Читать книгу European Integration - Mark Gilbert - Страница 25

The Treaty on Western Union had been signed in Brussels in March 1948 by the governments of Britain, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The treaty, as well as being a military alliance, bound its participants to develop and harmonize the economic recovery of Europe and to raise the standards of living of their populations. Its Permanent Commission was supposed to be the forum for such mutual cooperation between governments in the economic field.

The Treaty on Western Union was a far cry from the much greater degree of integration wished for by the European Movement, but its provisions, like the equally intergovernmental structure of the OEEC, accurately reflected how far Britain was prepared to move down the road toward supranational cooperation in the spring of 1948.

British hostility to a federal state in Europe might seem a foregone conclusion. Interestingly, however, Foreign Secretary Bevin himself had been, for much of 1947, intrigued by the notion of a European customs union and was seemingly prepared to acquiesce to the loss of sovereignty such an institution implied. The problem with a customs union was that while greater economic integration in Western Europe would lead to a rationalization of British heavy industry and expand trade and strengthen the continent politically, it would also lead to damaging short-run competition for the iron and steel industry and would end Britain’s advantageous trade relationship with the countries of the Commonwealth. A customs union seemed likely, moreover, to lead to a fully fledged economic union governed by supranational institutions. The notion of conferring sovereignty over the economy to an external body was even harder for a socialist government to accept than it would have been for the Conservatives. Labour ministers were in no mood to subordinate their socialist vision for British society to the economic priorities of foreigners.

In December 1947, the disastrous outcome of the London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) placed European cooperation firmly on the agenda. The CFM was the forum through which the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain, together with France and China, should have agreed on a postwar settlement. Its meetings, however, became steadily more acrimonious as mutual perceptions of ideological enmity grew. The London meeting, which was preceded by vituperative Soviet propaganda against the Americans’ plans to “enslave” Europe, left free Europe’s leaders in no doubt that, as Bevin expressed the situation in a paper titled “The First Aim of British Foreign Policy” to the British Cabinet in January 1948: “We shall be hard put to it to stem further encroachments of the Soviet tide” in the absence of “some form of union in Western Europe, whether of a formal or informal character.”⁵²

The discussion in the Cabinet of this paper led to Bevin’s famous “Western Union” speech to the House of Commons on January 22, 1948, which included the telling remark, “Great Britain cannot stand outside Europe and regard its problems as quite separate from those of its European neighbors.” In Europe, this comment, not unreasonably, was taken as a sign that Britain was preparing to throw its prestige behind the concept of European unity. Certainly, it was the decisive impulse that led to the signature of the Brussels Pact.⁵³

Britain regarded its promotion of the Western Union as a major development in its foreign policy, but, in fact, its attitude toward European integration satisfied neither the Americans—who wanted Britain to go further down the road to supranationalism—nor its European neighbors. Throughout the fall of 1948, Britain resisted all attempts by the European Movement to persuade governments to implement the resolutions agreed at the Congress of Europe, in particular the creation of an assembly of parliamentarians that could lobby for greater European unity.⁵⁴ An irritated Bevin told the House of Commons on September 15, 1948, that proposals to create political institutions before sorting out mutual defense and economic relations between governments was like “putting on the roof before building the house.”⁵⁵ The British were reluctant to go farther than the creation of a council of European governments, without any form of parliamentary supervision. Many in the European Movement were pressing for the constitution of a federal European state.

The other governments of Western Europe were more receptive to the European Movement’s assiduous lobbying. On January 29, 1949, the five Brussels Powers agreed to establish the Council of Europe, where decision making was to be reserved for the Committee of Ministers (as it was named), but an assembly with consultative powers was to be created in tandem. Five other nations who had not signed the Brussels Pact—Italy, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—were invited to join (the European Movement regretted that nascent West Germany was not invited).⁵⁶ Italy’s foreign minister, Count Carlo Sforza, immediately recommended that the new body be called the “European Union.” Bevin swatted aside Sforza’s bumptious diplomacy without difficulty. The Treaty of St. James Palace (London, May 15, 1949) instituting the Council of Europe was rigorously intergovernmental in design. It also excluded defense questions from its remit: Britain intended such issues to be dealt with by the North Atlantic Treaty, which had been signed on April 4, 1949. The European Movement was unhappy about this restriction, too. It nevertheless believed that “the future Parliament of Europe” would “grow out” of the Consultative Assembly.⁵⁷

The Council’s purpose was to construct a “closer unity” between the member states through joint action in economic, social, scientific, judicial, and administrative fields. Its main institutions, the Committee of Ministers and the Assembly, were both consultative in character. The Committee of Ministers, in which each country possessed one vote and in which votes required unanimity, was a forum for member states to debate measures proposed by the member states or the assembly; its decisions were not binding upon governments. The Consultative Assembly, meanwhile, was able to propose items for debate by the ministerial committee if they were passed by a two-thirds majority, but it had no legislative power whatever: it was “designed solely as a deliberative body for the formulation and expression of European public opinion.”⁵⁸ Paul-Henri Spaak was elected first president of the Assembly on August 10, 1949.

