Chapter 5

The Rocky Road to Rome: 1950–1957

‘Our Community is not a coal and steel producers association. It is the beginning of Europe.’

Jean Monnet¹

‘Nobody after the first two years of Monnet’s presidency at the High Authority would again talk of it or its equivalents as “a European government”… the idea of a Europe in some sense above the nations was no longer stated in the open.’

François Duchêne²

 

One remarkable feature of Monnet’s triumph was that, despite the protracted arguments about how his ‘government of Europe’ should be constructed, the model which finally emerged was almost identical to that outlined by Salter 20 years earlier. Adapting the structure of the League of Nations, Salter had proposed that the government of a ‘United States of Europe’ should be made up of a Secretariat, with supranational powers; a Council of Ministers representing national governments; an Assembly representing national parliaments; and a Court of Justice. This was precisely the structure, changing ‘Secretariat’ to ‘High Authority’ which came together in the Coal and Steel Community. In due course the same model would be extended to run the ‘European Economic Community’ and the European Union.

Yet, in previous accounts of the history of the ‘European project’, this has been overlooked. In vain does one look for any reference to Salter. There is scarcely a mention of the crucial developments in the 1920s, when the key ideas emerged. There may be perfunctory references to Coudenhove Kalergi. But, as with Salter, the name of Loucheur has vanished.

The reason for this is that the ‘project’ soon came to evolve its own mythology, to explain how it originated. One of the project’s central needs was to portray itself as having emerged from the years after 1945. This allowed it to promulgate the myth that it had put an end to European wars, and also allowed it to present itself as a progressive creation of the modern world, rather than as a failed dream of the 1920s. Only as a post-war ideal could it be projected as new and forward-looking, which was perhaps one unconscious reason for writing its true genesis out of the script.3

Thus, in the official histories, the project’s origins became increasingly veiled in hagiography. Monnet would come to be presented as a visionary figure who had happened to emerge at the right moment after 1945, and whose only concern had been to achieve lasting peace. Spinelli, for all his talk of dictatorships and revolution, would be presented as the man who made the EU democratic. Schuman would be honoured with a reverential plaque in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, describing him as the ‘Father of Europe’, when his only real contribution had been to act briefly as Monnet’s ‘front-man’.

This re-writing of history was to become even more glaring when British historians reconstructed the events surrounding Britain’s involvement in the project. Two accounts published in the 1990s, to which frequent reference will be made in these pages, were those by the journalist Hugo Young, who died in 2003, and Sir Roy Denman, a former senior civil servant in the Foreign Office.⁴

Young claimed that, had Britain pressed for it, Schuman would have been willing to dilute the principle of supranationalism in ‘his’ proposed High Authority.⁵ He thus missed the point that the driving force was not Schuman but Monnet, who was absolutely insistent that the supranational character of his High Authority was non-negotiable.⁶ Denman’s account of the Schuman Plan negotiations only mentions Monnet once, again falling for the fiction that Schuman was the prime mover. Similarly, though for different reasons, John Laughland in his attempt to ascribe the origins of the EU to Nazi ideology, The Tainted Source, only makes four brief references to Monnet, without recognising his pivotal role.

What makes such misunderstanding perverse is that Monnet soon cast off his anonymity as the project’s real author and came to London to discuss his plan with civil servants and ministers. As Young himself records, Monnet then made it crystal clear that the autonomy of his High Authority would mean ‘the surrender of national sovereignty over a wide strategic and economic field’.7 Few at the time had any illusions about this. Con O’Neill, then a young diplomat in Bonn, later recalled, ‘The idea that there should be a body with real authority over the decisions of national governments was something we felt was grotesque and absurd’.⁸ Given Attlee’s comments about the ‘lack of democracy’ in Monnet’s project, there can be no doubt that its nature was clear to the British government, which was why Britain could not accept it. Yet some accounts continue to present the Schuman Plan as something the British government could have modified, if only it had been sensible enough to attend the talks.

This was to become a persistent theme of the mythology surrounding Britain’s involvement with ‘Europe’ through the decades which followed. It rests on the need to portray the founders of the project as reasonable and open to ideas, whereas the British must invariably be shown as obdurate and lacking in vision. The central, implicit message behind this version of history is: ‘Europeans – positive, forward-looking, good; British – negative, backward-looking, bad’.

Nevertheless, despite Monnet having brilliantly pulled off the first step of his grand design, he was now to overreach himself. As a result, the next six years were to prove a rocky road. He would not eventually achieve his goal until his allies had impressed on him the need for their most daring strategy yet: to cloak the ‘project’ in deceit.

Monnet takes a fall

When the president of the new ‘government of Europe’ first came before the Assembly of his European Coal and Steel Community, he was quick to tell the ‘deputies’:

‘We can never sufficiently emphasise that the six Community countries are the forerunners of a broader, united Europe, whose bounds are set only by those who have not yet joined. Our Community is not a coal and steel producers’ association: it is the beginning of Europe.’⁹

For all his sense of triumphalism, however, events were catching up with M. Monnet. Having so far unfolded his plan so deftly, he now made a near-fatal mistake.

The cause of his near-nemesis was the Korean War, which had broken out on the Sunday after negotiations on the ECSC had opened. Monnet immediately feared that the pressure of this major new Cold War crisis, threatening possible Soviet aggression in Europe itself, might lead the Americans to strengthen their demands for German re-armament. This might reduce the attraction to Adenauer of the Schuman plan, as he might now be able to achieve this key objectives without having to place Germany’s coal and steel under the control of the High Authority.

To regain the initiative, Monnet had decided that the original Schuman plan should be widened to include defence, and set about planning what was to emerge as a proposal for a European Defence Community (EDC). This provided for a European Army, run by a European minister of defence and a council of ministers, with a common budget and arms procurement. While all other members would be able to maintain separate forces, for colonial and other purposes, Germany would only be allowed to participate in the European Army.

For his advocate this time, Monnet by-passed Schuman, who was strongly opposed to German rearmament. Instead, he sought out a man who had been his assistant during his somewhat murky days as a merchant banker – Rene Pleven. He had also been with him in London in 1940 during that exciting time when he had put to Churchill the plan for Anglo-French union. Fortunately for Monnet, his old subordinate was now in a position of some authority: he had become France’s prime minister.

Again the familiar deception was repeated. Although the proposal was entirely Monnet’s, he kept in the background and his idea became the ‘Pleven Plan’. Pleven outlined it to the French Assembly on 24 October 1950, where it won approval by 343 votes to 220. Nevertheless, during the debates, Pleven made clear that negotiations would not start until the Coal and Steel Treaty had been concluded, thus safeguarding Monnet’s original scheme.10

Unlike the Schuman Plan, this plan was not well received abroad. The Germans, in particular, were highly suspicious, preferring their forces to be part of NATO. They had good reason for their suspicion. Monnet intended his EDC to be ‘a government capable of taking the supreme decisions in the name of all Europeans’. Yet, for that very reason, the Italian premier, de Gasperi, supported the new plan, proclaiming that ‘The European Army is not an end in itself; it is the instrument of a patriotic foreign policy. But European patriotism can develop only in a federal Europe’.¹¹

Again, the Americans intervened, this time in the form of General Eisenhower, now the first supreme commander of NATO land forces. Meeting with Monnet on 21 June 1951, he agreed that Franco-German reconciliation could only be achieved through a European Army. The Korean War, following the intervention of Communist China, had entered a critical phase. As anticipated, American pressure for German rearmament had intensified, giving Adenauer a powerful negotiating hand. He chose to exploit it, offering in return for his support of the EDC a ‘general treaty’. This would recognise West German sovereignty, accept German contingents into the EDC on equal footing, allow West Germany into NATO, end the remnants of allied occupation of his country, and conclude a peace treaty. Ambitious though this proposal was, it was quickly agreed by the Allies and by the end of November 1951 a draft treaty was ready.12

In the final stages of the treaty negotiations, the British government had changed. On 25 October 1951, after a general election, Labour had lost to the Conservatives. Churchill was again prime minister, with Anthony Eden as foreign secretary. But the new government was immediately plunged into a balance of payments crisis and economic disaster loomed.

Despite some initial hopes that the ‘pro-European’ Churchill might reverse Labour’s view of the Six’s moves to integration, his view that Britain should remain aloof from direct European involvement remained intact. Britain, in Churchill’s view, was still one of the international ‘Big Three’, with her special relationship with America. Although anxious to co-operate with his European neighbours, his policy rested on ‘overlapping circles’, whereby Britain remained between Europe and the USA.

