Chapter 7

Why de Gaulle Kept Britain Out: 1961–1969

‘The French did not wish the British to be at the table taking part in the formative discussions on the CAP, for fear that we might disrupt the very favourable arrangements they otherwise had every reason to expect.’

Edward Heath¹

‘The importance of the CAP to de Gaulle cannot be overestimated.’

Professor Andrew Moravcsik²

It is a familiar fact of history that, during the 1960s, de Gaulle was to slam the door against Britain’s entry to the Common Market, not just once but twice. What has only recently come fully to light, however, is just why he found it imperative to do so, as a central plank of his domestic policy for France. From a British point of view, the generally accepted version of events during these years begins with the formal acceptance of Britain’s application to join by the EEC Council of Ministers on 26 September 1961.

Over the next year, as this version has it, Heath showed himself highly skilled in negotiating Britain’s terms of entry. But the talks then became mysteriously bogged down. In January 1963, de Gaulle then startled the world by announcing his personal decision to veto Britain’s entry, claiming that Britain was not yet sufficiently ‘European’ in her outlook, and still too closely tied to the USA. This came as a great blow to Macmillan, at the beginning of a year which was to see his government disintegrating amid a welter of scandals.

In 1965, after a Labour government had taken over under Harold Wilson, Heath became leader of the Conservative Party: not least thanks to the reputation he had won as Britain’s negotiator in Brussels. When Wilson made a second bid to join the Common Market in 1967, de Gaulle again blocked British entry, for similarly idiosyncratic reasons. Only when in 1969 de Gaulle departed from the stage and was succeeded by Georges Pompidou, this version concludes, did France’s attitude change. Largely thanks to the ‘personal chemistry’ between Pompidou and Heath, when he became prime minister in 1970, Britain’s third application proved successful.

This construction on what happened turns out to be not just highly misleading in detail but to have missed the single most important factor in the whole story. It is true that the key role in the EEC throughout the 1960s was played by de Gaulle. But what most historians have so far almost totally overlooked is the central underlying reason why France could not yet afford to allow Britain into the Common Market. Yet no sooner was this problem resolved than she then needed Britain to join as soon as possible: for reasons, it turns out, to which the personal views of Heath and Pompidou were irrelevant.

‘The Commonwealth problem’

On 16 October 1961, Heath went to Brussels to make an opening statement on why Britain now wished to join the Common Market and three weeks later, on 8 November, the formal negotiations for British entry began. A common misunderstanding about these entry ‘negotiations’ is that the applicant country may seek to change the rules to suit its particular needs. But one of the most fundamental principles on which Monnet had established his ‘government of Europe’ was that, once the supranational body has been granted a particular power or ‘competence’, it can never be returned. Power can only be handed by individual states to the supranational entity; never the other way round. Once those powers or ‘competences’ are ceded, either by treaty or by passing laws over a particular area of policy, they constitute the Community’s most sacred treasure, the ‘acquis communautaire’. This represents the sum of the treaties and the accumulated laws which have been ‘acquired’ over the years as the Community’s inalienable possession.

The whole point of the acquis is that it is non-negotiable. All that accession countries can achieve, therefore, are temporary ‘derogations’ or transitional concessions, designed to make it easier for those countries to adjust to the requirements of the acquis, with which they will eventually have to comply in full.

When Heath arrived in Brussels on 1 October there was no doubt that the greatest difficulty would be in securing transitional arrangements for the Commonwealth. Addressing the Six, he told them, ‘I am sure you will understand that Britain could not join the EEC under conditions in which this trade connection was cut, with grave loss and even ruin for some of the Commonwealth countries.’3 Already, when announcing his decision to apply for entry back in July, Macmillan had pledged to the House of Commons that Britain would only join if satisfactory arrangements could be made to meet the special needs of the United Kingdom, of the Commonwealth and of the European Free Trade Association.4

By far the greatest problem was the system of ‘imperial preference’ which had prevailed in Britain’s empire and Commonwealth for 60 years and more. Through this, Britain and her Commonwealth partners had established a much larger proportion of their trade with each other than with other countries. In 1961, 43 percent of British exports went to the Commonwealth, as against only 16.7 percent to the Common Market countries and 13.1 percent to her six partners in EFTA.⁵ In 1960, Britain had taken more than half New Zealand’s exports and a quarter of those from several other Commonwealth countries, including Australia and India.⁶ Yet the essence of joining the Common Market was that Britain would now have to raise tariff barriers against these imports, while her new partners would soon be able to export their goods to Britain tariff-free.

This posed difficulties which no other Common Market country had faced. As the price of Britain’s entry, she and her Commonwealth would now be expected to abandon much of their existing trade with each other. In the weeks before his announcement in July of Britain’s intention to join, therefore, Macmillan sent several of his Cabinet ministers, led by Duncan Sandys, round the Commonwealth capitals, pleading for their agreement to what he was about to do. These were countries which, less than 20 years before, had sent some four million of their citizens to fight alongside Britain in World War Two. Now they were to be dealt a mighty economic blow, which most were to see as an incomprehensible betrayal.

The response from Ottawa typified the sentiment: ‘the Canadian ministers indicated that their Government’s assessment of the situation was different from that put forward by Mr Sandys’; and ‘expressed grave concern… about the political and economic effects which British membership in the European Economic Community would have on Canada and on the Commonwealth as a whole’.⁷

The main task confronting Heath as he began formal negotiations in November was to ensure that the damage inflicted on Britain’s Commonwealth partners was at least softened. His top priority was to persuade his prospective new partners to grant ‘derogations’. These would extend for as long as possible the period in which imports from the Commonwealth could continue, on terms which might protect its producers while they searched for new markets. But, as he got down to detailed, day-by-day argument over arrangements for imports of New Zealand butter or Australian beef, Canadian wheat or West Indian sugar, it was not long before Heath was forced to realise that his new partners were not prepared to make many concessions. The reason was simple. For the Six this was precisely the test of Britain’s willingness to abandon her old, traditional role in the world and to demonstrate her willingness now to develop a wholly new centre of loyalties.

What Heath did not realise, however, was that one member of the Six was not only reluctant to make any concessions at all but actually opposed to Britain’s entry even before the talks began.

De Gaulle plays his own game

President de Gaulle was unlike any other national leader post-war Europe had known. As Churchill’s proud ‘Constable of France’, he saw himself as the man who had saved his country twice. The first time was at the end of the Second World War when he had joined with the Western allies in liberating his country from the Germans and restoring her national government. The second was in 1958, when he had rescued France from the chaos of the Fourth Republic to set up his new ‘Fifth Republic’, the regime which would restore French national self-respect. But with the continuing threat of internal instability being exported back across the Mediterranean from the fearful civil war in Algeria, de Gaulle was aware that any time France might again be plunged into violent chaos. In his 11 years in office he faced no fewer than 34 assassination attempts, more than any other statesman in history.

For these reasons, de Gaulle also saw the ‘European Communities’ and his country’s place in them very differently from any other of their leaders. One of his first acts on becoming France’s president in July 1958 had been to arrange a meeting with Adenauer, which took place in September at de Gaulle’s home in Colombeyles-Deux-Eglises. They announced that close co-operation between France and Germany was the foundation of ‘all constructive endeavour in Europe’, and that this should be put on an organised basis.8 In 1959, de Gaulle’s prime minister Michel Debré took this idea forward in a speech proposing that the Six should be aiming not only at economic but also political union. The way to this should be paved by frequent consultations between their leaders.9 By 1960, both publicly and privately, de Gaulle was canvassing the idea not merely of regular meetings of the Six heads of government but of ‘standing commissions’ to co-ordinate policies on political, defence and cultural issues, with their own secretariat.¹⁰

What de Gaulle was here evolving was his vision of a new kind of integration among the Six, shaped not on supranational but intergovernmental lines: his vision of what he was to call a ‘Europe des Etats’.¹¹ De Gaulle had never been an enthusiast for what he regarded as Monnet’s supranational obsessions. As he once remarked ‘we are no longer in the era when M. Monnet gave the orders’.¹² Not only did de Gaulle himself seem unsympathetic to Monnet’s ideas, but his prime minister Debré so detested them that he would allegedly pass Monnet with averted gaze. A later commentator noted that ‘the European reformation had scarcely begun, and the counter-reformation was installed in Paris’.

The impression thus conveyed in 1960, that ‘Europe’ might now be moving away from supranationalism towards a more intergovernmental approach, had a significant impact on Macmillan and his advisers. It held out the possibility that, by skilful negotiation of her terms of entry, Britain might use her influence to help redirect the EEC onto the path of inter-governmentalism.¹³

In February 1961, de Gaulle’s proposals for ‘closer political co-operation’ were discussed at a summit meeting of the Six in Paris, which set up a committee under Christian Fouchet to consider them. These talks had been preceded by a private meeting between de Gaulle and Adenauer, intended to patch up their bitter disagreements the following year over the abortive East–West summit on Berlin. Adenauer had wanted to clear the air about de Gaulle’s seeming desire to emasculate the Community, and also to discuss France’s plans regarding NATO. He appeared sufficiently satisfied to agree to de Gaulle’s wish for more ‘political co-operation’.

At the subsequent meeting with their EEC partners, despite a Dutch protest that the rest of the Six should not always be bound by what was agreed between Germany and France, it was resolved that the Fouchet committee should report on further political union. This would not, however, involve any further supranational elements, and would respect national sovereignty with full right of veto.

Fouchet’s recommendations were considered at two more heads of government meetings in Bonn, one in May, the second in July. Under discussion were two rival proposals: a ‘Union of States’, proposed by the French, and a ‘union of peoples’ preferred by the rest of the Six. Monnet himself had high hopes for the July meeting, noting in his memoirs that ‘The first steps towards a European currency now also seemed to be practicable’.14 His optimism was misplaced, and in his memoirs he plaintively asked why at this time France should have been trying ‘to bring back into an intergovernmental framework what had already become a Community?’¹⁵

Nevertheless the Six did agree on what became known as the Bonn Declaration, announcing on 18 July their decision ‘to give shape to the will for political union already implicit in the Treaties establishing the European Communities’.¹⁶ This was just 13 days before Macmillan announced to the world Britain’s decision to apply for entry.

Franco-German rapprochement

From now on, over the next 17 months two quite different dramas were to unfold simultaneously: in public, it seemed, wholly unrelated, but behind the scenes, in important respects, linked.

