Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

A year after the Common Market was inaugurated, the British—still trying to head off the emergence of a super-national European bloc—suggested that the EEC be expanded into an industrial free-trade zone including the EEC member-states, other European countries and the British Commonwealth. De Gaulle, predictably, rejected the idea. In response, and at the initiative of the UK, a number of countries then met in Stockholm in November 1959 and formed themselves into the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). The member states—Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Portugal and the UK, later joined by Ireland, Iceland and Finland—were mostly prosperous, peripheral, and enthusiastic proponents of free trade. Their agriculture, with the exception of Portugal, was small-scale but highly efficient and oriented to the world market.