De Gaulle’s vetoes of UK membership of the European Economic Community in 1963 and 1967 look prescient in light of the June referendum. He seems to have been right that British membership would have been a mistake for the European Community. But, perhaps it was his vetoes that made the UK’s eventual departure inevitable. By making us join in the 1970s when we felt especially weak, rather than the 1960s, we ended up with a poor deal that we have forever after regretted.
This is one of the many points so ably made by Robert Tombs in his outstanding “The English and Their History” (https://theobliqueview.com/2015/11/03/the-english-and-their-history-the-first-thirteen-centuries-by-robert-tombs/). The UK’s relationship with the EU has been poisoned by the poor deal struck on entry in 1973 when Britain was at the nadir of its declinism. Indeed, if you had to pick a year between 1945 and 2016 when the UK was at its lowest ebb, when would you choose? 1973 looks a pretty strong candidate.
Let’s imagine, by contrast, that the UK had joined 10 years’ earlier in 1963. Sure, we had suffered a great loss of national confidence at Suez, but, so too the French, who had been in the fight. And they had had the disaster at Dien Bien Phu as well as defeat in Algeria. The UK was, in 1963, still a global economic and military power. De Gaulle’s “L’Angleterre, ce n’est plus grande chose” was not really true, otherwise he would not so have minded us joining.
Instead, by 1973, we had announced the withdrawal from East of Suez, endured a devaluation and seen industrial relations worsen. From the vantage point of 1973, the preceding 18 years since Suez had been of accelerating decline. So we struck a deal in desperation and it was a pretty poor deal particularly on budget contribution, the CAP and governance.
Margaret Thatcher then had to use her considerable skills and power to re-negotiate our relationship with EC to try to get the deal we should have had in 1973 with collateral damage to the national perception of the EC. Indeed, imagine that the UK had not joined in 1973 and it had been left to Margaret Thatcher to negotiate joining the EC ten years’ later in the imperious aftermath of the Falklands campaign, with an ironclad relationship with the US and landslide election victory. Would we have got a better deal than in 1973? I rather suspect so.
The fundamental weaknesses of the 1973 deal only became apparent in the years that followed as our perception of ourselves recovered. What had seemed attractive in 1973, and which attracted 67% to 33% support in the 1975 referendum, looked less and less so as the recovery of 1980s restored national self-confidence. The original sin of 1973 deal damned all that followed.
The Oblique View 