REVIEW ARTICLE

THE BOURBONS OF EUROPE

WILLIAM PICKLES

Community Europe, A short guide to the Common Market, by Roger

Europe after de Gaulfe, Towards the United States of Europe, by John

D e Gaulle and Europe, or Why the General Says No, by Lord Gladwyn,

Britain in a Federal Europe, by John Lambert, Chatto & Windus, pp.

Europe, the politics of pig in the middle, by J. B. D. Mitchell, Leeds

The imminence and then, in 1969, the fact of the departure of General de Gaulle from the world political scene raised hopes in many hearts that the four applications for membership of the European Communi- ties that had ‘lain on the table’ since 1967 would at last be discussed. The result has been a flood of new writings, academic, propagandist or mixed, and one has been waiting with interest to see the effect on the dedicated ‘Europeans’ of the buffetings and disappointments of the pre- vious five or six years. Now we know. If the five works considered here are typical, the ‘Europeans’ have learnt but little and forgotten only the most obviously false of their earlier claims.

The first two of these five publications can be dismissed fairly quickly. Community Europe is a re-edition, with an eight-page supplement bringing some of its information up to 1969 (the first edition having gone only to 1967). Both its authors are officials of the London In- formation Office of the European Communities. They are, in other words, paid propagandists, but like all their colleagues, they try hard to be impartial. Unfortunately, the subject of the Communities involves so much guesswork about both past and future that nobody achieves total impartiality. Messrs. Broad and Jarrett see the whole picture through the rose-tinted spectacles which (presumably) took them into their present jobs. Even so-and again this is characteristic of Community officials-their vision is a good deal less distorted than that of a good many unsalaried propagandists for the same cause. Mr Lambert and Messrs. Pinder and Pryce, as we shall see, form admirable examples of this latter type.

Broad and Robert Jarrett, Oswald WoIK pp. 170, 30s.

Pinder and Roy Pryce, Penguin Special, pp. 191, 6s.

Secker & Warburg, pp. 161, 25s.

xv+203, 30s.

University Press, 3 0 pp. 3s 6d.

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So Community Europe is written in unemotional language, and tries to present only facB-first about life, politics and economics in the six countries of the Communities, and then about the history and working of the Communities as such. To the critical mind, the authors seem to gloss over a good many of the failures, of which some (as again we shall see) are freely recognized by the inde endent propagandists. On one vital point, indeed, which their supp f ement fails to correct, the weakness of their dedicated optimism shows through. They repeat what was for long one of the classic arguments of all but the most cautious ‘Europeans’-namely, that the existence of a common agricultural policy, with Community prices stated in a common accountancy unit, would be ‘a highly effective restraint on unilateral action’ (p. 12s) as regards currency values. The 1967-69 supplement was presumably already in the press when events exploded that legend. Nevertheless, the book could be a useful elementary manual if brought up to date at fairly frequent intervals with facts and figures in their proper places instead of in a supplement. It would be more useful still if the authors could allow themselves to face some of the more awkward facts about the Communities as well as summarizing their dreams.

Messrs. Pinder and Pryce show that those two exercises can-up to a point-be combined. That does not mean that they are impartial. They are sometimes silent, sometimes silly, and at points only just short of dishonest, as regards many of the weaknesses of the Communities. One example of silliness is worth quoting. Discussing one of the points made by Mr. Douglas Jay in his Penguin, After the Common Market, they say that ‘he seems to assume that if we make common policies with other Europeans we will always get the worst of it’. And their reply is that ‘in fact, the Rome Treaty provides that 46the living and working conditions of labour” should be equalized “in an upward direction”. There could scarcely be a clearer legal guarantee against a

sweeping retrograde movement”.’ The italics are mine. The article quoted is number 117 of the Treaty of Rome and the phrase quoted is only one of a couple of score of similar ones, crammed into the treaties of Paris and Rome by their drafters in order to satisfy the conflict- ing aspirations of a dozen different groups. Its legal value is what- ever the Community Court may choose to give it, if it ever gets before that Court, and if the Court, in the absence of any more specific treaty obligation, and only in that absence, chooses to make use of this particular phrase instead of one of the dozens of e ually valid and completely contradictory statements of aspiration w %i ch turn up all over the treaties. In other words, it commits nobody to anything and ‘guarantees’ strictly nothing.