The first drama, little understood in Britain, was the coming together of de Gaulle’s France and Adenauer’s Germany in a new and much closer alliance. It was based on a sense that they shared a European identity in a way which set them apart from the British and even more from the Americans. A powerful trigger for their new sense of common identity was the immense international crisis which blew up on Sunday 13 August 1961, when East Germany sealed off West Berlin’s borders with the GDR and began to build the ‘Berlin Wall’. The long-simmering East–West tension over Berlin had at last come to a head. When the initial response of the Kennedy government was slow and uncertain, as was that of the British, this reinforced the suspicions of Adenauer and de Gaulle that Anglo-US support could not be relied on.

On 19 October 1961, the French delegation on the Fouchet committee presented a draft treaty to establish a union between the countries of the Six. This proposed severing Europe’s dependence for military security on the Atlantic Alliance and the USA, reflecting de Gaulle’s wish for Europe to be more self-reliant, centred on a Franco-German alliance. De Gaulle further proposed a radical reconstruction of the EEC, turning it into a voluntary union of independent states. Its secretariat would be based in Paris and there would be extensive national veto powers over all common policies. Effectively, the proposals envisaged a drastic dilution of the powers of the Commission and Council of Ministers, and the subjection of Community law to national law. This was the supreme expression of de Gaulle’s vision of a ‘Europe des Etats’. Predictably, the reaction of the other five governments was hostile.

Early in the New Year of 1962, tensions were further exacerbated when the French put forward ‘a revised draft treaty’ which, far from taking account of the objections of the others, seemed to be worse in many respects than the original.17 According to one authority, the amended plan had been drawn up in de Gaulle’s own hand.¹⁸

Shortly afterwards, on 9 February 1962, de Gaulle asked for an urgent meeting with Adenauer to discuss his ‘Fouchet proposals’ and European security. The Chancellor had only recently suffered a heart attack, and was frail, ‘tetchy and bad tempered’, although his illness had been kept secret, even from de Gaulle. They met in a hotel in Baden-Baden, where Adenauer refused to support de Gaulle’s idea of a looser EEC structure. But the meeting marked a distinct warming in the relationship between the two leaders, not least as they were able to agree on their mistrust of American and British attitudes towards the Soviet Union, and the absolute necessity of avoiding another Franco-German war. Most importantly, de Gaulle was completely at one with Adenauer on the importance of not making deals with the Soviets on Berlin. They shared concern that the Americans and British were prepared to make concession to placate Khrushchev. Adenauer was beginning to look to France as his only reliable ally.

De Gaulle’s real agenda

During this time, the negotiations for Britain’s entry into the EEC were continuing in Brussels as if none of these fundamental shifts in thinking about the future of the ‘European project’ were taking place. Yet the greatest irony was that, at the very time when it seemed de Gaulle was moving away from the concept of supranationalism, he was in fact looking to the supranational mechanisms of the EEC to solve a problem which threatened the very existence of the French state.

Nowhere in the mainstream histories of that time or the memoirs of politicians is there any real understanding of just how important to France had become her agriculture, which in 1961 still accounted for 25 percent of all her employment, against only four percent in the United Kingdom. In the years immediately after the war all European countries had introduced state subsidies to their agriculture, to avoid any repetition of the food shortages of the wartime period or the farming depression of the 1930s. But in no country had the subsidy system come to be regarded as politically more important than in France.

Although French agricultural subsidies had hugely boosted output, this had led to persistent downward pressures on prices, which in turn threatened the economic viability of the mass of French farms, many of them small, inefficient peasant holdings. For France’s politicians, this presented a nightmare: the thought of millions of small farmers being displaced from the land and gravitating to towns and cities which could offer them neither jobs nor housing. The fear was that they would lose their naturally conservative political allegiances and become a fertile breeding ground for discontent. In a country where the Communist Party was the largest single political grouping, the spectre of the Communists sweeping to power on the votes of dispossessed agrarian workers was of very great concern. Even armed revolution could not be ruled out. In France’s highly unstable political structure, it was vital to the very survival of the state that the farmers and their families should be kept on the land.

To that effect, the Fourth Republic had spent ever-increasing sums on farm subsidies, to the point where this expenditure threatened to bankrupt the state. Yet the subsidies themselves only exacerbated the problem. They drew into production marginal land, while increased income encouraged investment in machinery. In 1950, the number of tractors in the Six as a whole had stood at only 370,000. By 1962 the number had grown to 2,300,000. Wheat production in the mid-1950s increased eight-fold. Sugar and wine production rose by over 300 percent. This necessitated ever-larger government-funded stockpiles and export subsidies.19

By the early 1960s production was still increasing at a rate of 20 percent per annum. Eleven million of the 24 million dairy cows in the Six were French, each producing less than a quarter of the milk yield of Dutch animals. Dairy subsidies alone were costing the French taxpayer 1.35 billion francs (equivalent to £3 billion a year at 2003 prices), of which 70 million were used to dump powdered milk on the Indian and Mexican markets. Huge further sums were spent on storage and processing, while the surplus ‘butter mountain’ stood at 200,000 tons.20 French farm policy was clearly unsustainable. Politically, however, it was essential.²¹

Only 40 years later, in a meticulously researched academic paper, did an American professor, Andrew Moravcsik,²² finally bring to light just how crucial this issue had become to the future not just of France but of the European Community. When de Gaulle took power in 1958, France’s farm surpluses had already reached crisis point. Attempts to reform the subsidy system had met with stiff opposition, which presented a dangerous threat to his electoral base. De Gaulle was being forced to continue payments on a scale the French government could simply no longer afford. At a crisis Cabinet meeting in August 1962, with the Algerian crisis now largely over, he was to call the ‘stabilisation’ of agriculture the ‘most important problem’ facing France. If the problems are not resolved, de Gaulle declared, ‘we will have another Algeria on our own soil’.²³

De Gaulle and his advisers realised there were only two possible remedies: to find new export markets, or an additional source of finance for the subsidies. The answer to both might lie in the EEC. What had become vital, they concluded, was to use it to set up an agricultural policy which could give French farmers access both to external markets and also to additional funding, primarily from Germany. But it was vital that such a policy should be framed above all to meet the needs of France. Thus, despite his overt dislike of supranational institutions, de Gaulle came to regard the EEC as the most essential instrument in furthering France’s national interest.

The idea of a ‘Common Agricultural Policy’ went back to the Spaak report in 1955, and an outline policy had been included in the Rome Treaty. But this amounted to no more than vague declarations of contradictory principles, such as commitments ‘to ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community’; ‘to increase agricultural productivity by promoting technical progress’; and ‘to ensure the availability of supplies’. There were no indications as to how these ends should be achieved. In 1958, a conference had been held in Stresa in Italy to develop such a policy. But it was to be nearly 11 years before full agreement was reached on the details and the all-important financing arrangements; and this was because the driving force throughout that period, battling to ensure that these met her requirements, was France.

A start had been made in 1960 when the agriculture Commissioner Sicco Mansholt produced a 300-page document, with a deadline for agreement at the end of 1961. The ‘Mansholt Plan’ proposed replacing all direct national subsidies to agriculture with a system of variable levies and support prices, under the centralised control of the Commission. But, for the next two years, Germany consistently blocked attempts to agree the details. German farm subsidies were the highest in the Six. Any attempt to rationalise and harmonise the support structure would disadvantage her farmers. Only on 14 January 1962, after what Hallstein famously described as ‘137 hours of discussion, with 214 hours in sub-committee; 582,000 pages of documents; three heart attacks’, did the Germans finally agree to give legal effect to the CAP. The clock was ‘stopped’ for two weeks and the conclusions back-dated to meet the symbolic 31 December deadline.24

With the basic principles agreed, however, the next step was to work out the all-important financial mechanisms. At France’s insistence, levies on imported goods were to be the main source of income,²⁵ a provision which particularly favoured her system, as her imports – particularly if her overseas departments were included – were minimal. This was where France would need to play her hand with infinite subtlety and ruthless-ness. Not only would this system ensure the maximum contribution from other members. It would ensure that Britain, which imported a much higher proportion of her food than any of the Six, mainly from the Commonwealth, would be a major contributor. Furthermore, as her main source of supply was eliminated, Britain could provide French farmers with their biggest export market of all. The central problem for France, however, was that Britain, with the much higher productivity of her own farming sector, would be unwilling to take on the burden of paying for French agriculture. Furthermore, after 1966, it had been agreed that decisions on the future of the CAP would be taken by qualified majority voting.

If Britain was allowed to enter before the financial arrangements for the CAP had been settled, she would therefore be likely to side with Germany to block France’s proposals. At all costs, Britain had to be excluded from the EEC until those final agreements on the CAP were in place.26 Therein lay the explanation for the dramas to come.

De Gaulle prepares to veto

By the spring of 1962, de Gaulle had three issues at the top of his agenda. The first was his ‘Fouchet proposals’ for political union of the Six. On the grounds that these would seriously influence the nature of the union Britain was seeking to join, Heath had made a belated bid for Britain to be involved in the discussions. At a WEU meeting on 10 April, he made plain Britain’s assumption that the existing Communities would be the foundation on which ‘Europe would be built’, but that he hoped their work could be ‘knit together with the new political structure in a coherent and effective whole’. There was little need for his concern, because shortly afterwards the proposals collapsed, when France’s partners could not agree a way forward.²⁷

De Gaulle was anyway by this time becoming more preoccupied by his new alliance with Adenauer. In the same month of April, Adenauer’s fears about American policy seemed to be confirmed when the US Secretary of State Dean Rusk came up with a new plan for Berlin, which seemed to propose de facto recognition of the GDR. Given only 48 hours to respond, Adenauer had no option but to reject it and, at his request, de Gaulle followed suit. When Kennedy endorsed Rusk’s action and criticised Adenauer, affirming that negotiations with the Soviet Union over Berlin would continue, relations between Adenauer and Kennedy became frigid. With this unprecedented rift having developed between West Germany and the United States, de Gaulle moved in to cement the Franco-German axis. He invited Adenauer to make a state visit to France two months later, in July. The third item on de Gaulle’s agenda was Britain’s application to join the EEC.

