Fabian International Bureau 

/. NOT 
WITH EUROPE: 


the political case 
for staying out 


Wl LLIAM ,PICKLES 

THREE SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE 


WILLIAM PICKLES is Senior Lecturer in Political 
Science at the London School of Economics. 


FABIAN TRACT 336 

FABIAN INTERNATIONAL B UREAU 

11 Dartmouth Street, S.W.l 


Note.-This pamphlet, like all publications of the 
FAB!AN SOCIETY, represents not the collective 
view of the Society but only the view of the 
individual who prepared it. The responsibility of the 
Society is limited to approving the publications 
which it issues as worthy of consideration within the 
Labour Movement. 

April, 1962 


I. Author to Reader 
"I warn the reader that this chapter must be read with calm deliberation, 
for I have not learned the art of making my meaning clear to those who 
do not read attentively." 

I
I
T was with this sentence that Rousseau began one of the more difficult 
chapters of his Contrat Social, and it may be appropriate to reproduce 
it here. In the earlier par.ts of this pamphlet, the attempt to analyse and 
criticise, in far too brief a study, a quite new experiment in gov.ernment, 
and to consider what would be its impact on our own system, may seem 
hard going to readers not familiar with this kind of sUibject. I have tried, 
therefore, to summarize and simplify each portion of the argument before 
I left it, and I hope that this will encourage the reader to persevere to the 
later parts, which present fewer difficulties. 

Discussion rubout the problem of British entry into the European 
Economic Community is taking place in unfortunate circumstances. 
Nobody dmies that, for good or ill, the whole future of Britain is at 
stake. The Daily Herald has said that the decision we ha·ve to make is 
more important than any that has been taken in the last 400 years, which 
means that in the months P(.eceding the decisi9n we need all the know,ledge 
and all the in<telJ,igent ·discussion we can muster. Yet it so happens that 
nearly all .the press is on one side. Of the nine 'London morning papers, 
eight are in favour of British membership. Some, it is true, give something 
of both sides of the ca'se. The Times has been as near to impartiality 
as any and The Gua,rdian has opened its columns on some occasions to 
the other side. The Express gives only the anti-Common Market case, 
on the {not unreasonaible) ground that ·eight to .one is already heavy 
enough odds. The mo~t startling case is that o.f the Daily Herald, which 
is still the nearest thing there is to a Lrubour daily, and whose Editor, 
incidentally, was brought up in the fairest journalistic tradition of all, that 
o,f C. P. ScoK Despite ~he obligations which these faots might have been 
expected to impose, the Daily Herald has done all that could be done, 
outside a few snippets of news, to conceal from its readers the existence 
inside the Lrubour Party of an opposition to British membership stretching 
from Bar! Attlee, Denis Healey and Douglas Jay on the one hand to 



2 NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

BM1bara Castle and Anthony Greenwood on the other. Only Michael Foot, 

and he only once, has been aHo·wed a say on the opposition side. 

This shameful fact lays a heavy duty on those La•bour men and women 

(including many supporters of Br~·tish en•try) who believe that whatever 

decision is taken should be backed by the maximum of knowledge and the 

fuUest possilble discussion. The Fabian Society sho.ws itself to be worthy 

of its own great tradition in undertaking to publish pamphlets from bo1th 

sides. 

This pamphle.t is addressed pr·imarily to La•bour Party members, voters 

and sympathi•sers, but much of it, I hope, will be useful to others too. 

Its purpose is less to convince or convert than to inform, and to 

start informed discussion of the political aspect. I hope, however, that 

the inf.ormation itself will convince others, as it convinced me, that Britain 

should not, at this stage, join the E.E.C. and that there are ways by which 

any a.ttempt to take us in without proper discussion could be frustrated. 

I have left out all argument a·bout the economic aspect, partly because it 

does not come wibhin my field of knowledge, partly because economic 

uncertainties are so ohviously even greater than the pol-itical, and partly 

because the E.E.C. is primarily a political enterprise. 

I should like to point out at this stage, and with great emphasis, that 

I do not claim to have any,thing like an adequa•te specialised kno.wledge of 

the politi·cal aspects of the E.E.C. I know enough to be aware of the extent 

of my o•wn ignorance, and fully expect that, as I learn more, I shall discover 

in these pages errors of fact, of emphasis, of assessment, and of judgment as 

to the future. I have taJken upon myself the task of starting discussion of 

this a•spect of the E.E.C. only because all but one or bwo of my colleagues 

in Bri.tish Universities seem to be even less well equipped than myself. 

I have lectured on the subject at ·the London School of Economics for 

the la•st five years, and I know of !1wo other University teachers who have 

done some work on it. By now, some of our Civi:l Servants may be 

presumed to have gone into most of its aspects, but their knowledge is not 

puiblicly available. At the moment of going to press, two books haJVe 

appeared which refer to some of bhe points discussed here, but apart 

from them there is scarcely any mater•ial available to those who wish to 

make a ser•ious study of it. 

llhis is a starotling fact. On infinitely less important ma•tters we do 

nothing in this country without careful enquiry and prol-onged pUiblic dis


cussion. It took three Royal Commissions and eighty years of argument 

to get the mines nationali·sed. The proposed changes in the government of 

London have been the subject of enquiry by a Royal Commission, tc• 

which a vast body of specra1ised knowl'edg·e and experience was mad•! 

availa.Jble, whose arguments have been pulblished, and whose proposals are 

now going through the mill of extremely well informed discussion. We do 

not change a parish 1boundary or divert a public footpath, if o·bjection is

j

raised, without formal public enquiry. At .the moment of writing no fe·wer 
than 33 Commissions and Commit·tees appointed by the Government are 
looking into other questions o.f minor or medium public importance. All 

these are matters on which we are free to change our minds almost overnight 
if we have made a mistake, but on the political problem of membership 


NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

of the E.E.C., on which, in theory at least/ we shall be bound for 
ever if we go in, there is no kind of public enquiry, no informed public 
di·scussion, and not enough published material availa.ble to fill a book of ~ moderate size. There is no means by which the ordinary intelligent citizen 
can inform himself and make up his mind rationally on a step which, 
by common consent, wm profoundly aff.ect the well.Jbeing of every one 
of us and determine whether in future this country is to exist or not. 

( This pamphlet does no,t pretend to fill that gap, but a.t least it makes a 
start. It is to 1be hoped that others .will follow, and so help to frustrate the 
evident in.tention of .the Government to get this thing settled, if ~t can, 
without even the be~nnihgs of proper consideration. 
Because the decision to be tli!ken is so important, the reader should also 
know the case for British membership. He will find the basic case 
in three Fabian pamphlets, ·by Shirley Williams and Evan Luard, and 
in pamphlets published ·by Reynold's News, The Times and the Daily 
Telegraph. The most recent exposition, and in my opin.i.on the best informed 
and clearest, is by U. W. Ki•tz:inger, in The Challenge of the Common 
Market (Blackwell). P.E.. P. has issued a series of pamphlets with much 
useful factual info·rmation. 

F·or fuller discussion of this, see below, pp. 29-30, 


4 NOT WITH EUROPE : THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

11. What is the Community? 
Uncertainties 

I
I
N spite of all that has ·been said and written on the Community in 
English-and still more ·in other languages-we know next to nothing of 
'what we need to know of its working effects and nothing at all a1oout 
·what it will •become as time passes. This ignorance is by far .the most 
.importa-nt fact a~bout the E.E.C. There are three reasons for it. 

The first is that-inev.i•taJbly -most of what goes on inside the E.E.C. 
machine is secret. The Council and -the Oommission1 together perform 
something like the functions of a Calbin.et, and, like the Cabinet, they do 
not publish records ·of discussion. Some of the 'directives', 'decisions' and 
'authorisations' sent by the Commiss~on or the Council to •the Governments 
of member countries are published, 'but some remain ~ecret, and so, of 
course, does the often pr.olonged correspondence between Commiss.ion and 
member Governments which precedes and follows .their issue. Only the 
'regulations' made by the Council are required to rbe puiblis.bed. 

We kno!W still less a~bout the decisions made by private firms as a 
result of-or in anticipation of-the existence of the Community, !because 
any;thing done by these fi~ms since the co,mjng of the Community may or 
may not have been done because of .its coming. I.C.I. are building a 
factory at Ro•bterdam. Some say that the deci~ion to do this was forced 
on the directors of I.C.I. by the ex•istence of the Community; others say 
that it wa-s made for totally different reasons and would have been made 
in any circumstances. In fact, only the directors of I.C..J. know, and then 
only i.f .they are accur-ately introspective and analytical. The same uncertainty 
applies to many-proba1bly all-the arguments a'bout the economic 
effects of the first four years of Community existence. 

Those are the first two reasons for our ignorance. The .third, and most 
important, i~ that the Common Market is not yet in e~istence, despite the 
many inaccurate statements to the contrary. The European Economic Community 
came into existence on 1st January 1957, but much of the structure 
of the Common Market, which the E.E.C. is to set up as one of its 
functions, is not yet there. The rules orf procedure for the control or abolition 
of cartels and monopolies have still to be drafted and tried out, and much 
of the vaunted agreement on a·gr:iculrture is only provisional, whHe the vital 
question orf common target-pr.ices has been left undecided. 

The rules on mobility of l<11bour and association o.f. overseas territories 

are stiU prov•i&iona•l, to be .further developed in .the one case and re


negotiated in the other; those on mo:biJ.ity orf 'Services and of capital, on 

the 'co-ordination' of commercial policies and on the 'harmonisation' of 

social policies are aU still .to come. Some of them may never come, for, 

as we shall see below/ the machinery of government of the E.E.C. makes 

it possilble on many matters either for any one, or for certain combinations 

of two countries, according to circumstances, to prevent any decision ever 

1 For a summary of E.E.C. institutions, see pp. 19-20. 

2 pp. 23-24. 


NOr WITH EUROPE: 1HE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

being taken. If and when all these decisions are made, we shall still 
be far from kno!Wmg how they will work out in practice, partly because 
they wm affect each other, pa.r·tly because no theory ever works quite as 
is intended, and paPtly because some countries enfo-rce their social and 
economic leg.islation a great deal less efficiently (and indeed with a great 
deal less enthusiasm) than others. 

To these three points a;bout present difficulties, there must be added a 
fourth. Everybody agrees that if and when Britain enters the Community, 
a great many things in the Community itself will change, in both the 
economic and the political fields. Certainly, new tensions wm be added 
to the many already there, but beyond that, only speculation is possible. 
~~ •this speculation, including my own, should be treated with caution. 

The main purpose, indeed, of this recital of uncertainties is to wam 
the reader against the danger of accepting at their face value some of the 
astonishingly categoric statements being made aJbout the future of the 

E.E.C. The articulate supporters of the Common Market fall into two 
distinct categories. Some, either i·gnorant or wildly Utopian, confuse dreams 
with realities, and argue as if the future were already here and known. 
Others are fully ruware that we are being asked to gamble our 
economic and political future in the hope of securing an extremely hypothetical 
gain, .but, like those whose remains fill the suicides' corner in the 
cemetery of Monte Carlo, they believe that the prize they dream of 
justifies the gamble. The characteristic of the writings of this second group 
is the frequency wi~h which 'is' and 'will' give way to 'should be', 'ought 
to be', 'can be expected to', 'I am confident that' and so on. Srtatements of 
fact merge almost unnoticed into expressions of hope. The reader is 
advised to study pro-Common•Market literature carefully and count the 
points at which the transition from real life to dream life takes place. 
He will find it revealing. 
He will also realise-and this is the second reason for laying stress 
on the uncertainties-why until 1961 successive British Governments. 
Labour and Tory, kept out of all the aprior•istic European schemes. Faced 
with many uncertainties, we believe in .taking a step at a time, and then 
feeling the ground under our feet and examining the prospects ahead, 
befoae we take the nex.t step. No Socialist objects to innova·tion and 
experimenrt; indeed, we all want them. But one can both be cautious and 
leave room for ada.ptation and change, as unexpected realities reveal 
themselves. The more we believe in the need for change, the stronger the 
case for elasticity, precisely because we want to give our experiments a 
chance to succeed. That is why La.bour's Nationalisation Acts and social-
service experiments all avoided over-rigidity. Anything else is a blind 
leap into the dark, of the kind that is only justifiable in ex.treme emergency. 
Trying to foresee the future shape of the Community is like trying to 
forecast the la.ter moves in a dozen different games of chess. But since 
the Government, with President Kennedy urging it on, has decided to 
force the issue, we have to try to assess the possibilities as best we may. 
J,t is important, however-and this notion has guided me in this brief 
and inadequate study-that the assessment shall be based, not on hopes 
of what might happen or on dreams of what our prospective partners 


6 NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

might be persuaded to accept, but on the best available evidence of what 
is likely to happen. 

The Confusion of Pnrposes 

The next most important fact a-bout the E.E.C. is that its ultima.te purpo e 
is wholly political. It is the fruit of an alliance between federalists and 
exponents of laisser-faire, from which there emerged a tacit agreement 
that laisser-faire should be the method, and federalism, or something 
approaching it, the goal. The laisser-faire-ists are by no means all federalists, 
but they believe they have made a good bargain, since the method comes 
first, while the goal may never be reached. They may well be right. 
A start has already been made in enforcing a modified form of laisserfaire, 
while argument about the nature of the goal and the best way to 
reach it still goes on. 

