MONNET CAN'T BUY YOU LOVE
John Laughland says that Tony Blair is wrong:
Britain did not stand aside from Europe in the early days; she was pushed aside
IN his speech on Britain's relations with Europe last week, Tony Blair advanced the familiar historical claim that Britain made a huge strategic error by standing aloof when the European institutions were created. According to this argument, peddled vigorously by Euro-grandees for five decades now, our refusal to sign up to the early European Community crippled our ability to influence its subsequent development. To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, goes the reasoning, we must be wholeheartedly engaged as positive Europeans in the future.
This assertion has the key political advantage of nagging, at his deepest emotional level, the Englishman's greatest neurosis — the terror of being excluded from the club. It is therefore very suitable for Tony Blair's purposes: a man who does not know how to spell the word 'tomorrow' is hardly interested in anything as trivial as historical truth. But it is an argument based on a complete misunderstanding of the logic of the European construction. The reality is that, far from standing aside when supranational European institutions were set up, Britain was in fact deliberately excluded from them in order to enable them to be created at all.
The history of the European construction does not begin, as British Euro-propagandists like to pretend, when Britain declined to sign up to the Messina conference which led to the creation of the EEC in 1957. Instead, it begins with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, on whose institutions those of the present EU are still based. As the Sorbonne historian Christophe RevelHard has shown, it was in the run-up to the signature of the ECSC treaty in 1951 that the supranational character of what was later to evolve into the EU was successfully forced on to the original six member states by resolutely keeping Britain out.
Before that, under Churchill's influence, Britain's role in building Europe on an intergovernmental basis had got off to quite a good start with the creation of the Council of Europe in 1949. That Strasbourg institution had all kinds of agreeable features such as a human-rights court and a parliamentary assembly, but it was also comfortably consensual: de Gaulle was later to poke fun at it as 'that little institution which sleeps by the side of the Rhine'. The United Kingdom was also a founder member of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, created in 1948 and which the Americans, through Averell Harriman, immediately tried to turn into a federalist organisation. This plan was successfully thwarted at the outset when the British vetoed Paul Henri Spaak's appointment as head of it.
As soon as European federalists and their American allies realised that London was using its influence to create a flexible Europe, they — especially Jean Monnet — decided instead to create their own federal institutions without Britain. As an employee of the American government from 1942 onwards, Jean Mon net had always been deeply committed to supranational European integration; indeed, so visceral was Monnet's hatred of national independence in general and of General de Gaulle in particular that, following the lead of the Americans, who refused to recognise de Gaulle, he very nearly succeeded in killing off the embryonic French Resistance. On 20 June 1940, Monnet, who had been given a post at the Foreign Office, persuaded the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, to cease de Gaulle's broadcasts on the BBC after the general had made only two. It was only when General Spears, who had brought de Gaulle to London, and Duff Cooper intervened directly with Churchill at Chequers that the decision was overturned and the broadcasts resumed on 22 June.
So when in 1949 the chancellor, Sir Stafford Cripps, dispatched three officials to discuss Monnet's plans to create a supranational authority to control coal and steel production in Europe, and when the familiar British position was presented — yes to commercial arrangements, no to federalism — Monnet immediately determined to prevent the British from even entering the negotiations on the new body, precisely so that it would be supranational. Among other considerations, Britain had to be kept out in order to weaken the Germans' hand. As Monnet himself wrote, 'The British will agree to participate in the negotiations only in the hope that a structure will emerge which they can join. . . But it is clear that if the British participate under conditions which allow them to question the principles themselves' — i.e.
supranationalism 'then other countries, in particular Germany, will do the same.' Monnet had always wanted 'gradually to make European that which is national', and he knew that supranationalism therefore had to be an absolute precondition to any negotiation. Even today candidate states for EU membership, like Britain in 1972, are not allowed to question any of the acquis communautaire either before or after joining.
Consequently, Monnet insisted that the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, press ahead with his famous declaration on creating the supranational Coal and Steel Community, on 9 May 1950, behind Britain's back. As even the vehemently pro European journalist Hugo Young admits, Monnet decided that, if supranationalism was to be achieved, the Schuman Declaration required a 'conspiracy' to exclude the largest coal and steel producer in Europe: Britain. It was a conspiracy, by the way, in which the American government and its secretary of state, Dean Acheson, were fully complicit. Although the Americans were initially worried about the threat of a European steel cartel, they soon saw the political and security benefits that they would obtain from a federally integrated Europe, and so agreed to back the French and Germans behind Britain's back. The British government was therefore deliberately kept in the dark about preparations for the Schuman Declaration, and did not learn about it until it was too late. Mon net's approach was naively but effectively denounced at the time by a French Socialist deputy, Francis Leenhardt: 'Why is France so attached to such a rigid notion of having a supranational European authority, when it is obvious that the more we go down this route, the more we will distance ourselves from the British?' Poor old Leenhardt could not see that this was the whole point.
So by the time the 1955 Messina conference came round, there was precious little left for Britain to influence. The principle of supranationalism — the one thing Monnet wanted and the one thing the British refused to accept — had already been established. Although the European Defence Community had been vetoed by Gaullists and Communists in 1954, the EEC treaty of 1957, which grew out of Messina, was an entirely natural continuation of the logic of the ECSC treaty signed six years earlier. So when Tony Blair said last Friday that Britain had 'jibbed' at the supranationalism of the Coal and Steel Community — 'So we said that it wouldn't happen. Then we said it wouldn't work. Then we said we didn't need it' — he was both confusing the ECSC with the EEC and also apparently cultivating the old story that the British delegate to Messina, Sir Russell Bretherton, had unilaterally broken off the talks by declaiming imperiously, 'Gentlemen, you are trying to negotiate something you will never be able to negotiate. But if negotiated, it will not be ratified. And if ratified, it will not work.' In fact, these words were never uttered.
It was therefore not influence that Britain lost in the period 1957-73; it was rather the resolve to maintain national independence. The supranationalism we accepted in 1973 was the same as in 1951 or 1957. The only difference lay in the British government's decision deliberately to obscure from Parliament and the people the constitutional implications of EEC membership. When Harold Macmillan set in motion the process that Edward Heath was later to bring to fruition, he did so by deliberately pretending that inside the EEC Britain would continue to be governed as before. 'It was in essence,' writes Hugo Young, 'a lie.
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