ABSTRACT

The Uniting of Europe: From Discord to Concord by Stanley Henig provides an introduction to the history of European integration. The author places European unification within a wider political and economic context. He shows how institutional developments have been conditioned by wider international considerations.
Including a succinct but comprehensive account of the structure, functions and working of the major European institutions, this book considers:

* the impact of the Cold War and the superpowers on Europe
* Britain's decision to join the Community
* the consequences of German reunification
* the problem of nationalism in Eastern Europe
* key personalities, parties, regimes and political systems
* the challenges of the future for the European Union.

Stanley Henig argues that integration and unification cannot be understood without reference to wider factors. The Uniting of Europe provides a comprehensive background to current and future issues confronting Europe in a global context.

chapter 1|8 pages

Europe in 1945

chapter 2|10 pages

The context for integration

chapter 3|12 pages

The emergence of the Six

chapter 4|15 pages

The European Community

chapter 5|12 pages

The Six in search of an identity

chapter 6|14 pages

Widening and deepening

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The three concerns itemised above – the continuing row over Britain’s contribution to the budget, enlargement and institutional reform – were inevitably linked. Early attempts to find a formula for resolving the budget issue were dogged by failure to recognise the need for a permanent solution rather than a temporary ‘fix’. The latter approach ensured that an increasingly irritable Margaret Thatcher was institutionally locked in to raising the issue at successive summits. Consequent explosions of ill temper did nothing to help the Community in its search for solutions to other problems, which included applications for membership from Portugal and Spain. At the end of the 1970s there were applications for membership on the table from three Mediterranean countries – Greece, Portugal and Spain. Although the subject matter of the negotiations was largely economic, particularly disparities between the three applicants and existing members, the major determinants of the new enlargements were political. Greece had been the earliest European associate of the Community, but the development of a closer relationship was put on hold after a military coup overthrew the elected government. The reestablishment of a democratic regime gave the new Greek government critical bargaining power in its bid to join, despite all the economic problems. Whatever their reservations on the readiness of the Greek economy for full membership, member states could hardly fail to offer support to the political aspirations of the new government. The second enlargement – to ten members – took place in January 1981. Negotiations were rather more protracted with Portugal and Spain. Again there were major economic problems and some member states, particularly France, expressed reservations. However, both countries had been ruled by arbitrary, neo-fascist regimes until the mid 1970s. In the last analysis the establishment of democratic regimes gave their new governments exactly the same political key to membership as Greece, but the economic issues still required resolution. The third major internal issue confronting the Community was institutional reform. This was a perennial, but the more pressing in view of continued enlargements. The crux of the problem related to voting in the Council of Ministers. Whatever view may be taken of the impact of de Gaulle and the so-called Luxembourg compromise, it is possible to argue that in a Community of only six members, voting methods were not that important. In effect, arguments about the right to national veto could be subsumed within the dynamics of a small, cosy club. This is hardly a view which could be taken of a putative Community of twelve. Further enlargement necessitated a behavioural change

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– most likely to be resisted by the United Kingdom, especially if there were no solution to the budgetary problem. At the very beginning of the decade the need for institutional reform generated an interesting, if odd, initiative from Germany and Italy – the so-called Genscher-Colombo plan, named after their respective foreign ministers. This emerged during 1981, when France was preoccupied with elections which produced a Socialist government with Mitterrand as President. The key features of the plan were development of political co-operation, which would be given an organic link with the Community through the European Council, and a procedure whereby qualified majority voting would be implemented in accordance with the treaty. The plan forms part of the background to the Single European Act, which is discussed below, but initially the auguries for any real change in voting methods did not seem very bright. The Genscher-Colombo plan disappeared into the Solemn Declaration on European Union produced by the Stuttgart European Council in 1983. The latter’s vision on majority voting was contained in a somewhat innocuous assertion that ‘the application of the decision-making procedures laid down by the Treaties is of vital importance’. However, there were some indications

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It is not easy to weave together the various inititiatives of the early 1980s. A major achievement of the previous decade was agreement to hold direct elections to the European Parliament. These first took place in 1979. Once elected, Parliament not unnaturally sought a rather greater role in the decision-making process with the aspiration of becoming a major Community player. Parliament’s decision to focus on the concept of European Union was at least in part a reaction to the Genscher-Colombo plan. Spinelli was the driving force in deliberations which ultimately produced the text of a draft treaty on European Union, handed over to member governments in spring 1984. Much more detailed than Genscher-Colombo or the Solemn Declaration, this was another initiative helping to promote a positive atmosphere for the forthcoming European Council to be held at Fontainebleau in June 1984. France had taken over the the Presidency of the Council in January 1984. Mitterrand clearly already intended to use this position to revive the dynamic of integration, but his approach may well have been influenced by the draft treaty. In May

