‘I recall one low point when nine foreign ministers from the major countries of Europe solemnly assembled in Brussels to spend several hours discussing how to resolve our differences on standardising a fixed position of rear-view mirrors on agricultural tractors.’
James Callaghan1
‘The Heads of State or Government, on the basis of an awareness of a common destiny and the wish to affirm the European identity, confirm their commitment to progress towards an ever closer union among the peoples and Member States of the European Community.’
Solemn Declaration on European Union, Stuttgart, 19 June 1983
On 16 March 1979, Monnet, the first and at the time only honorary ‘Citizen of Europe’, died at his home in the French countryside 30 miles outside Paris, at the age of 90 years and four months. Four days later Chancellor Schmidt joined Giscard in the nearby mediaeval church of Montfort l’Amuary for his funeral, along with friends from all over Europe and several of his long-time allies from Washington, led by George Ball. The music chosen for the service included pieces by French, German, Italian and English composers, culminating in a recorded version of all five verses of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.2 As this rousing American chorus rang through the nave, Giscard wrote later that a Frenchman almost felt left out.3
In his brief retirement, according to his biographer, Monnet had ‘come to question his life’s work’. ‘Was European union too narrow for a changing world? Had the Common Market really added to growth?’ He hoped Europe had ‘at least secured peace between France and Germany’. But even there, it might be argued, ‘the American presence in Europe had mattered more than a European Community reduced, it seemed, to a customs union’.
It was true that, in the years immediately preceding Monnet’s death, the great advance towards ‘ever closer union’ seemed to have lost much of its impetus. On the level of ‘high politics’, those brave dreams of the earlier 1970s, the proposals for full economic and monetary union by 1980, for political union and a common foreign policy, still seemed as far away as ever.
The only place where the momentum of the ‘European construction’ seemed unflagging in the late 1970s was on what might be described as the level of ‘low politics’, where the Commission, in alliance with the European Court of Justice, had now become more active than ever in extending its supranational powers, in the name of ‘completing the internal market’.
Once internal tariffs had been removed, though, this served to highlight the ‘non-tariff barriers’, by which individual states were still able to frustrate the emergence of a true ‘common market’. These forms of protectionism ranged from national rules and standards which could be used to exclude imports from other countries, to the various forms of ‘state aid’ by which governments could give their own producers financial advantage over their competitors. It was on this protectionism that the Commission now launched an assault, and it did so on two main fronts.
The first, using its right to initiate all Community legislation, was through a deluge of new directives and regulations designed to ‘harmonise’ or ‘approximate’ the laws of member states. Each replaced different national laws, imposing a single Community law in their place. By the late 1970s, the output of new Community laws had risen to some 350 a year and, as always, the real agenda was further integration.
Nothing better typifies the way the Commission was now extending its supranational tentacles into every ‘nook and cranny’ of economic life than the nature of the new laws (each identified by its reference number, accompanied by year of issue), such as:
73/361 Council Directive on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to the certification and marking of wire ropes, chains and hooks.
74/409 Council Directive on the harmonisation of the laws of the Member States relating to honey.
74/360 Council Directive on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to the interior fittings of motor vehicles (interior parts of the passenger compartment other than the interior rear view mirrors, layout of controls, the roof or sliding roof, the backrest and rear part of the seats).4
Reflecting the fact that the CAP was still responsible for 90 percent of the Community budget, it generated more law than any other sector, ranging from a long succession of directives which limited the number of plant varieties permissible in the EEC, to items such as:
Commission Regulation No. 1297/77 amending for the fourth time Regulation No. 1019/70 on detailed rules for establishing free-at-frontier offer prices and fixing the countervailing charge in the wine sector.
The second front on which the Commission launched its assault on national protectionism was through an attack on the financial assistance given by member states to their own industries. In its efforts to stamp out ‘illegal state aid’, the Commission intervened to eliminate ‘unfair competition’ in all kinds of economic activity, from shipbuilding to textiles. It did this partly through legislation, but its most useful ally in this battle was the ECJ, whose chief purpose was to act as the Community’s ‘Supreme Court’ in reinforcing supranationalism.
In 1977, the ECJ confirmed that the Treaty of Rome amounted to the ‘internal constitution’ of the Community, which member states were bound to obey.5 One measure of the growing importance of the court’s ‘constitutional’ role was that, in the ten years before 1979, the number of cases heard annually by the ECJ had averaged 113, whereas in the five years afterwards this figure would more than quadruple, to 514. With the ECJ’s aid, for instance, the Commission challenged government monopolies in France and Italy on the sale of tobacco, alcohol and matches. Another landmark was the Cassis de Dijon case in 1979, when, with the Commission’s support, a German firm challenged the German state authorities. They had refused to allow the import of a French blackcurrant liqueur because its alcohol content of 15–20 percent was lower than the 32 percent prescribed by German law. The ECJ ruled that any product lawfully produced in one country could be legally sold in another, even if there was no Community law specifically related to those products,6 thus cementing in the doctrine of ‘mutual recognition’. No longer could any member state control the flow of goods across its borders by applying its own national standards.
In all this torrent of legislative activity, the role of the third leg of the Community tripod, the Council of Ministers, seemed strangely marginal. Ministers found themselves spending much of their time giving formal approval to a constant stream of directives and regulations, the details of which had been negotiated by officials, the technicalities of which often seemed beyond their comprehension.7 In 1977, for instance, Britain’s Minister of Agriculture, John Silkin, found himself by the accident of Britain’s ‘presidency’ having to sign into law the Sixth VAT directive, a complex attempt to harmonise all the items on which member states would be obliged to levy VAT. It was unlikely that, as farming minister, Silkin was fully au fait with the implications of what was to become a significant landmark in the history of the Community’s long-term ambition to harmonise taxes, but it is his signature which stands at the bottom of the directive.
Worthy though all these efforts to extend the supranational tentacles of the Community might have seemed, they also gave justification to Monnet’s fear that his great dream was petering out in a sea of humdrum technocracy. From where was the impetus to come which would breathe new life into his great project? Who would bring it back to its original lofty aim of building a ‘United States of Europe’?
The answer was to lie in an event which took place just after his death, with the first elections for the European Parliament. The man who would now take on the baton from Monnet was one of the first members of the elected parliament: Altiero Spinelli. Yet, despite Spinelli having conceived his own vision of a United States of Europe nearly forty years earlier, when confined to his prison cell on the island of Ventotene, through most of those intervening four decades he had played little active part in the ‘project’.
In most accounts of the history of the European Union, the years of the early 1980s are dismissed as a time of ‘Eurosclerosis’, when the march of integration appeared to have stalled. British accounts of that period are dominated almost entirely by Thatcher’s endless battle for her rebate. The moment when the ‘project’ began to move forward again is generally identified with the arrival of Jacques Delors as Commission president in 1985. Yet it was in the early 1980s that the foundations which enabled Delors to make such an impact were laid. What was being planned was the most dramatic leap forward in integration of all: a ‘Treaty on European Union’. This was so ambitious that, for tactical reasons, it was eventually decided that it should be divided into two separate treaties, five years apart. The first would be known as the Single European Act; the second was to become the Treaty of Maastricht. The man responsible for the planning of this historic move was Spinelli.
The ‘Crocodile Club’
During the decades after the war, although he served as a deputy in the Italian parliament, Spinelli had been effectively excluded from mainstream ‘European’ politics, not least by Monnet, who had no time for his Communist antecedents. He is not mentioned in Monnet’s memoirs, published in 1978, and Duchêne notes, in his only reference to Spinelli, that he was a man ‘whom Monnet respected but with whom he did not agree’.8 The disapproval was mutual. Spinelli once remarked that Monnet had ‘the great merit of having built Europe and the great responsibility to have built it badly’.9
Spinelli had actually been in Brussels between 1972 and 1976 as one of Italy’s two Commissioners, but served without distinction. It was only after Monnet’s death in 1979 that he came out of the shadows, at the age of 72, to stand for the European Parliament. He chose to sit as an independent MEP attached to the Communist group. He had at last arrived on the stage for which he had been waiting through much of his life.
Spinelli first showed his hand on 25 June 1980, when the Parliament refused to adopt the Council’s draft Community budget. The Council came under fire from several speakers, but none so aggressive as Spinelli. He told his fellow MEPs that they must now take the destiny of the Community into their hands: ‘I do not address the Council of Ministers’, he told them, ‘because it has demonstrated its total impotence’.10
Spinelli was convinced that the only way to bring a federal Europe to fruition was for Parliament to seize the initiative and to work for total reform of the Treaty of Rome. Using a rallying cry that was to become all too familiar in later years, he argued that what now made further integration a matter of urgency was ‘enlargement’: the prospect that within a few years the Community would add three new members, Greece in 1981, soon to be followed by Spain and Portugal, when the ‘Nine’ would become ‘Twelve’.
His first formal step towards his goal came in July 1980 when, with his assistant Pier Virgilio Dastoli,11 he wrote to his fellow MEPs, inviting their support for a concerted move to further integration. Eight ‘eager members’ responded to his call, meeting at the prestigious Crocodile restaurant in Strasbourg. These included a German and an Italian Christian Democrat, an Italian Communist, two British Labour MEPs, including Richard Balfe, and a lone British Conservative, Stanley Johnson.12
So was born the ‘Crocodile Club’, a cross-party group open to all MEPs convinced ‘of the need for European political reform of great width’. Spinelli aimed to outflank the existing party groupings, which he feared would block his initiative. As he explained later in a letter to a colleague:
‘The European Parliament is elected using party electoral machines geared to national elections, which do not have European political programs but a vague trans-national background…their members were divided substantially into three groups: innovators, eager to advance the union; “immobilists”, eager to hold it where it was and to even make it regress; the swamp…composed of those which do not know what they want. The innovators are conscious that they must rally around a common policy and, by ignoring party loyalties, they would conquer the prevailing influence of “the swamp”.’