There is no natural reason why this alliance should have been made. 
It would have been both more natural and more sensible to combine the 
federalist aspiration with central economic planning, as do all exi'String 
federations, not excluding the United States. For that matter, a considerable 
degree of freeing of trade could have been combined with economic 
planning, and many of the federalists would no doubt have preferred this. 
The Socialists among them would, of c0urse, have been delighted to have 
Socialist allies from this country, and they made great and honest efforts 
to get us to join them. But it would not have worked, simply because 
there were never enough Socialists among the Six (or even among the eight, 
if Britain and Denmark had gone in) to ensure that planning would be 
chosen as the road. And in any case, for reasons discussed below/ British 
Labour very wisely rejected federalism as a goal. So free trade and pl,anning 
were both rejected by the Europeans, in favour of laisser-faire. 

The achievement of this strange alliance has led to a great deal of very 
confused thinking. For a very long time, British and continental participants 
in the discussion were at cross purposes, the former seeing the 
experiment as wholly economic, the la.tter knowing that it was wholly 
political. By now, many English commentators are willing to .agree that 
the purpose is political, but still regard the economic aspect as the only 
one worth discussing. Some believe that, after a friendly gesture towards 
the foreigners' quaint political dream. we can safely look only at present 
facts. which are indeed wholly economic, and trust to British influence 
from inside to prevent future political folly. It was, presumably, this type 
of attitude which led Mr. Edward Heath to assure the representatives of 
the Si,· in Paris that we bad suddenly become enthusiastic supporters of 
their political purposes, and then, three days later, to describe the E.E.C. 
to the Conservative Conference at Brighton as 'an economic enterprise', 
thus leaving many people on both side of the Channel wondering ju t 
who was to be the victim of the perfidy of Albion. 

Other , including some leading Liberals, who ought to have known 

better, saw the thing as a move towards free trade. This is an even more 

a toni hing error. If the purpose of the E.E.C. had been the freeing of 

I p, 28 . 


NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 7 

trade over the widest possible area, its leaders would have accepted the 
British proposals for a Free Trade Area; they would have jumped at the 
idea of fusion with the European Free Trade Association and they would 
now be welcoming the prospect of widening their o·wn area to take in 
the European neutrals and the Commonwealth. Their rejection of the first 
two, and their preparations to reject the second two, are evidence, if it 
were needed, that free trade is not their purpose. It is not even their method, 
for laisser-passer, which is free trade, is by no means the same thing as 
laisser-faire, and the essence o.f their whole enterprise is the planned enforcement 
of laisser-faire in the service of federalism or of some alternative 
form of political integration. Because the E.E.C. leaders believe-quite 
rightly-that federaLism (or its substitute) cannot be achieved over too 
large an area, 'they are protectionist, restrictive and inward-looking, while 
free-traders are essentially outward-looking. 

Some supporters of Bri{ish membership argue that it is preoisely 
beoause the purposes of the E.E.C. are so confused that Britain should 
go in and use her influence, at this formative stage, to push the Community 
towards a purpose more suited to British needs and prejurlices. The question 
of what Britain can do by 'influence' therefore needs careful examination.' 
For Britain to try to secure a general reduction of the E.E.C. external 
tariff would be perfectly legitimate, and some of the founder-members 
(Germany and Holland in particular) might jo•in her. But only the Com-
mi·ssion, n·ot the member countries,2 can take any initiative to this end, 
and jn the Council, which would t·ake the decision, every member would 
have a veto. This porint is forgotten by those who look forward optimistically 
to a majority made up of (say) Britain, Denmark, Norway, Germany 
and Holland turning the E.E.C. into a lo.w-tariff area. A majority would 
not be enough; we should halVe to persuade ~v~ member country to 
agree with us. What a hope! 


An attempt to use our influence to turn the Community away from the 
pursuit of federal,ism would not meet with the same difficulty. On the 
coD'tr·ary, we should be able to use our veto to prevent the Community 
from becoming in any way different from what it is today, provided we 1 111 
had enough abstinacy and strength of mind to stand alone, or nearly so. 
if necessary. In so doing, we should not in any way be unfaithful to our 
signature, since the 'principles' enunciated in Art. 2 commit us only to 1 
seeking 'closer reloa,tions' between the member States. But that is onlyV 
the letter. No·body in his senses imagines that any one conntry could 
stand out alone against polit•ical.changes des_i.r.ed by all the--otheFs,and yet 
re~in the E.E.C.,__!ID.less_his_pr.ese~_wa.s__aJ?~gluotely indispenswble. 
E~out would be ex,pelled (having by then lost all his 
other friends and suffered economic changes which would have been tolerable 
only if he had remained inside), or he would in the end have to accept 
a compromise which, in continental fashion, would be no more than the 
starting-point fo.r further pressure. In fact, it is impmbable that Br.itain 

1 It is further discussed below, p. 29. 
2 The tariffs on items on 'list G' are settled by negotiation between member 
Governments. (Art. 20). This is the only exception to the rule. 



8 NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITLCAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

would want to stand out. After a brief eX'perience o.f the bureaucracy, 
negativism and amti-planning mechan.isms descr~bed belo•w, many of us 
would begin to see federa!.ism, w,ith a strong central Gorvernment and 
democra-tic control, as the lesser evil. 

The alternative is that, without using the veto, we shall be clever enough 
to convince the others of the folly of their intentions. J.t i·s freely said 
in Whitehall, and has rbeen repeated more than once in print, that British 
politicians and Civil Servants will run rings round the Europeans. This 
claim, it should be noted, is ma.de on behalf of the Ministers and their

. 

I
I
adv.isers who have already sho•wn their utter incomprehension o.f the European 
mind by their reactions to the inventi·on of the E.E.C. They first 
believed that the Treaty would never be signed, and shrugged it all 
X off. Then they tried to absorb it in a large free-trade area with a 
totally different purpose. Finally, they invented the European Free Trade 
Association, which became a miJ.lstone round their necks when, within 

two years, they decided to try to get into the E.E.C. 
We shall not always have Governments as insular as that, but even 
others will find that the European poloitical game needs a lot of leaming. 
Tn many of the countries which would become our partners, politics has 
none of the fiduciary ·basis that it has here. Multi-party systems produce 
political haJbits of mind vastly different from those engendered by our 
two-party set-up. So do concepts of democr·acy based on interpretations 
of Rousseau, in&tead of, as in Britain, the ideas of Locke. Written cons.
bitutions create r.igidities and ways or£ getting round them unknown to 
pragmatic Britons. The Napoleonic adaptations of Roman Larw have 
produced legal institutions, practices and habits of mind to.tally fo·reign 
to us. None otf that means that the poli·ticians and Civil Servants otf the 
Six are less moral or less efficient than ours. It means that because their 
unconscious or inarticulate assumptions are differ·en•t, because they are the 
majority and have already fixed the rules, we shall have to play the game 
in their way, and shall find that leaming it is a long and difficult process. 
When we have learnt-in, say, a couple or£ generations-we shall perhaps 
be a<ble to exert our due share of influence, but certainly uo more. To 
believe anything else is to be guilty of stupid and insular arrogance. 
The 'perhaps' in italics in the paragraph above is important. Influence 
in any international or multi-national body depends on power and streng•th 
among others things. At the moment, Br.itain is economically weak, and 
will still be weak next year, by which time the Governmem hopes to have 
us inside the E.E.C. We shall then show our weakness by asking for help 
in balance-of-payments crises and invoking escape clauses in o·ther circumstances. 
We cannot then expect to get help unconrutionally. Far from 
influencing others, we shall be compelled to accept their prescriptions for 
our economic policies. Some people, indeed, want to take us in precisely 
for this reason. If, as is suggested below,l we remain weak or become 
weaker, our dependence wm be complete and our influence nil. l What all this means is that the new imperialism of some politicians and 
) civil servants, the <belief that we can walk into Europe and run t.he show, 

1 See p. 38. 


NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUf 9 

I 
I
"' 

is an empty dream. It would be folly to count on our influence to 
change either the purpose or the methods of the Community. We must Y 
see these as they are and accept them as they are, or stay out. 

Birthmarks 

The genesis o.f E.E.C. is worth some brief consideration, because it 
explains a great deal about the Treaty and the attitude of its members. 
In particular, it explains bow many good European Socialists, and democrats 
of other hues, were led to accept the reactionary economic methods and 
bureaucratic political structure described below, for neither had formed 
part of their or,iginal purpose. 

The first attempt at a major step towards a European federation was 
the Council of Europe, founded in 1949 after an agitation that had reached 
its peak in the so-called Congress of Europe, an astonishingly incoherent 
gathering of politicians w,ith conflicting purposes, which was paid for by 
anti-Communist big business and organised by the European Movement. 
The Council of Europe was an attempt to go to the political goal of 
federation (or, in some minds, something short of federation) by a polit<ical 
road. It was to become a European Parliament and 'make Europe', to use 
a fashionable federalist phrase. H suffered from the beginning from a 
Narcissus complex, and also rapidly got bogged down in a quarrel between V 
federalists and those~mostly British and Scandinavian-<Wbo called themsel~
es 'functionalists'. These l·atter were in fact pragmatists, seeking practical 
solutions before they evol~ed a theory and allowing the future, to a very 
considerable extent, to determine itself, but their misuse of the term 
'functionalism' led the Europeans to believe that what they wanted was 
a series of partial integrations, ultimately to be fused together to make a 
federation. 

So M. Monnet and M. Robert Schuman invented the European Coal 
and Steel Community, a partial integration of which the political assumptions 
and implications are worth a more serious critical study than anything 
they have bad so far. H was, however, unaccepta.Jble to .the British and 
their friends, because it was the reverse of pragmatic; it was planned in 
great detail on paper and then built up, not from experience, but fwm 
the theo:retical blue-print. Two si·milar but still~born projects with the same 
purpose (of partial integration), and dating from the same period, were 
a Transport Pool and an Agricultur·al Pool. A fourth, and more important, 
was the European Defence Community, providing, this time, for 
military integration. It was embodied in a treaty which got as far as 
being signed by all six Govemments and ratified by five Parliaments, 
before it was killed :by the refusal of the French Parliament to ratify it, 
in 1954. 

The long debate on E.D.C. bad forced the federaJ.ists and other integra.
tion•!sts to ~ink aga:in ll!bout politics. To hand over the. coal_ and steel 

) 

industries of s1x coun.tnes to a body o,f technocrats was a b1g thmg to do, 
d many people in Europe e~pressed alarm ll!bout it, but nevertheless 
ccep.ted it for the sake of the poEtical and economic benefits expected 
m it. Very few, however, were able to stomach the notion that more 
01 iously vital matters lik~ the level of armaments expenditure and th<t 


10 NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

actual issues of war and peace could similarly be left to technocratic 
decision. So the E.D.C. tr(ilaty was furnished with an article (No. 38) 
which stipulated that the E.D.C. Assembly should 'examine within six 
months the constitution of an assembly of the E.D.C. . . . elected on a 
democratic basis . .. .', which might 'constitute one of the elements of 
a federal or confederal structure, based on the principle of the separation 
of powers and having in particular a ~wo-Chamber system of government'. 
When it became clear that the Defence Communi•ty was to come into 
being only slowly, if at all, the job of providing for political control was 
taken over by a mixed body, the Ad Hoc Commission, coming partly from 
the E.C.S.C. Assembly and partly from the Council of Europe. 

Constitution-mak·ing has been a European hobby since 1789 and every 
one of the six countries has a fine collection of lawyer-politicians who 
can run you up a nice little Constitution in two twos. So the Commission 
worked quickly and sUJbmitted its draft Constitution for a European Political 
Community to a meeting of the Foreign Min-isters of the Six in December, 
1953. The organisation provided for in this draftl was by no means a 
federation, though its Parliarrnent was to have power to legislate by 
simple majority on some matters. Na~ional sovereignties were preserved, 
however, ·by leaving the final decision on most major issues in the' hands 
of a Council of National Ministers, in which every member country was 
to have an absolute right of veto.-The central authorities were also to 
have very little judicial and almost no coercive power? 

I 
I 
But there was still too much federalism (or supra-nationalism. or surrender 
of sovereignty) for the E.P.C. draft to be acceptable to all the 
six countries that had sponsored its preparation. Hostility came to a head 
over the proposed distr.ibution of seats in the lower House ('the Peoples' 
Chamber'), and the whole project was dropped. Its history had revealed 
what many of us had known all alon~ and I bad more than once written 
-·that many of those, especially the French, who talked airily of federalism 
had no notion of what in practice it meant. They had thought of federalism 
as a form of international government, capable of preserving their national 
influences and entities. It is in fact, as every smatterer in political science 

knows, a form of national government, involving the total disappearance 
of the existing national entities which go to form it. When the assembled 
Ministers saw that they were being invited to take the first big step towards 
a posi•tion in world affairs equivalent to that of the States of California, 
or British Columbia or New South Wales, they took fright and ran away. 

But in running away, they took some of their illusions with them. One 
of the purposes of the E.P.C. had been to set up a Common Market, and 
this proposal was salvaged from the wreckage at a further conference of 
the Six at Messina in 1955, owing, mainly, to the efforts of the Dutch 
represen,tatives. That was all that could be saved, after seven years of 
effort, and it was seized upon, in a mood of half~blind, half-desperatehope, by many otherwise sensible and democratic politicians. Two things, 
however, had been made clear to impartial outside observers. The first 

1 Those interested will find the details in European Coal and Steel Community.
Ad Hoc Assembly . . . Draft Treaty . . . European Political Community.

H.M.S.O. 1953. 

NOT W ITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 11 

was that the prospective partners had much too little confidence in each 
other to make possible the operation of any democratic central authority, 
or indeed, of any central authority at all with over-riding powers over 
national Governments. That is why the E.E.C. is stuffed with vetoes and 
semi-vetoes (the so-called 'qualified majority' being in fact the veto right 
of a two-nation minority). Some people believe that ultimately effective 
federal powers have been included. Professor Daniel Villey, a convinced 
1 integrationiSlt, claims that the Rome Treaty contains many 'camouflaged 
weapons, invisible to the naked eye' 1 Others believe that the economic 
powers of the Commission will effectively limit national sovereignty in 
fields like foreign affairs and defence, in which it is supposed to be 
preserved, while still others .believe that the muddle arising from vetoes 

I 
I
and from the division of powers between national Governments and a 
supranational authority will drive the non-federalists into acceptance of 
federation.2 What is certain is that, behind the pretence of creating unity, ./ 

· the battle between the non-federalists, defending themselves with their 
vetoes and qualified majorities, and the federalists using the weapons I 
have just desc11ibed, will become increasingly bitter and generate a vast 
quantity of bad feeling. 

