Fifty Things You Need To Know About British History. Hugh Williams

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       CHAPTER 10

       Britain Signs the Treaty of Rome

       1973

      In 1973 Britain joined the European Economic Community by signing the Treaty of Rome. It agreed to relinquish certain aspects of its national sovereignty in return for the benefits of cooperation with other European powers.

      In 1910 a newspaper headline caught the eye of the comic poet, Harry Graham. ‘The Kaiser,’ it said, ‘spoke at length with the Baron de Haulleville, Director of the Congo Museum, in French, German, and English.’ Graham decided to celebrate this multi-lingual occasion as follows:

      Guten morgen, mon ami,

       Heute ist es schones Wetter!

       Charmé de vous voir ici!

       Never saw you looking better!

      Another verse reads:

       Und die Kinder, how are they?

       Ont-ils eu la rougeole [measles] lately?

       Sind sie avec vous today?

      J’aimerais les treffen greatly.

      This piece of fun, written nearly a hundred years ago, can still raise a smile today. In fact it feels quite modern. It displays a certain relevance to the integrated European world in which we live – a continent without borders, sharing for the most part a common currency, which has turned its back on the conflicts of the past to sink its hopes in a united vision of prosperity and peace.

      The European Union of today was created out of the ashes of war.

      Harry Graham’s poem was written before the First World War devastated the hopes of Britain and its Empire, before the long depressions of the inter-war years and the fight to the death against Nazi Germany. It is no wonder that after nearly forty years of conflict and decline the tottering nations of Europe decided to grasp each other for support and to build something between them that might prevent the outbreak of war again. The European Union of today was created out of the ashes of war, and the greatest of the wartime leaders, Winston Churchill, was one of its first proponents. Speaking in Zurich in 1946 he said: ‘We must build a kind of United States of Europe.’ Quoting William Gladstone in his famous defence of Home Rule for Ireland he called for what the nineteenth-century Prime Minister had called ‘the blessed act of oblivion’ and added: ‘We must all turn our backs on the horrors of the past and we must look to the future.’ Most importantly, and presciently, he said there ‘must be a partnership between France and Germany’. He thought this was more important than Britain’s involvement and ended his speech with this: ‘If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join a union we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.’ In the event this is what happened. The European state which was not willing or able turned out to be Britain.

      In May 1950 the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, announced that the French and German governments were going to create a common ‘High Authority’ to regulate and control the production of coal and steel within the two countries. Other countries in Europe would be invited to participate in the plan which would ‘make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible’. The British government was given only a few hours’ notice of Schuman’s announcement, and its reaction was one of dismay. The nation still felt itself to be a world power. It was not like the other countries of Europe. It did not need to be pushed or chivvied into schemes it had not helped to invent. Furthermore it had just completed the nationalisation of its coal industry and was not inclined to unpick this to please some new, European dream.

      In fact Schuman and the planning brains behind the Franco-German idea, Jean Monnet, were prepared to let Britain join their partnership even though its coal industry was nationalised, but the British government under the re-elected Labour leader, Clement Attlee, declined. The country had a strong trading relationship with the Commonwealth and a political alliance with America – although America was very much in favour of seeing Britain absorbed into the European alliance. In 1952 the Treaty of Paris created the European Coal and Steel Community, made up of France, West Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Five years later, in 1957, the Treaty of Rome took it one stage further and established the European Economic Community. Britain could only watch these developments from the sidelines. It had decided to stay out, following the approach laid down by Winston Churchill who, although he had eloquently defended the idea of European integration in 1947, told his cabinet four years later: ‘We help, we dedicate, we play a part, but we are not merged and do not forfeit our insular or Commonwealth character.’

      By the 1960s the realities of international commerce were beginning to filter into the minds of British politicians. In 1960 Britain joined an organisation called the European Free Trade Area, or EFTA, whose other members were Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal. This was simply a trading association without the same political apparatus of the European Community. A year later, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, told the House of Commons that Britain was tendering a formal application to join the Common Market on condition that its obligations to the Commonwealth could be met. He was, he said, ‘not confident, but hopeful’ of success. Neither confidence nor hope would prove enough. The French President, Charles de Gaulle, sceptical of Britain’s commitment to the European idea, exercised his veto on two occasions, in 1963 and 1967, to prevent it from joining. In 1967 he loftily declared that Britain would need to accomplish ‘a profound economic and political transformation’ before it could become a member. Only in 1973, with the first enlargement of the original six-nation membership, was Britain allowed into Europe, along with Denmark and Ireland.

      Britain today, in 2008, has been part of the European idea for thirty-five years. The EEC has become the European Union. The collapse of the Soviet Union’s control of the countries of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, combined with the reunification of Germany in 1990, has fuelled its expansion on an unexpected scale. There are twenty-seven members with three more waiting to join. One of these is Turkey whose candidacy is highly controversial: a former French President, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, declared that Turkey was ‘not a European country’ and that its membership of the eu would mean ‘the end of Europe’. Meanwhile the member states have committed, under the Treaty of Lisbon of 2007, to strengthen the organisation and institutions of the Union, giving more power to its parliament, appointing a new President of the European Council and extending its activities to include defence. In Britain, and in some other countries, there has been strong opposition to these reforms being introduced without ordinary people approving them through a popular vote. The idea of the war-torn nations of Europe embracing one another in an act of self-protective friendship has grown into a vast multi-national conglomerate. It has turned European history on its head; the historic rivalries of individual sovereign states have been abandoned in a surge of democratic СКАЧАТЬ