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The United Kingdom and the European Community. Vol. I: The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy, 1945-1963

2006; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXI; Issue: 492 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cel140

1477-4534

Barry Supple,

Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics

THIS substantial book is part of the United Kingdom Government Official History series, and is the first volume in Professor Milward's magisterial contribution to our understanding of Britain's prolonged dalliance with the various European institutional experiments that have culminated in the European Union. Much less uneven than might have been anticipated, the Official Histories, which began life in 1919, and from 1966 were extended to embrace peacetime as well as wartime experience, have proved valuable—perhaps increasingly valuable—elements in the historiography of twentieth-century Britain. The volume under review, based on unrestrained access to official records and written with frankness, verve and a ruthlessly thorough analysis of official opinion, illustrates the civic responsibility as well as scholarly benefits of official policy towards the writing of ‘official’ history. Professor Milward's earlier work on post-war European recovery, and the institutional innovations which led to the various Communities, established a distinctive and provocatively persuasive viewpoint: that collaboration in Europe and the associated Community experiments, whatever their ultimate integrative consequences, can best be seen as devices not to transcend the nation state with a supranational entity, but to preserve and buttress the nation as an entity. Hence the title of his main study on the subject—The European Rescue of the Nation-State. In the present work this sort of perspective is adopted to look at the other side of the mirror: the origins and character of the United Kingdom's relationship with ‘Europe’ in the years which saw, first, an unsuccessful attempt to develop a national policy while standing apart from the developments on the continent, and then an unsuccessful and even more humiliating attempt to join the EEC on Britain's own terms.