The New Old World Read Free Page A

did economic recovery in Europe after the Second World War not repeat the pattern that occurred after the First—an initial spurt due to physical restocking, followed by erratic fits and starts of growth and recession? In
The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945–51
(1984), he set aside conventional explanations—the arrival of Keynesianism; repair of war damage; larger public sector; high defence spending; technological innovation—and suggested that the basis of the completely unprecedented boom, which started as early as 1945 and lasted till at least 1967, lay rather in the steady rise of popular earnings of this period, against a background of long-pent-up unsatisfied demand. This model of growth, in turn, was sustained by new arrangements betweenstates, whose ‘pursuit of narrow self-interest’ 1 led to both trade liberalization and the first limited measures of integration in the Schuman Plan.
    It is on the way these arrangements developed into the European Economic Community that Milward’s subsequent work has focussed, with a mass of empirical findings and increasingly sharp theoretical thrust. Both his great study
The European Rescue of the Nation-State
, and its coda in
The Frontiers of National Sovereignty
, are sustained polemics against neo-functionalist overestimation of the importance of federalist conceptions of any kind—dismissed as a pack of pieties in a caustic chapter on ‘The Lives and Teachings of the European Saints’. Milward’s central argument is that the origins of the Community have little or nothing to do with either the technical imperatives of interdependence—which may even have been less significant at mid-century than fifty years earlier—or the ethereal visions of a handful of federalist worthies. They were rather a product of the common disaster of the Second World War, when every nation-state between the Pyrenees and the North Sea was shattered by defeat and occupation.
    From the depths of impotence and discredit into which prewar institutions had fallen, a quite new kind of structure had to be built up after peace returned. The post-war states of Western Europe were laid, Milward contends, on a much wider social basis than their narrow and brittle predecessors, for the first time integrating farmers, workers and petty-bourgeois fully into the political nation with a set of measures for growth, employment and welfare. It was the unexpected success of these policies within each country that prompted a second kind of broadening, of cooperation between countries. Morally rehabilitated within their own borders, six nation-states on the continent found they could strengthen themselves yet further by sharing to common advantage certain elements of sovereignty. At the core of this process was the magnetic pull of the German market from an early date on the export sectors of the other five economies—complemented by the attractions for German industry of easier access to French and Italian markets, and eventual gains for particular interests like Belgian coal and Dutch agriculture. The European Economic Community, in Milward’s vision, was born essentially from theautonomous calculations of national states that the prosperity on which their domestic legitimacy rested would be enhanced by a customs union.
    The strategic need to contain Germany as a power also played a role. But Milward argues that it was an essentially secondary one, which could have been met by other means. If the driving force behind integration was indeed pursuit of security, the kind of security that really mattered to the peoples of Western Europe in the fifties was social and economic: the assurance that there would no return to the hunger, unemployment and dislocations of the thirties. In the age of Schuman, Adenauer and De Gasperi, the desire for political security—that is, reinsurance against German militarism and Soviet expansionism, and even the wish for