The Crocodile Club was to be the catalyst for ‘awakening the innovators’.
The established parliamentary forum for promoting new ideas was the Political Affairs Committee. But this was dominated by the centre-right European Peoples’ Party (EPP), hostile to Communists. Spinelli predicted that the committee would only give his project a ‘first class burial’. Instead, he planned an ad hoc ‘constitutional working group’, which he could control. For this he needed a parliamentary resolution, to prepare the ground for which, in October 1980, he launched a ‘semi-official periodical’, The Crocodile.13
As expected, his resolution was treated with disdain by the established groups; Spinelli’s ‘forces of organised immobilism’. Even the Communists were reluctant to back him, and only did so when Spinelli made a direct appeal to Italy’s national Communist leader, Enrico Berlinguer. The Christian Democrats, however, proved to be the main obstacle, using a procedural device to delay any vote on Spinelli’s resolution, hoping that support would collapse.
Here a British MEP Richard Balfe, acting as Spinelli’s ‘tactical adviser’,14 took the initiative, launching a covert operation code-named ‘Keep Silent’. He gradually enlisted support from his Socialist colleagues. The ‘Club’ attracted heavyweight support from the Italian prime minister Bettino Craxi, and several leading Social Democrats, including Willy Brandt and Erwin Lange (president of the Parliament’s powerful budgets committee). In backing the resolution they were joined by the Liberal group, under its German leader Martin Bangemann, later a commissioner.
By this means the resolution gathered enough support to be passed on 9 July 1981, establishing a ‘standing committee for the institutional problems charged to work out a modification of the existing treaties’. Spinelli thus won approval for the parliament ‘to assume the initiative fully to give new momentum to the establishment of the European Union’.
By this time various senior national politicians were becoming alarmed at Spinelli’s activity. At a national conference of the German Free Democrat party in 1981, Germany’s foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, put forward a ‘gradualist’ alternative. He then joined forces with Italy’s foreign minister, Emilio Colombo, to produce what became known as the ‘Genscher–Colombo Plan’. This included a proposal for a new treaty to be known as the ‘European Act’. This would formalise ‘political co-operation’ on foreign policy, binding on all member states, and a ‘declaration’ on economic integration.15 They proposed that member states should work towards a European defence policy, independent of Nato.
To justify their proposal for a common foreign policy, Genscher and Colombo referred to a little-publicised meeting of foreign ministers which had taken place in London on 13 October 1981, under the chairmanship of Thatcher’s Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington. The ministers had formulated new rules for political co-operation, building on the original agreement in Luxembourg in 1970, which they said had ‘contributed to the ultimate objective of the European union’.16 In London the ministers had already agreed to formalise their co-ordination of foreign policy through what were termed ‘Gymnich-type meetings’,17 taking place in private, without officials present, the contents of which would remain secret. It was also at this London meeting that arrangements were agreed for the so-called troika structure, to become famous during the Yugoslav crisis nine years later, whereby the government acting as president of the Council on the six-monthly rota system would act in concert with those which came before and after.
The Genscher–Colombo plan, incorporating the London agreement, was presented to the European Parliament on 19 November 1981, supported by the EPP. Colombo told the MEPs:
‘We are calling for a revival of European integration, we want the institutions strengthened and the decision-making process improved and we want to encourage and extend to a greater degree the pragmatic process whereby political co-operation is achieved among our ten countries. In this way, co-operation will become more widespread on matters ranging from security to culture and law, which will bring us closer to the basic aims of a European union. We will achieve this by adopting a flexible approach and through the mutual support of political, economic and social aspects in turn, and as we gradually progress, it will be possible to set ourselves, and meet, new targets.’18
In coded form, the plan’s purpose was to pre-empt Spinelli’s much bolder initiative by deliberately watering down its ‘constitutionalist’ agenda. However, when it was presented to the London European Council of 26–27 November 1981, the plan received no immediate support and, by being referred back to the foreign ministers, was effectively kicked into touch.
Genscher and Colombo did not immediately give up. Eleven months later, on 14 October 1982, they had a further chance to address the Parliament when it debated an interim report on their plan from its political affairs committee. Colombo was unrepentant: ‘history has taught us that European Union cannot be attained by moving too fast or forcing the pace’, he declared.19 But without support from member states their plan had already effectively been buried.
Spinelli’s project, however, was still very much alive. His ad hoc ‘committee for institutional affairs’, elected on 22 January 1982, had now been in place for nearly nine months, with Spinelli as its co-ordinator and Mauro Ferri as its president. To maximise support, at Spinelli’s insistence, the committee set up a steering group, to hold hearings for a wide range of politicians, trade union leaders and academics to give their views. The European Movement was recruited to whip up public support.
The committee’s task, approved by the European Parliament on 6 July 1983, could not have been more ambitious. It was not simply to amend the existing European treaties but, working through six sub-committees, to produce an entirely new one. Spinelli and his allies had already pulled off a remarkable achievement, in convincing their fellow MEPs that, by supporting his project, they could win unprecedented new prestige for the Parliament. It would establish it as the prime mover in the integration process; as Spinelli himself was already putting it, by transforming the ‘Community’ into a ‘European Union’.
Barely three weeks before Parliament gave Spinelli the go-ahead, the Genscher–Colombo Plan had been given what amounted to its tombstone, when it was incorporated into another document given the grandiose title of a ‘Solemn Declaration on European Union’. Presented to the Stuttgart European Council on 17–19 June 1983,20 this stated in its objectives:
‘The Heads of State or Government, on the basis of an awareness of a common destiny and the wish to affirm the European identity, confirm their commitment to progress towards an ever closer union among the peoples and Member States of the European Communities.’21
The ‘Solemn Declaration’ was approved by the heads of government, including Thatcher, now so preoccupied with her battle over the budget rebate that she merely noted it in her memoirs as having been just ‘one other aspect’ of the Stuttgart meeting.
Only four days earlier, on 15 June, Thatcher had won a landslide election victory over a Labour Party led by Michael Foot, which had included in its manifesto a pledge to take Britain out of the EEC. Among the few new Labour MPs to be elected was the young member for Sedgefield, Tony Blair, who promised in his election address:
‘We’ll negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC, which has drained our natural resources and destroyed jobs.’ 22
In a dismissive comment on the ‘Declaration on European Union’, Thatcher noted the ‘grandiloquent language’ which ‘had been used about the subject since before the UK had joined the Community’, but took the view that she ‘could not quarrel with everything, and the document had no legal force’. Therefore, she ‘went along with it’.23
When later questioned about the Declaration in the Commons, she replied, ‘I must make it quite clear that I do not in any way believe in a federated Europe. Nor does that document’.24 Her new Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe also gave the Declaration only a cursory mention in his memoirs, devoting more space to his visit afterwards to Stuttgart’s art gallery. He recalled that ‘we attached less importance than most of our colleagues – less than we should have done – to this blueprint of the future’.25
Thatcher was certainly right about the ‘grandiloquent language’ and much of the Declaration’s text was in fact taken up with restating principles already agreed elsewhere. Its only real purpose was to head off Spinelli’s draft treaty, now in active preparation. For precisely that reason Spinelli was angry. His committee president Ferri exploded that, for the Parliament, ‘no form of consultation with the Council and the Commission is possible’.26 If only Thatcher and Howe had been better briefed as to the hidden reason for the Declaration, they might have been better prepared for what was to hit them at the Milan Council two years later.
The first ‘federal policy’
Just at this moment when the Community was about to take a further giant step towards integration, there had emerged its first example of a fully-fledged ‘federal’ or supranational policy. In January 1983, after long and bitter argument, the Community had finally agreed how to apply the rules it had laid down for its Common Fisheries Policy.
After The Hague conference in 1976, when the Community had agreed the broad principles on which its CFP was to be operated, fishing ministers had to decide how the principle of ‘equal access’, modified by the ‘Hague preferences’ was to work. A ‘free-for-all’ could not be allowed, otherwise the resource would be quickly expended, so a conservation strategy had to be devised. The first step was to determine proportion of the Total Allowable Catches (TACs) for each of the main species of fish that would be allocated to each country, under a system of national ‘quotas’.
In doing this, the ministers opted to base the divisions on historical records, taking account of where national fleets had fished previously, and the tonnages caught. The crude percentages would then be modified by reference to the ‘Hague preferences’, which were more or less arbitrarily defined by subtracting parts of various countries’ allocations in order to give them to others.
Predictably, this led to bitter arguments, firstly over which years should be picked as the historical ‘reference points’. Eventually, the period agreed spanned 1973–78, which was particularly disadvantageous to Britain. During that period, most of her fishing effort had been concentrated in North Atlantic waters now closed to her. On the other hand, the period was particularly advantageous to France, since most of her fishing effort in those years had been in waters now within the British 200-mile zone.
Then there were bitter fights about the levels set for the TACs, which were to be agreed every year by fisheries ministers, in the last Council of the preceding year. The fights became an annual ritual and identified a fatal flaw in the conservation system. Ministers, fighting for their national interests, would push the TACs higher than was dictated by scientific data, while continually resisting Commission attempts to take over the process. As a result, Ministers often found themselves arguing about allocations of fish in excess of 100 percent of the quantities theoretically available.
