Keith Middlemas - Orchestrating Europe (Text Only)

Meanwhile, without becoming any more communautaire, or any less hostile to harmonizing laws and taxation, the British won an acceptable (though actually useless) formula on their budget contribution at Dublin in March 1975, an apparent redress which probably helped Harold Wilson’s last government to gain its referendum on retaining EC membership in June, after which Labour MEPs at last took their seats.

This emphasis on inter-governmental supremacy, as the recession began to lift, indicated that European integration would proceed without fundamental alterations in the balance of power or the patterns of activity set in the mid–1960s. France returned the franc to the ‘Snake’ in July 1975, and at a minor but not unimportant level acquired some support from Ireland, during the Irish Presidency. The restructuring of basket case industries was to follow the EC pattern of crisis cartels, first set out by the Commission in the case of steel in April 1975, followed by textiles, then the aircraft industry (1977), and shipbuilding (1978). Only in the novel areas covered by the Regional Development Fund was the Commission able to extend its informal autonomy by remedying grosser inequalities between north and south, core and peripheral regions, so that what had earlier been only an attempt to recuperate the Italian Mezzogiorno, became a more general policy of aiding poorer and peripheral regions.

The interplay between the Council and the Commission led to a flurry of activity, ranging from harmonizing company law to reports on a passport union and special rights for EC citizens. Most Commission draft directives at this time derived from the twin themes of harmonization or the internal market, free of border restraints, but those on worker participation and company law were clearly intended to restore an earlier tripartite balance between the social partners which the recession had severely damaged. 13In a series of tripartite conferences, the Commission sought to inspire some sort of interdependence rather than sectoral competition, firstly between financial interests and secondly between management and labour – all to no effect. The Council rejected the directive on co-determination and the Vredeling Directive on worker consultation within large firms, and the ETUC discovered that the EC saw the ‘social question’ only in terms of markets and industrial survival. 14

This failure of an earlier dream can be attributed both to the real loss of union influence, especially in labour-intensive industries such as engineering, metalworking and textiles, and to the implicit defensive alliance between management and union leaders to safeguard what employment still remained. But it also emphasized how the earlier consensus had been eroded, and how the Commission was now powerless to restore it.

As Etienne Davignon observed in his report on European Union, it was becoming increasingly difficult to resolve even apparently specific issues without reconstructing the general political conception of what Europe should become. What had appeared to exist in 1971–2 had largely disappeared. The McDougall Report, for example, recommended in 1977 that member states should concert macro-economic policy and structural adjustment, together with the Commission’s regional strategy. But what might in the 1960s have been the beginnings of a genuine attempt at redistribution between core and deprived periphery was rejected by a Council whose members could not agree on what macro-economic policy might be, and therefore refused either the powers or the money. The ERDF itself had become ‘a pawn in the debate over far wider issues’. 15At this stage, the total of 1.3 million units of account was split 40% for Italy, 28% UK, 15% France, 6% Ireland and 6% Germany. In 1981, Greece entered the arena with 13%.

Yet something more integrated could still be discerned, in direct suffrage for the European Parliament and the consequent distribution of seats (December 1975), in the strengthened budgetary system, backed now by the Court of Auditors with power to investigate members states’ spending practices, and in the institutional reports on EU, accompanied by the Tindemans document. Under the Dutch Presidency in November 1976, the European Council accepted a cautious statement about an incremental road to European Union. Six months earlier, under the Luxembourg Presidency, the Council had accepted no fewer than eighteen directives on the removal of technical barriers to trade, and resolved some of the fisheries disputes by extending EC limits to 200 miles in the North Sea and Atlantic.

But very many directives remained for approval, and the emergence of a common fisheries policy led to often violent disputes between members and with Nordic countries, which were not finally settled until 1983. At the same time, with the second Portuguese revolution 16and Franco’s death, the issue of extension surfaced again, in circumstances prejudiced rather than eased by the case of Greece.

Greece, freed of its military junta, had been encouraged to apply in mid–1975 by member governments who had backed the government-in-exile and who saw membership as a safeguard of the new democracy’s future. The implication at that point had been that similar support would extend to Spain and Portugal; 17and Spain’s centre-right government under Adolfo Suarez did indeed formally resume negotiations in mid–1977, after the first democratic elections, with the consent of the centre-left. The Socialist government in Portugal, led by Mario Soares, followed suit in 1978.

At this stage, Greece, liberated from military dictatorship in 1974, under prime minister Karamanlis, (who was widely liked in western Europe) stood furthest down the road to EC membership, untainted by the suspicions of member states, that the military might intervene as in Spain, or the Communist party return to power as in Portugal. The Commission on the other hand regarded all three rather more dispassionately, and recommended against early Greek entry, but the Council, mindful of the dangers of hostilities with Turkey’s military government in the Aegean, overrode it and opened negotiations in July 1976, ignoring Greece’s very different level of social, political and economic development.

Member states differed, depending on whether they looked at the political arguments or the economic ones: on the latter they were harder and more sceptical in the case of Spain, and by association Portugal. Spain also suffered from the outright opposition of French farmers in the south, some unease in Belgium and Holland, and uncertainty in Italy, tom between agricultural interests and Mediterranean solidarity. 18At a time when the largest entrants from 1973 had not still fully been assimilated, Spain represented too sizeable a risk, whereas the dangers of incorporating Greece seemed relatively small and apparently containable when it came to the CAP and regional funding.

Debate among member states had centred upon Spain’s potentially large new markets and the investments that could be made there, which seemed likely to offset the budgetary drain and to be especially profitable for Germany. But they also took account of the world strategic situation – in the tail end of Nixon’s presidency, the threat from the Greek Left to leave NATO and abrogate American air bases, and the economic conflict between France and Spain. 19In the end they compromised, agreeing to deal with Greece quickly and to delay the Iberians at a pace acceptable to France and Italy. Delay stretched into the 1980s, exacerbated by Greece’s own bout of factious campaigning to get more financial advantage before Spain and Portugal actually came in.

In the event, negotiations opened with Portugal in 1978, Spain a year later, and proceeded desultorily. In a speech in June 1980, Giscard linked Iberian entry to solution of the EC’s own problems – i.e., the Greek Kalends – an attitude which derived retrospective justification from an attempted coup by sections of the Spanish army in February 1981. Although the king’s firm stance and the rally by the great majority of senior commanders revealed that Franco’s ‘bunker’ had become obsolete, the excuse of unripe time continued, prolonged by Colonel Ynestrillas’s failed coup in October 1982, until Mitterrand’s political turnabout in 1983.