European Union Enlargement

A Comparative History

JURGEN ELVERT, Wolfram Kaiser

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134323852
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

European Union Enlargement provides a comparative analysis of the post-war European policies of those states that joined the European Union between 1973 and 1995.The volume draws upon new empirical research in order to investigate the policies that these 'newcomer' states have had towards Europe since 1945, with an emphasis on their experience of membership and its possible Europeanising effect. A final comparative chapter draws the national European policies of the 'newcomers' together and outlines what they have brought to the EU. The book also tests integration theories against the available evidence, demonstrating their limited explanatory value and the economic, political and cultural specificity of different national paths towards EU integration.

1
‘What alternative is open to us?,

Britain

Kaiser Wolfram

‘We are with Europe, but not of it. We are linked, but not compromised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed… We belong to no single Continent, but to all.’ This is how Winston Churchill, then a Conservative backbencher in the House of Commons, famously characterized Britain’s semi-detached relationship with continental Europe in 1930.¹ By the end of the Second World War, this relationship had become even more distant. The collapse of the continental European economy as well as the demise as great powers of France, defeated by Germany in 1940, and of Germany, defeated by the Allies in 1945, seemed to suggest that Britain’s economic and political interests, more than ever, lay elsewhere.

Economically, Britain’s infrastructure had suffered serious destruction during the war. Its war effort, which in many ways had been more ‘total’ than that of the German Reich,² had necessitated a complete reorientation towards war production, severely limiting Britain’s ability after 1945 to produce and export consumer goods. Moreover, Britain was highly indebted as a result of the war and in a very precarious financial position when the United States threatened to stop lend-lease and to demand market rates for loans in 1945. Britain’s new economic dependency on the United States was underlined by the no-new-preference rule of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was effectively directed against the Commonwealth preference system. It also showed in Britain’s reluctant promise to make sterling convertible once its exports had reached 75 per cent of the pre-war rate, a promise the government made to facilitate the resolution of the question of US loans.

In other words, the British economic situation was serious after 1945, but it also differed in several important respects from that of most continental European countries. First, British infrastructure was less thoroughly destroyed. In particular, its comparatively healthy coal and steel production made it somewhat less dependent on European cross-border cooperation for its economic reconstruction. Second, Britain’s recovering foreign trade became even more redirected towards the sterling area (as well as the United States) than after the initial introduction of Commonwealth preferences at Ottawa in 1932. This was largely due to the need to earn US dollars and other convertible currency to fight the balance of payments problems. It also resulted from the inability of most European countries to absorb British exports and to pay for them in hard currency. Even in 1955, ten years after the end of the war, 47 per cent of British exports still went to the sterling area and only 28 per cent to the whole of Western Europe.³ Moreover, Britain still held 25.5 per cent of world exports five years after the war, in 1950.⁴ Third, the continuing global role of sterling as a reserve currency alongside the US dollar also seemed to demand a strengthening of the economic ties with the Commonwealth. Taken together, these factors overshadowed the secular trend away from trade between industrialized and agricultural export countries towards more trade between industrialized countries, mitigating against a closer economic engagement with Western Europe after 1945.

Politically, the United Kingdom came out of the war victorious, with the unquestioned assumption of a continued world power role in the post-war period. British leadership of the Commonwealth, which was socially embedded in British emigration and continued family ties, seemed more cohesive than ever after the common experience of fighting Germany and Japan in the Second World War. Moreover, the lend-lease crisis in 1945 and the unilateral ending of nuclear collaboration by the United States in 1946 did not substantially undermine the idea of Anglo-American unity and solidarity, and the bilateral relationship became crucial for maintaining Western unity in the evolving Cold War.⁵ As Winston Churchill had already told Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French government, in Marrakech in January 1944, ‘How do you expect that the British should take a position separate from that of the U.S.?… Each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea.’⁶ Britain eventually exploded its own nuclear bomb in 1952, underlining the special British position alongside the two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. As Joseph Frankel has rightly emphasized, Britain’s nuclear armament ‘formed an integral part of her conception of her world role’ in the 1950s.⁷ In contrast, the Western European link contributed little after 1945 to enhancing this role.

The continued British claim to world power status was rationalized by Churchill in his ‘three circles’ speech in October 1948.⁸ To him, British foreign policy had to concentrate on maintaining the British world role by effectively managing the three circles which made up the Western world after 1945: the Commonwealth, the Anglo-American relationship and Western Europe. At the time, Churchill was leader of the Opposition. However, his strong preference for maximizing Britain’s global influence through the three circles was entirely shared by the political elite. In British politics after 1945 no one was initially prepared to strengthen what clearly appeared to be the weakest link, Western Europe, at the expense of the two others, while Britain was still enjoying, according to Christopher Bartlett, ‘the Indian summer of her career as a world power’.⁹

Thus, functional economic and political pressures limited the options of British governments over Europe. They tended to favour a semi-detached attitude and a policy of strictly inter-governmental cooperation, which was easily compatible with Britain’s two other, more important circles. This preference is reflected in British policy towards the creation and subsequent operation of the Organization of European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in 1947–48 and of the Council of Europe in 1949–50.¹⁰At important junctures, however, British policymakers did have a choice and exercised it, especially over the Schuman Plan in 1950, in the Spaak Committee in 1955, over the creation of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) in 1959–60 and in the case of the two British applications of 1961 and 1967 to join the European Economic Community (EEC), which finally led to British EC accession in 1973. Indeed, many political scientists and contemporary historians have argued that British post-war governments actually had an ‘unusually free hand to experiment in the external field’¹¹ because British foreign policy was characterized by a well-established permissive consensus which largely left foreign policy-making to those who ran the Empire, with little interference from economic interest groups, the media or public opinion.¹²

