Federalism and European Union: Political Ideas, Influences, and Strategies in the European Community 1972-1986

Federalism and European Union 1992 has focused attention on the development of integration within the European Community and the movement towards European Union. This book fills a notable gap in the study of the EC by demonstrating the significance of the Federalist tradition in promoting this union, arguing that the main impulse to give meaning to it since the early 1970s has been Federalism The author substantiates this argument by examining the notion of Federalism itself from the interstate and intrastate perspectives in Western Europe, and, by outlining a new interpretation of familiar events 1972–1987 along side original information based upon elite interviews. The conclusion is an analysis of the Single European Act of 1987 as the most recent manifestation of the mounting pressure for European unity. Michael Burgess is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Plymouth Polytechnic.

FEDERALISM AND EUROPEAN UNION Political Ideas, Influences and Strategies in the European Community, 1972–1987

Michael Burgess

London and New York

First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “ To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1991 Tony Crowley All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Burgess, Michael, 1949– Federalism and European union, political ideas, influences and strategies in the European Community, 1972– 1987. 1. European Community Federation I. Title 321′.02′094 ISBN 0-203-19215-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-19218-4 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-00498-5 (Print Edition) Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Burgess, Michael, 1949– Federalism and European union: political ideas, influences, and strategies in the European community, 1972–1987 / Michael Burgess. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-415-00498-5 European Economic Community countries. 2. European federation- History– 20th century. I. Title. D1060.B83 1989 341.24′2–dc19 88–29355 CIP

In memory of my mother and for Adam and Marie Louise

Experts are able to see what already exists, therefore they were able to say something on European law. But they are blind for all that must exist, but does not yet exist. This is our role. (Altiero Spinelli)

CONTENTS Preface

Introduction 1. Federalism and the Federalists

Viii

1 7

2. The European Community’s Federal Heritage

15

3. Jean Monnet and Altiero Spinelli: The Two Faces of Federalism

27

4. The Origins and Growth of European Union, 1969–1979

40

5. European Union Relaunched, 1980–1984

76

6. Federalism, European Union and the Intergovernmental Response, 1984– 1985 7. Federalism and the Single European Act, 1985–1987

115

8. Conclusion

138

Index

128

141

PREFACE This study is the result of a long-held conviction that no adequate survey of Federalism and European Union exists in the mainstream British literature dealing with the European Community. I was particularly struck by the continuity and resilience of the federal idea in the political and constitutional development of the Community and the absence of a detailed study of this important relationship. This book is intended to satisfy this requirement. Perhaps the British will eventually come to understand and appreciate the continuing significance of federalism to the future of Europe. They may even come to realise that there is also a British tradition of federalism and that it more than any other has informed the constitutional debate about ‘political’ Europe during the 1980s. During the research for this book I have incurred many debts. My first acknowledgement must be to the Economic and Social Research Council which provided me with a Personal Grant to conduct my research in Brussels, Strasbourg, Luxembourg and London during 1985. I would also like to thank Adrian Lee, Head of the Department of Social and Political Studies at Plymouth Polytechnic, for his usual encouragement and support. They have not been taken for granted. Neither have the patience and cooperation of Sue Ellicott, the Department’s new wizard of the word-processor. I gratefully acknowledge her creative consultations. Finally I would like to include the names of several people who have helped me in various ways, ranging from personal interviews to gathering key documents, to complete this study. They include: Christopher Jackson MEP, Derek Prag MEP, Tim Bainbridge, Alain Van Solinge and Riccardo Perissich in the Commission, and Rita Cardozo. A special mention must be made of Richard Corbett of the Committee of Institutional Affairs in the European Parliament. His help was invaluable in so many different ways. He knows more about Altiero Spinelli than perhaps it is wise to know. And no preface to a book of this sort would be satisfactory without a formal acknowledgement—sadly now a posthumous acknowledgement—of the debt owed to Spinelli himself. It is no exaggeration to confess that his lifelong pursuit of European peace via federation first inspired me to intensify my interest in federalism and the European Community. My recorded interviews with him remain as treasured historical archives representative of the man and his ideas. June 1988

INTRODUCTION The idea behind this book arose from a growing belief that the study of federalism in the specific context of European integration has been the victim of a strange paradox in scholarly thought among social scientists in the Western world. While there has been no shortage of intellectual theorising and pretheorising about the conditions deemed necessary for effecting a closer, more binding, union among the states and peoples of Western Europe, no attempt has been made in recent times to demonstrate both how and to what extent federal ideas, influences and strategies have been an ever-present, indeed integral, part of the European Community’s continuous political and constitutional development. At the very least this book is intended to fill this gap. In a very general sense it seeks to restore the importance of federalism to the study of the European Community’s past, present and future. Almost without exception, most of the recent mainstream political science literature on the European Community, published in English, depicts it as little more than an intergovernmental grouping of independent states.(1) There is no real sense of an evolving organic whole. The whole, when it is acknowledged, is deemed no greater than the sum of its aggregate parts. The Community’s central institutions, particularly those, like the Commission, the Parliament and the Court of Justice, which have supranational, federal propensities, are tolerated but rarely applauded. Recognition of their important potential for the future of the European Community is particularly grudging. And even when reluctantly recognised it is usually only as a cursory aside to the more comfortable assurance that the Council of Ministers, the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) and the European Council continue to control the Community’s destiny. The European idea to this extent is impoverished. A wholly intergovernmental perspective of the European Community while firmly grounded in the constituent state realities, both obscures and devalues an important rival conception of Europe. It is this federal European conception—which for many extends beyond what is Western Europe—that has suffered from an understandable, if undue, obsession with what governments say and do. This overriding concern with intergovernmental relations arises in particular out of the academic focus upon policy-making in the European Community. Since it is member state governments and the associated paraphernalia of elite hierarchies which dominate most of the policy sectors of the Community, political scientists using this approach to Community affairs repose in the safe knowledge that their research is empirically verifiable. But a policy-making approach has many limitations. It is singularly unhelpful when dealing with questions about the future of the European Community. It is myopic about institutional reform and it may actually be detrimental to the vision and work of those who strive to widen the range of practical options for reform even within an accepted intergovernmental framework. Finally it is uncomfortable with theoretical issues. As Carole Webb once remarked, a policy-making approach is a coward’s way out of a theoretical dilemma.(2)

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But for our purposes in this book the overloaded concept of intergovernmentalism has a particularly damaging and distorting impact upon the relevance of federalism to the European Community. Not only does it by implication overlook federalism but it also serves ipso facto both to misrepresent and devalue it. Federal ideas, influences and strategies appear only as an intermittent not a continuous pressure in the Community’s life. They are relegated to the sidelines as a laudable but unrealistic force and the widespread impression conveyed is one of minuscule support for an abstract utopian goal. Here the past is conveniently forgotten and the eye is deflected from what are deemed marginal influences and activities compared to the gladiatorial combat of intergovernmental rivalries and conflicts. Federal ideas, by contrast, fade into insignificance. The main purpose of this book is to challenge the prevailing conventional wisdom of intergovermentalism by reasserting and reinstating the relevance of federalism in the politics of the European Community. I do not wish to imply that federalism has in some sinister, covert sense replaced intergovernmentalism as the dominant guiding concept of the Community’s political future. Nor do I impute to it some notion of moral superiority over its conceptual competitors. My intention is to demonstrate that there has been a fundamental continuity of federal ideas, influences and strategies in the political development of the Community during the years between 1972 and 1987. Moreover, this continuity of federalism has been the main impulse behind the attempt to flesh out the meaning of European Union since the early 1970s. It has been neither an intermittent nor a fragmentary impulse but, on the contrary, a persistent and continuous struggle to achieve qualitative and quantitative change in the relations both between states and among the peoples of Europe. One of the underlying assumptions of this study is that ideas are important in politics. They not only inspire individuals and groups to act—to do something about what they believe in—but they also provide a constant source of discussion and debate about the goals of political activity and the strategies required to achieve them. However one perceives and defines the European idea, and its current manifestation in the European Community, the existing constitutional framework originally established by the Paris and Rome Treaties encapsulates a mixed political tradition and furnishes a wide range of practical possibilities for the Community’s future political development. The federal idea is one of these and it constitutes a perfectly legitimate part of that mixed tradition. It also acts as a solid antidote to that complacent instrumentalism so characteristic of intergovernmentalism and commonly revered as pragmatism. The word ‘pragmatic’ figures prominently in the language of intergovernmentalism largely as an apologia of pedestrian progress but it often carries with it the silent disapproval of forward, progressive political strategies designed to accelerate the pace towards ‘an ever closer union’. The boundary between being pragmatic and being chimerical is thus tightly drawn. We shall observe the lessons that federalists have learned from this uncompromising language during the course of our study. It is also worth emphasising that in our attempt to chronicle the sequence of key events during 1972–1987 which gave both shape and purpose to federal ideas, influences and strategies we shall not dwell upon the Community’s policy arenas per se. As this introductory discussion has suggested, there is already an abundant literature which deals with it. The discussion of particular policies does of course repeatedly enter into federal

Introduction

3

discourse, especially from the standpoint of political strategy, and we shall pay attention to them as they emerge during this study. There is, however, no attempt to explore in detail the complex and protracted debate among federalists about which particular policies would lead most quickly to federation in Europe. This debate, though important, would require a separate, and probably more than one, study. Since this survey of the period 1972–1987 focuses upon political ideas, influences and strategies devoted to federalism it is important to say something about each of them and how they are related. We have already emphasised the importance of ideas in politics and we shall have more to say about federalism in the next chapter. But it is perhaps appropriate at this juncture to underline the commonly accepted need among federalists for institutional structures which consolidate and preserve an assortment of salient diversities while simultaneously possessing the capacity to go beyond what exists. The genius of the federal idea lies in its ability to combine these two contrasting, but not always conflicting, goals. A strong executive authority of some sort, tempered by parliamentary accountability, would encapsulate and distil the common political will while various forms of regional decentralisation and administrative deconcentration would accommodate distinct cultural, economic and political diversities. Federalism thus engages a multiplicity of established human beliefs and practices at different levels both within and beyond traditional state boundaries. And this applies whether the institutional structures are arrived at, as it were, from below or from above existing state authorities. The principle of unity in diversity naturally facilitates different conceptions of unity and different conceptions of diversity but these conceptual varieties must ultimately be channelled into a network of institutional accommodation at some point. We shall return to these issues and concepts in the next chapter. What, then, do we mean by federalist influences in the European Community? Where is the evidence for this and how is it brought to bear upon political integration? The concept of political influence is difficult to grasp but I would suggest that we are entering the uncertain world of political communication where successful influence means shaping and changing people’s perceptions of what exists and what can happen. This indicates a capacity to affect human behaviour.(3) The institutional framework and the policy-making processes of the European Community both furnish appropriate sites for federalist influences to act upon national and supranational elites, as well as mass publics, in a significant way. By regular contact and political intercourse federalist influences can be spread widely and often imperceptibly across a network of Community activities so that the policy- and decision-making environments become more receptive to alternative options and strategies. Two examples will suffice to demonstrate the crucial atmospheric change which influence can effect in order to create new opportunities to move ahead towards more ambitious goals. The European Defence Community (EDC) episode of 1953–1954 and the European Union Treaty (EUT) event of 1984–1985 both admirably illustrate how far federalist influences can determine both the agenda and the pace of potentially far-reaching reforms. Contexts, environments and atmospheres are never static; they change constantly according to a variety of stimuli moving at different speeds and in different directions. Federalist influences flow through several channels both inside and outside the formal institutional and policy frameworks of the European Community. Individuals, groups and professional organisations exert such influence in many ways. This study will underline,

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for example, the individual impact of Leo Tindemans (The Tindemans Report) and Altiero Spinelli (The European Union Treaty), both self-confessed federalists in the Community domain, upon the evolving idea of European Union. Both helped to alter established perceptions of the Community and were part of the movement which helped to change the context of the political debate about Europe’s future. The European Parliament, especially after the first direct elections in 1979, also played a leading role in this debate and has long been an important repository of distinct federalist influences. The European People’s Party (EPP) has been an avowedly federalist transnational political party since its inception and federalists of varying shades occupy key positions in other party groups. Even the British Conservatives within the larger European Democrat Group (EDG) in the Parliament can boast of up to a dozen elected members who accept the federalist label depending upon the company they keep. And we cannot of course overlook the role of political and administrative elites working in the Commission in Brussels. Many Eurocrats will have been socialised into federalist thinking if only because of the institutional dilemmas confronting a supranational body operating within a predominantly intergovernmental framework.(4) These are not ideological preconceptions but rather rational conclusions. Federal practice would seek to overcome the Commission’s perceived impotence by reinstating it at the centre of Community affairs. Outside of the formal Community framework there also exists a myriad of European groups and organisations which are either openly federalist in their aims or tacit federalist sympathisers. This is not the place to identify all of them but it is appropriate to call attention to the European Union of Federalists (EUF), the Italian Movimento Federalista Europeo (MFE), the British Federal Trust, the Young European Federalists, and of course the European Movement. These are part of a Europe-wide network of political education, transmitting information and organising activities designed to foster European sympathies by breaking down narrow national mental barriers to closer union. We must not forget, too, that particular nation state leaders and elites have also contributed to forward movement in the Community at different periods in their history. This is not to imply that such elites and individuals have necessarily been convinced federalists but the impact of their actions has often coincided with movement in a federal direction. Most interested observers of Community affairs would doubtless point to the Benelux countries which have often been associated with progressive, and sometimes bold, initiatives. Some might interpret the Paris-Bonn axis with concrete policy achievements facilitating further incremental steps towards a more binding European union. In this study, however, I shall devote a short section to the Italian contribution to the institutional reform of the Community during the 1980s. For a variety of intellectual, historical and political reasons Italy played a particularly prominent role in recent efforts to translate European Union into a practical form. This merits closer analysis. Taken together we can appreciate how these various sites provide crucial access points for federalist influences to percolate throughout the Community, breaking down psychological barriers and opening doors previously closed to European solutions. This study suggests that there is a basic continuity of federal ideas in the European Community’s political development and it is important to recognise this if we are to understand the consistency of purpose which characterised attempts to give the idea of European Union both meaning and content during 1972–1987. The context of federal

Introduction

5

ideas and influences provided a platform for the testing of rival political strategies to flesh out European Union. It would be erroneous to claim that the period surveyed here witnessed a unanimous agreement among federalists as to the correct political strategy to adopt towards European Union. However, there was a convergence of opinion of sorts during the 1980s sufficient to mobilise a significant movement in support of institutional reform. This centred around Spinelli and the European Parliament, but it was a quite different political strategy from that which Tindemans was forced to shoulder in the mid1970s. The federalist inspiration was the same but the strategy was different. What, then, should we say about political strategy? If influence is a difficult concept to grasp and to operationalise, strategy is much more tangible although it generates more controversy. Agreement about the goal of a federal Europe does not automatically stretch to consensus about the strategy required to achieve it. And federalists have furnished a rich diverse literature about approaches to this goal which is as prolific as the numerous diversities which they themselves cherish. In this study, however, we shall reduce the complexities of this literature about federalist strategy by dividing it broadly into two categories: those strategies which focus primarily upon policy changes and policy innovations and those strategies which concentrate upon institutional reform. These rival approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed the political and constitutional development of the European Community indicates their lively coexistence. Nonetheless there are many federalists who believe that, for example, monetary integration, leading to economic and monetary union (EMU), is of paramount importance while others see political co-operation (POCO) and security issues as potentially more profitable approaches to a federal Europe.(5) The most prominent and vociferous protagonist of major institutional reform was Spinelli and we shall examine the assumptions which underpinned his political strategy later in our study. These two simplified categories of political strategy—policies and institutions—also harbour additional implications for federalist practice. Some policy strategies may be legitimised in the simple sense that they are merely fulfilling commitments already adumbrated in the Treaty of Rome while others are actually breaking fresh ground as new policies absent in the original treaty. Similarly institutional reform meant support for direct elections to the European Parliament, fulfilling Article 138 of the Rome Treaty, but it could also mean more far-reaching proposals necessitating either treaty amendments or a new treaty. These strategies are sometimes juxtaposed as the big leap forward versus incremental change. They have been the source of heated disputes among federalists and considerable misunderstanding among even informed observers of European Community politics. They also have major theoretical implications for the study of federalism and we will return to them in a short section of Chapter Seven. Having briefly outlined what we mean by political ideas, influences and strategies it is almost time to turn our attention to the nature and meaning of federalism itself. Before we do so, however, we must alert the reader to a peculiar feature of this study, namely, the special emphasis given to the beliefs and activities of Altiero Spinelli. Some commentators may regard this stress upon Spinelli’s role in the drive for European Union as idiosyncratic. British observers, in particular, may feel that his prominence in the following pages is exaggerated and that his individual importance has been overstated. Certainly some British Conservatives in the European Parliament have tacitly expressed this opinion and more than a few members of the European People’s Party have openly

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resented his towering reputation as Europe’s leading federalist spearheading the movement for institutional reform. But the view taken here is that Spinelli must be given the credit which he deserved. Both historically and intellectually Spinelli was the leading representative of a tradition which stretches back at least to the late 1930s. His own monumental contribution towards the reconstruction of the European Community during the 1980s should be seen in this context. His federalist inspiration and influence were part of a much wider struggle to build a strong independent Europe capable of asserting itself in an increasingly competitive and dangerous world. Both his own past and his vision of the future went beyond what we now call the European Community. This was only ever the current manifestation of the European idea. It was never the final goal. Spinelli, above all, took the initiative in attempting to translate the federal idea into sound political practice during the 1980’s and we must now turn our attention to what is meant by the federal idea in the specific context of the European Community. We will begin by looking briefly at some of the conceptual problems surrounding the academic debate about federalism and then discuss the main difficulties confronting federalists engaged in the daunting task of building Europe. Notes 1. Among these texts are H.Wallace, W.Wallace and C.Webb (Eds), Policy Making in the European Community, (London, John Wiley 1983); M.Forsyth, Unions of States: The Theory and Practice of Confederation, (Leicester, Leicester University Press 1981) , Ch.7; P.Taylor, The Limits of European Integration, (London, Croom Helm 1983); and C.Tugendhat, Making Sense of Europe, (London, Viking Penguin 1986). 2. C.Webb, Policy Making in the European Community, (First Edition 1977), p. 28. 3. I have found David V.J.Bell’s. Power, Influence and Authority; An Essay in Political Linguistics, (London, O.U.P. 1975) to be very helpful in grappling with this concept. 4. In his The European Community in Perspective, (London, D.C.Heath & Co. 1973), Ch. 3. Gerhard Mally identified such elites as ‘Internal Federators’ while Phillip Taylor in his When Europe Speaks With One Voice, (London, Aldwych Press 1979), Ch.3. presented a sample of elite attitudes towards European Union and Federalism.

The most recent attempt to identify ‘propulsive elites’ in the Community is R. Pryce (Ed.), The Dynamics of European Union, (London, Croom Helm 1987). 5. See for example S.Pistone, ‘Towards a Federal System of European Defence and World Security’, paper given at Union of European Federalists seminar, Univesity of Kent, Canterbury, 13–15 September 1985 and A.Jozzo, ‘Towards a Federal Economy: Pre-Federal Monetary Union’ at the same conference and subsequently published in The Federalist, year XXVII, No. 3, (Dec. 1985), pp. 195–201. It should also be noticed that some elements of a fiscal federalism are already apparent in the European Community. See M.Emerson, ‘The Finances of the European Community: A Case Study in Embryonic Fiscal Federalism’, Ch. 9. in W.E.Oates (Ed.), The Political Economy of Fiscal Federalism, (London, Lexington 1976).

Chapter One FEDERALISM AND THE FEDERALISTS It will be clear from our introductory discussion that the particular kind of federalism which we shall be investigating here is different from the federalism associated with domestic state government and politics. It is linked to but distinct from the sort of federalism which we might study in Spain, France or Belgium and in the three recognised federations of Western Europe, namely, Austria, Switzerland and West Germany.(1) Our focus instead will be upon the federalism which seeks to bring together both the states and the peoples of contemporary Western Europe, especially those which currently comprise the European Community, into a new form of union, namely, a federal state. This new federal state is something which, qualitatively and quantitatively, extends beyond the existing European Community and is both more binding and regulated in a formal constitutional and political sense than present organisational arrangements. A federal state, emerging out of the Community’s current acquis communitaire, would necessarily be founded upon stronger, more direct, institutional linkages between the member states as states and between the peoples of Europe as European citizens. Let us probe a little further. Thus far we have distinguished between federalism as the accommodation of diversity within a state, something concerned with domestic political organisation, and federalism as both a process and a strategy for political unification, a means by which European states can be brought together to form a new overarching federation. Both sorts of federalism, it should be noted, can be identified as process and strategy. Federalists after all operate both within and across states. This is what Charles Pentland referred to as the ‘international-domestic cleavage’.(2) In a certain sense there is no need to insist upon this qualitative distinction between these two dimensions of federalism, especially if we wish to underline the cultural and sociological continuity of federalism within the unique European tradition.(3) We will not however pursue this line of enquiry here. Rather it is more important for our purposes to call attention to the crucial distinction which Murray Forsyth has emphasised between a Federal union and a federal state, or a federation.(4) In the specific context of the European Community this distinction is more than merely academic. It also has significant practical implications both for the way that the Community is perceived and for federalist political strategy. Let us examine this distinction a little more closely. Forsyth takes ‘Federal Union’ to be ‘the spectrum between interstate and intrastate relations’. It is the ‘intermediary stage between normal interstate relations and normal intrastate relations’. The ‘federal state’, however, can be represented as ‘the spectrum between federal union and the unitary state’.(5) In other words federal unions are simply another label for what are commonly know as confederations. And Forsyth’s principal concern is with the theory and practice of Confederation as a discrete area of investigation. Where, then, does his impressive analysis of Confederation leave those of us who wish to concentrate upon the study of

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federalism? What does the distinction which he makes between federal union (or confederation) and federal state (or federation) suggest about the analysis of federalism in the particular context of the European Community? First let us stress the importance of the state. Forsyth’s observation that ‘there has been an unfortunate tendency…to apply paradigms and models to the Community in which reference to the state is either completely avoided, or kept to an absolute minimum,(6) is an instructive one. Much of the past theoretical literature on European integration, unwittingly or not, conveyed a view of the state as permeable, an entity which could be gradually corroded and eventually superseded. But this was very often normative theory with a highly prescriptive bias. It offered hypotheses and explanations which were tendentious. And not unnaturally the European Community encapsulated this theoretical prejudice. It seemed to point the way towards a new union of states which would ultimately transcend the old established nation state. But it was often unclear what the new political authority would look like. New institutional structures would forge and manifest new linkages designed to reflect new centres of loyalty detached from the old state which would be rendered increasingly redundant. The study of Confederation, however, is less apocalyptic. It presents the European Community essentially as an economic confederation albeit with some significant institutional features which characterise a political union of states but a union none the less of states. Federal union, then, is not a state. It is ‘not a union of individuals in a body politic, but a union of states in a body politic’. It is ‘the process by which a number of separate states raise themselves by contract to the threshold of being one state, rather than the organisation that exists once this threshold has been crossed’; it occupies ‘the intermediary ground between the interstate and the state worlds, of going beyond the one but of not unequivocally reaching the other’.(7) By adopting the interstate perspective, then, the federal state is located somewhere beyond the federal union, since it is a state, but it does not reach the position and status of a unitary state. Forsyth’s conceptual analysis of Confederation thus clarifies the sometimes confusing relationships which can be observed in the world of states. A careful study of the conceptual basis of Confederation can implicitly provide some interesting insights into the nature and meaning of federalism. In our present study which focuses upon federalism and the European Community two important points arise from a consideration of Confederation both of which affect perceptions of the Community and have significant practical implications for federalist political strategy. The first of these concerns the delineation of federalism as a process. Much has been written about this in the mainstream theoretical literature on federalism. It is most closely associated with the work of Carl Friedrich and it has generated considerable, although not always fruitful, academic controversy.(8) We have already presented federalism as both process and strategy in this discussion but we must pause for a moment to consider what might conceivably have invidious consequences for the European Community. By presenting federalism as a process and the federal state as the spectrum between Confederation and the unitary state the impression is easily conveyed that federations are merely an intermediary phase or stage along the road towards the complete union, namely, the unitary state. This view has been part of the academic controversy surrounding federalism to which we have already referred and it has, for example, the authority of William Riker to recommend it.(9) But it is a misleading assertion for the simple reason

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that it is historically invalid. The United States, Canada, India, Australia and Malaysia are clear evidence of the resilience and uniqueness of the federal state in the contemporary world of states. Furthermore there is an added, less explicit, imputation that the federal state is in some sense deficient. Terms like ‘unfinished’ or ‘incomplete’ union are regularly used to portray it as somehow lacking in the essential qualities necessary to achieve the rank of being a normal state, a unitary state. On this reckoning the world is composed only of unitary states and confederations of one type or another—a view which paradoxically excludes some of the world’s most populous and powerful states. Yet the history of the past two centuries surely confirms the opposite: confederations have become states and federal states are just as viable and distinct as unitary states. They are neither better nor worse, just different. Closely related to this discussion about federalism as a process is our second point which bears more directly upon the European Community and federalist political strategy. If federations are assumed to be as yet incomplete states on the road towards a more solid unitarism and federalism, as Christopher Hughes believes, is to be described as a form of unitary government,(10) the implications for the relationship between federalism and the Community become clear. And they too will be misleading. Viewed from this standpoint, federalism becomes literally menacing. It constitutes a direct attack upon the Community’s member states, pushing them, via increasing centralisation, assuredly towards a unitary denouement. But is this necessarily true? Is it in reality the case that federalists, in pursuit of federation, seek to construct a new European state ultimately in a unitary form? One of the most difficult hurdles for federalists to overcome in their struggle to achieve political unification in Europe is precisely this mental and psychological perception of their intentions. It is made all the more difficult because the perception is rooted in the experience of traditional state-building and national integration. Critics of the European Community often base their anxieties and objections upon the assumption that its emergence and subsequent development is comparable to the evolution of the nation state. This is perhaps an understandable assumption but it is none the less a false one. The implications for a successful federalist strategy in the Community are obvious. Federalists must be constantly sensitive to the genuine fears engendered by the word itself. Critics of federalism have used it to warn against the emasculation of the nation state and the destruction of inveterate cultural values and traditions. The idea of a federal Europe is easily misrepresented as a monstrous new Leviathan straddling Europe and trampling upon hallowed beliefs and modes of behaviour in its single-minded pursuit of social homogeneity and cultural standardisation. Any decisions taken by the Community which strengthen its own independent, overarching corporate personality can thus be construed as movement in this dangerous direction. The dilemma for federalists is particularly tantalising: how can they advocate closer, more binding, political and constitutional arrangements in the Community without arousing legitimate consternation about the perceived consequences of such projected centralisation? How can they reconcile what are usually depicted as irreconcilable objectives? Assurances of new constitutional guarantees will not silence their critics. Nor will they calm considered public fears no matter how misplaced. Apart from a long-term process of political education and growing familiarity with membership of the Community itself, there appears to be no ready-made antidote to this

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problem. Federalists must accept the dilemma and be cautious in their general public statements and activities. Each and every action must be carefully weighed in terms of its anticipated reception. The risks of confusion and misunderstanding are self-evident as are the ever-present attempts by national elites to misrepresent their case. History suggests that this is the price which all great ideas, movements and innovators must pay before their visions are translated into reality. This short excursion into the prescriptive world of a European federation which does not yet exist serves to highlight another aspect of federalist political strategy to which we have already alluded in the Introduction to this book. This is the question of small steps, also known as incremental change, and the big leap forward. In a recent seminal article published in International Affairs and entitled “European Community and nation-state: a case for a neo-federalism?”, John Pinder has explored the ambiguous relationship existing between these two federalist political strategies.(11) Using key examples from the European Community’s own historical development Pinder has tried to lean on this experience in order to clarify and understand the circumstances which enabled ‘increments of federal institutions or competences’(12) to be decided in the Community up to today. His plea for a shift of focus away from the great leap forward and towards the notion of incremental federalism must be seen as a realistic and practical response to the kind of federalist dilemma which we have just identified above. Such a reappraisal would have the double benefit of presenting federalism as a perfectly rational commonplace process of piecemeal political development and of allaying the sort of public fears and misconceptions which we have already underlined. In learning the lessons of a familiar past by drawing upon the Community’s own successes and failures we are increasingly compelled to look upon such increments of federal institutions and competences that we have as natural evolution. Here incremental federalism grows out of practical experience. These, then, are some of the dangers inherent in perceiving federalism to be a process. If misinterpreted it can do immense harm to the federalist cause in Europe. Old myths and bigotries thrive upon distortions of ideas and intentions. Federalists are, to their undoubted regret, hampered by traditional concepts which have been used in a variety of different contexts and ways in the past. A word which at the domestic state level enjoys popular legitimacy can suddenly incur an odium at the interstate level which is difficult to dissipate. How, then, can this conundrum be resolved without the need for a neologism? Neologisms can be counterproductive in politics. They smack of legerdemain. They enable critics to invent conspiracies where they do not exist. The defence of the federal idea would then appear increasingly as an apology. European federalists, however, can avoid this awkward predicament by pointing to contemporary developments within the state which could conveniently be harnessed to their cause. There is a need to take an overall perspective of what is happening to many of the states in Western Europe, some of which are already members of the European Community. Looking broadly at what has happened to the state in Western Europe since about the mid-1960s it is clear that we have witnessed ‘a steady decentralisation of the politics in those states’ and that we have been slow to accept it as ‘part of a general trend’.(13) This general political decentralisation in Western Europe has not always assumed the same form, nor has it arisen at the same levels in different countries. The United Kingdom and West Germany are notable exceptions to this general trend. But ‘the decade of the 1980s

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constitutes a phase in which the process of the transformation of West European states appears to be converging’.(14) Italy, France, Belgium and Spain in particular attest to this seeming convergence of official responses to an assortment of pressures and demands for local and regional reforms. Indeed such has been the impact of this overall trend towards political decentralisation that a new category—the regional state—has recently crept into political science terminology (15). Belgium and Spain probably come closest to this construct in the way that their respective territorial sub-state units and identities have recently become entrenched in new constitutions, but there are also other important distinguishing features, such as limited financial autonomy, which would have to be included in a detailed discussion of the regional state. These attributes of the regional state mirror many of the acknowledged characteristics of the federal state, although they are reflective of the devolution rather than the division of power, and merit closer consideration by European federalists. It has never been clear to political scientists exactly how to explain the nature of the relationship between these developments within West European states and the growth of the European Community. Research appears still to be at the seminal stage. But it is at least clear that many logical connections between these apparently discrete arenas and environments can be established to promote a variety of strategic goals. Regionalists who envisage a ‘Europe of the Regions’ are perhaps an obvious example but federalists too might gain some mileage from taking a more panoramic view of indigenous European change. Here the dangers which we have discussed in taking federalism to be a process can be effectively thwarted. If we reconnect the interstate and intrastate worlds of Western Europe it is possible to interpret these separate developments as part of a continuous process of adjustment to diversity at different levels. They are reintegrated into a genuinely European perspective. They are hence both parts of a unified whole. European federalists may thus have at their disposal a convincing and penetrative argument, grounded in historical fact and practical experience, which would enable them to champion their cause with more credibility. The credibility of a European federation would be considerably enhanced if it could be shown that the traditional concept of a new overarching political body was something which was consonant with current trends existing at both interstate and intrastate levels in Western Europe. The idea of a federal European state would then be seen for what it is: a distinct state. Founded upon certain organisational principles it would no longer be viewed as a new unitary state in the making but rather as something distinctive in its own right. Just as it is now conventional wisdom to describe the European Community as sui generis, so it would be perfectly possible to look upon a European federation as a unique state congruent with European needs and requirements. The thrust of this chapter began in perhaps an unusual way by approaching federalism in the context of the European Community from the conceptual standpoint of confederation. This is useful as a conceptual ground-clearing exercise and it also enables us to focus finally upon the increments of federal institutions which already exist in the Community. Forsyth, we are reminded, has described the Community as an economic confederation and in this regard his analysis cannot be faulted. However, even he is forced to acknowledge that the Community’s confederal elements, though conspicuous, do not exclude federal features. They do not tell the whole story. The special position occupied by the Commission in the institutional structure of the Community, the

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implication of a directly elected European Parliament and ‘the increasingly fragmented and uncertain character of the Council of Ministers’ combine seriously to ‘obscure the Community’s status as an economic confederation (16). These institutional characteristics serve to contaminate the confederal nature of the Community. Federalists, however, derive great hope from parts of this institutional structure which they see as evidence of an embryonic European federation. Forsyth identifies the main Community institutions, the Commission excepted, as being entirely in keeping with the confederal character of the European Community as a whole. Its constitutive treaty-based nature together with a series of institutions, procedures and rules stamp it as ‘an economic confederation…(in) its content and its form’.(17) But if we look at the Community from a federalist standpoint, using different conceptual lenses, the focus of interest within the Community shifts, as does the emphasis. For example, the Court of Justice may very well stand ‘fully within the logic of a confederal system’(18) but in its judicial capacity as overseer of laws which are superior to the national laws of member states and binding upon their citizens it conforms to a federal character. The position of the European Parliament, directly elected by the people of the member states as European citizens since 1979, also fits into a conventional federal category. Though entitled to speak in the name of the European people, it would clearly be rash to claim that one European people yet exists. History teaches us that parliaments have had to engage in lengthy struggles to assert their prerogatives. But Pinder is right to challenge the somewhat vague assertion that a European nation must be a prerequisite of a ‘fully democratic European Union’ when the notion of a single ‘people’ or ‘nation’ itself remains so problematic.(19) The European Parliament’s financial role in Community affairs has also grown markedly during the last two decades. It now exerts a significant influence upon both the size and the allocative nature of a growing part of the Community budget and it retains the overall power to reject it, which it has threatened more than once during the 1980s. This too is akin to federal practice. Finally we may emphasise the existence of an as yet tiny but none the less important independent Community tax, the Value Added Tax, derived not from member states but directly from Community citizens. These examples demonstrate that significant aspects of the Community’s form and content are not merely confederal but actually federal. Indeed in 1978 Spinelli was so optimistic about the prospects for federalist action that he felt able to claim that ‘the federal structures’, which had developed slowly but continuously, were ‘stronger than they were at the beginning of the European enterprise’ and ‘are on the brink of a further leap forward’.(20) Spinelli of course was not just referring to the process of direct elections to the European Parliament; he also had a federalist strategy for putting the new constitutive power of the people to good use in the 1980s. Conclusion This discussion of federalism and the federalists has attempted to clarify some of the main issues and themes which are central to the idea of a federal Europe. The European Community is clearly founded upon a number of different principles which are often incompatible and sometimes even contradictory. This is why it suffers from intermittent

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bouts of paralysis. Yet it exists and it represents the most advanced form of economic and political integration ever witnessed among democratic states in Europe. This chapter underlines the conceptual enigma that is the European Community. It furnishes hope for intergovernmentalists, confederalists and federalists alike. But it defies a simple categorisation. Walter Hallstein summarised its elusive character: We must remember that some people object to the use of the word ‘federal’ because to them it carries the implication that the Community arrogates to itself the right of being a state… It is not a federation because it is not a state. And it is not a confederation because it is endowed with the power of exercising authority directly over every citizen in each of its member states… The constitution of the Community is that of a union of states… It is therefore not unlike the constitution of a state; and like a state, it has not only ‘institutional’ but ‘constitutional’ problems. It is a living thing.(21) Hallstein considered the Community to be neither a federation nor a confederation. It was a legal and constitutional hybrid. Hallstein’s summary brings us to the end of our survey of federalism and the European Community. We have endeavoured to show that federalism as both a process and a strategy harbours particular dangers for the federal cause in Europe. We have also attempted to outline a number of ways in which these dangers can be overcome. It is important, above all, to emphasise that the federal state which would grow out of the European Community would be something unique. It would not be either Switzerland or Austria writ large. Federalists can draw upon such examples as a known experience but they are of only limited assistance. Their overriding obstacle remains one of credibility. They are confronted by a tantalising paradox: as European federalists they are compelled to support movement in a unitary direction without seeking a unitary state. Throughout the period surveyed in this study between 1972 and 1987 this has been their main bugbear. It is a far cry from the original beliefs and aspirations which gave shape and sustenance to the idea of a federal Europe shortly before and during the Second World War. Federalists remain optimists but the atmosphere within which they struggle is less conducive to fundamental reappraisals of Europe’s future. However it is to a closer consideration of the origins and history of the European Community’s federal heritage that we shall now turn our attention. We will begin by exploring the meaning of the Community’s federal heritage and then examine both its content and its implications for a federal Europe today. Notes 1. See M.Burgess (Ed.), Federalism and Federation in Western Europe, (London, Croom Helm 1986). 2. C.Pentland, International Theory and European Integration, (London, Faber 1973) p. 158. 3. See my chapter entitled “Federalism and Federation in Western Europe”, in Federalism and Federation, pp. 15–33. 4. M.Forsyth, Unions of States: The Theory and Practice of Confederation, (Leicester, Leicester University Press 1981), Ch. 1, pp. 1–16.

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5. Forsyth, Unions of States, p. 7. 6. Forsyth, Unions of States, p. 5. 7. Forsyth, Unions of States, p. 6 and pp. 2–3. 8. See for example his Trends of Federalism in Theory and Practice, (New York, Praeger 1968). The sources of this lengthy debate derive from some of the early critiques of K. C.Wheare’s Federal Government, first published in 1946, and they can be located in W.H.Riker, ‘Federalism’ in the Handbook of Political Science, Vol. 5, Ch. 2, edited by F. Greenstein and N.Polsby, (London, Addison-Wesley 1975), pp. 93–172.

For a recent up-to-date bibliography, see M.Burgess, Modern Federalism: A Select Bibliography, forthcoming (London, The Federal Trust 1988). 9. This view can be traced back in modern times at least to H.R.G.Greaves, Federalism in Practice, (London, Allen & Unwin 1940). See also the review article by W.H.Riker, ‘Six Books in Search of a Subject or does Federalism exist and does it matter’, Comparative Politics, Vol. 2 (1969), pp. 35–146. 10. C.J.Hughes, Confederacies, (Leicester, Leicester University Press 1963). 11. J.Pinder, ‘European Community and nation state: A case for a neo-federalism’, International Affairs, 1, (1986), pp. 41–54. 12. Pinder, ‘European Community’, p. 51. 13. L.J.Sharpe, ‘Decentralist Trends in Western Democracies: A First Appraisal’, p. 19. in L. J.Sharpe (Ed.), Decentralist Trends in Western Democracies, (London, Sage Publications 1979). 14. Y.Meny and V.Wright, Introduction, p. 8 to Y.Meny and V.Wright (Eds), Centre-Periphery Relations in Western Europe, (London, Allen & Unwin 1985). 15. See for example F.Delmartino, ‘Belgium: A Regional State or a Federal State in the Making’, Ch. 3, pp. 34–58 in M.Burgess, (Ed.) Federalism and Federation in Western Europe. More recent literature on this subject would also include R.Morgan (Ed.), Regionalism in European Politics, (London, PSI 1986) and Y. Peeters and T.Veiter (Eds), Federalism, Regionalism and Ethnic Group Rights, (Vienna, Braumuller 1987). 16. Forsyth, Union of States, p. 185. 17. Forsyth, Union of States, p. 183. 18. Forsyth, Union of States, p. 186. 19. Pinder, ‘European Community’, p. 53. 20. A.Spinelli, ‘Reflections on the Institutional Crisis in the European Community’, West European Politics, Vol. 1, (Feb. 1978), p. 81. 21. W.Hallstein, Europe in the Making, (New York, Norton & Co., Allen & Unwin 1972), pp. 39–40.

Chapter Two THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY’S FEDERAL HERITAGE This chapter seeks both to underline and to reinstate the importance of the European Community’s federal heritage. It does not assume, however, that the Community owes its existence solely to federalist pressures and aspirations. Indeed we must guard against unchallenged assumptions which often lead either to oversimplified or outright erroneous conclusions. The origins of the European Community remain complex at the levels both of political ideas and policy formation. Further research is still needed in order to understand more fully and appreciate the complicated relationships which existed between several long- and short-term factors: the role of key elite individuals; the relevance of intellectual thought; the intrinsic motives behind particular decisions; the reactions and responses to events; and the changing international environment.(1) And the temptation to impose a consistent, almost teleological, pattern upon what might be a set of unconnected events must be resisted. This would be to distort—and even to rewrite—history. When we claim that the Community has a federal heritage, then, what is it that we seek to identify and reassert? And what purpose would its reassertion serve? The Treaty of Rome is certainly unhelpful here. It is devoid of any terminology remotely resembling federalist language. And it is unclear whether or not we should assume firm, logically progressive, links between the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1957 and its putative forerunner, the European Coal and Steel Community, in 1952. Was there, even in hindsight, such a simple causal relationship? Certainly it is true, as the next chapter demonstrates, that the ultimate goal of Monnet and Schuman was a European federation but we should not underestimate the size of the gap between the rhetoric and reality, nor that between intention and consequence. Any attempt to link political ideas with political actions is fraught with immense pitfalls. Efforts to relate political influence to political impact and to connect political strategies with political effectiveness are equally difficult. When we make claims for the Community’s federal heritage, then, we must proceed cautiously. It is an assumption which needs to be proved. In one of the most recent commentaries on the Community’s current state of health, Christopher Tugendhat, the only Briton to have served two terms as a member of the European Commission (1977–1985), underlined the binary nature of the European construction: Federalism and intergovernmentalism supranationalism and co-operation between different nationalities: two concepts of Europe…have been vying with each other since the earlier days of the Community …the founding

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fathers allowed neither to prevail in the Treaty of Rome, which represents a delicate balance between the two.(2) Intergovernmentalism has commonly been accepted as the dominant operational mode of Community relations since around the mid-1960s, however. The mainstream academic literature bears testimony to this development. Tugendhat’s assertion of ‘a delicate balance’ has been overtaken by events. And one danger of a bland intergovernmentalist conception of the Community is that it tends to become the only reality. It is blind to rival perspectives. In consequence it not only underestimates actions and energies directed towards different goals but it also seriously limits the real possibility of policy and institutional renewal. Tugendhat, however, is correct to acknowledge the continued presence of federalism and supranationalism in the Community. These ideas, influences and strategies have varied in strength over time but they have always been a perfectly legitimate part of the Community’s mixed political tradition. The precise nature of this federal heritage, like the Community itself, is complex with many tantalising theoretical twists and turns which stretch back, paradoxically, much further than the Community’s own history. Some of the theoretical issues may be either dead or redundant but several remain as sources of lively controversy in the continuing debate about the Community’s future. We shall not focus here upon the numerous theoretical questions which inhere in the federal heritage. These will be addressed later in this book. Moreover, the next chapter will attempt indirectly to pinpoint some of the key elements of the theoretical debate by comparing and contrasting the respective European conceptions of Monnet and Spinelli. Instead this chapter will look at how and why federalism came to be a legitimate and logical part of the Community’s rich economic and political heritage. The Federal Heritage Revisited When we contemplate the labyrinthine depths, complexities and subtleties of the Community’s federal heritage it is wise to be reminded of an important observation made by Walter Lipgens in his recent monumental work on the history of postwar European integration: Europe’s growing self-awareness ‘should not be construed as simply a continuation of earlier European plans for unification’. Such schemes and plans for political unity had been drawn up repeatedly in past centuries but remained, with few exceptions, mere paper projects with no real chance of policy implementation. However, the intellectual self-examination ‘initially begun…during the First World War’, which led eventually to a cultural and political revival of ideas advocating European unification ‘arose from a passionately renewed awareness…of the centuries-old unity of European civilisation and values’.(3) In short, the movement for European unification in all of its cultural and political manifestations was both a highly self-conscious and a uniquely twentieth century phenomenon. Naturally the intellectual and historical lineage of this movement can be traced back many centuries, probably at least to the Enlightenment, but for practical reasons in terms of an embryonic self-conscious political movement Lipgens emphasis upon the impact of war in the twentieth century seems incontestable. The compelling drive to reorganise European state relations after 1918 possesses both a qualitative and a quantitative distinction from previous public expressions and sentiments for closer European union.

