first momentous steps of integration. Here—least prominently, yet still discernible—is a final suggestion: that where it really mattered, there was an ultimate symmetry in the participation of the states that formed the original customs union, and completed the internal market.
Primacy of domestic objectives, and continuity of foreign goals with them; democracy of policy formation, and symmetry of national public opinions. An element of caricature is inseparable from all compression, and Milward’s work is subtle and complex enough to contain a number of counter-indications, some of them quite striking. But roughly speaking, these four claims convey the main emphasis of his work. How robust are they? One way of approaching the question is to notice how Milward treats his starting-point. The absolute origin of movement towards European integration is located in the Second World War. Few would dissent. But the experience of the war itself is viewed in a quite particular light, as a cataclysm in which the general brittleness of pre-war political structures—lacking any broad democratic base—was suddenly revealed, as one nation-state after another crumpled in the furnace of conflict.
This is one legitimate and productive way of looking at the Second World War, which does set the stage for the story of post-war reconstruction leading to integration that Milward tells. Yet, of course, the war was not just a common ordeal in which all continental states were tested and found wanting. It was also a life-or-death battle between Great Powers, with an asymmetric outcome. Germany, which set off the struggle, never actually collapsed as a nation-state—and least of all because of any narrowness of popular support. Its soldiers and civilians resisted the Allies unflinchingly, to the end.
It was the memory of this incommensurable experience during the war—of the scale of German military supremacy, and its consequences—that shaped European integration quite as much as the commensurate tasks of rebuilding nation-states on a more prosperous and democratic basis after the war, on which Milward concentrates. The country centrally concerned was inevitably France. It is no accident that the French contribution to the construction of common European institutions has been out of all proportion to the weight of France within the overall economy of Western Europe. The political and military containment of Germany was a strategic priority for France from the outset, well before there was any consensus in Paris on the commercial benefits of integration among the Six. Once Anglo-American opposition ruled out any re-run of Clemenceau’s attempt to hold Germany down by main force, the only coherent alternative was to bind it into the closest of alliances, with a construction more enduring than the temporary shelters of traditional diplomacy.
At the centre of the process of European integration, therefore, has always lain a specifically bi-national compact between the two leading states of the continent, France and Germany. The rationale for the successive arrangements between them, principally economic in form, was consistently strategic in background. Decisive for the evolution of common European institutions were four major bargains between Paris and Bonn. The first of these was, of course, the Schuman Plan of 1950, which created the original Coal and Steel Community in 1951. If the local problems of French siderurgy, dependent on Rhenish coal for its supply of coke, were one element in the inception of the Plan, its intention was far broader. Of the two countries, Germany possessed much the larger heavy industrial base. France feared its potential for rearmament. On the other hand, Germany feared continued international military control of the Ruhr. The pooling of sovereignty over their joint resources gave France safeguards against the risk of renascent German militarism, and freed Germany from Allied economic tutelage.
A second milestone was the understanding between Adenauer and Mollet that made possible the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Overriding reservations from the Finance Ministry in Bonn and the Foreign Ministry in Paris, the two governments reached an accord that secured German and French goods industries free entry into each other’s markets, on which each was already highly dependent for its prosperity, while holding out the prospect of increased imports by the Federal Republic of French farm produce. Adenauer’s placet for this deal, in the face of fierce liberal opposition from Erhard—who feared higher French social costs might spread to Germany—was unambiguously political in inspiration. He wanted West European unity as a bulwark against Communism, and a guarantee that eventual German reunification would be respected by France. In Paris, on the other hand, economic counsels remained divided over the project of a Common Market until rival proposals from London for a free trade area looked as if they might be more attractive to Bonn, threatening the primacy of Franco-German commercial ties. But it was not the technical opinion of hauts fonctionnaires that decided the issue,6 nor the personal preference of Mollet himself—who had always favoured European integration but been quite unable to carry his party two years earlier, when the EDC was killed off by SFIO votes. What swung the balance was the political shock of the Suez crisis.
Mollet headed a government far more preoccupied with prosecution of the Algerian War, and preparations for a strike against Egypt, than with trade negotiations of any sort. Anglophile by background, he was committed to an understanding with Britain for joint operations in the Eastern Mediterranean. On 1 November 1956 the Suez expedition was launched. Five days later, as French paras were pawing the ground outside Ismailia, Adenauer arrived in Paris for confidential talks on the Common Market. He was in the middle of discussions with Mollet and Pineau, when Eden suddenly rang from London to announce that Britain had unilaterally called off the expedition, under pressure from the US Treasury. In the stunned silence, Adenauer tactfully implied the moral to his hosts.7 The French cabinet drew the lesson. America had reversed its stance since Indochina. Britain was a broken reed. For the last governments of the Fourth Republic, still committed to the French empire in Africa and planning for a French bomb, European unity alone could furnish the necessary counterweight to Washington. Six months later, the Treaty of Rome was signed by Pineau; and in the National Assembly it was the strategic argument—the need for a Europe independent of both America and Russia—that secured ratification.
The third critical episode came with the advent of De Gaulle. The first really strong regime in France since the war inevitably altered the terms of the bargain. After clinching a Common Agricultural Policy to the advantage of French farmers in early 1962, but failing to create an inter-governmental directorate among the Six, De Gaulle initiated talks for a formal diplomatic axis with Bonn in the autumn. France was by now a nuclear power. In January 1963 he vetoed British entry into the Community. In February Adenauer signed the Franco-German Treaty. Once this diplomatic alliance was in place, De Gaulle—notoriously hostile to the Commission headed by Hallstein in Brussels—could check further integration of the EC so long as he was in power. The institutional expression of the new balance became the Luxembourg compromise of 1966, blocking majority voting in the Council of Ministers, which set the legislative parameters for the Community for the next two decades.
Finally, during a period of relative institutional standstill, in 1978 Giscard and Schmidt together created the European Monetary System to counteract the destabilizing effects of the collapse of the Bretton Woods order, when fixed exchange rates disintegrated amid the first deep post-war recession. Created outside the framework of the Community, the EMS was imposed by France and Germany against resistance even within the Commission, as the first attempt to control the volatility of financial markets, and prepare the ground for a single currency within the space of the Six.
For the first three decades after the war, then, the pattern was quite consistent. The two strongest continental powers, adjacent former enemies, led European institutional development, in pursuit of distinct but convergent interests. France, which retained military and diplomatic superiority throughout, was determined to attach Germany to a common economic order, capable of ensuring its own prosperity and security, and allowing Western Europe to escape from subservience to the United States. Germany, which enjoyed economic superiority already by the mid-fifties, needed not only Community-wide markets for its industries, but French support for its full reintegration into the Atlantic bloc and eventual reunification with the zone—still officially Mitteldeutschland—under the control of the Soviet Union. The dominant partner in this period was always France, whose functionaries conceived the original Coal and Steel Community and designed most