A sentence on the previous page refers to the added-value tax ‘which

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would enable us to make our welfare system more helpful to those who really need it’. That statement is an excellent example of the art of deceiving without telling lies. It is incontrovertibly true, in the sense that any effective tax would ‘enable us’ to do more for any section of the community-if we took the separate decisions necessary to make possible the use of part of our resources in that particular way. But the implication that the AVT has in itself some special social value is wholly false. The use of this method of argument is typical of what messianic beliefs in the Common Market have done to some other- wise exactingly honest minds. One standard Marketeering phrase-I have seen it in almost identical terms from the pens of Messrs. Henig, Mayhew, and Rippon-says that, if Britain had joined the Common Market in 1958, and shared in the economicgrowth of the six countries, real wages in Britain would now be A5 a week higher than they are. The truth is that, taken together, the six countries have had more economic growth than we have (starting not in 1958, but well before that), but that others have done better still. If we had joined Japan, and shared in her economic growth, real wages here would have been even higher than the pro-Common Market figure. But both the statements are true only in the sense that they are turned into tautologies by the second element of the protasis of the conditional clause, and their use is either carelessly meaningless or carefully misleading.

The lack of any sign of an approach by the Communities to the political unity that was supposed to be the main objective is the one defect of the Communities on which Messrs. Pinder and Pryce are entirely frank. ‘The present members’, they write, ‘have failed to solve the political problem of effective integration. The institutions they have set up . . . are much too weak. The national governments have locked their economies together but have failed to take bold enough steps to develop the range of common economic policies which are now needed, or to develop a common posture on more political issues, such as defence and foreign policy. . . . In the Community today, its members have the worst of both worlds: a more remote and less democratic form of government without effective common action.’

These statements, and many like them, are wholly true. The Com- munities are stuck half-way in ‘the worst of both worlds’. But what the two authors offer in its place is not a remedy but a narcotic vision. Britain is tolead the member States to ‘the creation of a United States of Europe organized on federal lines’. This ‘would require a conscious policy of pooling sovereignty and building up strong and democratic institutions at a European level’. In other words, the Europeans who thought they wanted a federation, and then rejected it when they began to get a remote glimpse of the meaning of the term, are to be

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led back to the goal by the British, of whom only onefifth, according to the latest o inion polls, want to join the Communities and still

That level of political unrealism is exceeded when the authors go on to give their view of the advantages of federalism, in order to try to ersuade ther readers to begin a new federal crusade. Their panacea-

roaded utopianism reaches its peak on pages 13-1, where they propose, first that Britain and France (in defiance, in the case of the former, of the non-proliferation treaty) are to ‘assign’ their nuclear weapons to a European Political Community, and then that ‘Europe should develop the political and industrial capacity . . . to become a nuclear power, but produce no strategic nuclear weapons. It should then ‘use this potential to influence American nuclear policy and . . . to push both super-powers towards arms control and then disarmament’. The only meaning this can have is that the new ‘Europe’ should seek to influence the two super-powers by threatening that if they do not carry their own nuclear disarmanent far enough, ‘Europe’ will bankrupt itself by starting-forty, fifty, a hundred years behind-on a nuclear race that it can never hope to win. The rest of the politico-strategic argument is only a shade below that level of utopian inanity, except for a couple of points at which reality is allowed to show its unhappy head (e.g. p. 178, ‘The present picture in Europe presents a stark contrast to the picture that has been sketched in previous chapters of the creative potential of a United States of Europe’). For the rest, thereaderisremindedof nothing so much as those eighteenth-century Utopians whose imaginations abolished famine and death from starvation by dreaming up countries in which bread, meat and coal grew abundantly on trees (references available to ‘Europeans’ whose overworked imaginations have run dry). In those days, the panacea which transformed human instincts overnight was the abolition of private property. Now it is ‘the creation of Europe’, and it has exactly the same value. It stimulates sluggish imaginations, but does nothing for a world in need of real remedies for its multiple ills.