In opposition Churchill had claimed to favour the idea of a ‘European Army’, without ever spelling out what this might mean in practice. Back in power, however, orthodoxy re-asserted itself. Now the supranational element of the plan had become clear, he brushed aside any idea of a European army, calling it a ‘sludgy amalgam’, adding, ‘What soldiers want to sing are their own marching songs’. De Gaulle took a similar view.¹³

According to Hugo Young, on 28 November 1952, Eden told a press conference in Rome that no British formations would be available to the new army,14 which Young described as an example of British ‘perversity’.¹⁵ But the record shows that the new Conservative government did its best to be constructive. At a meeting with Schuman in February 1952, Eden assured the French of a close association with the Defence Community. British forces on the continent would co-operate very closely with ‘European forces’.¹⁶ In a further effort to be helpful, Eden proposed in March 1952 that the two Communities of the Six should come under the aegis of the Council of Europe. Monnet, predictably, saw this as a challenge to his supranationalism.¹⁷

Although nothing further came of Eden’s initiative, the French themselves had considerable reservations about the idea of a European army. What most concerned them was the possibility of Germany seceding from the Defence Community, allowing the German units raised to be reconstituted as a national army. Paris therefore pressed for an Anglo-American guarantee against any member’s secession. London’s response was obliging. Under the 1948 Brussels treaty, Britain was already pledged to give assistance to France and the Benelux countries in the event of war. The Six now asked, on 14 March 1952, that she should extend that guarantee to West Germany and Italy. Responding in a broadcast on 5 April, Eden said it was the duty and intention of the British government to help the people of Europe towards the idea of a united Europe. Great Britain could not join an exclusive European federation, but she could give support and encouragement to both the Coal and Steel and the Defence Communities.¹⁸

Ten days later, he followed this up with a firm proposal. In the event of an armed attack on any member of the European Defence Community, Britain would give full military and other aid in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This offer was well received by the Six. In Germany it was hailed as ‘one of the most important political developments of recent times’.¹⁹

However, this was not an Anglo-American guarantee. The Americans were still putting their faith in the EDC and refused to co-operate. As a result, on 19 May, it was announced that Washington and London were unable to provide a joint guarantee and would instead make a ‘declaration of intent’. Talks then became bogged down in arguments about the German contribution to the European defence budget, until the French Cabinet, still dissatisfied by the lack of commitment from the British and Americans, against German withdrawal from the EDC, decided it would not sign the agreements.

Efforts were made to satisfy the French by re-wording the declaration of intent. The USA and Britain finally agreed to regard any action which threatened the integrity of the European Defence Community as a threat to their own security.20 It was enough. The European Defence Treaty was signed on 27 May 1952, along with a general treaty which effectively restored German sovereignty.²¹ This was far from what Monnet had envisaged, with the budget subject still to national veto. Even so, there was still so much opposition in France that her prime minister Antoine Pinay signed the treaty without intending to seek immediate ratification.

It was over ratification that Monnet’s scheming began to unravel. Opposition in the French Assembly, far from diminishing, had been hardening. The Socialist group wanted a ‘more democratic’ EDC, with a European Assembly elected by universal suffrage. This was to prompt Monnet’s most daring initiative so far, in concert with the man who over the next few years would be his closest ally, Paul-Henri Spaak.²²

Spaak proposed setting up a European Political Community (EPC), as a ‘common political roof’ over the Coal and Steel and the Defence Communities, creating ‘an indissoluble supranational political community based on the union of peoples’. Schuman and Adenauer welcomed this, as did Italy’s prime minister de Gasperi, who went even further, proposing that a future EDC assembly should prepare a draft European constitution.

In September 1952, Spaak’s proposal was jointly endorsed by the foreign ministers of the Six, along with the assemblies of the ECSC and the Council of Europe, and the ECSC Assembly was asked to study the question of creating a ‘European Political Authority’. The result, from an ad hoc committee under Spaak’s chairmanship, was a ‘Draft Treaty Embodying the Statute of the European Community’.

This was nothing less than the first formal attempt to give ‘Europe’ a constitution. The new political authority was to be joined as a single legal entity with the defence community and the ECSC. It was to be governed by a European Executive Council, a precursor of the later European Commission, consisting of twelve members, two from each member state. These would be appointed by its President, to be elected by the 91 members of a ‘European Senate’, the upper house of the new ‘European Parliament’, elected in turn by members of national parliaments. A lower house, the ‘People’s Chamber’, would be elected by universal suffrage.

This draft constitution was submitted by Spaak to the foreign ministers of the Six on 9 March 1953 and to the ECSC Assembly the following day, which approved it by 50 votes, with five abstentions. Introducing his draft ‘constitution’ to the ECSC Council, Spaak began with the opening words of George Washington’s address in presenting the American Constitution to Congress in 1787, going on to express his conviction that, ‘with the same audacity’, Europe could hope for the same success.23

Although discussion of this draft continued through the following months,²⁴ this latest Monnet–Spaak initiative could go no further while the EDC itself was still arousing opposition. Part of the plan was to apply supranational controls on any production of nuclear weapons, which caused the French Atomic Energy Commission, Gaullist in sympathy, to wake up to the implications, should France wish become a nuclear power.²⁵ By October, deputies in the National Assembly were expressing concern that the treaty gave too many advantages to Germany, which would come to dominate the Community. Objections were also raised that the Treaty was presented as a fait accompli, to be accepted or rejected without alteration.²⁶

Thus, while the rest of the Six went on to ratify the Defence Treaty, French politics were to prevail. So great did opposition become among both Socialists and Gaullists that the Pinay government was brought down. A new government was formed under Rene Mayer, with Gaullist support, and the ‘Europe of Jean Monnet’ became almost a term of political abuse. Then, after four months, Mayer was replaced by Joseph Laniel. In the despairing words of Monnet, he ‘did nothing’. Despite intense pressure from the United States, with President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles threatening to cut US aid, France’s ratification process had come to a halt.

Outside Parliament, opposition was at least as strong. Army leaders were against it, intellectual groups detested it and de Gaulle, in November 1953, declared himself implacably hostile to it, referring to ‘this monstrous treaty’ which would rob the French Army of its sovereignty and separate the defence of France from the defence of the French Union. It would go against all her traditions and institutions, and deliver her soldiers to an organism over which France had no control. He blamed this ‘and other supranational monstrosities’ on ‘the Inspirer’, M. Jean Monnet. In a bitter parody of Monnet, he declared, ‘Since victorious France has an army and defeated Germany has none, let us suppress the French Army’. He went on:

‘After that we shall make a stateless army of Frenchmen and Germans, and since there must be a government above this army, we shall make a stateless government, a technocracy. As this may not please everyone, we’ll paint a new shop sign and call it “community”; it won’t matter, anyway, because the “European Army” will be placed at the entire disposal of the American Commander-in-Chief.’27

What finally brought matters to a head was a quite separate event, the fall to the Communist Viet Minh on 7 May 1954 of the enclave in Dien Bien Phu, in French Indochina. This disaster brought down the government. By 17 June, Laniel had been replaced by Mendès-France, a radical nationalist. He was ambivalent towards the EDC and sought to dilute its supranational element, proposing this to the Six in Brussels on 3 August. Adenauer rejected this out of hand. Spaak, who chaired the conference, made an almost hysterical plea to Mendès-France to support the treaty, clasping him by the arm while telling him that:

‘France will be completely isolated… You will be alone. Is that what you want? We must, must make Europe. The military side isn’t everything. What matters is the integration of Europe. EDC is only the first step in that direction, but if there is no EDC, then everything falls to the ground.’²⁸

Brushing aside Spaak’s accusations that he was not being ‘a good European’, Mendès-France also ignored entreaties from the Americans and even Churchill, from whom he sought, unsuccessfully, guarantees of British involvement in the EDC. He thus brought the treaty before a hostile Assembly on 30 August 1954 without endorsement. After a stormy debate, in which the supranational issue predominated, it was rejected by 319 votes to 264. Mendès-France’s government abstained. The triumphant majority burst into the Marseillaise.29 The EDC was dead. The idea of a Political Community soon faded into obscurity.³⁰ Monnet and his supra-nationalism had suffered a resounding defeat.

Still the problem of German rearmament remained. Eden stepped in to propose an extension of the 1948 Brussels Treaty, bringing Germany and Italy into its scope. This would set up the Western European Union (WEU), organised on an intergovernmental basis. Although for decades it would remain little more than a shadow, since its functions were largely exercised by NATO, the undertaking from Britain that her troops would not leave the continent without agreement from the other members was enough to satisfy French fears of unchecked German power. These fears had in any case lost much of their force. Le Monde, which had been strongly opposed to the idea, conceded that ‘twelve German divisions mattered little in a world of atomic strategy’.³¹ The WEU was soon ratified by all members.³²

With that, it seemed that progress towards supranational integration had been all but blocked. Intergovernmentalism had triumphed. In December that year, to complete her success, Britain signed an agreement of ‘association’ with the European Coal and Steel Community, committing her to no more than friendly co-operation.