By now he was certain Britain would have to be kept out. On 19 May, Macmillan recorded in his diary that the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir Pierson Dixon, conveyed the impression that de Gaulle ‘has now definitely decided to exclude us’. Macmillan forlornly noted: ‘others (and I am one) do not feel that de Gaulle has definitely made up his mind’.28

Throughout, Macmillan remained oblivious to the hidden element in de Gaulle’s determination to keep Britain out. He was still convinced that the key to changing the General’s mind lay in finding a way to offer him help with nuclear weapons: perhaps by talking the Americans into assisting the French (although it had already been made clear to him that this was very unlikely). An alternative was an Anglo-French arrangement for ‘joint targeting of nuclear forces’, without the direct involvement of the United States.²⁹

In pursuit of his fantasy, on 2 to 3 June, Macmillan met with de Gaulle in a beautiful small chateau near Paris, Champs, once the home of Madame de Pompadour. He described his host as playing ‘the role of a stately monarch unbending a little to the representative of a once hostile but now friendly country’. But de Gaulle ‘repeated his preference for a Six without Britain; first, because British entry would entirely alter the character of the Community’. Only secondly did de Gaulle offer the view that ‘Britain was too tied to America’.³⁰

The French Ambassador to London, de Courcel, who was present at the discussions, recorded that Macmillan made a direct offer of Franco-British nuclear collaboration as an implied quid pro quo for France supporting British EEC entry. But contrary to British expectations, de Gaulle did not react. Instead, he emphasised France’s absolute need to export her agricultural surpluses and insistently raised the issue of Commonwealth imports, which he insisted was the ‘most fundamental’ issue.

Throughout the discussions, Macmillan completely failed to understand what was at stake. Responding to de Gaulle’s demand that Commonwealth imports should be limited to tropical products only, he insisted on transitional arrangements, confirming all de Gaulle’s fears. And when Macmillan tried to shift the conversation away from agriculture, de Gaulle kept returning to it.31 Coming away without the first idea of what had transpired, Macmillan later reported to the Queen that ‘the danger of the French opposing a resolute veto to our application has now been avoided, at least for the time being’.³²

The following month Adenauer paid his state visit to France, the first by a German Chancellor since the war. The six-day visit culminated on 8 July with the two leaders attending High Mass in Rheims cathedral, after having taken the salute at a parade of French and German troops outside the city. It was the first time since the battle of Leipzig in 1813 that French and German troops had been on the same side. In their private discussions, de Gaulle expressed his doubts about Britain joining the EEC. When Adenauer did not disagree, the General knew he had his backing. This had been de Gaulle’s real purpose in so assiduously cultivating his alliance with Adenauer. With his flank secure, he now felt able to instruct his negotiators in Brussels to take a harder line with the British.

There were now only four weeks left before the marathon talks in Brussels broke up for the summer. Already the negotiators for the Six had been startled by how many concessions Heath had been prepared to make on Britain’s behalf, particularly over Commonwealth imports and even on issues formerly thought to be ‘non-negotiable’. This had provoked a joint statement by the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, on the eve of Macmillan’s visit to Champs, highly critical of Britain’s new readiness to abandon imperial preferences.³³

It was all to no avail. At the final session of the talks, during the night of 4 to 5 August, when everyone was exhausted, the chairman from Luxembourg, Eugène Schaus, had collapsed at two in the morning. Yet the session had continued with Spaak in the chair and, as Heath was to record:

‘A little before 4 a.m., the French unexpectedly demanded that we should sign a paper on financing the CAP, committing us to an interpretation of the financial regulation favourable to the French. They wanted a new tariff arrangement on imports from outside the EEC which would maintain the price of domestic produce. The action was self-evidently dilatory in intent, and I refused to be bounced into a snap judgment on such a complex matter. I was supported in this by the Germans and the Dutch, who were as interested as I was. The French redrafted the document twice, but this only hardened my resolve. This was no way to carry on such an important negotiation, and I was having none of it. In response, Couve de Murville said that he would reserve his position regarding food imports from the British Commonwealth, a matter which I had thought to be fully resolved.’ 34

It was a classic negotiating ambush, of a kind which in the years ahead was to become only too familiar. With no agreement possible, the talks had to be adjourned until the autumn. Then the French would make it clearer than ever that they had no intention of allowing Britain’s application to succeed.³⁵

The following month, on 5 September, President de Gaulle began a triumphant state visit to the German Federal Republic, regarded as even more successful than his host’s visit to France. In their private talks, they agreed that Britain must be excluded, and de Gaulle continued the courtship with a six-page memorandum, suggesting a solemn agreement between the French and German governments to co-ordinate their foreign policy and defence. Without referring to his own Cabinet, Adenauer signalled that such an agreement would be the first priority of his policy.³⁶

The denouement approaches

In Britain that autumn the Common Market issue briefly moved to the centre of the political stage. Although the Brussels negotiations had been dragging on for a year, they had never attracted much public interest. Now, as one historian put it, they seemed to be ‘inexplicably dragging out as if scripted by Kafka. Hours and even days were being taken up by discussion of the tariffs on Indian tea or Australian kangaroo meat’.³⁷

Belatedly the newspapers published turgid supplements, trying to explain in laborious detail what joining the Common Market would entail, most to be thrown away unread. Apart from the super-patriotic, right-wing titles owned by the ageing Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, a long-standing champion of the ‘Empire’, most of the press supported British entry, without showing any understanding of its deeper implications. As the government wanted, the issue was presented almost entirely in terms of economics and the supposed benefits that would follow from British industry being exposed to the ‘icy blasts of competition’ from the more ‘dynamic’ economies of the Six.38

The greatest enthusiasm for Britain’s involvement with ‘Europe’ was expressed by a group of younger writers and politicians representing what came to be dubbed the ‘What’s Wrong With Britain School of Journalism’. These publicists, such as Michael Shanks, author of a best-selling paperback The Stagnant Society, or the Labour MP Anthony Crosland, a regular contributor to the intellectual monthly Encounter, enjoyed contrasting what they saw as a stuffy, tradition-bound, class-ridden, obsolete, inefficient Britain, lost in nostalgia for the days of empire, with what they saw as the newly energetic, innovative, efficient ‘Europeans’. These paragons of virtue did not have licensing laws which prevented drinking after 10.30 at night and had discovered the secret of economic ‘dynamism’ which Britain had so obviously lost.³⁹

This mind-set in turn reflected a much deeper shift in social attitudes which was now evident at all levels of British society. It had first appeared in the late 1950s, in the rise of a new ‘youth-culture’, centred on rock ’n’ roll, an obsessive new fashion-consciousness and a sense of rebellion against everything which seemed identified with Britain’s imperial past, from Establishment institutions such as the monarchy to sexual morality. The 1960s had brought a sense that Britain was moving rapidly towards a new kind of society, where all the conventions of belief and behaviour associated with Britain’s traditional view of herself suddenly seemed out of date.

Politically this expressed itself in the striking change which had come over the image of Macmillan who, at the time of his election victory in 1959, had been identified with the social changes which were carrying Britain into a new age. But in 1961, with his languid aristocratic style, he had quite suddenly come to be seen as a tired, Edwardian grandfather-figure, particularly when measured against the young and ‘dynamic’ new President Kennedy across the Atlantic. By a new generation of satirists, in the revue Beyond The Fringe, in the new magazine Private Eye, and in the BBC’s television show That Was The Week That Was, Macmillan was made an object of ridicule. He was an antediluvian relic of a past age, out of touch with the ‘exciting’, ‘irreverent’ new world now taking shape around him.40

Then in early October, the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell electrified his party’s conference at Brighton with a speech wholly dedicated to the Common Market. Lasting 105 minutes, it was arguably the most remarkable speech made to a party conference in the post-war era. He began by observing that the level of debate in the media over this ‘crucial, complex and difficult issue’ had not been high. He then ranged in magisterial fashion across all the individual issues raised by Britain’s application, analysing each in turn, putting the arguments on both sides with devastating clarity, lit by flashes of humour.

He began by discussing at length the economic implications of joining a protectionist trading bloc and abandoning Britain’s main trading partners in the Commonwealth and EFTA, although, as he noted, these were now showing a more impressive rate of economic growth than the Six. He pointed out that, as even Heath was now being forced to admit, as an ‘essential part of the Common Market agricultural policy’ now taking shape, Britain would be obliged ‘to import expensive food from the continent of Europe in place of cheap food from the Commonwealth’.

He addressed the by-now familiar claim that, by joining the EEC, Britain would have a ‘home market of 220 million people’, pointing out that some of Europe’s most successful economies belonged to small countries, such as Switzerland and Sweden, which did not have large home markets. He dismissed the more extravagant claims being made for the economic benefits of joining the EEC as ‘rubbish’, explaining that Britain would not find a solution to her economic malaise simply from joining the Common Market. Ultimately she would only be able to solve it by her own internal efforts.

Gaitskell then turned to the political aspects of merging Britain’s destiny with Europe. Here he challenged Macmillan for being nothing like frank enough with the British people. ‘We are told,’ he said, ‘that the Economic Community is not just a customs union, that all who framed it saw it as a stepping stone towards political integration.’ But Macmillan was keeping remarkably quiet about the ‘serious political obligations’ this might imply. What the move towards ‘political’ or ‘federal’ union meant, Gaitskell explained, was that powers would be taken from national governments and handed to the new federal government. If Britain was to become part of this, she would be ‘no more than a state…in the United States of Europe, such as Texas and California’. If this process was ultimately to lead the British people to hand over all the most important decisions on economic and foreign policy and defence to a ‘supranational system’, to be decided by a Council of Ministers or a ‘federal parliament’, Britain would become no more than ‘a province of Europe’. It was this which prompted Gaitskell to the most famous passage in his speech, where he said:

‘We must be clear about this; it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state…it means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say “let it end”. But my goodness, it is a decision which needs a little care and thought.’

Gaitskell ended by pointing out that Macmillan had no mandate for what he was proposing. Indeed it ran contrary to everything the government had told the British people during the 1959 election campaign. Yet they were now, in effect, being told that they were ‘not capable of judging this issue – the government knows best, the top people are the only people who can really understand it…the classic argument of every tyranny in history’. The Labour Party proposed that the only honest, democratic way to proceed was to see what terms emerged from the negotiations, then put the most important decision the British people had ever faced to the test of an election.41 His speech received a tumultuous ovation.

However, not all Labour delegates were impressed. Denis Healey thought the argument exaggerated. He found it ‘inconceivable that the Common Market would acquire supranational powers in any major area, still less become a federation. He did not share Gaitskell’s ‘romantic chauvinism’ and thought the whole issue ‘a futile distraction’. In any case, ‘it was certain that de Gaulle would veto Britain’s entry’.⁴²

Macmillan’s response when the Conservatives met for their own conference at Llandudno the following week was to ignore Gaitskell’s detailed analysis, and to resort to ridicule. Referring to his passage on the moves towards political union, he said:

‘Mr Gaitskell now prattles on about our being reduced to the status of Texas or California. What nonsense!… Certainly if I believed that I would not touch it on any terms…there can be no question of Britain being outvoted into some arrangement which we found incompatible with our needs and responsibilities and traditions.’43

But the headlines were reserved for Macmillan’s quotation of an old music hall song, in which he sought to contrast his own decisiveness with Gaitskell’s lack of courage:

‘She wouldn’t say “yes”, she wouldn’t say “no”.

