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

Allegiance – The Past and the Future 17
material aspects for national voters and political parties has to be found. What is
'European' allegiance? Is it primarily cultural, economic, idealistically political,
realistically political, or simply born from fear or prejudice? And how has it changed
since 1945?
This pragmatic programme may well uncover only a small part of the answer to
the question of what induces allegiance. Its pragmatism is based essentially on
what market research and public opinion polls tell political parties about what will
win an election, together with the conclusions of historians of the nineteenth century
about the way states then tried to create allegiance. As a working hypothesis
for future research however it has the one great virtue of bringing together into one
common hypothesis the four separate currently-prevailing ideas about European
integration.
Both the materialist and the symbolic motives for allegiance to national and to
supranational institutions are relevant to the formulation and execution of an effective
foreign policy. Consider the currently-debated issue of the United Kingdom's
first application for membership. It was, certainly, an important change in the country's
foreign policy, as all commentators have pointed out. But why did the decision
to make that change drag out for so long? Even before the Treaty of Rome was signed
it had been firmly decided by the British government that it would be harmful
to the United Kingdom's interests not to become a signatory, but that membership
of the EEC was nevertheless impossible. It was considered impossible because of
the Commonwealth relationship, but also because it would not be acceptable to
public opinion. Between 1956 and 1961 the economic argument for retaining
special Commonwealth commercial links weakened to the point where a small
majority of the population accepted that the commercial framework of the EEC
was more to Britain's economic advantage than that of the Commonwealth. But
that did not necessarily lead them to accept the idea of Community membership,
because the argument about the Commonwealth was not just an economic one. For
public opinion the links with the Commonwealth had a symbolic value, partly created
by seventy-five years of imperialist indoctrination in the school system and
partly created by cultural affinities and the ties of personal relationships. Distant
Australia and Canada were still in the 1950s more real culturally to the government's
supporters and most of the population, no matter how distorted their vision
of them, than those brief and unsatisfactory next-door wartime allies Belgium and
France, to say nothing of the wartime enemies. Foreign policy towards the Community,
in short, could not be made solely on rational strategic and economic
grounds. The symbolic aspect of allegiance to the United Kingdom contained within
it the symbolic value that the United Kingdom was the centre of a vast Commonwealth
for most of whose members the symbolic head of government reigned
in London.
Consider, also, that the sharpest divide between the current British government
and its chief opposition party over policy towards the European Community is over
social policy. This divide was in fact already becoming apparent at the time of the
first application, but it ran in the opposite direction. Then the popular fear was
thought to be that membership of the Community might reduce levels of personal