Great Britain formally became part of the EEC on 1 January 1973, but Enoch Powell did a secret deal with Harold Wilson, whose policy was to renegotiate the deal, to get rid of Edward Heath in the next election. Labour renegotiated terms in a modest way and put the result to a referendum on 6 June 1975. During the referendum campaign precious little was said about the glories of empire, which seemed to have vanished, or even about the Commonwealth, which seemed to be unruly and divided between the former Dominions and newly independent African states over the question of apartheid. There was a powerful head of steam behind the idea of Britain’s future in Europe. The Sun declared that ‘After years of drift and failure, the Common Market offers an unrepeatable opportunity for a nation that lost an empire to gain a continent.’14 Even Enoch Powell was resigned to the loss of the Empire and thought the Commonwealth ‘a farce’. As he repeatedly told the Society of St George, he was much more interested in the project of England with its racial homogeneity, historical continuity and parliamentary sovereignty. ‘For a nation such as we are’, he told a meeting in Sidcup on the eve of the referendum, with ‘our whole history dominated by the evolution of Parliament and our very existence inseparable from parliamentary self-government’, the question was ‘nothing less than whether we shall remain a nation at all’.15
In the event, the British public voted 67.2 per cent to stay and 32.8 to leave. ‘We are all Europeans now. Let us make sure that we are good Europeans’, trumpeted The Sun.16 In the event, although Britain was now part of Europe, it was a reluctant member. It was not a founding father of postwar Europe, but had boarded the train when it had already left the station. More than that, joining Europe in itself felt like a defeat. Britain had built an empire on which the sun never set, and which it had ruled without being answerable to any other power, but now it was falling apart. It had won the Second World War and – albeit with the United States and USSR – been able to dictate terms to the defeated European countries, but this now counted for nothing. Henceforth Britain was part of a Europe in which she was not the leading power and could not dictate the rules. Enoch Powell put his finger on the pulse of this popular discontent when he told Tony Benn of a conversation with a taxi driver who had voted No. The taxi driver said, ‘there was some talk of a European Parliament and I was not prepared to see the British Parliament put under a European parliament’.17
‘Up Yours, Delors!’
Britain’s scepticism towards the European project continued and even intensified in the Thatcher era. France, under President Mitterrand, continued to develop the European project, not only as a vehicle for French influence but as the best way to lock in the ever more powerful Federal Republic of Germany. When German reunification took place in 1990, memories of France’s historic defeats by Germany came flooding back, but it became even more important to the French to keep Germany under supranational controls. For many in Britain, by contrast, Europe seemed simply to move from a French to a German hegemony.
In the early years of her prime ministership Margaret Thatcher pursued a tireless offensive against the amount the United Kingdom contributed to the EEC budget. She repeatedly demanded a rebate until she was finally given what she wanted at the Fontainebleau summit of June 1984. That same month she attended the fortieth anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings in Normandy, at which the keynote speech was given by US President Ronald Reagan. Commemorating the Second World War was always a good way of reminding the Europeans who had been victorious. Federal German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was not invited to the ceremony while François Mitterrand was left to rue how the French had not been invited to take part in the landings in 1944. Kohl and Mitterrand chose the commemoration of the Battle of Verdun, in which 700,000 French and German soldiers had died, now to join hands in a gesture of renewed Franco-German friendship. ‘Europe is our shared fatherland’, said their joint declaration, ‘The union of Europe is our common goal and we will work towards it in a fraternal future.’18 This Franco-German axis would be at the centre of the European project as it was now relaunched, while the United Kingdom would remain very much on the sidelines.