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There is no space here to develop and extend this historical assertion. Lipgens has already performed the spadework. It is clear that among the long- and short-term factors assisting the centripetal forces towards unification were: the horrors of what military technology could inflict upon human beings; the rise of the United States of America; the impact of the Russian Revolution; the spread of fascism; and a myriad of economic and social changes. Together these ideas and events amounted to a crisis of European values which provided fertile soil for the nourishment of the unification movement.(4) But why and how did federalism acquire such a prominence as the solution to Europe’s future? Much recent research has been devoted to the examination of plans for European union during the years between 1939 and 1945 and we are now in a better position to understand both the origins and the influences of such ideas.(5) Both the threat of war and the Second World War itself spurred political elites and intellectuals to reconsider ways and means to prevent Europe from tearing itself asunder at regular intervals. Government elites by and large sought merely the destruction of totalitarian states but there was also a formidable body of European intellectual opinion whose vision transcended this immediate priority. It was among the members of the anti-fascist European Resistance that the federal idea was largely nurtured as the answer to Europe’s destiny. For them the defeat of Hitler was only the first step. It offered a golden opportunity for Europeans to return to fundamental questions. The Franco-German conflict was only the most visible and persistent manifestation of nation-state rivalries in Europe. In order permanently to remove the very basis of military conflict, Resistance thinkers directed their intellectual challenge towards the perceived cause of war itself: the nation-state. It is impossible for the younger generations of today fully to comprehend the traumatic impact of the Second World War upon Europe and its population. The horror and brutality of it can be only imperfectly transmitted via films, memoirs and scholarship. Indeed, as new generations replace old generations and memories fade it has become increasingly difficult to defend the European idea. The sources of its inspiration are easily forgotten. Post-war generations see only a European Community of bickering, churlish nation-states, in a divided Europe, obsessed with short-sighted economic trade-offs. But the idea of a federal Europe, being much older than the Community, retains its original moral basis in reason and humanity as the directing force for the piecemeal construction of a Europe of peoples as well as states. This idea and its influence has been continuous, not intermittent, in the post-war building of Europe. Let us look a little closer at its emergence. Using broad brush strokes, we must of necessity paint the federal idea on a large canvas. It comprises radically different conceptions of Europe and divergent political strategies. What does seem common ground among rival federalist conceptions and strategies, however, is shared experiences of war. Among the intellectual Resistance this factor runs continuously throughout their agonising journey towards the new reconstructed Europe: The Resistance spirit was a blend of defiance and idealism… For Europe’s intellectuals, in particular, the Resistance experience gave to politics a moral dimension… This sense of moral mission continued undiminished after the Liberation of 1945. Guided by their vision of a

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‘spiritual revolution’, Resistance intellectuals sought to initiate a process of renewal in which they themselves would play a leading role. Projects that had been conceived and elaborated in the underground were now discussed with growing confidence. The Resistance offered a model for the social order to be erected after the war—one in which individual freedom would co-exist with social justice, human dignity would be accorded new respect, and the bonds formed in the underground would encourage trust and openness among citizens from all classes. These hopes were widely shared. The catastrophe that had engulfed the continent for six years seemed to assure a radical break with the past and to make a fresh start imperative.(6) They learned that just as the Fascist juggernaut had demonstrated how supposedly immutable European structures could be swept away, so the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini could open the way for their vision to become reality. Old state structures and petty sovereignties were not part of God’s law for the universe. At the end of the War almost anything must have seemed possible. The Resistance belief in man’s capacity to control events and to shape his own destiny ensured that former national loyalties and the obedience to the old state would not be integral to their ideas about the reconstruction of Europe. Reverence for the old state seemed inappropriate. It had collapsed everywhere in continental Europe in the face of the Nazi Blitzkrieg. In their quest for a better and peaceful society the Resistance had fought Hitler not for the old nation states but rather for a new European society. The consensus of opinion which emerged among Resistance groups, then, was that the defeat of totalitarianism and the creation of a ‘United States of Europe’ in its place went hand in hand. To allow the old nation states to recover and regain their former positions in a world of international rivalry would be to recreate the very conditions for war and totalitarian rule.(7) Written by a small nucleus of Italian federalists led by Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, these views and assumptions were lucidly expressed in the famous ‘Ventotene Manifesto’ of 1941, which was one of the first Resistance declarations devoted to European unification.(8) In it Spinelli observed that the collapse of most European states had already ‘reduced most peoples of the Continent to a common fate’ but that public attitudes were ‘already much more favourable toward a new, federative European order’. The brutal experience of the previous decade had ‘opened the eyes of the unbelievers’. (9) Much later, he recalled that the anti-fascist Resistance ‘accepted that it would be preferable to give a federal structure to Europe since this would also solve the problem of co-existence in peace and freedom with Germany’.(10) But the appeal of federalism in Resistance thought and experience also derived from their mode of operation. If the essence of social change—of altering people’s minds and perceptions—lay in the moral conversion of society, then the Resistance organisation itself epitomised the federal idea in practice. ‘The Resistance appeared to many of its adherents as a forerunner of a true federation’.(11) And if we reflect upon the role of the underground as a framework for international co-operation during the war it becomes clear why this should be so:

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The intellectuals’ ideal, inspired by their Resistance experience, was…a network of local voluntary associations, vehicles of direct democracy, united within a European federation. The old nation-states bellicose and unresponsive to the needs of their citizens, were to be superseded at both a lower and a higher level by more responsible institutions… local autonomy and international co-operation would form a complementary whole … such groups would…continue to follow the ‘natural’ pattern of free human associations… The intellectuals’ desire for flexibility in government reflected a concern for remaining close to life.(12) The Ventotene Manifesto thus elaborated the idea of a federal Europe as the panacea for virtually all the outstanding problems which would confront post-war statesmen. And Spinelli, who became the leading spokesman of the federalist cause, always retained the Resistance-based capacity to argue that the common people, if allowed to determine themselves, would inevitably gravitate towards unity in co-operation. It was obsolete state structures and the selfish, anachronistic values of states’ elites and interests which impeded this natural movement. People’s basic needs, whether in Italy, France or Denmark, were fundamentally the same. And contemporary problems were essentially common problems necessitating common solutions. All that was needed was a solid institutional structure to allow this common elaboration to develop and determine itself. This brief outline of the emergence of the federal idea in European Resistance thought does not, of course, do justice to the various nuances of opinion and real differences existing among those federalists who sought to rebuild Europe after 1945. But their agreement on basic principles remains more striking and more significant than their personal controversies. And although the Resistance programme—and the spiritual revolution which it symbolised—was effectively defeated and abandoned by the conservative restoration of the immediate post-war years, the federal idea did not disappear with it. On the contrary, it survived in the plethora of influential interest groups which sprouted across Western Europe after 1945 and it was sustained in the European Union of Federalists (EUF) founded in Basle in December 1946. One scholar has noted that in 1948 in France alone there were seventeen European federalist groups, each with between 50 and 4,000 members.(13) And it was during the late 1940s that renowned federalists like Alexander Marc, Henri Brugmans and Denis de Rougemont began to formulate highly elaborate federalist doctrines which were eventually to play a part in splitting the EUF in 1955–56. Leaving aside the strategic and doctrinal controversies which ruptured the early federalist movement in the mid-1950s, we should not forget the pervasive influence of federalist thought upon practical policy-making at this time. If we look closely at the eventful years between 1952 and 1954 it is clear that the attempt to launch the project for a European Political Community (EPC), building upon a European Defence Community (EDC), was made ‘largely as a result of federalist pressure’. Moreover, ‘federalist ideas also contributed a great deal to the content of the proposals’.(14) The EPC project collapsed in August 1954 when the French National Assembly jettisoned the EDC treaty but the continuity of federalist ideas, influences and strategies was unmistakable in this abortive effort to build political Europe in the early 1950s. And the role of Spinelli should

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be neither ignored nor underestimated in this episode. As Secretary- General of the Italian Movimento Federalista Europeo (MFE), it was he who was instrumental in channelling the Italian government’s support towards a federalist solution for the EPC which was to have a directly elected European Assembly, powers of taxation and a joint decisionmaking structure. Spinelli was also a member of the special committee of the European Movement which submitted a report to the Constitutional Committee (set up to formulate a preliminary draft treaty) outlining a federalist approach to EPC. Not for the first time in the struggle to build Europe after 1945, Spinelli’s role appeared ubiquitous if not yet pivotal. As we shall see, the failure of this federalist strategy—built upon giving a major role to a parliamentary assembly in drafting a new treaty for Europe—enabled interested observers to earmark 1954 as the end of the federalist phase in the Community’s early political development. Journalists, politicians and scholars helped to shape a conventional wisdom which appeared to vindicate Monnet’s approach to Europe and, correspondingly, to downgrade federalist ideas and strategies. The so-called ‘constitutional method’ was thereafter dismissed as unrealistic and impracticable. Monnet’s Europe seemed an unassailable citadel during the late 1950s as first Messina and then Rome became symbols of what could be achieved via elite bargaining over primarily economic issues. Spinelli accepted that Monnet’s elite-led functional strategy for Europe had paid dividends. He could hardly have denied its successes. But he remained convinced that Monnet’s conception was fundamentally flawed. It did not provide Europe with the effective means to go beyond what existed. National governments would always prevent the Community from developing the capacity to strengthen its own corporate personality independent of the member states. And after four years in academic exile working for the John Hopkins University during 1962–1966, Spinelli reasserted his belief in federalism in his book The Eurocrats: This very real change in the political consciousness of important sectors of society in several countries was clearly a creative response to some of the depressing and humiliating experiences of Europeans before, during and after World War II… These circumstances very greatly reduced the habitual respect of citizens for their states and their myths and opened the way to the united European transformation… For the federalist the role of European union consists essentially in the creation of a new political society dedicated to the development of a modern democratic life … A Europe committed to the creation of modern democratic liberties among multinational Europeans…they think institutionally only of establishing a new democratic society and not of restoring and then protecting old societies…. It is not difficult to recognise among them the well-known intellectual attitude of democratic radicalism which, as a rule, provides the creative political thought at the origin of all democratic progress and revival.(15) Spinelli’s allusion to ‘democratic radicalism’ is worth a moment’s reflection. It is now widely acknowledged that federalist thought developed during the Second World War mainly among sections of the democratic left within the various resistance movements.

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Since they were, by definition, the anti-fascist resistance the dominance of the democratic left, though not having a monopoly of ideological opposition, should not surprise us. What, then, did Spinelli mean by ‘democratic radicalism’? Here he was quite categorical. His own ideological crisis began in prison in 1928 and he gradually abandoned his Communist ethos by 1937. From this time he regarded every major ideological doctrine with suspicion. He refused to be committed to any one single belief system other than the need to organise power on the European level.(16) Albertini has confirmed this: ‘he never considered the great ideologies of our political tradition as exclusive schemes, nor as a mental boundary within which political thinking should be confined.’(17) Democracy was not something merely derivative from any particular ideological conception; it was something which had a value in itself.(18) Spinelli’s ‘new democracy’, then, meant organising political action on the European level: the creation of new powers for structures which did not then exist. If it was to be labelled in old terms, it was a ‘radical liberalism’.(19) But old labels did not concern him. The main aim was to mobilise a latent European political consciousness around new structures which would encapsulate, nurture and express the common political will. In practice and in theory Spinelli’s acceptance of the liberal economic market philosophy and of the need for limited state intervention in society mattered less than his passionate belief in the idea of transcending old state structures.(20) Here the federal idea, in his view, went beyond these national ideological concerns. This personal perspective would have encountered serious objections from many academic quarters. One can imagine what inconsistencies an incisive political economy approach would have exposed in Spinelli’s federalist beliefs today. But Spinelli was an intellectual activist in politics, not merely an intellectual studying politics. Practitioners do not usually have the luxury of testing their beliefs for theoretical symmetry. In retrospect, the ideological ambiguities apparent in this notion of ‘democratic radicalism’ can be explained by examining the intellectual origins of Spinelli’s federal ideas.(21) One might also add, moreover, that Spinelli’s federalism was itself a new overarching political ideology which committed its adherents ultimately to nothing less than a European federation. Before we bring this short chapter to a close, let us conclude this section of our discussion on the European Community’s federal heritage by recapitulating very briefly the logic implicit in federalism for the building of Europe: it offered the means by which the various elements and forces extant in the daily practice of European social, economic and political life could be effectively canalised and co-ordinated into an organic whole. The new political society would emerge only gradually, in piecemeal fashion, but it would evolve naturally from solid European structures. This was to be, we must remember, a new beginning. The federal idea was not to be shackled by the ideological conditioning of the past. The Federal Heritage: Past, Present and Future. The European Resistance movements gravitated towards the federal idea as the basis for a new Europe from a mixture of motives. The reasons for Spinelli’s adoption of this idea are especially interesting because his own point of departure and his turbulent journey towards Ventotene in 1941 conveniently demonstrate both the general and the particular aspects of the wider conversion to federalism across Europe. We must not forget that

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many other groups in different countries had, via separate routes, arrived at the same conclusion independently. What stands out in the general resistance literature is the personal experience of war; this trauma gave the burgeoning support for federalism its strong moral content. Lipgens explained the federal appeal clearly: The true character of the resistance movements was that of an intellectual resistance…the Resistance writings .. were not marginal efforts, produced in addition to military actions by a few intellectuals. On the contrary, for years, during which other forms of opposition were hardly possible, these were the Resistance. The most important function of the movements could only be to formulate ethical and political principles that would help people to live through the totalitarian experience, and that would strengthen their opposition to it… These principles were supported by specific plans for a better future These proposals contained demands for a thorough limiting of the state’s authority, for the possibility of self-government in districts and regions, for regional federalism as opposed to the centralised national state… From this central idea—namely the struggle against sovereignty— and from the experiences with the League of Nations derived concern with the manner in which an effective European Federation should be constituted.(22) Given the peculiar contexts and circumstances within which the various resistance movements found themselves during the war, their fervent belief in federalism is now perfectly understandable. We can appreciate both how and why it emerged. But is the idea of a federal Europe still relevant today? After all, the Europe of the late twentieth century has changed dramatically from the wartime realities so familiar to Resistance minds. And why is it important to emphasise the Community’s federal heritage? What purpose does its reassertion serve? In our introduction to this chapter we noted Christopher Tugendhat’s observation about the two rival concepts of Europe which continue to compete for attention and legitimacy in the Community’s political development. But he also warned against too great a use of federalist rhetoric in the Community today. He argued that the Community owed its existence to the imagination and determination of the federalists who endowed it with moral inspiration and authority, and whose ideals generated a resistless energy enabling it to take root and maintain an unwavering sense of purpose. However, he also claimed that federalist aspirations had ‘turned out disappointingly’ and that both the tone and the style of their rhetoric had lent a ‘scale of values and criteria for measuring progress’ which today is unrealistic and damaging because it suggests that ‘the whole array of concrete achievements has not lived up to expectations’. With the eclipse of the federalist dream ‘no new intellectual or moral framework has been constructed to enable the general public to make sense of what is going on and no new objectives have been set with which they can identify and towards which they can aspire’. His conclusion is simple: the Community will never be the first step towards the United States of Europe because ‘now…it looks…unlikely to be realised’.(23) Accordingly, federalist ideas and federalist rhetoric should be sensibly jettisoned because they propose what today and tomorrow is unattainable.

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Tugendhat’s further complaint about the federal heritage is also worth inclusion here: While those involved in running the machine have been aware of the realities for many years…the rhetoric, images and objectives of the supranational ideal have continued to dominate its language. In speeches, communiques, reports, public utterances and plans of every kind the impression is constantly given that federal union remains the one true faith with anything else some form of aberration or human frailty.(24) His underlying argument is that the stark contrast between federalist rhetoric and intergovernmental reality is harmful to the Community because as the language and the actions of the Community and its member states increasingly diverge so public confusion and misunderstanding about the Community and its objectives intensifies and ‘attitudes in its institutions…often appear to be theoretical and unworldly’.(25) Coming from a former Commissioner, this analysis of the Community is a damning indictment of the idea of a federal Europe. It should also be added that such views are typical of a traditional British mentality towards European unification. Terms like ‘realistic’ and ‘pragmatic’ feature prominently in the vocabulary of British commentators on the European Community’s future political development, as if rival conceptions of Europe were illusory and chimerical. Nonetheless, these hardened, insular national conceptions must be confronted and rebutted. They either underestimate or completely dismiss the Community’s enduring federal heritage as irrelevant today. It is deemed a handicap, representing only the disappointed hopes of a bygone age and the false aspirations of a new generation of idealists who stubbornly refuse to recognise contemporary realities. The verdict of much of the contemporary literature on the Community is clear: the idea of a long march towards a federal Europe is now both fanciful and futile. The Community’s federal heritage, at best, is an engaging historical relic; at worst, it is an irritating hindrance to further progress. Much of the hostility towards the idea of a federal Europe derives from fears and anxieties about the loss of national sovereignty. And some of these worries may be legitimate concerns. Most of them, however, are based upon outmoded conceptions of national independence and upon a fundamental misunderstanding of the Community’s federal heritage. For example, in Tugendhat’s analysis of the Community the federal heritage is merely ‘the federalist dream’—an archaeological monument to an age which ended in 1954 with the demise of the EDC and EPC. Federalism is consigned to history: ‘it could never have endured as a guide and stimulus to political action.’(26) This is both to distort and to impoverish the federal idea. It overlooks the crucial problem which our brief examination of the Community’s federal heritage has already pointed up, namely, the need for an institutional system which has the capacity to develop an autonomous European political life without threatening the Jacobin destruction of the nation state. The Community’s federal heritage must be neither forgotten nor jettisoned. It is the important continuing theme in the Community’s past, present and future. Not for nothing did Lipgens conclude his seminal article on European federation in Resistance political thought with the following assertion:

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We have heard during recent years enough about the failures on the road to European integration, about the crisis and stagnation of European unification. The writings of the Resistance leaders may help us to understand why, despite all these setbacks, the idea of European federation as a long-term trend remains dominant in a considerable portion of today’s European society.(27) It is important both to underline and to reinstate this federal heritage because it serves to emphasise the legitimacy of the federal idea in the Community’s political and constitutional development. It must not be pushed to the margins of Community activity. On the contrary, our discussion suggests that federalism retains its significance for European integration both as a process and as an end to be attained. Succeeding chapters will emphasise the fundamental continuity of the federal idea rather than its intermittent impact upon European action. Conclusion This discussion of the Community’s federal heritage provides the crucial historical and intellectual background to the great debate (between Monnet and Spinelli) about the future of Europe which is the central focus of the next chapter. It also helps to dispel many of the myths and fallacies which have grown up around the federal idea. Spinelli identified one major problem which federalists must accept in their struggle to bring the idea from the realms of myth and abstraction to that of political strategy when he acknowledged how far human conduct, laws, customs and political activity are formally ‘within the traditional and well-known domain of the nation-state’. These habits were so deeply rooted as to be almost ‘a conditioned reflex’; they gave a sense of completeness and security to those engaged in activities which conformed to accepted practice. For those engaged in the movement for European unification, however, the prospects were studded with ‘lacunae, obscurities, uncertainties about what to do’ and they lacked the support of ‘those standard rules and points of reference’ which assure them ‘tranquillity and security’. Summing up the great difficulty which federalists faced in seeking to transcend the nation-state, Spinelli recognised that: European community action cannot move forward through established institutions but must create and consolidate its own; it has no well-defined political alternatives expressed in definite political parties but must find them; it does not even have a political language of its own already formed but must invent one.(28) It was this journey into the unknown, this unfamiliar Europe in the making, which made federalism an easy target for its critics. Spinelli, of course, anticipated the scepticism of his adversaries. It was and remains something which federalists have to live with and tolerate. Human beings are afraid of what they do not understand; they dismiss what they regard as impossible. And history, indeed, is littered with visions which have not been implemented. But it is also often

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forgotten how great achievements and progress have been made in the teeth of public derision. Spinelli’s experiences taught him not to expect the federal idea to gain rapid public acceptance. He accepted and understood that to those dedicated to European innovation the political vision of a new idea always seemed much nearer to realisation than it actually was. Indeed, he believed that new ideas needed to experience some initial defeats because that was the only way to test whether or not they were capable of survival. If they survived there was a good chance that they were serious and relevant; if they disappeared then their intentions were irrelevant.(29) If this discussion has a moral it is that a wider understanding and appreciation of the complex nature of the Community’s federal heritage would assist towards greater comprehension of the federal ideal and its abiding practical relevance to the problems of Europe. We shall now take our discussion of the Community’s federal heritage a stage further by concentrating upon the political ideas and strategies of two of its most famous contributors, namely, Jean Monnet and Altiero Spinelli—the two faces of federalism. Notes 1. I have drawn on some of the themes conveyed by Professor R.Griffiths, (University of Amsterdam) in his contribution to the Annual Conference of the University Association For Contemporary European Studies (UACES) at Coventry Polytechnic, 5–7 January 1987. His collaborative research forms part of a larger project on the origins of the Paris and Rome Treaties, and is to be published in the E.U.I. (Florence) Working Papers. Another example of the sort of reappraisal being undertaken is P.H.Laurent, ‘Beneluxer Economic Diplomacy and the Creation of Little Europe, 1945–1950’, Journal of European Integration, Vol. 10, No. 1, (Autumn 1986), pp. 23–37. 2. C.Tugendhat, Making Sense of Europe, (Viking Penguin, London 1986), p. 71. 3. W.Lipgens, A History of European Integration 1945–1947: The Formation of the European Unity Movement, Vol. 1, (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1982), p. 18. 4. Lipgens, A History of European Integration Intro., pp. 1–92. 5. See W.Lipgens, (Ed.), Documents on the European Integration, Vol. 1., Continental Plans For European Union, 1939–1945, (W.de Gruyther, Berlin 1985), Ch. 6., pp. 456–555 and W.Lipgens, (Ed.), Documents, Vol.2., Plans for European Union in Great Britain and in Exile, 1939–1945, Part One: British Plans For Europe Union, 1939–1945, by P.H.Bell and J.Pinder, pp. 23–275. 6. J.D.Wilkinson, The Intellectual Resistance in Europe, (Harvard University Press, London 1981), p. 1. For more general texts see S. Hawes and R.White (Eds.), Resistance in Europe, 1939–1945, (Pelican, London 1976) and M.R.D.Foot, Resistance, (Paladin, London 1978). 7. This point has been underlined in W.Lipgens, ‘European Federation in the Political Thought of Resistance Movements during World War II’, Central European History, Vol. 1. (1968) pp. 5–19. 8. Lipgens, A History of European Integration, pp. 108–111. 9. Extract quoted from Wilkinson, Intellectual Resistance, p. 174. 10. A.Spinelli, ‘European Union in the Resistance’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 2., (1966–67), p. 325. 11. Wilkinson, Intellectual Resistance, p. 173. 12. Wilkinson, Intellectual Resistance, p. 268. 13. I.Greilsammer, ‘Some Observations on European Federalism’ in D.J.Elazar (Ed.) Federalism and Political Integration, (Turtledove Publishing, Israel 1979), Ch. 5., p. 108. 14. R.Cardozo, ‘The Project For a Political Community, 1952–54’, in R.Pryce (Ed.), The Dynamics of European Union, (Croom Helm, London 1987), Ch. 3., p. 49.

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15. A.Spinelli, The Eurocrats; Conflict and Crisis in the European Community, (The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore 1966), pp. 4–15. 16. Interview with Spinelli, European Parliament, Strasbourg, 14 February 1985. 17. M.Albertini, ‘Altiero Spinelli, Hero of Reason’, The Federalist, yr.XXVIII, (1986), No. 1., pp. 3–4. 18. Interview with Spinelli, 14 February 1985. 19. Interview with Spinelli, 14 February 1985. 20. In my last interview with him on 14 February 1985, Spinelli acknowledged that his gradual acceptance of Western liberal democratic capitalist views was largely a personal reaction to his rejection of the twin totalitarian ideologies of communism and fascism. But the influence of the liberal economist, Luigi Einaudi, must also have played a part in his ideological reorientation. See the next note. 21. See M.Burgess, ‘Federal Ideas in the European Community: Altiero Spinelli and European Union, 1981–1984’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 19., No. 3, (Summer 1984), pp. 339– 47 and ‘Altiero Spinelli, Federalism and the EUT’, Ch. 9., pp. 174–85 in J.Lodge, (Ed.), European Union: The European Community in Search of a Future, (Macmillan, London 1986). 22. Lipgens, ‘European Federation in the Political Thought of Resistance Movement’, pp. 7–11. 23. Tugendhat, Making Sense of Europe, pp. 38, 73, 81 and 227–8. 24. Tugendhat, Making Sense of Europe, p. 81. 25. Tugendhat, Making Sense of Europe, p. 81. 26. Tugendhat, Making Sense of Europe, p. 75. 27. Lipgens, ‘European Federation in the Political Thought of Resistance Movements’, p. 19. 28. Spinelli, The Eurocrats, p. 9. 29. Interview with Spinelli, 14 February 1985.

Chapter Three JEAN MONNET AND ALTIERO SPINELLI: THE TWO FACES OF FEDERALISM Introduction In a particular sense this chapter forms the core of this book. Its central focus upon the evolution of the political ideas and strategies of Jean Monnet and Altiero Spinelli exposes and underlines, by way of persistent contrast and comparison, the fundamental nature of the debate about Europe and its future. We shall be looking at how these two pioneers of European unification came to be rival protagonists with competing approaches to the building of Europe. This investigation into the evolution of their respective political ideas and strategies will enable us to unravel the basic guiding principles which pushed them along separate paths towards European unification and our conclusion will then consider exactly what kind of Europe is logically implicit in these two different routes. We will also be able to obtain a more sophisticated appreciation and understanding of the European Community’s federal heritage which we have just discussed. The previous chapter demonstrated the rich complexity of this federal heritage and we shall now attempt to simplify it somewhat by concentrating upon the history and development of federalist thought and practice as it evolved in the respective careers of Monnet and Spinelli. In simplifying their federalist ideas and strategies we must of course be careful to avoid crude oversimplification. The temptation to do so is great. But it is a risk worth taking here because of the paucity of literature and scholarship on the relationship between these two men and their ideas about Europe. Much of what we understand about their significant differences concerning Europe is only implicit in the mainstream literature. Our intention here is, as it were, to put them face to face. In this way the implicit will at last become explicit. And this task is essential if we are to appreciate the nature of the relationship between federalism and European Union during the years between 1972 and 1987. We shall see how far these rival approaches to European unification continue today to serve as the source of lively controversy about the future of the European Community. Monnet and Spinelli are usually depicted as opposing forces in the quest for closer union yet, though their paths diverged en route, in their separate journeys they travelled towards the same destination. Both belonged to an age far older than the European Community and both played an active role in the strengthening of its institutions, Monnet as President of the High Authority of the ECSC (1952–1955) and Spinelli as a European Commissioner (1970–1976) and Member of the European Parliament (1976–1986).(1) Moreover many of their basic views about history, the dangers of nationalism, the anachronistic nature of the State, the importance of common solutions to common

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problems, the role of new institutions and the need for lasting peace in Europe were identical. Their ultimate goal, it should be noted, was also the same: a European federation. Today we do not regard Monnet as having been a champion of the federal cause in Europe. His own particular method of uniting Europe primarily by economic integration has compelled political scientists to be cautious when attaching a label to him. Whereas Spinelli was without question the leading European federalist of contemporary times, Monnet has been described predominantly as the foremost ‘functionalist’ and only occasionally as an ‘incremental federalist’.(2) Spinelli’s own persistent criticisms of Monnet’s ‘method’ have undoubtedly contributed to this blurred image but it is also due to the various theoretical controversies which continue to surround the idea of shifting from functionalism to constitutionalism or, as Spinelli put it, to assert the political element. We shall identify and examine some of these conceptual issues during the course of this chapter but a closer analysis of the main theoretical disputes will be provided in Chapter Seven. Let us now examine the evolution of their political ideas and strategies. We will begin by looking first at Monnet’s approach to Europe. Monnet’s Approach to Europe Monnet’s political ideas are both easy and difficult to define. They are simple in the sense that they were forged out of practical experience and yet elusive to the extent that they defy a precise ideological categorisation. In his Memoirs Monnet confessed to a ‘distrust’ of ‘general ideas’ which were never allowed to lead him ‘far away from practical things’. His purpose was ‘very practical’. It was ‘collective action’—‘the product of circumstances as they arose’—designed to be ‘useful beyond the experience of one individual’.(3) These autobiographical reflections furnish a clue to the intellectual and practical influences which drove him to champion the cause of Europe. Let us take a closer look at the fundamental principles which guided his indomitable energies over three generations from the First World War until his retirement from the Action Committee for the United States of Europe in 1975. The essential thing is to hold fast to a few fixed principles that have guided us since the beginning; gradually to create among Europeans the broadest common interest, served by common democratic institutions to which the necessary sovereignty has been delegated. This is the dynamic that has never ceased to operate.(4) What, then, are these ‘few fixed principles’ upon which Monnet sought to construct Europe? Writing twenty years ago on the role of Monnet, Richard Mayne claimed that ‘Monnet’s own written words, oddly enough, are relatively unrevealing: they have the strength but also the limpidity of pure spirit. Fined and pared away until they achieve a stark simplicity’, they conceal more than they reveal and their very clarity may make them ‘seem banal’.(5) In 1978, however, the stark simplicity of Monnet’s political ideas seemed far from banal when his Memoirs were first published in English. (6) The bare bones of his thinking were fleshed-out to reveal a substantive body of consistent and

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connected themes and beliefs which together place him in a long tradition of political thought about European unity stretching back several centuries. The overarching aim was peace but in order to achieve it Monnet sought to change the nature of international relations by altering the relations between peoples: ‘to unite men, to solve the problems that divide them, and to persuade them to see their common interest’. And the need to forge direct links between people did not stop with Europe. Monnet was convinced that ‘the union of Europe was not only important for the Europeans themselves: it was valuable as an example for others, and this was a further reason for bringing it about’. To his mind this enterprise had implications for the whole of civilisation: it would ‘allow men to develop their potential within communities freely chosen and built’.(7) These goals are rooted in the age-old pursuit of international pacification and it is easy to see how they are linked to classic federal theory. Monnet’s ultimate objectives were grounded in a number of basic assumptions about the logic of events and the essential rationality of man. His belief that human nature was ‘weak and unpredictable without rules and institutions’ presupposed a particular view about the reasonableness of man. It assumed that men would co-operate naturally with each other provided that they could identify their common interests and understand the benefits which would accrue from co-operation. In every set of circumstances which might conceivably generate conflict there lurked a common interest. It did not have to be invented; it merely had to be discovered. The fundamental problem for Monnet remained the same: ‘how can people be persuaded to approach the problem in the same way, and to see that their interests are the same, when men and nations are divided?’ He set great store by the ‘habits of working together’ which fostered mutual confidence and familiarity but his arrival at the method by which he determined to ‘completely transform existing habits in international relations’ occurred only slowly and in piecemeal, cumulative fashion. It was typical of the overall evolution of his political ideas. They were grounded in practical experience. The method by which he approached international problems was ingenious in its simplicity. He intended to change men’s attitudes by ‘transforming the very reasons for their rivalry’(8) which meant a radical transformation of the political context in which the conflicts were traditionally set. Particular attitudes, perceptions and values were legitimate only according to specific contexts. Change the context and the problems themselves are changed. Monnet summarised this method succinctly in his Memoirs when recalling the events of 1950 which prompted him to take the initiative over the Schuman Plan: It was at that time, undoubtedly, and on that precise problem, that I realised the full possibilities of an approach which had long been familiar to me, and which I had applied empirically in trying to overcome difficulties of all kinds. I had come to see that it was often useless to make a frontal attack on problems, since they have not arisen by themselves, but are the product of circumstances. Only by modifying the circumstances— ‘lateral thinking’—can one disperse the difficulties that they create. So, instead of wearing myself out on the hard core of resistance, I had become accustomed to seeking out and trying to change whatever element in its environment was causing the block.(9)

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The ‘lateral thinking’ which he claimed ‘had long been familiar’ to him developed as far back as his experience with the inter-allied executives during the First World War. Monnet himself observed that the creation of the Wheat Executive in 1916 was ‘the first step on the long road that led (him) gradually to discover the immense possibilities of collective action’. It was ‘the first concrete proof that when men are put in a certain situation they see that they have common interests, and they are led towards agreement’. The key to decision-making success lay in explaining national viewpoints while they were still plastic and still unformed.(10) Other factors were necessary for success. Monnet always emphasised, without overestimating, the importance of long personal association and of the need to build mutual trust and confidence between national negotiators. Their propensity to co-operate, however, required the crucial impetus which only a perceived crisis could engender. Time and again Monnet repeated this basic axiom: ‘people only accept change when they are faced with necessity and only recognise necessity when a crisis is upon them’. Progress cannot be made without ‘a certain disorder’ when under the inescapable pressure of necessity national leaders can be induced to make far-reaching, unprecedented decisions which they would never consider under less arduous conditions. The proposal for an Anglo-French union in 1940 was a classic example of Monnet’s belief that ‘in exceptional times, anything is possible’, and it recurs constantly in his quest to build Europe: ‘I have always believed that Europe would be built through crises and that it would be the sum of their solutions’.(11) This notion of crisis, as we shall discover, was unique neither to Monnet’s thinking nor to his strategy. Spinelli, too, considered it integral to progress. While Monnet alluded to the idea of ‘an exceptionally creative phase’ which in the history of ideas was ‘always brief, Spinelli believed in ‘new moments of creative European tension’ in which ‘action by individual men and women can shape events in a new direction’.(12) Timing—to wait for the right moment to act— was also a vital ingredient common to both of their political strategies and we shall return to it later in our investigation of Spinelli’s federal ideas and strategies. Let us now proceed to the next link in the chain of Monnet’s basic assumptions about the union of European peoples. Having elaborated the idea of changing the context within which conventional problems between states were customarily located, Monnet was compelled to give that context a solid form. Institutional innovation answered the call for new habits of thought and action. Monnet’s faith in the value of new rules and institutions was both peculiar and deep-rooted. His remarks about them are couched in uncharacteristically philosophical terms: Nothing is possible without men: nothing is lasting without institutions… The union of Europe cannot be based on goodwill alone. Rules are needed. The tragic events we have lived through and are still witnessing may have made us wiser. But men pass away; others will take their place. We cannot bequeath them our personal experience. That will die with us. But we can leave them institutions. The life of institutions is longer than that of men: if they are well built, they can accumulate and hand on the wisdom of succeeding generations.(13) With a rhetorical flourish reminiscent of Burke, Monnet acknowledged that ‘every organism has its own natural rate of growth’ and that the process of giving Europe strong institutional roots needed time ‘for contact with reality to take effect’. (14) But what sort

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of institutions did Monnet have in mind? How did he arrive at the idea of supranational authority with limited powers? The answers to these questions are well-known but we can use the information for the purpose of underlining two further assumptions in Monnet’s political ideas which we have not yet emphasised and it will also enable us briefly to indicate the main contours of his political strategy. The origins of the supranational experiment appear to reach back to Monnet’s short tenure as deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations during 1919–1923. ‘Looking back’, he wrote, ‘I can see more clearly how the League of Nations prefigured supranationality—through underlying agreement among men who enjoyed widespread influence in their own countries, so that awareness of the general interest was communicated to the places where national decisions were reached’. This early experience, he added, was the only one which he ‘cared to copy’. The lessons learned from his wartime activities on the various inter-allied agencies, especially wheat and maritime transport, must also have sensitised him to the willingness and ability of States to pool their resources and act together in taking decisions but it was his fear of a general return to the old order of competing state sovereignties and, in particular, of a militaristic German postwar revival which helped most to crystallise his ideas about the supranational model. In 1944 Monnet was already thinking of a system whereby the former Reich could be stripped of its industrial potential ‘so that the coal and steel resources of the Ruhr could be placed under a European authority’.(15) There were no doubt several additional anxieties and experiences, such as his role as head of the AngloFrench Co-ordinating Committee in the Second World War, which combined to shape his views on the pooling of national sovereignties but each reveals the same two main conclusions: the archaic nature of the state and the dangers inherent in nationalism. These two conclusions became two basic assumptions in Monnet’s thinking which in these respects was typical of those continental Europeans who had lived through two World Wars. The State in Europe was considered obsolete partly because of its collapse in the face of the Nazi onslaught but mainly because of a perceived discrepancy between changing demands of new technologies and the capacity of the state to meet them. Moreover, it not only failed to satisfy the basic needs of its population but it also served to harden and distort the differences between European peoples to the point where they became dangerous rivalries. The common needs and interests which Monnet deemed to be immanent in Europe were thus effectively obscured and thwarted. The Franco-German conflict epitomised the dangers inherent in doctrinal nationalism which was channelled through traditional state structures. State boundaries were artificial—the cause and consequence of conflict and division—and would remain monuments to confrontation. These assumptions determined Monnet’s political strategy. His methods of work, though interesting, need not concern us here but his ways of exercising influence are crucial to a proper appreciation of his idiosyncratic strategy for achieving his goal. In a remarkably frank passage in his Memoirs Monnet explained that it was not in his nature to respect established authority for its own sake: What counted for me was its usefulness … I had an idea which only the Prime Minister had the power to put into practice: so why not go knocking on his door? It was…a simple idea of what would be most effective. I have never acted in any other way. First have an idea, then look for the man who can put it to work… It is the privilege of statesmen to decide what is in the general interest. Since I could not exercise that

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privilege in my own right, I naturally had to help those who could… Since I did not get in statesmen’s way, I could count on their support. Moreover, although it takes a long time to reach the men at the top, it takes very little to explain to them how to escape from the difficulties of the present…when the critical moment comes…when ideas are lacking, they accept yours…provided they can present them as their own…if I can best expedite matters by self-effacement then I prefer to work behind the scenes.(16) Monnet’s vast experience of domestic and international public affairs conducted in very diverse milieux gave him the confidence, the contacts and the opportunities to act effectively. Access to the key power-holders, however, did not by itself guarantee success. Timing, as we have already noted, was also crucial. Exploiting the psychological momentum of a chance event or of prevailing circumstances was essential to making headway: ‘Events… lead me to general conclusions about what has to be done. Then circumstances…supply the means of action’. Monnet’s determination not to be deterred by temporary setbacks was matched by his dogged pursuit of single objectives: ‘I do not like—or rather I am unable—to concentrate on two problems at once…this concentration on a single aim (has) shielded me from the temptation to disperse my efforts’.(17) The component elements of this general political strategy, based upon particular assumptions about man, the state, nationalism, the logic of events and the concept of change, were each directed towards collective action for the common interest. Both his political ideas and his political strategy appear to have been the product of a long practical experience of ‘the working habits of…several different nationalities’ rather than of any particular intellectual influence. Indeed, there appears to be no intellectual influence at all. The temptation to link his ideas and overall strategy with the ‘functionalism’ of David Mitrany must be resisted, although as contemporaries they did share many similar views and experiences. Mitrany’s concern for future international organisation during the First World War prompted him to join the League of Nations Society while Monnet acknowledged that the Tennessee Valley Authority experiment in the Roosevelt era of the 1930s (which Mitrany hailed as ‘a remarkable practical achievement…a purely functional development at every point) was ‘a possible objectlesson for France and Europe’.(18) Mitrany’s preoccupation with global organisation and his confirmed hostility to federation, however, underline the more obvious differences between them. Monnet’s original goal, it must be remembered, was European federation. Monnet and Federalism In retrospect, Monnet seems to have been an advocate of federation without ever having been a federalist. If we trace his advocacy of federation back to 1943 this is because it is first identified in a memorandum written for the French Committee of National Liberation in August of that year. Monnet recalled this episode later in 1950 when he was busily engaged in the activities which led ultimately to the Schuman Plan: the plans I had discussed in 1943…now came back to my mind. At the time they had been intellectual blueprints, traced over wartime maps whose frontiers were due to be redrawn. Now I rediscovered them—or rather, reinvented them in response to the needs of the hour.(19)

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In 1943 Monnet had emphasised that ‘the States of Europe must form a federation’ but he did not include Great Britain which could retreat into her own domain. By 1948, however, Monnet, in attacking the creation of the OEEC as ‘mere co-operation’, called for ‘the establishment of a federation of the West, including Britain’ as the only solution which would prevent another war. Fear of American economic dependency was as much a motive force as the visible Soviet military threat. In 1949 Monnet this time explored the idea of ‘a Franco-British union based on common interests’ as ‘the first step towards a European federation’.(20) In the immediate post-war years, however, such appeals were common. The intellectual and political climate was heady with federalist endeavours. What significance can be attached to Monnet’s support for federation during these years? How could he advocate federation without being a federalist? After all, he was not associated with the plethora of federalist groups active in Europe at the time and he was not sympathetic to their political strategy. The answer lies in his own consistent approach to federation which remains the source of continuing controversy today, namely, the belief that by forging specific functional links between states in a way which does not directly challenge national sovereignty the door to federation will gradually be opened. If we examine his early statements about the goal of federation it is perfectly clear that Monnet’s approach was functional with strong emphasis upon economic activities. As far back as 1921 Monnet urged Eduard Benes, the Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister, to solve the problem of Central European fragmentation by proposing a federation because it formed ‘a natural economic unit’. By 1944 he was already thinking of promoting coal and steel resources as the functional basis for solving the Franco-German conflict and in 1949 his hopes for a Franco-British union, which would presage a European federation, were grounded in practical economic issues such as agriculture, coal and trade. Europe, he believed, could not be built at a stroke. It was necessary first to lay the foundations of the European federation via concrete achievements which would form, as it were, that crucial solidarity—the evolving common interest—indispensable for the removal of physical and mental barriers. This was why Monnet rejected Adenauer’s offer in March 1950 of a Franco-German union which entailed the merging of their economies, parliaments and citizenship. He considered it impracticable. For Monnet this approach was premature; it derived from no practical experience of shared activity to nurture even an incipient community of interest. Instead of a specific practical objective leading to further joint responsibilities Adenauer’s proposal started ‘from a vague concept’ which meant that action could only be ‘in general terms’. Monnet wished to tackle national sovereignty boldly but on a narrow front. If we glance at the preliminary sketch outline of what became the Schuman Declaration this continuity in Monnet’s thinking is striking. Since Franco-German union could not be achieved at once, a start would be made by ‘the establishment of common bases for economic development’. The goal of a federal Europe would be attained via Franco-German union which would itself be realised ‘through the interplay of economics and institutions’ necessitating ‘new structures on a European scale’. The approach to federation, which Monnet called ‘the ECSC method’ of establishing ‘the greatest solidarity among peoples’, implied that ‘gradually, other tasks and other people would become subject to the same common rules and institutions—or perhaps to new institutions’ and this experience would ‘gradually spread by osmosis’. No time-limits were imposed on what was clearly deemed to be a long, slow organic process of

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economic and political integration. And this process, it should be noted, Monnet likened to that of national states: ‘Europe…would be built by the same process as each of our national states—by establishing among nations a new relationship comparable to that which exists among the citizens of any democratic country—equality organised by common institutions’. Monnet’s support for federation was based upon several assumptions which remain contentious. Let us look at an exceptionally lucid explanation of his path to federation: We believed in starting with limited achievements, establishing de facto solidarity, from which a federation would gradually emerge. I have never believed that one fine day Europe would be created by some great political mutation, and I thought it wrong to consult the peoples of Europe about the structure of a Community of which they had no practical experience. It was another matter, however, to ensure that in their limited field the new institutions were thoroughly democratic; and in this direction there was still progress to be made…the pragmatic method we had adopted would…lead to a federation validated by the people’s vote; but that federation would be the culmination of an existing economic and political reality, already put to the test …it was bringing together men and practical matters.(21) The external pressures during the early 1950s for military integration forced Monnet to go ‘further and faster politically than we had originally proposed in the Schuman Plan’ and John Pinder is correct to emphasise how both Monnet and the governments of the six Community States underestimated the political implications of the European Defence Community project.(22) But to be fair to Monnet the EDC issue was unexpected. It interrupted his own method of piecemeal, cumulative building whereby ‘political Europe’ would be ‘the culminating point of a gradual process’. Monnet had never believed that defence was the appropriate way to build Europe; that would be a task to be undertaken only after the federation itself had been created. None the less, once the EDC project was forced upon him he accepted the need to ‘take short cuts’ and recognised that ‘the federation of Europe would have to become an immediate objective’. He acknowledged that ‘joint defence was inconceivable without a joint political authority from the start’, but his proposal for ‘a single supranational authority’, as he put it, ‘sought in the same spirit and by the same methods as for coal and steel’ was, as Pinder implied, both inappropriate and inadequate to the task at hand.(23) This apparent lack of vision and imagination presumably stemmed from Monnet’s obstinate refusal to depart from what seems, in retrospect, to have been a very narrow and rigid approach to federation. He was trapped by his own method. The EDC project was both ‘concrete’ and ‘de facto’ but it forced the pace towards a fully-fledged federal structure. Monnet complained in his Memoirs that the constitutional committee, set up to design a European Political Community, was too ambitious ‘when they imagined that European unity would begin with the establishment of a federal political system’. His allegation that ‘it proposed to go too fast, without waiting for the force of necessity to make it seem natural in the eyes of Europeans’ (24) goes to the heart of the dispute between functionalists and federalists. Monnet’s approach to federation, then, rendered

