ABSTRACT

European integration. The British were among the most powerful advocates, in the Political Union negotiations and the concurrent discussions on the future of the WEU, of confining European defence cooperation to the WEU, and allowing the Union only to discuss security issues without an explicit defence dimension. (This attitude, which carried the day, was largely shared by the French, for somewhat different reasons.) By preventing the setting up of integrated structures, and thus privileging the three or four states whose voices really count in European defence discussions, it preserved for the UK the maximum influence possible, as well as keeping the grammar of European defence closer to one which the British find intellectually congenial.