As a ‘conservation policy’, there was a second flaw: although the rules were agreed centrally, their enforcement remained with member states, which meant that countries adopting a ‘light-touch’ regime would give their own fishermen a commercial advantage, and themselves short-term economic benefits. Lack of enforcement, and the relative severity of different national systems, became a constant source of aggravation, particularly to British fishermen who, with some justice, felt their own system was the most rigorous in the Community.
A problem also lay with the allocation of national quotas. This led to disputes so fierce and so prolonged that, even though the CFP was originally planned to begin in 1980, the start-date had to be delayed to 1 January 1983. Even then, the deadline was missed and final agreement was not reached until 25 January 1983. When the results of the negotiations were announced, Britain was allocated 37 percent of the total catch. British fishermen were initially relieved that their country’s contribution of four-fifths of the fish seemed at least to have been partially recognised. The detail, however, showed that the British allowance was very short on high-value species, such as sole, and weighted heavily in favour of lower-value fish, such as cod and haddock. In cash terms, the UK’s share of the total catch was only 13 percent.27
As would often be the case, other countries seemed to have won a very much better deal for their own fishermen, notably France, which secured, for instance, an 18,000 tonne cod quota for the English Channel, compared with only 1,750 tonnes allocated to British fishermen.
Another flaw, in conservation terms, was the award of a huge 1,000,000-ton quota to Denmark’s ‘industrial’ fishing fleet, nominally to permit harvesting sand eels and pout, used to provide food for pig, poultry or fish farms, or to be used as agricultural fertiliser. But this fleet also caught other species, including juvenile cod, which it was allowed to use under the classification ‘by-catch’.
The most serious flaw of all, however, was seen in the very nature of the quota system itself. Dictating to fishermen the maximum quantities of each species they were permitted to land ignored the most basic realities of fishing. When fishermen hauled in their nets, they often caught a range of species for which they had no quota. Since it would be a criminal offence to land these, their only alternative was return their ‘illegal’ catch to the sea, by which time the fish would be dead. This practice was to lead within a few years to an ecological disaster, as fishermen were forced to ‘discard’ billions of fish every year.
The reason why 1 January 1983 had been set as the deadline for introducing the new CFP system was in itself significant, in that this marked the end of the 10-year ‘derogations’ negotiated in the accession talks in 1971. Now those ten years were up, it lay with the Community to agree whether these ‘transitional arrangements’ could continue. The condition it imposed was that Britain must agree to the new CFP system.
But so intractable had the quota negotiations been that, on 1 January 1983, the derogations lapsed. Without the framework of quotas, the ‘equal access’ rule now prevailed without restriction. A Danish trawler skipper, Kent Kirk, also a Danish MEP, sailed into British coastal waters and began fishing. After being arrested, he appealed to the ECJ, which upheld his claim that, in the absence of a fisheries policy, he had been fully entitled to fish ‘up to the beaches’. This incident, which caused a widespread stir, helped concentrate the minds of the negotiators, and by 25 January the new quota policy had been agreed. Only then were Britain and other member states given back, for a further twenty years, the concession allowing them continued jurisdiction over their inshore waters. But Rippon’s claim in 1971 that this was a permanent right had again been exposed as a lie.
It was not generally understood that even the CFP system introduced in 1983 was itself only intended to be a further ‘transitional arrangement’, based on ‘derogations’ which would run out on 31 December 2002. But in one respect this was becoming particularly evident in 1983, as negotiations continued over further ‘enlargement’ of the Community to admit two new entrants, Spain and Portugal.
Spain and Portugal had applied for membership of the Community in 1977, following the deaths of the two dictators, Franco and Salazar, who for decades had kept their countries isolated from the mainstream of European politics. Negotiations began in 1978 and the nine years of talks reflected the particular difficulties posed by the admission of two relatively impoverished countries with mainly agrarian economies. An attempted military coup in Madrid in February 1981 lent particular urgency to Spain’s entry, with the Community now anxious to strengthen her fragile new democracy by bringing her into the fold. But despite this urgency, three central issues could not easily be resolved: agriculture, fisheries and the reduction of trade barriers for Spanish industrial goods.28
In some respects the toughest challenge of the three was posed by fisheries, because, for domestic political reasons, Spain had built up her fishing fleet under Franco to become easily the largest in Europe. The accession of Spain and Portugal would increase the Community’s total fishing capacity by three-quarters, while bringing little in the way of fishing resource. To allow these vessels immediate access to Community waters would be disastrous, not least because Spanish trawlers, fishing round the world, had already become internationally notorious for their predatory disregard of conservation rules.
To accommodate this ‘cuckoo in the nest’, ministers of the Ten decided that Spanish and Portuguese access to Community waters must be phased in over a long transitional period, starting with the admission of a limited number of vessels on 1 January 1995. Full integration would not be permitted until 31 December 2002. The newcomers were only persuaded to accept these conditions, however, in return for the Community paying a heavy price. Firstly Spain and Portugal were given substantial aid from the Community’s ‘structural funds’, to enable them to update and expand their fishing fleets. Secondly, the Community also undertook to pay out huge sums on buying fishing rights for the Spanish and Portuguese fleets around the coasts of Africa and across the under-developed world, to compensate them for their exclusion from European waters.
This largesse was to provoke an unintended consequence at the end of 1984. Thatcher recalled how, at the Dublin Council that December, just when the enlargement negotiations were nearing their conclusion,
‘Mr Papandreou, the left-wing Greek prime minister, suddenly treated us to some classic theatre. A charming and agreeable man in private, his whole persona changed when it was a question of getting more money for Greece. He now intervened, effectively vetoing enlargement unless he received an undertaking that Greece should be given huge sums over the next six years.’ 29
Other member states seemed ‘curiously reluctant’ to defend their financial interests, and the Greek Danegeld had to be paid. The price eventually to be paid by British fishermen would be even higher.
A treaty For ‘European union’
During the second half of 1983, Spinelli and his team in the European Parliament were quietly at work on what was now officially called a ‘Draft Treaty Establishing a European Union’.30 Amongst its innovations was a proposal that citizens of member states should, ipso facto, become citizens of the Union, and that they ‘shall take part in the political life of the Union’, enjoying the rights granted to them by the legal system of the Union while being subject to its laws.31 A central objective of the European Union, Spinelli declared, should be:
‘The attainment of humane and harmonious development of society based principally on endeavours to attain full employment, the progressive elimination of the existing imbalances between the regions, protection and improvement in the quality of the environment, scientific progress and the cultural development of its peoples.’ 32
If Spinelli was at odds with Monnet, he nevertheless recognised his brainchild, the European Council, which his treaty incorporated as a fully-fledged Community institution. The role he envisaged for the Council was straight out of the Monnet handbook on integration, where its main role should be to manage the transition of power from national to supranational authority, a process which must be one-way only. Spinelli’s draft also proposed a major expansion of the powers of the Parliament, giving it supervisory powers over the Commission, with the right to veto its political programme.33
In addition to the ‘internal market’, the Community was to assume the responsibility for co-ordinating national laws ‘with a view to constituting a homogenous judicial area’; the full co-ordination of economic policy; and the harmonisation of taxes. All member states would be required to participate in the European Monetary System and a law should be enacted governing ‘procedures and stages for attaining monetary union’, complete with a European central bank.
The Union would have ‘concurrent competence’ over all social and regional policies and those governing health, consumer protection, the environment, education and research, culture and information. It would have competence in relation to certain aspects of foreign policy, and exclusive competence to make trade deals with third countries. There was provision for the Union to set up its own revenue-collecting authorities and mechanisms for creating new sources of revenue. Finally, if any countries should refuse to ratify such a new treaty, the rest would be entitled to carry on without them, thus creating a ‘two-speed Europe’.
The draft was adopted by the Parliament on 14 February 1984 by 237 votes to 31 against, with 43 abstentions. It was addressed directly to the governments and parliaments of the member states, to prevent the Council from blocking it. Despite the support of the Parliament, however, Spinelli knew his treaty stood little chance of being ratified by member states without heavyweight support. He therefore sought Mitterrand’s aid, not least because France was then holding the presidency of the Council. Thus, in his speech to the Parliament – in the debate which resulted in his draft treaty being adopted – he exhorted France to take the initiative in winning support for it among other member states.
A month later, on 24 March, Spinelli told delegates to the European Movement congress in Brussels: ‘too many times we have heard the heads of State and governments make solemn statements and then we see the intergovernmental and diplomatic machines practically crushing them, reducing them to nothing’. He handed a personal note to that effect to Mitterrand during a short audience in Paris on 16 April 1984, telling him that he hoped the presidency would contribute to advancement of the project, obliging all member states ‘to assume their responsibilities’. In particular, he recommended that such an initiative should be taken ‘apart from the Council of Ministers, to circumvent the rule of the unanimity’.34
Spinelli got his answer on 24 May 1984. Mitterrand ‘made the choice for Europe’. Speaking in Strasbourg, he declared he was in favour of the European Parliament’s proposals. A new situation demanded a new treaty, and France was open to such a prospect.35 He was ready to examine Spinelli’s project and suggested ‘preparatory discussions’ which could lead to a conference of interested member states.36
Mitterrand responded so positively to Spinelli’s ideas because he greatly needed a European success. France was nearing the end of her presidency, and with her economy in recession, fast-rising unemployment, widespread demonstrations and his party’s failure in the European elections, he needed a dramatic gesture before his tenure ended. In the spring of 1984, he conducted a marathon tour of eight European capitals and judged that there was strong support for a new European initiative. The moment had come ‘to leave the humdrum routine of technical questions’ and to give ‘the political impetus which could solve Europe’s crisis’.37
However, Mitterrand’s support was by no means unconditional. His own foreign ministry was strongly opposed. His economic advisers therefore suggested that he had two options in responding to the treaty. One would be to split it into two parts. Its economic proposals could be put forward as a first step, and discussion of its more ambitious institutional components could then be deferred for ‘five years’, when it was already envisaged that the Community would re-examine the Solemn Declaration on the European Union. The second option would be for France to advance her own proposals.38 In the event, Mitterrand came up with a mixture of the two options, starting with an invitation to heads of government to take part in an ‘informal meeting’ in Paris in the autumn, to discuss ‘political and institutional questions’, the application of the Treaty of Rome and any other proposals which might be put forward.