The new strategy: deceit

The effect of the EDC rejection was to be profound and long-lasting. Quite simply, it was at this point that the ‘project’ went underground. According to Duchêne:

‘Nobody after the first two years of Monnet’s presidency at the High Authority would again talk of it or its equivalents as a “European government”… Awareness that the French would have to be coaxed into further progress introduced caution into the European vocabulary. The word federal was reserved as the political equivalent of Latin for the rare religious occasion. Even supranational … tended to be used only when another fig-leaf could not be found. The idea of a Europe in some sense above the nations was no longer stated in the open.’ 33

What had been to date a series of tactical deceptions now became a deliberate attempt to conceal. So far-reaching was this change of strategy to become that, in 1965, when the ‘Merger Treaty’ was agreed between the Six, combining the executives, councils and assemblies of the three ‘Communities’ – ECSC, EEC and Euratom – Article 9 of the Coal and Steel treaty, which originally read:

‘The members of the High Authority…shall refrain from any action incompatible with the supranational character of their duties.’

would be modified to

‘The members of the Commission…shall refrain from any action incompatible with their duties…’

Monnet’s more immediate reaction to his crushing defeat was to resign as president of the Coal and Steel Community. This meant that arrangements had to be made to fill his post, requiring a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Six. This was originally set for 8 February but, in the interim, Mendès-France’s government fell, delaying the meeting. The new French government was led by Edgar Faure, less hostile to European integration.

This gave Monnet some encouragement and he decided that something less ambitious might work. He settled on his earlier strategy of building his ‘Europe’ through the progressive integration of other economic sectors. In late 1955, from various options, he had chosen as his next target the nuclear industry, then in its early stages of development. It seemed to offer distinct advantages. While coal and steel represented the past, the ‘power of the atom’ could position ‘Europe’ as forward-looking and modern. Furthermore, the scale of investment required to develop the industry was so huge that Europe-wide co-operation could be made to seem a logical step.

To present his new plan for what was eventually to become ‘Euratom’, Monnet, in a pattern now familiar, needed a front-man, a new Schuman or Pleven: particularly since he had now made so many enemies. His choice was his closest ally, Paul-Henri Spaak. This proved sound. The new French prime minister Faure proved receptive to overtures from Belgium’s respected foreign minister. On 4 April 1955, Spaak sent Monnet’s proposals – which encompassed not just nuclear but all forms of energy and also transport – to Adenauer, Pinay – now France’s foreign minister – and Italy’s foreign minister, Gaetano Martino. In an accompanying letter Spaak suggested the time had now come for a ‘re-launch’ (relancer) of the ‘European idea’.34

There was one highly significant omission from Spaak’s letter. Although he and Monnet had already discussed the possibility of a ‘customs union’ or ‘common market’ among the Six, Spaak did not mention it. Monnet feared that to raise it so soon after the collapse of the EDC might be going too far.

The German response was not encouraging. Rather than pooling resources through Euratom, Erhard thought Germany would be better off buying technology from the US or Great Britain. France’s reaction was even less positive. In a message delivered orally to Spaak via the Belgian ambassador, her foreign minister replied that to ‘supranationalise energy and transport might produce another EDC in France’. He added: ‘Take care! Edgar Faure does not like Monnet.’³⁵

The only positive response came from the Dutch foreign minister, Johan Beyen. He proposed the very idea Monnet had rejected, a ‘common market’. Crucially, he suggested that this should not be a free trade area, but a customs union. Duties levied on goods traded between member states would be progressively reduced, then abolished, while a common external tariff wall would be erected against non-members. All this precipitated an internal battle between senior political figures of the ‘Six’, from which three options emerged. One, favoured by Erhard, was a free trade area, using the infrastructure of the intergovernmental OEEC. The second was Beyen’s ‘common market’. The third was Monnet’s strategy, whereby integration would be achieved sector by sector.

Quite how this issue was resolved is not clear.36 But on 18 May 1955 the Benelux foreign ministers offered a document to their ECSC counterparts known as the ‘Benelux Memorandum’. This linked the Beyen and Monnet strategies, in what was to become known as the junktim,³⁷ suggesting that a working group should be set up to draft treaties for a ‘common market’. The integration of transport, energy, nuclear energy and social legislation would all be included.³⁸ Erhard’s views had been ignored.

This memorandum had, in fact, been composed by Spaak, based on a draft prepared by himself and Monnet. After Spaak had amended Monnet’s version, he sent it back with the note ‘Ici votre bébé’ (‘Herewith your baby’). The most significant change was that the words ‘United States of Europe’ in Monnet’s original had been struck out. Spaak was careful to give more emphasis to the idea of an ‘economic community’.³⁹

Thus did the central deception of the whole story become established. From now on, the real agenda, political integration, was to be deliberately concealed under the guise of economic integration. Building ‘Europe’ was to be presented as a matter of trade and jobs.

Messina: A close-run thing

France was attracted to Euratom, which would enable Germany’s nuclear industry to be controlled, and might also assist in the as-yet undeclared objective of producing a French nuclear bomb. On the other hand, with the highest tariffs of the Six, and many other protectionist rules, she was hostile to the idea of a common market. Nevertheless she agreed that there should be ‘exploratory discussions’ of the Benelux memorandum, during talks on who should replace Monnet as head of the Coal and Steel Community. The Germans had considerable reservations as to whether to proceed at all.

The venue chosen for the talks was Messina, in deference to Italy’s foreign minister Gaetano Martino. He was facing an election in Sicily and needed to be near his power base. The dates of 1–2 June 1955 were agreed. A British representative was invited, but Messina was considered too far to go, for what was, ostensibly, only a meeting of Coal and Steel Community ministers.

Before the meeting, Monnet learnt that the French were preparing to bury the Benelux Memorandum under pious resolutions.40 Conscious that his presence might inflame the situation, he therefore decided not to attend. Spaak, acting as Monnet’s front man, chaired the conference. At first, for the supranationalists, the meeting went badly. Monnet was on the telephone constantly, seeking to instruct Spaak. Max Kohnstamm, the Dutch secretary to the High Authority, who had taken a number of calls from Monnet, was eventually driven to tell his old boss: ‘Please understand, they are not here to make Europe. They are here to bury you.’⁴¹

But late at night Spaak had gone to the hotel room of the French foreign minister Pinay. When he emerged in the early hours of the morning, some kind of agreement had been reached. It was enough for Spaak to order a bottle of champagne and greet the dawn with a rendition of O sole mio.⁴² That morning, ministers adopted a resolution that accepted much of the Benelux Memorandum, some of it word for word. However, the resolution only committed the Six to set up an intergovernmental committee to study how to put the Memorandum into action.⁴³ The future was far from certain as there was still considerable opposition to the proposals. The French had not assented but simply agreed ‘not to oppose a continuation of talks’.⁴⁴ Interestingly, Luxembourg’s representative, Joseph Bech, said the most significant thing about the meeting was its lack of any ‘smell’ of a High Authority, Schuman-style, to ruffle French concerns over sovereignty.⁴⁵ The deception was continuing.

A translation of the Messina communiqué was despatched to London by the British Embassy in Rome, on 11 June. An accompanying letter from assistant under-secretary, John Coulson, reported ‘it looks as though the Ministers had difficulty in reaching agreement on any specific action’, adding:

‘The Germans were keenly interested in transport, while Benelux wanted to expand the scope of the authority. The Italians went all out for a common market, while the French views were not clear. It is evident that the final communiqué went as far as possible to repeat the views of all the participants without taking any decisions of principle. It will be noticed that all the questions are to be “studied”, but there is no indication of how this is to be done.’ ⁴⁶

The Foreign Office, in fact, had considerable difficulty in finding out what had happened. In a letter to the new foreign secretary, Macmillan, on 15 June, the UK ambassador in Paris referred to the communiqué as ‘lengthy but not very informative’ suggesting that it was an accurate reflection of the vagueness that had prevailed at the conference. ‘There is some evidence for the theory that the six Ministers were unable to get to real grips with the problems they discussed’, he wrote. Noting the lack of clarity, he added:

‘… the Europeans are having to proceed very cautiously. Their opponents on the other hand, or many of them, do see advantages in some of the schemes now being considered. The practical differences between the two camps are therefore much narrower than the ideological differences. Therefore when M. Pinay says that the new schemes are to be supranational and the Gaullists say they are not, both sides are using contradictory words to express roughly the same issues. M. Boegner, when asked to explain M. Pinay’s language, said that he might well be thinking of organisations which had powers of decision (and were therefore supranational) but whose decisions would be reached unanimously (and were therefore intergovernmental). I am aware that this is a quibble. But this sort of double talk does seem to keep the Europeans quiet and if it serves to quieten a largely useless quarrel it has some justification.’ 47

Press coverage was meagre. The Italian newspaper, Il Tempo, described the communiqué as ‘another unnecessary document’ ⁴⁸ and Le Monde reported ‘the governments have implicitly abandoned the idea of supranationality’. Macmillan later observed ‘the official view seemed to be a confident expectation that nothing would come out of Messina’.⁴⁹

This was to reckon without Monnet. He was working on creating a platform from which he could continue his campaign. This culminated in his setting up an ‘Action Committee for the United States of Europe’, which issued its inaugural manifesto on 15 October 1955. With funding from the Ford Foundation, arranged by ACUE, its immediate objective was ‘to ensure that the Messina resolution… should be translated into a genuine step towards a United States of Europe’. An important adjunct was to give Monnet a ‘permanent visiting card’ to any head of government. Very much in character, his new role would provide

‘…him and his organisation with the advantage of being able to influence political élites directly without having to face the disadvantage of public scrutiny. Europe was being constructed by a remarkably small élite; while public support was welcomed, it was never a prerequisite for Monnet’s Europe.’ 50

Thus Spaak would be kept in the limelight, chairing the intergovernmental committee set up at Messina, while Monnet continued to work in the shadows.

