ABSTRACT
The fate of the Brussels negotiations rested on more than the economic arrangements discussed between Britain and the European Community (EC) Six. Behind the scenes, diplomatic efforts between the negotiating parties often appear to have turned on discussion over political union or the nuclear issue. This, too, is deceptive. Essentially, what was at stake in the negotiations was the future of Europe and of the Western Alliance. The negotiations were launched in the wake of a clash between the leaders of the Western Alliance - Charles de Gaulle, Harold Macmillan, John F. Kennedy and Konrad Adenauer - over the 'grand designs' which characterized their approaches to the future of Europe. Torn between adapting to the realities of international defence and economic interdependence and old-fashioned notions of national grandeur, they forged these broad strategies into watertight blueprints for the future, divorced from reality, too rigid to allow for swift adaptations, and too thoroughly imbued with their own national interests to serve as a basis for compromise between them. The breakdown of January 1963 was provoked not by developments in the negotiations themselves, but by irreconcilable contradictions between these different concepts, set firmly as early as 1959.