The real significance of the advice given to Mitterrand at this time would only become apparent as events unfolded over the next seven years. It was this which first sowed the idea that the next great step forward in the integration of Europe should be in two stages, beginning with a major ‘economic reform’, then continuing, five years later, with a more ambitious ‘institutional reform’. Herein lay the genesis of the two treaties which would become known as the ‘Single European Act’, ratified in 1986, and the ‘Treaty on European Union’ agreed at Maastricht five years later. All this was eventually to flow from Spinelli’s ‘draft treaty’ and from his decision at a timely moment to invite Mitterrand to act as its main sponsor.
One feature of Spinelli’s project which particularly appealed to Mitterrand was the idea of a ‘two-speed Europe’ which could not be blocked by the veto of any country, such as Britain, which might be reluctant to move on to much fuller integration. Mitterrand was to confirm this by his actions at the closing European Council under France’s presidency, scheduled for Fontainebleau on 25–26 June 1984.
As the heads of government gathered at the ornate chateau, Thatcher was almost entirely focused on what was to be the ‘showdown’ in the battle to win her rebate. After ‘very discreet meetings’ the previous day between Mitterrand’s and Kohl’s advisers, Mitterrand slipped onto the agenda a proposal to set up a ‘committee of experts’ to consider future institutional reform of the Community. Each head of government would nominate a personal representative. Mitterrand himself already saw this as the equivalent of Spaak’s 1955 committee which had drafted the Treaty of Rome. A former Irish foreign minister, James Dooge, was chosen as chairman, for what would soon become known to insiders as the ‘Spaak II Committee’. Its task was to make proposals to reform the institutions and to ‘improve European co-operation’.
In her account of Fontainebleau, Thatcher does not refer to the decision to appoint this committee.39 Had she known of the reasons for its informal title, this might have warned her just how ambitious her partners had become. She also failed to note another decision at Fontainebleau, in the wake of the June elections to the European Parliament which had produced a ‘disappointingly low’ poll across the Community, with Britain’s 31.8 percent lowest of all. Concern at this apathy moved the Council to set up a committee on how to build ‘a people’s Europe’, to be chaired by an Italian MEP, Pietro Adonnino.
Mitterrand had in fact already allowed for the possibility that Thatcher might veto the setting up of the Dooge committee, in which case he planned to call openly for a new ‘Messina conference’. Following Fontainebleau, the Community would finally have cleared most of the technical issues which dominated its agenda, the conflict over the budget and the thorny issue of the Spanish-Portuguese enlargement. The Community would now be free to launch out on a new stage of institutional reform, and for Mitterrand this had now become an absolute necessity:
‘At Twelve, the Community integrates heterogeneous interests, contrary traditions, rival ambitions… the present Community is more fragile than that of yesterday, and there is no longer just one cure for (all) its ills: For a larger Community, stronger institutions (are needed).’40
If Mitterrand had been forced to his ‘Plan B’, his plan was that the conference would then have worked to a Franco-German document, allowing it ‘to study a draft treaty for the creation of the European Union starting from the solemn declaration of Stuttgart, taking account of the European Parliament’s project’.41 But since Thatcher had now given her approval, this ‘nuclear option’ was not necessary.
Mitterrand ensured that he kept a guiding hand on the committee’s work, by nominating as his representative Maurice Faure, a ‘convinced European’, who became its rapporteur, responsible for orchestrating its activities. The committee was essentially controlled by its French and German members, who met in Bonn on 19 September 1984 for ‘a confidential working session on the Spaak committee’. Their objective was no more and no less than ‘the realisation of the European Union’.
The majority of the committee, in any case, recognised the value of Spinelli’s project. They were in favour of a ‘true political entity’ and wanted an intergovernmental conference (IGC) to prepare a Treaty of European Union. This IGC should take as its starting point ‘the spirit and the method of the project voted by the European Parliament’.42
Mrs Thatcher’s representative on the Dooge committee was an inexperienced Foreign Office minister, Malcolm Rifkind. It was not to be apparent from the committee’s final report that he made much contribution to its deliberations.
Fog in Channel, Continent cut off
Thatcher was to say that, once the rebate issue was resolved, she had been determined that Britain should reunite with her partners to play a ‘strong and positive role in the Community’. Looking back on how events unfolded during the 10 months after the Fontainebleau Council, however, it seems as though Britain and her partners were operating on different planets.
Immediately after Fontainebleau, as Geoffrey Howe was to recall in his memoirs, he had attended the Queen’s birthday banquet in honour of the Diplomatic Corps, which he had arranged: an ‘impeccably British function’. The Irish had now taken over the presidency of the Community, for what Howe reported as ‘a quiet six months’. One of his few recollections of this period was ‘an enjoyable day in Germany’ in September, inspecting some of the 60,000 soldiers serving with BAOR (the British Army of the Rhine), who were taking part jointly with the Bundeswehr in Nato exercises.
Later that month, he returned to make ‘an important speech in Bonn’, where he stated that Britain’s commitment to Europe was ‘profound and irreversible’. Evidently oblivious of the most recent dealings between the French and Germans, he was seeking, according to his own account, to demonstrate ‘the range of Britain’s European commitment’ and, by implication, ‘to suggest that the Franco-German relationship should not be seen as the only cornerstone of the European Community’.43 This, as we will see, was to be the cornerstone of British policy, as successive British governments sought to interpose themselves between the French and the Germans. Thus, as others were to do after him, Howe argued that Britain should be ‘a strong voice in the Community’, as one of its leading members. ‘We have brought to Europe a considerable dowry’, he said, ‘our markets for agricultural and industrial goods, our fishing grounds, our major contribution to the defence and security of the continent’. He continued:
‘It is because we have so much at stake in the Community, because we depend so much on its healthy development and because we believe so wholeheartedly in its future that we have devoted so much effort to the reform of its internal arrangements; to building a better foundation for the future of Europe.’ 44
So important did he consider this speech, along with others he was to deliver in similar vein over the months that followed, that he would eventually publish them in a book entitled Europe Tomorrow.
Meanwhile, Mitterrand was pursuing plans to establish a European ‘defence identity’ independent of Nato, effectively continuing a French policy objective which stretched back to the time of de Gaulle. The opportunity had been presented by the general European alarm over the announcement by US President Ronald Reagan on 23 October 1983 of his Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), the proposed anti-ballistic missile system dubbed ‘Star Wars’. This had raised the spectre for some of America’s European allies of the USA finding a way to make herself immune from the Soviet nuclear threat, and thus becoming less willing to commit her own nuclear deterrent on behalf of her allies.
By February 1984, therefore, Mitterrand felt he could use this opportunity to convince the Community to seek its own independent military capability: independent, that is, of the USA. To achieve his aim, he fastened on the moribund Western European Union, set up on British initiative in 1954. With a view to reactivating it, he had sent a memorandum to all its other members. The initial response was lukewarm. Thatcher predictably rejected the idea outright. However Howe and Michael Heseltine, now her Secretary of State for Defence, both fervent ‘Europeanists’, had felt ‘a strong instinct towards strengthening our European defence linkage’, presumably unaware or heedless of the French agenda. It was, they argued, in America’s interest as well as Europe’s that Europe should pull its weight.45 By October 1984, the Community members had been sufficiently won round to Mitterrand’s idea for a meeting of foreign and defence Ministers to take place in Rome within the WEU framework. On 27 October they agreed a ‘founding text’ for reactivating the WEU, the ‘Rome Declaration’, the objectives of which included the establishing of a ‘European security identity’ and the gradual harmonisation of member states’ defence policies.46
Two weeks later, on 11 November, took place the ceremony with which this book began, when Mitterrand and Kohl met to hold hands at Verdun, solemnly to reaffirm that indissoluble alliance between France and Germany on which they saw that the whole future of ‘European construction’ must ultimately be centred.
While all these events were unfolding, the Dooge committee had been hard at work. By December, it had a preliminary report ready for the Dublin European Council, favouring an ‘intergovernmental conference’ to prepare a new treaty. The UK, Denmark and Greece immediately tabled reservations, opposing institutional reform and any need for such a treaty. But at least agreement was reached on another matter. With strong backing from Mitterrand, Jacques Delors, a leading French fonctionnaire,47 was formally appointed as the new president of the Commission. On the interim Dooge proposals, Mitterrand could not have made his position clearer. At the press conference immediately after the Council, he declared that ‘the institutional debate may now take precedence over the others’.48
The significance of this seems to have escaped Thatcher, who only weeks previously had survived a massive IRA bomb attack on her hotel at the Brighton Conservative Party conference, and who was still preoccupied by the tense closing stages of the long-drawn-out 1984 miners’ strike. Already, in a speech in Avignon in October, she had claimed not to know what ‘European Union’ meant, preferring ‘practical unity’ in policies.49
A month later, in his New Year message to the German people, Kohl made no secret of his determination, with his ally France, ‘to give decisive impetus to the European Union concept’ during 1985. This was reinforced by the incoming president of the Council, Italy’s foreign minister Giulio Andreotti, who had begun his political career as a protégé of Alcide De Gasperi. Setting out to the European Parliament his programme, he declared, ‘no effort will be spared in seeking agreement by June on a date for convening an intergovernmental conference with the task of negotiating the Treaty on European Union’.50 Therein lay the genesis of what was to become known as the ‘ambush at Milan’. Howe, aided by the ‘Rolls-Royce minds’ of the Foreign Office, should have picked this up. He did not.
