had only been one of the lesser beneficiaries’.18
The possibility of a provocative revision of Paul Addison’s Road to 1945 can be glimpsed here. The assumption remains, however, that it was the degree of social consensus which governed the pace of economic growth and the fate of European policy. But ‘consensus’ is an evasive term, notoriously close to euphemism, that parades rather than defines a democratic will. Its usage is best confined to the elites that like to talk of it. In this sense, there was indeed a consensus in Britain, and—pace Milward—a singularly strong one: but it had little or nothing to do with elections.
The over-statement in Milward’s argument comes from an attractive political impulse. A radical and humane attachment to the achievements of the post-war welfare state—the material improvements in the lives of ordinary people it brought—is the underlying motif of his work. If these were the products of democratic choices within the nation-state, can the same pressures not be given credit for the new forms of cooperation between states? The temptation of this move leads to a quizzical heuristic hybrid—what might be called, stressing the oxymoron, a diplomatic populism. But if Milward yields to this out of one side of his radical temper, the other side—a robust impatience with sanctimonies of any kind—repeatedly checks him.
So his recent writing strikes a more ambivalent note. ‘Votes and voters’, he now concedes, ‘are less important than our original hypothesis suggested’.19 Instead of relying on the claims of consensus, Milward now proposes the notion of allegiance—‘all those elements which induce citizens to give loyalty to institutions of governance’—as the key to understanding European integration.20 The substitution is salutary. Compared with consensus, a democratic emulsion, allegiance is an older and stiffer physic. The feudal cast of the term Milward now recommends as capable of integrating the different strands involved in the emergence of the Community is more appropriate. It bespeaks not civic participation, but customary adhesion: obedience in exchange for benefits—Hobbes rather than Rousseau. This is certainly closer to Western realities.
‘The only defence for national government since 1945 we have offered’, Milward writes, ‘is that it has better represented popular will than in the past, even if still only partially and imperfectly. That is, for us, the historical reason why it has survived’—a survival, however, that he judges to have been ‘finely balanced’.21 Has reinforcement by European integration put it beyond danger? By no means. The rescue may prove only a temporary reprieve. After the promise of its title, Milward’s major book closes with what seems like a retraction: ‘the strength of the European Community’ lies after all ‘in the weakness of the nation-state’.22
If these contrary notes do not reach harmony, the historical richness of Milward’s work exceeding its theoretical scheme, this is also partly because his later work—unlike his earlier—proceeds by topical selection rather systematic narration. Without simultaneous tracking of the different forces which he in principle admits were at work, the relative contribution of each to the process of integration cannot be adjudicated on equal terms. Such a narrative waits on a fuller opening of the archives. In its absence, what provisional conclusions are reasonable?
There were at least four principal forces behind the process of integration. Although these overlapped, their core concerns were quite distinct. The central aim of the federalist circle round Monnet was to create a European order that would be immune to the catastrophic nationalist wars that had twice devastated the continent, in 1914–18 and 1939–45. The basic objective of the United States was to create a strong West European bulwark against the Soviet Union, as a means to victory in the Cold War. The key French goal was to tie Germany down in a strategic compact leaving Paris primus inter pares west of the Elbe. The major German concern was to return to the rank of an established power and keep open the prospect of reunification. What held these different programmes together was—here Milward is, of course, entirely right—the common interest of all parties in securing the economic stability and prosperity of Western Europe, as a condition of achieving each of these goals.
This constellation held good till the end of the sixties. In the course of the next decade, two significant shifts occurred. The first was an exchange of Anglo-Saxon roles. The belated entry of the UK brought another state into the Community of nominally comparable weight to France and West Germany; while on the other hand, the US withdrew to a more watchful stance as Nixon and Kissinger started to perceive the potential for a rival great power in Western Europe. The second change was more fundamental. The economic and social policies that had united the original Six during the post-war boom disintegrated with the onset of global recession. The result was a sea-change in official attitudes to public finance and levels of employment, social security and rules for competition, that set the barometer for the eighties.
Thus the last effective step of integration to date, the Single European Act of 1986, exhibits a somewhat different pattern from its predecessors, although not a discontinuous one. The initiative behind the completion of the internal market came from Delors, a convinced federalist recently appointed as French head of the Commission. At governmental level the critical change was, as Milward rightly stresses, the conversion of the Mitterrand regime at Delors’s prompting to orthodox liberal discipline—soon after the turn to the right that brought Kohl to office in Germany. This time, however, a third power played a role of some significance—Thatcher collaborating in the interest of deregulating financial markets, in which British banks and insurance companies saw prospects of large gains; while Cockfield in Brussels gave the project its administrative thrust.
The higher profile of the Commission in this episode was testimony of a certain change in the balance of institutional forces within the Community, which the Act itself modified by the introduction (more properly reinstatement) of qualified majority voting inside the Council of Ministers. On the other hand, the French stamp on the proto-federal machinery in Brussels was never more pronounced than during the Delors presidency, while Paris and Bonn retained their traditional dominance within the web of inter-governmental relations. The result of thirty years of such integration is the strange institutional congeries of today’s Union, composed of four disjointed parts.
Most visible to the public eye, the European Commission in Brussels acts as—so to speak—the ‘executive’ of the Community. A body composed of functionaries designated by member-governments, it is headed by a president enjoying a salary considerably higher than that of the occupant of the White House, but commanding a bureaucracy smaller than that of many a municipality, and a budget of little more than 1 per cent of area GDP. These revenues, moreover, are collected not by the Commission, which has no direct powers of taxation itself, but by the member-governments. In a provision of which conservatives can still only dream in the US, the Treaty of Rome forbids the Commission to run any deficit. Its expenditures remain heavily concentrated on the Common Agricultural Policy, about which there is much cant both inside and outside Europe—US and Canadian farm support being not much lower than European, and Japanese much higher. A certain amount is also spent on ‘Structural Funds’ to aid poor or rust-belt regions. The Commission administers this budget; issues regulatory directives; and—possessing the sole right of initiating European legislation—proposes new enactments. Its proceedings are confidential.
Secondly, there is the Council of Ministers—the utterly misleading name for what is in fact a parallel series of inter-governmental meetings between departmental ministers of each member-state, covering different policy areas (about thirty in all). The Council’s decisions are tantamount to the legislative function of the Community: a hydra-headed entity in virtually constant session at Brussels, whose deliberations are secret, most of whose decisions are sewn up at a bureaucratic level below the assembled ministers themselves, and whose outcomes are binding on national parliaments. Capping this structure, since 1974, has been the so-called European Council composed of the heads of government of each member-state, which meets at least two times a year and sets broad policy for the Council of Ministers.
Thirdly, there is the European
