system in which these struggles were fought out.
Although he was proud of his country, Monnet was not committed to the framework of the nation-state. He opposed the French nuclear deterrent and tried to dissuade Adenauer from signing the Franco-German Treaty. From the conception of the ECSC onwards, he worked consistently for supranational goals in Europe. He was initially cool towards the idea of the EEC, which he did not originate, thinking the Common Market to be a ‘rather vague’ scheme—he was anyway not particularly impressed with doctrines of free trade. Milward makes much of his paradoxical underestimation of the potential of a customs union for integration, but the question Monnet put as early as 1955—‘Is it possible to have a Common Market without federal social, monetary and macro-economic policies?’12—is still the central issue before the European Union forty years later. The order of the phrasing is significant. A banker by profession, Monnet was not economically conservative. He always sought trade-union support for his schemes, and late in life even expressed sympathy with the student movement of 1968, whose warning of social injustice stood for ‘the cause of humanity’.13
On the other hand, Monnet was a stranger to the democratic process, as conventionally understood. He never faced a crowd or ran for office. Shunning any direct contact with electorates, he worked among elites only. From Milward’s standpoint, in which European integration flowed from the popular consensus inside each nation-state, as expressed at the polls, this was in itself enough to condemn him to the irrelevance that affected federalism more largely. It is more plausible, however, to draw the opposite lesson. Monnet’s career was emblematic, in a particularly pure way, of the predominant character of the process that has led to the Union we have today. At no point until—ostensibly—the British referendum of 1976 was there any real popular participation in the movement towards European unity.
Parliamentary majorities, of course, had to be stitched together, and corporate interests squared: there was room for alert lobbies or cross-grained deputies to put in their word. But the electorates themselves were never consulted. Europe was scarcely mentioned at the polls that in January 1956 brought the Republican Front to office in France—they were fought over the Algerian conflict and the appeal of Poujade. But the critical point on which the fate of the EEC finally turned was the switch of a few dozen SFIO votes in the National Assembly that had blocked the EDC, in response to the climate after Suez. The weakest performer in Milward’s theoretical quartet is here. The democratic foundations he ascribes to the whole process of integration were quite notional. There was an absence of popular opposition to plans designed and debated on high, which received mere negative assent below. In his most recent writing, Milward himself comes close to conceding as much. The reality is the one Duchêne describes: ‘The situation was not revolutionary, and voters were neither a motor nor a brake’.14
But if this is so, what enabled Monnet and his associates to play the role they did in the bargaining between chancelleries? If we ask why the outcome of European integration was not as lopsidedly inter-governmental as a neo-realist logic would appear to imply—was not, in other words, something closer to the kind of framework that, let us say, Mendès-France or De Gaulle (or later Thatcher or Major) would have approved—the answer is twofold. Firstly, among the Six the smaller nations were predisposed to federalist solutions. The Benelux countries, whose own customs union was adumbrated in exile as early as 1943, were states whose only prospect of significant influence in Europe lay in some kind of supranational framework. It was two foreign ministers from the Low Countries—Beyen in the Netherlands and Spaak in Belgium—who originated the key moves that led to the eventual brokerage of the Treaty of Rome. Beyen, who first actually proposed the Common Market, was not an elected politician, but a former executive for Philips and director of Unilever parachuted straight from the IMF into the Dutch cabinet. Milward, forgetting his strictures on Monnet, rightly salutes him.
There was, however, a second and much heavier weight that descended on the federalist side of the scales. That was, of course, the United States. Monnet’s strength as an architect of integration did not lie in any particular leverage with European cabinets—even if he eventually came to enjoy the confidence of Adenauer—but in his direct line to Washington. American pressure, in the epoch of Acheson and Dulles, was crucial in putting real—not merely ideal—force behind the conception of ‘ever greater union’ that came to be enshrined in the Treaty of Rome. In so far as it tends to underplay this role, Milward’s account can be taxed not with excess but insufficiency of realism.
At the same time US policy throws into sharp relief the last of Milward’s postulates. For consistent American patronage, at critical moments pressure, for far-reaching European integration did not correspond to the interests or demands of any important domestic constituency. In the decisions reached, US voters counted for nothing. More significantly, when the potential for economic competition from a more unified Western Europe, equipped with a common external tariff, was registered by the Treasury, the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Reserve, they were firmly overridden by the White House and the State Department. American politico-military imperatives, in the global conflict with Communism, trumped commercial calculation without the slightest difficulty. Eisenhower informed Pineau that the realization of the Treaty of Rome would be ‘one of the finest days in the history of the free world, perhaps even more so than winning the war’.15 Pregnant words, from the Supreme Allied Commander.
Milward is entirely clear about US priorities, which he describes with his customary trenchancy. But he does not pursue the theoretical issue they pose for his interpretive scheme. In America, at least, continuity between domestic agendas and foreign objectives did not obtain. There was a clear-cut conflict between them. Was this just an American exception, without echo in Europe? Milward himself provides the evidence that it was not. For there was, after all, one major country of Western Europe which did not take the path of integration.
Why did the United Kingdom, under both Labour and Conservative rule, reject the logic of the Six? Surely the domestic consensus behind rising popular standards, based on the maintenance of full employment and the welfare state, was even more complete in Britain than in France or Italy, with their still intransigent mass Communist parties, or Germany with its doughty champions of economic liberalism? On the chequerboard of major political forces, there were no English counterparts of Marty or Erhard; and in the vocabulary of continental Europe no equivalents to Butskellism. If the predominant impetus to integration was a popular quest for socio-economic security codified in a strong national consensus, should Britain in the age of Attlee or Macmillan not have been foremost in it?
Although he points out the elements of an economic configuration that set the UK somewhat apart from the Six—the structure of agricultural subventions, the role of sterling, the salience of Commonwealth markets—Milward does not argue that it therefore made sense for Britain to stay out of Europe. On the contrary, he judges that ‘failure to sign the Treaties of Rome was a serious mistake’.16 His explanation for the error is that the British political establishment, arrogant and provincial, clung to the belief that the UK was ‘still in some sense a great power whose foreign policy should reflect that position’. Its ignorance of the nearby world was richly distilled by Harold Macmillan’s remark to his intimates that it was ‘the Jews, the Planners and the old cosmopolitan element’ who were to blame for the supranational tendencies of the European Commission.17
What the detail of Milward’s account suggests is that for fifteen years after the war British policy towards European integration was essentially settled by rulers who put calculations—or miscalculations—of political power and prestige before estimates of economic performance. The misfit between this pattern and the overall framework of The European Rescue of the Nation-State is too plain to escape his notice. On a more tentative note than usual, he offers the ingenious suggestion that because the crisis of the British state in the inter-war and war-time years was less acute than on the continent, ‘so the search for a new consensus after 1945 was more limited’, and—despite appearances—the result ‘perhaps weaker’. He goes on to remark: ‘The prosperity it brought was also