By the time of the Brussels Council, on 29–30 March 1985, the Dooge Committee was ready to present its final report. One may imagine Thatcher’s eyes glazing over as she read the first paragraph:
‘After the Second World War, Europe made a very promising start by setting up, firstly with the European Coal and Steel Community and then with the European Economic Community an unprecedented construction which could not be compared with any existing legal entity. The Community – based on the principles of pluralist democracy and the respect for human rights which constitute essential elements for membership and is one of the constant objectives of its activities throughout the world – answered the complex and deeply felt needs of all our citizens.’ 51
Notwithstanding the unsubstantiated assertion that the EEC answered ‘the complex and deeply felt needs of all our citizens’, the essence of the report was expressed in the following three paragraphs:
‘Although the Community decided to complete this construction as from the Summit in the Hague in 1969 and Paris in 1972, it is now in a state of crisis and suffers from serious deficiencies.
In addition, however, the Member States have become caught up in differences which have obscured the considerable economic advantages which could be obtained from the realisation of the Common Market and for Economic and Monetary Union.
Furthermore, after ten years of crisis, Europe, unlike Japan and the United States, has not achieved a growth rate sufficient to reduce the disturbing figure of almost fourteen million unemployed.’ 52
The Committee’s answer was that ‘Europe must recover faith in itself’ and ‘launch itself on a new common venture – the establishment of a political entity based on clearly defined priority objectives coupled with the means of achieving them’. Crucially, in arguing that institutional reform was essential to the Community’s future, the Committee proposed that the national veto must in general be abandoned in favour of qualified majority voting.
This was significant because, as Salter had been urging back in the 1920s and as Monnet had constantly insisted throughout his career, the issue of whether or not an organisation allowed the national veto was the key defining characteristic of a supranational organisation, because it meant that a country could be forced into accepting laws and policies which it did not regard as serving its own national interest. Now, under the inspiration of Spinelli, it seemed the European Community was considering phasing out national vetoes on an unprecedented scale.
The form taken by the Dooge Report was that, throughout its text, any dissenting comments from individual committee members were appended as footnotes. It is therefore possible to see what objections were raised to each point, and on this key proposal the only reservation came from a Dane.53 From Rifkind there was no comment, either on this or on the conclusion that member states must demonstrate their ‘common political will’ by creating ‘a genuine political entity’, namely ‘a European Union’.54
Among ‘priority objectives’ identified by the Committee were measures for the completion of a ‘genuine internal market’, including a ‘common transport policy’, the opening up of access to public contracts and the elimination of taxation differences ‘that impede the achievement of the Community’s objectives’. The European Monetary System should be strengthened. The Committee noted that ‘the logic of integration’ had already led member states to co-operate in fields other than purely economic, arguing that ‘the accentuation of this process will give a European dimension to all aspects of collective life in our countries’. Again, Rifkind was silent.
The Committee wanted laws to protect the environment, on the basis that pollution ‘does not recognise frontiers’, and the gradual creation of a ‘European social area’.55 There should be the ‘gradual establishment of a homogenous judicial area’, together with measures to promote ‘common cultural values’ and ‘an external identity’: i.e. a common foreign policy. This was to be augmented by ‘developing and strengthening consultation on security problems as part of political co-operation’. Picking up on the Rome Declaration, the role of the WEU was identified as working towards a common defence policy, and the report specifically proposed moves towards a fully integrated European defence industry, with industries from different member states working together on joint projects.56
Above all this, however, the report’s most significant recommendation was the elimination of the national veto in favour of qualified majority voting. Here, at last, Rifkind was visible. Where a member state considered that ‘its very important interests’ were at stake, he chipped in, discussion should continue until unanimous agreement was reached.
To achieve the radical changes proposed, the Committee was adamant that a major revision of the treaties would be required. It therefore formally proposed an intergovernmental conference to negotiate a European Union Treaty based on the acquis communautaire and guided by the spirit and method of the draft Treaty voted by the European Parliament.57 ‘The very decision’ to convene such a conference, the report argued, ‘would have a great symbolic value and would represent the initial act of a European Union’. On this too Rifkind remained silent.58
When the Dooge Report was presented to the Brussels Council, no decision was taken. The ‘high noon’ of political integration would have to wait for the next Council, scheduled for Milan on 28–29 June 1985.
Thatcher at this time was focused on a wholly different initiative of her own. Her chief contribution to the Brussels Council had been to propose that the Community should embark on a policy of ‘deregulation’, to stimulate its development as ‘a free trade and free enterprise area’.59 She was excited by the proposals of Arthur Cockfield, formerly the ‘prices commissioner’ under Heath’s government, whom she had sent to Brussels to become the senior British Commissioner under Delors. Within months of his arrival, he had produced a Commission White Paper entitled Completing the Internal Market. This document identified nearly three hundred measures by which, Cockfield suggested, the Community could by 1992 achieve the ‘completion’ of its ‘internal market’ or ‘Single Market’.
In support of this policy, Howe produced a report arguing that it would be impossible to make real progress towards the ‘Single Market’ as long as the unanimity rule prevailed, allowing national vetoes, but he also argued that a new treaty would not be necessary to reduce the number of issues requiring unanimity. The Treaty of Rome could remain unchanged, but there should be a written agreement that the Single Market could proceed as though the unanimity rule did not apply.60 Howe also proposed a greater degree of ‘political co-operation’ on foreign policy and that, if necessary, the Council should be given a political secretariat.61
Howe then persuaded Thatcher that she should be the one to launch his report on the European stage and, to pave the way for its acceptance, she should invite Kohl to become a joint sponsor of the scheme. Thus, unprecedently, Kohl was invited for a Saturday afternoon and evening at Chequers, during which Thatcher presented ‘her’ plan to him. Kohl tucked the paper into his briefcase, promising to look at it.62 Not only was there no response from him but, two weeks after having seen the report, the Germans produced their own counter-proposal; a Treaty between the Twelve to ‘mark a new stage in the progression towards the European Union’ and to establish a common foreign and security policy. Then, just as the Milan Council approached, Mitterrand announced that he would support the German proposal, to transform it into a ‘Franco-German project’. Once again, the Franco-German ‘motor of integration’ had asserted its dominance.
Thatcher should not have been surprised, but she was nevertheless not amused when she learned that much of the German paper was so similar to the British proposals that it was tantamount to plagiarism.63 ‘Such were the consequences of prior consultation’, she remarked tartly in her memoirs. According to Howe, she was furious, and so was he. Neither ever received a word of explanation from Kohl or from anyone on his behalf.64
Nor was the apparent commonality of approach between France, Germany and Britain all that it seemed. It in fact represented a tactical ploy by Mitterrand. Despite his enthusiasm for further integration, there were internal divisions in Germany’s Federal government and, with Thatcher’s resistance, he felt that ‘ambition would have to be moderated’.65 It was better to go for a bottom line that everyone could agree on. That ‘bottom line’ was the Dooge report and, in particular, the completion of the Single Market.66
Mitterand was also aware that expectations of a French success at the Milan Council were high, and a public row would play badly at home. Accordingly, he had decided to take a long view, confiding to his adviser, Jacques Attali, ‘France’s objective is to create a European Union in the long term; the task is now to define the substance and the stages. If we do not agree [at Milan], nothing will be done’.67 Thus, a start would be made on ‘the construction of a political Europe’, and the remaining objectives would be dealt with later.68 That ‘start’ would be an increase in majority voting. On that there could be no compromise. And despite their outward agreement with Thatcher, both Kohl and Mitterrand were adamant that there must be an IGC to push through the necessary changes to the treaties.
Meanwhile, in the months leading up to the Milan Council, others had been active. Although Spinelli recognised that the Dooge Report represented a severe dilution of his proposals, he did not reject it outright. Instead, he toured the European capitals with the president of the Parliament, urging an IGC as soon as possible, continuing to argue that it should work on the basis of his draft treaty. On 18 April 1985 the European Parliament enthusiastically approved a resolution moved by Spinelli insisting that it must be closely associated with the drafting of any new treaty and furthermore that the objections of the UK, Denmark and Greece should not prevent other governments setting up the IGC.
At the same time, as Commission president-designate, Delors had also been touring the capitals, suggesting three themes that were necessary to ‘relaunch’ Europe: a common defence policy; a single currency; and a change in the legal structure which would lead to political integration. He realised from his discussions that he would not get unanimous agreement on all three. As Milan approached, he therefore reached the same conclusions as Kohl and Mitterrand. The only proposal which would win support from all ten governments would be the completion of the Single Market. The further moves to integration they all wanted would be channelled through this project.69 The Single Market was to be the ‘bait’.
The trap is sprung
As all the participants headed for Milan, the scene was thus set for a classic confrontation. The Italian ‘presidency’ had announced the setting of a date for an IGC as their main objective. Kohl, Mitterrand, Delors and the Benelux countries were similarly determined. Against them were ranged the British, the Danes and the Greeks, with the Irish hovering in the middle. Thatcher and Howe in particular were intent on blocking any proposals for a new Treaty and therefore any idea of the IGC needed to bring it into being.