The main lesson learned by the integrationists from the failure of E.D.C. 
was the need for speed. The E.D.C. affair bad shown that if ordinary 
citizens are allowed to know what is going on, if the opponents are given 
time to put their case and get a hearing, any integrationist project is liahle 
to be defeated. Dr. Adenauer in Germany and M. Mollet who was then 
French Prime Minister were both favourable to the Common Markelt, so 


M. Paul-Henri Spaak used all his energies, as he freely admitted on dozens 
of occasions, to rush the Treaty through to signature while these tJwo 
were in office. M. Spaak never concealed his fear thaJt, in a less favouraJble 
governmental climate and if to-o much time were left for talk, the Common 
Market would suffer the fate of the E.D.C. 'Europeanism' had boxed the . 1 compass. Starting by trying to get integration by pressure of public opinion.V 
in 1948 and 1949, it had come round to a belief that it could be got only 
if it were imposed from above on unwilling citizens. It was this fear of 
public opinion, and not, as some Bri,tish admirers have suggested, a belief 
in pragmatism, that lef.t so much to future negotiation. Obstacles had to 
be l;>y-passed, because an attempt to overcome ~hem would take too much 
time and again allow the ordinary man to discover what was being prepared 
for him. This again made the vctoes and semi-vetoes necessary, since the 
national Governments had to have the means of defending themselves in 
the many postponed nego,tiations. Every other line of the Treaty expresses 
the distrust the Six feel for each other, and the whole expresses the ambivalence 
of politicians who want the sweets and the halfpenny, the advantages 
of unity together with the wholly incompatible advantages of separation. 
And schizophrenia is at least as dangerous in organisations as it is in 
individuals. 
Le Marche Commun dans l'optique europeenne, p. 38, in Le Marche Commun 
et ses Problemes, Sirey, 1958. 
z See Pierre Uri in the same work, p. 315 (on the E.C.S.C.), 'We had to create 
a disequilibrium which would drive people into a wider effort', 



12 NOT Wt"l H i::UROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

Ill. The Sovereignty Problem 

AGREAT deal of nonsense has been ta1ked and written about sovereignty, 

\, and most of it overlooks the classic and vital distinction between po-litical 
sovereign•ty and legal sovereignty. Political sovereignty means a nation's 
right to do what it wants on its own territory. I know of no Socialist 
(though I do know of many Communists) who would claim the right to 
an unquali.fied sovereignty of this k·ind. The supporters of the E.iE.C. 
claim, quite rightly, that the era of small and wholly sovereign nation-
states is over and that the age of wider groupings ·is already here. I do 
not see how any Socialist can reject -that view. Most of us would willingly 
surrender more than we have done of our national political sovereignty to 
an effective United Nations; most would happily surrender many more 
specific items osf sovereignty to the I.L.O.; and many others (like me) 
would do the same for N.A.T.O. 
So far, however, every surrender of sovereignty has been part of an 
y effort to solve a particular problem or problems, which could be solved only 
by internatj.onal agreement. We have never contempla•ted surrendering our 
national ·existence, as E.E.C. theory expects us to do, in order to move 
towards some distant, doubtful and a11bitrarily defined goal, by methods 
Wihich Mr. Macmillan once contemptuously dismissed as 'constitutionmongering'. 
Under the principles that have hitherto prevailed, any further 
surrenders of sovereignty would cover only defined areas and would require 
the consent of Parliament. Parliament would know what it was authorising 
and why. For some cons.idera1ble time to come, at least, future Parliaments 
would be free to recla·im the surrendered areas of sovereignty if circumstances 
changed, or even, if they were unw·ise enough, to do so in unchanged 
circumstances. Indeed, ilf it wanted to be really silly, Parliament could a•t 
any time con·traot out of the U.N., N.A.T.O., the l.L.O. and every other 
interna:tional organisation down to the Postal Union. The kind of surrender 
osf sovereignty involved in membership of these organisations is by now 
commonplace, and no political party challenges its general desirability, 
though some would, no doulbt, challenge it in particular cases. 
Mr. Edward Heath, Lord P11ivy Seal and our chief negotiator wi•th 
Europe, has tried to suggest that the surrender of sovereignty required by 
signing the Rome Treaty would be no different from those to which 
we are already accustomed. Speaking of the requirement that British Jaw 
must be 'a•pproX'imated' (i.e. adjusted) to fit the requirements of the Community, 
be said,1 'We do this in other organisations. In the J.L.O., for 
instance, if we accept a con•vention we approximate our law to carry it 
out. There is nothing unusual in it .. . the approximation is necessary 
·only in so far as it is for the functioning of the Common Market, and 
there is, therefore, another specific limitation on ·that'. That statement is 
both str>ictly true and whoHy misleading. An LL.O. Conven·tion covers 
known and stated points; it becomes val•id in this coun1try only if it is 
accepted by the Government and then translated into British law by an 

H0111ord. H. of C. 3.8.1961. Col, 1676, 



NOT WITI-l EUROPE : THE POLITICAL CASE FOR S1 AYING OUT 13 

Act of our own Parliament. By so doing, Parliament surrenders, over a 
clearly defined area, a part of this country's sovereignty, but it surrenders 
none of its own sovereignty. On the contrary, it reasserts its sovereignty, 
and can assert it again, if it w:ishes, by repealing the Act applying the 
convention. 

But the Rome Treaty, if it can be made to work in Britain as it works 
elsewhere-which, as I explain below, is in my view ex•tremely doUJbtful 
-will take away some of the sovereign.ty o.f Parliament. For legal sovereignty, 
the sovereignty of Parliament, is a quite different thing from pol·itical 
sovereignty. It is a v·ital part of the Bri.tish conception of democracy, hard 
won in centuries of struggle against arbitrary rule, fwm Magna Car.ta to 
the Act of Settlemen•t. Stated in its briefest form, it is the right of 
Parliament -Queen, Lords and Commons -to say what shall be JaJW in 

. this country. Today, no other right is superior to that right. Every sue-V 

cessive Parliament is itself sovereign; no law or any other instrument can 

prevent it from making what laws it wants or from undoing as much as 

i·t wants of what earlier Parliaments have done. 

l.f the Treaty of Rome is to apply here as it does elsewhere, that will 
cease to be true. According to Mr. P. VerLoren van Themaat, the E.E.C.'s " 
Director-General for Competition,1 'there are about 130 provisions of 1 
the Rome Treaty which have the character of substantive law'. In \ 
addition, the Council of the Community can issue 'regulations' (applying /; 
to all member States), and it and the Commission can issue 'decisions' \ 
(applying to named States) which are immediately and ipso facto 
valid as law in the countries concerned. This is perfectly possible in the 
six present member coun•tries, all of which have written Constitutions, 
limiting the rights of their Parliaments in ways in •which no British Parlialiament 
has consented to be limited. They also provide, as we do not, 
for the ratification of treaties by their Parliaments, and stipulate, in various 
ways,2 that trea~ies, on:ce ratified, are llllw, and take precedence over all 
other Jaws. If, in one of the six countries, a Court sees a conflict beuween 
a Community regulation or decision and one of its own national laJWs, 
it will regard the Community law as valid and ignore the other. If one 
of the six Parliaments passes a law which appears to a Court to be in 
conflict with the Treaty or with a regulllltion or decision made by virtue 
of the Treaty, the Court will regard the law in question as inval·id, and 
apply only the Treaty. 
This practice would raise two pro.blems here, if Bri•tain were to sign the 
Rome Treaty. In the first place, it is difficult to see how it can be applied 
in Britain. We have no written Constitution to alter, as the Six have. 
In Britain, as Sir Ivor Jennings has sa·id,3 'the supremacy of Parliament is 
the Constitution'. What, then, can we do, if we enter, to satisfy the Six \ 
that we have fulfilled what, on this point, is an explicit o•bligation? Parliament 
could pass an Act, stating that the Treaty and the regulations and 
decisions made under it are law in this country, notwithstanding any earlier 


1 In LeRal Problems of the E.E.C. and E.F.T.A .. (~tevens) P. 77.. 

2 See for instance Art. 55 of the French ConstitutiOn, Art. 24 ot the German 

Grunr!'r<esetz, and Art. 66 of the Dutch Constitution 

3 T!te Law and the Constitution, p. 294. 


14 NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

Acts which appear to say opposite things. But it could do nothing to 
prevent future Parliaments either from repealing .that Act, or from passing 
other Acts in contradiction with earlier Community regulations or decisions. 
To try so to limit the powers of future Parliaments would be to try to 
<11bolish the sovereignty of Parliament, and such an attempt would inevitably 
fail in the short run. Only a prolonged conflict of power be·tween (say) 
Government and Parliament, or the Courts and Parliament, or the Community 
Court and Parliament could prevent British Parliaments from reasserting 
their sovereignty if they so wished. 

\ _ That is the first difficulty, and it will be obv.ious .that it really ought 
'\1 to worry the Six more than us.1 The second difficulty, however, concerns 
us very closely. It is possible to imagine a tacit a;bandonment by Parliament 
of 1ts own sovereignty. If Parliament does pass an Act making past 
and future 'decisions' and 'regulations' of the Community Council and 
Commission valid here-please note, past and future -then future Parliaments 
might wish to respect tha,t Act and try to avoid conft.ict with it. 
If they did, ho•wever, they would thereby have surrendered not only their 
sovereignty, but also another right, to which all Parliaments orver the past 
30 years have attached increasing importance. Ever since the pu:b1icat·ion 
of Lord Hewart's famous book on 'The New Despotism' and the report 
of the Donoughmore Commission on delegated legislation (in 1932), Parliament 
has steadily tightened its contra.! over Statutory Instruments. Statutory 
Instruments are the Orders in Council and similar documents which 
Ministers use, with the specific authorisation of specific Acts of Parliament, 
to fill in the details of legislation which are either to.o small for Parliament 
t.:> deal with, or which may need to be changed as circumstances change, 
and so on. These Instruments are, in effect, 1a:rws made by Ministers, and 
Parliament keeps a check on them in three ways: the Committee on Statutory 
Instruments (usually called the Scrutiny Committee) calls the aN:ention of 
Parliament to any Instrument which, in its view, goes beyond what might 
be thought desinvble, in any one of six specified ways. All Instruments, 
with a negligi•ble number of exceptions, are laid on the tahle of the House; 
some come into force only if within · 40 days the House has raised no 
o•bjection; others become valid immediately, but must be withdrawn if 
the House votes a Piayer for Annulment. None of these devices is 
much used by Members of Parliament, .but their existence, in my vierw 
and in that of many authorities, makes Ministers and their advisers much 
more careful than they might otherwise be, and prevents many possilble 
a•buses. Note that these safeguards are used to check Instruments made 
by British Ministers responsible to our own Parliament, acting by virtue 
of laws passed by our own Parliament. Yet, if Britain signs the Rome 
{ Treaty, no similar safeguard, indeed no safeguard of any kind, will be 
available to Parliament as regards the regulations and decisions having 
force of law in this country, issuing either from a body of Ministers in 
Brussels, of whom only one will be responsible to Parliament, or from 
a Commission of appointed officials of whom none wiU be responsible to 

1 If the French wished to be awkward, they could argue that our inab¥"lity

to ensure the 'reciprocity' required by article 55 of their own Constitution would 

release them from their obligations. ~ 


NOT WITH EUROPE : THE POLITICAL CASE FOR SI AYING OUT 

15 

anybody. We shall have insti.tuted checks against Lord Hewart's 'new 
de&p()ltism', only to surrender to a newer and more remote despotism, 
totally tbeyond our control. This point is further examined below, in the 
section entitled 'Bureaucracy'. 

Other Legal Problems 

The Treaty presents a further problem in this field, which need not be 
insuperable if we really were under some economic compulsion to go into 
the Community, as some people quite wrongly think we are, but which will 
nevertheless play havoc with a useful and long esta:blished .tradition. British 
laJWyers interpret Acts of Parliament and Statutory Instruments in accor-v 
dance with the commonly accepted meaning, as they see it, of the words 
in them. Their assumption is that P.arliament, or the Minister, meant what 
they said, and that if they did not they are always free to change the words, 
in order to make their meaning clearer. This is a valua,ble tradirtion 
because, among other reasons, it means that the ordinary man or the 
ordinary man's laJWyer also has a reasonaJble chance of knowing what the 
law is, or will be declared .to be. In any case, it is now part of a habit 
of mind in which British lawyers have been trained for centuries, and will 
be very difficult to lose. But continental lawyers in all the countries of v'" 
the Six interpret la,ws by asking themselves what .the words in them were 
intended to mean. In order to find these interpretations, they go back to 
statements of pr·inciple in the preambles to laws, or to Parliamentary debates 
and similar sources. This creates great confusion. French citizens, for 
instance, have discovered, on a dozen occasions in the past three years, 
that the Constitution, for which over 80 per cent of .them voted in a 
referendum in September 1958, is not held to mean what nearly everybody, 
including some of those who hdped to draft it, thought it meant when 
they voted for it, and the interpretations which have led to these rulings 
have been based in part on private documents, to which neither the ordinary 
citizen nor the ordinary lawyer has access. 