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constitutionalism—political Europe—contingent upon cumulative functional achievements which restricted its very capacity to develop. In short, Monnet’s functional approach to federation in Europe smacked too much of economic determinism in the extent to which it subordinated political to economic factors; this causal, unidimensional conception would place Europe in a straitjacket, unable to grow and to augment its corporate personality. Monnet’s critics, especially federalists, would also claim that he misunderstood, and thus oversimplified, the very nature of the integration process itself. This disagreement about the process of European integration inevitably raises major theoretical issues of contemporary significance and we shall underline some of these by contrasting Monnet’s conception of Europe with that of Altiero Spinelli who, until his unwelcome death in May 1986, was the leading federalist in the European Community. Monnet’s Legacy In his Introduction to Monnet’s Memoirs, George Ball designated Monnet ‘the architect of the European Community’ and ‘its master builder’. Spinelli, in a much less pious allusion to Monnet’s achievements, declared that ‘Monnet has the great merit of having built Europe and the great responsibility to have built it badly’.(25) What did Spinelli mean by this statement? How did his federal conception of Europe differ from what Mitrany called the ‘federalist-functionalism’ of Monnet?(26) If the origins of Monnet’s political ideas remain in a sense imprecise, those of Spinelli are easier to locate and define. Spinelli’s belief in the ‘necessity of Europe’ crystallised during the Second World War. His experiences in the ant-Fascist Resistance helped him to envisage a new postwar Europe reorganised along federal lines which would guarantee peace, order and stability. The intellectual origins of his federal ideas, however, stretch back to the late 1930s and developed under the impact of Luigi Einaudi’s influence together with British federalist literature emanating from the Federal Union established in London in the autumn of 1938.(27) We shall return to these ideas later in our study. We have already underlined some of the views of Spinelli and Monnet which were identical. Many of their ideas and opinions about nationalism, the state and the future of Europe were common among those of their generation who sought to explain and remove the causes of war. And, indeed, there are several similarities relating to particular aspects of Monnet’s and Spinelli’s political strategies. We have already emphasised the importance of ‘crisis’ in both of their activities but timing, too, was a key element in their respective strategies. Monnet was prepared to ‘wait a long time for the right moment’ while Spinelli’s federalist strategy of ‘crisis exploitation’ posited the notion of the Community making opportunist progress by ‘jumping forward at exceptional moments’.(28) The role of institutions also occupied a pivotal position in their thinking. Though perhaps not identical, the significance which each attached to the need for institutions to encapsulate the common interest is quite striking. For Spinelli, ‘the common elaboration’ can be achieved on a gradual step-by-step basis provided that the Community is given the legs to take these steps but ‘the political setting of the institutions must be solid…this cannot be made step-by-step’.(29) Monnet’s emphasis differed somewhat in the extent to which he viewed institutional development as akin to organic growth arising out of functional performance but he shared Spinelli’s belief in the

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capacity of institutions to mould and shape men’s perceptions, attitudes and behaviour. What Monnet overlooked was the crucial role which institutions can play in determining both the pace and the direction of the integration process. While he was prepared to ‘wait and see’, Spinelli regarded major institutional reform as the critical political initiative necessary to enable the Community to make opportunist progress. Here it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Monnet’s method led, once again, to political immobilism and stagnation with Spinelli cast in the role of liberator, releasing Europe from Monnet’s legacy of imprisonment. But Spinelli’s disagreement with Monnet’s approach to federation went further and deeper than their differences about the role of institutions. The institutional question was merely the tip of a very large conceptual iceberg. Much as he disliked the way the Community had developed, Spinelli’s federal ideas were always grounded in the reality of intergovernmental hegemony. In 1972 he wrote that the Community was ‘the present expression of the European idea’. He even felt compelled to compromise with Monnet’s legacy when in 1970 he became a European Commissioner and entered the institutional reality which he had spent much of his time and energy criticising. This was because, as he put it, he was influenced by the fact that Monnet had succeeded where the federalists had failed.(30) Monnet’s Europe was a living reality. It was successful because it had been shown to be effective in two World Wars and was more acceptable to national elites than the federal experience which in Europe was limited to Switzerland and seemed too abstract to be feasible on a larger European scale. Having struggled to work within Monnet’s restrictive European conception during the 1970s, then, Spinelli launched his single-handed political initiative during 1980–1981 in the European Parliament which led, via the European Union Treaty, to the Single European Act of 1987. What, then, lay at the root of Spinelli’s conceptual differences with Monnet? Monnet’s legacy has, so far with few exceptions, clearly frustrated federalists’ attempts to alter the basic construction of Europe. They have been forced to begin with what has already been implemented. In Spinelli’s words, ‘we are still paying for this false departure’. The mistake which Spinelli attributed to Monnet was inherent in the functional approach which neglected to deal with ‘the organisation of political power at the European level’.(31) The political centre thus remained weak and impotent, lacking the capacity to go beyond what existed and unable to adapt to new forces and problems encountered at a European level. The route by which Spinelli arrived at this federalist conclusion is interesting both for what it reveals about the limitations of the functionalist method and for the theoretical implications which it undoubtedly suggests. The gist of Spinelli’s reasoning is devastatingly simple and worth close examination. The key to his criticism of Monnet’s method lies in the analogy which Monnet made with the process of national integration. Monnet, it will be recalled, believed that Europe would be built by the same process as that which had created nation states. Furthermore, it is clear that he was influenced by the slow nation-building process whereby the French provinces constructed France. It was, of course, a continuing process. Likewise the construction of Europe was ‘a process of change, continuing that same process which in an earlier period of history produced our national forms of life’.(32) But, according to Spinelli, there was a monumental flaw in Monnet’s basic hypothesis which falsified his conception of Europe. It is best summarised in Spinelli’s own words:

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Monnet’s barely-hidden plan was not to create mere agencies tamely tied to particular tasks but to establish one or more European administrations around which ‘concrete interests’ would concentrate with such force that the multi-headed sovereign would delegate more and more administrative tasks. At a certain point quantity would become quality: the originally functional institution would become a fully-fledged political power. After all, had not France been created in this way? Of course, only a French high official could believe that if the commis du Roi had founded the French state, the Commissioners of the Council could establish the United States of Europe. This vision of a Europe united by a bureaucracy was based on the hypothesis that there would exist between the Council and the Commission a convergence of views on European unity similar to that which had existed between Kings and their commis about suprafeudal unity. The error in Monnet’s interpretation of French nation-building was clearly exposed: ‘without the political direction and support of the Kings, the unification of France by the commis would never have been achieved’.(33) If we extend Monnet’s defective interpretation of French nation-building to the process of European integration the source of Spinelli’s conceptual differences with Monnet is starkly revealed. The missing element from Monnet’s Europe, once again, is the King. The King is the political element without which Europe is in chaos. The machinery of the nation states provide only a system of reciprocal brakes which paralyse the European Community and furnish no basis for fostering the common elaboration. To rely upon this machinery for ‘the task of being the centre of the European decisionmaking process means to play the European game with loaded dice, which systematically favour national answers against European solutions’.(34) As Mario Albertini has argued, ‘the degree of construction does not make it possible to move ahead any more’ without major institutional reform which will significantly shift the balance of political power away from intergovernmentalism and towards the supranational bodies: the Commission and the Parliament.(35) Let us now draw some conclusions from our comparative analysis of the two faces of federalism. Monnet and Spinelli: The Symbiotic Legacy? Monnet’s approach to federation failed by its own terms of reference. It did not possess that inherent sustaining dynamic which he believed, at least initially, would evolve inexorably towards a union among peoples. The shift from quantity to quality did not occur because of Monnet’s excessive reliance upon functionalist logic. His confidence in its success was misplaced because it constituted only part, though an important part, of the overall logic of European integration. There is some evidence in his Memoirs that he was aware of the conflict between his own legacy and the Community’s federal heritage but his ‘pre-federal model’ will remain just that in the absence of what Albertini calls ‘a much higher degree of construction’.(36) We must not, of course, forget Monnet’s successes in our emphasis upon his failures. Spinelli himself acknowledged the paradox

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in Monnet of great success and great failure. And the successes are naturally as much a part of his enduring legacy as the failures. Looking back at what we have just discussed it may seem a harsh verdict to consider Monnet as having failed to build Europe. Certainly some commentators would defend his approach to Europe as being both ingenious and realistic. It was the only feasible method to overcome national myopia and persuade national governments to pool their energies and resources in a common effort to surmount common difficulties. Some might even argue that Monnet was necessary before Spinelli. Europe in the 1950s was simply not ready for the constitutional approach of Spinelli. Monnet’s successes have subsequently created the concrete progress which may conceivably bring a federal Europe closer to reality. He has made the task for federalists easier to achieve. Spinelli, of course, never accepted these arguments. We are reminded of his own opinion on this matter: Monnet made the first steps easier to obtain but he made the later steps much more difficult to achieve.(37) It was not possible to go back to the drawing board. The European construction which emerged as the three Communities after 1957 meant that federalists were marginalised, their voices stifled, in the heady successes which the new Europe enjoyed during the late 1950s and early 1960s. But the fundamental flaw in Monnet’s Europe was quickly and dramatically exposed by General De Gaulle during the infamous Luxembourg crisis of 1965–1966. Both the implications and the consequences of this rupture in the European construction convinced Spinelli that Monnet’s method had run its course. It had exhausted its possibilities. It was time to begin again. Every failure is also an opportunity to start afresh and this was what Spinelli determined to do. We shall now shift the focus of our study from Monnet and Spinelli to the political circumstances and developments of the decade 1969–1979 in order to examine and explain both the origins and the growth of European Union. We will begin with the background context of the late 1960s. Notes 1. Spinelli remained an MEP until his death in May 1986. For a detailed account of his political career and the intellectual origins of his federal ideas, see Chapter Five. 2. See J.Pinder, ‘European Community and nation-state: a case for a neo-federalism?, International Affairs, (1986) pp. 41–54. 3. J.Monnet, Memoirs, (Doubleday, New York 1978), p. 519. 4. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 523. 5. R.Mayne, ‘The Role of Jean Monnet’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 2, (1966–1967), pp. 351–2. 6. They were first published in French in 1976. In an anonymous review of his Memoirs by ‘Z’ Monnet’s recollections were especially welcome because there was ‘no very easily accessible record of his utterances and opinions’. See ‘Z’, ‘What Jean Monnet Wrought’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 55, (1977), pp. 630–5. 7. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 221, 511 and 356. 8. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 37, 76, 87 and 511. 9. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 291. 10. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 58 and 76. 11. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 109, 46, 140 and 417. 12. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 332 and A.Spinelli, The European Adventure: Tasks For The Enlarged Community, (Charles Knight & Co. Ltd., London 1972), p. 186.

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13. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 304 and 384. 14. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 384 and 393. 15. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 85, 384 and 222. 16. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 50, 299 and 231. 17. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 42, 188 and 229. 18. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 329 and 276, and D. Mitrany, The Functional Theory of Politics, (Martin Robertson, London 1975), pp. 26–27. 19. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 293. 20. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 222, 272 and 280. 21. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 93, 286, 295, 392–393, 383 and 367. This would create a ‘silent revolution in men’s minds’ which would lead one day to ‘a European federation’, see J.Monnet, ‘A Ferment of Change’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 1, (1962), pp. 203–11. 22. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 368 and Pinder, ‘European Community and nation-state’, p. 44. 23. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 343 and 346, and Pinder, ‘European Community and nation-state’, p. 44. 24. Monnet, Memoirs, pp. 394–5. 25. G.Ball, Introduction, p. 11 and Interview with Spinelli, 15th September 1983, European Parliament, Strasbourg. 26. Mitrany, Functional Theory, p. 76. 27. See M.Burgess, ‘Federal Ideas in the European Community: Altiero Spinelli and ‘European Union’, 1981–1984’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 19, No. 3, (Summer, 1984) pp. 339– 47 and ‘Altiero Spinelli, Federalism and the EUT’, in J.Lodge (Ed.), European Union: The European Community in Search of a Future, (Macmillan, London 1986), Ch. 9, pp. 174–185. 28. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 42 and Spinelli, The European Adventure, p. 16. 29. Interview with Spinelli, September 1983, European Parliament, Strasbourg. 30. Spinelli, The European Adventure, preface p. vii and Interview with Spinelli, September 1983, European Parliament, Strasbourg. 31. Interview with Spinelli, September 1983 and 14 February 1985, European Parliament Strasbourg. 32. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 524. 33. A.Spinelli, ‘Reflections on the Institutional Crisis in the European Community’, West European Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1, (February 1978), pp. 79–80. 34. Spinelli, ‘Reflections’, p. 86. 35. M.Albertini, ‘Europe on the Threshold of Union’, The Federalist, year XXVIII, 1986, No. 1, p. 27. 36. Albertini, ‘Europe on the Threshold’, p. 27. 37. Interview with Spinelli, 14 February 1985, Strasbourg.

Chapter Four THE ORIGINS AND GROWTH OF EUROPEAN UNION, 1969–1979 (a) Introduction: From the Hague to Paris, 1969–1972 In the late 1960s the European Community had reached a new crossroads in its economic and political development. One legacy of the ‘ambiguous accommodation’(1) of 1966 in Luxembourg was atmospheric: there had been a dramatic change in the climate of opinion within Community circles. The former optimistic sense of purpose and steady progress was swiftly replaced by a morose caution and inertia. ‘Everyone had lost a few more illusions’, Miriam Camps observed in 1966, ‘the experience of the crisis will breed caution on all sides … Further progress will doubtless be slow’.(2) Her observation proved accurate. Writing in 1976, Annette Morgan commented upon the aftermath of the Luxembourg fiasco in less detail but more succinctly: The second half of the 1960s was marked by a decline in the decisionmaking capabilities of the Community, and no fresh initiative was taken in the fields of economic or political union, both the Council and the Commission appeared to mark time and to have lost their sense of purpose.(3) The tenth anniversary of the signature of the Treaty of Rome, belatedly celebrated in May 1967 in Rome, was a dull affair. Indeed the year 1967 was noted chiefly for the second French veto of Britain’s attempt to join the Community. But the Community did not stand completely still. The treaty obligations guaranteed some momentum. Walter Hallstein remarked subtly that it would be wrong to depict European unification as falling back: ‘Our problem was not to reverse a backward trend but to speed up a rate of progress which had been slowed down’.(4) The practical achievements of the 1960s were indeed not inconsiderable, though they were almost exclusively economic successes. Monnet’s European strategy appeared to be paying dividends. The planned economic goals of the Treaty of Rome were well on the road to attainment: the customs union was virtually completed; the common market for agriculture was imminent; workers would soon be assured freedom of movement throughout the Community; and progress in certain areas of trade, taxation and social security had been made. But the political balance-sheet registered on the debit side. The enforcement of the French veto against British membership in 1963 and 1967, the humiliation and subsequent attenuation of the Commission’s authority vis a vis the national governments during and after 1966, and the persistent disregard for the European Parliament’s electoral proclivities combined to yield, in Spinelli’s words, ‘certain

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important defeats’ which rendered the Community ‘weak and sterile’.(5) Europe’s concrete economic achievements seemed as yet unable to sustain a corresponding political momentum. What, then, spurred the Community of the Six to make ‘a breakthrough to fresh ground’(6) in 1969? And what comfort could the federalist perspective take from what happened in 1969 given that it was an elite intergovernmentalist initiative? Spinelli’s observation that ‘at the end of 1969 the wind began to change and from then until…mid-1972 the European theme was revitalised’(7) merely begged the key question. Why should the governments, institutions and assorted public opinions of the Community experience ‘an increasing realisation that decisive steps forward in European affairs must be taken?’(8) The answer, at a general level, lies in three intimately interrelated contexts which furnish several competing interpretations: the changing international arena; domestic policy priorities; and Community relationships. And these contexts can be broken down further into particular environments which accommodate both individual and collective actors such as political leaders, political party and bureaucratic interests and multi-national concerns.(9) The concluding interpretation of 1969 will be determined by the particular conceptual lens adopted. From the federalist standpoint, however, rival perspectives of what happened to create the Hague Summit matter less than the fact that here was another conjunction of circumstances conducive to the building of Europe. Here, in short, was yet another opportunity to move ahead and strengthen Europe. In the mainstream literature on the breakthrough achieved in 1969 it would appear that the disappearance of De Gaulle, the shifting nature of French domestic and foreign priorities, the competitive European dispositions of Pompidou and Brandt, and the contextual debate over the impending enlargement of the Community combined to alter the prospects for significant progress in Community relationships on a number of levels and in different dimensions. And if we add to this the deadlines and achievements foreshadowed in the Treaty of Rome it becomes clear why the Hague Summit represented an appropriate stocktaking enterprise: looking both backward at past accomplishments and forward to new ambitions. In this sense the Hague Summit was merely the necessary and logical outcome of a particular stage in the Community’s economic, social and political development. But the triptych of completion, deepening and enlargement evocatively inscribed in the French formula for Community progress conveniently circumvented the sort of institutional issues which federalists would have preferred to confront. Nonetheless, there were compensations. Hallstein invoked that comfortable sense of piecemeal inevitability to which some federalists adhere when he gauged that ‘integration was fast approaching the stage where economic and monetary policies…had to be fused’. His sense that these questions came ‘close to tackling the core of the Community’s concept and its practical implications’(10) raised the time-honoured issue of federalist strategy. Which approach to federal union in Europe was likely to be the most successful? Hallstein felt that his view coincided with the inexorable moving forces of history. Economic and monetary union followed logically from the idea of a customs union. Spinelli, too, came to the same conclusion: the Community must ‘set itself the goal of the progressive implementation of a monetary and economic union’. He viewed 1971 as yet another ‘moment of creative tension’(11) which would probably extend into the early 1970s. But monetary instability had permeated the economic atmosphere as far back as 1968–1969

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(12) and had undoubtedly strengthened the argument for economic and monetary union if only as a viable approach to closer intergovernmental unity and co-operation. The key question was how far national governments were prepared in the prevailing circumstances to increase Community competence in these areas. French and West German currency movements during late 1969 also appear to have been instrumental in Brandt’s own initiative on economic and monetary union at the Hague. But both the source and the purpose of this stand on new monetary policies were complex and deep-seated. Monnet claimed that Brandt’s proposals ‘came from a long way back: several of the ideas we had worked out together in the Action Committee were given their chance to succeed’.(13) In his personal recollections Brandt acknowledged Monnet’s ‘encouragement’(14) but it is important here to underline the complicated overarching nature of Brandt’s own political strategy for West Germany since it has been noticeably neglected in the mainstream literature. It is also important for enriching the context of federal influences and strategies with which this book is principally concerned. Brandt’s own personal commitment to a federal Europe stretched back at least to his long years in exile in Scandinavia having fled from the Nazis in 1933. Indeed, Brandt has acknowledged that his years ‘outside’ Germany had taught him ‘to become a European’: I became aware before many others that this continent could not be rebuilt on the decayed foundations of the old order of things: the nation state was a thing of the past.(15) With language very reminiscent of Spinelli and other fellow-travellers in the anti-fascist Resistance, Brandt claimed that his concept of Europe was ‘far more wide-ranging than that of its founding fathers Robert Schumann, de Gasperi and Adenauer’. This was true but hardly surprising given his personal background and his long experience as a socialist outcast from Hitler’s Germany. According to Brandt, ‘Adenauer was a man of the ‘inner emigration’…he withdrew into the protective cocoon of a strictly private existence’ without leaving Germany.(16) Brandt, however, was already beginning to evolve a solution to the German problem which was not confined to the integration of part of Germany into the Western security system, necessary though that was after 1945. During his exile years he had already ruminated upon the idea of federalism as a means of re-structuring relations between Germany and those east European countries which possessed common economic interests: There were many arguments in favour of a federal union between Germany and these countries…Trade conditions would be rendered substantially more favourable if Germany and her European neighbours to the east could be brought together in a federal organisation.(17) Recognising the arrival of the Soviet Union as a new actor on the international stage, but concentrating his mind upon the thorny issues of national minorities and boundary disputes between European states, Brandt’s conclusion was revealing in view of his subsequent political strategy for West Germany during 1969–1973:

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The most natural solution of such problems would evolve within the framework of a European federation. The constitution of a United States of Europe would be in a position to offer equal constitutional rights to all citizens—regardless of language, race or religion. Common agencies could be set up for the whole federation to serve the national and cultural needs of the various population groups. A federal system in central Europe would largely be able to resolve this issue, even if a broader federation covering the whole of Europe cannot yet become a reality.(18) It has been necessary to give these early political thoughts of Brandt more prominence here in order to underline the way that they foreshadowed the complex links which he forged in his later policies of Ostpolitik, Westpolitik and Deutschlandpolitik. In shorthand this came to mean the ‘Europeanisation of Germany’ and simultaneously the ‘Europeanisation of Europe’. The ‘European Peace Order’ which Brandt came to champion during the late 1960s, then, was the logical end-product of an evolving European solution to the German problem. It was a result which would at once facilitate an internationally acceptable German ‘unity’ within a new European ‘unity’. Bulmer and Paterson have recently remarked that the precise contours of the ‘European Peace Order’ were ‘indistinct and were delineated differently at different times’ but Brandt never seriously regarded it as an alternative to the European Community.(19) Brandt, of course, never claimed to have a blueprint of the ‘European Peace Order’, though he did go into some detail about its intended precursor—the new European security system. One is tempted to regard the ‘European Peace Order’ as a nebulous but necessary part of Brandt’s overall political vision for a new Germany in a new Europe. It offered something to each of the interested parties. The vision, rather like the idea of ‘European Union’ itself, was undefined but it facilitated movement forward towards closer relations. Maintaining momentum was vital for progress in such far-sighted projects. If it is true that both institutional and policy progress in Community affairs during 1969–1972 depended largely upon Franco-West German relations the particular role of Pompidou was crucial as the chief instigator of the summits. His period of office as French President during 1969–1974 marked a transitional post-de Gaulle adjustment of French policy and attitudes towards the Community. Brandt’s penchant for ‘incorporating wide vistas’ in his approach to contemporary problems was sharply counter-balanced by Pompidou’s more day-to-day business like realism. Nonetheless, Pompidou’s belief in the future of the Community, tempered by caution and continuity, did strengthen the European dimensions to French foreign policy and assisted towards the changed atmosphere in Community relations at the end of the 1960s.(20) The coincidence of interests which occurred in 1969 between Paris and Bonn, then, must not disguise the differing motives existing between Pompidou and Brandt. These motives have recently been reassessed and they confirm the extent to which Brandt linked the closer co-ordination of economic and monetary policies to closer co-ordination in foreign policy.(21) Brandt wanted to ‘invest the European Community with a new quality’(22) at the Hague while Pompidou strove to limit and confine progress in these areas to strictly intergovernmental gains. Presidential opposition to institutional reforms which might buttress the supranational features of the Community was consistently

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exerted. Given Pompidou’s unshakable resistance to strengthening the central institutions, Brandt’s initial enthusiasm for direct elections to the European Parliament was eventually quelled. But even if his ardent support for European integration at the Hague represented ‘only a partial exception’ to his overriding concern for Ostpolitik,(23) none the less, it would be a mistake completely to ignore the complex motives—short or long-term—which impelled him to readjust his political tactics at different times, shifting the emphasis of his strategy between its several component parts. Monnet may well have been correct to claim that Brandt ‘persuaded the Hague Summit to adopt the plan for economic and monetary union, with a European Reserve Fund, as the Action Committee had proposed’, but this is to overlook the deep-rooted driving force, outlined above, which propelled him into the forceful, self-confident posture he displayed and which so ebulliently overshadowed Pompidou as a progressive European. Brandt could hardly be depicted as a fervent agitator for a federal Europe in 1969 but the success of the Hague Summit was crucial to his larger political strategy: it was ‘widely judged as a prerequisite for Brandt’s Eastern policy’.(24) Several forces were at work in the late 1960s, therefore, which gave a fresh impetus to federalists’ hopes. Federalists, we must remember, had to rely upon whatever concessions could be wrung from a predominantly intergovernmental organisation in practice. Spinelli certainly had no illusions both about the value and the limitations of summits. He recognised that they could be useful for launching new initiatives, as with the Hague, but their necessity was itself symptomatic of the Community’s most debilitating handicap: its general institutional deficiencies. As long as its central institutions remained weak and unable to ‘develop subsequently their own fields of common action and correspondingly to carry out reforms within themselves’(25) the Community’s progress would be pedestrian. Whatever collection of favourable circumstances propelled the governments to move ahead in particular directions at certain times the major results of summitry would remain disappointing. Governments would prevaricate and compromise to the point where most of the genuine Community characteristics of new common policies would deteriorate in the hands of national officials. In some instances, as with the completion of the agricultural policy, concrete achievements could be made. But Spinelli’s interpretation of what happened at the Hague in 1969 left no doubts about his opinion of the yawning chasm between rhetoric and reality: When nothing further than a declaration of principle was made, in the belief that practical progress could be made through the existing channels, then nothing of moment was achieved: the ambitious vision of economic and monetary union was implemented with fragile promises which were completely inadequate and which were rapidly overturned by the monetary crisis.(26) From the standpoint of the late 1980s this judgement now seems harsh, if not actually erroneous. Summits were formally institutionalised by 1975 and several significant advances, including the European Monetary System (EMS) and direct elections to the European Parliament, have derived from them. But Spinelli’s argument about the need for strong, autonomous central institutions remains a compelling one. It highlights the

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federalist belief in looking at the Community as an already established autonomous entity independent of its component units. Diplomatic negotiators would always have an intergovernmentalist perspective of change which cannot help but view institutional reform as tantamount to far-reaching treaty revision with incalculable consequences. Federalists, however, regard the Community as more than a mere loose association of states: it is also a political entity with its own personality, superior in certain aspects to the states, possessing its own organisation, producing decisions which must be accepted by the member states and respected by their citizens. Thus that which for the states is a treaty, is for the Community its own constitution; that which for the states is a revision of the treaty is for the Community a revision of its constitution.(27) The contrasting and conflicting versions of federalists and intergovernmentalists in the building of Europe could hardly be better summarised. The Hague Summit demonstrated that any major breakthrough to fresh ground in the Community’s economic and political development still required a considerable push from national governments. Not unnaturally, the final declaration of the summit boldly claimed that the Community had ‘arrived at a turning-point in its history’. But while the determination of governments to make substantial headway in the fields of economic and monetary union and foreign policy co-operation seemed assured in the establishment of the Werner and Davignon Committees, respectively, and in the new French attitude towards enlargement, the hopes raised for the Community’s future had to be qualified from a federalist perspective. Brandt’s role was crucially important in the way that he assisted the already changing atmosphere of Community relations and added a fresh impetus to reform. But Hallstein realistically summarised the ‘significant omissions’ in the Hague Conference communique: We search in vain for measures actually to restore majority voting in the Council of Ministers, or to introduce direct elections to the European Parliament. There is no provision for strengthening the position of the Commission, for example, by having it invested with its powers and functions by the European Parliament, or by defining its role in negotiations with countries seeking membership. Finally, most of the dates fixed for the completion of the talks… smack of diplomatic compromise…they lie too far in the future.(28) Clearly, even to cautious federalists like Hallstein the progress achieved at the Hague Summit was unsatisfactory. He wanted to ‘make up for lost time by speedier action at this stage’. But, as we have already noted, federalists of whatever persuasion have to be optimists. They are also opportunists. The commitments endorsed by the national governments in 1969, then, had to be viewed in this light. However disappointing to federalists, something had obviously happened to the Community at the end of the 1960s. Why, after all, should governments commit themselves to such potentially far-reaching goals? What did the notions of entrenching the Community’s constitutional authority

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over its own financial resources and of strengthening the European Parliament’s budgetary powers mean if they were not intended to enhance Community competences in a manner which would gradually, and in piecemeal fashion, supersede state parameters? Federal progress, we are reminded, can occur on a number of fronts at the same time. The quantum jump strategy of a new treaty, or a major treaty revision, does not invalidate or render nugatory the less convulsive strategy of small steps. The goal remains the same. (b) From Paris to Paris, October 1972-December 1974 In the years between the intergovernmental euphoria epitomised by the Hague communique in December 1969 and the Paris Summit of October 1972 the overriding concern of Community member states was the continued upheaval in monetary relations. This, in turn, soured relations between the states, especially between France and West Germany, and ensured that ‘the question of the next meeting was much longer than that of its predecessor, and much stormier’.(29) Spinelli, as we have seen, regarded 1971– 1972 as yet another of those moments of ‘creative tension’ when opportunities arise for bold action in order once again to make significant progress. His view of the Community’s needs was characteristically unequivocal: It is finally no longer possible to conceal the fact that the present institutions of the Community, whatever their past merits, are no longer suitable for the dimensions and new tasks of the present Community and should be modified, probably in a very profound manner… The long and as yet uncertain meditation on the state of the Community is drawing to one central and obvious conclusion: if the countries of the enlarged Community are not capable of taking common international action—be it monetary, commercial or political—then everything may collapse.(30) Spinelli was not alone in his belief that institutional reform was imperative. Brandt noted that information reaching Pompidou during 1971 from the Benelux countries ‘implied a revision of the Rome treaties’: ‘there were proposals which, for all their sincerity, made him suspect that some people cherished vain illusions’.(31) And the pressure for shifting the focus of contemporary debate towards institutional matters was sufficient to provoke Pompidou’s wrath: if we try to define procedures and competences before making a start, however small, on common intergovernmental action, we shall condemn ourselves to endless ratiocination over principles and, in the end, to doing nothing.(32) Here was a classic statement of the French position, repeatedly supported by successive British and Danish governments, which constantly bedevilled those who advocated a federal Europe: new tasks and common policies should take priority over institutional reform.

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Pompidou’s well-known reservations about the institutional implications of the projected political secretariat arising out of the political co-operation discussions and his lukewarm attitude towards the ambitious ideas envisaged in the Werner Report on economic and monetary union did not augur well for major institutional reform. His much-heralded press conference speech of January 1971 in which he called for ‘a European confederation’ with a European government rendered ‘the dispute over supranationality… irrelevant’.(33) What, then, did the Paris Summit (1972) achieve and how did ‘European Union’ emerge from these discussions? Its achievements, once again, were largely determined by French and West German predispositions, although British inclinations were also accommodated this time. According to Spinelli, Pompidou was at last ‘quietly but continuously moving away from the European conception’ of de Gaulle,(34) but ‘intergovernmentalism remained his touchstone’.(35) With hindsight it was obvious that progress at the Paris Summit, because it could only ever be an elite intergovernmental bargaining affair, would be modest. Paul Taylor, the historian of intergovernmentalism, observed that the member state governments were ‘caught up in the dynamic process which had begun at the Hague’.(36) This view very much reflected the rhetoric of Pompidou at his 1971 press conference. Monnet acknowledged that it ‘had been full of good intentions and the objectives it had set for Europe had been both ambitious and precise’.(37) Others, however, took a less than sanguine view. Brandt lamented that ‘the effects of the programme agreed there remained disappointing, perhaps because we reached too far into the future’.(38) Another commentator remarked: The Paris summit contained the elements of a deal, but it was an unbalanced one… In practice, it did little more than salute, in somewhat vague and pompous terms, the desirability of creating a more agreeable and better co-ordinated Community, thus avoiding any precise commitment.(39) Three broad sets of issues faced the enlarged Community: economic and monetary union; political co-operation; and the strengthening of the Community institutions. Those favouring a federal Europe could in principle be comfortable with all three objectives. The lengthy communique amalgamated the various governmental priorities in a sixteenpoint programme which amounted to an omnibus statement: economic and monetary union (EMU), to be realised by 1980, would be accompanied by an effective regional policy and support for a vigorous social policy; agreement on a single industrial base included common scientific, technological and environmental policies; there would be further steps towards the progressive liberalisation of trade; and there would be moves towards a common commercial policy vis a vis Eastern Europe. Finally there was an agreement to strengthen political co-operation (POCO) consultations and an ‘invitation’ to the Community institutions to study ways of improving their decision-making procedures, submitting individual reports on ‘European Union’ by the end of 1975. ‘Probably the oddest feature of the summit was the concept of a ‘European Union’ raised by Pompidou.’(40) It was announced in appropriately innocuous phraseology as ‘transforming, before the end of the present decade, and with the fullest respect for the Treaties already signed, the whole complex of the relations of the Member States into a

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European Union’.(41) One recent writer, Christian Franck, has commented: ‘How exactly this last decision came to be taken is a story which remains to be told’.(42) Monnet remarked that ‘the final form of that union was not further defined’(43) and, like Brandt’s own European Peace Order, the phrase remained nebulous—‘the evocation of a grand and popular but undefined ambition’.(44) The phrase ‘European Union’, of course, was not new. It had been part of the vocabulary of European culture and philosophy for centuries. And in the immediate postwar years after 1945 it had been used often by advocates of an integrated Europe to indicate a generic goal. Its strength lay less in specific details than in the general idea which it conveyed but in 1962 it was resuscitated for a particular purpose during the contentious negotiations surrounding the Fouchet proposals.(45) In so far as its deployment ten years later meant anything it suggested a much more all-encompassing idea, denoting an organic but as yet abstract overarching framework which would be filled in and pieced together only gradually as changing events and circumstances dictated. In this way it committed European governments to nothing. Intergovernmentalists could feel as comfortable with it as federalists. Le Monde summarised its utility most accurately: “‘European Union” diverted attention away from differences in other areas, notably institutions, by opening up vast, but vague, vistas for the future’. For Pompidou, it represented ‘a vague formula that was readily so in order to avoid useless and paralysing doctrinal disputes’.(46) And it clearly suited both the spiritual and electoral priorities of Brandt and Heath. Its advocacy reinforced their domestic and international images as progressive Europeans. To Pompidou it meant economic and monetary union while the Benelux states and Italy construed in it far more concrete institutional implications. To this extent our need specifically to identify the architect of the phrase ‘European Union’ in 1972 is not important. It clearly emerged as yet another intergovernmental compromise. As Franck has put it, European Union expressed ‘a teleology which was intended to mobilise political will and energies… A new objective had been set—but what it meant and how it was to be achieved were problems deliberately set aside for later consideration’.(47) Indeed, had the concept even hinted at supranational ideals it is certain that Pompidou would not have agreed to its inclusion in the communique. European Union met a whole range of different approaches to the future of the Community, including federal and confederal scenarios. Above all, federalist strategies for the future remained valid. The commitment to European Union furnished both a reason and an opportunity to ensure that the Community’s future political development would be guided in a federal direction. In our general survey of federal ideas, influences and strategies during the early 1970s the Copenhagen Summit of December 1973 merits only cursory attention. It was widely recognised as an abject failure—even by conventional intergovernmentalist standards. Pompidou’s initiative was founded upon a mixture of motives, but the critical factor lay in his wish to ‘recapture and perpetuate’ an upsurge of public enthusiasm for Europe which only regular institutionalised summit meetings could guarantee. The summit was ‘inconclusive on every single issue’,(48) however, and it is remembered chiefly for the subsequent emergence of the European Council as a permanent feature of the institutional landscape in March 1975.

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The Paris Summit of December 1974, which conveniently brings this section of our survey to a close, was in contrast of great significance to federalists and intergovernmentalists alike. Before we consider the innovations agreed by the member states it is important to underline the elite personnel changes which had by then occurred. Brandt, Heath and Pompidou had gone and in their place Schmidt, Wilson and Giscard d’Estaing respectively ushered in a new era in Community relations. And, as before, their motives at the summit varied widely. From the federalist perspective Paris was a distinct improvement upon Copenhagen. One writer has gone as far as endowing this summit with an importance comparable to the Hague Summit of 1969. Another Franco-German convergence of interest enabled the Community to break new ground; both Giscard and Schmidt ‘firmly felt that some powerful demonstration of the Community’s cohesion and its future prospects was especially desirable’.(49) Giscard’s arrival in particular facilitated a far more flexible and pragmatic approach to Community affairs. Progress in economic policy co-ordination proved easier than expected, as did agreement on the establishment of a regional fund and on the United Kingdom’s budgetary contributions. Federalists, however, could take particular comfort from the promising commitments made in the area of institutional reform. Several fresh initiatives were launched and included the following: The Heads of Government would meet, accompanied by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, three times a year and, when necessary, in the Council of the Communities and in the context of political co-operation. They would reaffirm their determination gradually to adopt common positions and co-ordinate their diplomatic action in all areas of international affairs which affected the European Community. The European Parliament was to be more closely associated with the work of the Presidency in political co-operation and it was to submit proposals to the Council on the issue of direct elections which could take place at any time in or after 1978. A working party would be set up to study the possibility of creating a Passport Union, leading eventually to a uniform passport, and another group would examine the conditions and timing under which Community citizens could acquire special rights. Agreement was reached to renounce the practice of requiring unanimity among Member States in the Council of Ministers which had governed decision-making since the Luxembourg Agreement of January 1966 and Permanent Representatives would be given greater latitude so that only the most important political problems need be discussed in the Council. They consider that the time has come to agree as soon as possible on an overall concept of European Union. Leo Tindemans, the Belgian Prime Minister, was invited to submit a comprehensive report to the Heads of Government, based upon reports from the Community institutions, consultations with Governments and public opinion throughout the Community, before the end of 1975.(50)

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These public commitments paved the way for the Tindemans Report of 1975–76 and for the introduction of direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979. Looked at from a panoramic perspective these institutional reform proposals possessed a clear logic: the institutionalisation of the summits by the creation of the European Council buttressed the executive fulcrum of the Community by strengthening its capacity to resolve conflicts and launch fresh initiatives; the introduction of direct elections to the Parliament would reinforce the democratic nature of the Community by acknowledging a European electorate and giving the Community a new relevance and legitimacy in a parliamentary Europe; and the Tindemans exercise would surround and integrate these proposals, via a comprehensive report, in a new overarching institutional framework. It should be emphasised that there was no mention of augmenting the role of the Commission and that even where the Parliament’s power would be increased in the budgetary and legislative spheres these concessions, though important to the new MEPs, were modest. Giscard’s Community policy did not represent a complete break with the past. The shadows of de Gaulle and Pompidou still penetrated French perceptions of Europe’s future. Conclusion What are we to make of the years between 1969 and 1974 in terms of federalism and European Union? And what lessons could federalists learn from what occurred during this period? Certainly there was sufficient evidence of a European revival at the Hague in 1969 for it appropriately to warrant the label ‘watershed’. Federalists and non-federalists alike commonly alluded to the ‘spirit’ of the Hague. But it is also clear that what institutional progress there had been during 1969–1974 was overwhelmingly of an intergovernmental nature. How could it have been otherwise? The Commission was ‘conscientiously continuing its task of making proposals, but the Council was not taking decisions on them: the institutions had run out of steam’.(51) The new driving-force for building Europe came to be summit politics, followed by the European Council in 1975. But the predominance of summitry was not the only determinant of an intergovernmental Community: the influence of monetary unrest in the Brandt-Pompidou period…contributed to the drift towards inter-governmentalism.(52) The Commission had been kept firmly on the sidelines. And the Paris- Bonn dialogue ensured that agreement between France and West Germany proved indispensable to Community progress. Indeed, this period seemed to confirm the Community’s almost complete dependence upon the cyclical convergence of interests between the French and West German governments in order to make any headway. Already by the Paris summit of October 1972 the established bilateral relationship between France and West Germany had become in a sense a nascent trilateralism, adding Heath to Brandt and Pompidou. While welcoming enlargement, those who sought a federal Europe must have been more than a little ambivalent about the prospect of the United Kingdom, Denmark and Ireland becoming members. Yet even in this enhanced

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intergovernmental arena there could be cause for hope. Paul Taylor acknowledged that at the Paris Summit of 1974 there were several proposals ‘which seemed to confirm the commitment of members to integration of a rather advanced kind’.(53) And Simonian has claimed that ‘only the Paris Summit of December 1974 can be said to have rivalled the Hague Conference in terms of importance for the Community’s future’.(54) Recent research on the evolution of the European Council confirms this and underlines the important concessions granted to ‘the sceptics who saw summitry as a threat to the EC’s supranational aspirations’.(55) Bulmer and Wessels emphasised that the commitment to direct elections, the efforts to abandon the unanimity principle in the Council and the Tindemans Report were ‘the first institutional improvements to have been agreed at a summit conference’ (leaving aside the EPC initiated at the Hague) and that these were ‘components in favour of a more supranational or federal form of integration’.(56) The role of the smaller states in Benelux and of Italy during these years seems conspicuous by their absence. In reality, of course, they were anything but inactive. And it was no accident that they were the four countries most warmly disposed to major institutional reform which would strengthen the Commission and the Parliament against the Council.(57) Indeed, the Commission in the past had been able to rely upon the periodic mobilisation of this support in the Council. It had been of mutual benefit, giving these states a guaranteed voice and influence against the highly exclusive Paris-Bonn dialogue from which they were excluded and preserving the original supranational basis of the Community. During 1969–1974, however, their collective impact upon the greater intergovernmentalism of these years—with its attendant emphasis upon Paris, Bonn and, later, London—was severely restricted. But their potential influence remained a future mobilising force for institutional reform, and it was to be reasserted during the 1980s. In the mid-1970s, then, federal ideas, influences and strategies in the European Community were not absent from the revitalisation of the European idea, but they struggled in a difficult intergovernmental environment. None the less, Europe was moving again and it was, in some important respects, movement in the right direction. Some of the commitments, if accomplished, would at least accentuate the federal nature of the Community even it this was not the intention of the leading member states. Meanwhile attention was focused upon the Tindemans Report and its implications, and it is to this that we shall now turn in the next section. (c) The Tindemans Report, 1975–1976: Means to Ends Prepared for and on behalf of the European Council, the Tindemans Report was formally submitted to it, by letter, on 29 December 1975 and officially published on 7 January 1976. It was originally to have been based upon the reports propounded by the Commission, the European Parliament and the Court of Justice, but on their own initiative the Economic and Social Committee of the Community and the Dutch government also prepared similar reports, the latter known as the Spierenberg Report published in May 1975.(58) Tindemans’ brief also included consultations with the Member state governments and with a wide spectrum of public opinion throughout the Community.(59)

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The Spierenberg Committee determined to make its report available to Tindemans as ‘a fruitful and constructive contribution to the formation of ideas’ which would eventually form part of the discussions between Heads of Government at the next meeting of the European Council in Luxembourg during April 1976.(60) There is no conclusive evidence as to how far this report influenced Tindemans’ final proposals but in Part One of its general references to questions of the ‘desirable and the attainable’ it placed the federal goal in sober perspective: The Committee does not believe that the re-structuring of this system of states into a European federation is within the bounds of possibility in the period under consideration… The gap between the present situation and a European federation is so wide that there is still plenty of room for intermediate structures which would leave open a variety of other possibilities for evolution… The question of whether a future European government will develop first from the European Commission or from the Council of Ministers or from any combination of the two…can be left to the course of events.(61) Federalist strategies, however, did not always mean an automatic quantum jump into federation. Most federalists in the mid-1970s would probably have been pleased to change the economic and political atmosphere within the Community in order to render it more conducive to piecemeal federal institutional reform, such as direct elections to the European Parliament. Step-by-step federal instalments both in matters of Community policy and institutional change doubtless seemed the most profitable strategy. The most significant exception to this general strategic rule, however, proved to be the Commission. For reasons which will become clear in our survey of the Tindemans episode the Commission’s Report proved far more ambitious, both in ends and means, than the final report. For our purposes it is the Commission and Parliament Reports which are the most instructive. Both of these central institutions had a vested interest in promoting policy and institutional reforms which would lever them into the forefront of Community decisionmaking. Only by reasserting the supranational driving-force of integration and democratising the decision-making arena could the Community be revitalised and the European idea regenerated. Let us look at the way this perspective was channelled into practical proposals by the Commission. At this stage of our survey it is imperative that we take account of the role played by Spinelli in the Commissions’ initiative. Spinelli, it will be recalled, became the Commissioner responsible for Industry, Research and Technology in 1970 and regarded his position as an opportunity to explore the possibilities of further progress in the European construction. His personal strategy was ‘to learn what it meant to be a Commissioner, to have a certain influence in the Commission and to pay attention to how we could have the institutional developments’ necessary to go beyond merely the coordination of national policies.(62) His influence and inspiration lay behind the Commission’s Report, published on 26 June 1975, which urged Tindemans to adopt an ambitious approach to European Union. What, then, did the Commission propose and where were the federalist influences most explicit?

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We shall emphasise here those aspects of the Report which particularly reflect federalist priorities. Clearly it was important to take note of two significant clauses in the famous statement made at the Paris Summit of October 1972, namely, what was meant by ‘the fullest respect for the Treaties already signed’ and what meaning should be attached to the expression ‘whole complex of relations’.(63) The Commission Report did not assume ‘that European Union must necessarily encompass every type of relation between the Member States… European Union is not to give birth to a centralising superstate’.(64) It thus recognised two vital concerns and anxieties present in contemporary West European societies: the fear of, and growing resistance to, attempts to centralise power and the need to build on what had already been achieved—the Community patrimony. An ambitious approach to European Union did not rule out time-honoured pragmatism. These were not, and are still not, mutually exclusive. Bearing these two important qualifications in mind the report carefully outlined both the fields of competence of the Union and the new institutional Europe. It listed those competences already enshrined in the Rome Treaties in which significant progress had been made—commercial policy, competition, agricultural, social, regional, nuclear research and development aid policies—and those requiring further improvement—the convergence of national economic policies, industrial, energy, environmental and research policies. But it concluded that the main Community objective should be economic and monetary union. Competence, powers and means of action were identified in five main areas: monetary policy, budgetary expenditure, budgetary revenue, improving economic structures in order to reduce imbalances, and social affairs. In general the report emphasised the many possibilities already implicit in the Treaties to achieve these policy changes including, ultimately, treaty amendment under Article 236. But it also argued that ‘the creation of European Union should also make it possible to go beyond the present limits by explicitly vesting new powers and new fields of competence in the European institutions’.(65) These included foreign policy, defence and human rights. Political co-operation (POCO) being drawn into the formal Union framework logically necessitated the incorporation of defence in order for the Union to be organised coherently, while human rights reflected the gradual extension of the Community’s competence in the daily life of the European citizen. What were the institutional implications of these common policies? We should remember that for Spinelli the institutional reform of the Community and the attempt to achieve European Union were ‘one and the same thing’.(66) His paramount concern was to give these central institutions the capacity to go beyond what existed—to furnish them with an autonomous vitality to maintain the inexorable momentum towards closer union. What was a new treaty to the Member States, we will recall, was a new constitution to the Community. It required a mental predisposition to interpret the Community as something more than just a loose association of states. And this was precisely what the report set out to achieve, namely, the constitutionalisation of new and old practices. Briefly the Commission opted firmly for a single institutional structure covering all the fields of competence vested in the Union rather than separate bodies dealing with different policy areas. Basing its interpretation of the Paris communique (1972) upon the need both to build upon what already existed and to reinforce and make more effective the existing institutional structure, the report expressed a preference for a qualitative leap forward rather than an incremental step-by-step evolution. Its authors seemed to have

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been influenced by the method chosen when the Treaties were adopted during 1955– 1957. Seeking ‘a certain stability’, the report emphasised: The aim would be to set up the political organs required to enable the Union over a period which will, of necessity, be rather long, gradually to assume effective responsibility in its various fields of competence. This period of time will allow real political relations…to develop between the various organs European Union means nothing if it does not involve the development of a European governmental executive. The Commission sees the European Government as an executive body with political authority…comparable with those normally possessed by a Government—a body which would carry out its activities under the supervision of a Parliament to which it would be responsible.(67) The influence of Spinelli was clear. Europe had to have a real political centre with effective powers. The report identified three institutional models. It rejected the first in which executive authority would be vested in a body comprising national ministers, independent of a bicameral Parliament. Its own stated preference was for the second model in which the governmental organ would be a collegiate body, absorbing the existing Commission and Council of Ministers, independent of the national governments. This model also posited a bicameral Parliament having the legislative power and in some way able to hold the executive authority responsible to it. The third model, whereby a Committee of Ministers representing national governments would operate alongside the new collegiate governmental organ and bicameral Parliament, was deemed a more satisfactory solution to the problem of organising co-operation but involved a more ponderous institutional structure. It was viewed as appropriate for a limited transitional period.(68) In its emphasis upon gradual piecemeal evolution designed to foster genuine organic constitutional and political relations the report, notwithstanding its belief in the qualitative leap forward, recognised the immediate need to reactivate the building of Europe. In order to give European Union a new impetus a precondition for the major step lay in direct elections to the Parliament and fresh initiatives in existing common policies. These would be neither a transitional phase nor a first step towards European Union but a precondition for the major step. What did the Parliament propose? In the form of two resolutions adopted on 17 October 1974 and 10 July 1975 respectively it declared that European Union could be achieved only by strengthening and extending Community powers to include foreign policy and security as well as economic, monetary, social and cultural policy. Its conception of European Union was ‘a pluralist and democratic Community’. To this end it specified ‘a single decision-making centre’ which would be ‘in the nature of a real European government, independent of the national governments and responsible to the Parliament of the Union’, a European Court of Justice, a consultative Economic and Social Committee and a European Court of Auditors. The Parliament would have both budgetary and control powers, and would participate ‘on at least an equal footing’ in the legislative process. Like the Commission, it urged immediate action by calling for direct elections but it also called upon the Commission to submit an overall programme of

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priority action in furtherance of the Union by 1980 and it recommended the substantial reinforcement of the Parliament’s power also by 1980.(69) The Report: Ends But Not Means? Given the various inputs into the Tindemans exercise, what conclusions did he arrive at? However the Report is assessed it is perfectly clear that he did attempt to spell out what this meant. In two short pages of the Report he identified six ‘different components of European Union’ which were ‘closely connected’. Without going into these various facets in great detail it is, nonetheless, worth underlining one of Tindemans’ most telling remarks: ‘the development of the Union’s external relations cannot occur without a parallel development of common policies internally’. In practice this meant that European Union was conceptualised as a totality—foreign policy, defence, economic relations and development aid were inextricably intertwined with common monetary, industrial, agricultural, regional and social policies. But it was the new European Council’s responsibility to decide ‘in which general prospect the joint endeavour’ would be ‘pursued in the Union phase’. Both the scope and the consequences of specific actions in these different but cognate fields would have to be judged according to ‘their importance and the chances of success’.(70) Before we examine the institutional aspects of the Report it is important to pause and look more closely at what Tindemans meant by his references to ‘the Union phase’. He described it as ‘a new phase in the history of the unification of Europe’ which was ‘a continuous process’.(71) In the most recent account of the Tindemans Report, Jacques Vandamme reaffirms this, adding that the measures taken by the European Council were to have constituted ‘qualitative progress capable of leading, at a later stage, to a new Treaty confirming this progress in legally binding texts’. And ‘a new element appeared…namely, the quality of progress’ which implied ‘a complete package of measures’ designed to achieve a ‘qualitative transformation of the whole’.(72) Tindemans’ own contribution was to set the December 1974 Paris Summit commitments in a wider overarching context which would facilitate and nourish the evolving qualitative progress towards a new undefined totality. What kind of institutional reforms did Tindemans recommend in order to get Europe on the move towards this new totality? Like Spinelli, Tindemans regarded institutional reform as crucial to the achievement of European Union. Wisely he did not suggest an institutional upheaval. Rather he concluded that: To achieve European Union we must henceforth be able to find in the different European institutions the authority needed to define a policy, the efficiency needed for common action and the legitimacy needed for democratic control. It also implies that the institutions should have that coherence of vision and of action which alone will allow them to define and then pursue a policy.(73) Thus the four criteria of authority, efficiency, legitimacy and coherence determined Tindemans’ conception of institutional reform to bring about qualitative change.

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Designed both to strengthen the institutional machinery and improve its overall performance, Tindemans’ recommendations began with the Parliament. Direct elections were deemed the first necessity. This would give it a new political authority and reinforce the democratic legitimacy of the whole Community institutional apparatus. In addition it should be empowered to consider all questions within the competence of the Union, whether or not they lay outside the scope of the Treaties, and should gradually, as the Union progressed, be given the legal right of initiative. Concerning the European Council, Tindemans proposed that in order to strengthen the Union’s decision-making capacity the Heads of Governments should provide coherent general policy guidelines, based upon a comprehensive, panoramic vision of the major problems. They were to search constantly for that political agreement without which dynamic progress would be impossible. The Council of Ministers should prepare the meetings of the European Council and should itself become more coherent, speedy and continuous. This meant inter alia more majority voting as normal practice, the abolition of the distinction between ministerial meetings devoted to political co-operation and conventional Community business, and extending the term of the Presidency to a full year. Tindemans acknowledged that the Commission possessed its own inherent brand of dynamism in helping to construct Europe via common policies and he sought to reassert its freedom of action within the framework of agreed Community policies. More specifically, he proposed amendments to the Treaties so that the President of the Commission would be appointed by the European Council, subject to confirmation by the Parliament, and he in turn would appoint the other commissioners. Finally the existing powers of the Court of Justice were reaffirmed in the new sectors of the Union and Community citizens would have the right of appeal directly to it if their basic rights were infringed.(74) What are we to make of this particular episode in the struggle to achieve European Union? Given that ‘all those involved in the Tindemans exercise came up with solutions…essentially federal in character’,(75) how should we assess the Report’s significance? Scholarly opinion, though divided, was predominantly critical. Taylor claimed that it was ‘generally believed to be the most pragmatic of all the documents on European Union’, but he acknowledged that Tindemans’ ‘modest approach’ had been criticised as at once both too modest and too ambitious.(76) Henig believed that the whole event had been ‘a futile exercise’ simply because his task from the very beginning was ‘impossible’.(77) A more detailed and charitable view was taken by Mitchell who, although highly critical of some of the legal-constitutional relationships encountered in the Report, nevertheless, welcomed it for underlining the Community’s structural defects which impeded closer union and for effectively re-opening the debate ‘in real terms’.(78) The most thorough apologia of the Tindemans Report, however, is the recent account by Vandamme. Here a series of detailed explanations are listed for Tindemans’ failure to deliver the goods. But the Report, according to Vandamme, had two redeeming features: first, it restated and reaffirmed the long-term aims which had been formulated at the Paris Summit in 1972 and consequently gave a much more precise content both to the concept of European Union and to the mechanism required to achieve it; and, secondly, it fully exposed the wide differences of opinion which existed among the Member States regarding the goals and substance of European Union.(79)

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Tindemans’ mission was clearly difficult. It originated, we must not forget, in an intergovernmental arena. What else, we may ask, could realistically have been achieved? Tindemans was fully aware of an inherent intergovernmental scepticism and confessed that he ‘deliberately refused to draw up a report claiming to be, at least in part, the Constitution for the future European Union’.(80) This would, indeed, have been futile. But were the steps which he advocated be taken to advance towards European Union the appropriate ones? It is here that federalist strategy in this exercise becomes pertinent. Let us look at the Tindemans episode through Spinelli’s eyes. Spinelli did not agree that the various reports of the Community institutions should have been entrusted to ‘a political wise man’ in the first place. He urged the Commission, as the supranational authority, to forge an alliance with the Parliament and the Court in order to present a united front to the Heads of Government. In his view such a mobilisation of opinion would have been much more politically effective than diluting the institutional proposals at the compromising behest of nine separate national constituencies. At least the Community institutions would have nailed their colours to the mast and stood firm on what they believed in. Tindemans’ realism, in contrast, produced only words. The Heads of Government could quietly and conveniently put the Tindemans Report into cold storage. Spinelli’s view of the Tindemans episode was quite categorical. He regarded Tindemans as he regarded all European Christian Democrats: they were good Europeans in an ideological sense but bad operators of the European construction. Full of good intentions, they capitulated at the first sign of resistance and did not guarantee the means to achieve their undoubtedly genuine ends. Tindemans, according to Spinelli, succeeded in defining European Union in the mid-1970s, but he failed to specify and insist upon what was needed to achieve it. In his inimitable words, the Tindemans Report ‘had the consequence that it remained without consequence’.(81) Conclusion The great weakness of the Tindemans Report was that it did not provide the mechanism to enable the central institutions to develop a sufficiently autonomous capacity to go beyond what existed. Tindemans’ diplomatic faith ensured that the main thrust of European integration would remain firmly in the hands of the Heads of Government. This was why Spinelli dismissed it and why he determined to retire in 1976. In the event he did not retire but, his experiment with the Commission having failed, moved instead to the European Parliament to begin again. The intergovernmental response to the Report was, as Spinelli had predicted, disappointing. According to Simonian, Bonn was ‘enthusiastic about the proposals for increasing the powers of the Commission and boosting the role of its President’. They were also ‘pleased about the suggestion for the European Parliament being given the right to initiate and not just rubber-stamp policy’, but these ‘federalist options’ were unacceptable to the French who took ‘a minimalist view’. Giscard was stoutly opposed to the institutional recommendations concerning the Commission and the Parliament: they were seen as ‘highly undesirable, smacking much too strongly of supranationalism’.(82) The two European Council meetings which discussed the Tindemans Report during April

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1976 in Luxembourg and November 1976 in the Hague yielded one meagre outcome— the Commission and Council of Ministers were invited to produce an annual report on the progress towards European Union without even defining what it meant. And what, finally, of Tindemans? What was his view, given that he was a selfconfessed federalist as regards Europe? In an official speech entitled ‘The Future of Europe’ given at the Foreign Affairs Club in London during December 1976 the Belgian Prime Minister lamented about the practical results. The following extract is worth quoting at some length: I have done all I could in my report to sidestep doctrinal controversies which have already caused Europe so much harm. Not once did I write the word ‘supranational’ and…this was not from a lack of conviction on my part. But so strong are susceptibilities in this respect that it is impossible not to give offence when you want to say something pertinent…it is difficult to give a detailed description of the final form of Europe’s unification. This form will depend…on the psychological evolution (which)…is still incomplete, partial, unfinished… Today, if we want an overall picture, we must limit ourselves to indications on the various directions of our action, refraining from an exact description of the final result. That is what I wanted in my report…to attempt While writing my report, I tried to keep as close as possible to political reality, to suggest only measures that seemed feasible, to refrain from dreaming, to stick to what was practical and concrete…(but) the…conclusions were more than disappointing. Several proposals were discarded because there was no agreement, others were described as premature…many have been so hedged about with provisos and qualifications that they have lost much of their value. The idea of innovation, a new start, a qualitative leap forward…had almost disappeared from the documents submitted to the European Council… I think that this is only a matter of political will, but that our capability to act has been impaired.(83) The last sentence from this extract of Tindemans’ speech is particularly revealing. He was to return to its implications during the early 1980s. Meanwhile, having accepted the chairman- ship of the European People’s Party in the European Parliament, Tindemans, like Spinelli, had moved into a different institutional forum to continue his own efforts to bring about European Union. With Tindemans’ remarks reverberating in the ears of an attentive British elite audience in December 1976 we can conveniently bring our discussion of his Report and its implications to a close. Our subsequent focus will be upon the significance of direct elections to the European Parliament. (d) The European Parliament, Direct Elections and Federalism, 1976– 1979 If our discussion of the Tindemans Report and its results underlines the frustrations, difficulties and disappointments attendant upon attempts at general institutional reform

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during the mid-1970s, there is a sense in which it contributed to practical progress in one specific area, namely, direct elections to the European Parliament. Here was a single institutional reform which necessitated no treaty amendment and which it was possible, at least temporarily, to isolate as incremental change not necessarily presaging wholesale institutional upheaval. Both in theory and in practice of course the issue of direct elections did suggest far-reaching consequences for the future relations between member state governments and Community institutions. Moreover, it had important implications for inter-institutional Community relations. We shall examine the relevance of these issues as they relate to federalism and the European Community but first we will investigate the context within which the question of direct elections emerged during the early 1970s. The goal of direct elections was firmly entrenched, via Article 138, in the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Its inclusion in the treaty, however, had interesting contextual origins. Spinelli observed that the role of the European Parliament—known as the Common Assembly up to 1962—was ‘an almost purely formal concession made by the treaty negotiators to the democratic-federalist approach’.(84) Given his view of Monnet’s approach to European integration Spinelli considered that ‘the Common Assembly was not in the logic of the functionalist plan, in which the institutional mechanism consisted essentially in the dialogue between Eurocrats who proposed and governments which disposed’. Consequently it was ‘circumscribed by limitations…for the same reason that preceding assemblies had been’.(85) There was room in Monnet’s conception of Europe for an elected assembly. We can trace it back at least to the Schuman Plan Conference of June 1950 which set up the ECSC.(86) But Spinelli’s federalist approach to the European construction—the direct route via constitutionalism—naturally predisposed him to give the institution of parliament a central, indeed pivotal, place in treaty negotiations. Monnet’s idea of exploiting the possibilities of functionalism to achieve constitutionalism in contrast placed the role of the European Parliament in constant jeopardy. It risked being permanently marginalised in the process of unification. In this light the future of the European Parliament was something of a gamble. The role of the Parliament in the evolving European Community hence was determined at the outset by the rival European interpretations of Monnet and Spinelli which we have already designated as the two faces of federalism. The success of Monnet’s European conception, then, meant that the European Parliament’s future role in the European Community was inherently ambiguous. This legacy more than anything else explains the difficulties and frustrations which have characterised the Parliament’s incessant struggle to assert itself in the Community’s political and constitutional progress since 1957. And it is not enough to equate this struggle with historical comparisons of the evolution of national parliaments. Understandable though these might be the building of Europe is not synonymous with the conventional process of state-building and national integration which political scientists have identified with the creation of the nation-state. We have already underlined this mistaken assumption and its implications in our analysis of Monnet’s European conception. The institutional reality of the Community lacks a political authority sufficiently autonomous to express a genuine European perspective. In the absence of an authoritative European Government the Parliament has had to grow and develop in an institutional space with only tenuous connections to a fragmented executive authority.

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Monnet’s approach to federation provided a place for Parliament but it was secondary to his overriding concern for concrete functional achievements which would enable political institutions to grow, as it were, organically out of the daily practice of European experience. Given the major flaws which Spinelli identified in Monnet’s conception of Europe, however, the anticipated shift to ‘political Europe’ was inherently difficult. Member state governments would block significant progress in this direction. Monnet’s strategy hence determined that a parliamentary Europe would not necessarily be the logical outcome of European integration. It was a possibility which would have to be fought for. It is against this contextual background that we should assess the significance of direct elections to the European Parliament. Monnet’s legacy has imposed a heavy burden upon a fundamental political principle which informs the very core of Western liberal democracy. The principle of direct elections, engaging the European citizenry beyond their states, was attached to a weakly conceived institution with an inherently ambiguous role. Small wonder, then, that Hallstein believed the Treaty of Rome to be designed ‘to encourage the removal of the inadequacies in the Community’s parliamentary system at the earliest possible moment’.(87) The Parliament’s role since 1957 has been preoccupied with attempts to break free from the institutional prison in which Monnet’s Europe confined it. Beginning as early as 1960 considerable pressure was brought to bear by the Parliament upon the Council of Ministers to implement direct universal suffrage in accordance with a uniform procedure in all member states. Article 138, paragraph 3, of the Treaty of Rome, however, was ignored until May 1969 when it surfaced again, at Parliament’s insistence, on the agenda of the Committee of Permanent Representatives and of the Council. Brief mention was made of it later in the same year at the Hague Summit but it was the strengthening of the Parliament’s budgetary powers in 1970 and 1975 which eventually compelled the Council to agree to the implementation of direct elections in September 1976.(88) It could be argued that the delay in holding the elections of twenty-two years, between 1957 and 1979, vindicated Monnet’s ‘functionalist-federalist’ strategy. Political Europe would be built only slowly upon concrete practical achievements. Federalists, however, would argue that the Community’s very practice and progress has, on the contrary, exposed the inherent weaknesses and flaws of Monnet’s Europe. The Community is still dominated by its member states, unable to move ahead via significant institutional reform in order to solve European problems. Direct elections arrived late, in grudging fashion, and were themselves symptomatic of a Europe which urgently required further constitutionalism if it was to acquire and express that autonomous political life which was so palpably absent in Monnet’s Europe. Direct elections were only a step, albeit an important step, in this direction. For federalists the question of direct elections transcended the obvious need to lend some democratic legitimacy to the European enterprise and went beyond mere concession to Western liberal democratic ideology. They were part of a much larger overall strategy of institutional reform intended to organise power at the European level—a means by which the European political will could be nurtured and canalised. Spinelli himself had long ago recognised that once the Community institutions had begun to operate ‘practice would in one way or the other alter the role and relative positions of each of them’.(89) He had consistently urged the Commission to support the

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Parliament in its persistent quest to come in from the cold. In his view these two supranational bodies ‘should and ought to have made common cause before the Council’. Such an alliance, neither prescribed nor prohibited by the Rome Treaty, could have enabled both institutions to wring the maximum of advantage from their respective decision-making powers and rights of initiative and would have made the Parliament ‘one of the real decision centres and…increased its sense of importance’. Had this liaison been sensibly developed, Spinelli believed that the Community’s institutional history could have been different and that of the Parliament especially so: Capable parliamentarians would have been induced to participate in it and a fruitful tension between Parliament and Council would have taken shape. The subject of European elections and the reform of Parliament’s powers and of the political community in general would have developed in a very different way.(90) But the Commission eschewed this possibility until the limits of its supranational initiatives were firmly underlined by De Gaulle during 1965–1966. Until then it regarded the Parliament merely as ‘one of several sounding boards to publicise its own actions’ and Spinelli correctly observed the comical aspect of the Commission defending governmental prerogatives against that status without the concomitant growth of Parliament’s role. Indeed the Commission’s ‘substantial indifference’ toward Parliament actually guaranteed its own impotence in the face of enhanced intergovernmental cooperation. It defended not its strengths but its weaknesses.(91) We can now understand more fully the change in the attitude of the Commission towards direct elections during the early 1970s. It had slowly come to recognise the potential value of its Parliamentary ally and Spinelli, as a new Commission member, was determined to forge a closer alliance with both the Parliament and the European Court of Justice. His overriding aim in joining the Commission in 1970 was ‘to try to see what was possible…and to pay attention to how we could have further institutional developments’. This meant learning ‘what it means to be a Commissioner and to have a certain influence in the Commission’. Spinelli was convinced that the antidote to the Commission’s weakness in the overall institutional framework lay in ‘proposing some stronger legislative powers for the European Parliament’. This, he claimed, was how and why the Vedel Report emerged in March 1972.(92) This report, which was completed in six months, arose from a Commission initiative taken in July 1971 to set an up ad hoc Working Party under the chairmanship of the French constitutional lawyer, Professor Georges Vedel, to ‘examine the whole corpus of problems connected with the enlargement of the powers of the European Parliament’.(93) We shall not examine the details of the report here but content ourselves with emphasising the importance once again of federalist ideas and influences. It is clear, as Shlaim has acknowledged, that both moderation and gradualism were the hallmarks of the Working Party’s approach, conditioned by the prevailing political climate, in their efforts to make a significant impact upon the outcome of the Paris Summit of October 1972. Since the subject of institutions was on the agenda of the summit conference ‘it was hoped that the group’s recommendations would not only help to shape the Commission’s own proposals to the Heads of State but would influence government and

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non-govermental elites and make an important contribution to the public debate on the institutional reforms called for by the enlargement of the Communities’. With this intention in mind’ it saw little point in making proposals which, whatever their general merit, had no chance of being accepted’.(94) But if there was no mention of a European Government responsible to a directly elected European Parliament it is none the less true that federal ideas did circulate amidst the group’s early discussion.(95) And if we remember that one driving-force behind the Vedel Report, Spinelli, viewed the episode as part of a federalist strategy to reinstate the Commission at the centre of Community affairs the ubiquity of the federal idea is again evident. As the only federalist in the Mansholt Commission of the early 1970s Spinelli operated with isolated militancy and he was unable to persuade his colleagues to adopt the Vedel proposals and persevere with them after 1972. The Commission supported ideas of co-decision for the Parliament and it actually went further than the Vedel proposals in recommending a date for the introduction of direct elections. But it would not be pressurised into supporting Spinelli’s bold plan for radical reform, including direct elections and full legislative and budgetary powers for the Parliament, which he touted during 1973.(96) The two separate issues of direct elections and increased legislative and budgetary powers for the Parliament have come to be associated with federalism in both a direct and an indirect fashion. They are directly linked to federalism in the sense that they were, after all, part of an overall federalist strategy. This can hardly be refuted if we examine Spinelli’s role and thinking in the evolving life of the Community. But there is another more indirect sense in which they have gradually been equated with a federal Europe. The basis and underlying assumptions for reasoning along these lines has been cogently analysed by Herman and Lodge, and rests upon a number of fundamental misconceptions and misunderstandings about federalism, supranationalism, intergovermentalism and national sovereignty. We shall not re-examine the detailed assumptions which underpin much of the thinking about direct elections and the road to a federal Europe. Rather than trace the various steps which have led to this equation it is more important here to underline the extent to which such thinking fostered an assortment of myths, fears, suspicions and anxieties about federalism and European Union. This is important because it has encouraged distorted images of the Community and because it has nurtured deep misgivings among member state governments about the Community’s future political development. It should be emphasised at the outset that just as direct elections did not automatically endow Community decision-making with a sudden democratic legitimacy,(97) neither did they necessarily imply a federal Europe. A parliamentary federal Europe would certainly be predicated upon direct elections but the reverse logic does not automatically follow. As Herman and Lodge have already stated the predicament: national parliaments and governments fear that they (direct elections) are but the first step in a process likely to culminate in the creation of a federal union in which the member governments and national parliaments will be relegated to roles akin to those of regional governments and regional parliaments in federations… However, …power ultimately lies with the member governments. In other words, the implications of direct

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elections being detrimental to the autonomy and authority of the member states and national parliaments have been exaggerated.(98) The source of such a perception is familiar and arises from repeated mistaken analogies with nation-state evolution. Transplanted to the European level, the conventional processes of state-building and national integration would lead, so the logic follows, to the erosion of national sovereignty and the eventual withering away of the nation-state itself. The distorted image of the Community’s future is further misrepresented, as Herman and Lodge have remarked, by ‘an inadequate appreciation of both the position of regional parliaments in federations and of the political nature of federalism itself’.(99) A general misunderstanding of the Parliament’s intention has fuelled a paranoia among some national parliamentarians and member state governments that sovereignty is once again under threat. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are perceived as ambitious competitors with national parliaments for a growing range of legislative powers. In reality of course all that MEPs wanted was to fill an expanding gap in democratic parliamentary scrutiny and accountability which national parliaments were unable to bridge. As Spinelli emphasised, the Parliament’s efforts to assert itself were not inspired by theoretical federalist assumptions but by the very experience of the Community itself: it was particularly sensitive to ‘the undemocratic aspect and the intrinsic weakness of a situation in which large segments of legislative power and control of public monies were passing into the hands of the European Community administrators.(100) Only the European Parliament could effectively respond to changes in the Community which were beyond the capacity of national parliaments to deal with. There was never any suggestion, as Lodge remarked, that the European Parliament should acquire powers at the expense of national parliaments: ‘On the contrary, the two sets of parliamentarians were expected to have complementary, not competing functions’.(101) The discussions about the prospect of direct elections during the 1970s certainly helped to focus public attention upon some fundamental questions about both the nature and purpose of the Community. In particular they rekindled the debate about institutional powers and relationships. They forced some old issues and questions to surface in changed circumstances. What powers should the Community’s central institutions possess and what should their relationship be to each other? What sort of relationship should exist between these institutions and the member state governments? These and other questions often generated more heat than light. Anxieties and misconceptions abounded. But it was at least important to have such a debate and to return to fundamentals. In this way the Community and the European idea which it represented were thrust into the limelight and given a prominence continually sought but often denied to them. Certainly the issue of direct elections enabled Spinelli to prepare the platform from which he was later to launch a fresh federalist initiative and it facilitated his seemingly ubiquitous activities behind both the Vedel and the Tindemans Reports.

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Conclusion Today it probably makes little sense to speculate about the implicit assumptions of the architects of the Rome Treaty as they relate to a directly elected Parliament. Whatever their intentions the Parliament has slowly but persistently accumulated new formal powers and procedures which it has coupled with an extended network of influence to increase its visibility, stature and vitality. Direct elections have not yet distilled the aggregate of national biases and perceptions into the common political will of Community citizens as federalists would wish, but history suggests that such processes should be counted in generations rather than years. Spinelli certainly did not expect it to happen overnight. But it has been important for the Parliament to act and behave as if it was already pivotal in the decision-making procedures of the Community. If it had behaved like a sheep it would already have been eaten by the wolves. The Parliament’s powers have not grown as fast as its influence but its overall institutional strength—its capacity to take initiatives, to invade new public policy spheres previously unoccupied and to interpret its own role ambitiously—is undeniable. This silent disregard for the limitations placed upon it by the treaty partly explains its somewhat lacklustre appearance in the past. There are many reasons advanced for its presumed failure to establish and sustain a reputation worthy of the name ‘Parliament’,(102) but in retrospect the policy of stealth, of the gradual accretion of power, authority and influence, has yielded some valuable gains. The tendency to link direct elections with federalism has probably harmed the Parliament in some member states, notably the United Kingdom and Denmark, but it has not prevented it from evolving into something considerably more significant than a mere debating chamber. And its federal potential, it must be said, remains. There is now a direct channel which links the central institutions to the European citizenry. For federalists this was and remains crucial. And because of this the Parliament will be viewed suspiciously by some member state governments for many years to come. (e) Tinkering with the System: Spierenberg and the Committee of Three, 1979 Introduction According to Emile Noel, the Secretary-General of the Commission from 1958 until 1987, 1979 was ‘a year of movement and of innovation’.(103) Leaving aside direct elections to the European Parliament, several other developments prompted him to observe that after a long period of stagnation Europe had ‘taken off again, with new methods and a different impetus’.(104) Clearly a new combination of events lay at the root of his optimism. What were these fresh developments and was his optimism justified? We shall briefly survey the background to a series of events during 1979 which account for the European Community’s condition of institutional health at the end of the decade when European Union, originally promulgated at the Paris Summit of October 1972, was officially to be consummated.

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Noel apportioned credit for the achievements of 1979 to the established Community institutions of the Commission and Council of Ministers and to the much younger European Council in roughly equal measure. The latter had been responsible for implementing direct elections to the Parliament as well as providing the impetus for the common energy policy (aimed at regulating oil imports) and the creation of the European Monetary System (EMS) , while the former had been pivotal in the enlargement negotiations involving Greece, the multilateral trade discussions of the Toyko Round Table and the delicate renewal of the Lome Convention on overseas aid and development. Together these concrete gains reflected the value of a combined communitarian and intergovernmental approach to Community Progress. Arising out of this conjunction of achievements federalists were particularly active and interested in the emergence of the EMS. Monetary integration, as we have already noted, was considered by many federalists to be the most fruitful approach to European Union. When the EMS was launched in December 1978 it was primarily directed towards exchange rate stability but gradual progress towards the full convertibility of European currencies subsequently yielded the European Currency Unit (ECU) as the new system’s benchmark. Full convertibility has remained the ultimate goal of monetary federalists who believe that not until there is a real common monetary organisation will the customs union and Common Agriculture Policy be properly managed. The role of the ECU and of the revamped European Monetary Co-operation Fund have represented slow, albeit significant, progress in this direction but the contradictions existing between a single market for agricultural produce and industrial products and the existence of separate financial markets have been clearly exposed.(105) The current drive towards opening up the internal market by 1992 makes moves to strengthen and extend the EMS all the more imperative in the minds of the federalists who regard Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) as an irreversible commitment necessitating common institutions in order to obviate sporadic unilateral action detrimental to a wider European stability. No new institutions appeared in 1979 as part of the fresh monetary impetus. There were, however, two acts of institutional self-appraisal which occurred in this year and which together represent the culminating progress towards European Union of the decade 1969–1979. Noel believed the process of institutional self-appraisal to be a sign of their maturity and confidence and it seemed to confirm the continuing vitality of European Union itself. Let us look briefly at the Spierenberg Report and the Report of the Committee of Three (known as the Three Wise Men) and comment upon their respective relevance to federalism and European Union. The Spierenberg Report The origins of the independent review body chaired by Dirk Spierenberg to submit proposals for the reform of the Commission go back to the decision taken in 1978 by the Jenkins Commission to reassess its overall efficiency and coherence. The Spierenberg Committee thus had a narrow institutional focus. Moreover, its cautious pragmatic approach to reform, concentrating in the main upon improving the Commission’s general performance, was reflected in proposals requiring only procedural agreement rather than protracted treaty amendments. As Henig has correctly observed, there was indeed a clear

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acceptance of present reality as a starting point.(106) No constitutional blueprint was intended nor was there any attempt to contemplate long-term aims for the Community. The atmosphere which surrounded the whole exercise was one of level-headed caution. Since the proposals contained in the Spierenberg Report are well-known to most seasoned observers of Community institutional affairs we shall not provide another detailed survey of them here. Rather what we shall emphasise are those aspects of the Report which were perceived to have particular importance from the federalist standpoint. What parts of the Report were relevant to federalism and European Union? One central concern of the Report was especially germane to federalist thought and strategy, namely, the widely-perceived decline of the Commission. The centrality of the Commission’s position in the overall Community institutional framework has always been of paramount importance to federalist thinking and Spierenberg’s underlying purpose to counteract some of the forces responsible for its decline earned federalist support. Decline had to be reversed. The Commission required revitalisation from within since its reassertion from without seemed highly improbable. Reform from within at least equipped the Commission to put its own house in order without requiring other institutions to be involved. Thus recommendations affecting the role of and relationships between directors general and cabinets and those concerning the recruitment and career prospects of the Commission staff were practical proposals designed to improve overall efficiency. Their suggestions for the strengthening of the Commission President’s role and for reducing the number of Commissioners and portfolios, however, were controversial and did require member state approval. Briefly they identified the appointment process as the source of Commission weakness. Mindful of the impending membership of Greece and aware of Spanish and Portuguese intentions, the Report sought to place a curb on old practices. It recommended that member states have just one Commissioner each and that portfolios be similarly rationalised. The President was also able to play a greater role in the appointment of Commissioners and receive support in the work of co-ordination and control by one designated VicePresident instead of the several nominal ones which customarily existed. There was very little in all of this for federalists to find inspiring. They saw the sense in seeking to streamline the Commission’s internal administration and in proposing other reforms intended to improve performance but they did not view these as effective in reversing the Commission’s decline. This would need a genuine change of heart by member state governments and a closer working relationship with the directly elected Parliament—presaging wider institutional reform—before it could recover its former political leadership role in Community affairs. Nonetheless the Spierenberg Report was indicative of movement, of a fresh initiative to breathe new life into an old institution. It was an attempt to tinker with the system in a manner designed to avoid controversy. The Report of the Committee of Three The Committee of Three—Berend Biesheuvel, Edmund Dell and Robert Marjolin—was established in December 1978 by the European Council to consider adjustments to the machinery and procedures of the Community institutions. Its mandate applied formally to all the institutions but in the knowledge that Spierenberg was examining the Commission

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at the same time its focus came to rest mainly upon the Council of Ministers and other parts of the Community framework. As the Three Wise Men underlined in their prefatory remarks to their Report, they were influenced in their practical conception of their task by two imperatives: that their proposals should not entail treaty amendments and that their proposals should be ‘specific’ in order to be ‘implemented swiftly’.(107) These two imperatives placed clear limitations upon the scope and effectiveness of their recommendations. Before we look a little closer at these proposals it is worth our while to examine the origins of this Report, especially in view of the European Council’s weak response to the Tindemans Report which it was also instrumental in launching four years previously. It is significant that the initiative to set up a fresh institutional study came from the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, who, like his predecessor, Pompidou, was invariably willing to invoke French conceptions of European Union. Indeed it is particularly interesting to note the emphasis placed in the Report upon ‘progress towards European Union’,(108) a guarantee of safety in ambiguity. However, the Commission’s role in prompting Giscard’s initiative appears to have been crucial. One writer has gone as far as arguing that the Committee of Three was appointed in order to counter the Commission’s annual report of 1978 on the state of progress towards European Union which made several incisive remarks about the enlargement of the Community and the need for certain treaty amendments.(109) In this light it was an intergovernmental determination not to be upstaged by the Commission which accounts for the decision. Given these somewhat obscure origins to the Report, coupled with the clear limitations imposed by their mandate, the Committee of Three worked with admirable speed and efficiency to complete their task in October 1979, one month after the Spierenberg Report. Visiting all of the member states either individually or together they had confidential discussions with heads of governments, senior ministers and officials and met separately the presidents of all the Community institutions as well as the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper) and the Council Secretariat. Without wishing to enter into a detailed analysis of the Report it is significant to recognise their assumptions about the need for institutional reform. They were naturally very guarded about the scope for and value of institutional reform. In their view it was not the key which would unlock the door to further progress. Instead they blamed existing failures upon ‘political circumstances and attitudes that sometimes produced no clear conception at all’.(110) A conspicuous lack of political consensus rather than institutional deficiencies was deemed the main culprit. And as the Three Wise Men acknowledged, they could do nothing about that. It went beyond the boundaries of their mandate. The bulk of the Report concentrated upon the respective roles and workloads of the European Council and the Council of Ministers.(111) There was much here to interest federalists but nothing to excite them. The Parliament was to be able to debate the Council’s objectives for the next six months as outlined by the Council President and the use of majority voting in the Council was to be encouraged, albeit in the spirit of the 1974 Paris Summit which committed governments to using their veto less. The main focus of interest in the Report clearly lay in issues of interinstitutional efficiency and coordination especially involving the European Council, the Council of Ministers, Coreper and the general responsibilities of the Presidency. The recommendations of the Report served to confirm the future role of the European Council in evaluating overall

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Community priorities and the essentially political purpose of the Council of Ministers vis-a-vis preparation and execution without which the former could not effectively function. With the intergovernmentalist perspective firmly entrenched federalists doubtless expected little of significance from those short sections of the Report which looked at the Commission and the Parliament. Here perceived caution and pragmatism were especially evident. Nothing of much import was suggested for the Commission. The Report identified some prosaic reasons for its decline and broadly agreed with the proposals advocated by the Spierenberg Committee, although there was more than a hint about the Commission’s ability to reassert its political role by acting in a more independent manner during technical consultations with national officials. A close analysis of this section of the Report reveals a distinct sympathy for the Commission’s pivotal position conveying ‘something more than an approximation of the separate interests of Member States’. It should demonstrate what kind of actions would best reflect ‘the larger interests of Europe as a whole’.(112) Two specific developments influenced the Committee’s proposals regarding the European Parliament: the growth of the Parliament’s budgetary powers via the treaty amendments of 1970 and 1975 and direct elections. Their recommendations, however, deliberately eschewed the anticipated closer relationship between the Parliament and the Commission which Spinelli had so earnestly advocated and urged instead what it labelled a ‘triangular pattern’ of Commission, Parliament and Council. This would create ‘a more complete and stable institutional balance’.(113) Direct contact between the Parliament and the European Council was also envisaged in order to promote communication and co-operation in the launching of major initiatives. A regular six-monthly report by the President of the European Council to the Parliament in person was deemed appropriate. In the Committee’s opinion the Parliament was to develop its full potential as ‘a sounding-board for the large policy issues of the day’.(114) Since the Report of the Three Wise Men was predisposed to comment upon progress towards European Union it is appropriate for us to look at this final aspect of their work before bringing this section to a close. Their remarks about European Union were characteristically vague and cautious given the various mandatory constraints imposed upon them. Indeed in the concluding paragraph to the Report they acknowledged that their ‘few thoughts’ on European Union may have seemed to some to be ‘insufficiently ambitious’. Anticipating such criticism they reminded their potential detractors of the imperative for their proposals to be implemented swiftly. The late 1970s, they observed, was ‘ill-suited to futuristic visions’ which pre-supposed a profound and rapid change of attitudes within the Community.(115) What, then, did they say about European Union? The following brief extract from this section of the Report is revealing: European Union…is a term the meaning of which has been hotly contested during the last few years…our own practical and immediate approach…has been that everything which strengthens the Community’s internal unity, and its unity and that of the Nine in dealings with the rest of the world, constitutes progress towards European Union. When we speak of European Union…we are speaking not so much of a definite goal

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as of a direction of movement… The concept needs to be defined and measured in relation to the obstacles which will have to be overcome… It is through the efforts of the Community and its states to tackle the dangers…that European Union however one defines it, will be built.(116) There was no Tindemans-type teleology here. European Union, whatever it meant, would evolve in piecemeal fashion as a result of successive responses, both communitarian and intergovernmental, to the prevailing problems of the age. In particular monetary and budgetary policies to combat inflation, Community solidarity over energy shortages in oil and gas, and the adjustments required to accommodate Greece, Spain and Portugal in the next enlargement were identified as the areas where opportunities to promote European Union loomed large. Political co-operation was also mentioned as were industrial, regional and social policies in which concrete and limited actions were deemed possible. The atmosphere conveyed by this section of the Report was clearly congruent with the perceived crisis surrounding Community affairs and Europe in general. ‘Over-large or illdefined projects, in whatever area of policy’, were considered inopportune.(117) Conclusion This short survey of Community events which occurred in or about 1979 suggests that there was some basis for Noel’s optimism about the progress made, particularly regarding direct elections and the EMS. But the content and consequences of the two reports sketched above could hardly be construed as successful. Some of the institutional proposals of the Three Wise Men were significant from the federalist standpoint, especially those advocating closer contact between the Parliament and the Council, but tinkering with the system was really all that was implied. Indeed, judging by the outcome of the proposals contained in both the Spierenberg and the Committee of Three reports, it seems fair to conclude that very little was intended from the outset. Henig observed that in the immediate aftermath of the presentation of the Spierenberg Report the member states rejected the proposal to reduce the number of Commissioners—‘a very rapid justification of the cautious approach which was adopted’.(118) The Report of the Three Wise Men fared no better. The prospects of closer institutional relationships and of a greater political consensus among member state governments about European Union seemed just as remote. The European Council prevented the Parliament from having access to the Report before they had considered it themselves for fear that MEPs might ‘pre-empt their discussion of its contents’.(119) And after referral to the Council of Ministers the European Council returned to the Report at its December 1980 meeting in Luxembourg ‘where, in effect, it was shelved’. Once again, as Bulmer and Wessels remarked, the European Council was found ‘unable to transform vague commitments to European Union into a practical programme, even though the Report stressed concrete and practical steps forward’.(120) In retrospect, neither the Spierenberg nor the Committee of Three reports appear to have had much of a lasting impact upon subsequent Community developments and this is probably why very little attention has been paid to these two reports. From the federalist perspective they seem to represent relatively unimportant milestones along the road

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towards European Union. In one sense, however, they were significant: they served to confirm the views of Spinelli and other federalists that the way forward lay not in intergovernmentalist-inspired initiatives. Other routes were likely to be more promising. (f) The Hidden Agenda: A Decade of Federal Ideas, Influences and Strategies This chapter has surveyed the period 1969–1979 from the standpoint of federal ideas, influences and strategies in the European Community. It has chronicled the sequence of major events during these years in order to demonstrate the fundamental continuity of federalist ideas and activities present in the evolution of European Union. From Vedel to Tindemans and direct elections to the European Parliament the assertion of federalism has grown with increasing vigour and vitality. This is evident both at the level of ideas, influences and strategies and at the level of institutional structures. Initiatives have come from a number of different and often competing directions. Most, it must be admitted, have originated from what can be loosely described as the inter-governmental arena— from French Presidents, the European Council and individual member state governments—but we should not overlook the ideas and influence of Spinelli, Tindemans and the Commission. Federal ideas, influences and strategies have not always been very visible during these years. They have usually been reactive rather than active. Federalists have found themselves in a difficult position within the Community arena, responding to predominantly intergovernmental decisions in a way which exploits opportunities to move ahead. They have been forced to wring the maximum of federalist progress from a diet of intergovernmental initiatives. It was this frustrating predicament from which Spinelli in particular was determined to escape in the decade which followed. The decade 1969–1979 heralded significant overall achievements for the Community but it still lacked that essential capacity which federalists deemed essential of going beyond what existed. The pace of intergovernmental Europe could on occasions be accelerated, usually at the whim of governments and statesmen, but Europe remained incapable of sustaining an autonomous political life. It was shackled to intermittent intergovernmental consensus and was prey to short-term intergovernmental interests. Within such a restricted European conception federalist ideas and initiatives were correspondingly hampered and limited. This in turn is why federalism has been consistently ignored and overlooked in the mainstream literature on the European Community. It appears weak and fragmentary. Yet our survey of this decade, by concentrating upon specifically federalist interpretations and collecting information hitherto disconnected, furnishes a unified view of federalism and European Union. Corrective zeal of course has its pitfalls and equally we must not exaggerate the importance of federalism. But it is a distortion of the Community’s past, present and future to ignore the basic continuity of federalist thought and practice in the period 1969– 1979. There is, then, a hidden agenda of federalist ideas, influences and strategies in the Community. It is palpably absent from the more visible gladiatorial arenas of the European Council and Council of Ministers but it exists in other spheres of Community

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activity. The persistence of Spinelli and Tindemans epitomised the federalist drive during the 1970s just as the Commission and Parliament supported movement in this direction when opportunities arose. None of the major changes were intentionally federal during these years but many of them were nonetheless changes in a distinctly federal direction. The strengthening of the Parliament’s budgetary powers, direct elections, the creation of the EMS and the growing importance of the Court of Justice each pushed the Community along the federal path whatever obstacles remained to be overcome. By dint of efficiency, self-interest, the need to democratise the Community and an assortment of other reasons the member states had been compelled gradually and often reluctantly, to take steps which lent increasing credence to the federalist argument. The Community had slowly acquired the features of an evolving organic whole, while simultaneously retaining its aggregative intergovernmental characteristics. By 1980 the Community could not be described as having transformed the whole complex of the relations of member states into a European Union. Significant incremental federalism had occurred and in the words of the Three Wise Men the narrower conception of the Community, coloured by legal formalism, had given way to a new political concept which reflected ‘the deepest realities of a Europe in the throes of development’.(121) But much remained to be done to achieve ‘an ever closer union’. Indeed by 1980 the word ‘crisis’ seemed to serve as an identity bracelet for the Community. It was in this uncertain atmosphere of gloom and despondency that Spinelli reappeared in the public arena as one of the newly elected members of the European Parliament to launch a spectacular federalist initiative designed to achieve qualitative and quantitative change in the relations between states and among the European peoples. We shall now turn our attention to this fresh initiative and its origins, and examine how European Union was relaunched in the years between 1980 and 1984. Notes 1. The phrase is Monnet’s. See his Memoirs, (Doubleday, New York 1978), p. 484. 2. M.Camps, European Unification in the Sixties: From the Veto to the Crisis, (McGraw-Hill, London 1966), p. 124. 3. A.Morgan, From Summit to Council: Evolution in the EEC, (PEP: Chatham House, London 1976), p. 11. In his The New Europeans, (Hodder and Stoughton, London 1968), Anthony Sampson also observed that in the movement to unite Europe ‘the present point looks like the nadir’, p. 424. 4. W.Hallstein, Europe in the Making, (Allen & Unwin, London 1972), p. 97. 5. Spinelli, The European Adventure, (Charles Knight & Co. Ltd, London 1972), p. 19. 6. This is what West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, called it. See W.Brandt, People and Politics: The Years 1960–1975, (Collins, London 1970), p. 245. 7. Spinelli, The European Adventure, p. 20. 8. Spinelli, The European Adventure, p. 20. 9. Roy Pryce and Wolfgang Wessels have pointed to these actors and arenas in their essay ‘The Search For an Ever Closer Union: A Framework for Analysis’, in R.Pryce, (Ed.), The Dynamics of European Union, (Croom Helm, London 1987), Ch. 1, pp. 1–34. 10. Hallstein, Europe in the Making, p. 94. 11. Spinelli, The European Adventure, pp. 20–1. 12. See H.Simonian, The Privileged Partnership Franco-German Relations in the European Community, 1969–1984, (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1985), p. 138.

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13. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 494. 14. Brandt, People and Politics, p. 247. 15. W.Brandt, In Exile: Essays, Reflections and Letters, 1933–1947, (Oswald Wolff, London 1971), p. 8. 16. Brandt, In Exile, pp. 8–9. 17. Brandt, In Exile, p. 33. 18. Brandt, In Exile, p. 38. 19. For a detailed discussion of the EPO and its relationship to Brandt’s general political strategy for West Germany during 1969–1973 see the forthcoming doctoral thesis by K.Cordell (Plymouth Polytechnic) entitled ‘Brandt’s Deutschland Politik: Inter German Relations since the Wirtschaftswunder’. S.Bulmer and W.Paterson, The Federal Republic of Germany and the European Community, (Allen & Unwin, London 1987), p. 137. 20. On Brandt and Pompidou’s contrasting personalities, see Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, pp. 366–8. 21. See Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, Ch. 4., pp. 78–100. 22. Brandt, People and Politics, p. 254. 23. S.Bulmer and W.Paterson, The Federal Republic of Germany and the European Community, (Allen & Unwin, London 1987), p. 138. 24. Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, p. 82. 25. Spinelli, The European Adventure, p. 23. 26. Spinelli, The European Adventure, p. 25. 27. Spinelli, The European Adventure, p. 26. 28. Hallstein, Europe in the Making, p. 101. 29. Morgan, From Summit to Council, p. 14. 30. Spinelli, The European Adventure, p. 21. 31. Brandt, People and Politics, p. 258. 32. Quoted in Morgan, From Summit to Council, p. 15. 33. Press Conference by the President of the French Republic, 21 January 1971, Extracts from the French Documentation on political and social problems, Supplement No. 61, February 1971. 34. Spinelli, The European Adventure, p. 21. 35. Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, p. 143. 36. P.Taylor, The Limits of European Integration (Croom Helm, London 1983), p. 64. 37. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 501. 38. Brandt, People and Politics, p. 264. 39. Morgan, From Summit to Council, pp. 16–17. 40. Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, p. 147. 41. Point 16 of the final Communique, Bulletin of the European Communities, 10 (1972), part 1, Ch. 1. 42. C.Franck, ‘New Ambitions: From the Hague to Paris Summits (1969–1972)’, Ch. 6, p. 144 in Pryce, (Ed.), Dynamics of European Union. 43. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 501. 44. Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, p. 147. 45. These proposals have been republished in the Selection of Texts Concerning Institutional Matters of the Community from 1950–1982, European Parliament, Luxembourg, 1982, pp. 122–6. 46. Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, p. 148. 47. Franck, ‘New Ambitions’ in Pryce, (Ed.) Dynamics of European Union, p. 145. 48. Morgan, From Summit to Council, pp. 18–19. 49. Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, p. 259.

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50. Extracts from the Communique issued after the Paris meeting of Heads of State and Government, 10 December 1974, Bulletin of the European Communities, 12, (1974), pp. 7– 12. 51. Monnet, Memoirs, p. 502. 52. Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, p. 354. 53. Taylor, Limits of European Integration, p. 70. 54. Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, p. 349. 55. S.Bulmer and W.Wessels, The European Council: Decision-making in European Politics, (Macmillan, London 1987), p. 46. 56. Bulmer and Wessels, The European Council, pp. 45–6. 57. Brandt confirmed that at the Paris Summit (1972), ‘the Dutch and the Italians were foremost among those in favour’ of direct elections. See Brandt, People and Politics, p. 267. And the initiative in proposing ‘European Union’ in 1972 appears to have been taken by the Belgian Prime Minister, Gaston Eyskens, according to C.Franck, ‘New Ambitions’, p. 145 in Pryce (Ed.), Dynamics of European Union. 58. These Community reports have been gathered together and republished in Selection of Texts Concerning Institutional Matters of the Community from 1950–1982, European Parliament, Luxembourg, 1982, pp. 304–65. I have obtained an unofficial translation of the Spierenberg Report from the Dutch Embassy London. More conveniently, each of these reports has been discussed separately in P.Taylor, When Europe Speaks with One Voice: The External Relations of the European Community, (Aldwych Press, London 1979), pp. 27–41. 59. In the event he consulted over a thousand people and about 200 organisations. The personalities and organisations met are identified in the Annex to the Tindemans Report, Memo From Belgium: Views and Surveys, No. 171, 1976, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels. 60. Spierenberg Report, (1975), p. 3. 61. Spierenberg Report, (1975), pp. 6–7. 62. Interview with Spinelli, European Parliament Strasbourg, 14 February 1985. 63. Point 16 of the final communique, Sixth General Report, point 5, Bulletin EC 10–1972, Part One, Ch. 1. 64. The Report has been republished in Selection of Texts, pp. 308–41. 65. Selection of Texts, p. 315. 66. Spinelli, The European Adventure, p. 176. 67. Selection of Texts, p. 329. 68. For details of these models, see Selection of Texts, pp. 330–2. 69. Selection of Texts, pp. 340–342. These proposals are also in Bulletin, EC, Supplement 9/75, pp. 9–13. 70. Tindemans Report, Memo from Belgium, pp. 12–14. 71. Tindemans Report, Text of letter to the European Council, 29 December 1975, p. 4. 72. J.Vandamme, ‘The Tindemans Report (1975–1976)’, Ch. 7., pp. 149–160 in R.Pryce (Ed.), Dynamics of European Union. 73. Tindemans Report, Memo From Belgium, p. 45. 74. For the complete institutional recommendations, see the Tindemans Report, Memo From Belgium, pp. 45–54. 75. Such was the opinion of the study group set up by the University Association of Contemporary European Studies (UACES) to analyse the Tindemans Report. See Report of UACES Study Group on European Union, (1976), King’s college London, p. 13. 76. P.Taylor, When Europe Speaks With One Voice pp. 27–8. 77. S.Henig, Power and Decision in Europe: The Political Institutions of the European Community, (Europotentials Press, London 1980) pp. 109–10. 78. J.D.B.Mitchell, ‘The Tindemans Report: Retrospect and Prospect’, The Common Market Law Review, Vol. 13, (1976), pp. 455–84.

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79. J.Vandamme, pp. 166–7 in R.Pryce (Ed.), Dynamics of European Union. 80. Tindemans Report, Text of letter to the European Council, p. 4. 81. Spinelli’s views, interview in the European Parliament, Strasbourg, 14 February 1985. 82. Simonian, The Privileged Partnership, p. 262. On Brandt’s continued support for European Union, see Vandamme, pp. 163–4 in Pryce (Ed.), Dynamics of European Union. 83. ‘The Future of Europe’, address of Leo Tindemans to the Foreign Affairs Club, London, 7 December 1976, Press Report. 84. A.Spinelli, The Eurocrats; Conflict and Crisis in the European Community, (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press 1966), pp. 151–2. 85. Spinelli, The Eurocrats, p. 151. 86. J.Monnet, Memoirs, (New York, Doubleday 1978), pp. 321–4. 87. W.Hallstein, Europe in the Making, (New York, W.Norton & Co., Allen & Unwin 1972), p. 75. 88. The various efforts to implement Art. 138, Sec. 3., of the Rome Treaty are summarised in V.Herman and J.Lodge, The European Parliament and the European Community, (Macmillan, London 1978), p. 3. 89. Spinelli, The Eurocrats, p. 165. 90. Spinelli, The Eurocrats, pp. 165–6. 91. Spinelli, The Eurocrats, pp. 166–7. 92. Interview with Spinelli, European Parliament, Strasbourg, 14 February 1985. 93. See Report of the Working Party examining the problem of Enlargement of the Powers of the European Parliament. Bulletin of the EC, Supplement 4/72. A detailed analysis of the origins and contents of the report is given in A.Shlaim, ‘The Vedel Report and the Reform of the European Parliament’, Parliamentary Affairs, Vol. 27., No. 2., (1974), pp. 159–70. 94. Shlaim, ‘Vedel Report’, p. 161. 95. See M.T.W.Robinson, ‘The Political Implications of the Vedel Report’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 7., No. 4, (Autumn 1972), p. 427. 96. Shlaim, ‘Vedel Report’, p. 169. 97. See J.Lodge, ‘Nation-States versus Supranationalism: The Political Future of the European Community’, Journal of European Integration, Vol. 2., Pt. 2., (1979), pp. 161–81. 98. Herman and Lodge, European Parliament and European Community, p. 7. 99. Herman and Lodge, European Parliament and European Community, p. 160. 100. Spinelli, The Eurocrats, p. 162. 101. Lodge, ‘Nation States versus Supranationalism’, p. 178. 102. The most recent account dealing with the Parliament’s perceived weaknesses is A.Robinson (Ed.) with C.Bray, The Public Image of the European Parliament, Studies in European Politics 10, (PSI, London 1986). 103. E.Noel, ‘Reflections on the State of the European Community at the end of the Seventies’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 15 (No. 2, 1980), p. 134. 104. Noel, ‘Reflections’, p. 133. 105. For a short account of ‘monetary federalism’ see A.Jozzo, ‘Towards A Federal European Economy: Pre-Federal Monetary Union’, The Federalist, Year XXXVII, No. 3 (December 1985), pp. 195–201. Among more recent analyses of EMS and its political implications are P.Coffey, The European Monetary System: Past, Present and Future, (Martinus Nijhoff, Lancaster 1984); P.Ludlow, The Making of The European Monetary System, (Butterworth Scientific, London 1982); and M.T.Sumner and G.Zis’ (Eds), European Monetary Union, (Macmillan, London 1982). 106. For a short discussion of the Spierenberg Report, see S.Henig, Power and Decision in Europe, (Europotentials Press, London 1980), pp. 110–15. 107. Report on European Institutions, presented by the Committee of Three to the European Council (October 1979), Text of Mandate, p. 81., Brussels. 108. Report, p. 7.

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109. A.N.Duff, ‘The Report of the Three Wise Men’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. XIX, No. 3, (March 1981), pp. 239–40. 110. Report, p. 7. 111. Out of a 73 page report, pp. 15–48 were devoted specifically to these two institutions. 112. Report, p. 53. 113. Report, p. 61. 114. Report, p. 62. 115. Report, p. 80. 116. Report, pp. 73–8. 117. Report, p. 79. 118. Henig, Power and Decision in Europe, p. 115. 119. Bulmer and Wessels, The European Council, p. 115. 120. Bulmer and Wessels, The European Council, p. 89. 121. Report, p. 75.

Chapter Five EUROPEAN UNION RELAUNCHED, 1980–1984 (a) Introduction The years 1980–1981 represented something of a coincidence in the history of federalism and European Union. They marked both the beginning of a new federalist initiative by Altiero Spinelli in June 1980 and the culmination of a series of reports and debates about institutional reform emanating from the European Parliament during 1974–1981.(1) This is why the role of the Parliament appeared suddenly to assume such a large prominence in discussions about European Union after 1979. Direct elections were certainly a key factor in prompting the Parliament to adopt a more assertive position regarding European Union in the early 1980s but it was not the only explanation for the renewed impetus. The revitalisation of parliamentary activity must be set against the background of consistent efforts at inter-institutional reform stretching back several years at least to the initial Kirk Report of 1974. According to Michael Palmer the Kirk-Reay Report retains its significance as a landmark in the history of the Parliament’s development mainly because it ‘represented the clearest and most complete survey of the whole range of interinstitutional problems confronting the European Parliament’ since 1963 and because of the way in which it pointed to ‘the inadequacy of Parliament’s relationship with Council and to the lack of political accountability from Council to Parliament’,(2) a deficiency which remains to be corrected today. Testimony to the importance of much of the institutional thinking behind the Kirk-Reay Report was quickly demonstrated in October 1979 when the Parliament’s Political Affairs Committee (PAC) established a new subcommittee to deal with institutional problems. Given the specific task of investigating relations between the European Parliament and other Community institutions, the eight reports which followed retraced several of the steps of inter-institutional relations already trodden by Sir Peter Kirk. Taken together the Rey, Van Miert, Hansch, Diligent, Elles, Baduel Glorioso, Antoniozzi and Blumenfeld reports amounted to a comprehensive review of the Parliament’s relations with other Community institutions with a view to strengthening its overall influence in the decision-making process.(3) These resolutions, it should be noted, conformed to the goal of institutional reform within the existing treaties. The Rey report was the first to be debated and adopted in April 1980 while the Van Miert, Hansch, Diligent, Elles and Baduel Glorioso reports were discussed and approved in a major institutional debate in July 1981. The Antoniozzi and Blumenfeld reports were debated in December 1981 and February 1982 respectively. We have already considered how far political influence as a concept is difficult both to define and to operationalise in the Community context. As one recent writer has

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observed, ‘it is extremely difficult to determine precisely the influence of Parliamentary opinion on the final text of a Council decision’.(4) In this case, however, the connection between influence and action can be more clearly established. Several proposals made in the eight reports identified above were accepted by the Council of Ministers within a very short space of time.(5) And many of the suggestions outlined in the Blumenfeld, Hansch and Antoniozzi reports were incorporated in the Genscher-Colombo Act which we shall briefly survey in the next section of this chapter. From the standpoint of this short introduction, then, we can appreciate that the first directly-elected Parliament of the Community had already renewed its quest for insitutional reform within the personal initiative in 1980. But many of these existing treaties before Spinelli launched his own proposals were not original. They had been aired much earlier without success. Michael Palmer summarised the circumstances succinctly: By and large, the ideas which were developed, concerning relations with the Council, relations with the Commission and a greater role for Parliament in European polticial co-operation and in the handling of the Community’s external relations, represent a completion of ideas originally put forward in the years preceding direct elections by Sir Peter Kirk and Lord Reay. A number of ideas which seemed unattainable and unrealistic at the time when they were originally proposed… were taken over—in appropriately modi-fied forms—by a number of rapporteurs of the institutional subcommittee, were adopted by Parliament…and, in certain cases, have been accepted by the Council, the European Council and the foreign ministers meeting in political co-operation.(6) This background perspective is important to an accurate understanding of the events of 1980–1981. It demonstrates an extant parliamentary strategy of piecemeal ‘small steps’ institutional reform alongside the more illustrious episodes of Tindemans and direct elections which effectively overshadowed it. But in retrospect, the strategy of ‘small steps’ has been particularly submerged beneath the welter of attention thrust upon Spinelli’s far more radical federalist strategy for wholesale treaty revision which began in earnest in July 1981 when the Parliament agreed to the creation of a new committee to deal with institutional issues involving treaty amendments leading ultimately to European Union.(7) This was a fresh departure of approach for the Parliament but as two inside observers have recently remarked: A considerable body of opinion had come to believe that more radical proposals for amending the treaties were (also) necessary… They simply did not think it (the ‘small steps’ strategy) would be sufficient. The fact that the decision to set up a new committee to consider treaty revision was taken the same day as the adoption of resolutions advocating incremental changes in institutional relations showed that the EP saw no contradiction in following both approaches.(8) Before we can complete our introductory explanation of the relaunching of European Union during 1980–1984 several other events and circumstances must be accounted for.

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Initiatives came from more than one direction. And a peculiar conjunction of circumstances occurred about 1980–1981 which acted as a spur to renewed activity. Let us look briefly at these events and circumstances in order to obtain an overall picture of the evolving process of historical change. That these years witnessed a widespread recognition of the need for significant change within the European Community across an extensive range of issues and policies was clearly demonstrated by the European Council decision of 30 May 1980 giving the Commission a mandate to examine existing policies, their financing and the budgetary problems they posed to certain member states. The acrimonious controversy over the United Kingdom’s financial contribution to the Community budget may have been the main explanation for the European Council’s decision but it is more instructive to view this development from a longer perspective. The changing economic climate had a debilitating effect upon Community policies and served to expose and underline the deficiencies of the whole European enterprise. The development and subsequent deepening of the world recession from the early 1970s showed the Community to be wholly incapable of solving the major problems of the age like chronic unemployment and monetary instability. This increasing awareness of its own impotence and the public image of incessant intergovernmental bickering sparked a bout of self-examination. It was on the defensive and had to be seen to be fighting back. Indissolubly linked to the Community’s impotence caused by the world recession was its manifest inability to arrive at speedy and concordant decisions. Economic depression had served to emphasise the differences of interest among member states. Budgetary problems and the CAP, in particular, presented the Community decision-making process as a veritable war of attrition in which each state, or group of states, stood its ground with the intention of extracting concessions by wearing down its adversaries. The early 1980s seemed symptomatic of a deep and underlying lack of political commitment to act together to solve common problems. Criticisms inevitably gravitated towards the decision-making machinery itself. The sense of being continually locked in mortal combat over issues repeatedly conceived as zero-sum conflicts began to take its toll upon morale. In this sense the special problem of the United Kingdom’s budgetary position merely sharpened the growing Community introspection and led to the gradual reappraisal of the totality of the European apparatus. Consequently the Commission did not interpret the 30 May Mandate as ‘a mere accounting exercise’. Instead it chose to ‘map out the major pathways towards a common relaunching of the European ideal’.(9) Gaston Thorn, the President of the Commission, diagnosed the Community’s ills as lacking respect for the rules of democracy and in particular ‘respect for the rule of majority’.(10) When the Commission’s report was submitted to the European Council on 24 June 1981 it identified the following main areas as requiring immediate attention: tighter co-ordination of national monetary and economic policies; the expansion of the EMS; accelerating the shift towards a single market; a better co-ordination of national efforts and Community participation in solving energy problems; the promotion of investment in research and technology; and an active competition policy to bring about economic convergence. But Thorn urged that the Commission report should be seen as ‘a comprehensive view both of the Community and of the way the institutions work’. The problem posed by the 30 May Mandate was ‘much more than simply a difficult economic situation which could be solved purely by a

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change of machinery’. Indeed it was ‘the very existence of the Community that could ultimately be put at risk’.(11) Commission thinking thus extended beyond structural policy changes to include the institutional machinery of the Community. In this way it assumed a positive participatory role in the intensified parliamentary debate about institutional reform in the summer of 1981. Its involvement in this great debate and its subsequent declaration of support for improving inter-institutional relations added weight to the conjunction of events and circumstances which promoted the relauching of European Union.(12) But this advocacy of institutional reform confined mainly to urging more majority voting in the Council of Ministers, improving the Commission-Parliament dialogue and exploiting the Parliament’s existing powers and procedural reforms to the full—did not extend to major treaty revision. Here the Commission trod warily. Thorn’s position was cautious, advocating new working methods for the institutions and reverting to the procedures already laid down in the Treaties. If we stand back and take stock of the events of these years we can now understand precisely why there was a renewed impetus for European Union. The Parliament, Commission and European Council had each, deliberately or unwittingly assisted in that conjunction of developments which served to rekindle interest in the goal of European Union. A series of separate initiatives and circumstances provided a fresh opportunity to make further progress. The coincidence existed in the meeting-point of two separate developments during 1980–1981: the culmination of a long parliamentary drive for institutional reform and the decisive initiative of Altiero Spinelli. It was Spinelli whose federalist strategy pushed the Parliament towards wholesale treaty amendments beyond anything that the Commission dared to contemplate. We shall return to Spinelli’s federalist initiative later in this chapter. For the moment let us turn our attention to another development in the quest for European Union which it has been convenient to investigate separately. This is the Genscher-Colombo initiative which spanned the years 1981–1983 and resulted in the ‘Solemn Declaration on European Union’ agreed at the Stuttgart European Council of 19 June 1983. (b) The Genscher-Colombo Initiative The public launching of the Genscher-Colombo plan to revitalise European Union occurred on 6 January 1981 at an FDP Party Congress in Stuttgart and culminated in what eventually became known as the ‘Solemn Declaration on European Union’ formally agreed at the Stuttgart European Council of 19 June 1983. During this short period of two and a half years it is important to remember that this initiative which emanated from outside the established European Community institutional framework ran parallel to the separate federalist enterprise of Spinelli in the European Parliament. Mindful of the purpose of this book, we do not intend to present yet another detailed analysis of the origins, nature and purpose of these fresh proposals other than to discuss their relationship to federalism and European Union. The details of these proposals and their evolution have already been researched.(13) It is useful, however, to set these developments against the background of events already discussed in our Introduction to

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this chapter in order to establish their place in the overall context of European Union in this period. There remains some element of mystery about Genscher’s real motives in activating this enterprise. As the West German Foreign Minister in the SPD-FDP Coalition led by Helmut Schmidt, Genscher may have been driven by purely domestic party political concerns rather than by highminded European ideals.(14) Nonetheless the proposals were presented officially as those of the Federal German Government in co-ordination with the Italian Government whose own Foreign Minister, Emilio Colombo, lent his name to the initiative.(15) A certain irony existed at the outset in their diagnosis of the European Community’s problems in the extent to which, as Weiler remarked, they themselves as prominent representatives of the intergovernmental Community apparatus were also part of these problems.(16) This institutional paradox was soon exposed as the source of the many difficulties and obstacles which they faced during their quest for European Union. And as we shall see it was very scathingly underlined by many members of the European Parliament including Spinelli. Since the Draft European Act so-called was first propelled into the European Community framework in November 1981—via a letter to all member states and the Commission and by a formal presentation to the European Parliament—it is convenient to use the ensuing parliamentary debate as an entrance to our discussions. Genscher’s opening remarks were instructive. Echoing the deficiencies of Monnet’s concept of Europe to which we have already alluded in Chapter Three, Genscher called attention to the ‘widespread hope that economic constraints would automatically bring about political unification’ and dismissed it as ‘illusory’. Clearly political unification could only be achieved via a new political initiative, a strategic assertion which federalists like Spinelli had consistently made. The Community’s major economic problems could not be solved without ‘a definite political dimension’.(17) Genscher’s analysis certainly did not indicate that he had become a convert to federalist strategy but it served to emphasise yet again the fundamental dilemma of inter-governmentalists seeking to move from economic to political Europe. Addressing himself to the concept of European Union, Genscher observed that it would become ‘a special kind of entity not covered by the traditional concepts of the federal state or the confederation of states’. In the disarming language reminiscent of Tindemans he referred to the intended European Act as formulating the aim of European Union to encompass the ‘many-faceted process of the unification of European activities’.(18) Distilled as practical proposals this meant a wholesale consolidation of existing Community practices and procedures which would provide an impetus for the further development of economic and political integration. The specific targets were an extension of political co-operation and the consolidation of its procedures together with the central decisionmaking structures of the Community under the aegis of the European Council, improved co-operation and dialogue between the major Community institutions with particular emphasis upon the Parliament’s participation and watchdog functions, the reassertion of majority voting in the Council of Ministers, and the inclusion of security policy in the Community’s evolving political co-operation process. Additional institutional details spelled out new specialised ministerial councils, including culture and security, the strengthening of the Presidency and the creation of a small independent secretariat further to facilitate the political co-operation procedure. Arising mainly out of

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Italian priorities there was also a draft declaration on questions of economic integration which emphasised inter alia the internal market, economic convergence, the further development of the EMS and the completion of the southerly enlargement of the Community.(19) We shall not examine in detail the content of each of these broad policy objectives here. It is worth directing the reader’s attention to the significant emphasis placed upon both political co-operation and security issues since this study does not attempt to grapple with these subjects. Evident progress in political co-operation had already been made in 1981 by means of the London Report which facilitated discussions about some political and economic aspects of security and inaugurated regular reports from the European Council Presidency to the Parliament.(20) It is also worth noting the congruence between the position of the Italian Government and that of the Commission as revealed above in the ‘30 May Mandate’. Italian and West German priorities were clearly never identical during this episode.(21) The history and politics of this initiative served to confirm the worst fears and predictions of those, like Spinelli, who advocated a different strategy to achieve European Union. The Genscher-Colombo initiative suffered at the outset from a deliberate and purposive determination to downgrade and devalue its importance within the Community. Successive rebuttals by the European Council, the relative silence of the Commission and an aggressive posture by the Parliament seeking stronger proposals combined to reduce its status from an Act to a Solemn Declaration by June 1983. A comparison of the original Draft European Act of 1981 with the actual Solemn Declaration of 1983 reveals precisely how far evisceration had occurred. The original contents of the proposal were effectively emptied both of substance and significance.(22) This disappointing conclusion to yet another genuine attempt to break out of the institutional paralysis which had come increasingly to characterise Community affairs in the early 1980s was particularly ironic when it is recalled that Genscher had already uttered a warning in November 1981 against ambitious intentions: We have deliberately confined our draft European Act to proposals which we believe are capable of producing a consensus among the Member States in the present circumstances. Rather than saying what we should like to happen, we have tried to formulate what we believe to be feasible. We have learned from past failed initiatives that unification can only be achieved as a result of a continuous step-by-step approach and that any premature attempt to make a great leap forward is more likely to put us back to a point behind our original starting point.(23) He had first wanted a solid treaty, legally and politically binding, consolidating existing Community achievements but had abandoned the idea as ‘little short of unrealistic’. And it was also intended that five years after the signing of the proposed European Act the member states would subject it to a review ‘in the light of the aim of a treaty on European Union’. Colombo, too, had viewed the intended Act as ‘a new phase of dynamism in the building of Europe’ which would lead eventually to its revision and the participation of the Parliament in preparing a ‘draft treaty on European Union’.(24) These hopes and

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beliefs which collapsed in the inter-governmental bear-pit of the European Council in 1982–1983 were soon to be resurrected in a different arena in 1984. Let us look not at the Draft European Act or at its pale legacy in the shape of the Solemn Declaration, but at Spinelli’s federalist critique of the whole enterprise. There is no doubt that the fate of the initiative was precisely what Spinelli had expected. In the European Parliament in 1981 he had already warned Genscher about intergovernmental sabotage. Very little progress would come from national elites whose limited vision was more intergovernmental co-operation, lacking both substance and durability. His attack upon this approach to European Union was trenchant: in your ‘Act’ you call for the setting-up of an army of councils, committees and sub-committees as part of a preposterous secretariat whose structure and location will not be fixed. In other words you want to create a leviathan of a bureaucracy but manned only by intergovernmental agents. And when this monster of committees and boards has chewed everything over and disgorged it, you believe that each Member State is going to tot up the political experience acquired.(25) Only the European Parliament could rise above this aggregative, arithmetical experience as the only genuine constituent body capable of a vision going beyond what existed. Europe could not be built using the same old tools. Both Genscher and Colombo were fully aware of the Parliament’s own separate initiative for European Union and of the many searching criticisms of their proposals. Parliamentary support was evident but qualified. Not unnaturally the main concern of the Parliament was to ensure that no discussions by the Council, in the wake of the GenscherColombo proposals, would be taken about its own future role without Parliament itself being involved. Otherwise there seemed to be little cause for concern about the duality of the two initiatives. They were deemed not to be in direct competition with each other. Indeed Genscher reaffirmed his own belief, first stated publicly in December 1981, that the Draft Act he advanced with Colombo would be an initial step in the direction towards the revision of the Treaties already being pursued by the Parliament.(26) This interpretation undoubtedly gained credence during 1982 as the original Draft Act lost its impetus and was gradually watered down to innocuous proportions. By October 1982 the Commission claimed that to accept the diluted version of the Act would be insufficient. Its task was also to ‘trigger off a series of decisions’ which would ‘bring the European idea a step forward in practical terms’, such as in agriculture and budgetary policies, and to provide the starting-point for more far-reaching institutional reforms. Policy and institutional reform were thus indissolubly linked.(27) Looking back from the vantage point of five years, then, it is difficult to view the Genscher-Colombo Initiative as anything more than yet another piecemeal intergovernmental milestone on the road towards a more pronounced intergovernmental Europe. The best that can be said for it is that it helped to intensify the debate about Europe’s future and raised some of the fundamental issues surrounding the process of European integration. It also furnished some useful minor improvements in Community procedures such as the onus on the European Council to submit an annual report to the Parliament on progress towards European Union.(28) And perhaps its most enduring

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legacy lay in the extent to which some of its concerns, like political co-operation, were later to be fully incorporated in the Single European Act of 1987. But it is also clear in retrospect that both Genscher and Colombo were doomed to fail from the very beginning. Their initiative was well-intentioned but it never secured the necessary support from the government heads whose different priorities and motivations were gradually revealed as the concrete implications of closer political integration became clear. Indeed, as we have already noted, it was not certain that Italian and West German interests were identical. The Genscher-Colombo Initiative seemed to underline yet again the narrow limits of an intergovernmental strategy. And this of course was what lay at the heart of the federalist critique. Mauro Ferri, the first Chairman of the Parliament’s new Committee of Institutional Affairs, summarised this inherent strategic weakness in unequivocal terms: On the course we have taken no form of consultation with the Council of Ministers and the Commission is possible… The work itself…will be carried out in complete autonomy. The institutional committee expressed no judgment on the Genscher-Colombo Act. This was not its job. Moreover, the Act is situated on a different plane and it is part of a different philosophy: that of ‘small steps’ to be taken by the governments through common declarations of intention in the context of the Treaties, without exploring the possibilities of modifying the Treaties themselves… The fact is…that beyond the good intentions…the approach…is not feasible; it cannot produce the desired results.(29) Spinelli’s conclusion was equally damning. The Genscher-Colombo proposals were futile. Their realistic, pragmatic approach merely repeated the same mistakes made a decade earlier when European Union was first enunciated. They were now confronted with the unpleasant realities of their strategy. Spinelli’s federalist analysis pinpointed this error: they were in a dilemma not because of their aims but because of the means they proposed to achieve them.(30) With these remarks we can conveniently bring our discussion of the Genscher-Colombo episode to a close. Spinelli had unmasked what he considered to be the strategic self-deception of well-intentioned but myopic Europeans. In order for real progress to be made towards achieving European Union the old methods would have to be set aside. At best they furnished hope and some minor improvements; at worst they were demoralising and sterile. We shall now look closer at Spinelli’s own alternative federalist strategy and examine the origins of his own initiative during 1980– 1981. (c) Spinelli’s Federal Strategy and Initiative, 1980–1981. We have already examined Spinelli’s federal ideas in detail as part of his critique of Monnet’s Europe and we have therefore some understanding both of his goal and of the strategy required to achieve it. In this short section it is necessary to focus sharply upon the origins of Spinelli’s federalist initiative but since it arose directly from his larger overall strategy to build Europe we shall also provide a brief sketch outline of the

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intellectual origins of his federal ideas. These origins furnish the important clues to the remarkable consistency of purpose which has characterised Spinelli’s political career since his conversion to the federal idea during the late 1930s. The long-term origins of his initiative in the European Parliament to revive and rejuvenate the European idea stretch back at least to his imprisonment and subsequent confinement by Mussolini on the Italian island of Ventotene during the years between 1928 and 1944. There is no need to present a detailed account of these events and circumstances here because they have already been the subject of recent research and publication.(31) However, it is important to our current investigation of his federalist initiative of June 1980 to underline the connecting link between this and the intellectual influences of the 1930s and 1940s. The development of Spinelli’s federal ideas can be explained by reference to two particular influences upon him during the late 1930s. The first of these existed in the person of Luigi Einaudi, a prominent Italian Liberal and distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Turin, whose essays on the merits of federalism originally published in 1918 made a great impact upon Spinelli and his fellow travellers on Ventotene. Einaudi was an influential figure in the anti-Fascist Resistance and worked together with Spinelli and others to consolidate the Movimento Federalista Europeo (MFE) which was formed in Milan late in August 1943. Einaudi’s influence upon Spinelli, it should be noted, was above all an intellectual influence, and it is important to emphasise here that both American and Anglo-Scottish constitutional relations were considered to be successful examples of the federal principle at work. This emphasis was not lost on Spinelli. The second and related influence upon Spinelli also occurred at about this time. Here Einaudi’s role appears to have been pivotal in a different sense. According to John Pinder, it was Einaudi who sent ‘those of the British federal texts which he had been able to obtain’ to Spinelli and his comrade prisoners on Ventotene. (32) The importance of this British Federalist literature which emanated from the Federal Union, formed during 1938–1939, was crucial to the conversion of Spinelli to federalism. It confirmed his view of the anachronistic nature of the modern state and of the dangers of aggressive nationalism, and it convinced him that federalism provided the solution to these causes of war. Summing up the intellectual origins of his federal ideas, then, we can see clearly that they were ‘rooted in English political culture’(33) and that these ideas were both preserved and woven into his overall political strategy, thereby confirming the links between the intellectual influences of the 1930s and 1940s and those of the 1980s. Through Spinelli British federal ideas have made a significant intellectual contribution to the unification of Europe in a curious and quite remarkable manner scarcely known outside of federalist circles. Spinelli’s federal political strategy developed directly from these intellectual influences. Having imbibed the ideas and values consonant with the English liberal political tradition so typical of the Federal Union, it comes as no surprise to learn that constitutional and judicial guarantees, parliamentary representation and institutional checks and balances lay at the heart of his conception of democracy. There was only one genuine form of democracy: Western liberal democracy.(34) Let us look briefly at how Spinelli’s political strategy was conceived and formulated. His approach to Europe was grounded in a number of basic assumptions and propositions. Confederations in his view possessed no political significance unless there

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existed within them a critical unifying force which could progressively erode the authority and gradually transfer to itself certain prerogatives of the member states, exercising them in the name of all. Since the European Community was already an institutional system with supranational features—administering particular policies in the name of all the member states—it had to be the starting point for the constitutional development of Europe. The Community, we are reminded, was the current expression of the European idea. It was only a milestone on the road towards closer union. Beginning with what had already been implemented Spinelli argued that the existing supranational institutions of the Community, linked to but separate from the member states, should be reinforced. The critical unifying force here was the federal force. It would develop gradually within the Community confederation, with the agreement of the member states, until it eventually transformed it into a federation. But in order for the unifying force to have the capacity to go beyond what existed it required institutional reform. The existing institutional framework effectively stifled the creative impetus to strengthen Europe. Without it the Community would not develop. This was why Spinelli claimed that institutional reform and progress towards European Union were ‘one and the same thing’.(35) How, then, did he expect member state governments to agree to far-reaching institutional reforms which would augment the as yet only fragile autonomous common centre? As we have already seen in Chapter Three, Spinelli believed in ‘crisis exploitation’ whereby ‘new moments of creative tension’ fostered an ephemeral collective European sentiment or political will. Such moments provided rare opportunities to advance the construction of Europe: Only in these moments of crisis do governments pay more attention to European-orientated proposals… sometimes they go beyond simple intergovernmental commitment and decide to create or reinforce some centre of common action to promote the realisation of the common task in the interest of all… The critical moments of high European tension for national governments never last very long…governments…withdraw more or less rapidly from the sphere of the European adventure into that of the national routine.(36) But if what emerged during the moment of creative tension did in some sense buttress the common centre then for a short time the European cause was not in the hands of national governments. Rather it depended upon ‘the vitality and solidity of the European sentiment which occurred briefly during the crisis’.(37) And Spinelli had detected several such moments of crisis in his own contributions to the academic literature on the Community’s political development.(38) We are now in a position more fully to appreciate the significance of Spinelli’s federalist initiative of 1980–1981. This investigation into the intellectual origins of his federal ideas and his subsequent political strategy enables us once more to place his contemporary actions in their proper perspective. We can also underline yet again the fundamental continuity of federal ideas, influences and strategies with which this book is concerned. Europe’s so-called federal phase did not end with the collapse of the EDC and the EPC. This is a typical intergovernmentalist perspective which ignores the persistence of federal ideas throughout the Community’s history. As Spinelli himself argued in The

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Eurocrats, the course of European political development has been, and continues to be, shaped and conditioned by a number of tendencies and approaches which ‘manifest themselves sometimes clearly, sometimes confusedly, sometimes as antagonistic, (and) sometimes allied. In any one historical moment a certain tendency has predominated but the other tendencies have never been completely absent. In every concrete step the presence of the other ideas has been felt, now as a restraining influence, now as an inspiration not yet translated into reality’.(39) The early 1980s, then, were clearly viewed as a ‘state of profound crisis’ for the Community and afforded an opportunity to be exploited while it lasted.(40) In a letter dated 25 June 1980 which was circulated to all MEPs Spinelli launched his initiative for European Union with the idea of the European Parliament assuming a constituent role as the legitimate voice of the people of Europe. He warned his colleagues that each intergovernmental solution to the Community’s major structural and resource problems had only ‘a temporary character’ and that its existing institutions, procedures and competences condemned it to ‘pass through more and more frequent paralysing crises’. In these circumstances the Parliament had to act and seek compromise in ‘a European perspective and not one that would be only the sum of the national ones’. Reform of the Community’s institutions was too serious to be left in the hands of statesmen and diplomats.(41) The letter outlined a lucid federalist strategy for proposing a new draft treaty for European Union which both modified and integrated the existing treaties and would be ratified by the national parliaments of the member states. The initial response must have been disappointing to Spinelli since only eight members of various political groups and nationalities responded but it marked the origins of a huge mobilisation of parliamentary support of European Union which culminated in the European Union Treaty (EUT) of 1984. Meeting in the Crocodile restaurant in Strasbourg on 9 July 1980 the nine MEPs agreed upon both the goal and the strategy required to achieve it. Subsequently it was decided to form a club in order to exert pressure in the respective transnational political groups and in the Assembly, and in this way the new Crocodile Club was founded, taking its name from the Strasbourg restaurant. In their work on ‘The Crocodile Initiative’. Rita Cardozo and Richard Corbett have already provided us with a detailed analysis of how the European Parliament set up the new Committee on Institutional Affairs which began work on the draft treaty in January 1982.(42) We shall not duplicate this work. It is sufficient for our purpose here to remind ourselves of the peculiar conjunction of circumstances and events which combined to exert pressure for both new and old attempts to flesh out the meaning of European Union so ambiguously enunciated in 1972. The European People’s Party (EPP) had also been active in their own ideological drive for a federal Europe and we shall look at their European ideas, influences and strategies in a separate section of this chapter. The evolution of European Union from 1982, however, was predominantly a struggle between federalism and intergovernmentalism. (d) The Commission-Parliament Dialogue It is commonplace today to accept that since the Luxembourg ‘agreement to disagree’ of 1966 the role of the European Commission has altered quite radically. Its primary

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institutional position as the motor of economic and political integration in the Community was torpedoed by De Gaulle. Since then its treaty-based role has remained intact only in theory. In practice it has adopted a much less ambitious and adventurous interpretation of its own role. Indeed its self-perception changed so quickly that already in 1969 David Coombes observed a significant deterioration in its contribution to European integration: it had substituted its political role as initiator and upholder of the common interest for that of administrator and mediator between member state governments.(43) By 1975 John Pinder was able to portray the Commission as just another influential Community actor akin to a member state government so radically had its position declined from being that of the fulcrum of European integration.(44) In the light of such a dramatic change in the Commission’s pivotal position in the Community’s institutional framework since the mid-1960s, what has been its overall role in the drive for European Union since 1972 and, more specifically, how did it respond to Spinelli’s federalist initiative in the European Parliament during the early 1980s? We have already examined in some detail the relationship between Spinelli, the Commission and the Tindemans Report of 1975 and we have discussed the relevance of the Spierenberg Report of 1979 and of the 30 May 1980 Mandate. The Commission’s role in these developments was that of buttressing the acquis communitaire while seeking ways and means of extending it, usually by putting pressure on member state governments to fulfil their treaty obligations. The Commission proposal to Tindemans, prompted by Spinelli, was probably exceptional in its conspicuous boldness. Apart from this it usually trod cautiously. The draft treaty on European Union sponsored by the Parliament in the early 1980s was a new departure and as such opened up a new perspective on CommissionParliament relations. What was the nature of this particular dialogue both in theory and practice? Let us look first at the Commission’s formal position before we investigate its practical support for the Parliament’s self-styled constituent role in the pursuit of European Union. In theory the Commission was compelled to strike a very delicate balance between three major considerations: its legitimate political interest in progress towards European Union; the fact that it itself was an institution of the Rome Treaty and was ipso facto confined by it; and, thirdly, that it remained both loyal and responsible to the collective interest of the ten member states comprising the Community. In short it could not allow itself to be manouevred into a position deemed divisive by the member state governments. This meant that in theory—and to some extent in practice—it adopted a low public profile on matters which fell outside the Treaty, while simultaneously seeking to defend the validity of the Community method in general. The Commission’s public strategy was therefore coloured by a certain inherent schizophrenia. It fell back repeatedly upon the 30 May Mandate which was solid ground but also voiced strong support for the Spinelli initiative in a discreet manner. Gaston Thorn, the President of the Commission during 1981–1985, outlined the institution’s official position in two main speeches before the Parliament.(45) Both he and the Dutch Commissioner, Frans Andriessen, urged the Parliament to maintain the momentum generated by Spinelli. Institutions, it is often said, have long memories but individuals do not. Thorn, however, was an exception to this platitude. He identified several of the political principles and ideas originally contained in the Commission’s own

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report on European Union in 1975 and summarised the Commission’s perspective in a memorable speech to the Parliament in September 1983: the Commission…is pleased to note that the approach that you have adopted is one of adhering to the Community patrimony and maintaining continuity in the process of building Europe… There has to be a clarity in reactions between the institutions. It is necessary to eliminate the ambiguity of roles which is currently causing us so many problems in inter-institutional relations; this is particularly important in the Community where we have no precedents, no frame of reference, so that we always have to innovate.(46) Andriessen too, was categorical in his favourable assessment of the Parliament’s selfstyled constituent role and of its institutional approach to European Union: As the Commission sees it, what we are concerned with…is…the renewal of a constitution, something that all democracies resort to at intervals…many speakers…have referred to a kind of tension, the tension between the development of policies to promote genuine integration, on the one hand, and the development of the institutional framework and the decision-making that is needed on the other. Some people have suggested that these two aspects conflict… I am convinced that there is no real conflict. Each aspect is an extension of the other, both should be developed simultaneously.(47) These two extracts from separate speeches in the Parliament underline the co-operative nature of the Commission-Parliament dialogue during the early 1980s. It is important to our overall survey to keep this in mind since the replacement of Thorn by Jacques Delors as Commission President in January 1985, together with Andriessen’s new responsibility for agriculture and fisheries in the new Commission, meant in practice less willingness to be so publicly well-disposed towards the Parliament’s draft treaty. That the Parliament welcomed Commission support seems obvious in retrospect but their relationship in the general pursuit of European Union was not as simple as might be expected. The Commission, it must be remembered, had a vested interest in institutional reform and could hardly allow itself to be pushed aside in the great constitutional debate. Thorn who had been openly appreciative of the Parliament’s project was especially aware of this. The danger of institutional emasculation was not overlooked: the Commission must continue to be the engine providing motive power to the Community and must not be reduced to executing legislative acts stemming from a variety of sources and motivations. Beware…the danger of excessive renationalisation of the right of initiative which the founding fathers saw as the exclusive preserve of the Community, not the Member States. And they did so for good reason: the European Community institution, or a Community institution, has to be the engine of the

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Community because otherwise too many engines in the future could mean no engine at all.(48) Clearly, whatever else was agreed on the institutional front, Thorn was determined to safeguard the Commission’s power of initiative. As we shall see he had only one major reservation when the Parliament’s outline draft treaty was eventually given more precise detail during 1984 but Commission support for the Parliament was not inevitable. The Commission, along with the other EC institutions, had to be consulted and its views accommodated before the Parliament’s draft treaty could be solidified. At this point in our discussion of Commission-Parliament relations it is convenient to look at the Commission’s position on European Union through a different prism than that of the Parliament’s general debates. Let us focus for the moment upon the Parliament’s Committee on Institutional Affairs which began its life in January 1982 and was responsible for drawing up the draft treaty subsequently endorsed by the Parliament in February 1984.(49) This committee, consistent with Spinelli’s federalist strategy and on which Spinelli himself sat as rapporteur, sounded out a variety of opinions upon European Union as it gradually pieced together the impressive document which emerged ultimately as the EUT. In April 1982 it interviewed Thorn and the series of questions and answers which were subsequently published in June 1982 reveal the Commission’s views upon Parliament’s intentions from an unusual angle. We shall look at just a few of these. Eight questions and answers have been selected for what they tell us about the views of Thorn and the Commission’s position on Europe’s future. 1. What kind of new treaty should be devised? Do we need a detailed or an outline treaty? Current discussions centre on a new constitution for Europe. I therefore feel that we need an outline treaty rather than a detailed one, since this would be more compatible with the Member States’ constitutions. There is no point in seeking to settle in detail the areas of competence, etc., of the Union. However, the treaty must of course be clear, which means that certain parts will have to be more detailed than others. I would in fact describe the existing EEC Treaty as an outline treaty, although certain provisions, such as the rules on the adoption of the budget, are extremely detailed. 2. Should the Commission become the government of the Union? This is a difficult and complex area. It is clear that the European Union will require a government and that, in order to operate smoothly, the Council will have to cede its right to exercise both executive and legislative power. Executive powers must be in the hands of the executive body. As regards the composition of the government, I feel that the Commission should be taken as a starting-point. In my view, an institution consisting of independent individuals rather than of ministers from the various Member States would be better suited to the requirements of a European Union. I feel that Parliament and the Member States, or preferably the Council, should have an equal say in the appointment of the members of the government. It is essential for the government to enjoy the support and confidence not only of the Council but also of the European Parliament. In any event, as soon as the government is set up it should come under the political control of Parliament, as the Commission does at present. It is

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the directly elected representatives of the citizens of Europe who should have the power to dismiss the government. 3. Should the President of the Commission be appointed and should he then choose his colleagues? I firmly believe that an appointed President should be assigned much wider powers than at present with regard to the choice of his colleagues. These powers would be vitally important in achieving the necessary cohesion within the Commission. As soon as the President is appointed by the European Parliament and the Council he should be entitled to form his team, which would then require the approval of the Council and Parliament. The President should not necessarily have unlimited freedom of choice. He could perhaps choose his colleagues from a list adopted by Parliament and the Council. 4. Should the role of the President of the Commission be modified? As I have already said, there must be greater cohesion within the Commission. One of the principal means of achieving this aim is to strengthen the position of its President. The political hierarchy must have a central point of genuine authority. The President’s position would be greatly strengthened if the ideas I have just outlined concerning his role in choosing the Members of the Commission could be implemented. It would also be useful to extend the President’s power with regard to the allocation of portfolios among the various Members of the Commission. 5. What should be the nature of the relation between the Commission and the European Parliament? The Commission should have close relations with Parliament, since it needs its support and confidence. A directly elected European Parliament can form a sound democratic basis for the Commission’s activities. As the situation now stands the Commission is already subject to political control by Parliament. Parliament’s right to censure the Commission inevitably makes the latter sensitive to Parliament’s opinions. However I believe that a further positive element could be added to relations between the Commission and Parliament by enabling the latter to be genuinely involved in the appointment of the Commission. May I add that in the institutional system which I favour for a European Union, that is, one in which decisions would be taken jointly by Parliament and the Council, it would be inadvisable for the Commission to be excessively dependent on Parliament. The Commission should act as an intermediary between Parliament and the Council. 6. If the Council fails to act, should the European Parliament have the power to do so in its place? I do not think it would be very realistic to adopt a system in which the European Parliament would be entitled to replace the Council where the latter failed to act. It would be difficult for this solution to work satisfactorily. Parliament’s action would in effect simply be a remedy for the Council’s failure to act and would therefore be of an ad hoc nature and unco-ordinated with the Council’s actions. This could well result in the Community acting inconsistently.

