Postwar

few years of the inauguration of the Common Agricultural Policy, European maize and beef would be selling at 200 percent of world prices, European butter at 400 percent. By 1970 the CAP employed four out of five of the Common Market’s administrators, and agriculture was costing 70 percent of the budget, a bizarre situation for some of the world’s most industrialized states. No single country could have sustained so absurd a set of policies, but by transferring the burden to the Community at large, and tying it to the broader objectives of the Common Market, each national government stood to gain, at least in the short run. Only the urban poor (and non-EEC farmers) lost out from the CAP, and the former at least were typically compensated in other ways.

At this stage most West European countries were of course not members of the EEC. A year after the Common Market was inaugurated, the British—still trying to head off the emergence of a super-national European bloc—suggested that the EEC be expanded into an industrial free-trade zone including the EEC member-states, other European countries and the British Commonwealth. De Gaulle, predictably, rejected the idea. In response, and at the initiative of the UK, a number of countries then met in Stockholm in November 1959 and formed themselves into the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). The member states—Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Portugal and the UK, later joined by Ireland, Iceland and Finland—were mostly prosperous, peripheral, and enthusiastic proponents of free trade. Their agriculture, with the exception of Portugal, was small-scale but highly efficient and oriented to the world market.

For these reasons, and because of their close links to London (especially in the case of the Scandinavian countries), they had little use for the EEC. But EFTA was (and remains) a minimalist organization, a reaction to the defects of Brussels rather than a genuine alternative. It was only ever a free-trade zone for manufactured goods; farm products were left to find their own price level. Some of the smaller member-states, like Austria, Switzerland or Sweden, could thrive in a niche market for their high-value- added industrial goods and their attraction for tourists. Others, like Denmark, depended heavily on Britain as a market for their meat and dairy products.

But Britain itself needed a vastly larger industrial export market than its tiny Scandinavian and Alpine allies could provide. Recognizing the inevitable—though still hoping to influence the shape of EEC policy—Harold Macmillan’s government formally applied to join the European Economic Community in July 1961, six years after London’s disdainful disengagement from the Messina talks. Ireland and Denmark, their economies umbilically linked to that of the UK, applied alongside it. Whether the British application would have been successful is uncertain—most of the EEC member states still wanted Britain in, but they were also justifiably skeptical of London’s commitment to the core goals of the Rome Treaty. But the issue was moot—De Gaulle, as we have seen, publicly vetoed Britain’s entry in January 1963. It is an indication of the speed with which events had unfolded since the Suez crisis that Britain’s rejection from the hitherto disparaged European community prompted the following despairing entry in Macmillan’s private diary: ‘It is the end… to everything for which I have worked for many years. All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins.’

The British had little recourse but to try again, which they did in May 1967—only to be vetoed once more, six months later, by a calmly vengeful French President. Finally, in 1970, following De Gaulle’s resignation and subsequent death, negotiations between Britain and Europe were opened for a third time, culminating this time in a successful application (in part because British trade with the Commonwealth had fallen so far that London was no longer pressing a reluctant Brussels to guarantee third-party trading preferences to non-EEC nations). But by the time Britain, Denmark and Ireland finally joined, in 1973, the European Economic Community had taken shape and they were in no position to influence it as British leaders had once fondly hoped.

The EEC was a Franco-German condominium, in which Bonn underwrote the Community’s finances and Paris dictated its policies. The West German desire to be part of the European Community was thus bought at a high price, but for many decades Adenauer and his successors would pay that price without complaining, cleaving closely to the French alliance—rather to British surprise. The French, meanwhile, ‘Europeanized’ their farm subsidies and transfers, without paying the price of a loss of sovereignty. The latter concern had always been uppermost in French diplomatic strategy—back at Messina in 1955 the French foreign minister Antoine Pinay had made France’s objectives perfectly clear: supra-national administrative institutions were fine, but only if subordinated to decisions taken unanimously at the inter-government level.

