Socialism, (neo)liberalism and the Treaties of Rome.

Revisiting socialist debates on the Treaties of Rome (1957) opens a window onto early conceptions of the potential of a European common market--and Labour's capitulation to the sovereigntist dogmas of late-imperial Britain.

It has become fashionable in the last decade for scholars such as Wolfgang Streeck to associate the Treaties of Rome that created the European Economic Community (EEC) with Friedrich Hayek, the neoliberal thinker and proponent of European economic federation. Yet Hayek had no direct, nor arguably any indirect, role in the Treaties. Three of the six governments that negotiated these Treaties were led by socialist, social-democratic and labour parties, and a socialist party was in a cabinet coalition in a fourth. The Treaties of Rome also gained the backing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), then in opposition. The reasons for this initial socialist embrace of European integration have dropped out of contemporary debates on the future of Europe, particularly in the English-speaking world. This article reconstructs the historic reasons for the continental left's support for European integration. It also details some of the conflicts opened up by the British Labour Party's repeated and vocal objections to the idea of a European polity enjoying a measure of supranational authority over its member states.

British Labour and European socialism

It is no secret that UK Labour Party leaders were critical of most European integration initiatives in the 1940s and 1950s, although there were also prominent Labour supporters of UK membership of the EEC. Labour's reasoning and rhetoric are difficult to identify as strictly socialist. The party's discourses blended socialist ideas with positions held by Conservative and Liberal politicians, particularly concerning foreign trade interests, historical narratives of the 'English constitution', attitudes inherited from the UK's victory in the Second World War, and, perhaps most importantly, an attachment to the Commonwealth as an alternative vehicle for internationalist ambitions.

The debate among socialist parties regarding the prospects for European political and economic integration began during the Second World War. After the war a socialist clash emerged on international economic institutions, in 1948-50, reflecting a French-Belgian vs. British dispute over the principle of supranationalism. By the mid-1950s, the pro-integration French socialist (SFIO) position had broadly been taken up by key actors in the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) and the German SPD. There was a growing continental socialist consensus that European integration was necessary for economic prosperity, for international peace, and for building positive forms of integration to mitigate the negative consequences of regional trade liberalisation. This consensus increasingly clashed with anti-capitalist rhetoric and other criticisms of the European communities emerging from Scandinavia and the UK. Here we capture a few snapshots of this inter-socialist dialogue, focusing on the fraught question of the balance of liberalism and socialism in the economic constitution of early European integration.

To do so, we focus on the views of the continental socialists who were the most engaged in the European project: members of the Socialist Group of the European Common Assembly/Parliamentary Assembly, the predecessor of today's European Parliament. These were politicians delegated by national parliaments whom we would expect to favour European integration. As Talbot Imlay writes in his history of socialist internationalism, 'the Strasbourg Assembly quickly became a central site for the practice of socialist internationalism on the issue of European unity'. (1) It is well known that continental socialist parties were keen to have the UK join the European Communities. Yet they were also--and with good reason--concerned about the potential impact of British membership on their own visions of European integration.

Free trade or Common Market?

During the negotiations of the Treaties of Rome, a vigorous transnational debate unfolded over the philosophical bases and potential of a European common market. The European Economic Community, most Labour leaders asserted, would remove the ability of a Labour-led government to build socialism in Britain and deprive the British people of the sovereignty they had earned over centuries of parliamentary representation. The response to this by Labour's allies on the continent intersected directly with debates surrounding a 1956 proposal for a Free Trade Area (FTA), a British-inspired complement (or alternative) to the EEC, and the predecessor of today's European Free Trade Area (EFTA).

The FTA proposal excluded agriculture, which directly contradicted French designs for regional trade. As a comparatively simple free trade agreement, offering little capacity for positive economic coordination between member states, this was a greater cause of concern to continental socialists than the potential challenges posed by British membership in the EEC. As a bridgehead for Anglo-liberalism into European trade...