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Community-minded members accepting an extension of integration (higher overall budget) as the means of resolving a problem. Indeed, taken together with the incident over farm prices already discussed, it demonstrates the extent to which even Britain – the apparently ever-reluctant European – had under Margaret Thatcher become sucked into the Community ‘game’. Fontainebleau has to take its place as one of the most significant meetings of the European Council. It resolved a long-standing dispute which was jeopardising progress on a whole range of issues, cleared the way for Spanish and Portugese accession, and set in motion the process which was to lead to the signature of the Single European Act (SEA). None of this could have happened without agreement between France and Germany. Fontainebleau marked the re-emergence of what was earlier termed the ‘Franco-German axis’. Removal of the long-standing budgetary problem obviated the danger that Britain would simply obstruct all progress, and this brought one immediate bonus. Even though Thatcher’s predilections and policy priorities ensured that Britain would still not normally be centre stage, she was heavily committed to the notion of ‘completing’ the Community as a trading and commercial entity by establishing a single market. In the short run, Thatcher could thus work with Mitterrand and Kohl on what may be considered the first phase in their mission to regenerate the Community. They also gained a major long-term ally in the person of Jacques Delors, whose appointment as the next Commission President was also agreed at Fontainebleau. The term ‘founding fathers’ is normally used in a Community context to refer to those who inspired the original treaties in the fifties and who led the institutions at the commencement of the process of integration. As the Community developed thereafter, many individuals played important roles, but it is hard to think of occasions prior to the appointment of Delors where any were indispensable, save perhaps for Roy Jenkins in the case of the establishment of EMS. Delors, a former civil servant and government minister, was to be President of the Commission for a decade, which witnessed the SEA and the implementation of the 1992 programme, the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, the inclusion of Portugal and Spain and successful negotiations for membership of Austria, Finland and Sweden. A convinced federalist, Delors was to become virtually synonymous with the Community during the decade 1985–95. With the three largest countries onside, it was logical for the new Commission to make the single market its major policy priority when it took office at the beginning of 1985. The establishment of internal free trade,

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theoretically achieved back in the 1960s, meant the abolition of all barriers. In practice, the latter had remained a pious aspiration so long as a whole host of technical, fiscal and other barriers existed. Early in 1985 the Commission produced a white paper on establishing a single market. This, together with the report by the Dooge Committee, established at Fontainebleau to examine institutional issues, formed the major agenda when the European Council met in Milan in late June 1985 and took the crucial decisions which were to lead to the negotiation and signature of SEA. The Milan European Council was an early demonstration of the new Franco-German axis. Analysis of these events should properly focus on three critical features. First, the European Council confirmed its assumption of direct responsibility for all major decisions. In 1984 this involved enlargement and the budget. In 1985 it embraced ‘completion’ of the Community itself in the shape of the single market. Second, the actual decision to hold an inter-governmental conference (IGC), which would give a treaty base to foreign policy co-operation and revise some of the institutional arrangements, was taken by a majority despite opposition from Britain, Denmark and Greece. Italian Prime Minister Craxi as President of the European Council played a key role in this. Third, despite objections to developing European structures and institutions, Britain attached sufficient importance to the single market to accept a majority decision on the IGC. The lead up to the IGC had been long and tortuous, but the actual negotiation of the SEA was relatively simple. The IGC met in September, and by January an agreed text had emerged. The treaty itself is analysed in the next chapter. Its main features were agreement to implement the single market by the end of 1992, the establishment of a legal basis for Political Co-operation and a number of institutional reforms. Whilst not formally repudiating the Luxembourg compromise with its apparent extension of the national veto, member states seemed to have reached some understanding that in future the spirit of the original treaties would apply. The point is underlined by the fact that virtually all the provisions relating to the single market would be implemented by majority vote. In the immediate aftermath of the ratification of the SEA, some observers drew attention to the gap between aspirations expressed by Parliament in its Draft Treaty and the actual achievement. Although true, such comments are wide of the mark. In the negotiating process Parliament was little more than a bystander with the right to be heard. The member states were anxious to achieve a relaunching of the move towards unification after a period of apparent