She wouldn’t say “stay”, she wouldn’t say “go”.

She wanted to climb but she dreaded to fall.

So she bided her time, and clung to the wall.’

The 4,000 Tory delegates, most of whom sported ‘Yes’ badges handed out by party managers, rocked with laughter and gave Macmillan a standing ovation, to show their backing for a policy which all but a handful of them two years earlier would have rejected as an unthinkable betrayal of their country, the Commonwealth and a thousand years of British history.

The irony was that, although none of those hearing these speeches were aware of it, the die against British entry had already been cast. The day after Macmillan’s speech, pictures taken by an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft identified nuclear-capable Soviet missiles on the Communist island of Cuba, only 90 miles off the Florida coast. So began the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ which by 25 October had escalated to the point where nuclear war seemed imminent. What emerged was evidence of America’s willingness to pursue her own interests, irrespective of the effects on her allies. One effect was to cement the Franco-German relationship.

On 15 December 1962, Macmillan met de Gaulle at Rambouillet. Six weeks after the end of the Cuba crisis, Macmillan was more determined than ever to maintain Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, but he had just learned that the US had cancelled the missile he hoped to buy, Skybolt. Macmillan told de Gaulle that, as a replacement, he planned to ask Kennedy for Polaris. But de Gaulle seemed preoccupied with the Brussels negotiations. ‘In the Six’, as he was later to reflect, France could say ‘no’, even against the Germans; she could stop policies with which she disagreed, because of the strength of her position. Once Britain and all the rest joined, things would be different.’⁴⁴

De Gaulle’s negative attitude came as a shock to Macmillan. With ‘indignation’, he accused de Gaulle of putting forward ‘a fundamental objection to Britain’s application’.45 He was right. De Gaulle had already decided to turn this ‘fundamental objection’ into a veto, which he explained to his own Cabinet a few days later, on 19 December 1962:

‘If Great Britain and…the Commonwealth enter, it would be as if the Common Market had…dissolved within a large free trade area… Always the same question is posed, but the British don’t answer. Instead, they say, “It’s the French who don’t want it”… To please the British, should we call into question the Common Market and the negotiation of the agricultural regulations that benefit us? All this would be difficult to accept… Britain continues to supply itself cheaply in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc. The Germans are dying to do the same in Argentina. The others would follow. What will we do with European, and particularly French surpluses? If we have to spend 500 billion [francs] a year on agricultural subsidies, what will happen if the Common Market can no longer assist us? These eminently practical questions should not be resolved on the basis of sentiments. [Macmillan] is melancholy and so am I.We would prefer Macmillan’s Britain to that of Labour, and we would like to help him stay in office. But what can I do? Except to sing him the Edith Piaf song: Ne pleurez pas, Milord.’⁴⁶

Still failing to recognise de Gaulle’s real concern, Macmillan pursued the acquisition of Polaris during a bilateral summit with Kennedy at Nassau on 18 to 21 December 1962, when he asked Kennedy to make the missile available to both Britain and France. Kennedy was only prepared to say, delphically, that the two countries might be given Polaris on ‘similar terms’. He knew that Britain was in a position to make her own thermo-nuclear warheads while France was not; which meant that, even if Congress could be persuaded to approve, there was no way France could be given the missiles. But the point was irrelevant anyway.

On 14 January 1963, under crystal chandeliers in the Elysée Palace in Paris, and without warning his partners in the Six, de Gaulle announced before the world’s press that he intended to veto Britain’s entry. In the most-quoted passage of his 1500-word statement he declared:

‘England, in effect is insular. She is maritime. She is linked through her trade, her markets, her supply lines to the most distant countries. She pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities and only slightly agricultural ones. She has, in all her doings, very marked and very original habits and traditions. In short England’s nature, England’s structure, England’s very situation differs profoundly from those of the Continentals.’

This part of the text has often been interpreted simply as a nationalistic attack on Britain. Commentators have used it to argue that de Gaulle vetoed the British application because of Macmillan’s deal with Kennedy over Polaris. This is cited as evidence of Macmillan’s ‘Atlanticism’ and his preference for the ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Certainly this weighed heavily with de Gaulle, as he saw the whole philosophy of the British and the Americans as quite different from that of the ‘Europeans’, characterised above all by France and Germany.

Rarely quoted, however, are the preceding paragraphs, in which de Gaulle could hardly have revealed his real underlying concern more clearly. Referring to the vagueness of the Treaty of Rome on agriculture, he stated that, for France, this had to be ‘settled’:

‘It is obvious that agriculture is an essential element in our national activity as a whole. We cannot conceive of a Common Market in which French agriculture would not find outlets in keeping with its production. And we agree further that, of the Six, we are the country on which this necessity is imposed in the most imperative manner. That is why when, last January, consideration was given to the setting in motion of the second phase of the Treaty – in other words a practical start in its application – we were led to pose the entry of agriculture into the Common Market as a formal condition. This was finally accepted by our partners, but very difficult and very complex arrangements were needed and some rulings are still outstanding.’47

In this de Gaulle signalled his concern for the consequences of Britain being allowed to take part in the negotiations before detailed arrangements for the CAP had been finalised. This is confirmed by de Gaulle’s own memoirs. Referring to Britain’s initial antagonism to the Common Market, and her attempt to set up a rival in EFTA, he says that, by the middle of 1961, the British had ‘returned to the offensive’:

‘Having failed from without to prevent the birth of the Community, they now planned to paralyse it from within. Instead of calling for an end to it, they now declared that they themselves were eager to join, and proposed examining the conditions on which they might do so, “provided that their special relationship with their Commonwealth and their associates in the free trade area were taken into consideration, as well as their special interests in respect of agriculture”. To submit to this would obviously have meant abandoning the Common Market as originally conceived… I could see the day approaching when I should either have to remove the obstruction…or extricate France from an enterprise which had gone astray almost as soon as it had begun.’⁴⁸

The inescapable inference is that de Gaulle was convinced that Britain’s entry would have meant ‘abandoning the Common Market as originally conceived’, threatening the very core of his survival strategy. She could not be permitted to join until the financial details of the CAP had been settled. At last, it seems, Macmillan began to understand. On 11 February 1963, he told the Commons, ‘The end did not come because the discussions were menaced with failure. On the contrary, it was because they threatened to succeed’.49 In his memoirs, Heath also recognised that agriculture had been a crucial issue, noting that

‘…the Community had agreed, largely under pressure from the French, to sort out the framework of the new policy before entering into serious discussions with us on the arrangement for our entry. The French did not wish the British to be at the table taking part in the formative discussions on the CAP, for fear that we might disrupt the very favourable arrangements they otherwise had every reason to expect from their partners.’ ⁵⁰

Despite this, Heath never acknowledged that this very issue lay at the heart of the French veto. After the first three month of negotiations, he expressed his suspicions to one of his senior civil servants that the French seemed to want to drag out the talks as long as possible. He gave three reasons:

‘The French expected that opposition would grow in the UK the longer the negotiations progressed; that our own desire to reach an agreement would weaken; and, finally, that something else would turn up to prevent the negotiations being successfully concluded.’ ⁵¹

The third reason, Heath suggested, was to prove crucial. The French suspected that our position was becoming progressively weaker economically, politically and militarily, vis-à-vis both the Six and the US. In their view, the longer matters were drawn out, the greater the opportunity for securing better terms for the Community and themselves in particular.

There is something of the incurable ‘little Englander’ in these explanations. Heath’s view of the negotiations was wholly Anglocentric. To be fair, wrapped up in the narrow, sterile world of the Brussels negotiating circuit, he could hardly have been expected to have grasped the bigger picture. For that, he was reliant on his officials. Yet the officials themselves were no better informed. A report on the negotiations prepared by the UK delegation was to admit that, during the period between Britain’s application and the start of the negotiations, in contrast to the ‘intense consultation and discussion’ London had enjoyed with Commonwealth countries, contacts with the Six and the Commission had been minimal, and confined only to ‘questions of procedure’:

‘…there was very little knowledge in London of the manner in which the Member Governments, and the Institutions of the Community, were interpreting the provisions of the Treaty of Rome. It is at least possible that, if we had initiated during this period preliminary consultations on matters of substance with Member Governments, and still more with the Commission, we might have acquired information on which we should have been able to base a more informed judgment.’ 52

The real failure, therefore, lay with the Foreign Office. Informed analysis would have indicated that a British application could not succeed. The signals were there. But entirely lacking from the tortuous analyses presented to Macmillan and the Cabinet by the officials was any recognition of the true French agenda. Later commentators such as Denman and Young were to suggest that, if Macmillan’s approach had not been so timid and Britain had come forward with more concessions before the 1962 summer break, the negotiations might have succeeded.⁵³

Of Macmillan, Young wrote:

‘The only future for Britain, it soon turned out, was the one Macmillan sought to bring about. His problem was that he did not try hard enough to achieve it. Even as he plunged towards the future, he was besotted and ensnared by the past.’ ⁵⁴

Denman and Young praise the prescience of Sir Frank Lee, in ‘convincing’ Macmillan that Britain should apply to join the EEC. Their books are peppered with praise for the ‘brilliance’ of the various civil servants who had the ‘vision’ to appreciate how Britain’s way forward lay with ‘Europe’. At heart though, both civil servants and commentators were ‘little Englanders’. Like Heath, they viewed the continent from an entirely Anglocentric perspective, assuming that, just because Britain wanted to join, the Six would roll over to admit her, wholly failing to grasp why French rejection was inevitable.

When this insular strategy failed and Britain’s application was finally rejected, the ‘little Englanders’ put the blame on the politicians (though not on Heath, whose ‘negotiating skills’ continued to win admiration). Yet the failure to understand the vital importance of agriculture to France, and how the CAP was then to be weighted so massively in France’s favour, led all those responsible for Britain’s application to overlook how greatly disadvantaged Britain would be when she was finally to enter. At their door must lie a great deal of the responsibility for the eventual problems in British farming, which by the late 1990s had led to a major social and economic crisis. The fabled ‘Rolls-Royce minds’ of the Foreign Office and the Home Civil Service had failed in their duty.55

As for the other item at the top of de Gaulle’s agenda, only a week after he had shocked the world with his veto, Adenauer arrived in Paris for the final negotiations on their planned Franco-German treaty. On 20 January, while Adenauer was dining at the German Embassy, Monnet, Hallstein and the Dutch Commissioner, Blankenhorn, burst in to plead with him to link the Franco-German treaty with an assurance that negotiations with Britain should continue. Here de Gaulle’s courtship paid off. Adenauer refused. On 22 January the two men signed their treaty, in the same Elysée Palace where de Gaulle, nine days earlier, had announced his veto. According to an official summary of the Elysée Treaty:

‘It laid the institutional groundwork for biannual summits of heads of state and government, regular consultations at the ministerial level, and generally systematic efforts by French and German policymakers to co-ordinate policies as well as to overcome differences of opinion, to achieve mutually acceptable compromise solutions. The different meetings still go through various fields of work: defence, education, youth affairs and so on, and stand therefore as the milestone of the Franco-German relationship.’ ⁵⁶

This grand symbol of reconciliation was to be Adenauer’s swansong. He had initiated it without consulting his Cabinet and, when it was presented to the Bundestag for ratification, it had been accepted only with the addition of a long, rambling preamble – written by Monnet – which effectively nullified the treaty.