With 50,000 activists mobilised by the European Movement parading through the Milan streets, their banners proclaiming ‘down with frontiers’, Italy’s Socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi in the chair at first tried for a ‘common position’, supported by his Christian Democrat foreign minister, Giulio Andreotti. But Thatcher argued strongly that the Community had demonstrated its ability to take decisions under the present arrangements, and that the Council should simply agree on the measures necessary to achieve the Single Market and ‘political co-operation’. A new treaty was not necessary. Greater use of the existing majority voting articles of the Rome Treaty would suffice.70
As Thatcher quickly discovered, her arguments were to no avail. Having come to Milan to argue for closer co-operation, she found herself being bulldozed by a majority which ‘included a highly partisan chairman’.71 Intergovernmentalism was meeting supranationalism head on, and despite support from Greece and Denmark, intergovernmentalism lost. To Thatcher’s astonishment, Craxi invoked his right as chairman to call for a vote: a highly unorthodox move. Thatcher and Howe were startled to hear that, contrary to their understanding of the rules, only a simple majority was needed to carry the day. An IGC was agreed by a vote of seven to three.
At the end of the Council meeting, Craxi, in his role as president of the Council, made a statement:
‘Today’s decision was a difficult and contested one, but it was eventually carried because of the logic of political will and what is possible under the Treaty. We would have preferred a general consensus and unanimity, but these were not to be had. I believe we shall work steadfastly to overcome the obstacles before us and to achieve the necessary consensus to go forward together towards the objectives of the European Union.’ 72
Delors later told journalists that the Commission endorsed Craxi’s initiative. He added, ‘At least we know where we stand; if we had waited another year or two, we should not have made any progress’. Belgium’s prime minister said the Council had been a ‘turning point marking the end of Europe’s opposition to progress’. The intergovernmental conference would pave the way for the adjustments which would undoubtedly be necessary in a twelve-member Community.73
Howe’s view, faithfully echoed by Hugo Young in his book,74 was that Thatcher herself had been partly responsible for the defeat, Craxi’s behaviour having been triggered by ‘the sharp tone of the British leadership’. Yet Howe admits to having failed completely to anticipate that the British could be outvoted. Had he been better briefed as to what was going on in the background, he would have known that the moment the heads of government walked into the conference room, there could be only one outcome.
Yet again the success of the ‘Milan ambush’ demonstrated the ‘Little England’ insularity of the British participants in the Council, and the inability of either politicians or civil servants to grasp how their ‘partners’ thought and operated. Young at least quotes the comment of Michael Butler, ‘one of the posse of hard-faced Foreign Office men by Thatcher’s side’, who told him years later: ‘I was horrified at my own failure to see that this was what they would do to us if we went on being intransigent’.75 Thatcher bemoaned the fact that so much of her time had been wasted. She would have to return to the Commons to explain why all the high hopes that had been held of Milan had been dashed. She had not even had time to go to the opera.76 More to the point, Howe’s ‘strong voice in Europe’ had turned out to be no more than a pathetic bleat.
In all the excitement over Milan’s main event, the British team also completely overlooked the significance of another item on the agenda, the presentation and approval of a report by Craxi’s representative Pietro Addenino on ‘A People’s Europe’. This had been commissioned by the Fontainebleau Council the previous year, in response to the apathy towards ‘Europe’ shown in the poor turn-out for the elections to the Parliament. It was intended to suggest measures which could be adopted to promote the sense of a ‘European identity’.
Although there was nothing in the Treaty of Rome to authorise such a strategy, various gestures had been made towards it over the years, such as the Tindemans Report’s recommendation in 1975 for a policy forging a ‘people’s Europe’ through ‘concrete manifestations of the European solidarity in everyday life’. The 1983 Stuttgart declaration committed member states to promoting ‘cultural co-operation’, including such proposals as co-operation between higher education establishments and the dissemination of ‘information on Europe’s history and culture so as to promote European awareness’. There was also to be an ‘examination’ of the possibility of promoting joint television and cinema projects.77 This had led in 1984 to the so-called ‘television without frontiers’ directive, the importance of which was spelt out by the Commission:
‘Information is a decisive, perhaps the most decisive, factor in European unification…European unification will only be achieved if Europeans want it. Europeans will only want it if there is such a thing as a European identity. A European identity will only develop if Europeans are adequately informed. At present, information via the mass media is controlled at national level.’ 78
Thus had a new sphere of Community activity emerged, which had no basis whatever in the Treaties. But the Adonnino Report adopted by the Milan Council carried a determination to lift the ‘European identity’ onto a new plane.
Perhaps the most significant of its proposals, in terms of psychological impact, was that the European Community should have its own flag and its own anthem, ‘to be played at appropriate events and ceremonies’. The flag, carrying the emblem of a ring of twelve gold stars on a blue background, was borrowed from the existing flag of the Council of Europe, and would first be raised as the Community’s official flag at a ceremony outside the Berlaymont building in Brussels on 29 May 1986.79 This was accompanied by a first performance of the new ‘European anthem’, adapted from the ‘Ode To Joy’ theme from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, also borrowed from the Council of Europe and first suggested by Coudenhove Kalergi in 1929.
Addenino also recommended the adoption by 1 January 1986 of a standard ‘Community model’ driving licence, following a decision by the Paris European Council in 1984 to adopt a ‘Community passport’ to replace national passports (‘Community’ vehicle number plates, bearing the ring of stars, would soon follow). The report proposed other ‘concrete measures’ to encourage ‘the people of Europe’ to feel a sense of common identity, ranging from a ‘Europe-wide lottery’ to an emergency health card, entitling them to medical assistance in any member state. It recommended that the Community should take over the long-established practice of ‘town twinning’, dating back to the Second World War, and use it to promote the idea of ‘European union’. It recommended that ‘European’ sports teams should compete in international events, wearing the ‘ring of stars’ rather than national symbols (this would be adopted a few years later by the ‘European’ golf team competing against the USA for the Ryder Cup).
In the cultural field, the committee recommended the financing of European cinema and television programmes made by at least two member states, and the launch of a ‘European television channel’. Moving on to education, it recommended the establishment of a ‘European Academy of Science, Technology and Art’, to ‘highlight the achievements of European science and the originality of European civilisation in all its wealth and diversity’. Arguing that ‘the people of Europe’ did not ‘receive satisfactory information on the construction of Europe’, the committee recommended an ‘information programme’, taking the view that:
‘Information about the Community should aim to explain the fundamental themes underlying the crucial importance of the Community for the Member States – the historical events which led to the construction of the Community and which inspire its further development in freedom, peace and security and its achievements and potential in the economic and social field. Member States can show how national action is reinforced by Community action. It is also necessary to point out what the costs would be if the Community did not exist.’ 80
Special attention should be given to educational establishments and the need ‘to facilitate the work of schools and teachers’, by providing them with books and teaching materials putting across ‘the European dimension’. Schools and other institutions should be encouraged each year to celebrate ‘Europe Day’ on 9 May, to commemorate the ‘Schuman Declaration’.
The most obvious feature of the Adonnino report was its overall message that the Community should begin to adopt the symbolic trappings of a nation state (several of which, not least the ‘ring of stars’, would over the next few years become familiar). Yet for all its significance in the evolution of the European Union, the report is not mentioned by Thatcher or Howe in their memoirs, despite their being present when it was approved by the Council, and even though Thatcher’s own senior advisor on European affairs, David Williamson, was a member of the Adonnino committee.81
The Single European Act
It is interesting to contrast how Britain’s two main protagonists at Milan record in their memoirs their immediate response to what had happened to them. Howe does not dwell on the episode. He merely recalls how ‘soon the irritations of Milan faded into history’.82 Thatcher in her own memoirs presents a rather more thoughtful perspective:
‘Annoyed as I was with what had happened, I realised that we must make the best of it. I made clear that we would take part in the IGC. I saw no merit in the alternative policy – practised for a time in earlier years by France – of the so-called “empty chair”. There has to be a major matter of principle at stake to justify any nation’s refusing to take part in Community discussions. That was not the case here: we agreed with the aims of enhanced political co-operation and the Single Market; we disagreed only with the means (i.e., the IGC) to effect them.’ 83
Thus, over the next six months, did Britain for the first time enter into the negotiations for a new ‘European’ treaty.84 The intergovernmental conference or ‘IGC’ which results in a treaty is not so much a single event as a process, lasting many months, encompassing scores of meetings between both officials and ministers. Only after the contents of the treaty have been endlessly thrashed out does the process conclude at a final ‘summit’, where the heads of government argue over any issues still outstanding. The agreed text is then prepared for signing at a later date, before the final stage of the process in which the treaty is ratified by each of the member states.
A striking feature of the 1985 IGC was that, although the Commission had no formal part in it, its members played a central rôle. Delors attended the meetings of foreign ministers, where much of the work was done, while his secretary-general, Emile Noël, attended meetings of officials. Delors, Noël and François Lamoureaux, Delors’ institutional expert, then used the meetings to saturate the delegates with proposals which ‘helped define the agenda and dissuaded many governments from putting forward ideas of their own’.85 All proposals were drafted by these three, without reference to other Commissioners.