Lord Gladwyn, who deals with the same theme, combines ardent ‘Europeanism’ with too much diplomatic experience to allow him to fall into the same Utopian traps, and his book (which is only partly outdated by the withdrawal of General de Gaulle from the world scene) is a serious study. He understood and understands General de Gaulle and his policies. Except-possibly-on one point, his analysis of the weaknesses of the General’s ‘European’ policy, in all its complex ramifications, is subtle and knowledgeable. His demolition of it is total and looks deceptively easy. Even the one weak point might not be so weak as it seems if Lord Gladwyn’s own position were a little clearer.

fewer want a P ederation !

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He condemns as ‘feeble’ the General’s defence of his second &fact0 veto on British entry, in the Press Conference of November 27, 1967, in which the General affirmed that either Britain would have to change ‘fundamentally’ if she joined, or the Communities would degenerate into a large free-trade area. It is perfectly true that if British opinion, which from the Prime Minister downwards was in its immense majority hostile to federalism, could not be fundamentally re-oriented, then a Community including Britain would be transformed into the purely economic affair that Mr.Wilson said it was. The workings of a communuutk cf dix cannot and could not ever resemble those of a com- tnunuutt! b six, and its federalist aspirations would certainly be heavily diluted. It is, however, possible that Lord Gladwyn would not have minded such an outcome since, though he is more starr eyed than

wants is ‘integration’, or ‘some European entity’, and nobody has yet defined those terms, for the simple and adequate reason that if they ever were to be defined, the ‘integrationists’ would begin to quarrel with each other about their objective even more bitterly than they did at The Hague in 1948.

And that, of course, is the book’s main weakness. Lord Gladwyn gives convincing reasons for believing that the General’s brand of ‘Euro- peanism’ was self-contradictory and unworkable in the forms in which it came nearest to being stated. But he gives no reason at all for believing that his own brand has any more realistic basis. He also provides other, less important, irritations. He uses ‘hopefully’ in its German-American sense of the equivalent of hofentlich and bespatters his pages with minor errors of fact, date, nomenclature and what you will. These errors do not affect the argument, but they irritate the pernickety academic mind and might weaken the confidence of some readers.

One of the errors, however, is far from being minor. Lord Gladwyn twice writes as if he did not know the difference between weighted voting and a qualified majority. Now, that, ifit is anything more than a repeated slip, really is important.Weighted voting is defensible in a democratic framework, and might well be used with advantage in (say) the US. Senate or the UN, where common sense does not always come to the rescue of unrealistic arithmetic. But qualified majorities are a different matter. Though the whole notion is in se logically in- defensible, the qualified-majority rule of the Community b six (twelve weighted votes out of a total of seventeen) was neatly calculated to give some recognition to the realities of power, limiting (for instance) the overweighting of the Belgian and Dutch voting power and preventing the representative of Luxemburg’s 1/5soth of the Community’s population from ever exercising a decisive vote. This is important in

most exdiplomats, he is certainly not an impatient federa Y ist.What he

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the present context, because no such subtle calculation has been or could be made for the proposed Community h d i x , ~ and the more embittered conflicts which greater numbers and more varying interests would undoubtedly bring might well prevent the sensible respect for internal power politics which in practice has replaced the use of the qualified majority in the six-member Communities. If that were to happen, the qualified majority would be no more than another minority veto right, slightly modified by the requirement that the minority must reach a specified minimum size. Lord Gladwyn’s qualifications as an authority on ‘integration’ are therefore wide open to question. But his qualifications as an interpreter of France in the Gaullist era are not, and in that respect his book loses nothing from having been turned by events from a discussion of contemporary politics to one of history.

