The final and most important connection between the development of the Cold War and the evolution of European integration that this chapter will discuss was the way in which the East-West conflict shaped the very international system into which the first European bodies were born.266 European integration may well, as argued above, have been an important factor in bringing political and economic stability to Western Europe in the decade or so after the end of the Second World War. But it was also the beneficiary of the wider Western economic and political system which developed during the same period. This system was centred on US foreign-policy leadership. Each participating country enjoyed a close bilateral relationship with the United States and tended to treat Washington rather than another European capital as the first port of call whenever foreign-policy concerns arose. The fact that virtually every European country maintained its largest embassy in the US capital rather than elsewhere in Europe and appointed its most seasoned diplomats to Washington underlined the closeness of these transatlantic relationships. This web of bilateral linkages was reinforced by a network of Atlantic institutions, some of which, such as Bretton Woods bodies, predated the Cold War but had developed into purely Western structures, and others, like NATO, which were clear Cold War creations. These too highlighted US dominance - the United States was very clearly primus inter pares in each of these collective bodies - and provided an Atlantic forum within which each European country could express its concerns, grievances or desires. Bodies such as NATO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the GATT also provided a range of obvious public goods for Western Europe, guaranteeing security, monetary stability and a degree of commercial liberalisation.
This environment proved a highly congenial one for the nascent European institutions. The combination of clear US foreign-policy leadership and the very obvious ideological and military threat from the USSR helped maintain a high degree of foreign-policy uniformity among the Western European powers during the early Cold War years. Compared to previous eras, there were few bilateral foreign-policy disputes or disagreements amongst the French, Germans or Italians during the formative years of the integration process, and even when they did occur - as in the case of the ongoing Franco-German argument over the fate of the Saar, for instance - strong American pressure helped prevent the issue from spiralling out ofcontrol. The dominant role of the United States also helped minimise the scope for intra-European squabbles about leadership. Within the Atlantic institutions, all were able to accept that the United States should have the lion’s share of power, and this clear hierarchy at the very top made the issue of who else held positions of responsibility somewhat less contentious and divisive than it would otherwise have been.
Most fundamentally ofall, the institutions ofAtlantic co-operation removed the need for the early European structures to handle some of the most problematic aspects of international co-operation. Once the issue of German rearmament had been solved, there was thus no need for the Europeans to discuss defence or security matters amongst themselves, since this could be left to NATO. Nor, after 1958 and the introduction of full monetary convertibility across Western Europe, was it necessary for the early EEC to concern itself with the preservation of monetary stability. This was an IMF task, and one which seemed initially to be carried out very effectively: for most of the 1960s, the six countries that made up the EEC experienced almost total exchange-rate stability with each other. The potentially vexed topic of monetary co-operation could be left almost exclusively to the Atlantic-level institutions. As a result, the European Community could benefit from a generalised climate of macroeconomic stability and focus most of its initial energies on the eminently attainable tasks of creating a customs union and a common agricultural policy. Both of these targets had been reached by 1968.
Quite how valuable this protective Atlantic cocoon was to the early stages of European integration became apparent once the overarching system began to show signs of strain from the mid-1960s onwards. The first sign of change was the way in which detente, growing Western European confidence, and the United States’ ever-greater involvement in Southeast Asia started to erode European willingness to accept US foreign-policy leadership and to encourage individual European countries to experiment with their own, more autonomous, approaches to East-West relations. De Gaulle’s wide-ranging rebellion against the US role in Europe was the most obvious and extreme manifestation of this development, but was not entirely unique. Other Western European leaders also harboured misgivings about the direction of US policy, particularly in Vietnam, and aspired to a degree of influence on East-West relations. A great deal of that Western uniformity on the key foreign-policy issues of the day that had existed during the 1950s and early 1960s disappeared as a result. And disagreements among Western Europeans about the best approach to the Eastern bloc or the degree to which Europe should seek autonomy from the United States easily spilled over into disagreements within the EEC.267 Some of the disharmony in Brussels in the late 1960s reflected declining US hegemony and greater foreign-policy divergence amongst the countries ofWestern Europe.
The difficulties of European unity outside the protective Atlantic framework became even more apparent at the very end of the decade and into the early 1970s as European confidence in American leadership declined still further and as the Atlantic institutions that had ensured monetary stability fell apart. Together these developments helped encourage the EEC to broaden its policy agenda and to begin to concern itself with both foreign-policy co-ordination and with monetary co-operation. But while from a longterm perspective both of these steps can be seen to have been crucial to the EC/EU’s subsequent development, they were not easy ones to take. On the contrary, Western Europe’s initial experiences of both EEC monetary co-ordination and foreign-policy co-operation were deeply dispiriting and did much to contribute to that mood of gloom and disillusionment which characterised the Community for much of the 1970s. Co-operation in Brussels had in other words been much easier when difficult issues such as global currency fluctuations or questions about the best stance for Western Europe to adopt towards the crises in the Middle East could be dealt with elsewhere. The uncomfortable realities of operating without the protective Atlantic cocoon - realities which would become even more evident after 1990 - did, however, serve to underline the extent to which the Cold War system was a highly supportive environment for Europe’s nascent institutional structures.
World History