This was the last straw for his Christian Democrat Party which, supported by the Free Democrats under Erhard, forced Adenauer to announce his retirement. The following October, at the age of 87, he reluctantly handed over the reins to the minister who had presided over West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’.

De Gaulle, when told of this response to the treaty was reported to have greeted it with a verbal shrug: ‘Treaties are like maidens and roses, they each have their day.’ 57 In securing Adenauer’s support for his veto, the treaty had already served its original purpose.⁵⁸ But its longer-term consequences in placing a Franco-German alliance at the heart of the Community were to be profound.

Into the twilight

The Six formally confirmed Britain’s rejection on 28 January 1963. The news came as Britain was enduring the harshest winter of modern times. Much of the island was covered by deep snow from the beginning of January to March. For weeks London was obscured under a thick freezing fog. This helped bring on the sudden death of Gaitskell, from a rare chest disease, at only 56. He was succeeded as Labour leader by Harold Wilson.

Thus began a year in which the mood of English life was to become ever more febrile. Already wild rumours were circulating in London of some immense scandal hanging over the government, which finally broke into the open in June when Macmillan’s war minister, John Profumo, admitted he had lied to the Commons about an affair with a girl who was also the mistress of a senior Soviet spy. The headlines were dominated for weeks by further revelations and rumours which threatened to incriminate famous names across the British Establishment.

Equally hypnotic at the same time was the excitement surrounding the emergence of the Beatles, the supreme ‘dream heroes’ of 1960s popular culture. Their ‘irreverence’ and ‘classlessness’ seemed to epitomise the social revolution which had been engulfing Britain since the late 1950s, expressed in everything from the sexual ‘new morality’ to the rise of ‘satire’. The culminatory shock in a year of almost unbroken hysteria in English life was the news on 22 November from across the Atlantic of the assassination of that other supreme 1960s ‘dream hero’, President Kennedy.

After the dramatic international events of the earlier years of the decade, with the two greatest crises of the Cold War over Berlin and Cuba, the mood of the world itself now changed. America, through the middle years of the 1960s, became increasingly preoccupied by race riots in her cities at home and her ever greater involvement in the Vietnam War abroad. In the Soviet Union in October 1964 Khruschev was overthrown. In Britain, a strange unreality seemed to settle over national life, as ever more obsessive attention came to be paid to the new ‘pop culture’ and the hailing of London as ‘the most swinging city in the world’.

Equally unreal seemed the bubble of make-believe surrounding the new government under Wilson, which in October 1964 scraped into power on the promise of creating a ‘dynamic’ and ‘classless’ ‘New Britain’. Scarcely noticed but with almost frenzied speed, Britain was now freeing herself of almost all her remaining colonies across the globe. When in January 1965 Churchill died at the age of 90, his spectacular state funeral seemed like the nostalgic requiem for a Britain that had already faded into history.

Meanwhile, away from the headlines, in Brussels and Luxembourg the technocrats of western Europe’s new supranational institutions were gradually finding their feet.

The supremacy of EC Law

By 1963 the number of European Commission officials was rising towards 2,500. They were now planning for themselves one of the largest office blocks in the world. The immense Berlaymont building on the eastern side of Brussels, designed as ‘a symbol of Europe’, to provide nearly two million square feet of office space to house 3,000 officials on 13 floors, would not be ready for occupation until 1967.

Nevertheless it would have been a mistake to see these employees of the Commission as the only officials who were now engaged on the task of ‘European construction’. Right from the start, the Commission had seen it as a priority to build up an active collaboration with the civil servants of national governments, who could thus be recruited to the common cause. One observer who early noted the importance of this relationship was Altiero Spinelli who, through the post-war period, had continued to take an active interest in European integration as a member of the Italian Parliament. In 1966, in a book, The Eurocrats, he began a chapter on ‘The Eurocracy and the National Bureaucracies’ by describing how ‘in searching for the main key to the fulfilment of the mission confided to it’, the Commission had ‘unhesitatingly singled out above all else’ the building up of this close partnership with civil servants working for national governments.59

This was important, Spinelli emphasised, because so much of what the Community was setting out to achieve would continue to be carried out by the national administrations. The very essence of ‘functionalism’, he went on,

‘counselled against expressing its work in open political terms and urged concentration on the quiet construction of a Europe of offices, which would move forward in agreement with the offices of the member states’.

In the years ahead this intimate partnership between the officials in Brussels and those of national governments was to become a central key to the furthering of the integration process, long before the extent and significance of that collaboration was recognised outside the circle of those directly involved.

By 1963, the Commission’s most immediate task, to weld the Six into a single trading bloc by creating a common tariff structure against the outside world, was almost complete. One of the year’s more controversial issues was a new Washington-inspired drive under GATT to lower import duties world-wide, to be agreed through talks known as the ‘Kennedy round’. This was meant to be the first time the EEC acted as a single entity in international negotiations. But the US proposals split the Six between the ‘free traders’, led by Erhard, who supported tariff cuts, and the ‘protectionists’ led by de Gaulle. The result was a weak compromise.

The Commission’s next task was to set about promoting ‘ever closer union’ between the Six by proposing new laws. In doing so, it employed what came to be known as ‘the Monnet method’, gradually extending its ‘competences’ on the principle of ‘engrénage’ over ever more areas of economic and social activity. Every new initiative would deprive the member states of the right to make their own laws in that area. Thus would the Commission continually strive to enlarge what became known as the ‘occupied field’, made up of those areas of policy in which the Commission alone had the right to initiate legislation. Regardless of the immediate need cited for introducing any new law, its real purpose – with the collaboration of national civil servants – was always to transfer ever more power from national parliaments to the supranational centre.

Under the Treaty of Rome, the Community was empowered to pass three main types of law. The first was known in English as a ‘directive’, although the original French term is simply loi or ‘law’. This was a general set of instructions which each member state then had to ‘transpose’ into a national version of its own. The second was the ‘regulation’, which immediately had the force of law throughout the Community, exactly as issued. The third was the ‘decision’, directed to a specific situation, industry or country within the Community, applicable only to those to whom it was addressed. But what these all had in common was that, in keeping with the supranational principle, the right to propose any piece of legislation lay solely with the Commission. Subject to this crucial rule, most laws would then be negotiated between officials of the Commission and those of national governments, for final approval by the politicians on one of the various subdivisions of the Council of Ministers.

But in most cases, thanks to the complexity of much of the legislation going through the system, this political approval was merely a formality. Furthermore the Commission itself would increasingly develop the capacity to issue edicts in its own right, using powers delegated to it by the Councils.60

An urgent requirement at this early stage of the Community’s development was to establish its legal authority, which the drafting of the Treaty had left ill-defined. This was achieved through the new European Court of Justice based in Luxembourg, the central role of which was to extend and reinforce the supranational authority of the Commission. One of the Court’s first objectives was to confirm the supremacy of Community law, which it brought about through two historic judgments in 1963 and 1964.

Both these landmark judgments arose from seemingly trivial cases. The first, known as the Van Gend en Loos case, upheld the claim by a Dutch transport company that the Dutch customs authorities had been in breach of the Treaty by raising a duty on imports from Germany.⁶¹ The second, by which the ECJ confirmed its earlier ruling, arose from Italy’s nationalisation of her electricity industry in 1962. A shareholder, Mr Costa, protested that the transfer of his shares to the National Electricity Board (ENEL) had deprived him of his dividend. He therefore refused to pay an electricity bill for 1,926 Italian lira, then equivalent to just over £1 sterling. When Mr Costa claimed that the nationalisation infringed the EC Treaty, the case was referred to the ECJ. Again the court seized this opportunity to confirm the supremacy of EC law, stating that:

‘By contrast with ordinary international treaties, the EEC Treaty has created its own legal system which…became an integral part of the legal systems of the Member States and which their courts are bound to apply. By creating a Community of unlimited duration, having its own institutions, its own personality, its own legal capacity and capacity of representation on the international plane and, more particularly, real powers stemming from a limitation of sovereignty or a transfer of powers from the States to the Community, the Member States have limited their sovereign rights…and have thus created a body of law which binds both their nationals and themselves.’62

The ECJ’s conclusions could not have put more clearly where power now lay:

‘It follows…that the law stemming from the Treaty, an independent source of law, could not, because of its special and original nature, be overridden by domestic legal provisions, however framed, without being deprived of its character as Community law and without the legal basis of the Community itself being called into question. The transfer by the States from their domestic legal system to the Community legal system of the rights and obligations arising under the Treaty carries with it a permanent limitation of their sovereign rights, against which a subsequent unilateral act incompatible with the concept of the Community cannot prevail.’⁶³

This ruling, not agreed unanimously by the judges, was years later to be described by one expert observer of EU affairs as a ‘coup d’état’. He recalled that a proposal that Community law must be accepted as superior to national law had actually been rejected in the final drafting of the Treaty of Rome. But now this principle had been established by these two historic cases in the ECJ, it was to provide the foundation on which the whole edifice of supranational government could subsequently be built.⁶⁴

The CAP: the battle continues

There was still one central issue on which the Six were divided. Following his veto of British entry, de Gaulle had become increasingly agitated about the slow progress of the CAP negotiations. At a press conference in July 1963 he warned that unless the Six could meet a new deadline for finalis-ing the budgetary arrangements, the Common Market ‘would disappear’. In November, therefore, the Commission tried to force the pace with two proposals, which became known after their author, the agriculture commissioner, as Mansholt I and II. What emerged from these was the Commission’s acceptance that farming subsidies should be paid centrally from Community funds.

Although this proposal was intended to break the impasse, negotiations immediately stalled, resulting in chaos and confusion. When attempts to introduce standard Community farm prices failed, member states began to make their own bilateral agreements. The different subsidy schemes were still largely financed by national governments, only partly from their contributions to the Community, with no proper budgetary control. Farm surpluses continued to rise.