The Spaak Committee

The complex drama just beginning, the historical consequences of which were to be immense, essentially involved two separate plots. One was the discussions in Brussels directed by Spaak, mainly conducted through the work of four technical committees. The other centred on the response of Britain, still Europe’s most powerful nation and not directly involved.

By this time the principal roles in the British government had changed. The ageing Churchill had retired, succeeded by Anthony Eden, who led his party to election victory in May 1955. Macmillan became Foreign Secretary. Eden’s Cabinet considered the Six’s invitation to join the talks just beginning in Brussels. Despite rejecting British participation in any supranational organisation on principle, it decided on 30 June to send Russell Bretherton, an under-secretary of the Board of Trade. Much would later be made that only a civil servant rather than a minister was sent, but the talks were intended to be technical discussions rather than negotiations.

When they began, Bretherton made it clear, under instructions from London, that Britain did not subscribe to the ‘Messina goals’. He pursued his government’s traditional intergovernmental line, attempting to steer the Six towards a limited alternative, under the aegis of the OEEC, warning that much of what was being proposed would duplicate the OEEC’s work. Spaak objected to the OEEC alternative as a ‘much more modest enterprise’ which ‘offered no prospect of a European political union’.⁵¹

Representatives of the OEEC were present at the talks and the conduct of the meetings alarmed the head of the UK delegation, Hugh Ellis-Rees, who sent a letter of complaint to Macmillan. Stating that warnings of a conflict with the OEEC’s work had not been heeded, he wrote:

‘…the Secretary General has been made to feel most unwelcome…until representations by Her Majesty’s Government to the six Governments concerned brought about a better atmosphere and an opportunity of regular attendance. But there has never been any consultation on the avoidance of duplication: in fact, when a suggestion of this kind was made on one occasion by the United Kingdom observer, it was brushed aside by M. Spaak on the grounds he was obliged to carry out the directives of the Messina Conference. All the evidence here suggests that the OEEC’s position will not be considered.’ 52

In a seven-page letter, Ellis-Rees gave numerous examples of how the committee’s objectives might duplicate the OEEC’s work or cut across it, noting that:

‘The whole proceeding has been unusual… It may be asked…why the six Member countries did not raise the issues in the Organisation, if they were dissatisfied with the speed of progress… It would indeed have been courteous if one of their representatives at the Messina Conference had explained to the Council of Ministers of the OEEC, who were meeting a few days afterwards, what they were proposing to do.’ ⁵³

Ellis-Rees then offered an explanation as to why the organisers of the Messina conference had behaved so oddly. It seemed they had ‘political objectives’:

‘It is clear that both the French and German representatives on the Preparatory Committee have no other object in view, since they represent those elements in their respective governments who are in favour, or at least want to appear to be in favour, of European integration; and we are frequently told by representatives of Belgium and the Netherlands that the whole impetus behind this, so far as the Benelux is concerned, can be labelled “political” rather than “economic”.’

From Spaak himself, in his memoirs, came an admission that confirmed this impression. With his colleagues, he wrote, ‘we realised the political implications of our goal and knew that what we were about to achieve was nothing short of a revolution’.⁵⁴ Yet it was clear the British were not alone in having reservations about the talks. The German finance minister Hans Schäffer, took the view that:

‘…partial or functional integration in the style of the Iron and Steel Community [sic] should not go further, since it was necessarily bound up with supra-national authorities. Instead one should aim for a gradual process towards full integration, making progress, if possible, on many subjects but in every case by co-operation between governments and without developing any further supra-national authorities.’ ⁵⁵

The note added that it was not possible to judge what sort of agreement was likely to be reached on the setting up of a common market. There were clear ‘signs of conflicting interests’:

‘The Germans, who have been very active in Brussels in supporting the movements towards further integration, have nevertheless been unwilling to make many concessions in the field of agriculture, which, of course, must be a matter of prime concern to the Dutch and the French. There are also signs that the French will be extremely reluctant to go very far very fast in the direction of true integration through dismantling of tariffs…and may try to create a diversion by suggesting integration in particular sectors, notably in transport, energy and the development of atomic energy.’ 56

In parallel with the common market talks, details of the proposals for an ‘Atomic Community’ were also being discussed, and it emerged that the new organisation would require all fissile materials, including supplies of uranium, to be placed in a common ‘European pool’ under Euratom’s full control and ownership.

A central intention was to prevent military programmes using them. This was wholly unacceptable to the British, as Europe’s only nuclear power,⁵⁷ and it was clear that her interdependent civil and military programmes would not fit into this European mould. On 7 September 1955 therefore, Britain had no option but to withdraw from the Euratom talks.

Spaak was formally notified of the reasons for this in a letter from the British Ambassador in Brussels, George Labouchere. Informing Spaak that the UK government recognised ‘the strong impetus towards multilateral co-operation in Europe’, he pointed out that Britain’s civil nuclear operations were so closely integrated with her military programme that there would be ‘overriding difficulties in the defence field. These would prevent the UK from putting her resources, including supplies of nuclear material, into the European pool’.⁵⁸

As discussions ground on, Bretherton was told how Spaak intended to organise the final stages of the committee’s activities. In late October, there would be a meeting of delegations to hear reports from the committees, restricted only to the Six. Spaak then intended to set up a small drafting group to write the final report, and to hold a meeting of heads of delegations in November, from which Britain would also be excluded. Between these meetings there would be a meeting of the full steering committee, to keep everyone informed of progress. To this Britain was invited.

Britain was to be excluded from the drafting group because it was felt it might thus be possible for the Six to go further than Britain would wish. Her presence ‘might in some way act as a brake on the others’.59 In conclusion, Bretherton was told:

‘Monsieur Spaak felt that it was unrealistic to expect that the United Kingdom would become an equal member of the Common Market, which, with the Atomic Energy proposal, represented the most important elements under consideration. He felt, however, that it was highly desirable that we should be associated with whatever Common Market arrangements emerged…we should not feel that we were being in any way excluded from the community. The fact that we were not expected to be present at the restricted meetings of heads of delegations was solely designed to ensure that the Six reached as great a measure of agreement among themselves as possible.’ ⁶⁰

The steering committee meeting was held on 7 November 1955. It was at this meeting that Bretherton announced that Britain was to withdraw from the talks on the common market. The way in which he communicated this has become a legendary episode in the history of Britain’s relations with ‘Europe’, subject to the most bizarre historical disagreement. According to Denman, Bretherton asked for the floor and spoke ‘in the following terms’:

‘The future treaty which you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed, it would have no chance of being ratified; and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain. You speak of agriculture, which we don’t like, of power over customs, which we take exception to, and institutions which frighten us. Monsieur le president, messieurs, au revoir et bonne chance.’ ⁶¹

Bretherton then apparently walked out. But to support his version of what happened, Denman, curiously, cites only a secondary source, a book by Charles Grant published in 1994, nearly forty years after the event.⁶² Grant, in turn, can only cite as his own source Jean François Déniau’s L’Europe Interdite, quoted in Le Monde in October 1991.

Hugo Young also offers this version of the incident, giving a slightly different wording, citing Déniau as his source (referring to him as ‘J.-F. Denian’).63 Young claims that Bretherton’s text was drafted in Anthony Eden’s own hand. But Wolfram Kaiser, a respected German academic expert on European integration who writes in detail about Britain’s role in the EU, believes the speech to have been ‘a Foreign Office statement’, which Bretherton read out ‘word for word’.⁶⁴ As to the alleged ‘walk-out’, Young concedes that ‘there is no documentary evidence that anything so exciting occurred’.⁶⁵

Nevertheless, according to Young, after Bretherton delivered his speech, ‘Spaak just blew up’, saying: ‘I am astonished and very hurt at this. You are just sticking to your guns. England has not moved at all, and I am not going to move either.’⁶⁶

Kaiser gives a very different account:

‘The Six were not surprised. Spaak commented ironically that some governments could not understand the new context for European integration that had been created by the Messina conference, but separation was peaceful – as long as Britain refrained from torpedoing the Messina initiative.’ ⁶⁷

While Denman has it that Bretherton walked out and did not return,⁶⁸ Young had Bretherton denying that he made ‘the spectacular exit legend attributed to him’.⁶⁹ In any event, he could hardly have ‘returned’, since this was the committee’s final session and Britain had already been told that it was not invited to the final drafting session. Nor could the Six have had anything to be surprised about. Bretherton had made Britain’s position abundantly clear from the outset.

Still more oddly, neither Young nor Denman refer to the account of Miriam Camps,⁷⁰ a US State Department observer, although they both cite her as a source elsewhere and list her book in their bibliographies. Young calls her book ‘the most authoritative history of the time’.71 Yet, at the closing meeting of the committee, Camps describes Spaak as having decided to ask for comments only from those who had not accepted the principles of the Messina resolution: ‘that is the British representative …’ Bretherton, ‘when asked for his comments’ indicated, ‘on instructions from London’, that his government ‘could not take a definite position on the common market until it knew all the details of the plan’: an entirely reasonable point, since the committee had yet to produce its report.