There is no need to stress the dangers of this technique of interpretation 
especially in a country in which scarcely anybody is accustomed to it. 
But it carries with it another difficulty. Community regulations and decisions, 
as we have seen, are valid as law in every member coun,try. They 
must, obviously, have the same mean.ing in every member country, if the 
Community is not to be reduced to legal chaos. If, therefore, Britain jo·ins 
the Community, British judges must learn to interpret these regulation?} 
and decisions in the light of the intentions lying behind them, and not of 
the meaning of their words. What are .they then to do when they interpr 
ordinary British law? Either they must change our whole tradition in this 
matter, and interpret all our law in this way, or ·they must risk creating 
contradictory interpretations of the same words and phrases, according to 
whether they are dealing with Communi.ty law or with British law. 
Clearly, this would create an impossible si·tuation, and we shall either 
drift or jump into the purely Continental habit. It ·implies no disrespect 
to Continental laJW and Continental lawyers to say that most of us would 
see this as a change for the worse, and that it would in any case lead 
to a period of great confusion. 



16 NOT WITif EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

Ill. Defects of Principle and Structure 

The Underlying Philosophy 

I
I
F the conflict !between fedemlists and non~federalists has produced some 
ambivalence in everything that touches on the ultimate purpose of the 
E.E.C., there is and a!Jways has been complete unity on method. All the 
integrationists are agreed that the road from the 20th century to the 21st 
goes by way of the 19th-or perhaps, more accurately, of the 18th. In 
other words, the major immediate purpose of the Community is the creation 
and maintenance of as complete a system of laisser-faire (in plain English, 
a free~for-all) in economic life as its founders are able to obtain. Indeed, 
it is worse than that, and in a way that suggests that I have been unfair 
to the 18th century. Adam Smith and Turgot believed that, if all individuals 
were left free to pursue their separate economic purposes, the bidden hand 
of a !beneficent .providence would ensure that it all worked out for the 
benefit of all. The nineteenth century demonstrated the falsity of this 
view. It sho•wed, as Fourier put it, that 'competition leads to monopoly'. 
So the modern exponents of laisser-faire believe in planning for it. 

Where you or I would plan for full employment, or for quality, or low 
prices, or the preservation of the countryside, or the many other social 
purposes we baNe in mind, they plan to create artificially the k•ind of 
situation which Adam Smith saw as a part of nature. This is planning 
only in order to prevent planning. It is try~ng to use modern knowledge 
and techniques in order to adapt the world to the economic superstitions 
of the eighteenth century, and in practice it is just as silly as it sounds in 
theory, since it combines the n~cessary bureaucratic elements of planning 
with the inefficiency and purposelessness of laisser-faire. We would plan, 
because we know from experience that, if competition sometimes stimulates 
effort and ingenuity, it also leads to get-rich-quick methods of shoddy 
production, knows no social priorities, and is always wasteful. They plan 
to ensure the freedom orf every indi·vidual, outside specified areas of 
exception, to exploit other individuals to the top of his ben·t. 

This is in no way an O·Verstatement or a distortion. The integrationists 
had already tried their band at international planning for laisser-faire 
in the Coal-Steel Pool, and they never concealed their intentions a;bout the 
Common Market. They have called it 'the Institu.tional Market' and one of 
their leaders, M. Jacques Rueff, has ex.plained what it means, in his 
introduction to the symposium from which I have already quoted, Le 
Marche Commun et ses Problemes. 'The Institutional Market', he says, 
with endearing fr.ankness, 'crea·tes a geographical area in which the 
behaviour of individuals is in large measure determined by the price 
mechanism . . . . It aJbandons none of the legitimate hopes for free trade. 
Lt recognizes that the benefits of free trade will be greater as the geographical 
and economic area of d'ree trade is greater. But its founders knew 
where they were going. They preferred to get one step nearer to their 
goal, rather than go on eternally eXJpressing their regret a.t not reaching 
the goal. Therefore instead of total laisser-passer they preferred a market 
limited to the area in which the creation of (appropriate) ... insti·tutions 


NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 17 

was politically possible, and instead of total laisser-faire, a laisser-faire 
limited by so much State intervention as would g·ive it the chance of beingmorally acceptaJb1e and politically accepted'. 

The author of that frank staJtement is norw a member of the Community 
Court which interprets the Treaty. And the Treaty i,tself bears out his 
claims. It is true that there are exceptions to the rule of laisser-faire. 
There are expressions of belief in co-opera,tion on exchange rates, trade-
cycle policy .and balance-of-payments policy, but there is no adequate 
pro·vision for securing that co-operation, and no provision for enforcement 
of what may be agreed on. These ar.ticles, therefore, are likely to remain 
mere words. There is to be some kind of managed agriculture. There is 
a Social Fund, contributing half the cost of retraining displaced workers, 
and there is a European Development Bank, contributing, where appropriate, 
half the capital for development projects in under-developed areas 
of Europe. But the Social Fund runs only for another eight or ten years, 
unless a qual·i·fied maJjority of the Council votes to continue it, and the 
Development Bank makes its grants dependent on payment of interest at 
a level which must necessarily be high if its rules are fuJ.filled, and on 
the creation of a sinking fund. Any other variation from strict laisser-jaire 
requires the permission of the Commission. The most casual glance aJt 
the Treaty suggests, and closer examinaHon confirms, that !aisser-faire is 
the rule, as M. Rueff and his eo-founders intended, and the bits of planning 
very much the exception. If and when 'the Court has to decide on accusations 
of breaches of the rules of the Treaty it has to apply what the Treaty 
calls 'the rules of free competition' (under the wa~tchful eye of M. Rueff) 
in every case in which an excep·tion is not explicitly author·ised. · 

There are people who argue that the view just stated is based on a 
misunderstanding of the Treaty. They point· to pious aspirations about the 
desira~bility of economic expansion and a more rapidly rising standard of 
living (in Art. 2), and aJbout the improvement of wonk,ing and living 
conditions (in Art. 117). But they cannot point to a single reference to 
full employmen;t, they forget that Art. 117 trusts to laisser-faire to do 
the job and that Art. 2 imposes no obligation, precise or imprecise. •It 
is true that Art. 2 can be taken into account by the Court lawyers, who 
are last-resort rulers of the Community.1 But this can be done only where 
there is real doubt a'bout the intended meaning of the words in the Treatty 
or in the agreements and regulMions which will complete it. In the absence 
of doubt, they must and will apply the TreaJty. 

The Treaty, of course, can be changed, but only in one of two ways. 
It can be interpreted out of existence •by the combined. work of a qualified 
major·ity ot the Council, and ordinary majorities of the Commission and the 
Court. Since Commission members sit for a minimum of four years and 
Court members for six, any change of orientation could take a very long 
time, even if there was no minority on the Council with the desire and 
the po·wer to prevent it. The other way is by formal rev•ision, which 

1 Professor Perroux, the most distinguished living French economist, has described 
the E.E.C. as 'the second European lawyers' vara<!ise'-t}le first beingthe Coal-Steel Community, 


18 ~OT WITH EUROP E : THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

requires ratification by every member Parliament (i.e. can be blocked by 
the veto of any one member). lf Britain, Nor.way, Denmark and Ireland go 
in, there will be ten potential vetoes, so the reader can work out for 
himself the chances of revision. The trouble is, of course, that the 
rigidities of written Constitutions u.r~ deliberately crea;ted in order to 
safeguard specific vested interests, and. are intended to be resp\ected. 
The notion tha.t anything that doesn't work can always be changed is a 
British notion, based on a fiduciary and pragmatic approach to politics. 
Nobody on the continent accepts it, though some admire it from afar. 
So if we go in, we must go in in the full kno.wledge that we are accepting 
an anti-planning mechanism, and can change it only by learning to use the 
devious devices, strange to British minds, by which the rig.idities of written 
constitutions are sometimes overcome. 

Some supporters of British membership claim that things will not work 
out in that way. It is a strange argument for signing a treaty to say 
that it do·es not mean what it says, but the basic belief is probably true. 
That does not mean, however, that we shall be a-ble to replace the free-
for-all by Go'Yernment planning, but th<lit it is already being replaced by 
private, big~business planning. Cartels and unpublicised agreements between 
the big fipms are rapidly coming into being throughout the Community 
countries, and few, even among its supporters, are comvinced that the 
Commission can deal with them. The High Authority of the Coal-Steel 
Pool, which has been trying for years to enforce similar rules in its 
own ·sector, tbut with the tbacking of the same Court, has completely failed 
to secure the dismantling of the great Ruhr coal cartel, GEORG. We 
must expect the same weakness to be sho·wn by the E.E.C. Commission, 
which has fewer powers than the High Authority of the Coal and Steel 
Community. 

This takes us close to ·the E.E.C.'s central weakness. Governments 
which sign the Treaty sign a·way a great part of their existing planning and 
controlling powers. Some o.f these disappear altogether. They bind themselves 
not to exercise any power which, in the view of the Court in the 
last resort, could have the same effect as a tariff or an import quota, and 
which would affect trade between member States, and aims at or has the 
effect of preventing, limiting or interfering with the free working of 
competitio.n wi.tbin the Community. This renunciation of power applies 
specifically to nationalised as well as to private industry, and this means 
that, although member States are free to nationalise wha·t industries they 
Iike, they are not free to pursue many of the purposes for which nationalisation 
may well have been intended. There are, of course, great areas of 
economic life in which member States remain entirely free, and there are 
exceptions to the Jaisser-faire rules, but the real meaning both of the rules 
and the exceptions will be decided by the combination o.f bureaucracy 
and negative control described belorw. 

Other rights are banded over to the Commission, which is committed 
to using them, not in the interests of any social purpose, but solely in 
order to enforce rules of free competition against the small firms which 
are the only ones against which it is likely to be strong enough to enforce 
them. The Treaty binds member States, in effect and with the exceptions 


NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYJNG OUT J9 

mentioned ~bove, to regard the maximisation of free competition as an 
overriding good, more important than full employment or aesthetic or 
~trategic or political or any other considerations-but it then fails to 
create any central authority with democratic backing and real power to 
deal with international monopolies and cartels. That is why, from the 
very beginning, the money for propaganda in favour of European integration 
has come from the great European cartels, and why, also from the 
beginning, the pro-Common-Market campaign in Britain has been led by 
the giant firms, hungry for their share of the European pickings.1 It is 
also why so many of those who really believe in free trade within a 
framework of social policy have rejected the Common Market. The Treaty 
does have a section on social policy, but that section begins by affirming 
that free competition within the Community will itself promote any desirable 
social policies. Among the immense powers given to the organs of 
the Community there is not one (again apart from the oft-mentioned 
three exceptions) which will, or is intended to, enable it to enforce or 
pursue or encourage any social policy. As the title and chapter headings 
of Part I of the Trea'ly clearly say, laisser-faire is one of 'the foundations 
of the Community'. Or, as Herr Hans von der Groeben, of the E.E.C. 
Commission, says, 'The Treaty is founded on the principle that the course 
of economic events in the Communi·ty is to be guided by competition.'2 

Bureaucracy 

We have seen how the Common Market will help to consolidate the rule 
of big business, which will thus recoup its vast propaganda expenditure. 
Anybody who hopes that Britain can change this sta·te of affairs whenever 
she wishes had better think again. For another characteristic of the E.E.C. 
is the total absence of democracy. To explain this more fully, I must first 
set out a few .brief facts aJbout its machinery of go·vernment. 

The organs of the E.E.C. are the Council, the Commission, the Court, 
the Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee and, unofficially, the 
Ambassadors orf the member Governments accredited to the E.E.C., who 
appear to meet frequently in Brussels and form a kind of unofficial 
permanent liaison between Council and Commission. The Council consists 

o.f one member (normally a Cabinet Minister) from each member State. 
It decides a few minor matters by ordinary majority; on many matters, 
at the present stage, it decides by unanimous vote, and on a steadily 
increasing number by qualified majority,3 which means 'twelve votes out of 
1 'The Commission has few diriJ?iste weapons at its disposal for any general 
regulation of the market'. P. VerLoren van Themaat in LeJ?al Problems etc. (op.
cit.) p. 84. It should be noted in this connection that, if the Court follows the 
same trend in dealing with the E.E.C. Commission as it has with the HighAuthority of the E.C.S.C., ilt will interpret the Commission's powers restrictively. 

v. Lagrange, Les pouvoirs de la Haute Autorite et /'application du Traite de 
Paris, in Revue du Droit Public, 1961 , No. 1. pp. 45-47. 
2 Policy on Competition in the E.E.C. Brussels, 1961. p. 6. 
s France, Germany and Italy have four votes each; Belgium and Holland two 
each. Luxembourg one. What will happen if new members come in can only 
be guessed. Negotiation on distribution of votes and on the level of the qualified 
majority will be a very delicate matter, 

20 NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

the total of seventeen. It is thus possi1ble for one big and one medium-sized 
country, with six votes between them, to block any decision requiring a 
qualified majority. No pwvision is made for getting out of the deadlock; 
it goes on until somebody gives way. The Council issues regulations and I 
decisions, which are binding in law, from the moment of issue, the former f 
on all member States and the latter on those to whom they are addressed. 

The Commission consists of nine permanent officials (some of them 
ex~politicians), appointed by the Governments, for a minimum term of four 
years. Not more than !Jwo may come from any one country. I.t decides by 
majority vote. Its business is to further the general purposes of the 
Treaty (which its present members see as moving towards federation), to 
apply the /aisser-faire and other rules (first to be worked out in detail 
by the Commission and approved by the Council); and to make proposals 
to the Council (it has a near-monopoly of this right) on all the main 
subjects. It also has powers of its own, which are discussed beloiW. 
It issues recommendations and opinions, which are not binding; authorisations, 
wi·thout which many things are forbidden; directives, which order 
Governments to achieve a particular result, without ~pecifying hoiW, and 
decisions, which apply to named countries and are binding on them. 