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stagnation, and they used the carrot of the advantages of a single market to try to convince the sceptics. As the next chapter will show, the SEA foreshadowed virtually the entire contents of the later Maastricht Treaty on European Union, but ratification of the latter was much more difficult once the detail was spelled out. Any notion that Maastricht could somehow have been brought forward by five years is quite unreal. Whilst ratification by all members, including Portugal and Spain who joined the Community on 1 January 1986, was never in any real doubt, the Danish Parliament or Folketing actually rejected the Treaty – a decision overturned by a subsequent referendum. With the ratification of the SEA, Community developments become part of contemporary history. As our own perspectives shift, analysis of cause and effect becomes that much more difficult. In the period between the SEA and the Treaty on European Union, the major internal factor affecting the Community was the commitment to implement the single market. The way in which the idea of the single market captured public imagination is unrivalled by any other Community initiative since its beginning in the fifties. Some excitement was even generated by the notion of implementation by a particular year. Back in Chapter 2 reference was made to functionalism, and also to some of the early academics who wrote about the integration process. According to Ernst Haas, the functional approach to integration was all about the transfer of loyalties and expectations from the nation states to the new supra-national institutions. Some thirty years later, the single market initiative is almost a classic of functionalist strategy. In the immediate aftermath of the signature and ratification of the SEA, the major task was to bring about implementation of the single market by the end of 1992. The single market programme involved a vast amount of technical work leading to a plethora of legislative measures. This in turn brought the Commission back to centre stage perhaps for the first time since the crises of the mid 1960s. At the time of the Milan European Council, the Commission had presented a white paper on the implementation of a single market. With the signature of the new treaty, it fell to the Commission to draft some 300 legislative measures and to seek to steer them through the Council. This process was to mark the emergence of Delors as a major ‘player’ in the Community and as perhaps the most significant President of the Commission: certainly the first to become almost a ‘household name’. A major obstacle to implementation of the single market was posed by the economic gap between richer and poorer states. The southern or Mediterranean members argued that the commitment to cohesion enshrined in the SEA had

chapter |1 pages

to be implemented as a precondition for the single market programme. The Commission responded by proposing a package of measures. These would necessitate a significant increase in the budget, a prospect which met with little enthusiasm on the part of richer northern members who would have to pay the bill. The issue was resolved during Germany’s Presidency of the Council in the first part of 1988. In effect, Germany agreed to meet the bulk of the bill in order to secure implementation of the single market. It was a critical moment in Chancellor Kohl’s elevation to the rank of European statesman. It also consolidated his alignment with a re-elected President Mitterrand and ultimately opened up the route which would lead to Maastricht. The central thesis of this book is that external events have always been a critical determinant of the process of integration. However, the declared perspectives of the principal players at the time may not be the best guide to this. So far this chapter has focused entirely on internal Community events, completely ignoring the external context. At one level it seems almost unfair to make the point that whilst the Community was largely absorbed with the single market and with the pre-negotiations which were to lead to the Maastricht Treaty, the external context was entirely and irrevocably changed by collapse of the Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, the dismantling of the USSR and the end of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. The consequential reunification of Germany meant a physical and geographical enlargement of the Community itself. The collapse of the Communist regimes and the disintegration of the Soviet Empire were unexpected events. It is easy enough to understand in retrospect why these developments took place, and some will argue that they were inevitable, but at the time of the SEA there was no statesman in Western Europe with any conception that the external context was about to change so rapidly. It is interesting to contrast the prevalen external context at the time of the signature of the Treaty of Paris establishing the European Coal and Steel

