How it really was

26 February 2019

I have recently read The Price of Victory, by the BBC journalist, Michael Charlton, first published in 1983. The book attempts to explain why Britain decided not to join the European Union when it was first created after the war. The debates that took place then seem remarkably similar to those taking place now over Brexit, such as concerns over sovereignty, a belief in the ‘glittering prospects’ of trade with the Commonwealth and Empire, and the view that Britain can stand alone in the world and has no need of support from other countries in Europe.

Michael Charlton interviewed fifty-two politicians and civil servants, including many who were responsible for British relations with Europe between 1945 and 1963. All of them, without exception, whatever their views had been at the time, assumed that there had been ‘a failure of British policy over Europe in the vital decade of the 1950s', when the decision was taken not to join the organisations that later became the European Community and the European Union. Had Britain joined earlier, they believed they could have had more influence over how the organisation developed, and could probably have negotiated better terms than those agreed when Britain did eventually join, on 1 January 1973.

Michael Charlton claimed in the book that British politicians and civil servants failed to appreciate the importance of initiatives taken by other countries in Europe – France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg – to create the European Coal and Steel Community in 1950, to discuss greater economic cooperation at the Messina conference in 1955, and to form a Customs Union by signing the Treaty of Rome in 1957.

‘Alone among the old nation states of Europe, Britain emerged from the Second World War with an experience which was fundamentally different … It was victory which induced Britain to misinterpret and to misjudge the strength and relevance to her of the movement for unity in Europe. … The refusal to take part in the formative years proved to be at the cost of any decisive British influence in moulding the eventual outcome … That was the Price of Victory’.

One of the civil servants interviewed, Con O’Neill, is quoted as saying that the Foreign Office did not think that the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community was a significant development, adding ‘We were wrong, but we did not realise its significance’.

Another diplomat and politician interviewed by Charlton, Anthony Nutting, recalled the Belgian Prime Minister and statesman, Paul-Henri Spaak, telling him after the Treaty of Rome had been signed that he still hoped Britain would join in future, because Europe needed Britain’s moral leadership. Britain was the one country that had not had to face occupation, or fascist rule, and so remained untainted by the compromises that others had to make during and immediately after the war.

But what could have been an advantage, that Britain had survived the war with its traditions and values intact, proved to be a disadvantage. British policy, then as now, was ‘cooperation without commitment’ in the (mistaken) belief that we could always get what we wanted later, that we could obtain all the advantages of greater economic and political cooperation, without making any commitment.

The final quote in the book is from the French diplomat, Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the European Community, answering the hypothetical question: why did British politicians decide not to join an organisation that was so much in their own interest?

‘I came to the conclusion that it must have been because it was the price of victory – the illusion that you could maintain what you had, without change’.

Now, in 2019, we have to ask the same question: why has the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, decided to leave an organisation that is so much in our own interest? Is it the same reason, the same illusion that we can leave the European Union and maintain all the benefits it has given us, without change? That we can get all we want and offer nothing in return? Is that the Price of Victory?