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1 Introduction: Britain and Germany in the European Union of the Twenty-First Century

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1 Introduction: Britain and Germany in the European Union of the Twenty-First Century Notes 1 Introduction: Britain and Germany in the European Union of the Twenty-First Century 1. The negotiations on the international status of a unified Germany in 1990 were conducted amongst the governments of the two German states and the four Allied Powers the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. 2. Between 1995 and 1998 about 60 per cent of the German public persistently opposed the introduction of a Single European Currency and the abolition of the German national currency (Noelle-Neumann, 1999, pp. 595–598). 3. The prime example was the June 1997 intergovernmental conference in Amsterdam, which was supposed to revise the Maastricht Treaty and adopt the stability pact. At Amsterdam, the French Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin demanded a combination of the EMU stability pact with a common European employment policy (Gierieng, 1997, pp. 327–328). 4. Official address by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder to the German Bundestag, 10 November 1998. 5. Interview with Gerhard Schröder in Die Zeit, 9 September 1998, ‘Schröder:Jetzt sind die Pragmatiker die Visionäre’. 6. ‘From Confederacy to Federation – Thoughts on the finality of European integration’, Speech by Joschka Fischer at the Humboldt University, Berlin, 12 May 2000. 7. Le Monde, ‘L’Allemagne ne s’est pas encore guerie du nazisme’, 23 May 2000. 8. The Times, ‘Franco-German split hits summit’, 30 November 2000. 9. The Times, ‘Schröder rejects parity with France’, 4 December 2000, and an interview with Gerhard Schröder in Der Spiegel, 4 December 2000. 10. In Brussels, Chirac convinced Schröder to postpone a fundamental overhaul of the system of the CAP for an agreed limit on spending for agriculture in the EU budget. 11. The Guardian, ‘EU military summit angers Britain’, 29 April 2003. 2 The Reluctant European: Britain and European Integration Since 1945 1. Wolfram Kaiser numbers the British payment deficit between 1939 and 1945 to have been approximately £10 billion, while British exports had been reduced by 30 per cent in comparison to before the start of the Second World War (Kaiser, 1999, p. 1). 2. Winston Churchill’s speech at the University of Zürich, 19 September 1946, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 8. 3. It was joined by seven non-EEC countries: Britain, Denmark, Austria, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland but by none of the actual mem- bers of the EEC. 4. See table 5.1 in Sanders, 1990, p. 144. 5. Table 4.2, ibid., p. 117. 6. The Lee Report, 25 May 1960, source: Gowland and Turner, 2001, p. 98. 177 178 Notes 7. Statement by Prime Minister Harold MacMillan to the House of Commons, 31 July 1961, source: Gowland and Turner, 2001, p. 98. 8. Press conference of French President Charles de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace, 14 January 1963, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 106. 9. In a private meeting with the British ambassador Christopher Soames, de Gaulle laid out his views on the future of European integration which would lead to ‘a very different “Europe” from the EEC, a looser yet broader construct, with more pretensions and less invasions of national sovereignty that offended Gaullist France’ (Young, 1998, p. 201). De Gaulle offered the British government the prospect of becoming a leading member state in this ‘Gaullist’ Europe, as long as the British government would support French plans, which included the weakening of the transatlantic ties between Europe and the United States within NATO. 10. Press conference by Charles de Gaulle, Paris, 16 May 1967, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 123. 11. The British net contribution to the EEC budget amounted to £ 102.4 billion in the first year of British membership of the EEC. It was reduced in the fol- lowing two years, but rose again sharply after 1976, amounting to £ 730 bil- lion in 1976, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, document 8.3, p. 159. 12. ‘Let Us Work Together – Labour’s Way Out of the Crisis’, Labour Party general election manifesto, February 1974, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 142. 13. Wilson managed to achieve the establishment of a Regional Development Fund, from which the United Kingdom would benefit greatly and the intro- duction of a new principle of guaranteed refunds in case any one member state faced excessive net contributions to the EEC budget (Young, 2000, p. 116). 14. Margaret Thatcher’s speech at the College of Europe in Bruges, 20 September 1988, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 176. 15. During the Commons debate on the European Council in Rome in 1990, Thatcher illustrated her iron resolve against plans of the Delors Commission to expand its powers by uttering her famous three ‘no’s’: ‘The President of the Commission, Mr Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No. No. No.’ (Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 184). 16. Labour Party European Election Manifesto, 1979, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 163. 17. Above all the European Social chapter, which had been developed by the Delors Commission in 1988 was fiercely opposed by Thatcher as she consid- ered it to be a return to the policies the British people had rejected in three con- secutive general elections. In contrast, the Labour Party considered it to be very much in line with its own ideas (George and Rosamond, 1992, p. 180). 18. Two prominent examples are The Sun’s reactions to Commission president Delors’ proposals on the creation of a Single European Currency at the 1990 EC Council in Rome, which the paper commented with ‘Up yours, Delors’ (Young, 1998, p. 367) and the portrayal of former German finance minister Oskar Lafontaine, who advocated the harmonisation of economic policies, as the ‘most dangerous man in Europe’ (The Sun, 25 November 1998). Notes 179 19. Even Germany, which had been an exception when it was still divided into East and West, because no radical left-wing party was represented in the West Germany Bundestag, has since unification turned to political normality with the former Communist East German PDS having been represented in each parliamentary term since 1990. 20. Good examples for continuous continental change are France and Germany, which both changed their state structures repeatedly by developing new written constitutions. France has already gone through five different repub- lican structures and is now in the process of considering a renewed change of its constitution due to growing dissatisfaction of the French public with the political system. In Germany, the written constitution of the Weimar Republic did not manage to safeguard the democratic system against politi- cal extremism from left and right which is why the post-Second World War West German Grundgesetz, which is still Germany’s written constitution today, includes detailed rules and regulations with regard to the powers of state institutions and the political process as a whole. 21. In this respect it is important to note that a differentiation between the dif- ferent regions in the United Kingdom has to be made with regard to the reluctance to transfer national sovereignty. Wales and especially Scotland have traditionally found it easier to agree to the pooling of sovereignty on the European level, mainly because European integration was seen as a way of gaining more regional independence from London. Under a new system of devolution introduced by the Blair administration, Scotland and Wales already have greater independent possibilities to make their voices heard on the EU level (see Bogdanor, 1999, pp. 276–287). 22. See table 4.6 in Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 73. 23. Ernest Bevin elaborated the idea in 1948 as an attempt to combine the ‘tremendous resources, which stretch through Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to the Far East’, which would result in bringing together ‘resources, manpower, organisation and opportunity for millions of people’ (Bevin’s Western Union speech, January 1948, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 68). 24. Between 1956 and 1974, thirty-four former British colonies became inde- pendent Sanders, 1990, table 4.1, pp. 106–107. 25. US State Department paper, 19 April 1950, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 70. 26. Cabinet meeting, 18 June 1961, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 80. 27. Foreign Office memorandum, 21 March 1944, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 42. 28. US State Department paper, 19 April 1950, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 47. 29. Letter by US Secretary of State Dulles to British Foreign secretary Macmillan, 10 December 1955, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 49. 30. Transcript of a meeting between Prime Minister MacMillan and US Under- Secretary of State Douglas Dillon, 9 December 1959, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 54. 31. Transcript of meeting between US President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister MacMillan, April 1961, source: Gowland and Turner, 2000, p. 56. 32. See The Guardian, ‘US industry opposes Bush steel tariffs’, 10 April 2002. 180 Notes 33. Hugo Young, ‘Why our leaders love to get cosy with Washington’, The Guardian, 3 September 2002. 34. The Times, ‘Blair: I want to forge a new Europe’, 24 May 1997. 35. The Times, ‘International acclaim for Blair victory’, 3 May 1997. 36. The exception to this rule was Edward Heath who in spite of having been an eye-witness to the rise of the Nazi terror in Europe, strongly advocated closer links between Britain and the European continent and eventually managed to take Britain into the EEC. For an account of Heath’s premiership and the background to his pro-Europeanness see Young, 1998, pp.
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