With considerable subtlety, Delors steered the negotiations in his direction by carefully linking the UK objectives, notably the single market, to institutional reform.86 To get what they wanted, the British would thus be forced to concede that which they least wanted: an extension of qualified majority voting. Delors was also withering in his scorn for any member state daring to put up objections. While he pressed for what he described as the ‘two great dreams’ of Europe, an ‘area without frontiers’ and monetary union, Thatcher wrote that every exemption sought by other countries ‘seemed to be regarded as a kind of betrayal’. At one time or another, she observed, Delors had denounced almost every member state except Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands.87
Once the mass of paperwork had been distilled to its essentials, the substantive issues emerged. The first two were acceptable to the British: the completion of the Single Market, based on Cockfield’s White Paper, and strengthened co-operation on foreign policy. Delors had also put forward ‘chapters’ on environmental policy, research and ‘cohesion’ (the so-called ‘structural funds’ providing regional aid). All of these were important policy areas in which the Commission had already become active without having the legal authorisation to do so under the Treaty of Rome. With the proposed new competence on environmental policy came also an arcane new principle described as ‘subsidiarity’, the ramifications of which few at the time could have predicted.
The British agreed to all these ‘chapters’, as they did to a modest extension in the role of the European Parliament. Then, however, came the price Thatcher would have to pay for her Single Market. This would be a significant extension in majority voting, the key supranational principle which was the real reason for the treaty.88 The final version included twelve policy areas which would now be subject to QMV, including all measures considered necessary to establish the ‘internal market’, a new competence on ‘health and safety’, decisions relating to regional development and an extension of Community competence to air and sea transport.89 Yet, despite being fully aware that this expansion of QMV greatly increased the powers of the Commission, Thatcher seemed determined to believe that it would only be used to promote her Single Market rather than for any other purpose. What the British could not accept at all was Delors’ vision of ‘space without frontiers’, which would effectively mean surrendering immigration policy to the Commission. There were two other battles, one with proposals put forward by Cockfield over tax harmonisation and the other on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).
The trouble with Cockfield’s proposals stemmed from his remarkable transformation from British minister to European Commissioner. Within months of arriving in Brussels, Thatcher’s nominee had ‘gone native’. In Delors’ own words, ‘he was more and more pro-European’. He was committed to defending the powers and policies of the Commission at all costs.90 Cockfield had produced two schemes, one attempting to increase the harmonisation of VAT rates, the other a proposal for harmonising excise duties on tobacco and alcohol. Both proved highly contentious and were eventually abandoned.
The other battle, over EMU, stemmed from Delors’ insistence that it be included as a new ‘chapter’ in the treaty. This Thatcher resolutely opposed, right up until the Luxembourg ‘summit’ in December which was planned to mark the culmination of the IGC process. On this, she thought she could rely on German support and she certainly had the full support of Lawson, who, according to Thatcher,
‘… stressed that it would be essential that the language used should contain no obligation on us to join the ERM, make it clear that exchange rate policy is the responsibility of national authorities, minimise any extension of Community competence and avoid any treaty reference to EMU.’ 91
As the deadline approached, Delors protested at the changes proposed to his cherished ‘space without frontiers’. At a meeting of foreign ministers on 25–26 November 1985, he complained that his texts now had ‘more holes than Gruyère’ and stormed off to see Kohl and Mitterrand, with spectacular results. By the next ministerial meeting, a Franco-German initiative had reinstated Delors’ proposals.92
For Thatcher, things were to get worse. By the time the heads of government met in Luxembourg on 2–3 December 1985, the Franco-German axis had also reached an accommodation with Delors on monetary union. Germany, having abandoned Britain, agreed to accept a mention of EMU in return for a concession from the French on another issue to which they had been strongly opposed. This enabled Delors to insert into the preamble of the new treaty a commitment to the ‘progressive realisation of economic and monetary union’.93 The inclusion of this phrase moved Thatcher to consider vetoing the treaty, but she was persuaded to give her assent by the Foreign Office, who assured her the statement had no legal significance. Even then, just before midnight on the second day, when everyone was poised to sign, she thought long and hard before affixing her own name.94 But, with that, the Ten had formalised the Single European Act: a treaty in which they confirmed their will to transform relations between their nations into ‘a European Union’.
Almost as an afterthought, they also signed an intergovernmental treaty on ‘co-operation’ in foreign policy, enshrining the London agreement of 1981. Without committing themselves to details they had already agreed in principle that regional and development funds would be ‘significantly increased in real terms’. They finally agreed to declarations of intent on co-operation in research and the funding of technological development (the so-called ‘Eureka’ programme). With all that, the ‘EEC’ or ‘Common Market’ formally became the ‘European Community’, a term already informally used for several years.
After the summit, one of the main points of interest was monetary union. Thatcher told journalists that the text on EMU was meaningless, otherwise she would not have signed it. Delors had a different perspective. For him, it was a signpost. ‘It’s like the story of Tom Thumb lost in the forest, who left white stones so he could be found’, he said. ‘I put in white stones so we could find monetary union again’.95
Reaction to the treaty elsewhere was generally downbeat. Spinelli declared that ‘the mountain’ had given ‘birth to a mouse’. 96 BBC television news next day reported that ministers had met but ‘all that emerged was a few modest reforms of the Treaty of Rome’.97 The Guardian considered Britain had been the victor. The Economist, redolent of Spinelli, called the treaty a ‘smiling mouse’, meaning that it was well-intentioned but too diminutive to make much difference.98
The real significance of the Single European Act, however, was conveyed by its title. Although it would be presented as mainly dealing with the Single Market, it was in reality a further crucial step towards building a ‘single Europe’. It extended ‘Community competences’, by taking over from national governments the power to make laws in several important new policy areas, notably the environment. Through the extension of majority voting it added substantially to the supranational nature of the Community. And for those privy to all the plotting and manoeuvring which had brought the treaty about in the first place, there was also the knowledge that this first serious revision of the Treaty of Rome was already intended to pave the way for a second treaty. This would be much more ambitious in its scope. One clue to this had been Delors’ insistence on that declaration of intent about ‘economic and monetary union’.
Of all this, however, Thatcher herself seemed sublimely unaware. Answering questions in the Commons on her return from Luxembourg, she declared:
‘I am constantly saying that I wish they would talk less about European and political union. The terms are not understood in this country. In so far as they are understood over there, they mean a good deal less than some people over here think they mean.’ 99
If she had not yet got the message, neither had Parliament. When the Single European Act came to be ratified, the necessary Bill amending the European Communities Act 1972 was pushed through an often thinly attended Commons in just six days. The main debate was scheduled to begin on a Thursday, in the knowledge that MPs would be reluctant to see it prolonged lest it encroach on their weekend. After only three sessions of the committee stage, the government abruptly curtailed any further discussion by passing a ‘guillotine’ motion.
On the final reading, so few MPs turned up that the Bill passed by a mere 149 votes to 43. Apart from a tiny minority from both Labour and Tory benches, few MPs appreciated that this was what even Hugo Young would later agree was ‘a major constitutional measure’.100 Peter Tapsell, an unrepentant Eurosceptic who within a few years would be prominent in opposing the Maastricht Treaty, later spoke for not a few of his colleagues in recalling how they had eventually become ‘ashamed’ at having voted for it. ‘We didn’t give it the attention we should have done’, he said.101
The real irony was that, in accepting the treaty as an economic measure, Thatcher had unwittingly placed herself in exactly the same situation as the people who had been deceived by Macmillan and Heath into accepting something which was ‘political’ as just a matter of economics (of which she had been one). But Milan was the start of a learning curve which was eventually to prove her downfall.
On 23 May 1986, Altiero Spinelli died in Rome in his eightieth year. His dream might not yet have been fully achieved, but his life’s work was done.
1 Callaghan, James. (1987), Time And Chance (London, Collins), p. 304.
2 Ball, op. cit, pp. 98–99.
3 Duchêne, op. cit, p. 340. Duchêne records how, in 1988, to mark the centenary of Monnet’s birth, Mitterrand arranged for his ashes to be transferred to the grandiose neo-classical setting of the Pantheon in Paris, to lie alongside the remains of such legendary French heroes as Rousseau, Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola. Mitterrand addressed a torchlit ceremony on the steps, attended by Chancellor Kohl and many other European dignitaries, who stood for a performance of the ‘European anthem’ adapted from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Monnet’s home at Houjarray was bought by the European Parliament as a shrine to his memory.
4 This was just one of what would eventually be more than 450 directives controlling the production of motor vehicles. All details of legislation taken from the Official Journal of the European Communities: Directory of Community Legislation in Force.
5 CJEC, opinion 1/76 of 26 April 1977, ECR 741.
6 Rewe-Zentral v. Bundesmonopolverwaltung für Branntwein, Case 120/78 [1979] ECR 649 [1979]3 CMLR 494. See also Weatherill, Stephen, and Beaumont, Paul (1995), EC Law – The Essential Guide to the Legal Workings of the European Community (2nd edition) (London, Penguin Books), pp. 490–542.
7 Callaghan was to record his frustration at this in the passage from his memoirs quoted at the head of this chapter, preceded by recalling his bafflement at finding himself having to correspond with his ‘Chancellor, Denis Healey about import levels of apricot halves and canned fruit salad’ (op. cit., p. 304).
8 Urwin, op. cit., p. 285.
9 Burgess, M. (1989), Federalism And The European Union: Political Ideas, Influence And Strategy (London, Routledge), pp. 55–56, cited in McAllister, op. cit., pp. 156–157.
10 The following section of the narrative is constructed from a history of Spinelli’s activities of this period, written by Palayret, Jean-Marie. (Undated), ‘Entre cellule Carbonara et conseiller des Princes: Impulsions et limites de la relance européenne dans le projet Spinelli d’Union politique des années 1980’. http://users.skynet.be/clubcrocodile/Archive/ ProjetSpinneli.htm. (translated by the authors), augmented by interviews with Richard Balfe MEP.
