Integration and Co-operation in Europe

Brigid Laffan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134923403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An ideal introductory text for students studying the EU, International politics and organisations, or economics: Laffan clearly explains the evolution and extent of European integration in areas ranging from industrial development to international relations and considers the problems that new political and economic demands from the East may raise.

Chapter 1 A rich tapestry of organizations

By 1945, beyond the joy and frenzy of liberation, beyond the panic of defeat and conquest, much of the continent shared a grim uniformity. Europe, and above all, central and eastern Europe, was a land laid waste.¹

Although the European idea has its roots in European political discourse, it was not until the aftermath of World War II that serious thought was given to the construction of a ‘permanent regime of joint responsibility’ for the management of inter-state relations, as suggested by Aristide Briand to the League of Nations in 1930. The shape of the Western European regional system that evolved between 1945 and 1960 was moulded by the priorities of the superpowers, the need to reach an accommodation on the ‘German Question’, and the imperatives of economic, social and political reconstruction. The states of Western Europe had strongly held but differing views about the kind of regional organizations they were willing to endorse. The tension between sovereignty and integration, still characteristic of European integration, was apparent in the early years of the post-war era. For Western Europe, however, there could be no return to the world before the war. There was a perceived need among West European political élites to establish formal institutions to manage inter-state relations. This chapter analyses the challenges facing Western Europe after the war, in the light of the new strategic landscape. These challenges were to establish a security system that could balance growing Soviet power, to deal with demands for some form of European unity and to achieve economic reconstruction.

THE LEGACY OF THE WAR

World War II devastated both the victors and the vanquished. There was an urgent need to reconstruct basic infrastructure and housing, to transform the economies from a war footing to peacetime, to provide sufficient food to feed a war-weary population, to deal with wartime refugees and to re-establish political systems in those states where a complete or near-complete breakdown had occurred. The task of reconstruction took place against the emergence of an international system dominated by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. After World War I, the United States’ retreat to ‘Fortress America’ and a policy of quasi-isolationism, together with Stalin’s preoccupation with creating a state controlled economy in the USSR, served to disguise the extent to which European dominance of the international state system was weakening. Although fragile, the European state system, which was based on a delicate balance of power, did not collapse until World War II.

After 1945, Europe’s weakness could not be hidden; its future was dominated by relations with and between the superpowers. By the end of the war, a new strategic landscape, characterized by a high degree of bi-polarity, was in place.² The United States was both a military and an economic superpower, whereas Soviet power was based entirely on its awesome military strength. After the war, the United States set out to establish a system of international economic management based on a multilateral system of free trade. American policy-makers were convinced that a liberal economic system would enhance economic prosperity and political stability. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) provided the global institutions for the post-war capitalist economic system. Fear of communism led the US to conclude a series of multilateral defence arrangements, a ‘Pax Americana’, with states throughout the world. The competitive nature of relations between the two superpowers, reinforced by a deep ideological conflict, ensured that there would be no retreat to ‘Fortress America’ after the war.

The Soviet Union, although less powerful than the United States, made considerable strategic gains as a result of the war, and the Red Army was to remain the most powerful military establishment on the European continent. Stalin’s desire to provide the Soviet Union with a cordon sanitaire around its borders led him to dominate those states where the Red Army held sway in 1945 by engineering Communist control in one Eastern European state after another. Eastern Europe was locked into a Soviet sphere of influence. The USSR exercised its hegemony by establishing political systems controlled by Communist Parties and by creating command economies based on state ownership, modelled on the Soviet system. A related Soviet goal was to isolate the East European states from economic interaction with the Western World. The USSR refused to join the multilateral economic institutions that grew up after the war and prevented its satellites from doing so. A rival socialist economic system based on the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), was set up in 1949.³

Between 1945 and 1947, the wartime alliance between the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union gradually gave way to increasing hostility and suspicion which crystallized into the cold war. Europe became a continent of two halves. Germany, at the centre of this divide, represented the most delicate challenge facing the post-war order. Because Germany had gone to war against its neighbours twice in less than thirty years, occupying much of Europe, the need to contain German militarism loomed large in the debate about the post-war order. After its defeat, Germany was divided initially into four zones of occupation under American, Soviet, British and French control.

