The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy: The UK and The European Community: Volume 1

The Official History of Britain and the European Community #1

by Alan S. Milward

From summer 1950 to summer 1961, the UK was resolutely against joining the institutions of the emerging European Community. Many explanations of this stance have been offered. The prevalent one is that Britain's determination to play the role of a great power excluded it from membership of any organization whose ultimate objective was a European federation. Paradoxically, of all the countries outside the European Communities, the UK was the most closely linked to them.

This book--for which all official records were made freely available to the author--resolves this paradox by rejecting the conclusion that Britain believed it would be able to preserve its great-power status. Instead, it sees post-war decisions about Britain's part in a united Europe as having been governed by a national strategy, formed over the years 1945-50, which rested on a broad consensus of party-political and public support and was intended to effect Britain's transition from great-power status to that of a middle-ranking power. This strategy depended on using Britain's inherited, temporary, post-war advantages as bargaining counters to achieve that transition without endangering the security of its people or their relatively high level of prosperity and comfort.

The first of these objectives was successfully achieved; the second less so, in part because events in western Europe increased inherent disharmonies within the strategy. British policies towards the emergent European Communities remained nevertheless determined by this national-strategic synthesis, not by delusions of grandeur, dislike or suspicion of their European neighbours, sentimental attachment to the Commonwealth or by subservience to the USA.

The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy, 1945-1963, Volume I of the Official History of the United Kingdom and the European Community, traces the gradual failure of the British strategy and the decision of the Macmillan government in summer 1961 to try to rescue it through an application to join the European Communities. The rejection of that application marked the end of that strategy, leaving Harold Wilson's first Labour government with no viable policy towards the Communities other than to join them but with no evident means of achieving that aim.

Genres: History

528 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2002

About the author

Alan Steele Milward, FBA was a British economic historian. One of the most influential historians of the second half of the twentieth century, Milward's work was well known in Britain, across Europe and beyond.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Britain's relationship with the rest of Europe has long been a politically contentious issue. Yet those who argue that Britain make a mistake in not participating in the formation of the European Economic Community in the years after World War II would profit greatly from reading Alan Milward's superb book. In it he does a brilliant job of detailing Britain's involvement with Western Europe after the war, addressing not just the genesis of the institutions that coalesced into the European Economic Community in 1957, but the stillborn efforts for a unified defense structure as well. His argument about Britain's pursuit of a "national" strategy (his phrase for the vision of a Britain free of extra-Commonwealth economic boundaries) may be controversial, but the evidence he marshals shows how Britain's preference for maintaining the Commonwealth -- a far more economically significant trading group to the British economy in the late 1940s and early 1950s than Europe -- was a sound and understandable one given the circumstances of the time. It was only with Europe's economic boom of the 1950s and the growing encroachment of the U.S. on Britain's Commonwealth markets in the mid-1950s that the British had cause to reconsider, only by then developments had turned against them, ultimately frustrating their first attempt to join in the early 1960s.

Milward relates all of this in a text that, while frequently consumed with the details of innumerable meetings, remains accessible thanks to his powers of explanation and analysis. The result is a book that is required reading for anyone seeking to understand Britain's complex involvement with Europe in the post-war era or the role it played in the development of Europe's supra-national institutions during that period.