This is echoed by a Treasury memorandum dated 17 November 1955, recording notes of a meeting with Spaak. This stated ‘we cannot join Euratom’ and then observes vis-à-vis British membership of the common market that, until Spaak had produced his report, ‘it would be impolitic for us to take a formal position’. It concludes: ‘It would indeed be a major reversal of UK policy to say that we should join a common market and the Europeans would be very surprised if we did’. ⁷²

Spaak himself, who does not mention the Bretherton incident in his memoirs, dates Britain’s withdrawal from the common market from a memorandum dated 19 December 1955, addressed to the German government. It declared that ‘… it is our view that Britain cannot join such a project’. ⁷³

Despite Camps’s account and all the other evidence, Bretherton’s departure is the point at which Denman insists that Britain ‘walked out of Europe’, ⁷⁴ and which Young describes as her ‘self-exclusion’.⁷⁵ Yet Britain had already withdrawn from Monnet’s supranational Euratom because she was being asked to accept terms to which she could not possibly agree. When the proposed treaties on Euratom and the common market became linked, Britain would have found it impossible to proceed. By leaving the Euratom talks, as she had to, Britain had, in effect, been excluded from the common market because of how the treaties were subsequently linked.

Nevertheless it is important to recognise that – contrary to the version given by Young, Denman and others – Britain made it clear that in every other way she wished to continue co-operating with her European neighbours. On nuclear power, Spaak had been told:

‘the United Kingdom would not wish to do anything which would hinder the creation of Euratom if the six Messina countries should decide that their interests would be so met. Her Majesty’s Government would in fact be fully prepared to conclude a separate agreement with the European organisation.’ 76

In October 1955, the UK Atomic Energy Authority had already proposed an Anglo-German joint civil nuclear programme and, largely at the behest of Britain, the OEEC had set up a working party on the possibilities of wider nuclear co-operation. Labouchere referred to this, stating that this body:

‘seems likely to recommend a flexible system of multilateral co-operation… the working party may well propose that within the organisation there should be room for agreement on specific projects or for specific purposes between groups of countries which would be neither binding on other countries in the organisation nor subject to their veto. Under such a scheme the countries more advanced in atomic energy could co-operate closely on joint research projects…’

The working party reported in December.⁷⁷ It advocated the establishment of an OEEC directorate for nuclear energy, to co-ordinate national research and prepare joint projects. A key proposal was to build a plant to give Europe self-sufficiency in enriched uranium. But this was to be an intergovernmental venture, as opposed to Monnet’s supranational plan and, although welcomed by Erhard, it created a crisis for Spaak. The combination of Britain’s departure, the OEEC proposals and splits in the German delegation put not only the Messina agenda at risk but also Monnet’s supranational ambitions.

Nothing better illustrates the gulf between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism than Monnet’s response. Instead of welcoming Britain’s generous offer, he called on his ‘Action Committee’ in January 1956 to adopt a declaration emphasising the supranational nature of Euratom and calling on the parliaments of the Six to give it their support. Adenauer also intervened. Unlike Erhard, he strongly favoured the customs union aspect of the common market and, although less keen on Euratom, regarded this as necessary to gain French support for the market. To counter the opposition of Erhard and others he, on 19 January, demanded from all his ministers ‘a clear, positive attitude to European integration’, stating that the Messina resolution had to be implemented without alteration and delay.⁷⁸

At Monnet’s request, President Eisenhower then took a hand. To the end of December, on Monnet’s advice, the US had maintained a friendly distance from Euratom. He was conscious that too active a role might upset the French government, which had also seen the project as means whereby Europe might match the industrial power of the United States. Eisenhower now, on 22 February 1956, announced that the US would release 20 tons of enriched uranium (equivalent to 40 million tons of coal) for peaceful use by friendly states. He made it clear that the uranium would be offered on more preferential terms to Euratom than to any individual state. The condition was that Euratom had to have ‘effective communal authority and could undertake duties and responsibilities similar to that [sic] of national governments’.79 Again America had backed supranationalism.

Even in Washington, however, signs of division were appearing. According to the British embassy, there was now more enthusiasm for European integration in the State Department than among US economic policy makers, who feared the new common market might discriminate against imports from the dollar area.⁸⁰ For the moment, however, Monnet’s State Department supporters continued to prevail.

Franco-German musical chairs

Through the first 10 months of 1956 the two main players in the European drama, France and Germany, lumbered through elaborate shifts of policy, ending in each reversing the positions they held at the start of the year. The resultant impasse threatened to bring the whole process to a halt.

The year began with a major upset in French domestic politics when, at a general election on 2 January, the Gaullists lost 100 of their 120 seats in the Assembly and most of their influence. The new Socialist prime minister, Guy Mollet, was a committed supranationalist, having been president of the Council of Europe assembly, a delegate to the ECSC assembly and an active member of Monnet’s Action Committee. His foreign minister, Christian Pineau, was of like mind. Despite this, the new French government, now also preoccupied with the rebellion in its Algerian colony, still believed it would have difficulty selling a common market to the French public. On 7 February, Pineau told the American Ambassador that ‘a common market would not be possible…without a great deal of education in France’.81 The pair therefore agreed the two ‘communities’ should be separated, allowing Euratom to proceed. This, they thought, would better serve French interests. Germany, however, although still unenthusiastic about Euratom, favoured the common market.

On 21 April, the Spaak Committee finally published its report.⁸² Running to 84 pages on the common market and 24 on Euratom, it largely followed the line of the Messina resolution. Crucially, the elements of Euratom which would have made British acceptance impossible remained.

At Monnet’s insistence, in the wake of the EDC debacle, the report made no mention of a ‘High Authority’, or ‘supranational’.⁸³ It proposed that the new governing authority should be given the more neutral title of ‘commission’. According to Camps:

‘… great care had been taken to present proposals which could be accepted by the French government without, at the same time, abandoning any of the points of principle to which the “Europeans” attached real importance. Words and phrases such as “supra-nationalism”, which in the post-EDC atmosphere were certain to generate unfavourable emotional responses were abandoned in favour of phrases that were neutral emotionally and logically defensible. Thus, on the most difficult aspect of them all, that of institutions, the Benelux memorandum side-stepped the acrimonious “intergovernmental-supra-national” argument but, at the same time, firmly established the central point, that is, that an institution endowed with real power would be required.’ ⁸⁴

One highly significant new element in the package, added on French insistence, was a common agricultural policy. ‘One cannot conceive the establishment of a general Common Market in Europe’, said the report, ‘without agriculture being included.’ The reason for this was that farming, still mainly on peasant smallholdings, accounted for a quarter of France’s workforce and was over-represented in parliament.⁸⁵ If it was necessary to sell the idea of a common market, a common policy offering French farmers the prospect of a new outlet for their increasing surpluses of grain and sugar beet might be vital.

Nevertheless, France remained opposed to a common market in principle. Her government thus pushed for the two treaties to be ‘decoupled’, hoping that the common market negotiations could stagnate. Germany could not agree. On 9 May, Adenauer’s Cabinet confirmed that the two treaties must be linked.86 At a foreign ministers meeting in Venice at the end of May, the Germans, with Italy and Benelux, reiterated that the treaties were interdependent and must be negotiated together. The junktim became a central feature of the talks, with the reluctant agreement of the French.⁸⁷

France then insisted on another ‘linkage’ – between the reduction of tariffs between members in a common market and the harmonisation of social costs: overtime, length of paid holidays, equal pay for men and women.⁸⁸ Pineau further proposed that the treaty’s scope should be extended to member states’ overseas territories. These proposals seemed calculated to provoke disagreement. It was an early example of a French negotiating tactic which was to become only too familiar in the decades ahead whereby, if France wanted to stop something – in this case the common market – it would make demands it knew to be unacceptable.

These would provoke a breakdown of negotiations, for which others could be blamed. Nevertheless, the foreign ministers agreed that negotiations should begin. They would be held at the Château Val Duchesse near Brussels, and Spaak’s report would provide the basis for discussion.