Mr. Lambert’s book is by far the best of the three more purely ‘European’ books examined here. Its first six chapters can be recom- mended to those who favour British membership as well as to those who don’t and to those who just want to know, provided they can take its journalistic attempts to reduce Community life to familiar ‘human’ terms. It makes good journalism for those who like that kind of thing, but is wearisome for those who want to get down to the facts. When one does get to them, the facts are there, both on the Com- munity’s achievements and on many of its failures and disappointments. No other ‘pro-European’ study known to this reviewer is anything like so frank, though there are many points at which, for the genuinely knowledge-seeking reader, one would wish to add a gentle footnote, rubbing a little of the rose-tint from Mr. Lambert’s spectacles.

In the second part, however, Mr Lambert leaves the domain of fact and goes off into dreams of a federation and its influence that are just as unreal as those of Messrs. Pinder and Pryce. He admits that to many people, including ‘some who are partisans of the [Community] system’, his federalist picture ‘may read like political science fiction’. It does indeed, and even more so when he allows no more than ‘five or ten years. . . in the most optimistic of hypotheses’ for the emergence of a ‘federal political authority,’ or when he foresees a United Nations in which the representatives of the United States of Europe sit along with those of such constituent parts of the federation as ‘choose to keep a theoretical se arate responsibility for forei n policy’. After that he goes

fill the federalists’ dreams of how their federation will lead the world to peace.

off into the P amiliar conditional mood, t a e ‘codds’ and ‘woulds’ that

1 Review Editor’s Note: Cf.]CMS, Vol. I. No. 2, Dusar Sidjanski ‘Voting Proceedings in an Enlarged Community’ and Vol. I, No. 3, Stanley Henig, ‘Voting Procedures-A Reply’, which represent attempts at making such calculations.

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Only a fool would assert that these dreams cannot come true. But only a very much bigger fool would stake his own fate and that of his country on the beliefthat one or other of them must come true. That, of course, is why the peoples and governments of the member States have allowed the Communities to move only at the slow pace that so disappoints our federalists. ‘Measured against the changes that have occurred in the same twenty years in the rest of the world,’ says Mr. Lambert, ‘Europe has been making slow work of its unification.’ It has indeed. World events have run so far ahead of the carefully laid plans of 1955 and 1956 that those plans now look at the same time over- ambitious and ho elessly inadequate. The still non-existent united Europe of Mr. Lambert s dreams is too small to do anything about the world- scale problems we face and yet too big and too remote to be acceptable within foreseeable time even to six-let alone ten or more-peoples whose unconscious assumptions, patterns of behaviour, hopes, fears and political legal and economic structures are still firmly set in national frameworks. The ace set in the Treaties of Paris and Rome has been too

whole history of the Communities, the methods by which their successes were achieved and their still long list of unachieved objectives show how well based were the fears of those who saw the difficulties facing every other federation and doubted whether the roots of European nationalisms could be pulled up by the rationalistic processes of the Spaaks, the Monnets and the Hallsteins.

Professor Mitchell, whose twenty-eighth Montague Burton Lecture is here reproduced, is another integrationist, of an ill-defined species, but certainly not a federalist. ‘Federation’, he says, ‘is a dangerously uncertain word, and no one in modern times has made an effective federation of long-standing, soi-disunt sovereign states.’ One can only hope that Professor Mitchell’s co-religionaries will take note of his wisdom on that point. ‘Co-religionaries’, by the way, is the right word : ‘Europeanism’ is a matter of faith, sometimes aided, as in this case, by knowledge and intelligence, but never having its origins in those qualities. Faith has its uses, but it can cloud the best minds, and Profes- sor Mitchell provides an excellent example of that fact. ‘The merger of warring tribes’, he writes, ‘did not mean a loss of independence, but an increase of it. The larger unit could exercise a far greater degree of control over its own destiny than the smaller one could ever do.’

