number 1 - Centre d'études et de recherches européennes Robert ...

Dieses Dokument wurde erstellt mit FrameMaker 4.0.4.
Book reviews – Comptes rendus – Buchbesprechungen 143
Book reviews – Comptes rendus – Buchbesprechungen
Alan S. MILWARD (with the assistance of George Brennon and Frederico Romero). –
The European Rescue of the Nation-State. London, Routledge, 1992, p. xvi + 477, (62
tables, 4 figures). ISBN 0-415-08141-6.
In the second of his trilogy on the origins of European integration, 1 Milward expands his earlier
work concerning the inability of many traditional approaches to explain the origins and
development of the European Communities. In a persuasive and thought-provoking first
chapter, he makes three broad assertions concerning these origins. First, and most crucially,
that the prevailing political and public debate about the subject has been side-tracked by the
illusory notion, that the institutions of integration and the nation-states of Western Europe
have been engaged in a zero-sum game, whereby the advance of one necessarily implies the
retreat of the other. Second, that the "true origins of the EC are economic and social". Finally,
that the only way to discern these truths is through detailed, historical analysis. Hence the
juxtaposition of history and theory in the title of the first chapter, and the caustic comment,
that much "of the theorising about interdependence and integration tends to be a piquant but
watery soup through which the historian hunts in vain for solid scraps of nutriment" (p. 20).
His desire to rectify this lattermost failing is the most apparent. The enormity of the effort
that went into the writing of the book is impressive. Based on research, we are proudly informed
in the preface, in the archives of eight countries, as well as of the EC itself, it provides a
huge mass of primary evidence. This in itself represents a useful and necessary palliative to the
tendency (especially amongst North American scholars) to base theoretical observations on
European integration on insubstantial, if not non-existent, empirical evidence.
From this detailed empirical investigation emerges a view of integration far more subtle
than those arrived at by more abstract studies. Particularly interesting is the way in which the
book reveals profound and important differences not only between the countries directly or
indirectly involved in the early years of the integrative project, but also the different natures of
the various economic sectors affected by the move towards supranationalism. This marks a
timely counter-attack against those writers who have tended to lump together "functional" economic
sectors as equally ripe for integration, or to assume that the same integrative pressures
are at work on all states. Thus, Milward highlights the importance of the fact that farming lobbies
were both institutionalised and entrenched by the time it came to negotiate the Common
Agricultural Policy; that national attitudes towards the issue of subsidies for coal corresponded
to a country's position as a net importer or exporter of that commodity; that the influential
position of the City helps to explain British emphasis on currency issues rather than on trade
and industry. Milward thus realises what many theories have not – that domestic politics and
domestic policy preferences play a huge role in shaping the integrative project.
An emphasis on the detail of national bargaining positions based on particular interests in
particular sectors also helps to dispel the notion, that high-minded idealism lay at the root of
the moves towards integration. Milward underlines the fact that governments bargained on the
basis of perceived national interests. In a stimulating chapter on the much-admired "fathers" of
integration, he makes the valid point that even (indeed especially) figures such as Monnet
were as preoccupied with the notion of national reconstruction as with that of supranational
institution building. When addressing the origins and functioning of the European Coal and
Steel Community, he underlines that even the much-revered High Authority acted as a body
within which its members could argue in favour of the national interests of their own state.
1. The first was Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1952, London, Methuen, 1984, the third Alan
S. Milward, Frances M. B. Lynch, Ruggero Ranieri, Frederico Romero and Vibeka Sfrensen, The Frontier of National
Sovereignty: History and theory 1945-1992, London, Routledge, 1993.