ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on key episodes in the evolution of British policy and attitudes towards the idea of European unity in the first decade after the Second World War. The analysis concentrates on three periods that were of critical importance in determining the nature and extent of British involvement in the formative stages of post-war European organizations. The first period, January 1948-January 1949, began with a ringing endorsement of an expansive view of European unity expressed by British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in his Western Union speech of January 1948. It terminated, however, with a more circumscribed, official definition of the limits of British involvement in the post-war reconstruction and organization of western Europe. The second period, May-June 1950, included the unveiling of a plan for a coal and steel community by Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, and subsequent British aloofness from the negotiations resulting in the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), comprising Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany (thereafter known as ‘the Six’). The third period, June-November 1955, opened with a decision by the Six to consider plans for a common market. It ended with the British refusal to participate in negotiations resulting in the signing of the Treaties of Rome (March 1957) and the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC). The principal aims of this chapter are to identify the distinctive features of
the British approach to these developments, to assess the main and especially long-standing determinants of policy, and to identify, where appropriate, different explanations for the course of events in the immediate post-war decade. The concept of limited liability, frequently employed to characterize Britain’s minimal military commitment to the defence of Europe in the inter-war period, gradually emerged as the benchmark of British policy towards the reconstruction and integration of mainland Europe in the immediate post-war decade. It first figured prominently in January 1949 among the conclusions of a paper by senior Whitehall officials. Their advice on the essentials of Britain’s European policy was subsequently endorsed by the Cabinet of the Labour government under the leadership of Clement Attlee:
Our policy should be to assist Europe to recover as far as we can … But the concept must be one of limited liability. In no circumstances must we assist them [the Europeans] beyond the point at which the assistance leaves us too weak to be a worth-while ally for U.S.A. if Europe collapses … Nor can we embark upon measures of “cooperation” which surrender our sovereignty and which lead us down paths along which there is no return.
