than the actions. The vocabulary of Europe used so effectively by Churchill was also part of the problem. The contemporary use of words like ‘unity’ and ‘federation’ was widespread but there was little attempt to define what these phrases meant.¹⁴ Furthermore, confusion could be caused by translation. ‘Union’ is such an example. In the articles of the Council of Europe the English text uses the phrase ‘closer unity’, the French, ‘une union plus étroite’.¹⁵

With a Conservative return to office the European unity issue had served its purpose; then as now, it was not an issue that drew particular electoral support and therefore the more pressing needs of running the domestic economy, of building new houses and continuing to revive Britain’s world position were paramount.¹⁶ This is not to suggest that British involvement in European unity was not part of rebuilding Britain’s world role. Rather, the role envisaged for Europe in this process was not entirely as suggested by the rhetoric, especially as understood by an audience in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Britain was not looking to lead a move towards political federation; nor did she see much need to unite economically with the continent. Britain was still in 1950 the pre-eminent European economy by a considerable way and based upon all economic indices.¹⁷ Conservative rhetoric on European unity took the premise of Western Europe acting as a single entity to resist the encroachment of Communism and the Soviet military threat.¹⁸ This could be best achieved through British participation in WEU and NATO. This was what Conservatives meant by European unity, the defence of Europe. It fitted with a particular reading of history that saw Britain unite during periods of history to resist the domination of Europe by an aggressor: whether it was Elizabeth I, Henry IV’s Grand Design, the Holy Alliance, the Congress of Vienna or the congress system.

This concept of a defence of Europe fitted into the perceived model of Britain’s world as articulated by Churchill at the 1948 Llandudno Conservative conference and reiterated by Anthony Eden, as foreign secretary, at the 1953 Margate conference. When they spoke of three circles – the Commonwealth, Western Europe and America – Conservatives envisaged these blocks overlapping, with Britain as the common denominator. This left Britain in a unique leadership position, enabling her to maintain a leading world role. Because this was a formula that articulated Conservative desires for a restoration of Britain’s world power it was largely unquestioned, and Churchill was afforded the opportunity to articulate his European vision unchallenged. He was not alone in this vision, and importantly it was one shared by the Foreign Office and its Labour foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin. The weakness of Churchill’s model was that it assumed that Britain’s leadership roles in the Commonwealth and in Western Europe and with the USA could be sustained and combined, and yet as Macmillan later conceded little thought was given to how this might be practicably achieved.¹⁹ Further, as the 1950s developed the United States was increasingly distracted by sustaining the Cold War with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Decolonisation meant that increased numbers of colonies were now pursuing their own trade and economic affairs, with Britain less able to influence their general policies. The average Conservative activist was more concerned with the need to promote the imperial linkages and support the calls for imperial preference.²⁰ Herbert Williams, chair of the party’s voluntary wing, the National Union, denounced Churchill’s pro-Europeanism, likening it to a Colorado beetle undermining British trade. It was a denouncement that earned him a rebuke from the party chairman, Lord Woolton.²¹ It did not occur to, or was slow to impact upon, the Conservative mindset, that the leaders of continental Europe, particularly France and Germany, were not to be content with military unity. They foresaw opportunities for economic interdependency and for Europe to challenge economically the supremacy of the USA as a single trading bloc. It is clear that too often Conservatives would dismiss European initiatives on integration, implying that the goals were too ambitious to realise and too far into the future to worry about. This is not to suggest that they should have foreseen the development of the EEC, but this short-term arrogance was, and remains, a fatal weakness in the Conservatives’ European strategy. Too often Conservatives have failed to absorb the continental mentality of conducting diplomacy and the idea that often ‘positions’ are crucial to the future evolution of Europe over a ten-or twenty-year period. Those who gained experience attending the fledgling European assemblies could be alert to this difference. As Macmillan observed, the continental tradition reasoned ‘a priori from the top downwards, from general principles to practical application’, whereas the Anglo-Saxon method was to argue ‘a posteriori from the bottom upwards, from practical experience’.²² At the same time, too many were caught up in a mindset that, dressed up as patriotism, provided a misrepresentation of the realities of the world, such that Churchill could tell the American State Department in 1954 that ‘only the English-speaking peoples count: that together they can rule the world’.²³

The difficulty for Britain, and especially Conservatives, was the legacy of the empire. Within the political...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Conservative Moves Towards Europe, 1945–75: ‘Like Chasing a Girl’
• 2. From EEC to EU, 1975–2006: ‘In Europe, But Not Run By Europe’?
• 3. The Issues and Debates: ‘Head Versus Heart’
• 4. The Conservative Europeanist
• 5. Selling Europe: ‘A Pretty Big Thing to Undertake’
• 6. The Conservative Sceptic: ‘A Confederacy of Zealots and Lurchers’?
• 7. Conservatives In Europe: ‘The Concern of a Private Army’?
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography