Churchill set out a blueprint for the EU after the Second World War

Given how bulkily he towers over the European debate, and has since the end of the Second World War, maybe a good starting point for assessing Britain’s troubled, ambiguous, and now emotionally charged relationship with Europe is with Winston Churchill. Although various notions of a more politically united Europe had been floated over the years (excluding the imperial designs of Napoleon and Hitler, of course), these had mostly been idealistic and academic; few practising politicians, and none of the stature of Churchill, had put forward such a vision.

Yet, in a speech in Zurich in 1946, Churchill did precisely that, and in terms that would still make the Eurosceptics of today squirm, not least with embarrassment at the way they lazily invoke his memory and reputation to “get Brexit done”. Only one year after the end of the war, Churchill told his startled audience this:

“If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance, there would be no limit to the happiness, to the prosperity and glory which its three or four hundred million people would enjoy. Yet it is from Europe that have sprung that series of frightful nationalistic quarrels, originated by the Teutonic nations, which we have seen even in this twentieth century and in our own lifetime, wreck the peace and mar the prospects of all mankind.

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“I am now going to say something that will astonish you. The first step in the recreation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany.

“The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important. Small nations will count as much as large ones and gain their honour by their contribution to the common cause. The ancient states and principalities of Germany, freely joined together for mutual convenience in a federal system, might each take their individual place among the United States of Europe.

“Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America, and I trust Soviet Russia – for then indeed all would be well – must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe and must champion its right to live and shine.”

So in those few paragraphs we can see Churchill blessing a new super-state on the other side of the channel, but also the ambivalence about how far Britain would be a part of it. There are other Churchill quotes and speeches which serve both sides of the argument. In 1947, for example, he declared that “Britain will have to play her full part as a member of the European family”; another time he tilted towards the Atlantic: “If Britain must chose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea.”

It is obviously ludicrous to try to imagine if the old man would have voted Leave or Remain in 2016, say; but if actions speak louder than words, then the British establishment as a whole, and the British people, were never that keen on taking part in whatever the European project turned out to be. They’d rather it just went away; but it never has.

Or, rather, lack of action. All the way through the post-war administrations of Clement Attlee, Churchill and Anthony Eden, until indeed the end of the 1950s, the building of what we now know as the European Union proceeded with little if any British involvement, or even comprehension. The Europeans – western Europeans, that is, rather than the eastern states then under Soviet occupation – extended a warm invitation to the British to join in their various conferences and nascent communities. When their senior diplomats and foreign ministers gathered together, the British usually sent a lower-ranking official from the Board of Trade, with strict instructions not to say or do anything without London’s permission. Ministers in London professed themselves “bored” by the Europeans talking shop (plus ca change).

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And so it was that the European Coal and Steel Community was formed by international treaty in 1951, for example, to coordinate production and industrial strategy between France and Germany – and making sure militarily vital assets could not be available for war. The British (Labour) foreign secretary of the day, Ernest Bevin, declined to take part on the grounds that “the Durham miners’ won’t wear it”, shorthand for a fear of the loss of sovereignty – control – over a vital industry it would entail.

Proposals for a European Defence Community came and went – a “European army”. But economics proved more promising. France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg met at the Sicilian town of Messina in 1955 to set up a much wider Economic Community, with a six-nation-wide customs union.

This had been pioneered by the Low Countries’ governments in exile as early as 1944, and the BeNeLux Treaty was operational by 1948, with further political and economic cooperation following – the technocratic prototype of today’s EU. The British once again sent observers, or representatives, but refused to be participants and passed on joining the venture. They were not hostile to it, and couldn’t stop the others even if they wished to; but they did not see the need to be a part of it. Britain had its empire and Commonwealth and the Atlantic alliance, and distinct economic interests and parliamentary traditions.

Pre-Suez, and before British industrial decline started to become agonisingly acute, the British were still able to indulge the belief that they were a great power. Britain’s links were, to be fair, global. Eden, the prime minister while the European project was getting started, put it very well to his private secretary in an informal conversation: “What you’ve got to remember is that if you looked at the postbag of any English village and examined the letters coming in from abroad, 90 per cent would come from way beyond Europe.” In cabinet, discussion about the birth of the European Union took up less time than the planned dual carriageway along Park Lane.

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More precisely, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and hefty external tariffs on food imports that funded payments to continental peasant farmers was completely at odds with the British trade tradition of cheap tariff-free imports of food. These came from its dominions, colonies and former colonies – butter from New Zealand, sugar from the West Indies, tea from India, and so on. No one wanted to give them up; but they were irrelevant to the six continental powers.

And so The Six went ahead, and formed a club with rules and conventions to suit themselves; and in particular the CAP, which was designed to look after small farmers in France and Germany. In return, Germany’s burgeoning industries gained access to these other rapidly growing economies. The Messina Conference led to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, and the main institutions of the European Union as we know it today: the Council of Ministers, the Commission and the Assembly (later a directly elected parliament).

In its preamble, the EU’s founding treaty contained the famous commitment to ever closer union: “Déterminés à établir les fondements d’une union sans cesse plus étroite entre les peuples Européens.” In English: “Determined to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe…”

It was, in fact, just as Churchill intended; a new union under French political leadership, a vehicle for German recovery and rehabilitation; and an engine for the reconstruction of the other western European economies ravaged by war, to the benefit of the wider continent. It worked, spectacularly, while Britain languished, as the fashionable phrase went, having lost an empire and failed to find a role. The role it did find by the 1970s was an unwelcome one – as the “sick man of Europe”.

Had Britain joined in at the Messina meeting, arguably, this great debate about whether Europe should be a free trade zone or a customs union with political pretensions could have been settled to the UK’s satisfaction. It was not, however, and the whole history of the UK-EU relationship ever since has been a series of persistent attempts by the British to reshape and remake the European Union to suit British interests and conceptions.

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This has either been done when trying to gain entry (1963, 1967); or, after we joined in 1973, as grumbling members of the club periodically seeking “renegotiation” of the terms of entry (1975, 2016); or “opting out” of new ones (1994); or when exiting the club’s board and clubhouse in the hope of redefining the rules of access to the facilities for the UK in a more amenable form (2020).

Difficult as it may be to credit nowadays, in the 1950s and 1960s, the European Economic Community (EEC) was the most successfully economic zone on earth, with the possible exception of Japan. The German wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) soon saw what was West Germany recover its pre-war industrial output and standard of living, and the Deutsche Mark began its career as the strongest major currency in the world. France and Italy registered GDP growth rates of a kind we now associate with China or India – 5, 6 or 7 per cent a year was not uncommon.

The British were lucky to see 2.5 per cent. Gradually the Europeans started to catch up and overtake British GDP and livings standards, fuelled by export-led growth and barriers came down, markets expanded and industries thrived. Meanwhile, the British suffered perennial and draining problems with yawning trade deficits and sluggish, unsatisfactory, “stop go” growth and productivity.

As they become more disgruntled and rattled by their (self-imposed) exclusion from the European Six, the British set up a rival “club” to the EEC. Seven more peripheral European nations in 1960 agreed to form the European Free Trade Area (Efta): Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Each Efta state could choose to vary its own tariff regime on imports independently of the others – so the UK could, say, continue to import Canadian grain on existing terms, whether, say Sweden did the same or not. This was not the way the EEC ran, or wished to.

Efta was not seen as a permanent home for the UK’s ambitions. As early as 1959, Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, had told his foreign secretary: “For the first time since the Napoleonic era the major continental powers are united in a positive economic grouping, with considerable political aspects, which, though not specifically directed against the United Kingdom, may have the effect of excluding us from European markets and from consultation in European policy.”

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In 1961, Macmillan’s Conservative government decided to make the first of what turned out to be three British attempts to join the EU. Edward Heath was the tenacious British negotiator, but the French, in particular, found the British desire to look after Commonwealth interests, and for a looser free trade regime, irksome. Moreover the charismatic and chauvinistic French president, Charles de Gaulle, feared the UK would be a “Trojan horse” in Europe for America. He preferred for Europe – in fact France – to lead an independent third force on global politics, after the United States and the Soviet Union.

De Gaulle said “non” to the British application in 1963. In a theatrical press conference in the grand surroundings of the Elysee Palace, De Gaulle patronised the British to the point of humiliation: “England, in effect, is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her exchanges, her markets, her supply lines to the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones. She has in all her doings very marked and very original habits and traditions.”

De Gaulle summed things up thus: “L’Angleterre, ce n’est plus grand chose” – England isn’t such a big deal anymore. The implication was the British needed Europe more than the Europeans needed Britain, seeing as France and the others were enjoying an unprecedented boom and prosperity. Again, that is a harsh fact of life that is echoed to this day.

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But it wasn’t all about food, or the UK’s special relationship with America and the Commonwealth, and her delusions. There were also Eurosceptical objections based on sovereignty – and those days rather more from the Left than the Tory side. The then leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, while otherwise an impeccable European-style social democrat, declared to his party conference (held in Brighton, almost within earshot of Brussels), in 1962:

“What does federation mean? It means that powers are taken from national governments and to federal parliaments. It means, I repeat it, that, if we go into this, we are no more than a state (as it were) in the United States of Europe, such as Texas and California. They are remarkably friendly examples; you do not find every state as rich or having such good weather as those two! But I could take others; it would be the same as in Australia, where you have Western Australia, for example, and New South Wales. We should be like them. This is what it means; it does mean the end of Britain as an independent nation state. It may be a good thing or a bad thing, but we must recognise that this is so ... We must be clear about this ... I make no apology for repeating it. It means the end of a thousand years of history. You may say: ‘Let it end.’ But, my goodness, it is a decision that needs a little care and thought.”

Of course, he had a point; Macmillan’s overtures to Europe were not even mentioned in the Conservative manifesto for the 1959 general election (and no talk of referendums, either). On the other hand, at that time, the French were not actually keen federalists: de Gaulle much preferred a partnership of nation states – “Europe des patries” – though one with a firm French influence applied to it.

As Europe prospered and the British economy floundered, Labour in government came around to the idea of Europe again, as part of the answer to the UK’s industrial malaise. Harold Wilson, as prime minister in 1967, launched a second application, and told the Commons “we do not intend to take no for an answer”. He did, however, get “non” for an answer from de Gaulle, and one that was, once again, close to open ridicule.

Asked at his usual grandstanding press conference replete with vast Gallic shrugs, whether General de Gaulle had ever said that he wanted to see Britain enter into the Common Market stripped naked, he could not help himself. For a beautiful creature, he mused, nakedness was natural enough: for those around her, it was satisfying enough – “But I have never said that about England.” More concretely, he cited the UK’s obvious economic and financial weakness and preferences of importing cheap food made the UK incompatible with the solid, interdependent and assured society of the EEC.

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The talks were shelved once again. Not until De Gaulle left office, soon after, and the British had made more concession to the EEC’s existing laws (the “acquis communitaire”) was another attempt possible. The arch-Europhile Heath had become prime minister in 1970, which presented a much more serious opportunity for getting in. The British signed a Treaty of Accession in 1972, and membership began on 1 January 1973.

Heath, in his terms, sought to make the UK a member of the European Community only with “the full-hearted consent of parliament and the people”. There was through, no referendum on entry, and some of the parliamentary votes were excruciatingly close. Labour was more split on the issue then, and Heath faced down his own small band of rebels and secured membership only with the support of pro-European Labour rebels, as well as the Liberal Party, the only group entirely consistent in its support for European membership (the communists were equally ardent and long-term opponents of this “bosses club”).

At the time, and still today, there were many who believed Heath had given much too much – on food taxes, on industrial protection and, of course, on fishing rights. Heath was the only British prime minister to explicitly, in words and actions, put the UK’s relationship with Europe ahead of that with United States, and his personal commitment to the cause was beyond doubt. As a student on a visit to the Nuremburg rallies he had met Hermann Goering, Josef Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, and took part in the Normandy landings, so he knew well Nazis and what Nazism has done to Europe. It was not quite 30 years since the war had ended when the UK joined the EU, and memories of it were more visceral and less sentimentalised and infantilised than they were to become by the 2010s. Not for nothing was Heath nicknamed “Mr Europe”.

Yet Heath was essentially an aberration, and was out of office a little over a year after the UK joined the EEC. Every other premier before and since has tried and failed to balance Britain’s interests – economic, diplomatic and security – whether the UK was inside the EU, outside it, or clamouring to get in or to get out.

As David Cameron was later to remark, the British were always “reluctant and uncertain” members of the club. His 2016 referendum was supposed to settle that for good; but the lesson of history is that, whichever way it went, it would not have done so. That “reluctant and uncertain” attitude to Europe, glimpsed in Churchill’s rolling if imprecise prose, if not beyond, seems to be an eternal, immutable national state of mind for the British.