In 1949, as relations between the West and its wartime ally, the USSR, continued to deteriorate, two German states were constituted: the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), consisting of the American, British and French zones, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), made up of the remaining territory, under Soviet control. Berlin, at the centre of the GDR, was controlled under separate arrangements by the four occupying powers. The partition of Germany was the centrepiece of the European post-war order. After 1949, the incorporation of the FRG into the emerging Western European order became a major priority for the United States and France.

During World War II there had been much debate among the fighters of the Resistance movements about Europe’s future political order. The model favoured by many in the movements was a ‘United States of Europe’. The following attitudes dominated their writings:

• Worship of the state and extreme nationalism was the primary source of strife in Europe.
• The weakness of the intergovernmental League of Nations led many of the Resistance fighters to favour supranational federal institutions.
• A federal Europe was the best solution to the German Question.
• Economic integration was justified on the basis of the small size of individual European states.
• A federal Europe would enable the European states to resist domination by the Soviet Union and the United States.⁴

Although the utopian vision of the Resistance fighters did not prevail, the ideal of a united Europe had a powerful emotive appeal in the immediate post-war era. Nationalism was seen as a powerful but irrational and dangerous ideology which had contributed to the rise of fascism.

Western European states had to respond to the multiple challenges of fashioning a new security order that could deal with the German Question and growing East-West conflict, of establishing structures to foster economic recovery, and of responding to the trauma of the war by creating new institutions to manage inter-state relations. The system was fashioned by a number of key states. The United States, as the Western superpower, spurred on by its policy of containment vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, largely determined the nature of the security regime and influenced, but did not fashion, the political/economic institutions. Britain and France became the key Western European states in the development of the new order. The Federal Republic of Germany was the subject of much of the post-war system-building, but it was also a participant from 1949 onwards. The smaller states had to work out their responses to proposals and policy designs emanating from these key states.

THE SECURITY DILEMMA

The task of assuring their own defence and territorial integrity led the states of Western Europe into a highly institutionalized and multilateral defence system designed to counterbalance the military might of the USSR. Yet in the immediate post-war years, fear of German militarism was rampant. The Dunkirk Treaty, signed by France and Britain in 1947, cited the German threat as its raison d’être. In time, anxiety about Soviet military power would replace fears of Germany and would impel the states of Western Europe to accept German rearmament. A keenly fought civil war in Greece led to fears of a communist take-over of that country. Britain, traditionally the policeman of the Mediterranean, informed the US that it could not come to the aid of the Greek government. The US responded with what is known as the Truman Doctrine’, a pledge by President Truman of American aid for ‘free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures’.⁵ The United States was willing to accept global responsibilities in its effort to contain communism and its rival superpower.

In 1948 a series of events strengthened the perception of a Soviet threat to Western Europe. A coup in Prague ended a multi-party system as Czechslovakia fell under the yoke of communism. In July 1948, the Soviet Union began the Berlin blockade by refusing West Berlin supplies of food, energy and other necessities. The blockade lasted from July 1948 to May 1949. Rather than respond by force, and thereby increase the possibility of major conflict, the US and Britain kept Berlin supplied from the air until the USSR finally abandoned the blockade. Fear of communist subversion in France and Italy was rife during this period because both had sizeable communist parties and trade unions with strong links to Moscow.⁶

The Western European states first resorted to regional multilateral defence arrangements and later to an integrated defence structure linked to and dependent upon the United States. Although the Brussels Treaty Organization (BTO), established in 1948 between France, Britain, and The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg (Benelux states), identified Germany as a potential aggressor, it was also a response to the Soviet threat. The Western European states, faced with the size of the Red Army (175 divisions), felt the need for a US involvement in their defence.⁷ In 1949 the US signed the North Atlantic Treaty with the Brussels Treaty states, Canada, Italy, Portugal, and three Scandinavian states (Denmark, Norway and Iceland). Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, followed by the Federal Republic in 1955 and Spain in 1982. Although France withdrew from the integrated command in 1965, it remains a member of the Atlantic Alliance. A number of Western European states are outside the system of collective defence; these are Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Finland and Ireland.⁸

