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

Allegiance – The Past and the Future 19
giance to the Communities. This is difficult, technical, statistical work if it is done on
a comparative basis, but its absence means that argument about the validity of the
hypothesis that integration was one aspect of strengthening the nation-state expires in
baffled ignorance of the real historical detail needed to confirm or refute it.
Lastly, what proportion of national populations has responded to the long-run
trends of international economic development in such a way that its national allegiance
has been weakened? Is it in fact correct, as much of the literature on the evolution
of the international economy implies, that the policies by which nation-states
may actually have increased national allegiance between 1945 and 1968 have
become impossible since then, so that national allegiance becomes in part a pointless
romanticism? Of those French taxpayers, for example, notorious for tax evasion
before the mid-1950s who then faithfully paid swingeing tax increases in
return, it could be assumed, for massive increase in state welfare from the mid-
1950s onwards, what proportion now avoid paying taxation by devices which, if
not strictly legitimate, are at least in conformity with modern economic trends and
the state's new policies? Has the proportion of 'citizens' with foreign bank accounts,
untaxed, increased? Has the proportion of the income of a growing and significant
proportion of private citizens earned abroad increased? Or have these considerations
only been of real financial significance for multinational corporations? Has
decontrol of capital movements allowed citizens to escape the ties of national allegiance?
Has that and the weakening of other controls, including within the Union
controls over Union citizens, returned the situation to that of the nineteenth century
when national allegiance was much weaker? Has the trend of national allegiance
over the long-run been one in which it was maximised during the 1960s by state
benefits and has been diminishing ever since? To what extent decontrol has been a
considered trend in policy and to what extent it has been merely accepting the inevitable,
as this fourth idea of European integration would imply, is another unanswered
historical question. But the implications for allegiance are unmistakeable,
and since all these policies or their abandonment have been put to the test of general
elections the research hypothesis proposed here would embrace them too.
Of course, the idea that everyone can write every kind of history is unrealistic.
Yet any review of the present state of research into the history of European integration
is bound to come to the conclusion that we are far from being able to explain it
convincingly. The historiography of the subject has been effectively destructive,
sweeping aside inapplicable and inapposite theory. But where it is constructive it
appears to be engaged, like children on a crowded beach, in building separate small
sandcastles, all of which look very vulnerable to an incoming tide. The suggestion
made here for a common working hypothesis does at least deal with the central
political issue of the whole story and it is only intended to persuade or help scholars
to consider the kind of history they write about European integration in the
light of the kind of history others write.
Alan S. Milward