' The Court consists of seven Judges, appointed by the Governmen•ts 
for a maximum of six years in the first place. They are assisted, in 
the Continental manner, by Advocates-General, and the procedure also 
is wholly Continental. The Court has the final word on the interpretation 
of the Treaty, of rules made under its author~ty and of the legality of 
the actions of Community organs. J.ts contingent powers are therefore 
almost unlimited.1 

The Parliament (called l'Assemblee in the French version), consists of 
36 representatives each for the three bigger powers, 14 each for the 
two medium ones and six for Luxemburg. They are delegated by national 
Parliaments, which in practice exclude all Communists. It meets once a 
year as of right, uses Continental procedures, and has as its only power 
the passing by a bwo-thirds majority of a motion of censure on the 
Commission, which entails the wholesale resignation of the Commission 
members. This, o.f course, does not amount to anything resembl·ing Parliamentary 
control in any ordinarily accepted sense of that term. The fact 
that members of the Commission in practice attend meetings of the 
ParLiament and its Committees and are sometimes influenced by what they 
hear takes this caricature of democracy only one small step nearer to 
real democracy. The Parliament has been given a steam hammer, difficult 
to operate (two-thirds majority), which it can use, if it wishes, to crack 
nuts. There has been much talk of a directly elected assembly with some 
real power to legislate, but this is running into the same difficulties as 
were responsible for the death of the European Political Community. The 
Economic and Social Committee appears, on the available evidence, to be 
purely decora·tive. 

Let us now look at the working of these institutions. We can begin 

'Nearly all really imp'ortant questions', says its present president, Professor 
Donner, 'tend to come before the Court', LeJ?nl Problems etc. p. 72. 


NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

by forgetting a1bout .the Court. It is true that rule by judges is repugnant 
to all our in&tincts and traditions, but it is also true that if ever we 
do enter any wider internaJtional grouping, we shall pro·bably ha'Ve to 
accept some degree of judicial supervision of the applrication of its rules. 
It is possi·ble to manage without such supervision, but if most of our 
probable partners want it, we might well decide that judicial supervision 
was a price worth paying for whatever other advantages there were. 

One cannot, however, say the same of the Commission or the Council, 
bo.th of which suffer from a basically anti-democratic structure. The~ 
Commission is the only plllblic goveming body known to me which is, 
in the literal sense of the term, a bureaucracy; it is a body of officials 
with the right and the duty to exercise many of the powers of government. 
It is also by far the most poJWerful of the Community organs. On nearly 
every matter, it is the only body in the Community with a right o[ 
initiative. The Council cannot prepare its own proposals for consideration ; V 
it can consider only those of the Commission. The only parallel known to 
me in his·tory for this separation of the functions of initiation and decis•ion 
is to be found in the Constitutions which Sieyes drafted for Napoleon I 
-and their all too ev.ident purpose was to stifle democracy. The pro·vision 
means that the Commission can prevent the Council from considering 
any;thing it does not want to be considered. Such proposals as the Commission 
does sUJbmit can normally be amended by the Council only if 

• it 
is unanimous, or by a quaJi,fied majority which includes at least four 
members. The Commission also prepares the ·budget, administers the Social 
Fund and takes member Governments into Court as and when ·it thinks fit. 
It is itself the Monopoly and RestrictiiVe Practices Court of the Commun·i1y 
and it runs the managed agricultural market, having in particular the 
vital function of fixing the variable levies (i.e. taxes) on imports. 
The Commission also has, as the Treaty says (Art. 155), 'its own powers 
of decision'. Note the words: of decision. And indeed it has. It can give 
orders to any member State on the principles and the details of application 
of the rules of free competition to nationalised industries or to any 
industries enjoying special or exclusive rights, or to monopoly services. 
(Art. 90). It can order a Government which has taken emergency measures 
in defence of its curr·ency to withdraw those measures (•Art. 73), and it 
can order it to a!bolish any form of State aid which it regards as incompa,
tilble with Art. 92, defining in vague terms the permissible forms 
of State aid. In all these cases, the rule means that the bureaucrats ha'Ve 
the last word, unless the Government concerned takes the matter to the 
Community Court. 

The Commission also issues 'directives' (specifying the result to be 
achieved, but not the method of achievement) on the rate of suppression of 
taxes equivalent to customs duties (Art. 13) and on the 'framewopk' within 
which agricul,tural prices are to be negotiated. It also gives or refuses 
'authorisa.tions' on a wide range of matters covered by a dozen Articles 
(17, 25, 26, 37, 46, 73, 80, 89, 91 , 107 and 108). These include the 
maintenance of certain revenue duties, the crea•tion of quotas at reduced 
or zero tariffs in certain cases, the partial or total suspens·ion of the 
external tariff, the postponement in certain circumstances of the ra·ising 


22 NOT WITif EUROPE : THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

or lowering of that tariff, the taking of protective measures on capital 
movements liable to cause disturbances of the capital market, the granting 
of supports or protection >to enterprises or industries by way of transport 
rates or conditions, protective measures against dumping, similar measures 
in cases where another State has broken the rules, and so on. 

,......----The reader will have seen for himself that these powers are both 
ex.tensive and important. They touch at three points upon taxation (Arts. 
13, 17, 97), they affect the running of nationalised industries and the uses 
o{ Government aid, and they touch at one point on the right of the 
State to control capita-l mo·vements (Art. 93). In the two cases in which 
the Council can intervene and overturn the Commission's decisions (Ants. 
73 and 93), it requires a qualified majority in the former case and unanimity 
in the latter. In the a•bsence of those majorities, and in all the other 
cases cited, the Commission is supreme. 

What makes the nine bureaucrats the real rulers of the Community, 
h01Wever, is not only the range and importance of the po•wers given to the 
Commission by the Treaty, but the conditions of its work and the manner 
in wbich they compare with those of the only other decision-making body, 
the Oouncil. The Commission decides by simple majo·rity (and can .therefore 1 
always reach some kind of decision); the Council requires either a unanimous 
vote or a qualoified majority for every important decision, and 
may therefore, as is explained belorw, often find itself unable to reach 
a decision at alL The Commission has almost all the right of initiative, 
and the Council can on-ly either amend its proposals (by unanimous vote) 
or tell the Commission to think aga·in. The latter right is, in practice, 
the one most frequently used and the only effective one. The Commission 
members sit for a min·imum of four years, while Council members come 
and go as Go·vernments change or are re-shuffled. The Commission meets 
as often as it likes, the Council only once a month, for .two or three days. 
The Commission thus acquires a conporate personality and a mind of its 
own, while the Council can have none. The Commission controls the 
Community Civil Service, prepares the budget, runs the Social Fund. 
There is no body of offici·als in any democratic counltry which enjoys 
anything even remotely resembling such a position of po·wer vis-a-vis a 
body of Ministers issuing from democratically elected Parliaments. 

To visualize any.thing equivalent at home, one would have to imagine 
our having two Cabinets, each with porwers of its own, and of which 
the second consisted entirely of permanent officials. None o.f the officials 
would ·be responsilble to any individual Minister; on the contrary, they 
would do many .things without reference to the Minis·ters at all ; it would 
be they and not the Ministers who would appoint all the other officials 
and they who decided on the agenda for the first Cabinet. The second 
CaJbinet could not be got rid of so long as it had the support of only 
one-third of the members of Parliament, and neither Cabinet would be 
sUJbject to any other form of Parliamentary control wha-tsoever. A straightforward 
proposal to a1bolish our present Cabinet and Parliament and replace 
them .by the above arrangement would be treated with contempt. But the 
proposal to take Britain into the E.E.C. is in fact a proposal to take 
a great and growing part of our affairs out of the control o.f our present 


NOT WITH EUROPE : THE POL!TlCA L CASE FOR STAYING OUT 23 

Ca'binet and Parliament and put them under precisely the kind of rule 
I have just described. 

Negativism 

The Council is not a bureaucracy, but it is certainly not a democratic 
body. It is responsible to no·body and its individual members obviously 
cannot be held responsible by their national Parl-iaments for what they 
have done in a body whose proceedings are of necessity secret.1 The most 
ohjeotiona1ble feature of the Council is, ho.wever, its voting system. Even 
after the passage from stage I to stage li of the transition period, there are 
38 specified cases or circumstances (if my counting is accurate) in which 
it can take no decision except by unanimous vote; on rubout 30 others, 
the unanimity rule gives way sooner or later to the qualified majority rule. 
On none of these matters is there any provision for changing to normal 
majority v.o.ting. On its o·wn internal affairs, together with a very few 
others, and on matters not foreseen in the Treaty, it decides by simple 
majority. 

Both simple-majority voting and the unanimity rule can be defended. 
The one expresses confidence, the other lack of confidence. Majority vo·tJing 
is possible wherever those concerned have sufficient confidence in each 
other to accept this instrument of democracy. The unanimity rule safeguards 
national sovereignty where it is thought desirruble to do so. The 
qualified-majority rule, on the other hand, is indefensiible both in logic 
and in practice. It is intended to safeguard legitimate minority rights, 
but in practice it fails to safeguard those (though they may well be 
legitimate) whose streng-th faHs just below the required minimum, and 
gives excessive po,wer to those who can just reach that minimum. It 
enthrones minorities and incites them to horse-trading. It means that tJwo 
minority coun-tries (or more i.f Britain enters and the blocking figure is 
raised in consequence) hruve only to agree to veto the projects that either 
objects to, in order to prevent anything they dislike. It is thought of as a 
protection for minorities, but it is not possible, in logic or in fact, to 
protect minor-ities •by fixing an anbitrary figure, above which minorities are 
allowed to dominate, while below it they cease to count. Respect for 
minority rights is best ensured by intelligent consideration of them by 
the majority, but none of the Six is prepared to trust the other five to 
do that. 

The working of the qualified~majority rule is made even worse in the 
E.E.C., in that the Treaty provides in only one instance for a way out of 
the deadlocks created by this form of minority rule. Provision was made 
for arbi.tration, if necessary, over the passage from the first to the second 
stage of the transition period, but that is now past, and in no other case 
1s any solution offered. In some cases, deadlock is relatively unimportant; 

1 It would be pointless and unjust to dismis~ a Minister . who had tried and 
failed to prevent a decision unacceptable to h1s home Pa~hament. If he ~~re 
known to have voted for it, he could be compelled to resign. But the deciSion 
would remain valid and be enforceable by the Courts of the country which had 
thus expressed its disappro val. There is thus no effective responsibility of Ministers 
even to their home Parliaments. 


24 NOT WITH EUROPE : THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

the Community can still function in ~ome way irf no decis·ion is reached. 
But in weH over half of them, a decision of some kind is essential to the 
proper working of the Community, and discussion has to go on until 
enough members give way. The result is either compromise or anarchy. 

W-hat it means, at bottom, is that the six countries were not ready 
for the enterprise on which they have embarked. Mistrusting each other 
as they do, they would have been wiser to stick to in-ternational co-operation, 
instead of supranationalism. Britain certainly should not go in unless and 
until she and her partners are willing to accept democra.tic majority rule. 
Mean-while, if Britain and two of the Scandinavian states go in, they will 
take with them, not only more vetoes, but different traditions and different 
interests to defend. Their mere applications will lead to some very difficult 
negotiations on the size of the qual-ified majority in the new set-up. If 
it is too low, it will lbe possilble for the new member States (e.g. Britain 
and Denmark) to use it to defend their own ideas and interests; if it is 
too high, any of the founder po•wers may find it difficuH to recruit enough 
support for the defence of their interests. I.t looks like a case where six 
are company tbut seven or eight are trouble. This is one of the reasons 
that lead many Continentals to fear that the admission of Britain would 
break up the Community, and it is why many are convinced, as I am, 
that t·he Community would never have come into being if Britain had tried 
to get in at the start. There is a limit to the number of conflicting interests 
that can be reconciled within a single effective organisation. 

Why Institutions Matter 

This problem of the efficiency or the desirabiJ.ity of the insti,tutions 
of the E.E.C. has scarcely been raised at all in British discussions. To 
my knowledge, only Hugh Gaitskell (in the Commons on August 2, 1961) 
has mentioned it. 1t is easy to see why the English behave as if ins•titutions 
did not matter. We are more interested in what we are trying to do than 
in the tools we are using to do it; we think more of purposes and less of 
the institutions needed to achieve the purposes. We are ahle to do this 
precisely because, havin-g an unwritten Constitution, we can change our 
instruments if they turn out to be unsuited to their purposes. Under 
written Constitutions, changing one's insti-tutions is rarely imposs·ib.Je, but 
it is always very much more difficult. The provisions of written Constitutions 
can always be made more worka1ble, as those of the Rome Treaty 
have been, by season-ing their application with a great deal of goodwiH, 
commonsense and give-and-take, .but it is aLways possible for someone to 
dig his toes in when it suits him, and insist that the rules be obeyed. 

No·w, the Rome Treaty is the written Constitution of a partial 
(functional) federation. Irf we accept it, we accept, within the field it 
coiVers, exactly the kind o!f obLigations that are imposed by federal constitutions 
on their member States. The only difference is that the Rome 
Treaty is more rigid -less easy to change-than any federal constitution 
known to me. It can be changed only with the consent of the Parliaments 
of all the member States (Art. 236). Note that this particular unanimity 
rule is tougher than the others I have mentioned. They require unanimity 
only among Governments: Art. 236 requires it among Parliaments, where 


NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

it will always be more difficult to get, as the French Parliamen<t showed 
when it refused to ratify the E.U.C. Treaty, which successive French 
Go·vernmen.ts had accepted. The unanimity rules were put there for a 
purpose. They ex.ist in order to safeguard specific national ves•ted interes<ts, 
and bh'e tougher provision of Art. 236 exists to safeguard the whole 
structure by which the vested interests are protected. It would be wise, 
therefore, to regard the Treaty as practically impossible to change, and 
to enter the Community only if we are prepared to accept its crazy 
mixture of bureaucracy, negativi·sm and rule by judges. 