chapter |1 pages

European Union, but their immediate impact has to be looked at in a different light. There was no shortage of speeches, and presumably internal memoranda, drawing attention to the significance of events beyond the Eastern border, but it is hard to see what practical difference they actually made in the short term to policies being pursued by the member states or to the development of the Community. The process which would lead to the Maastricht Treaty on European Union was set in motion in the first part of 1988. The treaty itself was signed at the end of 1991. There is no evidence that this process would have proceeded differently even if none of the events to the East had occurred! In concluding this chapter it may be appropriate to summarise the major events which led up to the Maastricht Treaty and its subsequent ratification. Although implementation of the single market brought the Commission to the centre stage, the real driving force for developing the Community was undoubtedly the European Council. In the course of 1988 and 1989 it agreed to establish two separate but parallel IGCs to consider respectively Political Union and Economic and Monetary Union. After some preparations, the two IGCs came into formal existence at the Rome European Council in December 1990. Working throughout 1991 they reported to the Maastricht European Council just one year later, resulting in the Treaty on European Union. Inevitably the attitudes of France and Germany were crucial. Initially there was some difference of emphasis. Once German reunification was secured, Kohl’s major aim was to complete the process of locking the newly united Germany irrevocably into an integrated Europe through Political Union. Mitterrand’s concern was the preeminence of the Deutschmark and the desirability of establishing some European political control over monetary issues. By mid 1990 the positions of the two chief partners were broadly in line, henceforth working towards both political and economic and monetary union, with strong support from Italy, who took over the Council Presidency in the second half of the year. Meanwhile ,British policy was in turmoil. Following her third successive election victory, Thatcher became increasingly strident in her condemnation of further European integration. This was undoubtedly fuelled by growing concern over possible German dominance. However, many of Thatcher’s leading ministers were committed to extending the European agenda. During 1989 the British government both agreed that at last it would join the exchange rate mechanism and vainly opposed the establishment of the IGC on EMU. Late in 1990, following the resignation of Geoffrey Howe as Foreign Minister, essentially on issues concerned with Europe, Thatcher was deposed as Prime

chapter |1 pages

Minister. At first sight it is an interesting example of a reverse linkage between national and European developments. This book has highlighted a number of occasions when the course of European integration was profoundly influenced, even determined, by national political developments. The deposition of Thatcher was an occasion on which European issues apparently impacted decisively on national politics. However, occasion and cause are not always synonymous and the reality is slightly different. European issues were undoubtedly the occasion for the change of Prime Minister. However, the underlying causes lay in domestic politics – particularly the poll tax fiasco – and a fear amongst Conservative back-benchers that the next general election could be lost if changes were not made. There is little evidence that the replacement of Margaret Thatcher by John Major changed British attitudes towards the Community, soon to become the Union. Differences between leading British government ministers remained and splits over European issues in the Conservative party were to deepen, especially after the 1992 elections. Other European leaders now had to deal with a much weaker British Prime Minister – not necessarily an advantage. Although there is little evidence that the changed external context had much impact on the IGCs and the shape of the Treaty on European Union, the same may not necessarily be true for developments immediately post-Maastricht. The ratification process was more difficult than that for any other treaty. A referendum in Denmark rejected the entire Treaty, a situation only reversed by special concessions and opt outs. President Mitterand called a referendum in France, largely in the hope of boosting his own waning popularity, and came within a whisker of losing. In Britain the ratification process in Parliament was delayed by the growing split in the Conservative party re-inforced by a crisis in the European Monetary System. When Britain had finally joined the exchange rate mechanism in 1990, the pound sterling – which had for some time previously been shadowing the mark – was valued at a high rate which simply could not be sustained. Faced with enormous and uncontrollable speculative movements and unwilling to seek an agreed currency revaluation, Britain simply pulled out of the exchange rate mechanism in September 1992. Thereafter with the Conservative party increasingly adopting the line on Europe which had theoretically cost Thatcher her job, ratification of Maastricht was for some time on a knife edge. This chapter is entitled ‘From Commmunity to Union’. An apparent relaunching of the integration process with the single market initiative promoted another of those relatively brief and infrequent waves of what has

chapter |1 pages

in earlier chapters been termed ‘Europhoria’. The relaunched integration process seemingly culminated in successful negotiation of the Treaty on European Union. Nonetheless this chapter ends with a question mark. The problems of ratifying the new treaty suggest the recurrence of a basic doubt about where Europe should be going. Earlier it was argued that there was little clear linkage between external context and the process leading to Maastricht. However, the external context is never far away. By the time the new treaty was signed in February 1992, the revolutionary events in Central and Eastern Europe and the USSR were not quite so new. Perceptions of a new and very different international order were beginning to make an impact on the thinking of both opinion formers and the general public. Real questions could be asked about the contemporary relevance of a structure originally designed to meet the problems of the 1950s. There is no necessary suggestion that all the critics of the new Treaty were motivated by this argument, but it needs to be assessed. This will be the task of the final chapter of this book. However, before then there is a need to consider in more detail the treaty which transformed the Community into the Union.

chapter 8|13 pages

Maastricht and European Union

chapter 9|7 pages

Conclusion

Towards a federal Europe

chapter |7 pages

Notes

chapter |3 pages

An annotated selective bibliography

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