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

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Alan S. Milward
them from personal security, because it is long-run expectations of security of
income and employment through the life-cycle which have also determined voting
patterns.
It would, though, be absurdly mechanistic to suppose that the disposition of
allegiance between the different forms of governance on offer has been – or will be
– determined by accurate materialistic calculations or even solely by materialistic
perspectives. It is obvious that in some member-states the European Communities
came to symbolise both physical security, as a guarantee against future wars, and
personal security, as the guarantor of social and welfare 'rights'. It is obvious, too,
that at most moments both these guarantees had at least as high a symbolical as a
practical content.
Secondly, the economic and social issues determining the disposition of national
allegiance since 1945 must be fully explored. This requires a programme of
research into the public finances and fiscal history of post-1945 western European
states. It is an odd fact that when we are extremely knowledgeable about levels of
public taxation in the formation of eighteenth century German states no research at
all has been undertaken on how voters in west European states were persuaded between
1945 and 1974 to pay continually increasing levels of personal taxation
which in most countries culminated in tax rates double those in the 1930s. That was
a change in the nature of allegiance of the greatest possible significance both to
national states and the Community – as the reversal of the trend since 1984 also is.
The connection between personal income, taxation, security in the widest sense of
the word and the accepted common policies of the Communities needs therefore to
be explored as an issue in both economic and social history. Why did people pay to
central government in the 1950s and 1960s so much more money with no diminution,
and perhaps an increase, in allegiance?
What was purchased with this extra taxation was not primarily a more robust
system of national defence, although that was a big item, but a complex system of
social welfare and personal benefits throughout the family life-cycle. National
governments became giant insurance companies. How far did the growth of 'the
welfare-state' correspond with, and how far did it induce, an increase in national
allegiance? President Johnson, copying much of what had happened ten years earlier
in western Europe, put it explicitly when he called the expansion of the welfare
programme 'giving people a stake in society'. Where primary education and conscription
had failed to induce mass allegiance in the nineteenth century, did the
welfare state and its accompanying employment policies and agricultural income
support policies succeed?
Thirdly, the symbolical role of 'Europe' in political rhetoric, and the changing
way in which it enters into national political discourse is a crucial area of research.
One weakness of earlier theories borrowed from political science was their false
assumption about the causes of popular support for the idea of a united Europe, that
it was supported as something better than the nation-state. But there has been no
diminution in national allegiance even though there has been a growth of
secondary allegiance to 'Europe'. A more valid historical explanation of the symbolical
and rhetorical level of what 'Europe' symbolises and represents in its non-