Continental Motives 

By this time, the reader may well be asking why, if the Treaty is as 
bad as I have shown it to be, and so difficult to change, the Governments 
and Parliaments of six countries accepted it. It is a fair question, since 
European statesmen, members of Parliaments and electors are as intelligent 
and as sensuble as ours. Part of the answer to this has been given atbove 
on pages 8-11. It must also be recognised that, despite the criticisms accumulated 
in this pamphlet, the Community was in part the product of a highly 
idea1ist inspiration, and has g.ood sides. It would be foolish and ungenerous 
to sneer at the idea of trying to get rid of the economic causes of conflict 
in Europe. It is true that economic union can not, in fact, prevent war; 
the States of North America f.ought eaob other three-qu•arters otf a 
century after union, and more recently both Germany and Britain performed 
extensive and painf ul surgical operations on their own economies 
in order to fight .the second world war. France and· Germany could do 
the same tomorww, despite ,both the E.C.S.C. and the E.E.C., in the now 
unlikely event of their being foolish enough to want to fight each other. 
But we cannot withhold respect for those who had the energy and the 
imag·ination to try even the improbable ways. 

In the same way, one must recognise the merit of the idea of planning 
agriculture on a continental scale, even if one dislikes the methods used 
and is apprehensive atbout its prohatble results. Freer movement of lrubour 
too would be wholly desirable, if the Community had adequate machinery 
for ensuring full employment, and a democratic Parli·ament to insist on 
its use. It ·is .easy to see bow the constructive idealism of these notions 
attracted many minds, ·both in Britain and on the Continent. 

There were other reasons, too, which made the objections listed here less 

o·bjectionaible to the Six than they are to us. In the first pl·ace, all the 

Six are accustomed to written Constitutions, the difficulties .they create, 

and the ways of getting round them. Some of them are less worried 

than we are atbout bureaucracy in economic affairs. The French, for 

instance, have tended more and more since the war to band over control 

of their economic life to their admirable technicians; their Commissariat 

au Plan was for lon·g one of a dozen organisations responsible directly to 

the Prime Minister, who never had time to bother with it, and the second 

PLan was not debated in the French ParJ.iament until it had been working 

for two full years. 

There was, nevertheless, in all six countries, much criticism of the 

Treaty's bureaucratic provisions. On vetoes, too, I quote belo·w what 


26 NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

Dr. Erhard has said. The Treaty was accepted, in spite of these criticisms, 
for various reasons. Every one oif the six countries has groups of 
federal·ists and laisser-faire-ists who were prepared to sacrifice a lot of 
democracy in an attempt to achieve their purposes. And each country as a 
whole had its OIWn reasons for wanting or being <willing to accept some 
kind of merger. Italy was so weakened 1by Fascism and war that she gains 
in influence by harving 4 I 17 of a voice in the running o<f a much bigger 
show, in which she is treated, quite unrealistically, as equal in power 
to France and Germany. Germany saw great political and psychological 
advantages in being accepted as a full, equal and respected member, only 
12 years after the end of the war, of an organisation in which her former 
enemies were in a majority. It was a heaven-sent chance to work her 
passage back into European society. Dr. Adenauer may also be right in 
thinking, as it is said he does, that some merging of sovereignties would 
help to prevent a revival of militarism in Germany. And, of course, many 
German businessmen were and still are convinced that they would eat up 
their competitors and make their country boss o.f the show. Belgium and 
Holland are small powers, heavily dependent on entrepot trade, and they 
long ago accepted the implications of their status. When you know that 
your fate depends on what your bigger neighbours do, when it is their 
policies, and not yours, that take you into and out of wars and slumps, 
it really is an advantage to be close enough to them to know what they 
are thinking, and to have a voice, even if only a small one, in the decisions 
made. Luxemburg was already economically linked with Belgium. 

France is and was a special case. In 1955 and 1956, when the Treaty 
was under discussion, French business opinion was largely hostile, and 
pUJbtic opinion apathetic. But -strange as this may seem -business 
opinion in France, which is well organised to enforce sectional demands in 
ma-tters of internal economic pol-icy, has never developed a similar mechanism 
for influencing foreign policy, or any general decision. The French 
nego-tiators, moreover, did some very tough bargaining, and extracted concession 
after concession from the others, to an extent which made it 
increasingly difficult for the French Parliament to reject the Treaty. General 
de Gaulle (not then in power) is said to have been just as impressed 
by the vetoes (unanimity and qualified-majority rules) as Dr. Erhard had 
been depressed by them, and to have authorised his supporters to vote 
for the Treaty. So the Bill for ratification finally got a majority (342 to 
234) which was both quite unrepresentative of real public feeling, and 
still, in my view, far too narrow to justify the acceptance of so far-reaching 
a change. It should, in fairness, be added that many French businessmen 
have now changed their minds, are doing very well, and are looking forward 
to dominating the Market economically, as General de Gaulle counts on 
dominating the Community politically. 

In other words, the Six knew what they were doing and had good 
reasons for accepting techniques which we detest. We have none of these 
reasons and, if we know what we are doing, we shall stay out. If we do, 
we shall not, as is sometimes suggested, be 'cutting ourselrves off from 
European Socialism'. Of the thirteen European Socialist parties in the 
International, only ix are from countries which are members of the 


NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 27 

E.E.C. The others were all opposed to membership, until Britain showed 
signs of changing her po.sition. If Norway a.nd Denmark go in along with 
Britain, it will 1be only because they feel that we have driven them to it. 
If the three neutral countries are kept out, as is proba,ble, their Socialist 
parties really will have been cut off from the majority, and by our fault. 
The pmba·ble fate of Finnish Socialism is a matter that ought to weighheavily on the consciences of pro-E.E.C. Socialists. 
Will it Work? 

The shortcomings described aJbove have not, of course, escaped attention 
in Europe. They explain why Dr. Erhard described the E.E.C. (in the 
Bllndestag debate of 12.3.57) as: 

'like an armoured car, heavily protected against attack from outside, 
with an allotted place for everybody inside, outsize brakes and an undersized 
en.gine, which will stall more often than it runs'. 

Or take M. Daniel V11ley, whose fervent Europeanism has already been 

mentioned. He agrees1 with those who see the Treaty as something: 
'interminable, compLicated, inextr.ica·bly muddled . . . a mixture of 
elQquent declarations o.f principle, of tiny and sometimes ridiculously 
detailed rules, platonic protestations of good intentions . .. pious hopes, 
principles, exceptions to principles and exceptions t'O the exceptions'. 

M. Robert Marjolin, Vice-President od' the E.E.C. Commission, has been 
equally critical: 
'.Lf the Europeanisation of agricuLture is to work', he says among other 
criticisms,2 'if the infinite number of day-to-day decisions on prices, levies, 
subsidies, etc., are to be taken , we shall need a real (European) Government, 
and not merely periodic meetings of Ministers of the Six countries'. 

One could go on almost indefinitely with quotations of this kind. 
What is important is that many o.f those who support the E.E.C. or even 
actua!Jy help to run it, have doubts about it similar tQ mine, and want 
to move on to something different. Dr. Erhard, as everybody knows, 
would be happier with a straightforward free trade area, uncluttered with 
rules and regulations. Professor Villey thinks the Treaty as it stands 
could be (with luck and determination) the starting point of a federation. 

M. Marjolin is quite sure that a decision to federate, or to go through 
'confederation' to federation, must be taken consciously and quickly.3 
Others beLieve that the very difficulties I have summarised will drive the 
member Governments and peoples into federation , simply in order to get 
themselves out of the difficulties created by the division of powers between 
six national Governmen.ts sovereign in some spheres and the E.E.C. organs 
sovereign in the rest. There is wide agreement that the E.E.C. cannot stay 
as it is, though that is what the British Government appears to want. 
Op. cit., p. 31. 
Le Marche Comm1111 et !'Unification de l'Europe, Societe Royale d'Economie 
Politique de Belgique. 1961, p. 11. 
=• I bid., pp. 13-16. 


28 NO"! WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

The question of what it should change into is not easily answered. Federation 
means the disappearance of the member .States as separate, sovereign 
entities, with their own de.fence forces, Ambassadors, foreign policy, representatives 
in the U.N. and so on. lt means giving all the major powers 
of government to a single West European Federal Government, Parliament 
and Civil Service, and leaving to the existing national organs only the 
minor functions performed by the State organs of States l·ike California 
or British Columbia. The alternative, which General de Gaulle calls 
'confederation' is almost the exact opposite, since it leaves two of the 
most important po•wers, defence and foreign policy (subject to a meaningless 
'co-ordination') to the constituent States, and hands most economic and 
social powers to the central authority. ~his is what was proposed in the 
French Go·vernment's 1961 plan for an 'indissoluble poLitical union'. 

Both these notions raise immense difficulties. H is far from certain 
(to put it mildly) that it is poss.ible to form a democratic federation of 
from six to ten deveLoped industr.ial States, with long histories, deeply 
embedded traditi•ons and habits of mind, from four to seven different 
languages, different legal, political and social systems, different regimes 
(some monarchic, the others Repub1ican), and great entrenched veS'ted 
interests at every social level and in every ,field oif activity, industrial, agricultural 
or professional. All existing federations have come either from 
the breaking-down of an existing unitary State (e.g. West Germany), or 
from the union of countries at a very early stage of economic development 
(U.S.A., India, Canada, Australia) or from quite special circumstances, 
determin·ed by uni·que historical and geographical factors (Switzerland). 
An attempt at federation in part of Western Europe would be, at best, a 
hazardous venture, doomed .to a prolonged period of acute internal friction, 
and to consequent disunity. It is worth adding that, as Mr. Menzies once 
remarked (and he ought to know), federalism is an an1ti-Sociahst form 
of government, since it normally leaves in its constituent States enough 
power for any one of them, even if it has only a fraction of the total 
population, to frustrate a great deal of federal policy. 

'Confederation' looks even less attainaJble. The only confederations in 
history, those of North America in 1777-87 and of North Germany in 
1867-71, were so short-lived as to su~gest that the notion was even then 
impossible of real.isation. In modern industrial countries, economic policy 
is tightly inte!'Woven with foreign and defence policies. Trade treaties, 
for instance, over which E.E.C. member States are to hav·e no separate 
control, are matters both of foreign and of commercial policy. J,t is very 
difficult to see how this division of powers can work successfully, and 
it is certain, in my view, that the nation which does not control its oiWn 
economy cannot have independent foreign and defence policies. This 
opinion is shared by M. Marjolin, who asks, 'how much independence 
would be left to a national State which had given up all its economic 
powers to a central authority or authorities?'1 If 'confederation' is tried, 
either Community o·bliga,tions will remain unfulfi.Ued, or the member States 
will be dri~en to make the difficult experiment in federation. 

1 

Op. cit., p . 10. 


NOT WITH EUROPE : THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 29 

lt is often said, especiaU.y in the United States, tha·t it is Bri.tain's duty 
to go into Europe, and accept, as well as helping to create, whatever form 
of union comes into bein•g. We must do this, we are told, in order to 
bring sta:bility to the unstable Europeans, or to prevent them from turning 
anti-American, or from being dominated by Germany, and so on. This 
is a different notion from the one discussed above/ according to which 
Bri.ta·in is to recover her los-t pres-tige, power and influence through going 
into Europe. In the American theory, Britain sinks her identity in whatever 
Europe may turn into, but she does it wholly for the sake of others. 
The blunt and only possible honest reply to this suggestion is that it 
assumes too much and asks too much. 

l<t assumes f·ar too easily that i<f a relatively stable nation merges with 
the relatively unstable, sta,bility will result. The chances of Con6nental 
ins-taJbility overcoming British stability are in fa.ct, because of the disparity 
of numbers, very much greater than the opposite. It still has to be proved 
that instability in Fr.ance, Germany and ltaly is not, in part at least, a 
product of the very type o<f po·Iitical institutions which we should accep.t 
if we joined the E.E.C. And the possibility of the new entity's being run 
by a Franco-German combination is at least as grea:t as that of its coming 
under Anglo-German or Anglo-French domination, and infinitely greater 
than that of Britain's exercising alone any controlling or guiding influence. 
The way to reduce instability in Europe is to give whatever help we can 
from outside, not to sacrifice Britain to it. The sensible missionary does 
not jump into the cannitbal stewpot in order to reduce its temperature. 
Besides, if the argument were valid for us, it could equally well-or 
better-require the U.S . .A. to merge her stahil<ity in•to South-American 
instaJbilities, but nobody seems to have suggested that. The U.S. prefers 
to exercise its stabilisin,g influence from outside, and we can quite well do 
the same for Europe. 

It must also be remembered that membership of the Community is in 
theory permanent, and that its members intend to make it permanent in 
fact as well. Both these aspects are important. It is true that there are 
plenty of examples in his-tory of treaty obligations being broken, and that 
for some time to come, Britain will be able to withdraw from the Community, 
if she is prepared to break her word. But to go in now with 
the expressed intention of breaking our word, as Lord Boothby has suggested 
we should, and as others imagine we could, if we find we don't 
like what we have promised to do, is surely carrying cynicism and dishonesty 
in international relations a considerable step further than it has 
ev·er been carried before. 

What is perhaps more important is the fact that, if the Community 
works as it is intended to work, it will soon be impossi1ble for its memlbers 
to break their word, except at an increasingly high economic cost. E.E.C. 
theory assumes that, in the completely free market which it is intended 
to set lllp in industry, a vast redistribution of producti·ve resources and 
of manpower wi11 take place, each firm, and indeed each industry. ul-timately 

1 pp. 6-8. 


