the Single European Act of 1986 and the Treaty of Union at Maastricht stood out in that optimistic period. Now that the wave of euphoria has broken, and the tide receded – though not nearly to its pre-1985 level – it is worth asking what were the permanent achievements and the quality of change that each brought about. As EEC, EC or EU, the European Community has habitually moved through troughs and hollows, punctuated by much shorter bursts of energy: neither can be explained without asking what all the relevant forces – governments, Community institutions and the array of interested outside players – were doing at each point in the cycle.
How member state governments and EU bodies relate is similar enough to what goes on in national political systems to be comprehensible, and open enough to be readily accessible. Community institutions are in most cases much the less secretive of the two. But the task of weaving the influence of non-governmental players (industrial firms, financial institutions, trades unions, regions and distinct state organs such as central banks) into the recent history of a subject extending over twelve or more nation states requires a different format, almost an alternative kind of history. Robert Brenner did this for seventeenth-century England in Merchants and Revolution,1 with the benefit of access to all surviving archives. But the EU, like its member governments, restricts access at every point after 1965.
Yet without a complete picture of how influence is exercised and who moves whom, we have only half the story. Present day comment lacks essential connections to the recent past, to the trends which may not be obvious today but remain latent, like nationalism in eastern Europe before 1989. Without contemporary history, studies of the contemporary world – by political scientists, lawyers, economists, or specialists in international relations – rest on a dangerously relative foundation, and students are faced with a blind spot for the ‘years not taught’.
The contemporary historian (like any other), ought to contribute a distinct sort of understanding of three connected phenomena: processes as they change over time; the continuous interchange of many players; and the mutation of institutions, and the beliefs and behaviour patterns of those who work in them. These were my own concerns in a series of studies of British government during the twentieth century which developed the concept of a long and continuous game between an increasing number of players of different power, status and interests, a game in which all of them used the needs that the modem state had for their participation to draw it and its component parts into an informal framework, from which there could subsequently be no retreat to a pristine minimal state.
Their continual rivalry in the political marketplace focused on a range of goals, from naked self-interest to bargaining a consensus about what the common or national interest might be. Each one’s willingness to accept a measure of interdependence ensured that the others would be more inclined to recognize some of its own claims, if only as the price of general social harmony (for which, in turn, governments and political parties were prepared to pay). As a descriptive device, I called this a ‘competitive symposium’ – to signify a prolonged discourse, not between equal partners but ones which recognized each other’s claims and followed, voluntarily but as a precondition of membership, a code of political language and conventions of behaviour in pursuit of rational self-interest.
The competitive element was always present but was limited by the need not to risk the whole delicate balance through outright conflict. The game was therefore a continuous one, many-headed and usually peaceable, with regular prizes but no final victories, open to generally acceptable players bound by agreed rules and a shared belief that negotiated results, though never entirely binding or satisfactory, were preferable to dictation by a higher power.
Having reached a point in 1990 where a contemporary historian could not reasonably go further forward in a British context, I have tried to apply the same method on the European scale, by looking not only at the Community’s history over the last twenty years but at the interchanges between a much broader range of players or constellations than is usual in the approaches of other disciplines. To borrow a phrase of Andrew Shonfield’s, I hoped to study a great theme from a single standpoint, to discover an underlying coherence in the idea that the arena where these players meet could be described as informal politics, part of the overall system whose more obvious features are of course formal.
Living in a country which, more than any other member of the Community, has difficulty with the concept of being European, yet which I firmly believe has no special role and hardly any living space outside it, I am disturbed by the distorted and frequently trivial way the Community is portrayed in the press and on television by all but a handful of commentators. Apart from the brief period in 1972–4, and during the 1975 referendum, British governments have done little in their public discourse to make clear what is at stake, so that stereotypes are used habitually which provoke incomprehension if not derision across the Channel.
What is said here is meant therefore also as a contribution to perceptions: as Rudyard Kipling put it in Something of Myself in 1891, ‘trying to tell the English something of the world outside England – not directly, but by implication … a vast conspectus of the whole sweep and meaning of things …’. (Kipling of course wrote ‘Empire’ not Europe.) To start with, the Community is not just Brussels, the Council of Ministers and the Commission, but fifteen member states of varying size, importance and interests, some of which are very much more effective than others (insofar as their games lie within Europe). Beyond them, but in overlapping circles, range other players at national or regional level, of different status operating from different standpoints. There is no ideal Europe, no single picture, outside the emptiness of political rhetoric; just as there is no one centre. The centre is wherever the players meet. Those from ‘above’ may be formally superior, but informally, when they meet as a matter of common interest, it is each one’s effectiveness that counts.
The question to ask here is not ‘what is Europe?’, because in this dimension Europe is whatever you see, but how, informally, does the Community function, how do governments and non-governmental players act and what do they try to achieve? Does informal politics help to ameliorate the deep-rooted discords between north and south, core and periphery, small states and large, Anglo-Saxon and continental mentalities? Does it facilitate the entry of new players? Does it reduce rigidities and friction which would otherwise make the Community a less efficient mechanism for what its members want?
The Europe which questions like these throws into focus is one of interests, elites and powerful groups. It is vital to study these as they are: Europe as it is, not as people might wish it to be, as a preliminary to changing it. Players in the informal sector of a system are those who choose to enter out of self-interest, who have the willpower and resources to stay in and the capacity to make themselves heard in that highly competitive arena. Lack of resources or inability to form stable alliances condemns the rest to marginal status or, like small companies, to reliance on whatever support they can get at national or regional level. There is no democratic bias here.
But not all roads in the EU’s history lead to the same outcome. The narrative from 1973 to the present given in chapters 3 to 5 is intended to make clear how the European project revived after a long stagnation, and why the Single Act led on to the Treaty of Union at Maastricht – in the context of a Europe which had been fundamentally altered by the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989. There are other ways of telling the story because the Community’s development is not teleological, not precisely delimited by the Treaties. How it evolves and what new legal texts it produces are for the players to decide.
As an historian I have tried not to confine myself to any one interpretation, whether federal, functional or intergovernmental, and to proceed empirically, taking account of all the significant players. The project assumes no hierarchy of players, no measured evolution: it examines ‘punctuated equilibrium’, change rather than progress, short bursts of energy interrupted by longer troughs (usually associated with recession). Of these, the economic and financial crisis of 1973–5 profoundly altered the balance between industry and labour, while that of 1981–3 had a direct effect on the behaviour of large firms and their federations towards the Community. The more recent 1990–93 recession ran parallel to a political cleavage between governments