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

50
Lasse Michael Boehm
Wilson and Brown’s visit to Paris in January 1967, the Foreign secretary did not
want the Paris embassy to influence his strategy – and ordered Reilly not to meet de
Gaulle in the run-up to the summit. 31
Reilly realised that he was increasingly marginalised within the Foreign Office
in London:
“If I had said to them then, ‘It’s no good, don’t bother to come to Paris. We know the
answer here already’, I think it would probably have been the case that my tenure in
office here would have been even shorter than it has been”. 32
Brown, Reilly wrote in his memoirs, „hated to be told that the cause for which
he had fought so hard and so successfully on the home front, was doomed to defeat
in France”. The Foreign secretary’s greatest mistake, Reilly claims, was that he
„refused to the end to accept that the general could prevent the opening of
negotiations”. 33 In his valedictory dispatch of September 1968, Reilly severely
criticised Brown’s strategy to enter the EEC as quickly as possible:
“One hope I would venture to express, with the utmost respect; and this is that Ministers
will decide on the timing of the next major effort not with reference to any
electoral calculations, but on the merits of its chances of success”. 34
Indeed, with hindsight Brown’s strategy that Germany, Italy and the Benelux
countries would apply enough pressure on France for de Gaulle to refrain from
using a veto seems naïve. Not only had he already once vetoed a British application
in 1963, there were also abundant signals from other Foreign Office posts that an
application in 1967 was unlikely to succeed. The ambassador to the EEC, Sir James
Marjoribanks, wrote in his Annual Review for 1966, circulated widely in Whitehall
in January 1967:
“The Community lives under the shadow of General de Gaulle. […] Every step taken
here is taken in the knowledge of a Head of State who cannot be pushed far with
impunity. There is a clear desire to avoid provoking him unnecessarily”. 35
On 20 January 1967 the British ambassador in Bonn told the Foreign Office that the
German chancellor, on whose support Wilson and Brown placed high hopes, wanted to
„avoid getting drawn at this stage into an argument with General de Gaulle”. 36
31. PRP.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. UKNA: FCO33/53, Reilly to Michael Stewart, 11 September 1968.
35. UKNA: PREM13/1475, Sir James Marjoribanks: Annual Review for 1966, 10 January 1967.
36. UKNA: PREM13/1475, Roberts to FO, 20 January 1967. For the German attitude see also K.
BÖHMER, ‘We Too Mean Business’: Germany and the Second British Application to the EEC,
1966-67, in: O. DADDOW (ed.), op.cit., pp.211-226.