The Common Market without Britain Britain and European Integration Week 1 Dr Isabelle Hertner

One of Churchill’s famous quotes on Britain & Europe Churchill wrote for America’s Saturday Evening Post on 15 February 1930: “We have our own dream and our own task.  We are with Europe, but not of it.  We are linked but not combined. We are interested and associated but not absorbed.”

1. Please read Churchill’s famous 1946 Zurich speech

Churchill and European Integration In his 1946 speech, how does Churchill envisage Europe’s future? What role would he like Britain to play?

From 1945-51 Clement Attlee is Prime Minister

Attlee’s Labour Government Expansion of social services. Creation of the NHS. Nationalizing major industries. Overseeing the decolonisation of India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon and Jordan. Attlee: a moderate centre-left politician who had a strong dislike for communism. But also: not a Europhile government. Suspicious of the Common Market and against Britain’s membership of it. Why?

Attlee’s 1962 speech to the Commons “The fact is that if the designs behind the Common Market are carried out, we are bound to be affected in every phase of our national life. There would be no national planning, except under the guidance of Continental planning—we shall not be able to deal with our own problems; we shall not be able to build up the country in the way we want to do, so far as I can see. I think we shall be subject to overall control and planning by others.” http://www.labourleave.org.uk/what_did_clement_atle

Dis-engaged? In 1950, Attlee’s government did not send any British representative(s) to Paris to discuss the Schuman Plan. UK was invited to participate in talks which led to the European Union’s predecessors: the Treaty of Paris (1951) which established the European Coal and Steel Community and the Treaty of Rome (1957) which established the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community. The British government did not engage in a significant way with these talks and signed neither treaty at the time. They disliked many of the supranational and technocratic elements in the treaties. They were worried about damaging links with the Commonwealth, and they wished to pursue a ‘one-world economic system’ policy in which sterling was a central currency.

With but not of? 1951-55 Churchill is back in office as PM. On 11 May 1953 he said: "Where do we stand? We are not members of the European Defence Community, nor do we intend to be merged in a Federal European system. We feel we have a special relation to both. This can be expressed by prepositions, by the preposition "with" but not "of"—we are with them, but not of them.  We have our own Commonwealth and Empire."