Monnet, who had not involved himself in the detail of all these negotiations, had become increasingly depressed. By 1965 he felt his Community was stagnating. ‘Everywhere,’ he wrote later, ‘there was the danger of a return to separate policies and bilateral agreements; and Germany might well be strongly tempted to compete with France in the quest for national advantage.’65 But, in December 1965, French presidential elections were due and de Gaulle’s attacks on the Community had generated far more opposition in France than expected, especially among farmers.

Capitalising on de Gaulle’s weakness, Hallstein proposed that a settlement on CAP finances should be linked with contentious proposals to establish the Community’s own resources, and stronger powers for the Assembly, all in one package. He believed that, under pressure from the other member states, de Gaulle would be forced to accept the whole package. The Six had already agreed that the decision on CAP finance would be made by the Council of Ministers at the latest by 30 June. But, before the meeting due in Brussels on 28 to 30 June, Hallstein made another tactical error. He submitted the package to the Assembly, which enthusiastically endorsed it.

When the package was presented to the Council on 28 June, the French demanded immediate agreement on CAP funding, only to find that the Germans, Dutch and Italians, not wishing to ignore the Assembly, called for all three issues in the package to be taken as a whole. In the mere 72 hours scheduled for negotiation, this would have been impossible, and effectively amounted to a postponement of any agreement. The French therefore insisted that the CAP funding question should be considered separately, but the other members refused.⁶⁶ Right up to the deadline, the stalemate persisted, but when the Commission proposed resort to the now familiar technique of ‘stopping the clock’, the French representatives would not play. After they had reported back to Paris, de Gaulle ordered his permanent representatives to leave Brussels, and announced a French boycott of all EEC meetings concerned with new policies. The Community had entered what became known as the ‘empty chair’ crisis.

As France’s presidential elections approached, Monnet turned openly against de Gaulle, announcing he would vote against him. The combined pressures put de Gaulle in the humiliating position of winning less than 44 percent in the first round. Monnet then endorsed Mitterrand, the opposition candidate, and de Gaulle only scraped home with a margin of 55 to 45 percent, far short of the huge majorities he was used to.67

Once re-elected, however, de Gaulle set out an ambitious price for France’s co-operation with the Community. His government called for the Commission to change its name; to refrain from running an information service; abandon diplomatic missions; cease criticising member states’ policies in public; submit proposals to the Council before publicising them; and to draft vaguer directives. Most of all, however, De Gaulle demanded explicit recognition of the right of member states to veto any decision arrived at by qualified majority voting (QMV) when they considered their ‘vital interests’ to be at stake.⁶⁸

The power to override national vetoes lay at the very core of supranationalism and a shocked Monnet wrote in his memoirs how, behind calls for reform of the Commission,

‘…could be glimpsed the desire to prevent majority voting becoming normal practice in the Community from January 1966 onwards, as the Treaty laid down. I suspected that this was a goal on which de Gaulle was irrevocably bent…’ ⁶⁹

Yet, despite de Gaulle’s overtly nationalistic stance through the crisis, it was significant that his officials only boycotted discussion on new policies. They continued to participate in the EEC’s work on existing policies, including the negotiations on the CAP. In fact the effect of the ‘empty chair’ policy was to draw the Community more tightly together. Consensus, hitherto elusive, suddenly became easier, and the impasse on QMV was resolved in January 1966 with an agreement between France and the others, known as the ‘Luxembourg Compromise’. This informal agreement acknowledged that any government which considered its ‘vital interests’ threatened by EEC legislation could prevent a decision being taken.⁷⁰

Another price extracted for de Gaulle’s return to co-operation was the resignation of Hallstein. But his real victory was the protection of ‘vital interests’, because the particular vital interest de Gaulle had in mind, as he confirmed in his memoirs, was France’s agriculture:

‘I may say that if, on resuming control of our affairs, I embraced the Common Market forthwith, it was as much because of our position as an agricultural country as for the spur it would give our industry. Certainly I was fully aware that, in order to integrate agriculture effectively into the Community, we should have to work energetically on our partners, whose interests in this matter are not ours. But I considered that this, for France, was a sine qua non of membership.’

De Gaulle made clear his conviction that, without a settlement designed to suit France’s needs, her agriculture ‘would constitute an incubus which would put us in a position of chronic inferiority in relation to others’. Thus he felt obliged to put up ‘literally a desperate fight’, sometimes going so far as to threaten to withdraw membership.71

Moravcsik points out that de Gaulle’s confidential discussions and speeches at the time revealed ‘a man obsessed with the possibility that QMV might be exploited to undermine carefully negotiated arrangements for fiscal transfers to French farmers’. He repeatedly stressed the need to retain control over three types of votes: those on CAP financing, on GATT negotiations, and on any possible free trade area. His reasoning was simple. Even with the progress already made, the CAP was not yet safe from reversal through the combined efforts of West Germany, Britain, Denmark and the United States, working through GATT. The result might, de Gaulle feared, allow the Americans to swamp the European market with their agricultural produce.⁷² He further predicted that, if QMV remained in place, within a year Erhard’s West Germany would be sure to call everything into question by calling for a majority vote on the CAP, and France ‘would be unable to do anything’.⁷³ With the Luxembourg Compromise, he could now protect his CAP agreements. The onward march of the EEC could continue.

Britain’s second rebuff

By 1967, the ‘project’ seemed to be making steady progress. By the so-called ‘merger treaty’, signed in 1965, the EEC, Euratom and the Coal and Steel Community were now brought together as ‘the Communities’. In Brussels the new Berlaymont building was opened and immediately filled by 3,000 Commission officials. On a French initiative, the EEC agreed to adopt a new form of indirect taxation, value added tax or VAT: a percentage of which would be passed to the Commission to provide an additional source of revenue for the CAP. And the output of EEC legislation was quickening. In the early years of the decade, the annual production of new directives and regulations had been around 25 a year. By the middle of the decade this reached 50. Now it was topping 100.74

Many of these early directives were dedicated to ‘market organisation’, requiring the standardisation of a wide range of produce, from eggs to bananas. Everything was geared to promoting uniformity and consistency: an ideology designed to encourage large-scale production but highly damaging to smaller, individual producers.⁷⁵

Then, quite unexpectedly, came a new British application to join the ‘Common Market’. In March 1966, Wilson, hitherto a supporter of his predecessor Gaitskell’s opposition to entry, had won a landslide election victory over the Conservatives, now led by Heath. So unlikely was it that the Wilson government would apply to join the EEC that, during the election campaign, Nigel Lawson, then editor of The Spectator, commented: ‘Europe is the supreme issue at this election…no one who genuinely believes in a European Britain can vote Labour’.⁷⁶ Wilson’s parliamentary secretary, Peter Shore, later recalled that he still seemed as hostile to British entry as Gaitskell.⁷⁷

In July 1966, however, only four months after Wilson’s election victory, Britain’s chronic balance of payments problem came to a head in a major crisis. In the eight years between 1956 and 1964, Britain’s economic performance had been lamentable compared with her continental neighbours. The yearly increase in her industrial production had averaged just 2.8 percent, against West Germany’s 7.3 percent, Italy’s 8.2 percent and France’s 6.2 percent. The growth of national per capita income had shown Britain similarly lagging behind, her 26.2 percent increase dwarfed by West Germany’s 58.2 percent, Italy’s 58.3 percent and France’s 47.5 percent.78 With the pound now under extreme pressure, Wilson introduced panic counter-measures, including a surcharge on imports, which threatened to bring even this modest growth to a halt. His familiar cheery optimism vanished. He began to look around in desperation for some more dramatic solution. Another factor in his thinking was the growing frustration of his dealings with the Commonwealth. Since the white supremacist regime in Rhodesia had unilaterally declared independence from Britain in 1965, relations with his fellow Commonwealth leaders had become increasingly painful.⁷⁹ In addition, as Peter Shore recalled, Wilson had been ‘got at’ by some of his closest advisers, who were fervently ‘pro-European’, notably his private secretary, Michael Palliser and his Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, who in the summer of 1967 Wilson was to make Chancellor.⁸⁰

In face of all these pressures Wilson made a remarkable volte face. By October 1966 he had decided that Britain should make a new application.⁸¹ Although his Cabinet was sharply divided, with ministers such as Denis Healey, Barbara Castle and Douglas Jay strongly opposed, a majority supported his change of policy, on the promise that Wilson and his new Foreign Secretary George Brown would make a ‘Grand Tour’ of the capitals of the Six to sound out opinion.

The tour started on 15 January 1967, when Wilson was described by his Eurosceptic back-bencher Michael Foot as trotting round Europe ‘like Don Quixote, his Sancho Panza at his side’.⁸² The Italians and the Germans supported British entry. But de Gaulle appeared noncommittal. Wilson and Brown nevertheless came away from meeting him optimistic, recommending to their Cabinet colleagues that entry should be pursued. A revealing insight into Wilson’s thinking came from his Cabinet colleague, Richard Crossman. In his diary he recorded that Wilson, just back from Adenauer’s funeral on 26 April,⁸³ admitted to the German chancellor Dr Kiesinger that there were ‘economic disadvantages in entering the Common Market but they are being overlooked by the British Government because of the tremendous political advantages’.84

On 30 April, the Cabinet voted in favour of applying, by 13 votes to eight. On the BBC’s Panorama, Wilson described the application as ‘a great turning point in history’, stating that he believed, on balance, ‘it will be right economically, but the political argument is stronger’. Britain’s role in joining was ‘to make Europe stronger, more independent, more decisive in world affairs’.

