Tony Judt Quote
The EEC was grounded in weakness, not strength. As Spaak’s 1956 report emphasized, ‘Europe, which once had the monopoly of manufacturing industries and obtained important resources from its overseas possessions, today sees its external position weakened, its influence declining and its capacity to progress lost in its divisions.’ It was precisely because the British did not—yet—understand their situation in this light that they declined to join the EEC. The idea that the European Common Market was part of some calculated strategy to challenge the growing power of the United States—a notion that would acquire a certain currency in Washington policy circles in later decades—is thus quite absurd: the new-formed EEC depended utterly upon the American security guarantee, without which its members would never have been able to afford to indulge in economic integration to the exclusion of all concern with common defense.
The EEC was grounded in weakness, not strength. As Spaak’s 1956 report emphasized, ‘Europe, which once had the monopoly of manufacturing industries and obtained important resources from its overseas possessions, today sees its external position weakened, its influence declining and its capacity to progress lost in its divisions.’ It was precisely because the British did not—yet—understand their situation in this light that they declined to join the EEC. The idea that the European Common Market was part of some calculated strategy to challenge the growing power of the United States—a notion that would acquire a certain currency in Washington policy circles in later decades—is thus quite absurd: the new-formed EEC depended utterly upon the American security guarantee, without which its members would never have been able to afford to indulge in economic integration to the exclusion of all concern with common defense.
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