journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

An Elusive Partnership: Europe, Economic Co-operation and
British Policy towards Scandinavia 1949-1951
103
Juhana Aunesluoma
Throughout the past half-century of European economic and political integration, Britain
and Scandinavia have formed a stronghold for “Euro-scepticism”, where reluctance
and outright opposition to new ideas about co-operation amongst the European
nation-states has been widespread. Britain, Denmark and Sweden have been latecomers
in the present day European Union (EU), whereas in Norway the question of European
Economic Community (EEC) or EU membership has been rejected twice in national
referenda. Whether in- or outside these organisations their relationship with more
ardent Europeans has been problematic over a long period.
Not least because their paths joined in the European Free Trade Association
(EFTA) in 1959-60, the British and the Scandinavians have often been seen to have
drawn a sense of unity from the fact that they all were in the 1950s, for various reasons,
unable to participate in such integrative experiments as the European Coal
and Steel Community (ECSC) or later in the EEC. The similarities in their behaviour
have led to assumptions that even more wide-ranging convergence of interests
between the British and the Scandinavians has existed since Europe's economic reconstruction
began in the 1940s.
British and Scandinavian scepticism towards new forms of economic and political
co-operation in Europe in the 1950s was embedded in national circumstances
and preferences, but was coupled with their shared feeling of the feasibility of an
intergovernmental alternative towards economic co-operation in Europe in the
1950s. Further, instead of withdrawing into complete isolation, it has been argued
that they sought “meaningful association” with the new institutions, and as can be
seen in the following, with each other. 1 What is argued in the following is, that this
basic convergence of interests in the early phase of European integration brought
the British, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian governments together into regular
consultations within a specifically established body, Uniscan, which sought to facilitate
a degree of co-ordination of policies and eventually paved the way for the
speedy establishment of EFTA in 1959, when the alternative to create a wider free
trade area had been exhausted.
None the less, before EFTA realised the original vision outlined in 1949, attempts
towards deeper Anglo-Scandinavian economic co-operation beyond the
consultative remit of Uniscan proved unsuccessful. In spite of similar thinking
about the most fruitful approach to integration policies in Europe, co-ordinated policy-making
and the definition of collective bargaining positions within and towards
1. On the ‘meaningful association’–thesis concerning British policy, see Chr. LORD, ’With but not
of’: Britain and the Schuman Plan, A Reinterpretation, in: Journal of European Integration History
(JEIH), 2/4(1998), pp.23-46, and Chr. LORD, Absent at the Creation: Britain and the Formation
of the European Community, 1950-52, Darthmout, Aldershot, 1996.