Orchestrating Europe (Text Only). Keith Middlemas

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       The Stagnant Decade, 1973–83

      There is a received picture in Britain of a Community slumping from the high point of optimism reached at the Hague in 1972 into a dismal decade of inertia, relieved only by fractious competition among its member states. Like all received pictures it contains truths. The aspirations of 1972, such as the Davignon Report’s attempt to address the issue of political cooperation for the first time since the mid–1960s,¹ and the Community’s first enlargement in 1973, did little to break the pattern of self-interested national bargaining vying with rare bursts of collective altruism. Worse, the recession set off in 1973–4, and renewed in 1980–82 after an uneasy remission, brought internal problems and a pan-European sense of relative decline. Yet EC institutions sustained the idea of integration with an often surprising momentum in the interstices, so that the astonishing regeneration of the mid–1980s has to be explained not only in terms of a sudden shift around 1984 but in an accumulation of long-planned strategies at different levels within the Community and among different categories of players in the game.

      The accession of Britain, Denmark and Ireland on 1 January 1973 occurred while the optimistic mood survived, so that the immediate consequential processes of adapting EC institutions and negotiating the informal areas took place against a background of goodwill, buoyed up by affinity between Edward Heath’s government and that of Georges Pompidou. But ministers and officials in Brussels had also to adapt to – or frustrate – the expectation of two new small states (Denmark and Ireland), both with a high agricultural content to their economies, and one large one (Britain) whose predominantly industrial economy, currency and financial institutions were, by the end of 1973, manifestly in disarray, and its industrial relations close to civil disorder.

      Yet in the years of Britain’s final negotiations, the climate of opinion both in the EC and in the Heath government had been optimistic, even euphoric. To French observers, Heath seemed not only willing to pay the full price of entry but to bring for the first – indeed in retrospect the only – time a genuine willingness to follow European models of industrial policy and industrial government. In turn, Heath saw his DTI and regional innovations as material for the EC to emulate.² The fact that an anti-EC wing already existed in his Conservative party seemed unimportant, for Enoch Powell, then the chief critic, was not to turn to outright hostility until 1974. The fact that all Britain’s initial advantage was subsequently lost should not obscure the possibility that, had the oil crisis not struck then, and had Heath not lost the February 1974 election, Britain might have fitted into a novel triangular relationship with Germany and France in a way quite different from its actual halting, semi-detached progress thereafter.

      Denmark, in spite of some internal opposition, could take advantage of the experience of other small states in northern Europe, and its economic linkages with West Germany; Ireland (whose emergence from a long period of introspective isolation which stretched back to the late 1920s had now begun) increasingly found a political ally in France. But British entry posed questions for the future of the Franco-German entente, and since the accession terms represented an act of will by the Heath government, with the close support of business, banking and industry, rather than the nation as a whole, Britain’s long-term stance under the next Labour government remained problematic – something which not only French and German governments but those of Benelux and even Italy watched with trepidation.

      The new entrants’ responses differed from the beginning. As the Commission recruited new staff, experts and linguists, the Irish took up the offers speedily and successfully, the Danes less so, and the British with marked reluctance. Whitehall’s resistance to transfers, and fears among expatriates for their promotion, lost a great potential advantage during the next decade.³ Due to the lack of full cooperation between ministries, for example, Britain found its former colonies losing out on the share of Yaoundé/Lomé aid even as late as 1981, when they gained only 11 % of the total despite the existence of an informal system of apportioning on a geographical basis, because the form had been shaped originally with Francophone Africa in mind, on which UK representations subsequently made small impression. The Labour party also refused to take the seats allotted to it in the Parliament, as trades unions did in the Economic and Social Committee (Ecosoc) – again in contrast to the other entrants, ensuring an illusory Tory parliamentary contingent at the first direct elections in 1979.

      Meanwhile, the new Commission President, from France, Francois-Xavier Ortoli, encouraged the Paris Summit momentum on three broad fronts. As free trade agreements came into force with EFTA countries (Austria, Sweden and Switzerland, followed by Norway, Iceland, and Finland in January 1973, together with Portugal in 1974, newly liberated from dictatorship) it seemed for the first time since Messina that the ‘real Europe’ could be achieved. Discussion began with North African countries about long-term trading relationships, although nothing tangible was likely to emerge until the Council had agreed its own policy for the European side of the Mediterranean. By July 1973, EC and ACP countries started to negotiate both renewal and extension of the Yaoundé Convention, clearly necessary in terms of former British colonies, and despite this potent source of Anglo-French tension, what emerged as the Lomé Convention between СКАЧАТЬ