Monnet’s Action Committee had already declared itself ‘unanimously in favour’ of British entry.⁸⁵ In Strasbourg on 9 May, when the European Parliament discussed Britain’s application, Fernand Dehousse, a Belgian socialist, declared that it had ‘rejoiced our hearts’. But the Gaullists were silent. Then, on 10 May, Britain’s entry was discussed by the French Cabinet. Georges Gorse, the minister of information, said afterwards:

‘France in the past has sufficiently deplored British insularity not to rejoice over any trend in the opposite direction. I think General de Gaulle will speak about this at his press conference and will be in a position to express the satisfaction provoked in French public opinion by the movement which is pushing Britain towards Europe – a movement we have always hoped for – and the difficult problems raised by a candidature of this importance with everything that implies.’⁸⁶

On 16 May, de Gaulle delivered his verdict: ‘Le Grand Non’. Denman, quoting from the end of his statement, records de Gaulle saying that Britain’s entry would only be possible when

‘…this great people, so magnificently gifted with ability and courage, should on their own behalf and for themselves achieve a profound economic and political transformation which could allow them to join the Six continentals.’⁸⁷

What he omitted, however, was the long earlier passage in which, by referring to ‘the agricultural regulations’, de Gaulle gave another indication of his real motives. Britain, he said, ‘nourishes herself, to a great extent, on foodstuffs bought inexpensively throughout the world and, particularly, in the Commonwealth’. If she was to submit ‘to the rules of the Six’, then her ‘balance of payments would be crushed’ by the duties on her food imports. She would then be forced to raise her food prices to continental levels, causing her even greater problems. But, de Gaulle continued,

‘…if she enters the Community without being really subjected to the agricultural system of the Six, the system will thereby collapse, completely upsetting the equilibrium of the Common Market and removing for France one of the main reasons she can have for participating in it.’ 88

Just as in 1963, de Gaulle had laid out with consummate clarity for those with eyes to see why British entry at this stage was out of the question. Wilson, like Heath and Macmillan before him, showed no signs of understanding de Gaulle’s objections. He tabled Britain’s application in July 1967, only for this to be formally vetoed five months later. Shore, however, records how Wilson then instructed that preparations should be made for another application in the summer of 1970.⁸⁹

In July 1968, Monnet came over to England to meet Wilson, later writing ‘rarely had I seen him so determined and so pleased to commit himself to Europe’.⁹⁰

Before he left London, Monnet secured agreement from all three main political parties that they should join the Action Committee. Responding to Monnet’s formal letter of invitation, Wilson wrote:

‘The aims of the Action Committee are in close conformity with those to which the Labour Party subscribes. Our Party believes that European political, economic and technological integration is essential if Europe is to fulfil her great potential and make a unique contribution to secure and maintain world peace.’ ⁹¹

Had Wilson won the general election which took place two years later, his conversion to the ‘European’ cause now seemed so complete that he might well have been the man who took Britain into the EEC.

De Gaulle’s final battle

Yet de Gaulle still had not secured his main prize – that financing system for the CAP which would guarantee subsidies for his farmers, with much of the bill picked up by Germany, as the richest country in the EEC, and Germany would also help to absorb France’s agricultural surpluses. But this would also be the reason why France would then want British entry. Importing 50 percent of her food, Britain would be cut off from most of her Commonwealth suppliers, EEC import duties making their produce too expensive. She would then have to buy huge quantities of food from her new partners, above all from France.

However, the genius which lay at the heart of the budgetary structure was that, since the EEC was a ‘customs union’, the income from levies on imports would have to be paid to the EEC as its ‘own resource’. Once Britain was in, the import duties she collected would be paid straight to Community funds, to help finance the CAP, and therefore the French farmers who would be the chief beneficiaries. France would thus benefit from British entry twice over.

Before he could finally secure this prize, however, de Gaulle unexpectedly found himself faced with two more crises, one from Brussels, the other nearer home. In May 1968, Paris was taken over by crowds of rebellious students, triggering off a wave of strikes and unrest which paralysed the French economy. De Gaulle fled his capital, appealing for support from his army. Invoking fears of a Communist revolution, he called a snap election and won an overwhelming victory.

In Brussels the same year, agriculture commissioner Sicco Mansholt had become seriously disturbed by the way the half-formed version of the CAP was running out of control, with subsidies continuing to soar and food surpluses increasing. As a Dutch free trader, he had originally wanted a liberal, market-orientated CAP, which would encourage major structural changes to western Europe’s agriculture, leading to greater productivity and a substantial drop in employment. What had so far emerged had been the opposite: high support prices with no spending limits and maximum protection, with prices harmonised at the highest levels, bolstered by subsidised exports of surpluses which were flooding world markets. Thanks above all to de Gaulle, the CAP was more protectionist than the sum of member state policies.

In desperation Mansholt decided to counter attack. He began work on a major CAP reform, the first of what would be many, producing in 1969 the ‘second Mansholt Plan’. This concluded:

‘The Community is now having to pay so heavy a price for an agricultural production which bears no relation to demand that measures to balance the situation on the market can no longer be avoided …’ 92

He proposed halving the number of farmers; slaughtering millions of farm animals; and turning over seven percent of all agricultural land to forestry. Hundreds of thousands of farmers rioted in Brussels and other capitals and two died. Mansholt’s own life was threatened. The Six’s agriculture ministers, led by Germany, rejected his proposals out of hand. De Gaulle had now almost completely got his way. France’s peasants could stay on the land. The Community, and eventually Britain, would pay the price.

Final victory

In April 1969 de Gaulle held a referendum asking for the French people to approve a tranche of radical reforms. When he lost he retired from office, to be succeeded by his prime minister, Georges Pompidou. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing became the new premier. It was this succession which was later to be credited for the shift in French policy which allowed Britain, after Heath’s victory in the 1970 general election, to make her third and successful application to join the EEC. Another factor attributed to Heath’s eventual success was the arrival of Willy Brandt, a supporter of British entry, as the new German chancellor.

But there was still one vital detail to be settled before Pompidou could allow a further application from Britain or the other three potential applicants – Ireland, Denmark and Norway. He first needed that guarantee on CAP financing. At his first presidential press conference on 10 July 1969, he declared that he had no objection in principle to British accession, but the Six first had to ‘reach agreement amongst themselves’. At the same press conference, Pompidou agreed to a summit which had been called for by Brandt and other leaders of the Six, to be held at The Hague in December. There, Pompidou hoped, the arrangements would be finalised.

There was also another important issue on the Six’s agenda. There had been a sharp revival of interest among the Six in the idea that the EEC should move towards economic and monetary union, first mooted by Spaak in his report setting out the framework for the Treaty of Rome. In the early 1960s this had again been advocated by Monnet and Luxembourg’s prime minister, Pierre Werner; then again by the European Assembly and the Commission in 1965. Furthermore, the Council of Ministers had already laid the foundations for a common economic policy, by setting up various committees to discuss monetary and economic issues. The most important was Ecofin, at which the finance ministers of the Six held monthly meetings.93

In January 1968 Werner formally proposed that the Six should move to full economic and monetary union. This was followed by proposals from Giscard d’Estaing and the Commission.94 Momentum had now built up to such a degree that Pompidou proposed that the Hague summit, fixed for 1 to 2 December, should link negotiations on the budget and the CAP with talks on monetary integration and ‘enlargement’.

When the summit began, Brandt immediately turned the tables on Pompidou, with a thinly veiled threat that, unless there was ‘fair play’ for the applicant countries, there would be no agreement on the budget. Piet de Jong, the Dutch prime minister, proposed that the Six should discuss enlargement. According to Kitzinger,

‘Pompidou, in pained surprise, countered that farming must come first. This was agreed. Everyone knew by this time that that was France’s price for lifting the veto.’ ⁹⁵

Thus the Six agreed to deal with the budget and CAP package first. Farm subsidies would be funded not only from levies on imports from outside the EEC but also from a percentage of VAT receipts levied by each of the member states. This was so radical that it needed a new treaty (to be signed in 1970 as the Luxembourg Treaty).

Only with that settled would France agree to the Six opening negotiations with the four would-be applicants, led by Britain. France did, however, insist on the crucial condition that they would not be allowed to alter the terms of that all-important financial package. As it was later put by a leading Foreign Office civil servant engaged in the subsequent negotiations:

‘…the French continued to attach the highest importance to them, and to getting them concluded and ratified by all the existing member states before we could appear on the scene. It was thus a crucial point of the policy with which President Pompidou went to The Hague Summit meeting in December 1969 that, if he had to accept the opening of negotiations on our application, he must ensure that the negotiations did not begin until the Six had completed their agricultural finance regulation, and did not conclude until they had all ratified the resulting Treaty. This was the factor which produced the link, in The Hague Communiqué, between ‘the completion of the Community’ (achèvement) and its enlargement … élargissement was made clearly conditional on achèvement.’ ⁹⁶

In other words, the transition from de Gaulle to Pompidou made no difference to French policy. Throughout the 1960s, it had remained constant. There could be no enlargement until the CAP financial arrangements were in place.

Nevertheless, the budgetary arrangements were not the only unfinished business. The summit’s other aim was to plan for further integration: to which effect the heads of government recognised that the Community had now reached a turning point:

‘Entering the final phase of the Common Market is not only in fact putting the seal on the irreversible character of the work accomplished by the Communities, it is also preparing the way for a united Europe capable of assuming its responsibilities in the world of tomorrow… Consequently, the Heads of State or Government desire to reaffirm their faith in the political objects which give to the Community its whole meaning and significance, their determination to carry the enterprise through to its conclusion, and their confidence in the final success of their efforts.’ 97

If there had ever been any doubt as to where the Six intended to go, there now could be none. To help it on its way, they commissioned two reports. The first, by Pierre Werner, would be on ‘economic and monetary union’. The subject of the other, by the Belgian foreign minister Etienne Davignon, was ‘political union’. All this was in train before Heath applied for entry to what he would consistently describe to the British people as merely a ‘Common Market’.

 

 

1  Heath, Edward (1998), The Course Of My Life (London, Hodder and Stoughton), p. 222.

2  Moravcsik, Andrew (2000), ‘De Gaulle Between Grain and Grandeur: The Political Economy of French EC Policy, 1958–1970’ (Part 1) in Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring, p. 34.

3  For some reason, this was not reported by The Times and other newspapers until 28 November 1961.

4  Macmillan, At The End of The Day, p. 22.

5  Figures taken from speech by Hugh Gaitskell to Labour Party Conference, 1962 (Holmes, Martin (ed.) in The Eurosceptic Reader (London, Macmillan, 1966), p. 15).

6  Britain and The European Communities (London, HMSO), 1962.

7  Mansergh, Nicholas (1963), Documents and Speeches on Commonwealth Affairs, 1952–1962 (London, Oxford University Press), p. 635.

8  Royal Institute of International Affairs (1959), Documents on International Affairs, 1958 (London, Chatham House), p. 445. These will subsequently be referred to just as Documents, with relevant dates.

9  Documents (1959), pp. 508–509.

10  See for instance his press conference on 5 September 1960, and Documents (1960), pp. 157–158.

11  This came often to be misrepresented as a ‘Europe des Patries’, a phrase which de Gaulle himself went out of his way at a press conference to explain that he never used. The misunderstanding arose through a reverse translation back from his original words.

12  This and the two following sentences come from Duchêne, op. cit., p. 315.

13  As the Foreign Secretary Lord Home put it ‘if we act quickly now we can go into Europe and help shape the political structure in the way which suits us best. De Gaulle doesn’t want a tight European Federation, a Federal Europe. He wants a union of independent states. If we go in now, that is what it will be’ (interview in The Observer, 23 September 1962).