In January 1985 Jacques Delors, Mitterrand’s former finance minister, became president of the European Commission. He was an admirer of Pierre Mendès-France because, like him, he was in favour of ‘decolonisation, the modernisation of France and the deepening of democratic participation’.19 He wanted to broaden the EC, including Spain and Portugal, which had recently rejected their dictatorships, and to deepen it both economically and politically, to control West Germany and ensure that it did not move closer to communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He argued that ‘France will become greater through Europe’.20 Mitterrand, back in Paris, was also keen to develop Europe militarily, overcoming the failure of the European Defence Community in 1954 by making France and West Germany a European pillar of NATO, while ensuring that Germany did not become once again an independent great power. ‘France has no better or solid partner in Europe’ than West Germany, he wrote in 1986. ‘Germany is part of Europe, without Germany there would be no Europe, and there will be no German greatness outside Europe.’21
Delors’ first step was to propose to European leaders a Single European Act, which would achieve a single market in Europe without customs barriers by the end of 1992. It would also end the system by which one power could veto an EC decision by moving to a system of qualified majority voting. He wished to take advantage of the economic recovery and the embrace of more liberal economic principles by France and Britain, as well as West Germany. The Act was signed in Luxembourg and The Hague in February 1986 and came into force on 1 July 1987. Meanwhile, in Brussels in May 1986, Jacques Delors unveiled the new twelve-star European flag and sounded the new European anthem, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.22
This was already a step too far for Margaret Thatcher, but it was only the beginning for Jacques Delors. In February 1987 he proposed that the EC budget should be set for five years. In February 1988 he proposed to double EC structural funds and move towards an economic and monetary union (EMU) with a single currency, together with a social charter that would soften some of the shifts towards a free market. In July 1988 Delors also suggested that in ten years 80 per cent of economic legislation, and possibly also financial and social legislation, would come from the EC.23
After her third general election victory in June 1988, Mrs Thatcher felt that she could push back against the developing European project. ‘Britain counts for something good again’, she had announced earlier that year. ‘For the first time since the Second World War our energies as a people are now concentrated on improving our national standing.’24 Jacques Delors was her bugbear, and the fact that the British trade movement embraced the social charter sorely antagonised her. After Delors came to England and addressed the TUC conference in Bournemouth on 7 September 1988, and was greeted by chants of Frère Jacques, she decided to make Britain’s position clear. Until now, she had been quite pragmatic in her negotiations with Europe, but this was an ideological offensive against what she called ‘the federalist express’ or ‘the Babel express’ which drew on all the weapons of her armoury: freedom, sovereignty, nationhood and British relations with the wider world.25
Addressing the College of Europe in Bruges on 22 September 1988, Margaret Thatcher argued that modern Europe was not created in the 1950s but had a much longer history in which Britain had played a central part:
We British have in a very special way contributed to Europe. Over the centuries we have fought to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power […] We have fought and we have died for her freedom […] And it was from our island fortress that the liberation of Europe itself was mounted.
This political liberation, she argued, had also brought economic freedom, as collectivist projects were seen off and deregulation, privatisation and free markets had been promoted. Britain had pioneered this work through privatisation, the Big Bang (deregulation of financial markets)
and (though she did not mention it) dismantling the power of trade unions and crushing the miners:
We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.
The European Community, she continued, should not be thought of as moving towards a federation or a United States of Europe. That was anathema to her. Instead, it should be a
willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states […] Let Europe be a family of nations, understanding each other better, appreciating each other more, doing more together but relishing our national identity no less than our common European endeavour […] Europe will be stronger precisely because it has France as France, Spain as Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality.26
Lastly, Britain’s commitment to Europe had to be balanced by its commitment to the Commonwealth, to NATO for defence and above all to the special relationship with the United States.
Let us have a Europe which plays its full part in the wider world, which looks outward not inward, and which preserves that Atlantic community – that Europe on both sides of the Atlantic – which is our noblest inheritance and our greatest strength.