The Assembly opened its first session in Strasbourg on August 12, 1949, amid scenes of great enthusiasm for European unity and much windy rhetoric: Churchill’s inevitable speech, for instance, was merely an egregious collection of euphonious words. Beneath the rhetoric, the Assembly was deeply divided. Most delegates agreed on the need for a supranational political organization for Western Europe—on September 5, 1949, the Assembly voted by a margin of eighty-four to two to recommend the creation of a “European political authority with limited functions but real powers”—but the British and the Nordic delegates were opposed to any kind of proposal for a federal European state. A consequence of this split in the Assembly was that much of the Council of Europe’s first two years were expended on acrimonious wrangling. Paul-Henri Spaak, who subsequently wrote in his memoirs that “of all the international bodies I have known, I have never known one more timorous and ineffectual” than the Council of Europe, resigned on December 11, 1951, from frustration at the Assembly’s caution on this issue.⁵⁹

Another initiative launched by the European Movement in 1949 had more success. This was the submission of a draft European Convention on Human Rights to the Council. After just over a year’s debate and redrafting, the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms was signed in Rome on November 4, 1950, by thirteen European states or territories: Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, the Saarland, Turkey, the United Kingdom (which, however, specifically refused to ratify two clauses of the treaty that were particularly invasive of national sovereignty), and West Germany. Greece and Sweden signed a few weeks later.

The Convention guaranteed the traditional liberal freedoms: it did not include specific guarantees for social rights such as the right to work. To adjudicate, if breaches of the Convention had occurred, the document created two institutions: the Commission and the Court of Human Rights. The Commission’s task was to screen cases according to strict criteria; the Court then judged on the merits of the case. Article 53 of the Convention committed the signatories to the Convention to “abide by the decision of the Court,” although no sanctions could be applied in the event of noncompliance. European states have generally tried very hard not to be cited before the Court in the postwar years. The Court’s sentences have carried an explicit moral condemnation that most states have wished to avoid.⁶⁰

By the fall of 1950, despite progress on human rights, it was evident that the Council of Europe would not act as a springboard to a “European Union.” To this extent, the British had—temporarily at least—imposed their vision of ad hoc cooperation between governments. Yet it would be wrong to underestimate the power of the European ideal. Members of the European Movement openly described their political activity on behalf of a united Europe in quasi-religious terms:

The European Movement started as an organization. It is rapidly becoming a faith—a faith that gives strength, inspiration and a sense of partnership to all those who will adopt it. That for which we are striving is clearly right. It is also clearly necessary.⁶¹

The bedrock upon which this faith was based was the conviction that the European Movement represented the “real” or “true” European spirit. Nazism and fascism had been aberrations, not the rule. Just five years after the liberation of Auschwitz and Belsen, and the end of the cruelest war in human history, European notables apparently saw nothing outlandish about making lengthy speeches at Strasbourg proclaiming Europe to be a civilizing force in world affairs, or asserting that Europe was essentially tolerant, democratic, and culturally unified—even though most of the world was still under European colonial rule and the French, in particular, were waging a ruthless war in Vietnam as the Strasbourg assembly orated. The history of Europe is many things, but only an ideologue could claim with a straight face that it is a story of tolerance and democracy, rather than one of war, tyranny, and social and racial injustice. The European project, in short, was based from the start upon a “noble lie.”

But that was not necessarily a bad thing. Alcide De Gasperi made this point openly in May 1950:

If there is to be a myth, just tell me what better myth of the relationship between states, the future of Europe, of the world, of security, of peace, we can give youth today if not this effort to build a Union? Do you want a myth of dictatorship, of power, or even of the heroism that accompanies the national flag? If so, we will immediately create a new conflict that will inevitably lead to war. I’m telling you that this [the myth of Europe] is a myth of peace; it is peace and it is the road that needs to be taken.⁶²

For political purposes, the idealism associated with the European project was an immense advantage. It was impossible to contain or dismiss the urge to construct supranational solutions for political problems: too many influential people in Western Europe regarded working for such solutions as a moral and political imperative. This would prove useful as the growing economic strength and political independence of West Germany began to loom. The mood was ripe for integrating the new democratic Germany into a common project, not isolating it or confining its growth.