It was with this goal in mind that De Gaulle browbeat the other member-states of the European Economic Community in the course of its first decade. Under the original Rome Treaty all major decisions (except for the admission of new members) were to be taken by majority vote in the inter-governmental Council of Ministers. But by withdrawing from inter-governmental talks in June 1965 until his fellow leaders agreed to adapt its agricultural funding to French demands, the French President hobbled the workings of the Community. After holding out for six months the other countries gave in; in January 1966 they reluctantly conceded that in future the Council of Ministers would no longer be able to pass measures by a majority vote. It was the first breach of the original Treaty and a remarkable demonstration of raw French power.

The early achievements of the EEC were nonetheless impressive. Intra-Community tariffs were removed by 1968, well ahead of schedule. Trade between the six member-states quadrupled in the same period. The farming workforce fell steadily, by some 4 percent each year, while agricultural production per worker rose in the Sixties at an annual rate of 8.1 percent. By the end of its first decade, and notwithstanding the shadow of De Gaulle, the European Economic Community had acquired an aura of inevitability, which is why other European states began lining up to join it.

But there were problems, too. A high-priced, self-serving customs union, directed from Brussels by a centralized administration and an unelected executive, was not an unalloyed gain for Europe or the rest of the world. Indeed, the network of protective agreements and indirect subsidies put into place at France’s bidding was altogether out of keeping with the spirit and institutions of the international trading system that had emerged in the decades following Bretton Woods. To the (considerable) extent that the EEC’s system of governance was modeled on that of France, its Napoleonic heritage was not a good omen.

Lastly, France’s influence in the European Community’s early years helped forge a new ‘Europe’ that was vulnerable to the charge that it had reproduced all the worst features of the nation-state on a sub-continental scale: there was always more than a little risk that the price to be paid for the recovery of Western Europe would be a certain Euro-centric provincialism. For all its growing wealth the world of the EEC was quite petty. In certain respects it was actually a lot smaller than the world that the French, or Dutch, had known when their nation-states opened on to people and places flung far across the seas. In the circumstances of the time this hardly mattered to most West Europeans, who in any case had little option. But it would lead in time to a distinctly parochial vision of ‘Europe’, with troubling implications for the future.

Josef Stalin’s death in March 1953 had precipitated a power struggle among his nervous heirs. At first the head of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, appeared likely to emerge as the dictator’s sole heir. But for just that reason, his colleagues conspired to assassinate him in July of that same year and after a brief detour via Georgy Malenkov it was Nikita Khrushchev—by no means the best-known of Stalin’s inner circle—who was confirmed two months later as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This was somewhat ironic: for all his psychotic disposition, Beria was an advocate of reforms and even of what was not yet called ‘de-Stalinization’. In the brief period of time separating Stalin’s death from his own arrest, he repudiated the Doctors’ Plot, released some prisoners from the Gulag and even proposed reforms in the satellite states, to the confusion of the local Party leaders there.

The new leadership, collective in name but with Khrushchev increasingly primus inter pares, had little choice but to follow the path that Beria had advocated. Stalin’s death, following many years of repression and impoverishment, had precipitated widespread protests and demand for change. In the course of 1953 and 1954 there were revolts in Siberian labor camps at Norilsk, Vorkuta and Kengir; it took tanks, planes and a considerable deployment of troops for the Kremlin to bring these under control. But once ‘order’ had been restored, Khrushchev reverted to Beria’s strategy. In the course of the years 1953-56 some five million prisoners were released from the Gulag.

In the people’s democracies the post-Stalin era was marked not just by the 1953 Berlin revolt (see Chapter Six) but by opposition even in such obscure and typically cowed imperial outposts as provincial Bulgaria, where workers in tobacco factories rioted in May and June of that same year. Nowhere was Soviet rule seriously threatened, but the authorities in Moscow took very seriously the scale of public discontent. The task now facing Khrushchev and his colleagues was to bury Stalin and his excesses without putting at risk the