That often-repeated view is, as Professor Mitchell says, ‘central to the present argument about Europe’, and it is false. The past mergers he speaks of may have been desirable, as may those he wants to see, but they did (or would, as the case may be) involve total loss of indepen- dence. He actually mentions Mercia and Northumbria. Where are they

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and their inde endence now? The ‘larger unit’ into which they were

destiny’, but is that control exercised in pursuit of the interests the Mercians and Northumbrians would have wanted to defend? Some of their descendents think not. If Hider’s Europe had ever been made, it would have ‘exercised a greater degree of control, etc.’, than Britain has been able to exercise since 1945, but one may legitimately doubt whether Professor Mitchell would have approved of its methods and purposes, or failed to regret the loss of the less effective independence of Britain. His error is the same as that of the others reviewed here; his imagination is projecting into his future ‘larger unit’ a set of attitudes of which he approves, but with no solid reason to believe that it will in fact have those attitudes. The existing nations that he wishes to abolish all have their separate virtues, but so do whisky and sherry, and it is improbable that Professor Mitchell enjoys a mixture of them.

He goes on to argue that our present political arrangements are ‘constructed on the hypothesis’ of the threat of war w i t h western Europe. That is only partly true. NATO and many other present international organizations could not have existed in 1939. It is true that they have failed to correct many of the weaknesses of existing struc- tures, but so have the European Communities, and the latter are now visibly too small to change much of what still needs changing. To believe otherwise is another projection of the imagination-legitimate enough, but no more so than the views of those who see the whole European project as both petty by present world standards and yet over-ambitious, both premature and outdated, realist in some of its limitations but unrealistic in its dreams.

Professor Mitchell’s alternative to federalism and supranationalism, both of which he dismisses, is not clearly defined in this short pamphlet. It appears to be based on the notion that Community law and the Com- munity Court can offer a protection to the citizens that will ensure their allegiance. This is a lawyer’s version of a discredited functionalist theme, much inflated by a man of great learning, who chooses to ignore all that the Court cannot or will not do. (He should try asking the Dutch for their view of what the French and the Italians have got away with !) In immediate institutional terms, it boils down to ‘acceptance of the broad pattern of the structure of the Communities’, but there is also to be a formal constitution, to take the form of a (new?) treaty, providing for ‘appropriate force’, and meeting ‘the demands of political democracy’. This may be an unfair summary of what reads like the over-compressed conclusion of a lecture for which the lecturer would have liked more time. Perhaps he will develop it more fully elsewhere: as Professor of a subject-‘European Government’-that does not exist, he ought to have

merged doub s ess exercises ‘a greater degree of control over its own

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leisure to do so. If he does, we shall, if I follow his argument, find him to be just as Utopian as all the others.

Much ofwhat has been written by the ‘Europeans’ ofthe inadequacy of the nineteenth-centry nation-State is true, though much also is overstated and much of the time scale is wrong. But the cure is not to be found in trying to drive whole populations along blue-printed roads to federations which, if they are ever formed and consolidated, are at least as likely to develop only larger-scale and even reedier national-

noble ideas that our federalists too easily paint into their dream-pictures. The pace of movement towards a more reasonable world order will be that of the slowest country in the convoy and the route to it will have to be found bit by bit as existing nations show themselves ready to take it. That much of Gaullism is solid truth. It is not even certain that utopianism helps by stirring the imagination; it may just as probably provoke fear or contempt or over+onfidence. Certainly there comes a moment for all dreamers when they have to wake up and face life as it is. With all the experience of twenty years of the Treaty of Paris and thirteen of the Treaties of Rome behind us, and the examples of so many failed or stumbling federations all around us, is it not time for serious reformers, academic or journalist, to come down from the clouds, keep their dreams-if they so wish-usgods, but try to see today’s world and its short- and medium-term hture as they really are?

isms as to become the gently cooing distributors o B good things and