ABSTRACT
Commenting in summer 1953 on the laborious and unrewarding pursuit of association with the Coal and Steel Community, R. C. Hope Jones, who handled the Foreign Office end of the Franco-German Committee's Working Party on that problem, presciently noted ‘that if further economic integration does come, it is likely to be as a result of pressure from the Dutch enthusiasts for a Tariff Community, rather than of the machinations of the High Authority’.1 The negotiations by which this came true forlornly toll over British diplomacy from summer 1955.