Strong stuff though this was, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe had to persuade Mrs Thatcher to cut some phrases, such as proclaiming the British ‘more successful colonialists than any other European countries’ and ‘forget a United States of Europe, it will not come’.27 At the Madrid summit of the European Council in June 1989 he battled valiantly to keep the prime minister on course for monetary union, but was increasingly unable to control her anti-European outbursts. He feared the growing isolation of Great Britain from the European Community. In June 1989 they both attended a European summit in Madrid at which the pressure was increased both for monetary union and the social charter, which she described as ‘quite simply a socialist charter’.28 On 14 July 1989 Thatcher attended the French Revolution celebrations in Paris, giving an interview to Le Monde in which she claimed that with Magna Carta the English, not the French, had invented liberty, and pointedly giving Mitterrand a copy of A Tale of Two Cities.29 On her return, on 24 July 1989, she sacked Geoffrey Howe as Foreign Secretary. A few days later François Mitterrand announced that it would be quite possible to enact a treaty on greater union without Britain.30
British scepticism about Europe crashed into a higher gear after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November and steady progress towards German reunification, which was finalised in August and September 1990. Mitterrand too was anxious about the revival of the German threat. A Pancho cartoon in Le Monde depicted Mitterrand saying to Kohl, ‘You haven’t said anything about the Oder-Neisse line’ and Kohl teasing, ‘Nor about Alsace-Lorraine’.31 For Margaret Thatcher and some of her Cabinet colleagues it was as if all the lives lost in the First and Second World War had been sacrificed in vain. ‘We must not forget. We have had two world wars, haven’t we?’ she asked in July 1990.32 Her Trade and Industry Secretary, Nicholas Ridley, was even more explicit. In an interview to The Spectator he said of monetary union, ‘This is all a German racket designed to take over Europe. I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You may as well give it to Adolf Hitler.’ The ensuing furore obliged Ridley to resign but arguably, in private, Mrs Thatcher shared his thoughts.33
For Jacques Delors the answer to German reunification was deeper European union. Appearing on L’Heure de Vérité on 23 January 1990 he expressed hope that Europe would become a ‘true federation’ by the end of the millennium.34 Matters came to a head at a meeting of the European Council in Rome on 27–28 October 1990, when agreement was reached about progress towards a European Union with greater powers and a timetable for further monetary union, with a central bank by 1994 and a single currency by 1997. The United Kingdom was unable to sign up to these developments and in the House of Commons on 30 October 1990 Margaret Thatcher reported that ‘The President of the Commission, Mr Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No. No. No.’ In reply to a challenge from Liberal Democratic leader Paddy Ashdown that the prime minister ‘no longer speaks for Britain – she speaks for the past’, Mrs Thatcher replied:
Oh dear, it seems that there must be quite a lot of late parrots in cloud cuckoo land, judging by the right hon. Gentleman coming out with that stuff […] I take it that the right hon. Gentleman’s policy is to abolish the pound sterling, the greatest expression of sovereignty […] That matter is one to be decided by future generations and future Parliaments. Parliament is supreme, not the right hon. Gentleman, the Leader of the Liberal Democrats.35
The verdict of The Sun on 1 November 1990 was somewhat more succinct: ‘Up yours, Delors’. That day, Geoffrey Howe, now leader of the House, resigned. As a backbencher, on 13 November 1990, he explained that the prime minister had made compromise impossible by asserting ‘a false antithesis’ between ‘independent sovereign states’ and ‘a centralised, federal super-state’. ‘I have fought too many battles in a minority of one’, he regretted, intimating that Mrs Thatcher had no problem with standing alone, as Britain had in 1940. He concluded:
The tragedy is – and it is for me personally, for my Party, for our whole people and for my Right Honourable Friend herself, a very real tragedy – that the Prime Minister’s perceived attitude towards Europe is running increasingly serious risks for the future of our nation. It risks minimising our influence and maximising our chances of being once again shut out. We have paid heavily in the past for late starts and squandered opportunities in Europe. We dare not let that happen again. If we detach ourselves completely, as a Party or a nation, from the middle ground of Europe, the effects will be incalculable and very hard ever to correct.36
This was the beginning of the end of the Thatcher era. Other Cabinet ministers came out against her and a leadership election was called. Although she topped the poll her majority was not enough to avoid a second round, and on 28 November 1990 she resigned. It seemed for a moment that the pro-Europeans had won the battle. But Geoffrey Howe was reminded ruefully of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which exposes the danger of conjuring up powerful spirits: ‘Where Margaret had drawn the first bucket of Euro-scepticism from the well, others were only too ready to follow.’37
The Breakthrough of Euroscepticism
Plans for greater monetary and political union promoted by President of the European Commission Jacques Delors came to a head with the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, signed by leaders on 7 February 1992. This renamed the EC the European Union, introduced citizenship of the Union, added steps towards political union in foreign, security and internal affairs and paved the way to the introduction of the euro in 1997. The governments of François Mitterrand and John Major supported the treaty but this had to be ratified by national parliaments or by referendum. There was a good deal of opposition to Maastricht in both France and Britain. Ghosts of past domination of Europe by Germany and fears of its return were conjured up. On this occasion the French and British behaved differently: the former swallowed the treaty in order to retain a dominant role in Europe, while among the latter Euroscepticism took long strides forward.
