European Economic Community
Western European economic integration body founded 1957 by the Treaty of Rome
Also known as: EEC, Common Market, European Communities
The European Economic Community was established by the Treaty of Rome signed on 25 March 1957 by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and came into operation on 1 January 1958. Quigley discusses the EEC in the late chapters of Tragedy and Hope (chiefly pp. 1283–1299) as the principal post-war Continental project of economic integration and as a structural counterweight both to the British Commonwealth system and to the U.S.-dominated Atlantic economy. The Common Market is Quigley's clearest contemporary example of how successful regional integration reshapes the global distribution of economic power.
From the Schuman Declaration to the Treaty of Rome
Quigley's institutional lineage for the EEC begins with the 9 May 1950 Schuman Declaration, proposing what became the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, 1951), which placed French and West German heavy industry under a common High Authority. The ECSC was the institutional prototype: a supranational regulatory body with binding authority over a defined economic sector, accountable to a Council of Ministers from member governments and to a parliamentary assembly. The 1955 Messina Conference produced the framework that became the Treaty of Rome two years later, expanding the supranational principle from coal and steel to a comprehensive customs union (the EEC) and to atomic energy (Euratom). For Quigley these treaties represented the Monnet-Schuman-Adenauer-de Gasperi project of binding France and Germany institutionally so as to make a third Continental war impossible.
The Quigley Framing: Three Worlds in Western Europe
Quigley's framing of European post-war integration is comparative. He distinguishes three institutional projects competing for Western Europe in the 1950s: the British Commonwealth and Sterling Area, the Atlantic relationship organized through NATO and the U.S. economy, and Continental integration through the ECSC and EEC. The British strategy under both Conservative and Labour governments through the early 1960s was to remain outside the Continental project while remaining indispensable to both the Commonwealth and the Atlantic relationships. The Continental strategy was to bind the Six into a single economic system that would generate a political union over time. The American strategy through the Eisenhower and early Kennedy administrations was active support for the Continental project — sometimes (as in the 1963 Grand Design speech) over British preferences. Quigley reads the EEC as the institutional winner of this three-way contest: by the late 1960s, both Britain and the Atlantic powers had had to adjust to the EEC's structural reality.
De Gaulle, British Accession, and the Politics of the 1960s
Quigley devotes substantial attention to de Gaulle's twin vetoes of British EEC accession (January 1963 and November 1967). De Gaulle's case — that British accession would import an Atlantic orientation into a Community whose proper destiny was a Continental and Gaullist Europe — represented a coherent political programme: an EEC under French leadership, with Germany as a junior partner, articulated externally against both the Atlantic and the Soviet systems (T&H 1293–1299). The vetoes prevented British accession until 1973, after de Gaulle's resignation. The 1965 "empty chair" crisis, in which France boycotted the EEC institutions for seven months, was Quigley's clearest example of the inherent tension between the supranational ambitions of the Treaty of Rome and the residual sovereignty of the founding states.
Trade, the CAP, and the Reshaping of World Commerce
Tragedy and Hope analyses the EEC's two largest first-decade achievements: the rapid completion of the internal customs union (eighteen months ahead of schedule, by mid-1968) and the Common Agricultural Policy (operational from 1962, fully integrated by 1968). The CAP transformed European agricultural markets, accelerated rural depopulation, generated chronic budgetary surpluses (the "butter mountains" and "wine lakes" of later decades), and became the principal source of friction with American agricultural exporters in the Kennedy Round (1964–1967) and subsequent GATT negotiations. Quigley reads these episodes as the moment at which the EEC ceased to be an aspirational project and became a structural fact of the international economy: a single bloc with which the United States, the Commonwealth, and the Soviet system all had to negotiate on terms it largely set.
Long-Term Significance in the Quigley Argument
Quigley's broader argument is that the EEC represents one of the principal twentieth-century examples of his thesis on civilizational expansion: that the great Powers of the late nineteenth century — Britain, France, Germany — exhausted themselves militarily in the two world wars and that the surviving political project of Western Civilization was reconstruction through supranational economic integration. The EEC is, in this framing, both a means of preventing further intra-European war and the institutional vehicle by which Western Europe sought to remain a coherent civilizational unit in a world dominated by two super-Powers neither of which was, in the strict Quigleyan sense, Western. The EEC's later evolution into the European Community (1967) and the European Union (1992) post-dates Quigley's writing, but the structural diagnosis in Tragedy and Hope anticipated both the deepening and the recurrent crises of European integration.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1283 Quigley
Council of Europe (Strasbourg), 1283.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1285 Quigley
P. H. Spaak, 793, 1285-6.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1288 Quigley
Commonwealth of Nations (British), 144-8, 153, 1288-9, 1299.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1293 Quigley
and de Gaulle, 1293-9.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1298 Quigley
Common Market, see European Economic Community.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1330 Quigley
Common Market, see European Economic Community.