The New Old World (5 page)

Monnet was strangely unmoved by all this. In France itself he got on well with CGT leaders after the liberation. He considered the colonial war in Indochina, financed by Washington, ‘absurd and dangerous'; feared the Korean War would escalate American pressure for German rearmament to a point where French public opinion would reject the sharing of sovereignty envisaged in the Schuman Plan; thought Western fixation with the Soviet menace a distraction. As late as June 1950 he told the editor of the
Economist
that the underlying purpose of the ECSC was ‘the setting up of a neutralized group in Europe—if France need not fear Germany, she need have no other fears, i.e. Russia'.
⁹
The
important task was to build a modern and united Europe, capable in the long run of an independent partnership with the United States. ‘We would transform our archaic social conditions', he wrote in 1952, ‘and come to laugh at our present fear of Russia'.
¹⁰
American power set the limits of all political action in Europe, and Monnet knew better than anyone how to work within them. But he had an original agenda of his own, which was diagonal to US intentions.

Where did it come from? Monnet had lived through two devastating European conflicts, and his over-riding goal was to bar the road to another one. But this was a common preoccupation of his generation, without inspiring any general vision of federalism. Part of the reason was that the passions of the Cold War so quickly succeeded the lessons of the World War, displacing or surcharging it in another set of priorities for the political elites of Western Europe. Monnet was detached from these. His career as a deracinated financial projector, adrift from any stable social forces or national frontiers, left him at a psychological angle to the conventional outlook of his class. As Duchêne points out, people thought Monnet ‘lacked political values', because he did not care very much about the ‘struggles over economic equality springing from the French and Russian Revolutions'.
¹¹
It was this relative indifference—not exactly the same as insensibility—that freed him to act so inventively beyond the assumptions of the inter-state 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 more limited and the United Kingdom was eventually to lead the attack on the post-war consensus of which it 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?