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As I said in my statement to your committee, my belief is that the best solution would be for the Council to act by majority vote in the context of a system of joint decisionmaking by Parliament and the Council. 7. Should Parliament be given the right to put forward new proposals? As Parliament is aware, the Commission attaches great importance to the power of initiative assigned to it by the Treaties. The Commission will therefore always be prepared as far as possible to take Parliament’s view into account in its proposals. As far as the future is concerned, it will of course be essential to consider whether this power of initiative should remain exclusively the Commission’s prerogative. If Parliament is also to have the right to initiate legislation, the question naturally arises as to whether the other arm of the legislative body, that is the Council, should also have this right. In my opinion it would be difficult to argue convincingly against granting the right of initiative to one of the arms of the legislative authority, since this would create an imbalance between them. It might therefore prove necessary also to give the Council a right of initiative. In any event, I believe that, strengthened by its permanent administrative structures and its executive power, the Commission will continue to play a vital role in the creation of Community law. 8. Is the Commission’s 1975 report on European Union still valid? Since the Commission drew up its report on European Union, in 1975, many things have happened in the Community. We have had the first direct elections to the European Parliament; the Community has been enlarged by the accession of Greece; the European Council is now firmly established, and political cooperation has progressed. These are just a few examples of what has happened. However, many of the ideas contained in the report could still form the basis for discussions with a view to drafting a new treaty for European Union. The report contains interesting proposals concerning the powers of the Union, for example with regard to economic and monetary affairs, foreign policy, defence and human rights. As regards the institutional structure of the Union, the report suggests a number of possibilities concerning the composition and appointment of the government and the composition and role of the ‘parliament of the’ Union. It also indicates how the role of the Court of Justice could be extended.(50) Thorn’s remarks about the Commission’s report of 1975 which had been submitted to Tindemans enables us to bring our discussion of the Commission-Parliament dialogue to a close by looking at Tindemans’ own views on European Union during the early 1980s. Seven years after the publication of the Tindemans Report the Committee on Institutional Affairs interviewed the Belgian Prime Minister during 28–29 April 1982, and were able to assess their own initiative in the light of the failure of 1975. Since Belgium occupied the Council Presidency Tindemans’ views were made strictly in a personal capacity. His views and opinions were candid but they did not augur well for the Parliament’s project. Acknowledging the need for European Union to be more urgent than ever, Tindemans nonetheless warned of the dangers which confronted the Parliament. He underlined the dissonance which existed between the Community institutions—comparing the Parliament’s enthusiasm with the scepticism manifested in the Council—and the serious

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obstacles to be encountered in several member states whenever institutional reform suggested modifications involving a loss of national sovereignty. European Union was presumed to be necessary but was it deemed to be feasible in 1982? Tindemans was far from sanguine about its prospects: to attempt in present circumstances to carry through a fairly radical transformation of the Treaties of Paris and Rome would be to risk landing in an impasse and even of finding the Community patrimony called into question… Nothing in my opinion would do more harm than to propose a new treaty which might well be rejected by two, three or four of our national parliaments. It would be a kind of repetition, only worse, of the failure of the European Defence Community (1954).(51) But he did not want to appear defeatist. The Parliament had an important role to play in changing the political atmosphere. It could be the catalyst required to mobilise public opinion in the member state countries, and through it the governments themselves, to give a new momentum to the building of Europe: I think this determination to advance is still the essential basis for any endeavour and here Parliament can—and must—set the tone… Can we expect a new ‘Messina’?…before one can introduce modifications to the Treaty or a new treaty these texts must naturally have received the approval of all the national parliaments and I have already told you that the climate is very unfavourable at present…no new Messina will be possible without clear indications…as to the direction one might move in and it is precisely the European Parliament that could give these indications through the proposals you endorse and the texts you have drawn up…a Messina…would be possible only if the European Parliament helps to bring it about through ideas put forward by a large majority of your members.(52) Tindemans’ message was clear. He personally supported the idea of Parliament approving a draft constitution but he was certain that it had no chance whatsoever of being accepted in the prevailing circumstances of 1982. It was up to the Parliament to educate public opinion and to solicit the crucial support of the national parliaments without which progress would be insignificant. But in its priority given to the institutional approach to European Union Tindemans concurred: ‘as a result of my experience and my contacts with Jean Monnet I have become an ‘institutionalist’…the essential requirement, if problems are to be surmounted, is sound institutions’.(53) The two faces of federalism continued to haunt the general debate about political strategy during the 1980s. Summing up our discussion of the Commission-Parliament dialogue in this period what conclusions can be drawn from their relationship concerning European Union? Here there are some important points to underline. Neither the Committee on Institutional Affairs nor the Parliament as a whole wished to involve the Commission at all in the project of a new draft treaty. The Commission could have been expected to be in broad agreement with the Parliament’s project but without descending from the general

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principle to the particular details of the treaty. What began with Spinelli and gradually became the property of the Parliament as a whole was, after all, the Parliament’s conception of European Union. It was not the Commission’s initiative. Thorn, as we shall see, had one major reservation about the Parliament’s draft treaty but the treaty itself was never thoroughly discussed clause by clause by the Commission. Certainly one or two key clauses were the subject of some investigation, especially by Thorn himself, but the Commission as a body never adopted an official position on the text during 1983. We should emphasise, however, that there were a series of unofficial, off-the-record meetings between certain Commission officials in the Legal Service and those lawyers responsible for drafting the Parliament’s treaty in order to obviate ambiguities of interpretation. This should not surprise us but it remains understandably unacknowledged. We should also underline here the active roles played by Thorn and Andriessen for the Commission. Thorn used his position as President to encourage and exhort the Parliament in its quest while Andriessen gradually built up a reputation for single-minded persistence in advocating institutional reform. Some regarded him as an active federalist and his own willingness to be associated publicly with European Union sustained this image.(54) In general, then, the Commission-Parliament dialogue on European Union certainly existed but it was handled cautiously by both institutions. The relationship was officially tentative while in practice being comfortable. Mutual recognition of each other’s sensitivities lubricated the relationship and ensured that the politics of compromise and accommodation prevailed when it came to translating ideas and principles into the solid details of a treaty. We shall look more closely at the EUT but for the moment let us focus upon federalism in the European Parliament from a standpoint very different from that of Spinelli. His was not the only federalist perspective in the Parliament. We will examine two distinctive political strands of European Conservatism in the European Parliament in order principally to widen and enrich our understanding of the federal tradition in pursuit of European Union. (e) Federalism in the European Parliament: The Convergence of the British and European Conservative Traditions. Our purpose here is to analyse and compare two distinct political strands of European Conservatism in the Parliament as they relate to federalism and European Union. In the history of the struggle to achieve European Union during 1972–1987 we have emphasised the crucial role of Spinelli in arriving finally at the EUT. But it is important to recognise that Spinelli was not alone in his genuine desire to revitalise the Community in the 1980s. Nor were his federalist predilections the only ones to serve as the mainspring of contemporary proposals for institutional reform. Spinelli’s own role during 1980–1984 was of course pivotal but he could not have encapsulated European Union in a treaty without the vital parliamentary support of the two leading traditions of European Conservatism: the European People’s Party (EPP) and the European Democrat Group (EDG). Between 1979 and 1984 these two sources of support could muster a total of 169 MEPs from a Parliament of 410 members. Between them, then, they controlled 41% of the total vote - crucial if the EUT was to succeed.(55)

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It is worth pointing out here that the EPP had already taken the lead in September 1979 in tabling a motion in the Parliament, by Jochen Van Aerssen on ‘the extension of the legal bases of the Community’ which proposed to supplement the existing treaties with a new treaty.(56) Among their concerns were: a charter of human rights; a framework for European Political Co-operation; new electoral guidelines for the Parliament; the strengthening of the Parliament’s position in appointments to the Commission and the Court of Justice, the conciliation procedure with the Council and the ratification of treaties; and the modification of the Community’s functions according to the principle of subsidiarity. We shall have more to say about the subsidiarity principle later in this discussion. The important point here is the EPP’s own self-perception of its federalist role. It had serious reservations, for example, in supporting Spinelli’s Crocodile initiative in 1980 ‘considering that in matters of federalist initiative and orthodoxy it had greater seniority and continuity of thought than any other political group’.(57) Indeed no better example of the EPP’s federalist credentials—and of its determination not to be upstaged by Spinelli during these years—can be shown than the motion for a resolution, put forward by Sjouke Jonker, on the draft treaty on the first stage in the implementation of European Union. Known as the Jonker proposal of 12 February 1982, it advocated a ‘federal-type constitution by stages’ and although never seriously entertained as a practical proposal by the Committee on Institutional Affairs nonetheless reminded the Parliament of the EPP’s own federal patent.(58) The importance of these two European Conservative traditions to European Union was not, then, confined to their numbers. The EPP, in particular, had its own peculiar ideas about European Union and could draw upon a long intellectual and philosophical tradition about the unity of Europe. So, too, with the EDG. Dominated by British Conservatives it increasingly showed itself to be both progressive and imaginative when tackling the thorny issue of institutional reform. Neither body was prepared to genuflect unquestioningly to Spinelli’s desires and, indeed, both groups were intermittent rivals vis a vis Spinelli’s federalist conception of Europe. In view of their important position in the European Parliament as regards their numerical size, political ideas, and particular inputs into the EUT, let us now turn our attentions to the EPP and EDG respectively in order to examine their principal ideological and philosophical bases together with their overall strategies and goals related to European Union during 1981–1984. Two Traditions of European Conservatism A Preliminary Caution In the preface to his The Christian Democratic Parties of Western Europe, R.E.M. Irving remarked upon the paucity of literature (especially in English) dealing with Christian Democratic movements in Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands and upon the sparse nature of research on Christian Democracy ‘at the level of the European Community’.(59) Since 1979 this lacuna in the literature has been partially—but only partially - filled by a number of scholarly monographs which have included analyses both of Christian Democracy and European Conservatism as part of wider studies on transnational party organisation and co-operation in the European Parliament.(60) The bulk of the research,

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however, has tended to concentrate upon the origins and development of the party federations, their organisational links and their programmatic policy disputes and differences. The issues of party strategy and especially ideological/philosophical design related to European integration appear to have been the subject of detailed research only by G. Pridham in his Transnational Party Co-operation and European Integration first published in 1981.(61) Thus Irving’s original lament of 1979 has not been satisfactorily assuaged. Subsequent publications have persisted in looking at precisely the same topics already identified above. Taking these points into account, we do not intend to traverse the same territory in this discussion. Instead our purpose is threefold: to underline the ideological/philosophical bases of the EPP and the EDG as they relate to European integration; to link these bases to party/group strategy; and, finally, to illuminate the existence of a convergence of the two separate political traditions on the question of European Union. The European People’s Party Subtitled the ‘Federation of Christian Democratic Parties of the European Community’, the EPP has an unequivocal commitment to a federal Europe. Formed in April 1976 after a series of inter-party differences over organisation strategy and membership, the EPP sees itself as a genuinely ‘integrative’ European transnational party federation. As Pridham has already remarked, ‘the conscious choice of the term ‘party’ in the name EPP does…indicate a pretension or future potential rather than the present reality’, but ‘the very use of the word in this European context reflects the much looser Christian Democratic concept of what a political party entails’.(62) The continuing reality seems to be that the EPP’s parliamentary group in the Parliament—the Christian Democrats— dominate the working of the federation and have, by virtue of their own internal organisation and frequency of contact, developed into ‘an initiating organ’.(63) Irving may still be correct to state that the EPP is ‘more a federation of parties than a unified party’,(64) but there is general agreement among scholars that its future is intimately bound up with the future of the Parliament and, ultimately, of the European Community itself. Since the EPP, and in particular the Christian Democrat Group in the Parliament, have a well-known reputation for their long-standing and enthusiastic ideological commitment to European integration, it is important to sketch out the particular contours of this ideology in view of its peculiar conception of what constitutes European Union. The party statutes are remarkably lucid about the future of Europe but we also need to probe into their ideological and philosophical origins and assumptions if we are more fully to understand what amounts to an organic view of European society. Moreover, the Christian conception of Europe is not restricted to the European Community alone. As the EPP Group Secretariat put it, ‘we are only the onset for Europe…those people which are at present separated from us by military force also belong to Europe…the final aim of any European policy worthy of the name must be to achieve the peaceful reunification of Europe’.(65) In such terms is the military reality of 1945 clearly repudiated and the underlying social, economic and cultural identity of European history asserted in the face of political division. The current political divide is to be overcome in a fashion boldly stated in the overriding raison d’etre of the party’s statute: ‘We are firmly committed to the final

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political objective of European unification, that is the transformation of the European Union into a unique European Federation’. But the essentially Christian-based nature of this goal transcends even Europe and searches for peace, freedom and justice via movement towards a world order which is grounded in fundamental principles characteristically Christian Democratic: pluralism, personalism, solidarism and subsidiarity. These principles, taken together, yield a particular brand of European federalism whose ideological roots lie deep within Catholic social theory. Without wishing to enter the now somewhat sterile debate about whether or not these Christian Democratic principles amount to a solid, distinctive political ideology, it is clear that they underscore certain political and philosophical ideas which, if sometimes wide-ranging and imprecise, are none the less sufficiently developed to have an individual identity. In his classic work on Christian Democracy in Western Europe, 1820–1953, M.P.Fogarty observed that the essence of Christian Democracy was its catholicity: Christian Democrats were ‘trying to create a broad synthesis incorporating and bringing into perspective elements which tend…to be one-sidedly emphasised in the traditions of conservatism or liberalism or socialism; together with certain other federalist or pluralist ideas which are the characteristic contribution of the Christian social movement itself. It is this catholic, synthetic view which makes the Christian Democratic parties…tend to appear at or about the centre of the political stage’.(66) While observing that this synthesis ‘does not amount to a sufficiently precise corpus of doctrine for it to be appropriate to refer to Christian Democratic ideology’, Irving does concede (one senses reluctantly) that there are ‘certain common ideas and principles which amount to a solid corpus of Christian Democratic theory’(67) sufficient to distinguish it from socialism and conservatism. Given that European Christian Democracy may be suspect from the standpoint of its ideological promiscuity, what implications do these common ideas and principles have in terms of European Union? Elevated to the international and supranational levels, what is specific to the Christian Democratic conception of ‘closer union’? The Christian Democratic notion of a federal Europe is rooted in a peculiarly catholic view of organic society given particular ecclesiastical authority in the papal encyclicals of Rerum Novarum (1891), Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and Pacem in Terris (1963).(68) Together these doctrinal pronouncements constitute a philosophy of man and society in which federalism is located as a central organising principle of society ranging from association between individuals to that between distinct social groups. In this view association is the first principle of federalism. It extends beyond federation between states to become a basic concept of social life and in consequence of man himself. Hence the Christian Democratic goal of a federal Europe suggests that the federal principle thus conceived must be firmly woven into the institutional fabric of the European Community. Personalism, solidarism and subsidiarity are each bound up with the Christian concept of man and they coalesce in the pluralist form of political organisation. The personalist doctrine, arising out of catholic principles of divine and natural law, came in the twentieth century to be linked with democratic values which rejected the liberal theory of individualism. Attacking the ‘atomisation’ alleged to be implicit in liberal individualism it stressed instead the idea of man as a spiritual being capable of initiative, decision and responsibility with a personal life which exceeded in value all the material universe. Thus the organisation of social, economic and political life must be structured so that man may

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freely develop as a person, both spiritually and morally. Solidarism, or mutualism as it is sometimes called, was conceived as the democratic and Christian alternative to socialism and fascism on the one hand and liberal individualism on the other. It suggests that coordination both in society and in the political system should be achieved by individual and group acquiescence on the basis of a mutual recognition of the interdependence of human life. Both personalism and solidarism imply co-ordination and acquiescence in the ‘common good’; man is a social being who seeks a human order in which the various dimensions of his personality are firmly integrated into society while retaining their vitality and initiative.(69) Subsidiarity fits logically into this scheme of things. It is a principle of natural justice concerning primarily social relationships which must be protected against encroachment of the modern state. Pope Pius XI provided the clearest explanation of the idea in Quadragesimo Anno: It is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and industry. So, too it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and a disturbance of right order, to transfer to the larger and higher collectivity functions which can be performed and provided for by lesser and subordinate bodies. In as much as every social activity should, by its very nature, prove a help to members of the body social, it should never destroy or absorb them.(70) The Christian Democratic conception of federalism demands that this principle be applied to the entire social order. It regards excessive state interference in the social domain as an offence against natural justice which can lead only to the stunting of men’s personal lives by denuding them of their responsibilities and inhibiting their spiritual expansion. In Pacem in Terris, however, this principle was elevated to the discussion of international relations and world order. The catholic conception of the world community—having as its fundamental objective ‘the recognition, respect, safeguarding and promotion of the rights of the human person’—requires that modern states acknowledge their interdependence in solving major problems. The principles of subsidiarity applied to relations between the world community and modern states is expressed thus: The public authority of the world community is not intended to limit the sphere of action of the public authority of the individual political community, much less take its place. On the contrary, its purpose is to create, on a world basis, an environment in which the public authorities of each political community, its citizens and intermediate associations, can carry out their tasks, fufill their duties and exercise their rights with greater security.(71) It is clear from our brief examination of the political ideas of Christian Democracy that they predispose towards an essentially pluralist approach to power and authority. Man is

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a member of certain natural groups—the family, the profession, the commune, the region—which are natural law entities whose autonomy should be protected by the state. Since the main danger in modern society is defined as the development of an all-powerful state, Christian Democracy favours the dispersion of power both territorially and functionally. The idea of federation thus emerges as a political order which seeks to accommodate the greatest possible number of communities and societies, primary and intermediate, without destroying them. It is a living, pluralist, organic order which builds itself from the ground upwards, constructing its tiers of authority and decision-making according to the principle of subsidiarity. We can see from this short resume of Christian Democratic social and political thought that the concept of federalism is both multi-dimensional and organic. It is rooted in Catholic social theory which gives it a profoundly unique and distinctive character. In order for these basic social values, beliefs and perceptions to be promoted, sustained and preserved in the context of European Union, then, it is hardly surprising to discover that the EPP’s own particular interpretation of European Union is categorically federal. A European federation is the only answer to Europe’s problems. Only a European federal state can logically satisfy the requirements of the social order described above. Thus the European Union Treaty (EUT) which was endorsed by the European Parliament in 1984 represented for the EPP only an intermediate goal, albeit one which they supported unanimously as a transnational party federation. Their ultimate objective remains a federal Europe. Indeed, the EPP was not reticent in its efforts to pressurise the Committee on Institutional Affairs of the European Parliament to discuss a genuine draft constitution for a federal Europe. The EPP’s strategy in pursuing this line of attack, however, was somewhat puzzling. They appeared to be concerned at Spinelli’s ability personally to monopolise the cause of European Union and they were clearly keen to keep the federal cause before the public eye. Doubtless personal rivalries and the EPP’s awareness of its own pro-integrationist heritage and reputation also help us to understand its political strategy. But whatever conclusions we draw from its activities, there is no doubt the EPP was and continues to be the mainstay of the federal cause in the European Parliament, combining as it does a uniquely Christian Democratic conception of the European state and society. The European Democratic Group The EDG is literally what the name implies: a group. It emerged in July 1979, after the first direct elections to the European Parliament from a mixture of motives—ideological, historical, organisational and strategic—and has been dominated numerically by the British Conservatives.(72) Leaving aside the complexities of its origins it is clear that the EDG has never had what Pridham called a ‘party-political integrative purpose’(73) and it has never aspired to the grand vision of a federal Europe which continues to motivate the EPP. In line with what would conventionally be described as a pragmatic support for democratic institutions in Europe, the British Conservatives in the European Parliament have never developed an overtly ‘ideological position on European Union’. There is no organic concept of the European state and society. What, then, are the underlying principles and motives of British Conservatism which continue to determine the bases of support for closer European integration?

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There is general agreement in the mainstream literature of English Conservatism that it eschews ‘ideology’.(74) In the words of Ian Gilmour, echoing the consistent scepticism of David Hume, as regards philosophy or doctrine ‘the wise Conservative travels light: Conservatism is concerned with people not abstractions, with issues not ideologies’.(75) This does not mean that Conservatism must be impoverished by the epithet ‘pragmatic’, as if it had no central unifying principles to explain its outlook and behaviour. It merely means that Conservatism is not an ideology whose precepts can be embodied in a sequence of syllogisms and which constitutes a programme for political action. It deals, according to this view, not in abstract ideas but in concrete historical facts; it is grounded in experience. Without wishing to enter the debate about Conservative epistemology let us take the core values identified by Robert Jackson in his Tradition and Reality: Conservative Philosophy and European Integration as our framework of analysis. These are tradition, organicism, political scepticism and realism.(76) Together these central values produce what has been commonly alluded to as the philosophy or politics of imperfection.(77) There is no grand design. Conservatism of the Anglo-Saxon kind differs in several important respects from its continental European counterpart. Bearing in mind our sketch outline of Christian Democratic political ideas, Jackson’s contrast with Anglo-Saxon Conservatism is particularly telling: Tories look at the state and the phenomenon of nationality with none of the metaphysical preconceptions which characterise the other Western political philosophies. They may be, and usually are, Christians: but their Conservatism does not necessarily derive from their Christian belief, and sometimes sits uneasily with it. Conservatives have no principled belief in individual freedom, in utility, in the role of the state as an agent or vehicle of the historical process, in human rights, in natural law, in reason, or even in the Divine Dispensation. Indeed their thinkers have often contested these ideas on the philosophical level and their statesmen have sometimes acted in contradiction of them.(78) Tradition and organicism are tied inextricably to the idea of the accumulated experience and wisdom of human development and to respect for history. Their organicism is not the heady Christian mixture centred upon the human ‘person’ and derived from reason and natural law. Rather it exists in the Burkean notion of prejudice and prescription: opinions which have stood the test of time are preferable to abstract thought and politics should be founded upon what is known rather than unknown. Hence social and political institutions are the product of a very long process of custom, practice, tradition and formal enactment, and the state and society are based upon a slow and gradual accumulation of rules and precedents built up through centuries of experience. But this received wisdom and inherited practice does not counsel against change. Quite the reverse. In a famous sentence which Burke wrote in the Reflections: ‘a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation’. Continuity can be preserved only via evolutionary change and Conservatives will reappraise established practices in the light of new conditions, thus enabling them to retain what is worth preserving. Political scepticism emanates from the fear of abstractions which are deemed rootless and

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consequently dangerous. Conservatism conceives men to be both morally and intellectually imperfect—they are incapable of achieving perfection. Thus the accumulated weight of history, the lived experience of human development, cannot be either rivalled or surpassed by the thought or the efforts of any one generation or of any individual thinker teasing out the logic of some abstract principle. This can be summarised in the idea that there is a special virtue in existing institutions simply because they already exist. The realism element in Conservative thinking which both buttresses and emerges from tradition, organicism and political scepticism—especially as regards Community membership—is its concept of national interest. British Conservatism construes Community politics in terms of furthering the national interest in a manner far removed from European Christian Democracy. It can reconcile Community membership with the national interest by the realistic appreciation that as a member Britain can influence it whereas outside of the Community we would have been influenced by it. The reality of power and influence means more than abstract speculation. European decisions would still have determined the framework within which Britain exercised her formal parliamentary sovereignty. Given these core values which infuse British Conservatism, how far can the reverence for tradition, the commitment to organic continuity, the robust scepticism about human aspirations and contrivances and the politics of realism be congruent with the unremitting drive for an ‘ever closer union of the European peoples’? What was and remains the position of the EDG on European Union in the 1980s? The academic answer is simple: it will react and respond in a characteristically cautious, sceptical and defensive manner, resting its case, as Jackson observed, ‘on realism and respect for the accomplished facts that the European Community exists and that Britain has been part of it for more than ten years’.(79) This is, or seems to be, a much less overtly ideological posture regarding Europe than that of Christian Democracy. Indeed, it might even be argued that British Conservatism has only a very opaque conception of what constitutes Europe in the 1980s and a particularly cloudy view of its future which borders on the amorphous. From a policy standpoint this explains why Britain will always be, along with the Danish, the slowest of ships in the convoy of European integration. There is, unlike the Christian Democrats, no overarching conception of what Europe is or should be. The integrationist spirit which gives meaning to the ‘ever closer union’ appears conspicuously absent. European Union is merely a nebulous phrase. In the words of the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, it was nothing more than ‘continental rhetoric’. But was it? Robert Jackson did not take such a cursorily dismissive view of the capacity of British Conservatism to accommodate the goals and practices which Community membership implied. His own view was that the British identity was not at risk in Europe because Europe did not touch those immanent, deep-rooted sinews of culture upon which identity depends. According to this view, it is a fundamental error to regard the sense of identity of a people as contingent upon the exclusiveness or particularity of their political institutions. In short, cultural foundations go deeper than those of the political order which encapsulates them. Jackson was thus able to argue that the British Conservatives in the European Parliament viewed the Community merely as a larger and wider institutional context within which to place British interests. He justified the peculiarly Conservative commitment to Europe thus:

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Europe involves a choice between or within national traditions—between asserting the insular and exclusive elements in British institutions and ways of doing things, and those elements in the national tradition which look outward to what we share in the ideas, values and practices of our Continental neighbours. Novelty and some discontinuity is not so remarkable because the new elements we are assimilating derive from the larger organism of Western civilisation of which the life of our own nation forms a part… What seems to be at stake in Europe is, rather, the formation and deliberate fostering of a new dimension-the European dimension—in the continuing identity of the various European patriotism to our established patriotism of nationality and locality. And no people in Europe should find this process easier to recognise than the British.(80) In such reassuring language of political assimilation, accommodation and continuity did Jackson posit the case for reconciling British Conservative values with the ideals and principles embedded in the Treaty of Rome. And this apologia had important implications for Conservative strategy regarding Europe. It meant that Conservatism should not imagine federalist conspiracies where they did not exist. Rather it suggested that the Conservative approach regarding European Union had to be one of trying to work out, with due caution, what political institutions were required in the Community in practical terms to perform the tasks which they deemed both necessary and desirable. The real issue was that of effectiveness in realising agreed purposes. If this implied more majority voting in the Council of Ministers then so be it. Conservatives should not entertain theoretical objections to this on grounds of a narrow, outmoded concept of national sovereignty. As the EC expanded and developed, new experiences would shape new values formed on a European basis and would increasingly modify the perspectives inherited from the national past—a process of synthesising similar viewpoints arising out of new, shared historical experiences. The way was thus open for a growing accommodation of ideological differences. British Conservatism may indeed have constituted a tradition separate and distinct from Christian Democracy in Europe but if conflicts of national and sectional interest were to become increasingly entangled in conflicts of political values then the basis for a strengthening of ideological affinities and the likelihood of a greater ideological convergence among and between party groups seemed promising. In this light European Union may certainly be viewed as an issue which had just such an impact upon the EDG and the EPP. Conclusion: A Convergence of Two Political Traditions In suggesting that there was a discernible convergence of opinion and behaviour between the two distinct traditions of Conservatism in the European Parliament on the question of federalism and European Union we do not wish to exaggerate the extent to which British Conservatism has been, as it were, converted to the federalist ideal. European Christian Democracy has a solid cultural—ideological basis in federalism which British Conservatism could never match. However, there is no doubt—as we have already demonstrated—that the EUT has been federal both in inspiration and to some extent in

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practice. British federalist ideas have been woven into the fabric of European Union to a degree largely unnoticed and British Conservative MEPs have been remarkably consistent in their support for the EUT. For example, in the debate on the Croux Report in April 1985, which urged the European Parliament to pressurise the European Council to convene an inter-governmental conference on the basis of the EUT, 29 British Conservatives supported the resolution with 5 abstentions and only 3 opposed. British Conservative MEPs were noticeably progressive and forthcoming in their advocacy of the EUT and the core body of Conservative ‘pro-Europeans’ who regularly voiced support for Spinelli’s initiative comprised at least 15 MEPs by 1984. Some, like Christopher Jackson and William Newton Dunn, remain self-confessed federalists although they were somewhat careful about the company in which they accepted this label. Many would call themselves federalists today if only because they believe that Europe is already on that road.(81) The tiny number of Danish Conservatives, although committed to European Union in their party manifesto, were markedly reticent about the EUT. According to Claus Toksvig, the EDG was split three ways on European Union: the committed federalists; the ‘middle-of-the-roaders’; and the out-and-out Little Englanders. The Danes putthemselves in the second category and reputedly have to be ‘dragged by the hair’ on the question of the European Union.(82) They wanted to take small steps to strengthen the Treaty of Rome but were openly opposed to the EUT chiefly because of their domestic position with the Danish electorate. Unlike the British Conservatives in the European Parliament, the four Danish Conservatives were very close to the Danish Conservative domestic view on European Union. Both federalism and European Union, then, were instrumental in the visible convergence of the EPP and the EDG in the European Parliament. But what long term significance could be attached to this particular convergence? Jackson, not surprisingly, detected a reason for optimism on this question: The historical experiences which have moulded Conservatism in Britain are not, in fact, so very different from those which have formed the parties of the moderate right on the Continent. The deposit of established institutions, traditions and customs which Toryism seeks to safeguard in Britain is not dissimilar from those which attract conservative sentiment elsewhere in Western Europe. Toryism will not take to itself an idea of the kind of abstract, theoretical grounds which constitute so large a part of other political philosophies. But it is a matter of fact that ideas deriving from such grounds have entered into the lives of the British people, giving rise to habits, customs, traditions, ways of thinking and acting which the Tory cherishes and will seek to preserve… Christain ideas of natural law and human rights, liberal concepts of individualism, utility and democracy have all contributed to forming that order whose stability, continuity and organic development the British Tory is concerned to safeguard.(83) This perspective, then, acknowledges the continued existence of two quite distinct traditions of European Conservatism but envisages a growing ideological convergence arising out of an incipient European politics. As the political life of the Community

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develops and deepens towards the end of the twentieth century so the emergent European value system will increasingly encourage and sustain a sharper ideological focus drawing European Conservatives together in an elevated institutional context with shared historical experiences. The EDG, and its new Spanish allies, may continue along the federal road to European Union in the late twentieth century with an ever stronger sense that its piecemeal progress and cautious optimism are comfortably consonant with the incoming federal tide of European history. Having looked at the congested contextual background of the years between 1980 and 1984 against which we have set the emergence of the EUT, it is now time to devote some attention to the Parliament’s treaty in order once again to underline the continuity of federal ideas, influences and strategies in the search for Europe’s future. (f) The European Union Treaty, 1984 We have now arrived at the destination of Spinelli’s long journey dating back at least to the early attempts to establish the EDC and the EPC in 1953. Given the many compromises which he made, the EUT was certainly not his own ideal model for Europe nor was it intended to be the final goal of European unification. But it was probably the best achievement which he could have secured given the circumstances of the 1980s. We shall not enter into a detailed discussion of every clause in the new treaty. Recent research has already been published which satisfies this requirement.(84) Instead we will concentrate our attentions upon the federalist ideas and influences which permeated both the letter and the spirit of the Parliament’s text. First, however, it is appropriate to return to the role of Spinelli in mobilising a large parliamentary support for what was tantamount to yet another of those federalist initiatives in post-war European political development. It is important to distinguish between the EUT itself and the political environment out of which it emerged. The political weight which was accorded the new treaty can be attributed to Spinelli. It was his single-minded determination and clarity of purpose which laid down the formula which should be the basis for future action. Earlier efforts by the Parliament and the Commission had encapsulated the goal of European Union but had never spelled out both a clear, purposive strategy and an end to be attained. Spinelli had the purpose, the energy, the strategy, and the breadth of vision necessary to push the Parliament towards a new treaty, via the various resolutions required to achieve it during 1981–1983. His own personal charisma, influence and reputation both within and without the Parliament enabled him to gather widespread support for the project which initially did not look promising in the prevailing circumstances of the early 1980s. This particular role which he played was vital and cannot be exaggerated. And in this sense his contribution to the movement for European Union was more important than the actual imprint which he stamped upon the content of the EUT itself. It was much easier to persuade the Parliament to agree to the general principle of European Union than it was to obtain a majority in support of a specific treaty. This was Spinelli’s great achievement and it enabled the Parliament to travel a long way in a short time. From a minority position and stigmatised by some as having the Communist label, Spinelli had to convince parliamentary opinion to overcome its reluctance to commit

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itself to a formal treaty. This was a formidable task. It was not like seeking to obtain support for human rights in Afghanistan or Nicaragua but of mobilising a majority in favour of a particular concept of European integration which was simultaneously competing with the Parliament’s more familiar strategy of ‘small steps’ towards European Union. The agenda for institutional reform was already crowded. Parliamentary opinion concerning a new treaty was at best lukewarm. Spinelli had to put enormous physical and intellectual weight into uniting MEPs behind the treaty. Once this decisive momentum had been achieved and the project kept in the public limelight, of course, parliamentarians gradually began to accept responsibility for it and incorporate it in public debate over a period of time. The longer it was debated the more it acquired a dynamic of its own and correspondingly the less the enterprise needed Spinelli. Without wishing to labour the point it is worth underlining the parliamentary context in which Spinelli struggled to mobilise support. We have already noted how far his federalist reputation generated stiff competition from within the ranks of the EPP. It has to be emphasised categorically that he encountered a rivalry rooted in jealousy from several quarters—jealousy of his impeccable federalist credentials, of his capacity successfully to convince and persuade people and of his personal contacts. Few MEPs, after all, possessed the esteem which he had, for example, to extract a personal reply of substance from President Mitterrand. It would probably be an exaggeration to suggest that such rivalries actually stretched to sabotage but their existence hardly smoothed his own path towards European Union. A good example of the unremitting presence of alternative ideas and strategies was the model constitution proposed by the EPP which envisaged the Community of Ten transformed into a federal state. Dated 13 September 1983 this draft constitution was timed to coincide with the Parliament’s vote on the substance of the preliminary draft treaty emanating from the Committee on Institutional Affairs.(85) Tabled by two West German Christian Democrats, Rudolf Luster and Gero Pfennig, the authors of the new constitution for Europe denied that theirs was a counterproposal to the work of the Committee on Institutional Affairs. They presented it as a useful model which indicated the form that the final objective of European Union might take. It was to be viewed as a contribution by the EPP which would provide criteria establishing at each stage whether the EUT was along the right lines. This meant that the yardstick by which the EUT should be judged was a federation. It remains difficult, in hindsight, to regard this EPP initiative so late in the day as anything other than mischief. The bulk of the work on the draft treaty had already been completed. Pending the necessary parliamentary majority all that was required was a final text to be drawn up in legal form by the four lawyers appointed by the Parliament. A generous interpretation of the EPP’s motives would emphasise their own dissatisfaction with the EUT and their legitimate concern to ensure that certain key matters were not omitted from the final text. There was some basis for this argument. When the draft treaty was formally adopted by the Parliament on 14 February 1984 (237 votes in favour, 31 against and 43 abstentions) several criticisms of its content were made by EPP members. And it is significant that in the Luster/Pfennig proposal cited above there had been a whole section devoted to listing basic human rights and freedoms—something absent from the EUT.(86) Leaving this aside, it none the less has to be said that the EPP did to some extent hamper the work of the Committee on Institutional Affairs. Ortensio Zecchino, the EPP rapporteur responsible for institutional aspects of the EUT in the

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Committee on Institutional Affairs, was particularly troublesome in his eccentric insistence upon floating new proposals and using overtly federalist rhetoric which were too ambitious and divisive. The Italian lawyer and university professor even managed to exasperate Spinelli who regarded his temporary absence from the committee during the final voting on institutions as ‘divine intervention’ in their favour.(87) Zecchino’s ideas and the Luster/ Pfennig model constitution both serve to illustrate once again the continuity and resilience of federalism in the drive for European Union but they also underline the distinction between what was desirable and what was feasible. Federalists were sometimes too detailed when it paid to be general and too vague when clarity was necessary. It was to Spinelli’s credit that he understood perfectly the delicate relationship between these two conflicting imperatives. What, then, should we say about the EUT itself? In what sense did it incorporate federalist ideas and influences? The EUT which Parliament adopted in February 1984 was carefully constructed upon the existing Community apparatus. It was built upon the acquis communitaire, thus respecting the legal and political continuity between the existing treaties and the new Union. Nowhere did controversial terms like ‘Federation’ or ‘European Government’ appear in the text. Not only was the Community patrimony accepted as the starting point for the Union—beginning, as Spinelli had always said, with what had already been implemented—but the same institutions were the basis of the EUT. Institutional continuity was therefore also deliberately preserved. The EUT took the form of an international treaty which required ratification by the appropriate constitutional authorities within the member states. Spinelli devised an ingenious means by which to prevent national elites from grasping the treaty first and watering it down to insignificant proportions. Avoiding the conventional use of Article 236 of the Rome Treaty which would have placed the EUT’s destiny in the hands of the customary guardians of national sovereignty, Spinelli prolonged the possibilities of the new treaty’s survival with the intention that it would be carried along by the momentum of a majority of member states unhindered by minority opposition. In short his strategy centred upon the ability to give clear expression to the will of the majority. Here the unanimity required by Article 236, effectively giving any single member state the power to veto the project and bring the whole enterprise to a halt, was circumvented and replaced by a majoritarian formula enabling the EUT journey to proceed by overcoming the usual obstacles inherent in narrow national perspectives. This federalist strategy, consistent throughout Spinelli’s long career, raised more than a few legal eyebrows and provided fertile ground for a number of labyrinthine legal arguments and interpretations.(88) The preamble and the 87 articles of the EUT, for the first time, were to encapsulate that hitherto elusive common European political will which had been only intermittently present during the previous forty years of the European construction. In order for future progress to be guaranteed the EUT altered the institutional balance of the Community by revising the competences in particular of the Commission, Parliament, European Council and Council of Ministers. Crucial to these changes, however, was the inclusion of the key principle of subsidiarity which we have already examined in this chapter. Despite its origins in Catholic social theory and Spinelli’s own personal indifference to the use of the term itself, ‘subsidiarity’ was incorporated in the EUT at the initiative and insistence of Christopher Jackson, British Conservative MEP for Kent East and a member of the Committee on Institutional Affairs.(89) Incorporated

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in Article 12(2) of the EUT, the principle emphasised that the Union would act only in those areas that could be dealt with in common more effectively than by the Member States acting separately. Briefly stated Union law could only lay down ‘the fundamental principles governing common action’ and would ‘entrust the responsible authorities in the Union or the Member States with setting out in detail the procedures for their implementation’.(90) Mindful of the dilemma confronting federalists in their pursuit of federation, namely, of advocating movement in a unitary direction without seeking a unitary state,(91) this principle was crucial. It was a definitive answer to those critics who repeatedly pointed the finger of excessive centralisation at federalist intentions. Articles 12 and 34 were designed to ensure that the Union did not become a centralised Leviathan encroaching upon national sensitivities. As a direct extension of the existing Community, the Union was intended to complement the Member States not to substitute for them. Consequently an important distinction was made between those areas where the Union had exclusive competence to act (as at present, for example, competition policy and customs duties) and those areas in which the Union and Member States had concurrent competence. Should the Union wish to initiate or extend common action in a new field, it could do so only via qualified majority approval by each branch of the legislature—designated in the EUT as the Parliament and the Council. Furthermore Article 11(2) was important to prevent what Juliet Lodge has described as ‘creeping intergovernmentalism’(92) characteristic of the Community: ‘in the fields subject to common action, common action may not be replaced by co-operation’.(93) The ever-present temptation to fall back on intergovernmental solutions was thus effectively thwarted. In general the EUT established a single institutional system which would incorporate all of those fields formerly subject to Community competence and those subject to co-operation, or intergovernmentalism, among Member States while maintaining both the method of co-operation and that of common action. In this short sketch of common action, co-operation and the subsidiarity principle we can already detect the underlying distinctions and relationships which typify federations. A more detailed analysis of the EUT would reveal further federal elements and those who wish to pursue this search can be profitably directed to the main texts already identified at the beginning of this chapter. Meanwhile let us look briefly at the institutional relationships laid down in the EUT. Given what we know about Spinelli’s own intellectual background it came as no surprise to learn that standard Western liberal democratic notions of parliamentary representation, constitutional and judicial guarantees and legislative-executive relations were the hallmark of the institutional provisions. No radical restructuring of the institutional framework was intended but a major modification of the legislative power was proposed. It was shared jointly by the Council of the Union and the Parliament, thus providing two arms of the legislative authority akin to traditional federal practice whereby democratic accountability was assured to citizens as members both of the European Union and of their member state. The imposition of majority voting procedures and deadlines was deemed of vital importance in order once again to ensure that at the end of the day a firm decision guaranteeing positive action would be taken instead of the all too familiar inertia so characteristic of contemporary Community practice. The Parliament’s elevation to the legislative arena was of course entirely in keeping with its recently acquired democratic legitimacy derived from having been