Histories of these negotiations tend to focus almost entirely on the common market aspects,⁸⁹ but the central issue was actually the differences over Euratom. As a recent study by the European Parliament put it:

‘The Euratom treaty is often overlooked in the history and operation of the European Union. This neglect is unwarranted. Its tactical pairing with the EEC was a crucial factor in initially persuading and eventually convincing a sceptical French government to engage with European integration after the embittering experience of the aborted European defence community… At the time, in 1955 and early 1956, however, it was widely believed in many quarters that the Euratom proposal held the greater promise of success, while the EEC negotiations faltered.’⁹⁰

Initially, though, it was the Euratom talks that got bogged down. The sticking point was the ‘military question’, whereby Euratom, as proposed, would prevent France pursuing a military nuclear programme. Although France was already working on a covert nuclear weapons programme, the socialist Mollet was unconcerned. He was happy to renounce nuclear research for military purposes, a position endorsed by Monnet’s Action Committee.91 But the prospect of a prohibition so angered France’s nationalists that any Euratom treaty looked destined to follow the EDC. French ratification would never succeed if the impression was given that the treaty would stop France becoming a nuclear power.⁹²

By early July, Mollet was forced to tell the National Assembly that Euratom would not stand in the way of French ambitions. With this he secured a vote of 322 to 181 in favour of pursuing negotiations. But that, in turn, strengthened a growing lobby against Euratom in Germany, which now believed it could allow France to restrict Germany’s own nuclear ambitions, while pursuing her own. This supposed discrimination now threatened ratification by the Bundestag.⁹³

The German situation was complex. In June, rumours that Soviet leaders would be invited to Washington DC by Eisenhower had fuelled German fears of a US–Soviet détente, the neutralisation of West Germany and the withdrawal of American troops from Europe. On 13 July, The New York Times revealed a plan drawn up by Admiral Radford, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, which proposed reducing US conventional forces in Europe by 800,000 men. They were to be replaced with tactical nuclear weapons. Adenauer, already nervous about American intentions, had become determined that Germany should now have its own nuclear weapons. Despite the opposition of some of his Cabinet, led by Erhard, he now welcomed Euratom as a means of acquiring them.

To Adenauer’s frustration, the majority of his Cabinet supported Erhard’s wish for a free-trade association rather than a common market. Although not an adept politician, Erhard was now a highly respected figure in Germany, because he was identified with the astonishing economic recovery, already known since 1954 as the Wirtschaftwunder or ‘economic miracle’, which was rapidly making West Germany the richest and most dynamic country in western Europe.

Adenauer, therefore, had to make tactical concessions. On the common market, he retreated from the concept of Monnet’s ‘United States of Europe’ in favour of Erhard’s free market solution. Meanwhile, Monnet himself, as it happened, was doing his best to ditch the common market idea altogether. At a meeting in Bonn on 12 September, he told Adenauer that the French Parliament might not ratify such a treaty. Therefore, Euratom should be the priority.94 On 20 September, Monnet’s Action Committee called for Euratom to be ratified by the end of the year, ahead of any treaty on the common market.

Against this fractious background, on 25 September formal negotiations on both Euratom and the common market began in Brussels. Adenauer, under Erhard’s influence, made a speech to the Grandes Conférences Catholiques in Brussels, arguing that the first period of European integration had been successful in preventing war in Europe and that any further integration should be ‘flexible and elastic’. On 5 October, he went further, telling his Cabinet that Euratom would allow West Germany access to the technology necessary to produce atomic warheads as quickly as possible. But the only way to get Euratom was to agree to a ‘common market’ on Erhard’s terms: namely a free trade area.⁹⁵

Perversely, the French had by now begun to warm to the original idea of a full common market, but based on a customs union. The leaders of France’s farmers and key French industrialists had come out in favour. But they demanded a price. If high social welfare standards were to be imposed on employers, as France had suggested in the Venice conference as a ‘wrecking’ tactic, they must be ‘harmonised’ throughout the new ‘community’, to avoid the other five member states, especially Germany, gaining a competitive advantage. Predictably, this was entirely unacceptable to the Erhard faction.

Thus, from the beginning of the year, the positions of the two main players had become almost wholly reversed. The French, having first supported Euratom and opposed a common market, now opposed Euratom and favoured a common market. The Germans had now moved to the position abandoned by France.

This provoked a crisis so serious that, at a meeting of the foreign minister of the Six in Paris on 19–20 October, no way forward could be found. Euratom looked doomed. With an impasse on the harmonisation of social policies it seemed the common market would follow. Erhard, for one, was confident that the ‘distasteful common market project’ was dying, and that the prospects for his chosen alternative, a free trade area, were now looking distinctly hopeful.⁹⁶

At that very moment, however, great events were to rescue the ‘project’ from oblivion. The irony was that the country whose actions were about to put it firmly back on the rails was Great Britain.

Britain’s ‘destructive embrace’

Despite Britain’s seemingly confident refusal to get drawn into any supra-national experiments, some in her government were becoming alarmed that a successful ‘customs union’ of the Six, based on common tariffs, might be used to exclude British trade.

Following the collapse of the attempts to set up ‘Defence’ and ‘Political’ Communities, it had not been unrealistic for the British government to believe that the Messina initiatives would fail. The French Fourth Republic was already a byword for political and economic instability, with 20 changes of government in 10 years. The value of the franc was plummeting, and there was France’s humiliating failure to keep control over Indochina, and the running sore of Algeria. In Germany, there was the serious rift between Adenauer and Erhard.

Furthermore, following the failure of the EDC, Eden had brought off his triumphant intergovernmental solution with the WEU, enthusiastically accepted by the Six. If the Euratom and common market negotiations failed, there was no reason to believe that British alternatives, based on intergovernmental structures, might not also be accepted.

Nevertheless the British government had given serious thought to the advantages and disadvantages of British membership of a common market, and these had been studied by a working group, set up in June 1955 under a senior Treasury civil servant Burke Trend. When this group submitted its internal report in October 1955, it reflected the dominant British view that a free trade area was preferable to a customs union. Only this option allowed Britain to retain national autonomy in foreign trade policy and to safeguard its Commonwealth preferences.

Conscious of the danger of British exclusion from a ‘customs union’, the report did, however, offer that ‘it can be argued, with some reason, that the disadvantages of abstaining would, in the long run, outweigh the advantages’.97

The response of the Foreign Office was simply to argue that membership of a common market would be incompatible with Britain’s role as a world power.⁹⁸ But it also believed that, as with the EDC, the Messina initiative would collapse as a result of French obstruction.⁹⁹

Macmillan accepted the Foreign Office view. But in the autumn of 1955, with the prospect of a more ‘Europe-friendly’, centre-left government being elected in France, there seemed an increasing chance of a common market succeeding. The civil servants of the economic ministries became more concerned about the dangers of exclusion from ‘Europe’. In October 1955, just as the Spaak talks were drawing to an end, it was agreed they could no longer ‘count on the project collapsing of its own accord’. They therefore decided that the common market ‘if possible, should be frustrated’.100

This represented a significant change in British policy, from the previous stance of ‘benign neglect’. The Foreign Office decided to force the issue with a diplomatic offensive. The intention was to divert the ‘common market’ initiative into the orbit of the OEEC, where the British government could dilute it into something more intergovernmental. The term given to this strategy was ‘destructive embrace’, taken from a note appended to a memorandum by Gladwyn Jebb, Britain’s Ambassador to France.¹⁰¹

In pursuit of this strategy, letters from Macmillan were sent to the US and German governments, stressing British displeasure with the Messina initiative and particularly the plan for a customs union. On 14 December 1955, while he was on a visit to Paris to attend a WEU ministerial council and then a North Atlantic Council meeting, Macmillan was still convinced the Messina initiative would fail. He recorded in his diary:

‘The French will never go into the “common market” – the German industrialists and economists equally dislike it, although Adenauer is attracted to the idea of closer European unity on political grounds. This, of course, is very important, and I made it clear that we would welcome and assist the plan, although we would not join.’¹⁰²

Inevitably, at the WEU meeting, Macmillan was roundly attacked by the Six, with Spaak ‘leading the charge’. Nobody had expected British participation, Spaak had said, but neither had they foreseen a frontal assault by the British government.¹⁰³

The response from the US government was predictably unhelpful. On 12 December Secretary of State Dulles simply affirmed support for the common market. Macmillan aborted his offensive. At the end of 1955 all British embassies were instructed to offer reserved diplomatic support for the common market, to avoid conflict with Washington.¹⁰⁴ According to Kaiser, all Britain had achieved by this ‘attempted sabotage’ was ‘the creation of justified suspicion among the Six as to the British motives in Western Europe… and to raise among the Six the traditional unpleasant spectre of perfidious Albion’.105

On 21 December 1955, Macmillan was, somewhat unwillingly, transferred from the Foreign Office to the Treasury. Because of its economic implications, however, he kept some control of the European agenda. And by then he was having serious concerns about the possible success of the ‘common market’. ‘What then are we to do?’ he asked.

‘Are we just to sit back and hope for the best? If we do it may be very dangerous for us; and perhaps Messina will come off after all and that will mean Western Europe dominated in fact by Germany and used as an instrument for the revival of power through economic means. It really is giving them on a plate what we fought two wars to prevent.’¹⁰⁶

Despite the failure of his first attempt to subvert the common market, therefore, he sought to regain the diplomatic initiative, instructing his officials to form an inter-ministerial working group to develop possible alternatives. This group was chaired by Richard Clarke, number three in the Treasury, as head of their Overseas Finance Group. In the spring of 1956, before the ministers of the Six had met in Vienna to agree to formal negotiations, Clarke’s committee had produced a number of options, plans ‘A to G’. That chosen was ‘Plan G’, a Free Trade Area (FTA) for manufactured goods only.¹⁰⁷

Parliament was told what was happening in July 1956, when Sir Edward Boyle, economic secretary to the Treasury, announced that the government was engaged in a major reappraisal of its policy towards the emerging common market. On the European front, approaches were made to the OEEC and, later that month, the OEEC Council responded with a decision to establish a working party to study possible forms of association between the Six and the OEEC, including a possible Europe-wide free trade area.