‘I love Germany so much’, French writer François Mauriac once wrote, ‘that I am delighted there are two of them’. After 1990 there was only one, with a population of 80 million. France relived the painful memories of 1870, when the first German unification was built from the defeat of France, and even closer to home, memories of the defeat of 1940 and the German occupation of France. The message of 1940, however, was that France could only survive in a united Europe. During the parliamentary debates of May 1992, socialist Prime Minister
Pierre Bérégovoy said that his experience as an adolescent in 1940 of the defeat of France had made him more European, not less. As a left-wing European, moreover, he was able lovingly to quote Victor Hugo on the future United States of Europe.38 However, not all socialists voted the same way. Jean-Pierre Chevènement, whose constituency of Belfort had famously not been taken by the Germans in 1870, denounced what he called ‘the new American-German Holy Alliance of capital’ and the emergence of a new Bismarckian Reich.39
On the Right, the leadership of the Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) was in favour of the treaty, but Philippe Séguin, who had written a biography of Emperor Napoleon III, who had made France great again in the nineteenth century, feared that the French would lose their sovereignty in the new German-dominated Europe. In terms of national identity, he said, they would be left ‘only their cheeses, a few of their customs, because folklore doesn’t upset anyone […] perhaps the Marseillaise, so long as we change the words’.40 There was much debate over whether General de Gaulle would have approved Maastricht. His former prime minister, Michel Debré, aged 80, argued that the treaty subjected France to collaboration with a dominant Germany, as in 1940–4, so that ‘Laval would have said “yes”, de Gaulle would have said “no”’.41
The treaty was approved by the French National Assembly on 13 May 1992 by 398 votes to 77, with 99 abstentions, but the country was far more reserved. Its feeling would be gauged in a referendum on 21 September 1992. During the campaign François Mitterrand argued for ‘a strong France in a strong Europe’, which would reach out to the former communist states of Eastern Europe.42 Giscard d’Estaing, leader of the centre-right Union de la Démocratie Française (UDF), visiting the peace memorial at Caen, told a female voter to support Maastricht ‘for Franco-German reconciliation, Madame’.43 Later he told young UDF activists at Vincennes that they had launched today’s Europe: ‘There is too much negativity in this campaign. People are conjuring up fear and advising retreat. But this idea of Europe came from France. Imagine how other countries would see us if we tore up our own work with our own hands?’44 On the eve of the vote, Bérégovoy warned that ‘victory for the “no” vote would be victory for the Front National’.45 In the event, the vote was very close, ‘yes’ 51 per cent and ‘no’ 49 per cent. Large cities and those with high levels of education and high incomes voted in favour, but the banlieues, the deindustrialised regions of the Nord Pas-de-Calais and Normandy and towns on the south coast from Perpignan to Nice (which were indeed Front National strongholds) were against.46 The danger of a France closing in on itself and fearing wider engagement was commented upon, but for the moment France’s commitment to Europe was safe.47
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