Journal of European Integration History – Revue d'histoire de l'

Industrial Interest in West Germany´s Decision 37increased export opportunities to France and Italy. While the BDI's positionremained practically unchanged throughout, sectoral industrial interests, whichwere far from being uniform anyway, shifted in such a way as to weaken supportfor the free trade area solution and to strengthen considerably the inclination tofirmly hold on to the EEC of the Six and of the Six only. That this change of heart ofa number of sectors of German industry is not reflected in the statements made bythe BDI might be partly explained by the fact that the BDI did not systematicallygather and aggregate particular industrial interests but rather had to establish andrepresent what it saw as the general interest of German industry and in particular ofthe strong and expanding sectors. While the archival documents to this effect arepresented in the author’s PhD thesis, this article assembles some of the statisticalevidence which corroborates the divisions of interest within German industry.These divisions of interest which are expressed here quantitatively match veryclosely with the qualitative evidence presented elsewhere 6 .One important finding of this article is that the FTA, British accession to theEEC and the prospect of an Atlantic free trade area certainly did not have the strongsupport from sectoral associations of German industry which these projects arealleged to have enjoyed and which was expressed in most of the BDI’s own publicstatements on these questions. The balance of sectoral interests and the potential ofthese interests for being successfully represented at the political level made theEEC of the Six and of the Six only the clear preference of a number of sectors,while in others this option came to be seen as much more acceptable than it hadbeen regarded at the beginning.This article offers thus an additional explanation as to why and how Adenauerwas able to get away with his collusion with de Gaulle against the express will ofthe federal parliament, his cabinet and the majority of his own parliamentary party.It presents trade statistics relating to a number of sectors of German industry, inparticular to those whose trade associations made their voices heard in the debatesover the Europe-wide free trade area, the split between EEC and EFTA and theBritish application for membership in the EEC. The sectors which feared the competitionfrom the OEEC/OECD members outside the Community will be looked atwith particular interest here, since it was they who were able to exert pressures ongovernmental actors most successfully and who obtained more attention than anyof those who were likely to be the winners in the free trade area and from Britishaccession. In order to deliver a more complete picture the statistical evidence concerningthese potential winners from any such arrangement will also be looked at.The statistical exercise undertaken in order to assess the impact which the tradediscrimination between EEC and EFTA made on German foreign trade in industrialgoods according to sectors is fairly simple. What has been done to estimate the“EEC-effect” or the “EFTA-effect” on German foreign trade was to calculate thetrend of German foreign trade with the other EEC partners and with the EFTAmembers (Portugal was not included) for the period of 1953 to 1958 7 , to extrapo-6. See M. SCHULTE, Industry, Politics and Trade Discrimination.