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

14
Alan S. Milward
choose between being open or being poor. It is the next step after the gold standard,
and taken the more readily after 1945 because inter-war experiments with steps in
the opposite direction proved so calamitous. 17
One concept which may link these allegedly separate continuities together in
one hypothesis from which an eventual model of integration might even be constructed
is that of allegiance. By allegiance is meant the analysis of all those elements
which induce citizens to give their loyalty to institutions of governance,
whether national, international or supranational. It excludes repression. While
accepting that repression has never been absent as an element of governance of
western European democracies, and even accepting the possibility that it may have
increased in the last twenty years, few would doubt the validity of the generalisation
that in all the member-states of the successive European Communities government
has been in its essentials government by consent. The transition to a greater
measure of government by consent seems indeed to have been a fundamental
requirement for Greek, Portuguese and Spanish membership. For western Europe
outside the Iberian peninsula parliamentary democracy in which political parties
have been the main conduits between public opinion and government policy has
been the rule. The growing influence of the media does not weaken this statement,
for those who react to that influence have almost invariably done so in respect of
their function within a political party. Why has this system retained the allegiance
of national populations, 'citizens' might be the appropriate term if democratic continuities
were to be traced back to the French Revolution, while at the same time a
measurable secondary allegiance to the supranational institutions of the European
Union has also grown? 18
Establishing and retaining allegiance was not a task accomplished with any
great success by nineteenth century European states. About thirty-four million
people voluntarily and permanently left European states between 1815 and 1914
for a life elsewhere. Perhaps twenty million of these took citizenship of the United
States of America. By contrast, only a very small proportion of emigrants to Argentina
and Brazil had taken citizenship of those countries before 1914. Even if, as
seems to be the case, the preference for a more democratic and participatory form
of governance was the main factor in the choice of emigration for only a very small
proportion of the emigrants, allegiance to European nation-states was not high.
This did not apply only to states like Romania or Russia, where much of the population
had little to hope for in their lifetime politically or economically. It applied
notably to Norway, which by 1914 could have laid reasonable claim to being the
most democratic, at least in terms of its suffrage, of the European states, and to the
United Kingdom, which was indubitably the richest and most powerful of them.
Norway had the highest proportion of its population leaving the country permanently
of all the European states. The United Kingdom provided the largest abso-
17. M. AGLIETTA, A. BRENDER and V. COUDERT. Globalisation financière: l’aventure obligée,
Paris, 1990.
18. For the measure of these two allegiances, M. HEWSTONE, Understanding Attitudes to the European
Community: A social-psychological study in four member states, Cambridge, 1986.