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directly elected. Its elevation thus remedied the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ in Community affairs and, apart from the additional advantage of combating the notorious deficiences in decision making mentioned above, it also created a new accountability of both the Council and the Commission to the elected body of the European Union. Finally the new Council-Parliament relationship also included the ratification of international treaties and agreements, thus in part foreshadowing an important aspect of the subsequent Single European Act. If we reflect broadly upon the Council-Parliament linkage in the EUT—one that had been consistently sought by the Parliament at least as far back as the Kirk-Reay Report of 1974—it would appear that the Parliament had been the main beneficiary of a significant shift in institutional relationships. But if we turn our attention to the reform of the Commission’s role we obtain a somewhat different picture. Spinelli always remarked that something very important had been obscured in the public discussions about the EUT. If we recall his original intentions and beliefs analysed in Chapter Three we will also remember that it was in reality the Commission, not the Parliament, which was central to his conception of European Union. His own explanation was tantalisingly simple: If a Parliament does not have a Government it is a source of chaos; the really important problem—the first one is the King… The King is the political element…in our case we must have the real nucleus of a European Government because the most important thing is the authority we have given to the Commission in the formation of the Community. If we have this, then this is the political centre; in order to have it democratic Parliament is necessary.(94) Here was a paradox which Spinelli was convinced the majority of parliamentarians had failed fully to understand: normally parliaments attempt to check the power of the executive whereas the European Parliament sought consciously to increase it. By strengthening the Commission, the Parliament would also be strengthened. Hence by altering the Community’s institutional balance in favour of the Commission and the Parliament, the two main pivots of supranationalism, the ‘common elaboration’ would be released to develop and determine itself. How, then, did the EUT reform the Commission? First it established a clear link between its term of office and the term of the Parliament. The Commission’s tenure was extended from four to five years, appointed after each European parliamentary election which would consequently raise the political profile of both institutions as well as the elections themselves. But the method of the Commission’s appointment, deemed by one friendly critic to be ‘a somewhat awkward procedure’(95), involved the designation of its President by the European Council and the subsequent selection of other Commission members by the new President. Finally the whole Commission was to be invested by Parliament on the strength of its programme. The EUT did not alter the Commission’s power to initiate legislation nor its executive power to implement it, and it was guaranteed a voice in the new legislative process. Parliament’s underlying assumption in this novel triangular institutional relationship was that ‘the President of the Commission whose authority originated from the European Council, would seek an understanding with Parliament on the choice of his colleagues’(96) and it seems clear in retrospect that

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the architects of the EUT wanted ‘to turn the Commission into an executive vested with real authority’(97), authority derived from its manner of appointment via governments and citizens. The European Council emerged relatively unchanged in appearance but not unscathed. It retained its authority for intergovernmental co-operation and its supremacy in international affairs, and it acquired the decisive power to determine the transfer of areas of co-operation to common action. Its formal incorporation in the EUT, however, seems to have been something of a puzzle. Roland Bieber claimed that it was included ‘somewhat reluctantly’(98), while Juliet Lodge suggested that its accommodation actually entailed a distinct diminution in its power to initiate legislative proposals.(99) Whatever conclusions are drawn from these observations part of the answer to this apparent conundrum lay in one simple fact: the European Council was not really a European institution qua institution but a cumbersome device for patching together intergovernmental compromises. The EUT merely exposed its expedient quality. We shall now make a few general observations about the EUT before commenting upon its relationship to federal ideas and influences. Our survey has been far from exhaustive but it does enable us to obtain a general picture of the Parliament’s interpretation of European Union in the mid-1980s. One outstanding question of controversy resided in Article 23(3) which confirmed Member States’ right of veto in the Council of the Union—a right designed to extend over a transitional period of ten years. It requires little imagination to appreciate how far this decision was the product of heated compromise. It satisfied few participants. Even Thorn found it difficult to swallow, perpetuating as it did the very principle against which the Commission had fought for nearly two decades. Other aspects of the EUT which generated fierce criticism for being either too ambitious or too anaemic were Article 38 dealing with the complicated voting procedures for draft laws, Article 82 concerning the legal and political imbroglio of the treaty’s entry into force and the conspicuous silence of the treaty concerning security matters. These complaints, however, had to be set against the overall content of the EUT which stood in perspective as having ‘an appealing internal balance and a surprising modesty in its reformism.(100) Given the Community patrimony, the retention of familiar institutional identities within a single institutional system, the maintenance of intergovernmentalism and the principle of subsidiarity, the EUT could hardly be described as a blueprint for a European federation. Paulo Barbi, the EPP President in 1983, summed up his interpretation of the new treaty in lucid terms: This proposal does not do away with the sovereignty of our states, it does not set up a federation,…it does not create the United States of Europe; but it does lay the institutional basis for that European Union which our political leaders said they wanted to bring about ten years ago.(101) This view of the Parliament’s project was endorsed by Zecchino in a perhaps unusually modest statement: it will not be a federation for the fundamental reason that the member states will retain their sovereignty, but it will have important federal characteristics such as the complexity and subdivision of the institutional system (with a directly elected parliamentary body) and the possibility of

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taking legal action which, in given cases, may be of immediate concern to the citizens of the member states.(102) But it was obviously wrong to underestimate the degree of change inherent in the EUT. The Key Article 38 set out a new legislative procedure involving a bicameral system of co-decision by the Parliament and the Council together with a series of deadlines, albeit flexible ones, for each stage of the legislative process, and specific majorities for voting in both institutions. The EUT could accurately be described as a federal document only in the extent to which it enhanced the decision-making capacity of the Union. Juliet Lodge claimed that ‘the institutional set-up envisaged for European Union accords with a vision of a federal system of open government and representative democracy in which an elected chamber plays a pivotal role scrutinising and controlling the executive and legislating for the people on the basis of the majority views of the ‘common good’ instead of according to a blocking minority of national interests’.(103) Rival interpretations may have been just as valid. The EUT, after all, claimed no competence in the fields traditionally associated with a federal authority: defence, foreign policy, currency and the money supply, and internal security. Institutionally much remained unchanged. The Commission retained its powers of initiation and implementation, the Council remained the dominant authority despite having to share its legislative role with the Parliament and acknowledge formally in specific areas the supremacy of the European Council, and the three existing Community treaties remained valid in so far as they had not been either modified or superseded by the EUT. How, then, should we assess the EUT in the light of federalist ideas and influences? Was the spectre of a federal Europe in this treaty a myth or a reality? At the levels of political ideas and political strategy the federalist impetus was unmistakable. Here the search for a distinctive federal imprint in the EUT should not be confined solely to the examination of political institutions and legislative competences. This would overlook and thereby underestimate the federalist influences and aspirations which lay at the root of the treaty. The absence of federation should not blind us to the presence of federalism. The EUT could conceivably be assessed as a case of federalism without federation. But our conclusion cannot be allowed to end so abruptly. There is another observation which must be made before we investigate the intergovernmental response to this remarkable episode in the Parliament’s recent history. The basic ingredient of the EUT was not just that it was a political document which reflected a broad consensus of European parliamentary opinion, but that it contained within it the cornerstone of Spinelli’s federalist strategy: an essential dynamic which would enable the Community to break out of Monnet’s Europe. In short it provided the means by which the Community could go beyond what existed. This is also why Spinelli’s role in the whole enterprise would have declined in direct proportion to the success of what, at the beginning, was his project. The EUT was indeed wisely moderate, gradualist and pragmatic. Derek Prag remarked that it contained nothing federalist and that such hopes had been deeply disappointed precisely because of its practical and realistic content.(104) But the key to understanding the full implications of the EUT was to realise that it presupposed a decisive quality leap. The EUT represented the embryo of an overall political system with its own political legitimacy. In a general sense it proposed a structure, seemingly harmless, with little actual power, but with considerable

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potential power having a full legitimacy of its own. Here was a profound difference in conceptual approach from what already existed. The Rome and Paris Treaties had been suffocated and stifled by pragmatic intergovernmental co-operation. The EUT provided the mechanism for the nurturing of that autonomous European political life which Spinelli had persistently sought to cultivate for over forty years. Conclusion The construction of the EUT was significant from a number of different standpoints.(105) Even so-called pragmatism—reputed to be open-minded and amenable to experimentation—could not justifiably exclude the Parliament’s attempt to make the existing Community institutions more effective. Using pragmatic terms of reference it was nonsense for Member State governments and other national elites continually to complain that the Community did not work properly while at the same time opposing genuine efforts to make it operate more effectively. The EUT was not a take-it-or-leave it proposition but a basis for agreement between the Member State governments. It remained to be seen how they would respond. Spinelli of course knew that the Parliament’s treaty, having survived for so long by being kept out of the hands of national elites, would ultimately be compelled to confront both the governments and parliaments of the Member States in order to seek their approval. This, as he often remarked, would be when the real battle for the Union would begin. The EUT had been launched into the intergovermental arena where its future was uncertain. It was now set on a different course from that originally envisaged. We shall now turn our attention to the intergovernmental response to examine briefly the sequence of events which determined the future of the EUT. Notes 1. For a detailed discussion of these reports and debates concerning the Parliament’s own views of its institutional role, see M.Palmer, ‘The Development of the European Parliament’s Institutional Role Within the European Community, 1974–1983’, Journal of European Integration, VI, No. 2/3, (1983), pp. 183–202. 2. Palmer, ‘European Parliament’s Institutional Role’, pp. 187–8. 3. Palmer, ‘European Parliament’s Institutional Role’, pp. 188–9. 4. R.Bieber, ‘Achievements of the European Parliament, 1979–1984’, Common Market Law Review, Vol. 21. (1984), p. 284. 5. For a detailed survey of these successful proposals, see Palmer, ‘European Parliament’s Institutional Role’, pp. 192–3. 6. Palmer, ‘European Parliament’s Institutional Role’, pp. 193–4. 7. Official Journal, C 234/48. 14.9.81. 8. R.Cardozo and R.Corbett, ‘The Crocodile Initiative’, Chap. 2., pp. 20–21 in J.Lodge (Ed.), European Union: The European Community in Search of a Future, (London, Macmillan 1986). 9. ‘The 30 May Mandate and the Relaunching of the European Community’, European File 16/81, Commission of the European Communities, Brussels, October 1981. 10. Thorn’s speech to the European Parliament, 7 July 1981, DEP, No. 1–273, p. 32. 11. Thorn’s speech, DEP, 1–273, p. 31.

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12. ‘Relations Between The Institutions of the Community’, Commission of the European Communities, Com(81) 581 Final. 13. See J.H.Weiler, ‘The Genscher-Colombo Draft European Act: The Politics of Indecision’, Journal of European Integration, VI, (1983), Nos. 2–3, pp. 129–53 and G.Bonvicini, ‘The Genscher-Colombo Plan and the ‘Solemn Declaration on European Union, 1981–1983’ in R.Pryce (Ed.), Dynamics of European Union, Ch. 8, pp. 174–87 (London, Croom Helm 1987). 14. See Bonvicini, ‘Genscher-Colombo Plan’, pp. 176–7 and S.Bulmer and W.Paterson, The Federal Republic of Germany and the European Community, (Allen & Unwin Ltd. London 1987) pp. 134–5. 15. See Genscher’s speech to the European Parliament, 19 November 1981, DEP, OJ, Annex No. 1–277, pp. 216–19. 16. Weiler, ‘Genscher-Colombo’, p. 130. 17. Genscher’s speech, DEP, pp. 216–17. 18. Genscher’s speech, DEP, p. 217. 19. For a complete summary of the initial details see EC.Bulletin, Vol. 14, 11/81, pp. 87–91. 20. See Report on European Political Co-operation 13 October 1981, EC Bulletin, Supplement 3/19/81. For a detailed survey of EPC, see D.Allen et. al. European Political Co-operation, (London, Butterworth Scientific 1982). 21. On their differences and the tensions between them, see Bonvicini, ‘Genscher-Colombo Plan’, pp. 177–8. 22. Bonvicini discusses this in ‘Genscher-Colombo Plan’, pp. 182–4. 23. Genscher’s speech, DEP, pp. 218–19. 24. Genscher, DEP, p. 219; Colombo, DEP, p. 220. 25. Spinelli’s remarks, DEP, p. 228. 26. Genscher’s speech, 14 October 1982, DEP, OJ, Annex No. 1–289, p. 246. 27. Andriessen representing the Commission, 14 October 1982, DEP, OJ, Annex No. 1–289, p. 248. 28. For the details see the Solemn Declaration on European Union, EC Bulletin, 1983, No. 6, pp. 25–6. 29. Ferri’s analysis, 14 October 1982, DEP, pp. 261–2. 30. Spinelli’s remarks, 14 October 1982, DEP, p. 263. 31. See M.Burgess, ‘Federal Ideas in the European Community: Altiero Spinelli and European Union, 1981–1984’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 19, No. 3, (Summer 1984), pp. 339– 47 and ‘Altiero Spinelli, Federalism and the EUT’, in J.Lodge (Ed.), European Union: The European Community in Search of a Future, (Macmillan, London 1986), Ch. 9, pp. 174–85. 32. J.Pinder, ‘Prophet Not Without Honour: Lothian and the Federal Idea’, The Round Table, Vol. 286, (1983), p. 217. 33. Interview with Spinelli, 15 September 1983, European Parliament, Strasbourg. 34. Interview with Spinelli, September 1983. 35. A.Spinelli, The European Aventure: Tasks for the Enlarged Community, (Charles Knight & Co. Ltd., London 1972), p. 176. 36. Spinelli, European Adventure, p. 15. 37. Spinelli, European Adventure, p. 15. 38. See, for example, The Eurocrats: Conflicts and Crisis in the European Community, (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1966), p. 24. and his article ‘Reflections on the Institutional Crisis in the European Community’, West European Politics, Vol. 1., (February 1978), pp. 77–88. 39. The Eurocrats, pp. 11–17. 40. A.Spinelli, ‘Towards European Union’, Sixth Jean Monnet Conference, 13 June 1983, Europe Documents, Agence Internationale, Brussels, pp. 1–9.

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41. Copy of Spinelli’s letter, addressed in Rome, obtained with thanks to Derek Prag, British Conservative MEP in the European Democrat Group, who placed his own private archive at my disposal. 42. See R.Cardozo and R.Corbett, ‘The Crocodile Initiative’ in J.Lodge (Ed.), European Union Ch. 2., pp. 15–46. 43. See D.Coombes, Politics and Bureaucracy in the European Community, (London, Allen and Unwin 1969). 44. J.Pinder, ‘Europe as a Tenth Member of the Community’, Government and Opposition, Vol. 10., pp. 387–96. Strictly speaking Pinder referred to ‘parallel instruments’ but there is an implicit sense too in which the Commission’s role had changed and functioned alongside the Community rather than as a central institution. 45. See Thorn’s two keynote speeches,(1) 13 September 1983, DEP, OJ, 1–303, pp. 40–4. (2) 14 February 1984, DEP, OJ, 1–309, pp. 43–5. 46. Thorn’s speech, 13 September 1983, DEP, OJ, Annex, No. 1–303, pp. 40–1. 47. Andriessen’s remarks, 14 September 1983, DEP, pp. 110–11. 48. Thorn’s comments on the draft treaty, 13 September 1983, DEP, p. 41. 49. For a detailed analysis of the committee see, R.Cardozo and R.Corbett, ‘The Crocodile Initiative’, Ch. 2. in J.Lodge (Ed.) European Union: The European Community in Search of a Future. 50. Written answers from Mr.Thorn, President of the Commission, to the questions put to him at the meeting of the Committee on Institutional Affairs of 29 April 1982, European Parliament, D.G. for Committees and Interplanning Delegations, (22 July 1982), PE 79.996. 51. President Tindemans’ Statements at the Meeting of the Committee on Institutional Affairs of 28/29 April 1982, E.P., (17 May 1982), PE.78.971. 52. Tindemans’ Statements, pp. 5–9. 53. Tindemans’ Statements, p. 11. 54. Commission interviews during 1985 underlined this observation. It is also the opinion of Fernand Herman, MEP, European People’s Party who sat on the Dooge Committee with Andriessen until the latter’s departure at the end of 1984. Interview with Herman (Belgian representative), European Parliament, Strasbourg 11 February 1988. 55. For the European Parliament Election Results of 1979, see J.Lodge and V.Herman, Direct Elections to the European Parliament: A Community Perspective, (London, Macmillan 1982). 56. E.P. Working Document, 27 September 1979, 1–347/79. 57. EPP Group Document, October 1981, 106/81, p. 32. 58. Jonker and others, P.E. 1–940/81/Rev.11. 59. R.E.M. Irving, The Christian Democratic Parties of Western Europe, (London, Allen & Unwin 1979), p. ix. 60. See, for example, G.Pridham and P.Pridham, ‘Transnational Parties in the European Community, 1 and 2, in S.Henig (Ed), Political Parties in the European Community, (Allen & Unwin, London 1979), Chs. 11 and 12; B.Kohler and B.Myrzik, ‘Transnational Party Links’ in R.Morgan and S.Silvestri, Moderates and Conservatives in Western Europe (Heinemann, London 1982), pp. 193–23; and G.Pridham ‘Christian Democrats, Conservatives and Transnational Party Co-operation in the European Community: CentreForward or Centre-Right?’ in Z.Layton-Henry (Ed.), Conservative Politics in Western Europe, (London, Macmillan 1982), pp. 318–46. 61. Even in this detailed text there is no analysis of the philosophical, historical, ideological and intellectual bases of Christian Democratic and British Conservative ideas about European integration of the sort discussed below. 62. G.Pridham, ‘Christian Democrats, Conservatives and Transnational Party Co-operation in the European Community’ in Z.Layton-Henry (Ed.) Conservative Politics, p. 324.

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63. B.Kohler and B.Myrzik, ‘Transnational Party Links’ in R.Morgan and S.Silvestri (Eds.) Moderates and Conservatives, pp. 210–14. 64. Irving, Christian Democratic Parties, p. 246. 65. Europe: The Challenge—The Principles, Achievements and Objectives of the EPP Group from 1979 to 1984, General Secretariat of the EPP Group, European Parliament (December 1983), p. 6. 66. M.Fogarty Christian Democracy in Western Europe, 1820–1953, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1957), Preface, p. xiv. 67. Irving, Christian Democracy Parties, pp. 29 and 56. 68. See A.Freemantle (Ed.), The Papal Encyclicals in their Historical Context, (London, Mentor/ Omega, 1963). 69. On personalism, see M.Fogarty, Christian Democracy, pp. 27–40 and F.Kinsky, ‘Personalism and Federalism’ Publius, Vol. 9, No. 4, (1979), pp. 131–56. 70. See A.Freemantle (Ed.), Papal Encyclicals, p. 342. 71. Freemantle (Ed.), Papal Encyclicals, p. 420. 72. Between 1979–1984 there were 60 British Conservatives out of a total of 63 MEPs in the EDG and between 1984–1985 (before the Spanish joined) there were 45 out of a total of 50 MEPs in the EDG. 73. G.Pridham, Transnational Party Co-operation and European Integration, (Allen & Unwin Ltd. London 1981) p. 165. 74. See inter alia, N.O’Sullivan, Conservatism, (Dent, London 1976); A.Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection, (Faber, London 1978); and I.Gilmour, Inside Right: A Study of Conservatism, (Quartet, London 1978). 75. Gilmour, Inside Right, pp. 109–65. 76. See R.Jackson, MEP, Tradition and Reality: Conservative Philosophy and European Integration, (EDG, Conservative Central Office, London 1982), p. 11. 77. See A.Quinton, Politics of Imperfection. 78. Jackson, Tradition, p. 16. 79. Jackson, Tradition, p. 20. 80. Jackson, Tradition, pp. 25–6. 81. These details and opinions have been culled from a series of interviews which I conducted in the EDG during April to September 1985 as part of an ESRC funded project entitled ‘Federalism and European Union in the European Community, 1972–1985’. I am indebted to the ESRC for their financial assistance and would like to acknowledge this here. 82. Interview with Claus Toksvig, Danish Conservative MEP, 13 September 1985. 83. Jackson, Tradition, p. 45. 84. See, for example, J.Lodge, ‘European Union and the First Elected European Parliament: The Spinelli Initiative’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. XXII, No. 4, (June 1984), pp. 377–402; R.Bieber et al (Eds.) An Ever Closer Union: A Critical Analysis of the Draft Treaty establishing the European Union, (Brussels-Luxembourg, European Perspectives Series, 1985); J.Lodge (Ed.), European Union: The European Community in Search of a Future, (London, Macmillan 1986); and O.Schmuck, ‘The European Parliament’s Draft Treaty Establishing The European Union (1979–1984)’, in R.Pryce (Ed.), The Dynamics of European Union, Ch. 9, pp. 188–216, (London, Croom Helm 1987). 85. See EP Working Document, 1–659/83. 86. See Art. 4(3) of the Draft Treaty establishing the European Union, (Luxembourg, E.P. 1984), p. 12. This task was to be entrusted to the Union itself which would adopt its own declaration on fundamental rights within five years. The treaty has been published in J.Lodge (Ed.), European Union, pp. 188–227. 87. Private observations of Derek Prag, rapporteur on international relations, who kindly gave me access to his own files.

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88. This legal debate is lucidly discussed by R.Corbett and J.Lodge in ‘Progress and Prospects’, Ch. 8 in J.Lodge (Ed.), European Union. 89. Interview with Christopher Jackson, 17 May 1985, European Parliament, Strasbourg. 90. Article 34(1), Draft Treaty, p. 23. 91. See Ch. 1, p. 21. 92. J.Lodge, Ch. 3, p. 60 in J.Lodge (Ed.), European Union. 93. Article 11(2), Draft Treaty, p. 16. 94. Interview with Spinelli, 15 September 1983, European Parliament, Strasbourg. 95. R.Bieber, ‘The Institutions and the Decision-Making Procedure in the Draft Treaty establishing the European Union’, Ch. II, p. 38 in R.Bieber et al, An Ever Closer Union. 96. Bieber, An Ever Closer Union, p. 36. 97. J-P, Jacque, ‘The Draft Treaty: An Overview’, Ch. I, p. 25 in R.Bieber et al, An Ever Closer Union. 98. Bieber, An Ever Closer Union, p. 36. 99. J.Lodge, ‘European Union and the First Elected European Parliament: The Spinelli Initiative’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. XXII, No. 4, (June 1984), p. 391. 100. R.Bieber et al, ‘Introduction’, in Bieber, An Ever Closer Union, p. 9. 101. Barbi’s speech, 13 September 1983, OJ, DEP, 1–303, p. 46. 102. Zecchino’s remarks, 15 July 1983, EP Working Documents, Doc.1–575/83/C, p. 142. 103. J.Lodge, ‘European Union’, p. 291. 104. D.Prag’s European Union file, private remarks. 105. See the useful summary by O.Schmuck, ‘The European Parliament’s Draft Treaty’ Ch. 9, pp. 210–11 in R.Pryce (Ed.), Dynamics of European Union.

Chapter Six FEDERALISM, EUROPEAN UNION AND THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL RESPONSE, 1984–1985 (a) Introduction The context out of which the EUT emerged in the period 1980–1984 was very different from that into which it was catapulted during the succeeding years. The world of intergovernmental relations, built upon fragile, shifting coalitions, was uncertain. It lacked the sort of institutional continuity which both the Parliament and the Commission possessed for the successful achievement of European Union. Furthermore the EUT had in a sense been shielded from the full blast of intergovernmental bickering and turbulence over the British budgetary problem which has so dominated this arena during the early 1980s. Hence the atmosphere in which the EUT surfaced during the first half of 1984 was exceptionally uninviting. It did not suggest that there would be a healthy climate for the serious discussion of major treaty revision. The EUT was prey to the vicissitudes of intergovernmental politics and personalities, but it also needed elevated status for the impending European Parliament elections due in June 1984. All in all the interim period of four months between 14 February and 14–17 June seemed a palpably insufficient interval within which to mobilise national governments, political parties, interest groups, parliaments and mass publics in support of the new treaty. Spinelli’s original strategy appeared to have been mistimed. What changed this somewhat bleak scenario was the unexpected public intervention of the French President, Francois Mitterrand, in the EUT equation. During the parliamentary debate of 14 February which resulted in the adoption of the EUT Spinelli had already challenged the French government—as occupants of the Presidency of the Council—to ‘ponder the crisis in Europe’ and to deal with it ‘with greater intensity and more imagination than in past years’,(1) His appeal could hardly have been more blunt: Our Parliament must…say to all the people of France, but above all to the President of the Republic, who recently appealed for a return to the spirit of the Congress of The Hague and spoke of the need to achieve political unity, that we look to the French Presidency of the Council to do more than come and speak to us in ritual fashion…we look to the French Government—I really do mean the French Government, not the European Council—to adopt the draft treaty… In that case these six months of the French Presidency would go down in history.(2)

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Within the space of three and a half months Mitterand addressed the European Parliament on 24 May 1984 and provided the important fillip which the EUT required. Mitterand’s speech was significant if only for the way in which it changed the atmosphere surrounding the debate about Europe. But in his public remarks he did not believe that a new treaty had to be ‘a substitute’ for the existing treaties but only an extension of them to fields they did not already cover.(3 ) Close analysis of this speech, then, did not confirm the French President’s own personal support for the EUT itself; it was only qualified approval of the Parliament’s pre-dilections. Nonetheless Mitterand’s intervention gave a lift to the EUT’s prospects and at the memorable European Council meeting at Fontainebleau on 25–26 June 1984 agreement was reached to establish two committees to advance the concept of European Union. The first, the Adonnino Committee, was instructed to make proposals to promote the image of a ‘people’s Europe’, such as a Community flag and anthem designed to give Community citizens a sense of common identity(4), but the second committee was give a more searching task. It was described as ‘an ad hoc committee consisting of personal representatives of the Heads of State or Government on the lines of the ‘Spaak Committee’ whose function was ‘to make suggestions for the improvement of the operation of European co-operation in both the Community field and that of political, or any other, co-operation’.(5) The President of the European Council would take the necessary steps to implement the Fontainebleau decision. Since Ireland occupied the Council Presidency during July-December 1984 the Ad Hoc Committee for Institutional Affairs was commonly referred to as the Dooge Committee after the majority leader of the Irish Senate, James Dooge. For the next twelve months the ten personal representatives of the Heads of State or Government, along with the Commission, served as the main forum for the evolving intergovernmental debate about European Union. Why did Mitterrand take this initiative? What was he seeking to achieve? Whenever we focus upon the intentions of Member State governments and of Heads of State it is usual to ascribe their actions to domestic tactics. Their real motives are determined less by the Community arena itself than by what they perceive as necessary for their success at home. This means that factors such as the complexities of coalition government, impending national elections and economic difficulties over currency, inflation or unemployment usually explain their actions in the Community arena. Domestic priorities are elevated to the Community level. Here Mitterrand was no exception. The French Socialist government, having taken a nosedive in public popularity, was about to enter a critical period with elections due in 1986. And the British budgetary imbroglio cannot be ignored. Fontainebleau brought to an end the very painful and damaging episode of juste retour. Mitterrand’s initiative, which was never supported by the Quai d’Orsay, could be portrayed as tactical. In contrast to the British who appeared niggardly and intransigent, the French seemed suddenly to don the mantle of good Europeans. Was this all that lay behind Mitterrand’s personal initiative? Spinelli’s view of Mitterrand was pertinent because it provides an interesting explanation for the French position in 1984. Taking into account the broad international context construed in terms of the military and economic policies of the Reagan Presidency, Mitterrand viewed a new European initiative as appropriate to French national interests. But Spinelli also believed in Mitterrand’s own past as a man of Europe. Unlike any other French President of the Fifth Republic, Mitterrand could legitimately

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claim to have a pedigree as a European. He was a man of the Fourth Republic not of the Gaullist era. Indeed he is the first President of the Fifth Republic who is not a man of the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle invented it, Pompidou and Giscard D’Estaing were products of it, but Mitterrand is a political animal from an earlier era. Spinelli did not ignore Mitterrand’s ‘Florentine’ reputation but the Machiavellian instincts should not be allowed to obscure his European past: He was a man who had been there at the beginning and supported the first steps… At the Hague Congress (1948) he could say I was there and I believed in it. When Schuman began (1950) he could say I was there and I believed in it. And this has lain dormant in his spirit, but it existed. When it awakened in his mind he discovered again that he believed in it.(6) In other words Mitterrand is a genuine European socialised in the European spirit of the Hague and well acquainted with the heyday of Schuman and Monnet in the 1950s. But he continued to preside over a divided France on the question of Europe’s future and of the place of France within it. Mitterrand’s own role in the intergovernmental response to the EUT was therefore of critical importance. He also required the support of the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, in the customary Paris-Bonn axis approach to Community affairs. As we shall shortly discover, a series of unexpected events and circumstances emerged during the first six months of 1985 which soured the atmosphere and damaged the prospects of an early agreement on European Union, but immediately after Fontainebleau both Mitterrand and Kohl gave the impression that Europe needed a big leap forward. In particular their public rhetoric and demeanour provided a useful impetus to the first phase: the work of the Dooge Committee. (b) The Dooge Report What was the relationship between the Dooge Report of March 1985 and the European Parliament’s EUT? In order to clarify the precise nature of this relationship it is vitally important to look first at the composition of this so-called ‘Spaak II Committee’. The EUT, though never actually on the table for discussion, was very much in the background of the debate because it was very much in the minds of some members of the Dooge Committee. The Italian Representative, Mauro Ferri, for example, was a former MEP and an ex-chairman of the Parliament’s Committee on Institutional Affairs which had laboured over the EUT. Fernand Herman, the Belgian Representative, had also been a very active and committed MEP who had sat on the Committee on Institutional Affairs and worked in the avowedly federalist cause of the EPP. It is also worth mentioning Frans Andriessen who represented the Commission and whose enthusiastic alliance with Gaston Thorn, the Commission President, had been an important source of support for the Parliament’s project. Andriessen remained until the end of 1984 when he was replaced by the much less committed Ripa de Meana in the new Commission of Jacques Delors.

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The Commission’s role was interesting. It had achieved the immediate objective of ‘being there’ and it followed the same favourable line which Thorn had originally adopted on the Parliament’s EUT. But as we noted in our previous discussion of Commission-Parliament relations in Chapter Five (d), it had to walk a very difficult tightrope in order to avoid being divisive. The Dooge Committee had an independent life of its own and the Commission’s purpose was to play an active part in these proceedings. Keeping a low profile in view of its delicate position it sought overall unity. This meant allying with the majority of the seven—France, West Germany, Italy, Ireland and Benelux—but seeking simultaneously to bring the remaining minority of three—U.K., Greece and Denmark—closer to the majority position.(7) This tactical dilemma had two broad implications for the Commission. First it was essential not to be isolated or marooned. It could not afford to be alone against all of the member states or even alignments of member states. And, secondly, its search for compromise between the majority group and the minority group meant that it had to be more ambitious with the former and less ambitious with the latter. But the intellectual lead within the Dooge Committee at the beginning lay elsewhere. Here we must return to the French position. The French Representative was Maurice Faure, a well-known European of longstanding who had been a signatory of the Rome Treaty in 1957, a former foreign minister and an ex-MEP. Faure, however, did not participate on behalf of the French government. He was therefore independent from the clutches of the Quai d’Orsay. Unlike Jurgen Ruhfus of West Germany and Malcolm Rifkind of the United Kingdom, Faure had been appointed as a personal representative of a Head of State rather than as a government spokesman. Mitterrand thus ensured that Faure’s independence was protected. And it was Faure who produced the first draft outline which served as the basis for discussion within the committee. His text, though much less ambitious than the EUT, was none the less along the same lines as the Parliament’s project. Conceptually at least there was no fundamental contradiction. Thus although the final Dooge Report and the EUT were not identical the Report did follow the spirit and in some cases even the letter of the EUT. The French position therefore remained constant during this first phase. Faure and Mitterrand maintained an autonomous position distinct from both the Quai d’Orsay and the French government. Before we look in more detail at the Dooge Report it is important to underline a fundamental conceptual distinction between the Report and the EUT. Our previous analysis of the EUT in Chapter Five (f) has already emphasised the qualitative difference between it and the existing Community framework. Here we need to make another important conceptual distinction. The Dooge Report in its concluding sentences alluded to: a Conference of the Representatives of the Governments of the Member States should be convened in the near future to negotiate a draft European Union Treaty based on the ‘acquis communitaire’, the present document and the Stuttgart Solemn Declaration on European Union and guided by the spirit and method of the draft treaty voted by the European Parliament… The very decision of the Heads of State or of Government to convene such a Conference would have great symbolic value and would represent the initial act of European Union.(8)

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What did this mean? If we compare this statement of intent with the actual content of the Dooge Report it is difficult not to view it both as merely demagogic and rhetorical. A careful analysis of the Dooge Report reveals the main difference between it and the EUT: the latter was written deliberately by people within the system who wanted consciously to replace the existing treaties with something completely different whereas the former was written by people of goodwill who remained within the system, while changing and modifying it even substantially, but who nonetheless preserved the existing balance of the Rome Treaty, namely, intergovernmental co-operation. Of course it was important for the Parliament to downgrade the differences between the two texts but they remained nonetheless significant.(9) In the Dooge Report there was no real merger between the Community and EPC as there was in the EUT. Energy policy, included in the EUT, was conspicuous by its absence in the Report and it was also less elaborate on the EMS than the EUT. Leaving aside the role of the European Council which was to remain outside the institutional scope, the approach of the Dooge Committee was very similar to that of the EUT. But their verdict on the future role of the Commission was not identical. In the EUT the role of the Commission was substantially altered while in the Dooge Report it was merely strengthened. There was a significant difference. As we have already observed the EUT outlined an overall political system with its own legitimacy; this was not the case with the Dooge Report. From an analytical standpoint the main differences between the two texts were much more significant than the Parliament, Commission and Dooge Committee were prepared to admit. For obvious reasons they did not want to split the European camp. In retrospect there were some areas where the Dooge Report went beyond the EUT and many fields in which it lagged behind. The Report was more advanced on security issues, for example, though a close scrutiny suggested that its institutional implications were extremely thin. In effect both texts seemed to acknowledge that the Community had not yet reached the stage where defence in Europe could be approached from an institutional standpoint. Taking a broad perspective, then, we can conclude that the Dooge Report did not really alter the basic institutional position whereby legitimacy was derived directly from the member states. It was a political document not a legal text. It defined the political objectives, policies and institutional reforms deemed necessary to ‘restore to Europe the vigour and ambition of its inception’ but this did not commit it to ‘draft a new Treaty in legal form’.(10) There did seem to be some ambiguity in the language of the Dooge Report on this question. The Report was obviously less precise than the EUT; it was clearly not of the same order or character of its counterpart, and this led to much initial confusion. Did it advocate a new treaty or merely a supplementary treaty? Did it suggest a new treaty going beyond the existing treaties as regards additional policy areas or did it simply mean a modification of the existing treaties in order to accommodate new institutional procedures? These questions were left open in the minds of many informed observers. Some commentators, like Christopher Jackson MEP, did not believe that it mattered. At the end of the day the member state governments would have to decide precisely what they wanted. Talk of a new treaty in the sense of starting again by going back to first principles was politically unwise, especially from a British viewpoint, and it was in any case inaccurate. What was at issue here was really a

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supplementary treaty which would add to the existing Community patrimony rather than sweep it all away and begin again.(11) (c) From Dublin to Milan, December 1984-June 1985 The Dooge Committee produced an interim report to the Dublin European Council on 3– 4 December 1984 which merely noted its submission and decided to defer it to the Brussels European Council due to meet on 29–30 March 1985 when the final report could be thoroughly discussed. As Keatinge and Murphy emphasise in their detailed analysis of this whole episode, however, the Dooge Committee was not engaged in negotiations: ‘its members were not the plenipotentiaries of governments but rather were involved in a preliminary exploration of the national leaders’ positions in order to clarify the extent of agreement which might be possible’.(12) What happened between the Dublin meeting and the decisive Milan European Council remains to some extent a matter of conjecture. It is a period open to many different interpretations. One conclusion, however, is unequivocal: the inter-governmental arena, always prey to sudden unexpected shifts in member state positions, produced a new climate much less favourable to the progress of European Union. Changing events and circumstances occurred which served to highlight yet again the observations which we have already underlined in the Introduction to Chapter Two of our survey. Both long- and short-term factors in the domestic state and international environments complicated the evolving progress which had originated with Mitterrand’s Strasbourg speech of May 1984. Many observers have argued that had it not been for the Greek refusal to allow the negotiations on Community enlargement concerning Spain and Portugal to go ahead during December 1984, the Dooge Report could have been discussed at the Brussels meeting in March 1985 in circumstances much more favourable than those which prevailed thereafter. Had Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, not insisted upon quarrelling over the two issues of wine and the proposed integrated Mediterranean programmes, the whole outcome of the Dooge Report might have been radically different. This reasoning is predicated upon the deterioration of the Paris-Bonn accord arising out of a number of events during March and June. Indeed early signs of a rift were already evident in February when Ruhfus refused to change West Germany’s demand that the money needed to pay for estimated Community spending in 1985 should be contributed in the form of a special extra payment among member states. Overall West Germany’s position between Dublin and Brussels grew weaker on the Dooge Report mainly because of currency and financial questions involving the Bundesbank, the EMS and economic convergence. This was reflected in Ruhfus’ reservations on the economic aspects of the Report which were entered in March. The Brussels European Council meeting, having solved the Papandreou problem and thus removed the last obstacle to the British receiving their post-Fontainebleau rebate, merely gave a preliminary first reading to the Dooge Report. During May the agricultural prices row with West Germany erupted, followed by the Franco-German rift which opened up at the Bonn Economic Summit and the cloud which hung over President Reagan’s visit to the Bitberg military cemetery. The overall impact of these events—the eventual use of the West German veto for the first time over cereal prices, Kohl’s loss of

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credibility amidst the weakening West German domestic political balance, and Mitterrand’s tough resistance to American pressure for a new round of trade talks coupled with his strong reservations about the Strategic Defence Initiative—was abruptly to end the almost euphoric first phase of progress towards European Union dated from May 1984. With this second phase a new pessimism returned. We should not underestimate the gravity of this Paris-Bonn dissension. It struck hard and deep. Mitterrand was bitterly disappointed with Kohl’s apparent subordination of European priorities to American interests and French confidence in their chief European partner was badly shaken. This breakdown in the Paris-Bonn accord was critically important to the success of European Union. The hitherto customary image of a very strong Paris-Bonn Axis taking the lead again in the drive for European Union and seeking to impose its will upon the recalcitrant British, Danes and Greeks was thus not credible. And in this atmosphere of hectic preparatory tactics which preceded the Milan European Council of 28–29 June the British sensed a golden opportunity to present their own carefully constructed proposals designed principally to pull the rug from under the divided Europeans and settle European Union to British advantage. Whitehall was very clever and skilful in exploiting French scepticism and prevarication. The Quai d’Orsay, it should be remembered, had never liked Mitterrand’s initiative and had never accepted his Strasbourg speech, and Bonn offered no clear signals about its intentions. But the French and West Germans could not afford to allow the Howe initiative on political co-operation to present the British as progressive Europeans. This was why Kohl and Mitterrand acted so swiftly so late in the day in order to wrest the initiative from Whitehall. In a joint initiative announced by Kohl in the Bundestag and confirmed in Paris by Mitterrand on 27 June the Paris-Bonn accord was belatedly reactivated, although the details of the draft proposals were conspicuously absent. The general consequence of these shadowy manoeuvres between London, Paris and Bonn was to create the impression that a fresh deal had been struck and that there was substantial agreement between Thatcher, Kohl and Mitterrand. The phrase ‘Treaty on European Union’ certainly caused some confusion in Community circles but it boiled down to nothing more than a meagre variation of the Howe proposals: strengthening political cooperation, creating a new secretariat and pulling it all closer to the European Council. This seemed a far cry from the Dooge Report agenda. When the Milan meeting opened on 28 June the British must have felt confident that it had already moved in their direction. They had been branded, along with Denmark and Greece, as one of the ‘footnote’ countries because of the number of reservations they had entered as footnotes to the Dooge Report and Thatcher was resolutely opposed to the recommendation in the Report for an intergovernmental conference to discuss institutional reform to achieve European Union. British proposals amounted instead to a programme of action centred upon political co-operation, increased majority voting in the Council of Ministers and measures designed to facilitate the completion of the internal market, none of which required major Treaty revision. It was the rhetoric of pragmatism yet again. Little at this point had been heard of Rome and the Benelux countries. But by the time the proceedings had begun in Milan it rapidly became evident that they did not intend meekly to follow the three big member states. The signals emanating from Rome and Benelux in June did not make it clear in explaining that they would not fall in line with London, Paris and Bonn.

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The result of Milan was Britain’s failure to secure approval of its own package of proposals as the basis for negotiations which would pre-empt plans for an intergovernmental conference to amend the Rome Treaty. The mistake that they made was to underestimate the politics of ‘Euro-froth’ so brilliantly portrayed by Ian Davidson of the Financial Times: Before Milan there was very serious doubt whether the French or German Governments really wanted much more sweeping constitutional changes than Britain… But after Milan the position may change. The fact that the future of the Community does now hang on this conference will endow it with political resonances which may not be ‘sensible’, which Mrs. Thatcher may think are silly, but which are part of the reality of the European enterprise and have been since it began. Why will the British never learn? Euro-froth is essential for an undertaking whose defining characteristic is an institutional mechanism for reforming the political and economic map of Europe. By itself Euro-froth produces nothing but empty declarations. But without the ingredient of political aspiration, the Community grinds to a halt…pragmatism is not enough—and everybody knows it, except Mrs. Thatcher… She thought she would outsmart the unionists in Milan but she underestimated the importance of Eurofroth.(13) The British government based its strategy too much upon diplomacy and too little on politics. It underestimated the simple fact that both Mitterrand and Kohl were in a sense prisoners of their own recent rhetoric and most important of all it failed to appreciate the determination of Italy and the Benelux countries to insist upon a result which would satisfy their own domestic public opinions. In hindsight it is now easy to understand this political jigsaw puzzle. There was no way that Rome and Benelux were prepared to allow the outcome of Milan to be construed as a victory for Thatcher. This explains why the usual formula for success—that the smaller states would always follow the united initiative of the larger countries—was not applicable in this particular case. Two of the three big states were in a weak position. Indeed the strongest countries were Italy and the Benelux states, and this created an unusual opportunity to make unexpected headway in the intergovernmental arena. The crisis of European Union had been turned to good account. In retrospect, the British government missed a golden opportunity. It could in all probability have escaped without conceding an inter-governmental conference had it realised that a lower threshold of agreement existed. But the trick of the Howe initiative backfired and the Italian government of Bettino Craxi was able to crown its tenure of the Council Presidency with an important legacy eventually brought to fruition by the subsequent Luxembourg Presidency in December 1985.