30 NOT WITH EUROPE : THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

settling down and each service being performed, in the place where its 
particular commodity can most economically be produced or its service 
performed. It is in· fact impro.bable that member Governments will allow 
this to happen on the scale on which it happens in Common Market 
dreams, but some~hing of the kind will take place, and to the extent that 
it does, countries wishing to break away wall find that they have lost 
the whole or great portions of some essential industries. Clearly, they 
will think many times before break,ing away. This is the process which 
the federalists count on to hold the Community together, before they 
drive it on to federation. 


NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 31 

V. The Wrong Grouping 
T
T
HE political objections list€d so far add up to an overwhelming case 
against British membership. The economic objections are also strongand there is in addition one other political objection which ought alone 
to lead us to decide against, even if none of the others ex.isted. The E.E.C. 
is the wrong international grouping for Britain to join, because it is irrelevant 
to the principal requirements of the age we live in and destructive of 
the most effective international grouping in the world today, the Common


wealth. 
Many people believe that it would be wrong for Britain to join an 
or·ganisation in which General de Gaulle and Dr. Adenauer, whom they 
regard as dangerous reac·tionaries, play a prominent part. I do not share 
their view, partly because I am less ready to condemn these two statesmen, 
and partly because I recognise that both are advanced in years and both 
mortal. It has also been said, in the same quarters, that the E.E.C. 'underpins 
the cold war'. If this means that it would strengthen N.A.T.O., I 
disagree with that too. My own fear in this respect is that it will weaken 
N.A.T.O., pat:tly .through the many new subjects of discord which it injects 
into the European scene, and partly because of the anti-American prejudices 
and purposes of some of its supporters. 
There is, however, a substratum o.f truth in the view just discussed. 
The movement for European integration, of which the E.tE.C. is the 
culmination, began at the height of the Stalinist period, and much of the 
support for it was, in its political aspects, almost entirely inspired by 
fear of Russian aggression. Russian aggression is, of course, still possi1ble 
under Khrushchev as it was under Stalin, but the balance of terror and 
the existence of N.A.T.O. have· made it infinitely less proba,ble and made 
Communist political infiltration,· especially in the uncommitted areas of 
the world, a much greater danger. lt follows that priorities have changed. 

N.A.T.O. is stm very much needed, but if any further ganging up by the 
West against Russia ever was a priority, it is not so no·w. With the acquisition 
of strength by States· inside or alongside both big po•wer blocs, and 
with the fray.ing at the edges (Denis Healey's phrase) of the Communist 
bloc, the picture has changed. Protected by N.A.T.O., which we must not 
weaken, we must take the ·opportun.ity now offered, and patiently seek a 
modus vivendi with the Communist world. 
Doin,g this succesfully will give us all the better chance of tacklingthe greatest and most urg_ent job awaiting the world today, which is the 
narrowing of the still growin'g gap ·between the rich nations of the northern 
hemisphere and the poor nations, grouped largely in the southern hemisphere. 
To this purpose, the E.E.C. is irrelevant and indeed harmful. Its 
existence, methods and purposes have already created acute alarm, not 
only in the Commonwealth and in Asia and Africa, but also in Israel, 
in JugosJ.avia, and in Latin America. 

The E.E.C. Commission has admiralble views on the needs of the underdeveloped 
countries. M. Lemaignen, the Commission representative deaJ.in.g 
with the under-developed countries associated with the Community, has 


32 NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

quoted with approval President Sekou Toure's statement that be sees 
neither Eastern nor Western countries, but only riob and poor ones. 
The same M. Lemaignen has pointed out that, although one of the purposes 
of the Community is supposed to be the improvement oif overseas living 
standards, the behaviour of its members often has the opposite eff·ect. 
Coffee, be points out, is a vital product in tropical economies; but in 
addition to the 16 per cent tariff to be imposed by the Community, it 
already carries the burden otf consumption taxes equivalent to 40 per cent 
of its import price in France, 85 per cent in Germany and 140 per cent 
in Italy. M. Lemaignen and the Commission deplore this, but they can do 
nothing about it, except appeal to the moral sense of those concerned.1 The 
Commission has been given great powers intended to make some of the 
rich nations richer, but none to make the poor richer, except by gifts and 
loans which, in the Commission's own view, constitute neither the right nor 
an adequate method. Commission and Council together can allo·w the 
overseas associates to protect their industries until their economies have 
become more balanced, but this protection must fall to zero by the end 
of the transition period, and the philosophy of the Community will most 
pmba~bly prevent any extension of the period allowed. 

It is sometimes claimed that it would be right for BPitain to join the 
E.E.C., precisely because both Britain and her prospective partners would 
become so much more prosperous that they would be <11ble to help the 
under-developed countries by buy,ing more from them. This cynical and 
dangerous argument has always been used by the rich to defend their 
riches. We must, of course, make the most of our resources, but the 
question is not whether we shall become richer or poorer, but whether 
we shall set ourselves as a priority task making ourselves richer or making 
the poor countries richer. If the Common Market does make its members 
richer, then unless they devote more than fifty per cent of their extra 
wealth to helping the under-developed, they will be widening the gap 
between rich and poor and, incidentally, paving the road to Communism 
in the under-developed world. Our present Government sho,ws no signs 
of wanting to give very much away. If Ministers really wanted to help the 
under-developed world, they would have seized upon President Kennedy's 
proposal for free entry for the products of under-developed countries to 
the U.S. and the Common Market, and have made acceptance of it in 
principle by the E.E.C. a condi•tion of our entry. The proha,ble reason for 
their not doing so is that they kno;w how the whole idea terrifies the 

E.E.C. federalists, and are afraid that the inevitable E.E.C. refusal would 
be too revealin-g. If we go in with the intention of changing the E.E.C. 
trend, its own machinery will prevent us from doing so, as I have shown, 
and we shall find ourselves part of the line-up against the poorer countr-ies. 
The E.E.C. is irrelevant or harmful in another sense too. Any:thing tha·t 
tends to the creation of rigid, inturned, single-race or single-continent 
groupings is a threat to peace. Vast new and homogeneous nations, if they 
can be created, which is improbable, can quarrel just as violently and with 

1 Witlhin the Community too, as ~be Commission itself admits (Bulletin from 
the European Community, Dec. 1961), it is only the rich areas that are gettingricher. Again the Commission's powers are limited to exhortation. 



NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 33 

consequences even more devastating than the old and smaller ones. There 
is both greater safety and more profit to the world in the creation of 
mixed blocs, bringing together black, white and brown, rich and poor, 
Asian, European and African, and influencing each o·ther through overlaipping 
memberships. 

The Commonwealth 

.Britain has the good fortune to belong already to just such a grouping, 
the Commonwealth. There are Conservative Ministers who have already 
secretly written off the Commonwealth and there are Tory journaLiMs 
and others who, more honestly, ha·ve done so openly. Their attraction to 
some other grouping is comprehen!'>ible, and it is not with them that I am 
arguing. To those who have only begun to lean the same way, however, 
I would say this: the trade figures which are commonly being used to 
decry the CommonweaLth bond are a passing phenomenon which is in 
part the direct result of the Government's own polioies. The CommonweaLth 
is still by far our biggest customer and supplier, and long-term 
planning, bulk buying and commodity agreements could still further increase 
Commonwealth trade, without reducing our trade with Europe (which 
is growing fast, without the benefit of Common Market tariff reductions). 
As for the political disagreements, which are also often mentioned, they 
are no greater and no more frequent than those we have and shall continue 
for a long time to have with Euroipean countries; but they are discussed 
and the edges of confl,ict softened in an infinitely friendlier and more 
co-operative atmosphere. 

There is no point in writing at great length a•bout the impossibility 
of reconciling E.E.C. needs, demands and loyalties with those of the 
Commonwealth. The result of the membership negotiations will be known 
soon enough after this pamphlet appears, and it will show clearly, to anyone 
prepared to look beneath the ambiguities and hopes in which the reality 
will certainly be clouded, that we cannot have both. Mr. Heath's opening 
statement to the E.E.C. was a wonderful picture of what it would be nice 
to have if we could get it (thuugh even there he offered to sacrifice Canadian 
industry), but he will not get ten per cent of it. The Europeans know 
perfectly well, as M. Couve de Murville has said, that if the Commonwealth 
goes in with us, that is the end of the Community, but too many 
people here still refuse to recognise the truth of the other half of his 
statement, that if we go in without the Commonwealth, that is the end 
of the Commonwealth. Or, more accurately, it would be the end of 
British membership of the Commo11wealth, for the other memJbers value 
the Commonwealth ties very hi.ghly, and would pwbably re-form the 
Commonwealth without us around a Montreal-Delhi axis. 

The Europeans know better than we do that if they accept a permanent 
link with any consideratble area of the world, they weaken the economic 
clauses of the Treaty and stui~ify its political purpose. They cannot, therefore, 
make su·bstantial or long-term concessions to Canada, Australia 
or India. Nor can they agree to 'associate' status for African and ot·her 
under-developed territories on the same terms as those gr-anted to the former 
French and other terri·tories now associated, for the former British terri



34 NOT Wllli EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STA YlNG OUT 

tonies would eat up 60 per cent or more of the available funds, while 
Britain herself contri1buted only 30 per cent. In any case, the former 
British African territories will not accept any status less than one of 
complete equality, and that they will certainly not 1be offered. There may be 
tapering concessions to some Commonwealth countries, but in the not very 
much longer run, British membership of E.E.C. would break her economic 
ties with the CommonweaHh. 

It would also break the political bonds. Our links with the Commonwealth, 
though they are real and immensely valued, are partly sentimental 
and traditional. Where they are not, they rest on the continued and 
confidential exch<mge of information. If we accept precise and written 
obligations to Europe, these must inevitably take precedence over the 
intangible and imprecise Commonwealth ties. We cannot respect the 
obJ.igation of secrecy to both bodies at once, as we discovered after 
Mr. Heath's first meeting with the European negotiators. We have already 
done the Commonwealth damage so serious, as the Accra resolutions 
showed, that only time and patience will be able to remedy it, even if we 
finally stay out of the E.E.C. If we go in, conflicts of loyalty will 
arise over and over again, so that we shall have less and less to offer 
the Commonwealth and it will either fade away or continue without us. 
It is not even probable that this shabby and dishonourable treatment of 
the Common·weaHh would do us any good in Europe. The man who is too 
quickly and unashamedly off with the old love is l-iable to find the new 
one more than a little mistrustful in consequence, especially if his lies 
and evasions are all pulblic property. 

It is sometimes said, in defence of the attempt to link up with Europe, 
that we must do so, because we cannot stand alone, and the Commonwealth 
no longer has any effective existence. Ours is not the first period in which 
the Commonwealth has been thus discounted. Hitler's specialist in Bri-tish 
affairs, von Ri,blbentrop, told his master that the Commonwealth was 
made of moonbeams -1but he soon discovered that his 'moonbeams' could 
hit very bard. l'he truth is, not that the Commonwealth no longer eX!ists, 
but that, politically, Europe does not exist and never has existed. The 
European integrationists have never denied tbis-hence their favourite 
expression, 'to make Europe'. Only the British integrationists, with all 
the fervour of recent and reluctant converts, pretend that it already exists 
today. 

In fact, if one takes only the countries of Western Europe, it is clear 
from a moment's examination that they have no political cohesion and 
do not form any natural political block. Germany and Italy are drawn 
towards the East or to the United States, and the Scandinavians inwardly 
towards themselves, France towards her former African possessions, and 
Britain towards the Commonwealth and her world trading partners, wbile 
Spain and Portgual form a Fascist island of their o.wn. The European 
countries have not a single common interest that they do not share with 
the U.S.A., the Commonwealth and South America. Outside the fields 
of world-wide interest, Europe is marked by conflicts of interest, habits 
and ideologies infinitely greater than any we find in the Commonwealth. 
It is thus not, in any sense of the term, a political reality. The desire to 


NOT WlTH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 35 

believe that it is such a reality spr.ings only from fear-fear of Communism, 
of war, or of loss of friends elsewere, and so on. And fear, as 
always, has led to irraJtional beliefs and beha·viours. To believe in the 
political existence of Europe is w<>rse than clutching at a straw ; it is 
inventing a straw to clutch at. 

* * * 

That ends the list of the ma:in political disadvantages. From Britain's 
point of view, the E.E.C. is the wrong body, doing the wrong job, in 
the wrong way. The picture that I have given in outline will, I hope, 
have thrown some doubt on the legend which would have us believe 
that a six-nation or ten-nation grouping o.f peoples o.f one race and 
colour, run by big business on the basis of a discredited philosophy and 
by undemocratic methods, is, in some incredible way, more internationalist, 
more forward-looking, more progressive, more attractive to the adventurous 
mind than a group of more than a dozen free and ind!!pendent countries, 
and of others rapidly becoming so, covering all races, creeds and continents 
and combining, or trying to combine, political democracy with modern 
ideas of economic planning and social progress. This notion, which had 

'become a verita~ble mystique, has been fostered by skilful propaganda. 

I hope I have shown that it will not bear analysis. Ii now remains to 

consider what can be done a~bout the whole pmblem. 


36 NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLlliCAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

VI. What Britain Should Do 
How to Stay Out 

T
T
HERiE is much to suggest that the Government has decided that Britain 
must go into the E.£.C. whatever the result of the negotia·tions. Public 
opinion has been and is being softened up, first by vague suggestions, then 
by references to 'association' (rwhich is something less than membership), 
then by phrases (in the resolution carried by the House of Commons on 
August 3rd) a·bout 'formal application . . . to see if satisfactory arrangements 
can be made .. . etc... .' Since then we have moved from Mr. 
Macmillan's 'the moment of decision has not yet come' of August 2nd, 
1961, to Mr. Heath's 'great decision, a turning-point in our history' 
(October lOth), which clearly cannot apply to a mere tentative opening 
of negotiations. It would, indeed, be difficult almost to the point of 
imposs.ibility for a Government to admit defeat in an enterprise of this 
kind, especially after the heavy blow which the application itself has 
dealt to the Commonwealth. Clearly, if the Government can get away 
wi,th it, we are to be taken in (in both senses), whether we like it or not. 