When discussions began on the establishment of NATO in 1948, Sweden, in an attempt to keep all of Scandinavia outside the Atlantic defence system, proposed a Defence Union of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. However, the three countries had very different views of their security interests. Denmark and Norway opted for membership of NATO. A delicate Nordic balance was struck between the two members of NATO, and the neutrals—Sweden and Finland. Sweden opted for its traditional policy of neutrality, whereas Finland’s relationship with its neighbour, the Soviet Union, was regulated by the 1948 Treaty of Friendship.⁹

The question of German rearmament came to the fore with the onset of the Korean War in 1950. Given increasing commitments in Asia, the US was determined to foster the rearming of West Germany as a contribution to the defence of Western Europe. For its neighbours, ever fearful of a resurgent Germany, the imperative was to find a means of acquiescing to the demands of the United States while controlling a rearmed Germany. The French proposed a solution modelled on the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) (discussed below) of establishing a European Defence Community (EDC); the Pleven Plan in which German contingents would form part of a European army within NATO. The EDC Treaty was signed in May 1952 by the six states that had participated in the European Coal and Steel Community. As a corollary to the EDC, a companion European Political Community (EPC) Treaty was drafted some six months after the EDC Treaty. In 1954, the French National Assembly rejected the EDC on a procedural vote because of communist and Gaullist opposition. The international environment following the death of Stalin in 1953 was less conducive to bold initiatives such as the EDC and the EPC which implied the establishment of federal institutions and an advanced level of political integration.¹⁰

The rearming of Germany was accomplished by the reorganization of the Brussels Treaty Organization (BTO) into the Western European Union (WEU) in 1954. It made provision for a West German army and for that nation’s membership of NATO in 1955. After the failure of the EDC, Britain, which had refused to become part of a European defence organization with a supranational character, took the lead in establishing the WEU. The latter was not envisaged as a European defence arrangement in its own right; it was simply a device to integrate the Federal Republic of Germany into NATO and, by specific measures, to control German rearmament. By 1955, Western Europe’s security order was in place. The challenge of European unity remained.

A UNITED EUROPE

In 1947 a variety of groups committed to European union formed the ‘International Committee of the Movements for European Unity,’ with the intention of convening a Congress of Europe. This was held at The Hague in 1948 under the chairmanship of Winston Churchill. The resolutions of the Hague Congress were a mixture of idealism and rhetoric. Among the most important claims and demands were

• the duty of the nations of Europe to create an economic and political union
• that European nations must transfer and merge some portion of their sovereign rights
• the convening of a European assembly
• the drafting of a charter of human rights
• the establishment of a court of justice
• the integration of Germany into a united or federated Europe.¹¹

The French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, suggested that the Advisory Council of the BTO should study the possibility of setting up a European assembly among its member states and other states wishing to take part. This led to the Council of Europe.

Tension emerged in the Committee between the French and Benelux representatives, on the one hand, and Britain, on the other, about the role and powers of a European assembly. Britain was opposed to all forms of supranational integration and the transfer of sovereignty. It agreed to the establishment of a European assembly, provided that there was a controlling committee of ministers representing state interests. The Statutes of the Council of Europe were signed in May 1949 by the BTO states and by Ireland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The debate on the powers of the Council’s institutions was the first indication of a major divergence between Britain and the continental Western European states about the transfer of powers to regional institutions. Britain favoured traditional intergovernmental arrangements, whereas the others were prepared to go beyond the existing state-system to embrace integration.¹²

The aim of the Council, as laid down in Article 1 of its Statutes, is to ‘achieve a greater unity between its members’ so as to safeguard Europe’s common heritage.¹³ From the outset, the Council of Europe has been identified with promoting the common values of Western European democracy, especially the rule of law. The aim of the Council...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge/University Association for Contemporary European Studies series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acronyms, abbreviations and glossary of terms
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 A rich tapestry of organizations
• Chapter 2 The evolution of Western European organizations An overview
• Chapter 3 Economic integration The home market
• Chapter 4 Economic integration The wider agenda
• Chapter 5 A people’s Europe
• Chapter 6 Western Europe in world politics
• Chapter 7 The domestic dimension of co-operation and integration
• Chapter 8 Europe—a period of transition