14  Macmillan, op. cit., p. 439.

15  Ibid., pp. 439–440.

16  Documents (1961), pp. 187–189.

17  Camps, op. cit., p. 418.

18  Moravcsik, De Gaulle, p. 34.

19  A widespread subsequent ‘myth’ about post-war European agriculture was that it was the Common Agricultural Policy which boosted production and made farming prosperous. Decades later a ‘Fact Sheet’ on the European Parliament website (The Treaty of Rome and Green Europe) would, typically, claim that ‘the CAP produced spectacular results: the Community was soon able to overcome the food shortages of the 1950s, achieving self-sufficiency and then generating cyclical and structural surpluses’. In fact it was in the 1950s, long before the CAP, that the combination of subsidies and technological innovation had already led to over-production of food, which the CAP only helped to exacerbate.

20  Brombergers, op. cit., pp. 285–286.

21  Moravcsik, op. cit., pp. 3–43.

22  Ibid. Moravcsik is an Associate Professor of Government at Harvard.

23  Ibid., pp. 18–19.

24  Moravscik, Andrew (1999), The Choice For Europe (London, UCL), p. 212.

25  Milward, op. cit., p. 424.

26  Moravscik, Andrew (2000) ‘De Gaulle Between Grain and Grandeur: The Political Economy of French EC Policy, 1958–1970 (Pt. 2)’, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Fall), p. 9. Despite suggestions from the Germans that Britain should participate as observers in discussions about agricultural policy, this never happened. (See also Milward, op. cit., p. 424, and CAB 134/1821.)

27  On 15 May 1962, de Gaulle gave a press conference to explain the collapse, in which he reiterated his view that ‘only the States, in this respect, are valid, legitimate, and capable of achieving it [political union]. I repeat that at present there is and can be no Europe other than a Europe of States – except of course for myths, fictions, and pageants.’ This particularly rankled with Monnet who castigated de Gaulle’s comments in his Memoirs as having ‘travestied’ his beloved Community and all that supranationalism stood for.

28  Horne, op. cit., p. 326

29  Letter from Macmillan to Lord Home on 16 May, quoted in Horne, op. cit., pp. 326–327.

30  Horne, op. cit., p. 328. Adenauer had also by this time made clear, in a speech in West Berlin on 11 May, his view that Britain could not possibly join any ‘political union’ of the Six. In a broadcast on 29 May, he reiterated this, saying that even if Britain did join the Common Market, her interests were so different from those of the Six that she could not join a political union.

31  PRO. PREM 11/3775, pp. 7–9. Record of a conversation at the Château de Champs, 2–3 June 1962.

32  Horne, op. cit., p. 328–329.

33  Ibid., p. 327.

34  Heath, op. cit., p. 222.

35  See Milward, op. cit., pp. 438–441. He takes the view that, had de Gaulle not eventually vetoed Britain’s application, the British government would have been forced to break off negotiations over precisely this issue. This view is shared by another historian. He claims that Couve de Murville was convinced that France was within ‘striking distance’ of forcing Britain to withdraw its application, and was thus reportedly furious with de Gaulle for invoking the veto. (Ludlow, Piers (1997), Dealing With Britain – The Six And The First UK Application To The EEC (Cambridge University Press), p. 210.)

36  Williams, op. cit., p. 506.

37  Booker, Christopher (1969), The Neophiliacs (London, Collins), p. 183.

38  Or, as Macmillan himself termed it, ‘the cold douche of competition’ (Ball, op. cit., p. 217).

39  The ‘What’s Wrong With Britain’ vogue had also caught on with the two leading ‘trendset-ting’ glossy magazines of the time, Queen and About Town (owned by a new young publisher Michael Heseltine). According to a contemporary history: ‘It was no accident that it was just these papers which were on the crest of a wave of young, upper-middle class popularity, with their antennae out for any new excitement that happened to be in the air, whether joining the Common Market or candy-striped shirts, economic "growth" or "ton-up kids".’ (Booker, op. cit., p. 158.)

40  It was in a full-page strip cartoon in Private Eye on 2 November 1962 that Edward Heath was first portrayed as ‘Grocer Heath’, a nickname which stuck. The sequence of images (drawn by William Rushton to a text by one of the present authors) showed Heath and a senior civil servant, Sir Brussels Sprout, going off to Brussels to negotiate with ‘the evil Hallstein gang’. By shouting ‘Euratom!’, Sprout is transformed into ‘Supermarketeer’. He and Heath start laying about them and win ‘the Concessions!’, such as ‘2d. off Indian tea’ or ‘4d. off New Zealand butter’ (hence ‘the Grocer’). Returning home they are acclaimed as heroes, but the final frame records how their ‘great victory was nothing more than the graceful surrender that had been inevitable all along’.

41  Gaitskell’s speech is published in full in The Eurosceptic Reader, op. cit., pp. 15–37.

42  Healey, Denis (1989), The Time Of My Life (London, Michael Joseph), p. 211.

43  The Times, 15 October 1962

44  Memoirs, pp. 353–354.

45  Ibid.

46  Peyrefitte, Alain (1994), C’était de Gaulle, Vol. 1 (Paris, Fayard), p. 333.

47  In Salmon, Trevor, & Nicoll, Sir William (1997), Building European Union – A Documentary History and Analysis (Manchester, Manchester University Press), p. 88.

48  De Gaulle, op. cit., pp. 41–42.

49  Memoirs, 1961–1963, p. 377.

50  Ibid., pp. 216–217.

51  Ibid., p. 220.

52  O’Neill, Con (2000), Britain’s Entry Into The European Community – Report On The Negotiations Of 1970–1972 (London, Frank Cass Publishers), p. 49.

53  Young, op. cit., pp. 222–226.

54  Ibid., p. 132.

55  Milward (op. cit., pp. 425–426) also remarks that, ‘In retrospect, the Ministry of Agriculture’s optimism about the role Britain would play in shaping the CAP is hard to explain…their reports and briefings seemed sometimes wilfully to minimise the problems involved…’ and they were ‘…not based on a full consideration of the way the CAP would also be shaped by political pressures within the Six’.

56  www.weltpolitik.net/regionen/europa/frankreich/943.html

57  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 330.

58  Spaak confirms de Gaulle’s cynicism: Adenauer, he writes, ‘failed to resist de Gaulle’s deliberate bid to seduce him’. The carefully stage-managed rapprochement at Rheims ‘was enough to confuse a man whose advanced age had already weakened his powers of judgement’ (Spaak, op. cit., p. 342).

59  Spinelli, Altiero (1966), The Eurocrats: Conflict and Crisis In The European Community (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press).

60  In addition to these central types of legislation, both Council and Commission could also issue ‘recommendations’ and ‘opinions’, carrying less weight than laws but designed as guidance to be followed by those to whom they were addressed.

61  Case 26/62, Van Geld en Loos v Nederlandse Belastingadministratie [1963] CMLR 105.

62  Case 6/64, Costa v ENEL [1964] CMLR 425.

63  Ibid.

64  Jens-Peter Bonde MEP, Danish leader of the Europe of Democracies and Diversities group in the European Parliament, personal interview, 19 December 2002.

65  Monnet, op. cit., p. 479.

66  Spaak, op. cit., pp. 481–482.

67  Duchêne, op. cit., p. 332.

68  Moravscik, De Gaulle, Part 2, p. 36.

69  Monnet, op. cit., pp. 482–483.

70  Spaak (op. cit., p. 471) was surprised to hear de Gaulle insist that ‘the European Community, as established under the Treaty of Rome, must be maintained’. He added, ‘De Gaulle tends to adopt this rigid stance to prevent Britain’s entry into the Common Market; on the other hand he is apt to disregard the Treaty altogether when it is a matter of respecting the powers of the EEC Commission or of submitting to a majority vote.’

71  De Gaulle, Charles (1971), Memoirs Of Hope – Renewal 1958–1962 (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson), p. 159.

72  Moravcsik, De Gaulle, Part 2, p. 40.

73  Ibid., p. 41.

74  Official Journal of the European Communities: Directory of Community Legislation In Force and Other Acts of the Community Institutions, Vol. II, Chronological Index.

75  From this ethos came some of the regulations which in Britain were later to give the EEC’s obsession with uniformity a bad name, such as that banning the sale of excessively curved bananas; or the egg marketing regulations which prohibited small free-range producers from selling ungraded eggs to their local shops, thus outlawing the traditional practice of displaying baskets of fresh eggs on the counter.

76  The Spectator, 25 March 1966.

77  Shore, Peter (2000), Separate Ways – The Heart Of Europe (London, Duckworth), p. 68.

78  Britain and Europe: The Future (1966), London, p. 47, cited in Maclean, Donald (1970) British Foreign Policy Since Suez 1956–1968 (London, Hodder & Stoughton), p. 80.

79  Shore, op. cit., p. 70.

80  Ibid., p. 71.

81  US views were no longer a serious factor. Washington was now almost wholly preoccupied with the Vietnam War. Most of the ‘Europeanists’ in Kennedy’s Cabinet had either departed or were otherwise engaged. Even George Ball was now devoting much of his time to Vietnam policy (and was eventually to resign over President Johnson’s handling of the war). The State Department’s economic bureau was actually hostile to British entry, because it believed that this could threaten the successful conclusion of the ‘Kennedy Round’ of GATT (Department of State telegramme 186605, 2 May 1967, Administrative History of the Department of State, LBJL, cited in Winand, op. cit., p. 362).

82  The Times, 9 May 1967.

83  Adenauer died on 19 April 1967.

84  Crossman, Richard (1976), The Diaries Of A Cabinet Minister, Vol. II (London, Hamish Hamilton), p. 330.

85  Monnet, op. cit., p. 487.

86  The Times, 11 May 1967.

87  Denman, op. cit., p. 229.

88  De Gaulle, Charles, fifteenth press conference, 16 May 1967. Text supplied by the French Press and Information Service, New York, available on: www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1967-degaullenon-uk.html

89  Shore, op. cit., p. 70.

90  Ibid.

91  Monnet, op. cit., p. 492.

92  Commission of the European Communities, Memorandum on the Reform of Agriculture in the European Economic Community, Supplement to Bulletin No. 1–69, 1969.

93  Moravcsik, op. cit., p. 291.

94  The Barre Proposals, named after the then president of the Commission.

95  Kitzinger, Uwe (1973), Diplomacy and Persuasion – How Britain Joined The Common Market (London, Thames and Hudson), p. 71.

96  O’Neill, op. cit., p. 169.

97  Summit communiqué, Bulletin of the European Communities, 1–1970: para. 4.