In the British case, the way in which the integration efforts in continental Europe were perceived and how they impacted upon policy-making was much more determined by cultural influences on the elite in politics and Whitehall, such as dominant historical orientations, cultural prejudices and ideological preferences. Elite assumptions about the Second World War as a triumph of ‘the British way of life’ and its political institutions¹³ and about an almost moral right to a continued world power role combined with widespread popular feelings of contempt for continental European political and cultural traditions to strengthen the imagined ‘otherness’ of ‘the Europeans’ and the idea of British singularity, over and above the real differences in the economic situation and political commitments.¹⁴ To the majority of the political elite and, even more so, the population at large, Western Europe appeared somewhat like Czechoslovakia to Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain in 1938: a far-away country (or region) of which the British knew little and cared about only insofar as it mattered in the Cold War.

After 1945 British European policy-makers operated under particular circumstances. These included Britain’s dependency on extra-European trade, its Commonwealth link and preference system, its global political role and its close relationship with the United States. These factors influenced the rationale behind the EEC applications and the expectations of membership. Yet, Britain was not per se a special case. British European policy-makers shared important perceptions and preferences with others in Western Europe, especially outside the EEC/EC. The British case is peculiar, but not in every respect unique.¹⁵

British attitudes to early ‘core Europe’ integration and EFTA

The French government proposed the Schuman Plan, the first ‘core Europe’ project, in May 1950 to deal with the imminent American and British demand to lift restrictions on German production of coal and steel. It would guarantee French access to German resources of coke and coal and allow the regulation of steel markets. It would also serve as a suitable starting point for Franco-German cooperation and reconciliation.¹⁶ None of these motives had any direct relevance for Britain. Such limited sectoral integration did not generate any functional economic pressures on Britain to integrate its own comparatively healthy coal and steel industries with those of continental Europe, nor did it threaten to undermine British political leadership of the inter governmental Western Europe in the wider OEEC. It also appears that Ernest Bevin, the Socialist Foreign Minister, and others in the government believed that the plan would fail anyway. In any case, the French—and especially the Christian Democrats—did not actually wish British participation. Their insistence on advance agreement on the supranational principle, which Schuman eventually put in the ultimatum of 1 June 1950, partly reflected the French aim to break the inter-governmental deadlock over Europe in the OEEC and the newly created Council of Europe. The British had various objections to supranationality ranging from the Labour Party’s nationalist economic ideology to the constitutional principle of parliamentary sovereignty as incompatible with a supranational pooling of resources.¹⁷

Later in the same year, the Attlee government supported the Pleven Plan for a European Defence Community. It did so only reluctantly, however, because it saw it—not the alternative NATO option—as the only politically feasible solution to the urgent question of West German rearmament. The British had grave doubts about the military efficiency of such a supranational army. They were also adamant that Britain, with its world-wide military role, could not participate in such an army. When the Conservatives regained office in 1951, this policy remained fundamentally unchanged.¹⁸ On 28 November 1951, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden stressed publicly that Britain could never join a European army. There is now a consensus among historians of British European policy that there was never in fact any chance that a Conservative government would reverse the initial decision against British participation.¹⁹ The Churchill government was divided. Yet this only concerned the issue how best to safeguard British leadership of Western Europe. Eden benevolently supported the European Defence Community (EDC) because the United States advocated it. In May 1952, he agreed to sign a fifty-year mutual security treaty with the EDC to ease the ratification process. Churchill and Harold Macmillan, among others, appeared more ‘pro-European’ in their public statements. In fact, they hoped that the EDC would fail, allowing Britain to put forward an alternative solution. They were primarily concerned about the possible domination of European institutions by the Germans.

Essentially, these early strategic decisions in relation to ‘core Europe’ were not politically controversial in the United Kingdom. The same was still true for the British decision of 1955 against participation in a Western European customs union. The Eden government has often been accused of having ‘missed the bus’ which apparently took the Six directly from the conference in Messina in early June 1955 to the Italian capital for the signing of the Rome Treaties in March 1957.²⁰ However, it was not at all clear in 1955 that the bus, which the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) governments boarded at Messina, was actually roadworthy, or that the driver and passengers would be able to avoid a major diplomatic accident on the way. The success of the initiative was not guaranteed. The analogy is also misleading because no British minister seriously considered buying a ticket. At that time, British membership in a European customs union, by over-emphasizing the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• European Union Enlargement
• Routledge Advances in European Politics
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 ‘What alternative is open to us?’: Britain
• 2 A kingdom divided: Denmark
• 3 From isolation to involvement: Ireland
• 4 State interests, external dependency trajectories and ‘Europe’: Greece
• 5 In search of lost Europe: Spain
• 6 From Atlantic past to European destiny: Portugal
• 7 A newcomer experienced in European integration: Austria
• 8 If in ‘Europe’, then in its ‘core?’: Finland
• 9 Combining dependence with distance: Sweden
• 10 A fool’s game or a comedy of errors?: EU enlargements in comparative perspective
• Annotated bibliography
• Index