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(d) The Italian Contribution Before we bring our survey of the intergovernmental response to European Union to a close it is worth paying close attention to the Italian contribution in these events. It is easy to get lost in the maelstrom of intergovernmental politics. Motives and intentions are often confused and confusing. In the quest for European Union, however, the Italians have been consistently vocal and enthusiastic. Their rhetoric and their behaviour have not always been consistent, of course, but in the very difficult struggle to get Europe moving again they have usually been in the forefront of recent efforts to move towards a maximalist position. Let us look briefly at why this is so. Recently Christopher Tugendhat remarked that ‘Italian attitudes towards Europe in general and the Community in particular have been more consistent than those of other major powers’ and he portrayed them thus: From the outset Italians have been inspired by the vision of a united Europe and the grand designs for achieving it. To them it has always seemed a noble concept, recalling their own long struggle for national unification and a natural continuation of it. The idea of unity as such—as distinct from Europe as a field for fulfilling national ambitions and promoting national interests—has from the beginning aroused genuine enthusiasm in Italy and continues to do so now.(14) The historical landmarks in this distinctive perception of Europe are many and varied, and can be traced back spiritually, intellectually and culturally over many centuries. More recently the Risorgimento, the flaws in state-building and national integration, the experience and legacy of fascism and Italy’s role in NATO have been the most familiar milestones en route to a solid and consistent European policy. Indeed so widespread was the acceptance of Italy’s impeccable European credentials that F. Roy Willis wrote in his classic text Italy Chooses Europe: ‘its .unflagging endorsement of every move that would further political and economic unification of Western Europe has come to be taken for granted’.(15) Italy and Italian governments have also been at the forefront of political initiatives closely associated with federalist ideas. We have already investigated the historical context within which Spinelli first developed his federalist beliefs and Walter Lipgens’ recent exhaustive study of the history of European integration has documented the origins and growth of the European federalist movement in Italy.(16) In order to underline this Italian predisposition it is worth including Geoffrey Pridham’s observations on post-war Italy: European federalist ideas were undeniably present after the Second World War among political elites in government at the time Italy’s European policy was first conceived… The existence of a federalist outlook did of course mean that projects for European integration were from the start viewed sympathetically in official circles.(17)

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This, as Pridham noted, was clearly enshrined in the Italian Constitution of 1948 and it was no surprise to learn that during the great constitutional debate in Europe on the EDC and EPC during the early 1950s: The Italian delegation at the EDC Conference became the chief advocate of a federalist model in which a European Political Authority would be democratically responsible through a directly elected European Assembly and have powers of taxation and a joint decision-making structure. Prime Minister De Gasperi lent full public support to this view and consistently advocated a federalist solution.(18) Even the lugubrious Andrew Shonfield felt compelled in his 1972 BBC Reith Lectures to call attention to this peculiar Italian propensity for European federalism: on the Vedel Committee which looked at the European Parliament’s powers with a view to recommending direct elections ‘I was a little puzzled at first to find that the Italians tended to take the most extreme federal line’.(19) From the beginning of the Community enterprise, then, Europe has remained for Italy ‘the great hope for the future’.(20) And Italian public opinion attaches a significance to Community affairs which finds comparison only with the Benelux states. Spinelli was known in Italy as the ‘man of Europe’ and because of the widespread inter-party support for the Community was able quite comfortably to accept the Communist party label as part of a deal in the course of his election to the European Parliament. If we now focus our attention upon the events of the 1980s in the quest for European Union we will be able to identify and gauge the Italian influences upon the recent achievements. Spinelli of course has been the leading light in the fresh initiative of the 1980s. But he has not been alone among prominent Italians in this cause. Italians have a particular conception of the role of Parliament in their own political system, one which gives it both a power and a prominence unlike that of most other West European states and certainly different from, say, France in the Fifth Republic. This means that elected representatives have a high profile in Italy and it explains why Italians have a higher regard for the European Parliament and their MEPs than most other Community publics. Electoral turnout for national elections in Italy is notorioulsy high but this also extends to European Parliament elections which were 85.5% in 1979 and 83.9% in 1984.(21) The party political convergence on European Union naturally extends into the European Parliament where yet again there is a homogeneity of outlook across the party groups unlike any other member ‘state with the possible exception of Belgium. Given this array of Italian support for the Community, Spinelli could expect to win widespread Italian favour from within the Parliament for a project which conformed to an Italian conception of a parliamentary Europe. If we look closely at the actors intimately involved in the EUT we can emphasise the Italian presence at a number of key points. Mauro Ferri was the first chairman of the Committee on Institutional Affairs and significantly Bettino Craxi’s Representative on the Dooge Committee. Spinelli too was chairman of this committee and we have already noted the federalist proclivities of Zecchino in this arena. Looking at the Commission we would admittedly be hard-pressed to find evidence for Ripa de Meana’s enthusiasm for institutional reform as Commissioner responsible for institutional questions, but his Chef de Cabinet, Riccardo

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Perissich, played an important role in formulating the Commission’s position on European Union. Perissich was an active member of the shadow group of Chefs de Cabinet who helped to crystallise and distil the ideas of the President, Jacque Delors during 1985. Delor’s position then became the Commission’s position. Furthermore continuity in thinking and strategy can be underlined here if we also add to this Italian inventory the fact that Perissich had been Chef de Cabinet to Spinelli during the latter’s tenure at the Commission between 1970 and 1976. Perissich had played a part in the Commission’s draft proposal submitted to Tindemans in 1974–1975 and understood fully the federalist strategy of Spinelli. Such personal links are often overlooked in academic studies and are important to this analysis of continuity in the ideas which lie at the root of European Union. When we switch our attention to the intergovernmental arena of the Council of Ministers it is clear that the Italian Presidency of January to June 1985 was also influential for the progress of European Union. Emilio Colombo had already been active in this cause during the early 1980s and lent his name to the intergovernmental initiative known as the Genscher-Colombo proposals. But both Craxi and Andreotti worked energetically during the Italian Presidency to keep up the momentum and it was Craxi who skilfully outwitted Thatcher in the Milan European Council by obtaining the majority vote for an intergovernmental conference. Keatinge and Murphy explained the effectiveness of the Italian leadership role by a curious paradox: their success was aided by competition within the coalition government which had unusually positive effects as Craxi the Socialist and Andreotti the Christian Democrat sought to match each other’s successes.(22) In summary, then, we can see that Italy played a pivotal role from a number of different Community sites and arenas in the search for European Union in the 1980s. It was a role which should not of course be exaggerated but it should equally not be ignored. The circumstances of 1985 were admittedly unique but the Italian contribution should be viewed from both a wider and a longer perspective. It has been our purpose to stress the role of Italy and the Italians here because their contribution to European Union has usually been neglected in the mainstream British academic literature. We shall now bring this chapter to a close by making some general remarks about the intergovernmental response to European Union during 1984–1986. (e) Conclusion This chapter has attempted briefly to analyse and chart the prospects for European Union as they emerged in the shape of the EUT in 1984, and embarked upon a perilous journey via the intergovernmental world of national interests and priorities. The EUT certainly did not disappear completely from sight during 1984–1985. It existed in the minds of many intergovernmental actors and the Parliament did its best to keep its project alive by the use of reports, resolutions and debate.(23) But the EUT was never actually on the intergovernmental table as a subject for negotiation. By 1985 it was probably true to say that it had served its purpose in provoking serious debate about Europe’s future and in maintaining the momentum towards decisive action. Doubtless only few European stalwarts really believed that it still stood a real chance of being accepted intact. It was

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more realistic to believe that the EUT furnished a set of eminently practical proposals which would enable member states to extract segments for implementation a la carte. Spinelli of course rejected this scenario. He wanted to introduce a new dynamic into the body politic. Mitterrand’s dramatic public intervention certainly raised the Parliament’s expectations but as we have seen it was just as likely to fade in the fickle uncertain world of intergovernmental politics. The Dooge Report also kept some hopes of political Europe alive but it too was a fragile victory never unanimously approved. Its great enduring achievement was that it provided concrete proof that the process could be launched. The political will of the majority persisted and succeeded in pushing national governments towards a higher ground. The significance of this lay in the convergence of expectations between the leaders of the national governments representing the member states and the elected representatives of the peoples of the Community. This was where the line was drawn in 1985. We shall now turn to the penultimate chapter of this book in order both to bring our study fully up to date and to examine some of the theoretical implications suggested by our discussion of European Union. We will not attempt a detailed survey of the events of 1986–1987 in Community affairs. Rather we will approach our subject from the standpoint of a broad sketch outline of federal ideas, influences and strategies in the Community in the late 1980s. This will enable us to locate our subject in the historical perspective of 1972–1987. Notes 1. Spinelli’s speech, 14 February 1984, OJ, DEP, 1–309, p. 28. 2. Spinelli’s peroration, 14 February 1984, OJ, DEP, 1–309, p. 28. 3. Mitterrand’s speech, 24 May 1984, OJ, DEP, 1–314, pp. 262–3. 4. See the Report from the ad hoc Committee on a People’s Europe, Bulletin of the EC 3–1985, pp. 3–10. 5. For the conclusions of the Fontainebleau European Council, see Agence Europe, 28 June 1984. 6. Interview with Spinelli, 14 February 1985, European Parliament, Strasbourg. 7. It is important to note that this equation was not a fixed majority-minority relationship. There were shifting alignments on different policy issues e.g. Eire and security. 8. Ad hoc Committee For Institutional Affairs, Report To The European Council, 29–30 March 1985, (Brussels), p. 33. 9. The Parliament published an official comparison of the Dooge Report and the EUT in order to demonstrate how ‘strikingly similar’ they were. See D.G. for Committees and Interparliamentary Delagations, 16 April 1985, P.E. 97.407. 10. Report To The European Council, p. 2. 11. Interview with C.Jackson, MEP for Kent East, 14 February 1985, European Parliament, Strasbourg. 12. P.Keatinge and A.Murphy, ‘The European Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Institutional Affairs, 1984–1985’, Ch. 10, p. 223 in R.Pryce (Ed.), The Dynamics of European Union, (London, Croom Helm 1987). 13. I.Davidson, ‘The Case For Euro-froth’, Financial Times, 8 July 1985. 14. C.Tugendhat, Making Sense of Europe, (London, Viking Pelican 1986), pp. 105–6. 15. F.Roy Willis, Italy Chooses Europe, (Oxford, OUP 1971) , Preface, p. vii. 16. W.Lipgens, A History of European Integration, 1945–1947, (Oxford, Clarendon Press 1982), Ch. 1, sections 2 and 6.

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17. G.Pridham, ‘Italy’, Ch. IV, p. 84 in C. and K.Twitchett, (Eds.), Building Europe: Britain’s Partners in the EEC, (London, Europa Publications Ltd 1981). 18. R.Cardozo, ‘The Project For A Political Community’, (1952–1954) Ch. 3, p. 52 in R.Pryce (Ed.), The Dynamics of European Union. 19. A.Shonfield, Europe: Journey To An Unknown Destination, (London, Penguin Books 1973), p. 72. 20. Tugendhat, Making Sense of Europe, p. 106. 21. For a detailed analysis of Italy during the 1984 European elections, see G.Pridham, ‘Italy’, Ch. 7, pp. 155–77 in J.Lodge (Ed.), Direct Elections To The European Parliament, 1984, (London, Macmillan 1986). 22. Keatinge and Murphy, ‘Ad Hoc Committee’, p. 232. 23. On the Parliament’s attempts to ensure that the EUT was not discarded during July to October 1985 in the intergovernmental conference, see R.Corbett, ‘The 1985 Intergovernmental Conference and the Single European Act’, Ch. 11 in R.Pryce (Ed.), The Dynamics of European Union.

Chapter Seven FEDERALISM AND THE SINGLE EUROPEAN ACT, 1985–1987 Introduction Looking back upon the period between June 1985 and December 1985 when the Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) met to fashion a series of compromises on reforming the treaties which would be the central focus of the Luxembourg European Council, it can be seen clearly that at last the status quo was not an option. The political momentum generated by the European Parliament’s EUT and the subsequent Dooge Report, culminating in the Milan decision to have an IGC, meant that institutional reform of some sort was kept on the agenda. Thatcher had been forced to go along with this momentum and the three so-called ‘footnote’ countries—the U.K., Denmark and Greece—were compelled at the very least to attend the IGC for fear of being marginalised by the decisions likely to be taken by the majority of seven. As we have seen, Thatcher’s room for manouevre had been narrowly circumscribed. But national sovereignty was not at risk because within the IGC, unlike in Milan, unanimity was required for the approval of treaty amendments. From the federalist perspective, at this critical stage, it was vital simply to keep up the pressure upon the governments. The IGC was formally convened on 22 July 1985 and the first ministerial meeting took place on 9 September, agreeing to ‘take account in its work of the Draft Treaty adopted by the European Parliament’ as well as ‘any further proposal which the European Parliament may wish to submit’.(1) We shall not attempt a detailed analysis of what occurred inside the IGC during the important months of September to November 1985 because this has already been researched by Richard Corbett in a recently published text.(2) But it is important to underline the point which he has stressed concerning the IGC: In convening the IGC on this basis, Council broke with precedent. Previous revisions of the Treaty were negotiated within the Council, often in close association with the other institutions, and the IGC had merely provided formal assent. This time the real negotiations were to take place in the IGC, the outcome of which was unknown when the other institutions gave their favourable opinions.(3) We can see that in these circumstances the Parliament had to use its best skill and diplomacy in order to keep its foot in the door of institutional reform. The approach of the IGC was not institutional reform at all. Instead it chose to examine and discuss what it

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perceived as necessary from a policy perspective and only then to consider the institutional implications. It was obvious by this stage of the proceedings that despite the rhetoric of the IGC it had no intention of considering a new treaty in the sense of the EUT. It was engaged in a very different enterprise. Santer, the Luxembourg Prime Minister, identified five main themes which had come to dominate the attention of the European Council: improved decision-making in the Council of Ministers; an enhanced role for the European Parliament; the Commission’s executive responsibilities; the extension of Community activities into new areas; and the strengthening of political co-operation.(4) Here we can already detect the skeletal outline of what eventually became the Single European Act. There was no real difference of opinion between member state governments about the problems to be solved; the differences emerged over the methods to be used. Santer’s five main themes prompted different responses from the Heads of State or Government. The familiar question reappeared: should the reforms considered necessary be achieved by making better use of the existing structures without treaty revision or should a new departure be made requiring treaty amendment? The Luxembourg Presidency resolved to adhere strictly to Article 236 of the EEC Rome Treaty in order to achieve unanimous agreement among the Twelve. This was deemed inescapable. But Santer expressed the view that a complementarity of proposals would suffice to make an historic step forward, built upon unanimity, which would ‘represent a major step towards the final objective of a European Union’. (5) Any contributions towards achieving this goal whether or not they entailed ‘modifying the treaties’ were, in his view, ultimately ‘complementary’.(6) Treaty modification was therefore not excluded. The main aim of the Commission and of some of the small member states such as Belgium and Luxembourg was to avoid a conclusion which yielded two separate texts—one on political co-operation and one on modifications to the EEC Rome Treaty. Delors spelled this out very clearly to the Parliament.(7) The first reason for this was purely tactical. The Commission wanted to prevent the IGC from dishing reforms to the Rome Treaty in order to claim modest successes in political co-operation. In this event member state governments could plausibly jettison changes to the Rome Treaty but still argue that the IGC had been successful. EPC would thus constitute the sole area of progress. With one single text, however, it would have been very difficult for member state governments to claim success in one area while confessing failure in the other. The second reason was substantive. To allow two separate texts would effectively impede the gradual approximation of EPC to the main Community arena. The Commission’s position, then, was once again tactical, the predicament of a supranational institution reacting to an intergovernmental strategy. It had, after all, not chosen the approach. Its main concern was to ensure that headway was made in the areas of new competences and in decision-making procedures. The latter meant increased use of majority voting in the Council of Ministers and new powers of co-decision for the European Parliament. Delors had put the internal market and technological co-operation at the forefront of the Commission’s proposals but in following what he perceived to be a wise response to the IGC there were two obvious dangers.(8) First the Commission’s acquiescence risked losing sight of the importance of the overall institutional question. The grand design might be forfeited. Secondly the IGC might degenerate into a fragmentary discussion in which only a number of very specific points were developed

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into a working programme rather than constitutional change. Hence if the Commission wanted to retain the advantage of the Luxembourg Presidency approach while avoiding its pitfalls it was compelled to discuss competences in a global sense in order to determine what would be necessary to facilitate Community progress during the next generation while simultaneously keeping attention focused upon decision-making procedures. From the Commission’s perspective the IGC could not be allowed to fail. Its conclusions would determine the scope of the treaties for the next twenty years and therefore the pace and development of Europe. But the Commission also feared a cosmetic result. Even if successful, a cosmetic conference would be seen as just that. Still worse would have been disagreement even on cosmetics. In this event the Community would have been divided about nothing and Europe would not have even been able to explain to public opinion that its disarray was about real issues. This would have been the worst possible outcome. And this was the reason why Delors had deliberately set the IGC at such an audaciously high level of ambition. Having called the IGC into existence, he reasoned that its conclusions could not be cosmetic. Member state governments were to some extent imprisoned by their own decision to go ahead with the IGC in Milan. Let us look now at the results of the politics and diplomacy of this intergovernmental dilemma. The Single European Act The Luxembourg Presidency was confronted with two pressing demands. First there was the requirement of unanimity and, secondly, there was the imperative of national ratification to twelve separate parliaments. Given these constraints it came as little surprise to learn that the Single European Act (SEA) fell far short of European Union as conceptualised by the European Parliament and by several member states, notably Italy and Belgium. Certainly if we compare it with the EUT, though there were some limited resemblances, it was only a pale reflection of what the Parliament’s project had intended. We will not provide a detailed examination of the SEA here since it has already been analysed in depth elsewhere.(9) Instead we will approach it from the federalist standpoint in order to suggest how far the SEA could conceivably move the European Community closer towards federalism and European Union. Before we begin our brief survey of the SEA it is useful to bear in mind two important preliminary considerations. First it is possible to adopt either a minimalist or a maximalist position. Certain member state governments, notably the British, Danish and Greek, interpret the new treaty revision for different reasons from the standpoint of restricting its policy and institutional implications to very modest proportions. Others, including Italy and the Benelux countries, perceive it in more ambitious terms. And federalists of course believe that as the first major overhaul of the Treaties—leaving aside the 1970 and 1975 budgetary revisions—the maximum of advantage should be wrung from the policy extensions and institutional reforms enshrined within it. Even seemingly modest adaptations can be very significant and if persistent pressure is applied discreetly these changes could be made to work in a federalist direction, thus altering the institutional balance in ways unforeseen by intergovernmental elites. Secondly, we should remember the federalist conception of policies and institutions from a political strategy viewpoint.

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Some federalists believe that concrete progress can be made by extending Community competences, like POCO and EMS, within the existing institutional framework while others focus almost exclusively upon institutional reform as the most productive route to European Union. The SEA contained reforms in both of these dimensions. Let us look first at the extensions of formal competences to new areas. Community competence in research and technological development, the environment, regional policy and social policy was formally extended. In particular both environmental policy and regional policy are not treaty-based. Hitherto only implemented as part of a series of environment programmes dating from 1973, environmental policy is now an official Community policy albeit subject to unanimity in the Council of Ministers on questions of principle. There may be some potential here for further extension too if the Commission attempts to route parts of it through Article 100A concerning the establishment and functioning of the internal market rather than via the more restrictive Articles 130R and 130S. Similarly with regional policy there may in future be some scope for extension in Article 130E which recognises the Regional Development Fund and provides for majority voting in the Council of Ministers concerning the implementation of decisions.(10) But what of POCO and the EMS—two policy areas which federalists have traditionally viewed as potentially path-breaking towards European Union? Here their hopes were disappointed. There was no merger of political co-operation and the Community arena, as had been proposed in the EUT. Certainly it has been formally incorporated in the SEA but, though linked, it remains a distinctly separate structure from the Community with no mechanism provided for its gradual transfer from the intergovernmental arena to the more integrated Community framework. A secretariat based in Brussels was established but it remains a moot point as to how far its potential will be realised as a centripetal force for POCO development. In summary, ‘none of these novelties change the character of the co-operation. It remains a statement of intent, especially as the competence of the Court of Justice is not enlarged to include EPC’.(11) Similarly with the EMS it was mentioned in the preamble of the SEA (implementing monetary co-operation) and both the EMS and the ECU have been acknowledged in the Treaty revision (Article 102A), but it was significant that any institutional changes deemed necessary by the further development of economic and monetary policy would be subject to Article 236 of the EEC Treaty which requires national ratification in each of the member states. In short, although both the EMS and the ECU are now firmly treatybased, the procedures for their further development within the framework of existing competences are more cumbersome rather than less so. Progress, at least in theory, may in future be more difficult to achieve. Much will depend upon long-term currency changes, notably with the American dollar and the Deutschmark, but Tindemans’ observation in 1975 that ‘this question is the crux of the internal development of the Union’(12) remains to be solved. There can be no genuine European Union until this basic goal is achieved. The modest outcome of the SEA in the monetary field brings the question of the internal market and majority voting in the Council of Ministers into sharp focus. Among the outstanding unfulfilled commitments in the Treaty of Rome, the idea of a seamless common market, to be achieved by 1992, has been given great prominence in the SEA and subsequently in the economic liberalism espoused by much of the West European

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media. Clearly qualified majority voting applied with few exceptions (eg. fiscal harmonisation) to the completion of the internal market by 1992 represents a significant milestone in the gradual legal surrender by member states of their national sovereignty in the areas delineated. But much depends yet again upon how member state governments perceive the quality, scope and speed of the changes required. The sheer motive force of West European capitalism may conceivably push governments closer towards the internal market goal, but to abolish the frontiers completely could be construed as a political promise not a legal guarantee. Nonetheless the commitment to remove entirely, rather than merely to diminish, internal barriers by 1992 is important. There is no magic in the year 1992 but it does serve the vital purpose of galvanising governments, of giving them at least a symbolic deadline at which to aim. If we look finally at the institutional provisions laid down in the SEA concerning the Commission, the Court of Justice, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament we will have an overall picture of the recent treaty revision. The Commission’s role was theoretically strengthened in that it was given ‘powers for the implementation of the rules which the Council lays down’ but the latter was able to ‘reserve the right, in specific cases, to exercise directly implementing powers itself and to specify the ‘principles and rules to be laid down’ which governed Commission action.(13) The treaty revision also extended to the Court of Justice in that a subsidiary Court of First Instance was created, principally to relieve the workload of the main Court, but it was granted no specific powers. It was in the area of the European Parliament’s altered institutional role that federalists have sensed perhaps the best possibility to exploit opportunities unintended by member state governments. Here a new co-operation procedure was introduced, albeit limited to ten articles, which provides for a Second Reading in the Parliament’s participation in decision-making. The overall effect of this new mechanism remains as yet unclear but it does give the Parliament something of a toe in the door of codecision— so strenuously pursued in the EUT. First it could reject a Council proposal entirely by an absolute majority of all its members. If in a Council of twelve member state governments it could find at least one ally in its favour then it could effectively destroy those proposals which it disliked. The Council may enact these texts only by unanimity. This, then, could give the Parliament a new leverage in its relationship with the Council. On the face of it this amounts to a veto power in the absence of unanimity in the Council because here the proposal would fall. If we investigate this procedure further by looking at amendment possibilities the picture becomes both complicated and cloudy. The Parliament can propose amendments to Council texts by an absolute majority of all its members. In this case its amendments go to the Commission which must re-examine the text and within one month send the Council both its own amendments and those of the Parliament which it does not accept. The Council can adopt the Commission’s re-examined proposal by a qualified majority but would require unanimity to amend it. Concerning the Parliament’s amendments, the Council may adopt them only by unanimity. What are the implications of this new cooperation procedure for the Commission and the Parliament? What does it herald in terms of the Community’s future institutional relationships? The implications are undoubtedly many-sided. Much remains unclear. The Parliament has certainly been accorded a greater role in decision-making than hitherto but many observers would view it as essentially a negative role. For example, its assent is now

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required for further enlargement of the Community and for Association Agreements but here it has only ‘a chance to accept or reject a package negotiated by others; and it concerns events not likely to occur frequently in future years’.(14) Similarly with the amendment procedure a first glance would certainly suggest that the Commission’s amendments have a much better chance of being adopted by the Council than do those of the Parliament. But this is where it may be a mistake to look narrowly at the effect upon each individual institution. We should instead consider the overall impact of these procedures upon the triangular relationship of Council, Commission and Parliament. If, for example, the Parliament could find at least one ally on most issues in the Council then its bargaining power would be enhanced while if it could ensure that the Commission would incorporate its own amendments in dealing with the Council then qualified majority voting rather than unanimity would apply. In the latter example the SEA would facilitate a de facto co-decision in a limited area. From the federalist standpoint ‘cooperation’ would thus become ‘co-decision’. And this would be the result of a skilful political strategy rather than a battle of legal interpretation. Such windows of opportunity must, however, be handled delicately by the Commission. Given the original positions of Denmark and the United Kingdom contrasted with those of Italy and Belgium, for example, the co-operation procedure was obviously a compromise package deal and one which the Commission did not like. Realistically, then, it has been given an important gatekeeping role, seeking above all to ensure that proposals are not allowed to lapse via Council inertia. The three-months time limit imposed on the Council to respond (allowing for a further month agreed by the Council and the Parliament) to Commission and Parliament decisions may or may not exert pressure for decisive action. Only practice will tell. In general the Commission must adopt an approach which is designed to minimise conflict and maximise consensus and co-operation between itself, the Council and the Parliament. Here attention may well be directed in the First Reading towards the Parliament, especially over the issue of coordinating amendments to Council texts. The SEA may very well usher in a new dialogue between the Commission and the Parliament of a kind previously unknown in Community history. Taken as a whole it seems sensible in retrospect for the member state governments not to have equated the SEA with European Union. Even our short survey of it indicates very clearly that it fell far short of this goal. Indeed the phrase ‘European Union’ was alluded to just twice and only in the preamble to the SEA. Our brief analysis of the SEA offers both security to the intergovernmentalists and hope for the federalists. It can conveniently be reduced to minimalism versus maximalism. Some competences were carefully safeguarded for the member states and on some issues such as culture, education, energy and consumer protection the SEA’s silence was deafening. Here the intergovernmental interpretation was confirmed. But if the door to institutional reform appears now to have been firmly closed to federalists there may well be several windows open to them for the future. Much will depend upon how the new co-operation procedure works. We are reminded here of the emphasis both Monnet and Spinelli placed upon new institutions and procedures which effectively altered men’s perceptions of problems and their behaviour thereafter. Old views, habits and roles are radically changed by working within new procedures. The SEA may not have introduced de jure codecision between the Council, Commission and Parliament but it does contain potentially far-reaching

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possibilities for the Community’s institutional relationships and provides greater scope to do things which many member states did not originally intend. Federalists, it will be recalled, are both optimists and opportunists; it is their destiny to canvas ideas which are deemed premature by pragmatists. Let us look finally at what this book—this long journey—suggests about federalism and European Union from a theoretical perspective. Some Theoretical Implications Given the usual limitations of space we shall not embark upon a long and detailed discussion of the theoretical implications for federalism and European Union which is perhaps long overdue. Instead we will underline what the federalist ideas, influences and strategies identified in this book suggest about federalist theory in the specific context of the European Community. First, however, it is important for us to return to the federalism of Spinelli which had as its main focus and goal the building of the European federation based upon a federal constitution. Leaving aside questions of federalist strategy and tactics in the building of Europe, was there not a fundamental flaw in Spinelli’s federalist thinking? Since he sought ultimately to transcend narrow-minded nationalism and archaic state structures which were both dangerous and stifled the latest common European elaboration, would not a new European federation merely recreate the problems of the past which he had struggled so relentlessly to surmount? In short, a new European federation would be a state and states are notoriously resilient and tough in defence and promotion of their perceived interests. This criticism has been made in a recent text which analysed the Parliament’s EUT: in the notion of Union we could be tempted to see an underlying idealtype of European integration, a distant aspiration: a Europe which will bring about the elimination of the individual Member States as the basic units of political power and sovereignty—a Federal State, a United States of Europe… This temptation…must be rejected … The notion of an idealtype United States of Europe, of a European Federal State represents in a most real sense a betrayal of both the deeper aspirations of European integration and of Europe’s unique contribution to current political life…in the lore of modern European integration the raison d’etre for setting the process in motion was largely to negate the ravages brought about by the excesses of the modern and relatively new nation State and its ideology… And yet, that very raison d’etre compels the rejection today of a European ‘superstate’. What achievement will it be, what progress will we have made, if we arrive at a point which paradoxically reinforces the very political structure towards which the European process was attempting to create a distance?(15) In other words Spinelli was unable to escape from the state and its putative shortcomings. And in the logic of his own reasoning what sense did it make to elevate the state to a new

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European level? Would it not as a state continue to harbour all of the dangers and deficiencies which he had so painstakingly striven to expose? For many federalists this conundrum is only temporary. Viewed from the standpoint of the world historical process it is but a phase in the development of the federal idea towards World government. But even at the level of European unification there are no precedents in history for what Spinelli sought to achieve. As Albertini has observed, the Union is only effective when it is achieved, that is, when it begins to safeguard interests on a European level previously entrusted to the states. Only at this point does it connect directly with ordinary people’s daily lives. Its political effectiveness thus becomes apparent only at the end and not at the beginning of the action. (16) Moreover, ‘there is no exhaustive theoretical model of the transition from one system of states with absolute sovereignty to a federal system’.(17) The questions raised here suggest the need for further development in federalist theory. The study of federalism is constantly hampered and restricted both by history and conventional terminology. Classic federal theories have little relevance to the European enterprise and federalists are therefore in something of a theoretical and strategic dilemma when advocating a new type of federal state. In a recent article Lucio Levi has underlined this peculiar predicament: We may therefore conclude that the problem of European unification requires the creation of an entirely new form of state with completely new political and social contents, of which the federations of the past are only a pallid antecedent. The search for new solutions to the problem of associating independent states in a stable way is a challenge for reason and a powerful stimulus to the renewal of federalist theory.(18) Here we return to the problem already identified in Chapter One: how can federalists support movement in a unitary direction in Europe without seeking a new unitary state? The answer we have suggested lies in reconnecting the interstate and intrastate worlds of Western Europe in order to reintegrate them into a genuine unified European perspective. Grounded in practical experience and current realities the idea of European federalism seeking federation—would then evolve and develop, as it were, indigenously out of daily practice. What, then, does the study of federalist ideas, influences and strategies in the European Community during 1972–1987 suggest about federalist theory? What are the theoretical implications? It is important to emphasise the historical context in which such theoretical implications are situated. The period surveyed in this study certainly suggests that, unlike neo-functionalism, federalism has both survived and responded to the politics of the economic recession. It has identified the crisis of the nation-state and furnished the means by which it can be overcome. Spinelli was quick to exploit the contradictions arising out of the partial character of the solutions proposed by member state governments to major contemporary problems. Since the degree of construction in the Community its limited constitutionalism—prevented anything but partial solutions to European problems, Spinelli was forced to take advantage of what little progress could be made during these years. Piecemeal, evolutionary progress in areas like POCO and EMS indicated the limits of integration and underlined Europe’s palpable inability to develop

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and implement genuine common policies. Spinelli therefore attempted to use these failures—these makeshift intergovernmental nostrums—in order to pressurise governments to adopt constitutional solutions. Europe was faced with the need to take decisions which required state-like political power but, as we have seen, the King was missing. There was no real government. And without a decisive reinforcement of the Community’s capacity for action—its ability to go beyond what existed—there was no guarantee that the process of unification, of an ever closer union, would continue. Political Europe, though, has made some progress during these years. The increased budgetary powers of the Parliament, direct elections to the Parliament, procedural consensus in POCO and of course the SEA represent small but significant gains. If we return to the important article written by John Pinder to which we referred in Chapter One, it would seem that a detailed investigation of how even such modest increments of federalism (as we have achieved in this period) were made possible might have some theoretical implications. This is not to suggest that there exist some as yet undiscovered ‘dynamics’ of federal political unification which needs to be revealed to a waiting world. Rather it means that we need to understand more fully the circumstances which propelled forward movements at different times. In other words we require a deeper knowledge and understanding of the complex relationships which exist between what Murray Forsyth has defined as the interstate and intrastate worlds. Pinder’s analysis logically impels us to look again at the importance of political leadership in the quest for further federal increments, whether in competences or institutions, an input considered to be of vital significance by Roy Pryce as early as 1973.(19) Only in the light of such renewed considerations does the much misunderstood phrase ‘political will’ make any sense. Federalists need to understand and explain how and why political will can coalesce around different issues at different times. Certainly Spinelli was under no illusions about it. It existed and if it could not be effectively encapsulated in institutional reform then federalists were compelled as outsiders to adopt the strategy of crisis-exploitation to push governments in a federal direction. We have not provided a detailed account of the theoretical implications for federalism arising out of this study but we have pointed up some of the lines of enquiry which might be profitably followed in the future. Pinder’s recent analysis goes into more detail and offers many thought-provoking arguments in support of incremental federalism. This study certainly suggests that federalist theory must address itself to the notion of federalisation as a process as well as to the more familiar idea of a federal end to be attained. In this light the SEA may be viewed as yet another, albeit small, step in an overall process of federalisation. It must not be exaggerated but equally it cannot be ignored. Something clearly is happening to Europe. After all, why even from a purely intergovernmental perspective should the member states agree to the SEA? What meaning can it have if it does not add yet another tier to the building of Europe? Notes 1. EP Bulletin, No. 39 (Special Edition, 26 September 1985), p. 6. 2. See R.Corbett, ‘The 1985 Intergovernmental Conference and the Single European Act’, Chap. 11 in R.Pryce (Ed.), The Dynamics of European Union, pp. 238–72 (London, Croom Helm 1987). 3. Corbett, ‘The 1985 Intergovernmental Conference’, p. 239.

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4. See Santer’s speech to the European Parliament on the results and implications of the Milan European Council and the Luxembourg Presidency’s intentions regarding the IGC, OJ, DEP, No. 2–328, (9 July 1985), pp. 36–41 and 68–9. 5. Santer’s speech, No. 2–328/41. 6. Santer’s speech, No. 2–328/41. 7. See Delors’ speech on the Commission’s position, OJ, DEP, No. 2–328 (9 July 1985), pp. 41–6. 8. Delors personally favoured economic convergence and the strengthening of the EMS but he acknowledged that the differences between the member state governments were ‘too great and remain too great for progress to be possible’, OJ, DEP, No. 2–328 (9 July 1985), p. 42. 9. See J.Lodge, ‘The Single European Act: Towards a New Euro-Dynamism?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol. xxiv, No. 3 (March 1986), pp. 203–23, and R.Corbett, ‘The 1985 Intergovernmental Conference and the Single European Act’, Ch. 11, pp. 238–72 in R.Pryce (Ed.), The Dynamics of European Union. 10. Single European Act, EC Bulletin, Supplement 2/86, pp. 5–26. 11. Corbett, ‘The 1985 Intergovernmental Conference’, p. 261. 12. Tindemans Report, Memo From Belgium, (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Brussels 1976), p. 26. 13. Single European Act, EC Bulletin, Supplement 2/86, p. 10. 14. Corbett, ‘The 1985 Intergovernmental Conference’, p. 262. 15. R.Bieber et al., Intro., pp. 7–8 in R.Bieber, J.P.Jacque and J.H.Weiler (Eds.) An Ever Closer Union (European Perspectives Series,Brussels 1985). 16. M.Albertini, ‘Europe on the Threshold of Union’, The Federalist, vol. xxviii, No. 1, (1986), p. 32. 17. Albertini, ‘Europe on the Threshold’, pp. 35–6. 18. L.Levi, ‘Recent Developments in Federalist Theory’, The Federalist, vol. xxix, No. 2, (1987), p. 102. 19. R.Pryce, The Politics of the European Community, (Butterworths, London 1973), pp. 41–5.

Chapter Eight CONCLUSION This study has demonstrated a fundamental continuity of federal ideas, influences and strategies in the political development of the European Community during the years between 1972 and 1987. It has attempted to show that the main impulse behind the efforts to give meaning to European Union since the early 1970s has been that of federalism. By focusing our attention almost exclusively upon the federal ideas, influences and strategies we have tried to chronicle the sequence of key events in the Community during 1972– 1987 from an unusual, some might say even idiosyncratic, perspective. Our attempt has been to escape from the myopic vision of intergovern-mentalism which portrays the Community as a mere association of sovereign states lacking any overall sense of distinct organic identity. On the contrary, we have suggested the existence of an evolving organic whole which is gradually taking shape in the form of a new and unique European federal state. In order to substantiate this argument we have examined the notion of federalism itself both from the interstate and intrastate perspectives in Western Europe and have pointed up the important connecting links which exist between them. The conceptual distinction between federalism and federation enables us conveniently to differentiate federalism as a political ideology, a political movement and a process from federation which the Community has not yet become but elements of which it already possesses. It was important in this study to pay some attention to the Community’s federal heritage not only because it has been neglected but also because it provides a crucial legitimacy to current federalist ideas, influences and strategies. This enabled us to restore the importance of federalism to the study of the Community’s past, present and future. It allows us to view federalism as a perfectly rational, logical approach to Community affairs, thus distancing it from the largely misleading criticisms levelled at it by its less percipient detractors. Our subsequent focus upon Monnet and Spinelli brought us in a sense to the core of our study at an early stage. By comparing and contrasting their respective routes towards European federation it was possible to reveal their underlying assumptions about the logic and nature of economic and political integration which continue to inform the debate about Europe today. The following chapters which examined the Community’s political development up until 1987 were predicted mainly upon Monnet’s legacy and Spinelli’s attempts to shift from functionalism to constitutionalism. In other words the years between 1972 and 1987 can be seen as the struggle to achieve political Europe. And this is where we are today. But in the quest to flesh out the meaning of European Union during this period the main driving-force has been federalism. Federal ideas, influences and strategies have displayed a remarkable resilience and continuity throughout the postwar years since 1945 and our survey of the period 1972–1987 demonstrates their continuing vigour and vitality. Indeed, if we take account of the roles of Spinelli and the

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European Parliament in the 1980s we can see that federalism is even stronger and more relevant to the Community than it has ever been, thus rendering the so-called ‘federalist phase’ up to 1954 an obsolete aphorism. But what of the future? In the wake of the Parliament’s EUT and the subsequent SEA what are the prospects for federalism and European Union? This is a crucial question in view of the fact that most member state governments regard the SEA as having decided the future of the Community for at least the remainder of this century. And of course there is now no Spinelli to provide that galvanising momentum and intellectual clarity essential to forward movement. The SEA may provide the mechanism for some such movement if it can be skilfully exploited but Europe still does not have the institutional capacity to go much beyond what exists. It is around this central question of the institutional machinery that a new federalist group in the Parliament has recently coalesced. Known as the ‘Federalist Intergroup for European Union’, this new all-party group already has 140 out of the Parliament’s 518 MEPs. Its main aim is to ‘resume the Parliament’s action to achieve European Union and to act as a ginger group to the Parliament’s Institutional Committee’.(1) Derek Prag, not surprisingly, was one of the new group’s founding members and construes the Parliament’s future role as a ‘federator’ in the following terms: The Single European Act performs little more than a slight gesture towards making the Community more effective and more democratic…we have decided that we need inspiration and new action…we must not fail again. We cannot afford to let another three years of effort, like those we expended on the draft treaty, produce a result as insignificant as the Single European Act. Another failure could end in the European idea being submerged for many years. To avoid any such fate, we must above all look at where we went wrong last time. I have no doubt of where the trouble lay: we tried to rush the fences and fell. It was understandable: Altiero Spinelli inspired us all…But he…was a man in a hurry to get things done… The intensive dialogue with the governments, parliaments and citizens of the Member States never actually took off. Next time, to avoid another failure, consultations in the Member States must not only be longer, more systematic and more intensive; they must also be better planned and adequately financed. For there is no way of avoiding the realities of power, and power in the democractic states of Western Europe still resides in the national governments and the national parliaments… while European Union will not be built by the governments, it cannot be built in opposition to them either.(2) The Parliament’s self-styled constituent role in the search for European Union in the 1990s appears to have been reaffirmed. And its strategy in the future will be a twin approach: to exploit the new powers granted to the Parliament in the SEA to the full and simultaneously to put pressure upon national governments. Here, then, there has been a significant shift in its strategy. Another leading member of the new federalist group, Fernand Herman, a former Belgian Finance Minister and EPP member who sat on the Dooge Committee during 1984–1985, has acknowledged that Spinelli’s attempt to build

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Europe against national governments by mobilising the support of national parliaments, failed by its own terms of reference. The member states’ citizens were not sufficiently aware of European issues to be effectively mobilised in support of European Union.(3) Parliament’s aim therefore is to enlist greater public support in the future principally by focussing upon the ‘democratic deficit’ which allows European legislation to be sanctioned and implemented without any public influence or control either at the level of national parliaments or at the European Parliament level. Parliament now regards the 1989 European elections as vital for the beginning of this new campaign. MEPs have the opportunity to create an enhanced role for themselves if they can demonstrate that the Parliament’s new powers, especially in the co-operation procedure, have an equally new relevance to the national publics. Much will depend upon what information reaches the ordinary citizen and how well MEPs can obtain a high profile in national as well as European arenas. But there remains the danger in this new strategy that in its efforts to pressurise national governments to introduce further institutional reform the Parliament will be unable to muster the sort of support which Spinelli garnered among MEPs. It may be very difficult to obtain widespread agreement across the Parliament on further amendments to the Treaty of Rome. Spinelli, we must remember, managed to capture the imagination of sufficient MEPs among the various party groups for a big campaign centred upon a very ambitious EUT designed ultimately to replace the existing status quo. Without him none of it would have happened and it certainly would not have taken the audacious form that it did. The current ‘Federalist Intergroup for European Union’ may ironically find it harder to achieve amendments to the Rome Treaty than to mobilise the Parliament and national publics around a new more ambitious EUT. In retrospect had Spinelli chosen a different, less ambitious, route for the Parliament there may have been no significant forward movement at all because national governments would have been able to sabotage the proposals by selective disagreement at an early stage. Whatever view we have of these recent developments it is clear, as we bring our study to a close, that federalism retains both its significance and its vitality to European Union in the late twentieth century. Future progress towards that elusive ‘ever closer union’ will be built upon the legacy of Altiero Spinelli whose shadow and spirit continue to infuse it. NOTES 1. D.Prag, ‘Crocodile Mark Two Sets Off in Pursuit of European Union’, The European Enterprise, vol. 1, No. 1, (Jan-Feb 1987), p. 21. 2. Prag, ‘Crocodile Mark Two’, p. 21. 3. Interview with Fernand Herman, 11 February 1988, European Parliament, Strasbourg.

INDEX Adenauer, K. 53, 67 Adonnino Committee 184 Albertini, M. 33, 59–60, 212 Andreotti, G. 197–8 Andriessen, F. 138–9, 146, 187 Australia, 14 Austria 11, 21, Barbi, P. 170 Belgium 11, 17, 146, 194, 200, 205, 210 Benelux Countries 80, 187, 192–4, 206, 193, 199, 204, 209 Benes, E. 52 Brandt, W. 66–9, 73–6, 79–80 Brugmans, H. 30, 80 Burke, E. 48, 156–7 Camps, M. 64 Canada 14 Colombo, E. 126, 198 Craxi, B. 194, 197–8 Delors, J. 139, 187, 197, 204 De Gasperi, A. 67, 193 de Gaulle, Gen. 60, 66 73, 77, 96, 134 Denmark 30, 78, 100, 187, 192, 202, 210 de Rougemont, D. 31 Dooge, J. (Senator) 180 Dooge, Committee 184, 186 Economic and Monetary Union 7, 66–7, 75, 84, 102 Economic and Social Committee 81, 86 Einaudi, L. 56, 132 European Coal and Steel Community 24, 43, 52–3 European Commission 79–81, 83–4, 88–90, 96, 104–6, 123–5, 136–44, 187, 202–4, 209 European Council Brussels (1985) 190–91 Dublin (1984) 187 Fontainebleau (1984) 180 Luxembourg (1976) 80, 89 Milan (1985) 190–94 European Court of Justice 19, 81, 86, 88, 96, 111, 147, 207–8

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European Defence Community 5, 31, 37, 54 European Democrat Group 5, 147–8, 155–9 European Monetary System 71, 101, 111, 206, 214 European Parliament 7, 19, 56, 87, 92–9, 197, 208 European People’s Party 5, 8, 90, 134, 147–54, 163–5 European Political Community 31, 37, 55 European Political Co-operation 7, 75, 84, 204–6, 214 European Resistance 27, 30, 34 European Union of Federalists 6, 30 European Union Treaty 5, 56, 135, 159, 160–73, 183–9, 198–9 Faure, M. 187–8 Federal Union 55, 133–4 Ferri, M. 130, 186, 197, Forsyth, M. 11–12, 18–19 211 France 11, 17, 30, 78, 187 Franck, C. 75–6 Friedrich, C. 13 Genscher-Colombo Plan 121, 125–31, 198 Gilmour, I. 152 Giscard d’Estaing 76–7, 79, 90, 105 Greece 99, 103, 108, 187, 192, 202 Hallsteing, W. 20, 64, 66, 72, 94 Heath, E. 76–7, 79–80 Herman, F. 186, 220–21 Hitler, A. 29, 66 Hughes, C.J. 14 Hume, D. 152 India 14 Ireland 78, 187 Italy 17, 30, 80, 146, 187, 194–8, 205, 206, 210 Jackson, C 160, 163, 186 Jackson, R. 155–9 Kirk, Sir P. 120–1 Kohl, H. 186, 191–2 194 League of Nations 35, 49 Lipgens, W. 26, 34, 192 Luster, R. 164–5 Malaysia 14 Marc, A. 30 Mayne, R. 45 Mitrany, D. 51, 56

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Mitterrand, F. 163, 182–6, 188–92, 194, 199 Monnet, J. 24–5, 31, 39, 42–46, 70, 74, 91–4, 145, 185, 210, 218–9 Morgan, A. 64 Movimento Federalista Europeo 6, 31, 130 Mussolini, B. 28 Newton, Dunn, W. 160 Noel, E. 101, 108 OEEC 52 Papandreou, A. 191 Pentland, C. 11 Perrissich, R. 197 Pfennig, G. 164 Pinder, J. 16, 19, 54, 132, 136, 214 Pompidou, G. 65, 69, 73–7, 79–80, 105 Prag, D. 172, 215 Reports Committee of Three (1979) 104–8 Dooge (1984–5) 186–70, 199, 202, 221 London (1981) 125 Spirenberg (1979) 102–4, 135 Tindermans (1975) 5, 77, 80–92, 100, 134 Vedel (1972) 96–7, 100, 109, 196 Rifkind, M. 187 Riker, W. 13 Ripa de Meana, C. 187, 197 Rossi, E. 29 Ruhfus, J. 187, 191 Santer, J. 203 Schmidt, H. 76, 123 Schuman Plan 45, 54, 93 Schuman, R. 24, 67, 182 Single European Act (1987) 56, 130, 168 203, 205–11, 214, 219–20 Soviet Union 68 Spain 11, 17, 108, 168, Spinelli, A. 5, 7–8, 19, 25, 29, 31–2, 38–9, 42–62, 64, 70–72, 81, 86, 89–90, 131–6, 199, 210, 211–14, 218–22 Summits Copenhagen (1973) 75 Hague (1969) 64–6, 69–71, 76 Paris (1972) 72, 78, 99, 81, 87, 99 Switzerland 11, 21, 56 Taylor, P. 73, 78 Thatcher, M. 155, 189–95, 194, 199, Thorn, G. 121, 135–43 167, 182

Index Tindemans, L. 5, 124, 141–3, 194, 204 see also Report, Tindemans Toksvig, C. 157 Tugendhat, C. 25, 35, 37, 191 United Kingdom 17, 76, 78, 99, 121, 184 Paris (1974) 76–8 United States 14, 26 Vandamme, J. 85, 87 Ventotene 29, 78, 90, 184 Webb, C. 2 West Germany 11, 17, 78, 184 Wilson, H. 76 Zecchino, O. 162, 168, 194

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