11 Dastoli had been chef de cabinet for Spinelli when he was president of the ‘Independent Left’ group in the Italian parliament. From July 1979 to June 1983, he became Spinelli’s parliamentary assistant in the European Parliament. By 2003 he was a senior official of the European Parliament, had been secretary-general of the international European Movement since April 1995 and was a professor of the History of European Integration at Rome University.
12 Johnson had between 1973 and 1979 been a senior official of the European Commission, as head inter alia of its Prevention of Pollution and Nuisances Division. In 1984, he resumed his career in the Commission, becoming Director for Energy Policy in 1990. His son Boris was to become a prominent journalist and Conservative MP.
13 The magazine survives to this day.
14 Interview with authors, 2 December 2002.
15 European Parliament (1982), Selection of Texts Concerning Institutional Matters of the Community from 1950–1982 (Luxembourg), pp. 492–499.
16 Reproduced in Selection of Texts Concerning Institutional Matters of the Community from 1950–1982, pp. 539–542.
17 Named after Gymnich Schloss, a palatial German Federal Government guest house near Cologne, used for informal, confidential meetings of foreign ministers. The British equivalent is ‘Chatham House Rules’.
18 Debates of the European Parliament, No. 1 289/237.
19 Ibid.
20 Commission of the European Communities. European Bulletin, EC 6-1983, points 1.6.1 to 4.3.
21 Ibid., point 1.1.
22 Blair’s 1983 election address was published in fascimile on the No-Euro website, www.no-euro.com.
23 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 314.
24 Ibid.
25 Howe, op. cit., p. 307.
26 Debates of the European Parliament. No. 1/289: 261-2.
27 Figures confirmed by fisheries commissioner Frans Fischler in reply to a question from Charles Tannoch MEP in 2002.
28 There was also, in Community terms, the ‘side-issue’ of the dispute between Britain and Spain over Britain’s colony Gibraltar, and the opening of the land border which had been closed by General Franco since 1969. The border crossing problem was partially resolved in February 1984, after 15 months of bilateral talks, when Geoffrey Howe signed an agreement with Spain to re-open the border, on the promise of holding talks about Gibraltar’s sovereignty. See Howe, op. cit., p. 407.
29 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 545.
30 European Parliament, Directorate-General for Information and Public Relations, Publications and Briefings Division, Luxembourg.
31 Ibid., Article 3.
32 Ibid., Article 9.
33 Ibid., Article 16.
34 Spinelli, Altiero, Diario Europeo, pp. 976 and 998.
35 See Palayret, op. cit. He cites official documents.
36 Ibid., citing: Mitterrand, F. (1985), Réflexions Sur La Politique Extérieure De La France. Introduction à 25 discours, 1981-1985. Fayard, Paris, pp. 261–262 and 281.
37 Ibid., citing Dépêche Agence France-Presse, 21 February 1984, in AN. 5 AG (4) PM 12.
38 AN AG 5 (4) PM 12. Direction économique et financière, service de coopération économique. Fiche sur ‘Présidence française: réforme des institutions (projet Spinelli)’, 20 December 1983.
39 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 546.
40 Mitterrand, Réflexions.
41 Saunier, G. (2001), ‘Prélude à la relance de l’Europe. Le couple franco-allemand et les pro-jets de relance communautaire vus de l’hexagone 1981–1985’, in Bitsch, M. T., Le couple France-Allemagne et les Constitutions européennes (Bruxelles, Bruylant), pp. 464–485.
42 AHCE; AS 365, document PE 94.568: ‘Note établissant un parallèle entre le rapport du Comité Dooge et le projet de Traité instituant l’Union européenne’, 13 December 1984.
43 Howe, op. cit., pp. 403–404.
44 Cited in Hillman, Judy, and Clarke, Peter (1988), Geoffrey Howe – A Quiet Revolutionary (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson), p. 172.
45 Howe, op. cit., p. 386.
47 A ‘fonctionnaire’ in France is much more than a civil servant. Most of the fonctionnaire class which came to rule France in the closing decades of the 20th century were educated at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), set up by Michel Debré in 1946, and known as ‘Enarques’. The Enarques may play the role of politician and senior official interchangeably. Prominent Enarques included Giscard d’Estaing, Jacques Chirac (who first became French prime minister in 1974, when Giscard moved from the premiership to the Presidency), and several French Commissioners, such as Pascal Lamy and Yves Thibault de Silguy, responsible for setting up the single currency. Delors, though unmistakably a fonctionnaire, was not an Enarque, since he did not attend the ENA.
48 Agence Europe, No. 3984. 6 December 1984, p. 7.
49 Corbett, Richard (2001), The European Parliament’s Role In Closer EU Integration (London, Palgrave), p. 205.
50 Debates of the European Parliament, 16 January 1985, No. 2-321, pp. 105–106.
51 Ad Hoc Committee for Institutional Affairs, Report to the European Council, SN/1187/85 (SPAAK II), Brussels, 29–30 March 1985, p. 1.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid., p. 2, footnote 1.
54 Ibid., p. 3.
55 Ibid., p. 14.
56 Ibid., pp. 21-22.
57 Ibid., p. 33.
58 As Thatcher’s ‘personal representative’, Rifkind was later keen to emphasise that he was not authorised to ‘support or oppose any proposal without the express agreement of Number Ten’ (personal communication with authors). The countries whose representatives registered the greatest number of objections or reservations to the Dooge proposals were Greece (14) and Denmark (11). Britain came well behind with only four (one of which in fact proposed even greater integration, with an increased role for the European Parliament). On the committee’s final recommendation, that there should be a new IGC to negotiate a ‘European Union Treaty’, Britain and Greece proposed that this should be left to negotiation between governments, for discussion at the Milan Council.
59 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 546.
60 Ibid.
61 Howe, op. cit., p. 408; Sharp, P. (1999), Thatcher’s Diplomacy: The Revival Of British Foreign Policy (London, Macmillan), pp. 162–163.
62 Howe, op. cit., p. 409.
63 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 549; McAllistair, op. cit., p. 174.
64 Howe, op. cit., p. 409.
65 Palayret, op. cit. He cites: AN. 5 AG (4) EG 13, ‘Note pour le Président’ (E. Guigou) a/s. ‘Votre rencontre avec le chancelier Kohl: Que faire pour l’Europe?’, 20 May 1985.
66 Favier, P. Martin-Rolland, M., La décennie Mitterrand. T. II, Les épreuves (1984–1988), p. 215.
67 Attali, Jacques, verbatim account, cited in Palayret, op. cit.
68 Attali, in Palayret, op. cit.
69 Grant, op. cit., pp. 66–67.
70 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 559.
71 Ibid., p. 550.
72 Bulletin of the European Communities, EC 6-1985, point 1.2.10.
73 Ibid.
74 Young, op. cit., p. 332.
75 Ibid.
76 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 551.
77 European Bulletin, op. cit., point 3.3.
78 Commission of the European Communities, Television Without Frontiers: Green Paper on the Establishment of the Common Market for Broadcasting especially for Satellite and Cable, COM(84) final, Luxembourg.
79 The rationale for the ring of stars, according to the Commission, was that twelve was a symbol of perfection and plenitude, associated equally with the apostles, the sons of Jacob, the tables of the Roman legislator, the labours of Hercules, the hours of the day, the months of the year, or the signs of the Zodiac. Lastly, the circular layout denoted union. The Commission also pointed out that the circle of twelve stars was a Christian symbol representing the Virgin Mary’s halo, which was a symbol of European identity and unification.
80 Commission, op. cit., p. 13.
81 European Council, Presidency Conclusions, Milan 28–29 June 1985. Bulletin of the European Parliament, PE 99 511, Luxembourg, p. 7.
82 Howe, op. cit., p. 447.
83 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 551.
84 Contrary to general understanding, the Single European Act was not to be the first treaty since the Treaties of Rome. There had also been the Treaty of Brussels in 1965, merging the three ‘Communities’ and the very important Luxembourg Treaty of 1970 establishing the arrangements for the EEC budget and the financing of the CAP, which in turn was superseded by the 1975 Treaty of Brussels (which also introduced the Court of Auditors). In addition to these, the accession treaties each time there was an ‘enlargement’ could themselves be used to establish new principles of policy which might have repercussions wider than those affecting the applicant countries alone (as in the details of fisheries policy established in 1972).
85 Grant, op. cit., p. 73.
86 Corbett, op. cit., p. 219.
87 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 351.
88 With the accession of Spain and Portugal in 1986, the number of votes in Council rose to 76: the four biggest countries, France, Germany, Britain and Italy each with ten votes; Spain with eight; Belgium, Greece, the Netherlands and Portugal with five; Denmark and Ireland with three; and Luxembourg with two.
89 A ‘qualified majority’ would require 54 of the 76 votes, thus preventing the ‘big four’ ganging up on the smaller states, but leaving Britain with only just over one-seventh of the vote.
90 The Poisoned Chalice, verbatim statement: subtitle translation.
91 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 554.
92 Grant, op. cit., p. 73.
93 Ibid.
94 Thatcher, op. cit., p. 554.
95 Interview with Delors. Grant, op. cit., p. 74.
96 Palayret, op. cit.
97 Shown in The Poisoned Chalice.
98 Grant, op. cit., p. 74.
99 Thatcher, op. cit.
100 Young, op. cit., p. 334.
101 The Poisoned Chalice.