ABSTRACT
During the 1960s the six member governments of the EC transformed a framework treaty into a fully elaborated system coordinating their trade policies. Nearly continuous negotiations were punctuated by four overlapping "package deals." Between 1958 and 1962 agreement was reached on an accelerated removal of internal tariffs and harmonization of external tariff policy. As we have seen, many negotiators of the Treaty in France had doubted that agreement could be attained. Between 1960 and 1969 came agreement on the most important deal, namely the creation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)- a policy only vaguely sketched in the Treaty and left to implementation by unanimity vote. With the partial exception of competition (antitrust) policy, there was little movement in other economic policies mentioned in the Treaty, notably transport, social policy, industrial policy, regional policy, and macroeconomic coordination. Between 1961 and 1971 followed a number of successive discussions and negotiations concerning British membership, the first three fruitless and the final one successful. Finally, between 1960 and 1966 came discussion of institutional reform, in part to coordinate foreign policy but mostly to limit the scope of qualified majority voting (QMV). Such discussions began with the Fouchet Plan and culminated, after French threats to withdraw from the EC (the "empty chair" crisis of 1965-66) , in the Luxembourg Compromise, which informally recognized France's assertion of a unilateral right to veto EC decisions where "vital interests" were engaged. Taken together, these decisions reshaped the EC so profoundly that some speak of "a second European constitution." 1
Most accounts of the EC in the Ig6os, whether by contemporary commentators or by recent analysts, are dominated by three claims. First, "high" politics is said to trump "low" politics, at least in the short term. That is, geopolitical interests and ideologies were primary and economic motivations, while perhaps significant, were decidedly secondary. In this view , advanced by Stanley Hoffmann, Miriam Camps, and Ernst Haas, nearly all subsequent historians of the period, statesmen such as Charles de Gaulle, Harold Macmillan, and Konrad Adenauer were old-fashioned thinkers whose major decisions were motivated primarily by distinctive geopolitical ideologies. Even Haas , committed to the technocratic triumph oflow politics in the long run, conceded the disruptive effects of "dramatic political" actors, though other neofunctionalists challenged him. Second, EC bargaining was fundamentally influenced by the political entrepreneurship of supranational actors, notably the Commission, which intervened decisively to "upgrade the common interest." Without supernational participation, argue the neofunctionalists, integration would not have been possible. Governments themselves, by contrast, made many tactical errors-a criticism in particular by Robert Lieber and many others since British conduct of the accession negotiations in Ig61-63. Third, sovereignty was pooled in qualified majority voting arrangements and delegated to supranational bodies, most notably the Commission, for technocratic reasons. Delegation and pooling provided a technocratically competent means ofdecision-making on issues on which there was little fundamental conflict; the Commission, many argued, was particular adept at assembling the technical and political information necessary for modern economic planning. In sum, there is a consensus on the importance of geopolitical motivations, supranational entrepreneurship, and technocratic imperatives.