The new strategy looked promising. The European powers were broadly sympathetic. Erhard was enthusiastic. This was so much closer to his own ideas than any dirigiste common market. Macmillan reported that Washington was ‘surprisingly positive’. Even Commonwealth leaders were not hostile, seeing in it an opportunity for increased trade with Europe. Duchêne conceded that the FTA was ‘a genuine attempt to adapt British interests to the common market’.¹⁰⁸

Work on ‘Plan G’ continued through the summer and, to minimise the institutionalisation involved, it was proposed that the FTA be integrated into the existing structures of the OEEC. Formal OEEC negotiations were launched in Paris in October 1956. By that time, common market negotiations looked irretrievably stalled. Erhard was confidently predicting the death of the idea. The Six were in disarray. At that moment, the great events intervened.

Suez: The watershed

On 26 July 1956, Egypt’s new leader Colonel Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal, since its opening in 1869 under Anglo-French ownership. Through the remaining weeks of summer, amid an atmosphere of growing international crisis, Britain and France had assembled a military task force to seize it back. The problem was that this might be viewed as an act of ‘colonialist aggression’ by the international community, including the USA.

On 23 October, amid intense secrecy, Britain’s prime minister Eden therefore sent his foreign secretary to rendezvous in a French villa at Sevres with Mollet, Pinay, Israel’s prime minister Ben Gurion and his chief of staff, General Dayan. Between them they agreed a plan. Israel would invade Egypt. Anglo-French forces would then intervene in a ‘police action’ to separate the combatants and seize back the Canal. Nasser would be toppled.

The scheme did not work. On 29 October, Israel invaded Egypt, as planned. But when the following day Britain and France issued an ultimatum, demanding a cease-fire, this provoked a storm of international protest, only complicated by a crisis now blowing up over the Soviet Union’s military invasion of Hungary, to suppress the first major popular rising against Communist tyranny in eastern Europe.

This suddenly explosive international situation, possibly threatening a European war, convinced Adenauer more than ever that Germany must have nuclear weapons. In Cabinet on 31 October he put to Erhard that Euratom was now vital to West Germany’s security interests. He then added that the only way this treaty could be agreed was if Germany accepted the common market. On 4 November, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, where thousands were to die in street battles. Invoking his constitutional right as Chancellor to make policy on matters of national interest, Adenauer bludgeoned his Cabinet into agreeing that he should go to Paris to negotiate, on his own terms, a final settlement on both Euratom and the common market.109

Through one of those accidents of history, Adenauer was on the overnight train to Paris on 5 November as the news broke that British and French paratroops had landed in the Canal Zone. When he arrived in the early hours of 6 November at the Gare de l’Est, he found half the French Cabinet waiting for him at the station.

Adenauer immediately gave his unconditional approval of French actions, thus instantly strengthening Franco-German relations. As that day unfolded, however, the British Cabinet was also in crisis session over a report from Macmillan that massive selling of sterling had led to an unprecedented collapse in Britain’s currency reserves. Washington was furious at Britain’s action. So was the Soviet Union, whose prime minister Nikolai Bulganin threatened to shower London and Paris with nuclear missiles. Eden caved in.

Unilaterally he decided to abort the Suez campaign. When he telephoned his French opposite number to convey his decision, Mollet was furious at what seemed like betrayal. Seizing the moment, Adenauer advised him to ‘make Europe your revenge’.110

The Suez crisis, ending in such fiasco, changed everything. In its aftermath, while the Canal remained blocked, oil in Western Europe was in short supply, petrol had to be rationed, roads emptied. This brought home Europe’s dependence on Middle East oil, underlining the need for alternative sources of energy. Euratom, with its promise of abundant nuclear power, seemed suddenly an urgent necessity. So dramatic was the impact that a colleague of Monnet suggested, only half-jokingly, that a statue should be erected to Nasser, ‘the federator of Europe’.¹¹¹

Progress was now rapid. The contentious issue of social harmonisation became a mere trifle. Adenauer removed this previously insurmountable obstacle by agreeing ‘in principle’ to the French demands and, on 24 January 1957, the Germans also agreed to exclude military installations from Euratom control, clearing the way for the French nuclear weapons programme. By then, Adenauer had already achieved his own nuclear ambitions. In December, a NATO military committee, in a secret directive, had stipulated that 12 West German divisions on the front to the east would be equipped for nuclear warfare. It was assumed that America would supply the firepower, but Adenauer was now satisfied that the way for West Germany to acquire nuclear weapons was clear.¹¹²

However, the way for the common market was still not entirely open. There were still two issues to be resolved: the problem of overseas territories and the decision-making mechanisms of the two new communities. The key was the overseas territories question. Bled dry by wars in Indochina and Algeria, France could not afford vital modernisation programmes in its territories without German financial support. Post-Suez, Adenauer was willing to contribute nearly half the needed funds.113 Final agreement was reached in February when any restrictions on the use of fissile material supplied by Euratom were removed.

The Euratom and common market treaties were signed by representatives of the Six governments on 25 March 1957, at a venue carefully chosen for its symbolic significance: the Capitol in Rome, the city which for 2,000 years, under the Roman Empire and the Papacy, had stood at the centre of European history.

The preamble to the treaty setting up the European Economic Community opened with a declaration that it expressed the determination of the ‘High Contracting Parties’ to ‘lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe’. In many respects, what followed took the form not so much of a treaty as of a constitution, defining the institutions of a new type of government, with definitions of their purposes and powers. This centred on a new ‘European Commission’, more an executive than a civil service, which alone would have the right to initiate legislation. Alongside it was to be a ‘Council of Ministers’, representing the governments of the member states; an ‘Assembly’, made up of delegates from their national parliaments; and a ‘European Court of Justice’, with appointees from each member state, entrusted with adjudicating on matters of Community law, in particular where it conflicted with the laws of member states.

The model for this new form of government was already familiar. It was adapted from the Coal and Steel Community. This in turn had been adapted from the League of Nations blueprint sketched out at the end of the 1920s by Monnet’s friend Salter in his proposal for a supranational ‘United States of Europe’. Crucially, the rule of unanimity, allowing for national vetoes, which, according to Spaak, had been ‘responsible for the bankruptcy of the League of Nations’ had been heavily circumscribed. The authors of the Treaty (of which he was one) had been aware of the dangers of the veto and held that ‘the will of the majority should as a rule prevail and that unanimous decisions should only be mandatory in exceptional circumstances’.114

Interestingly, Monnet was not invited to Rome for the signing of the new treaties. Both the Bundestag and the Assemblée Nationale ratified them in the first week of July. Mendès-France voted against ratification. In an earlier debate, he had cautioned, ‘France must not be the victim of the Treaty. A democrat may abdicate by giving in to an internal dictatorship, but also by delegating his powers to an external authority’.¹¹⁵ The last to ratify was Italy, the following December. The ‘European Economic Community’ was finally born.

It had been a close-run thing.

 

 

1  Memoirs, p. 392.

2  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 288.

3  One unintended by-product of this rewriting of the official chronology was that it would help to reinforce the myth of the EU’s ‘Nazi origins’; in that the ideas behind it could then be shown to have followed those of the Nazis about European integration rather than having preceded them.

4  Young, Hugo (1998), This Blessed Plot – Britain And Europe, From Churchill To Blair (London, Routledge); Denman, Roy (1996), Missed Chances – Britain And Europe In The Twentieth Century (London, Cassell).

5  Young, op. cit., p. 65.

6  Young even mocked the ‘British idée fixe, that the Schuman Plan would lead to a European Federation’ (This Blessed Plot, p. 60). Such an analysis, he wrote, ‘turned out to be premature, if not something of a hallucination’. Young thus completely missed the Plan’s central purpose (cf. for instance, Monnet’s Memoirs, p. 326).

7  Young, op. cit., p. 58.

8  Ibid., p. 69.

9  Monnet, op. cit., p. 392.

10  Leiden University Historical Institute, History of European Integration site.

11  Monnet, op. cit., p. 382.

12  Williams, op. cit., pp. 372–373. US enthusiasm for European integration was now at its height. On 11 August 1952 the USA was the first non-member country to give international recognition to the ECSC. Monnet’s friend Dean Acheson, as Truman’s Secretary of State, sent Monnet a personal message declaring ‘All Americans will join me in welcoming the new institution and in expressing the expectation that it will develop as its founders intended…’ (published on the EU’s Washington website, 2004).

13  Sampson, op. cit., p. 17.

14  Young, op. cit., p. 76.

15  Ibid.

16  Calvocoressi, Peter (1955), Survey Of International Affairs – 1952 (London, Oxford University Press), pp. 93–94.

17  Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series 2, Vol. 1, doc. 484 (29 August 1952).

18  Ibid.

19  Calvocoressi, op. cit., p. 94. See also Foreign Office Press Release, 15 April 1952, and The Times, 16 April 1952, Le Monde and Neue Zeitung, 17 April 1952.

