The New Old World Read Free Page B

‘spiritual’ security afforded by Catholic solidarity—was so to speak an extension of the same basic quest. The foundation of the EEC lay in the ‘similarity and reconcilability’ 2 of the socioeconomic interests of the six renascent states, set by the political consensus of the post-war democratic order in each country. In Milward’s view, this original matrix has held fast down to the present, unaltered by the enlargement of the Community or the elaboration of its machinery.
    The one significant further advance in European integration, the Single Market Act of the mid-eighties, reveals the same pattern. By then, under the pressure of global economic crisis and mounting competition from the US and Japan, the political consensus had shifted, as electorates became resigned to the return of unemployment and converted to the imperatives of sound money and social deregulation. Milward does not conceal his dislike for the ‘managerial clap-trap and narrow authoritarian deductions from abstract economic principles’ 3 which orchestrated this change of outlook. But it was the general turn to neo-liberalism, sealed by Mitterrand’s abandonment of his initial Keynesian programme in 1983, that made possible the convergence of all member states, including the UK in Thatcher’s heyday, on the completion of the internal market—each calculating, as in the fifties, the particular commercial benefits it would reap from further liberalizationwithin the Community. Once again the nation-state remained master of the process, yielding certain of its juridical prerogatives only to enhance the sum of its material capacities to satisfy the domestic expectations of its citizenry.
    The cumulative power of Milward’s account of European integration, hammered home in one case-study after another, each delivered with tremendous drive—institutional detail and theoretical attack racing imperiously across the keyboard, individual portraits pedalled sardonically below—has no equal. But its very force raises a number of questions. Milward’s construction as a whole rests on four assumptions, which can perhaps be formulated without too much simplification as follows.
    The first, and most explicit, is that the traditional objectives of international diplomacy—the rivalrous struggle for power in an inter-state system: ‘world politics’ as Max Weber understood it—were always of secondary weight in the options that led to post-war European integration. Milward argues that this truth is as valid today as it ever was. Whether the states of the Community proceed with further integration, he writes in his conclusion, ‘depends
absolutely
on the nature of domestic policy choices’ (my italics). 4 Inverting the classical Prussian axiom, Milward postulates a virtually unconditional
Primat der Innenpolitik
. Foreign policy, as once conceived, is not dismissed: but it is taken to be ancillary to the socio-economic priorities of the nation-state.
    The second assumption—logically distinct from the first—is that where external political or military calculations entered the balance of policy-making, they did so as extensions of the internal pursuit of popular prosperity: security in a complementary register. Diplomatic objectives are germane, but only in continuity, rather than conflict, with the concerns of a domestic consensus. The latter in turn—here we reach a third assumption—reflects the popular will as expressed in the ballot-box. ‘The preponderant influence on the formulation of national policy and the national interest was always a response to demands from electors’, and ‘it is by their votes . . . that citizens will continue to exercise the preponderant influence in defining the national interest’. 5 It wasbecause the democratic consensus, in which the voices of workers, clerks and farmers could at last be properly heard, was so similar