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

18
Alan S. Milward
social benefits by diluting the welfare state or burdening it with payments to poorer
foreigners. When the Labour Party opposed the application this train of thought
was important in its decision to do so. Now, the European Union is seen by the
Labour Party as the last defence of what is left of employee protection and trade
union rights in the United Kingdom and a better defence of accumulated welfare
benefits than the national government. Unless opinion polls are entirely wrong the
Labour Party's foreign policy has been reorientated partly through the development
of a European allegiance for those specific social reasons among its supporters.
These points are made here about the United Kingdom, because that has been
the country most under discussion in the recent literature. But they are equally
valid for the foreign policies towards the Communities of all other member states.
A remarkable exception to the narrowness of recent diplomatic history on European
integration is the excellent official history of the Coal and Steel Community
by Poidevin and Spierenburg, as inquisitive and informative on business and social
history as on diplomacy. 19 Working with the hypothesis suggested here might help
further scholars to emulate the effort made by Poidevin and Spierenburg and put
the history of European business and domestic politics into the foreign policy formulation
process.
As for the intellectual history of European integration the same point is almost
too obvious to make. Jean Monnet was surely an interesting and persuasive man in
the corridors of government. But he was never required to win an election. If European
integration has been an act of political will, how has the idea spread and what
forms has it taken at a popular level? This is a question from which historians have
fled. 20 It has been much easier to write the history of federalist groups; they were
very small and unimportant so their papers and speeches are easily mastered. But
what has 'Europe' meant to the electorate when governments have had to win
elections, and how have they used it? We are only as yet scratching the surface of
that history. We need to dig more deeply to find the roots of European allegiance,
and that must mean linking intellectual history to the mechanics of the society in
which it evolves.
Is it true, for it is currently a matter of dispute, that the social and economic
policies of western European governments after 1945 successfully recreated the
nation-state on a much solider basis of popular allegiance than before? If so, how
exactly was this done? We have no thorough history of the welfare-state in any country
which identifies the precise beneficiaries of particular acts of policy. 21 Who gained
and who lost from these complex redistributional structures seems essential
knowledge to explaining the extent of national allegiance, and subsequently of alle-
19. R. POIDEVIN and R. SPIERENBURG, The History of the High Authority of the European Coal
and Steel Community. Supranationality in Operation, London, 1994.
20. Useful thoughts about how it may be approached can be found in A.D. SMITH, "National Identity
and the Idea of European Unity", International Affairs, vol. 68, no. 1, 1992.
21. For valuable categorisations of European welfare states and typologies of their social and class differences,
P. BALDWIN, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases in the European Welfare
State 1875-1975, Cambridge, 1990; G. ESPING-ANDERSEN, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism,
Cambridge, 1990.