How can this be stopped? It is obviously too much to expect that 
Conservative Members of Parliament will revolt against it in sufficient 
numbers to defeat their Government. They might, if they have the courage 
and the conv•ictions, utter a warning behind dosed doors, but it is improbable 
that enough of them will have enough of either. But the La•bour 
Party, in my vierw, can stop it, by announcing in advance that it will 
not accept the Treaty and will either denounce it or ignore it when it 
returns to office. In all normal circums-tances, any such action would be 
undesirable, though there can be no dowbt at all that it is constitutionally 
possi!ble and proper. Governmen•ts normally do accept the obligations 
entered into by their predecessors, because both sides know that the 
ordinary •business of foreign affairs would become impossi·bie if obligations 
could be lightly repudiated when the Opposition becam,e· the Government. 
Behind this convention, however, there lies of necessity the assumption 
that the more serious olbligations (including declarations of war, the 
acceptance of obligations liable to lead to war, and other proposals involving 
the whole life of the nation) are not under·taken without the knowledge 
that the Opposition either accepts them or will not repudiate them. The 
absence of any such knowledge was, for instance, what gave constitution-al 
propriety to Labour's attitude over Suez. 

Nobody pretends that signing the Rome Treaty would be a minor matter. 
lt is accepted that it would be, indeed, 'a turning-point in our history'. 
affecting for all time and for good or ill our lives, livelihoods, ha:bits of 
life, la.w, rights and duties, prospects and status in the world, and in the 
long run the very existence of Britain as a separate entity. It is just not 
possible for a Government to commit the country to a change of this 
magnitude on its own sole responsibi!.ity and with the support only of a 
party majority, elected on a programme which made no reference to any 
such intention, and after Ministers had specifically stated, over and over 
again, that Britain could not and would not go in. Labour is perfectly 


NOT WlTH EUROPE : TilE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

37 

entitled to inform the Six of these facts olf Brit·ish political life and warn 
them that the electorate must be consulted before a signature in these 
circumst•ances can have any moral validity. For a Labour Government to 
withdraw from the E.E.C. if the condition was not fulfiUed would not be 
to repudiate an obligation, but to honour a pledge. It would strengthen 
rather than weaken the conventions on which continuity in foreign policy 
is based. 

If such a declaration led to a general election, as it ought, the issue 
would not, of course, be as clear-cut as election issues sometimes have 
been. Some Conservative candidates would be opposed to British membership 
and some Labour ones in favour. Many electors-perhaps most-
would base their choice -orrmatters unconnected with the proposal to join 
the E.E.C. But neither of these pwbaJbilities would obscure the outcome 
to the point od' making the verdict uncertain or unclear. Many voters 
would change sides on the E.E.C. issue, knowing that their parties would 
still be there at the foUo.wing election, but that an independen.t Britain 
might not, if the voting went bhe wrong way. Shifting majorities would 
show what the popul•ar trend was, and whatever Government resulted 
would be wise to take note of them. If the po·pular vote were orverwhelmingly 
favoura~ble, it could fairly claim that it had a mandate. My 
QIWO deep conviction is, however, that Labour could sweep the country 
on a programme rejecting British membership of the E.E.C., proclaiming 
support for the Commonwealth, and setting out the steps to be taken 
to put our economic house in order. I can name prominent Liberals and 
Conservatives who in these circumstances would speak, work and vo.te 
for Labour. But whether or not this forecast is well founded, the essential 
is that an election should be held before any such vital decision is made. 

The Positive Answer 

Supporters of Br·itish membership of the E.E.C. tend to reply to the 
kind of argument I have put by asking 'What will you put in its place?' 
or 'What, then, would you do aJbout Britain's economic problem?'. This 
type of question is as irrelevant as that put by the individual who was 
found in the streets of Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755, selling pills 
to cure earthquakes, and who, when he was asked if he was sure they 
would work, irwar·ia•bly countered by asking : 'Have you got anything 
better?'. If a proposed course of action is harmful or irrelevant, pointing _ 
out those defects is in itself a service, ·without any positi.ve proposa.L The J 
first alternative to foUy is not to be foolish. But the practical man also 
likes to have positive suggestions, and he is entitled to have them. 

It says a lot for the propaganda skill of the CQimmon Market swpporters 
that they have made their ideas sound posWve, when in fact they are only 
passive. 'Going into the Common Market,' says Mr. Macmillan, typically, 
'w1U be a bracing cold sho.wer'. Cold sho·wer indeed, but cold showers 
soliVe no pmblems, and neither would membership of the Market. There 
is no advantage in being braced and re-invigorated, if we then waste the 
tonic effects in doing the wrong things. There is nothing that the Common 
Market can do for us that we cannot do for ourselves-and that, according 
to Lord H~ilsham, in six weeks, if we put our minds to it. 


38 NOT WITH EUROPE : THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

Supporters and opponents of British membership agree on one or two 
things. They agree that, in the short run, imports will rise very much 
more rapidly than exports, as they did under the O.E.E.C. lj.beralisation 
pmgramme, which was only a partial taste of freer trade. That will be 
cold shower number one. Opponents wonder just how long the short run 
is likely to be, and how the economy will stand it if it turns out to be 
too long. Supporters beiieve that it will brace us to make a bigger e~port 
effort. Opponents ask why, in that case, we can't brace oursel,ves now, 
without the co.Id shower, and they point out that, since the creation of 
the Export Council for Europe, we have in fact been expanding our exports 
to the Six faster rhan they are now expanding theirs to each other. No 
cold shower; just a pullting up of socks! Both sides agree that food 
prices will go up-cold sho•wer number two . This is bound to stimula.te 
wage demands. Supporters of British memlbership believe that the cold 
shower will so stimulate employers that they will be braced into refusing 
the wage demands. Opponen•ts don't see why we have to inflict dearer 
food on ourselves anyhorw. They also fear, as even the Economist does, 
that Bri,tain may become 'the Scotland o.f the Common Market', too far 
from the economic centre of things, and too small a minority to make 
her voice heard politically. 

Supporters believe that the Common Mavket economy is more dynamic 
than that of Britain. Opponents believe that the economies of the Six 
were just as dynamic before the coming of the Market as they have been 
since, because they did not suffer from a lethargic and restrictive Conservative 
Government. They are not convinced that the virus of dynamism 
can be picked up merely by 'going into Europe', and they point out in 
support of their view that the less dynamic parts of Europe are just as 
undynamic today, on the admission of the E.E.C.'s own Commission, as 
they were before the Market existed. There are other thin,gs to be said 
on the same lines, and they all add up to one point: the Common Market 
will neither save us nor cure us; we must save ourselves. So the 'positive 
answer' of the supporters of British membership turns out to be not so 
positive a,f.ter all! 

The more genuinely positive answers offered by economists vary, in 
this as in all other matters, and it is not the function of a pamphlet on 
the political aspect to discuss them. What can be said is that the points 
mentioned a1bove are only a small part o.f the economic o•bjectio:ns to 
Br~tish membership, Economist opponents, like their colleagues in la·w and 
politics, were taken by surprise by the folly and the suddenness of the 
Government's rubout-·turn. They include some o.f our most eminent economists, 
and some, no doUJbt, will in due course publish their arguments 
and conclusions. The reader is advised to look out for them. 

In the meantime, the Labour Party has its own positive answer. Its 
economic programme is designed to do all that the lethargic dreamers are 
counting on the Common .Market to do ror them. It aims at reviving 
production and seeks to meet the proiblem of rising costs by increasing 
productivity, and the lbalance-of-payments pwblem by positive encouragements 
to exporters. There are six potential customers for these exports 
in the Common Market, and 97 (on the basis of U.N. membership), in



NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 39 

eluding both rich and poor, in the rest of the world. The 97 already 
take four-fifths of our exports and can take more if we make the necessary 
effort. So can the Six themselves, if their external tariff is to be as low as <the 
Common Market supporters assure us it will be, when they are trying 
to prove that our membership would not hurt the CommonweaJth-and 
they can't have it bo,th ways. On the home front, too, we must put 
our house in order. We must share the effort and the burden fairly. 
We must know where we are going, and show that we know. In these 
circumstances, if we believe in ourselves, we can do what needs to be 
done, and if we don't believe in ourselves, going into the Market will 
only be a quicker way of committing national suicide. 

The Case for Waiting 

A decision by Britajn not to enter the Community now would not 
necessarily prevent her from entering (and obviously not from tryin:g to 
enter) at some future date, if it then seemed desirCllble. One of the few 
certainties aJbout the Community is that it will change, as facts impose 
themselves upon those who run it, as the social cost of intended policies 
becomes clear, as institutions are run in, and as membership of the 
Council and Commission changes. In addition, many of the current uncertainties 
will be cleared up as the open parts of the Treaty are filled in, 
and as theory ~ves way to practice. Even the outcome of the conflict 
betJween free-traders, federalists and confederalists may begin to be visj,ble. 
If, for instance, President Kennedy's proposals for all-round tariff disarmament 
by agreement between the U.S.A. and Western Europe (for he is 
unlikely to leave Britain out, whether or not we join the E.E.C.) are 
accepted by Congress, they w,iJ.l create a major crisis inside the E.E.C. 
In the unlikely1 event of bheir being accepted ·by the E.E.C., both 
federalists and confederalists would regard this as a major defeat for themselves 
and some of the fears expressed here would have been answered. 

l!f, for this or any other reason, the Community seems to 'be evolving 
in the right direction, if it becomes more outward-looking, more interested 
in social policy and less in laisser-faire, more democratic and (most important 
of all) more effectively conscious of the duties of the richer 
countries towards the poorer, it might well be worth Britain's while to 
go in. To go in no•w, in the hope of guiding it in a direction in which it 
does not want to go, would be to play Canute, but we really could have 
influence from inside if it were already going our way. It is also clear 
that, in such circumstances, British membership would be much more 
welcome than it is today. 

It is true that supporters of Br,itish membership have been saying that 
time is against us, that this is our last chance, and so on. But this is 
patently untrue. No daim even for association of any Commonwealth 
terrjtory would have been so much as considered in the early stages of 
the negotiation of the Treaty. Even the association of the French Overseas 

• Territories (as they then were) was agreed only at the last momen•t, after a 
1 Acceptance would require a unanimous vote of the Council (Arts. 111 & 114).
On the improbability of acceptance, see also above, p. 6. 


40 NOT WITH EUROPE: THE POLITICAL CASE FOR STAYING OUT 

difficult meeting bel!ween Dr. Adenauer and M. Mollet, and only as the 
last of the long series of concessions which were France's minimum price 
for entry. Today the position of CommonweaHh territories is being considered 
and some minor concessions will certainly be offered. The simple 
truth is that, as conflicts within the Community become more and more 
acute, each side in the conflicts tends to see Britain as a possible and 
desirable ally and this sotftens some of the quite understandable suspicions 
we have aroused. If this situation persists, that and the trading advantages 
we could bring to the Common Market should always ensure a serious 
British application of some sort of welcome. The only thing that would 
prevent it would be a strong trend towards federalism , which in any case 
ought to make us want to stay out. 

The proper policy for Britain, therefore, is to wait and see. To go in 
now would be a gamble of unprecedented size. To procrastinate is to 
give ourselves a chance to see just what kind of pig is in the poke. And 
procrastination is surely a proper policy to advocate in a Fa~bian pamphlet! 


MEMBERSHIP 
of the Fabian Society 


is open to all who are eligible for individual 
membership of the Labour Party. Other radicals 
and reformers sympathetic towards the aims of 
the Society may become Associates. Please write 
for further particulars to the General Secretary, 

11 Dartmouth Street, London, S.W.l 
(WHitehall 3077) 



Recent Fabian Publications 


Research Pamphlets 

219 WANrED: A MONOPOLY POLICY 4/Patrick 
Hutber 

220 MIDDLE EAsT IssuEs 3I-
David Ennals and Ian Campbell 

221 COUNCILS AND THEIR PUBLIC 
3/


H. J. Boyden, M.P. 
222 
A TAX ON ADVERTISING 4/Max 
Corden 

223 A FREE PREss 3/6 
Peter Benenson 
224 THE HOUSING PROBLEM 4/J,
ohn Greve 

225 THE FARMER AND EUROPE 3/6 
Lord Walston 

226 A PLAN FOR RoAD SAFETY 2/6 
Barbara Preston 

227 UNITED NATIONS ON TRIAL 2/6 
David Ennals 

Tracts 

329 THE PURSUIT OF PEACE 3/John 
Strachey, M.P. 

330 BRITAIN AND EUROPE 2/6 
Evan Luard 
·.~ .f 4/6

331 SOCIALISM 
AND CULTURE 

Richard Wollheim ._~"" 

332 ADEN, 
THE PROTECTORATES AND THE YEMEN 3I-
Reginald Sorensen 

333 Dis~NT, FINNEGAN'S CHOICE 2/6 
Wayland and Elizabeth Young 

334 THE STRUCTURE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 2/6 
A Fabi~n Group 

~ 335 TRADE 
UNIONS IN OPPOSITION 3/6 
Ken Alexander and John Hughes 

Young Fabian Group 

2 NATO AND NEUTRALITY 

3 THE MECHANICS OF VICTORY 

~Davtd Nell & Company Dorktng Surrey 

'