20  Ibid., p. 103.

21  Ibid., p. 126.

22  Not only had Spaak been the US State Department’s original nominee as president of the OEEC, and later first president of the Assembly of the Council of Europe, in 1950 he had also become president of the European Movement, following the resignation of Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys. Churchill and Sandys, who believed that the European Movement should represent the aspirations of the whole of Europe, including those central and Eastern European peoples now under Soviet hegemony, had become increasingly disenchanted with the Movement’s narrow obsession with integration in western Europe. After a brief hiatus, the Movement was still largely supported by secret funding from the CIA, through ACUE, of which Spaak himself was also a personal beneficiary.

23  Griffiths, Richard T. (2000), Europe’s First Constitution – The European Political Community, 1952–1954 (London, Federal Trust), p. 93.

24  On the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation, June 2 1953, a lead item on the main news page of the London Times reported that Dr Adenauer had ‘decided to attend the conference in Rome of the Foreign Ministers of the six members of the Coal and Steel Community which opens on June 12’, its original purpose ‘to consider the draft of a constitution for the proposed political community’.

25  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 233.

26  Calvocoressi, op. cit., p. 127.

27  Werth, op. cit., pp. 646–647.

28  Ibid., p. 696.

29  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 256.

30  As an example of real perversity, Hugo Young claimed that Britain’s refusal to place sufficient soldiers under European command ‘was, effectively, what drove French parliamentarians to kill the EDC’.

31  Werth, op. cit., p. 700.

32  Nevertheless US Secretary of State Dulles, a supporter of the EDC (and Monnet’s friend since 1919) wrote dismissively to Eden about the plans for WEU that he would regard ‘any solution which did not provide for the creation of a supranational institution as makeshift’. (Eden, Anthony (1960), Memoirs, Full Circle (London, Cassell), p. 159.)

33  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 256. One exception to this attempt to conceal the true purpose of the ECSC was Monnet’s decision, through his friend and ally George Ball, to open an ECSC office in Washington (adjoining Ball’s law firm Cleary and Gottlieb). Fearing that, following the collapse of the EDC, US officials might lose enthusiasm for European integration, his purpose was to maintain close links with Washington and the State Department, now headed by his old friend John Foster Dulles. The two-room office on Fifteenth Street NW was run by Leonard Tennyson, who in October 1954 published his first ECSC ‘Bulletin’ headed ‘Towards A Federal Government Of Europe’. Its first paragraph, directed to US readers, began ‘Today Europe is in march towards unification. Yet the details of this progress are not well known, nor is their significance widely understood’ (‘50 Years of the Commission Delegration in Washington’, published on the EU’s Washington website 2004).

34  Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Paris. Europe, 1944–…, Generalities, vol. 110, pp. 109–111.

35  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 271.

36  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 274.

37  European Parliament (2002), The European Parliament And The Euratom Treaty: Past Present And Future (Luxembourg, Directorate General for Research), Working Paper, Energy and Research Series, ENER 114EN, p. 9.

38  Bruylant, E. (1987), Pour Une Communauté Politique Européenne, Travaux Préparatoires (1955–1957). Tome II: 1955–1957 (Bruxelles), pp. 25–29.

39  Monnet, op. cit., p. 403.

40  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 280.

41  Ibid.

42  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 281.

43  European Parliament, Selection of texts concerning institutional matters on the Community from 1950 to 1982 (Luxembourg, Committee on Institutional Affairs), pp. 94–100.

44  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 282.

45  Young, op. cit., p. 81.

46  PRO. FO371/11640, pp. 7–9. Letter from J. E. Coulson Esq. to Ashley Clarke.

47  PRO. FO371/116040, pp. 38–43. Letter from Gladwyn Jebb to Harold Macmillan, 15 June 1955.

48  PRO: Coulson, op. cit.

49  Macmillan, Harold (1971), Riding The Storm – 1956-1959 (London, Macmillan), p. 73.

50  Holland, Martin (1993), European Integration – From Community To Union (London, Pinter Publishers), p. 9.

51  Spaak, op. cit., p. 236.

52  PRO. T 232/433, 11 October 1955, pp. 49–55.

53  Ibid.

54  Spaak, op. cit., pp. 230–231.

55  PRO. T 232/433, 10 October 1955, pp. 2–4.

56  Ibid.

57  Britain had exploded her first atomic bomb in 1952, and was well on the way to producing her first hydrogen bomb (tested in 1957). The first US hydrogen bomb test was in 1952. The USSR first detonated a nuclear device in 1949, her first thermo-nuclear test was in 1954. France’s first atomic test was not until 1960. Britain was also substantially ahead of the rest of Europe in the development of nuclear power for civil purposes (the world’s first large-scale nuclear power station was opened at Calder Hall, Cumberland, in August 1956).

58  PRO. FO 371/116054, pp. 61–63.

59  PRO. T 232/433, 14 October 1955, pp. 56–57.

60  Ibid.

61  Denman, Roy, Missed Chances, p. 199.

62  Grant, Charles (1994), Delors – Inside The House That Jacques Built (London, Nicholas Brearley), p. 62.

63  Young, op. cit., p. 93.

64  Kaiser, Wolfram (1996), Using Europe, Abusing The Europeans – Britain And European Integration, 1945–63 (London, Macmillan Press), p. 47. He cites as his reference: PRO FO/116055/361 (7 November 1955). Young cites PRO T/234/181 as the source of a document that Bretherton may have used.

65  Young, op. cit., p. 93.

66  Ibid.

67  Kaiser, op. cit., p. 47.

68  Denman, op. cit., p. 199.

69  Young, op. cit., p. 93.

70  Camps, Miriam (1964), Britain And The European Community 1955–1963 (London, Oxford University Press), p. 66. The book is described as ‘a detailed and objective account of the British search for an accommodation with the European Economic Community…’ It was lauded by the Financial Times as ‘far away the most comprehensive and best account’, with Roy Jenkins, in the Daily Telegraph, describing her degree of objectivity as ‘just right’.

71  Young, op. cit., p. 129.

72  PRO. T 234/181, 17 November 1955.

73  Spaak, op. cit., p. 233.

74  Denman, op. cit., p. 201.

75  Young, op. cit., p. 99.

76  PRO. FO 371/116054.

77  Nelsen G. R. (1958), European Organisation In The Field Of Atomic Energy. European Yearbook IV, pp. 36–54.

78  Schwartz, H. (1997), Konrad Adenauer: German Politician and Statesman in a Period of War, Revolution and Reconstruction, Vol 2: The Statesman, 1952–1967 (Oxford, Berghahn), p. 231.

79  Goldschmidt, B. (1982), The Atomic Complex: A Worldwide Political History Of Nuclear Energy (Grange Park, Illinois, American Nuclear Society), pp. 293–294.

80  PRO. FO 371/116054, pp. 83–84. Letter from J. H. A. Watson, British Embassy, Washington, to A. J. Edden, Mutual Aid Department, Foreign Office, London, 10 November 1955.

81  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 290.

82  Intergovernmental Committee created by the Messina Conference. Report of the Heads of Delegation to the Foreign Ministers (Brussels, Secretariat), 21 April 1956, pp. 9–135.

83  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 257.

84  Camps, op. cit., p. 24.

85  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 291.

86  Stirk, Peter M. R. (1996), A History of European Integration Since 1914 (London, Pinter), p. 142.

87  Camps, op. cit., p. 66.

88  Op. cit., p. 65.

89  For instance, Hugo Young’s This Blessed Plot does not include any references to Euratom in its index. Denman’s book, Missed Chances, gives it three brief mentions.

90  Directorate General for Research, op. cit., p. vii.

91  Soutou, G. H. (1981), ‘The French Military Programme for Nuclear Energy, 1945–1981’. Occasional Paper No. 3, Nuclear History Programme, Maryland.

92  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 295.

93  Ibid., p. 297.

94  Ibid.

95  Williams, op. cit., pp. 439–440.

96  Schwartz, op. cit., p. 240.

97  PRO. CAB 134/1030/201, 24 October 1955.

98  PRO. CAB 134/1030/200, 24 October 1955.

99  PRO. CAB 134/889, 17 October 1955.

100  PRO. CAB 134/1026, 27 October 1955.

101  Harold Macmillan Archives. Quoted in Horne, op. cit., p. 363. Gladwyn Jebb appended to a brief on the Common Market the words ‘embrace destructively’.

102  Harold Macmillan diaries. Quoted in Horne, op. cit., p. 362.

103  PRO. FO 371/116057/384, 15 December 1955.

104  PRO. FO 371/116057/390, 31 December 1955.

105  Kaiser, op. cit., p. 53.

106  PRO. T 234/100, 1 February 1956. Macmillan to Sir E. Bridges.

107  PRO. BT 11/5715, 10 May 1956.

108  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 320.

109  Williams, op. cit., p. 441.

110  Moravcsik, Andrew (1998), The Choice Of Europe: Social Purpose And State Power: From Messina To Maastricht (London, UCL), p. 144.

111  Monnet, op. cit., p. 422.

112  Williams, op. cit., p. 442.

113  Stirk, op. cit., p. 145. He cites: Küsters, Fondements de la Communauté économique européen, pp. 257–268.

114  Spaak, op. cit., p. 250.

115  Monnet, op. cit., p. 425.