INTRODUCTION

It was one of the strangest cabinet meetings in British political history. Yet it was also one of the most important. The three leading members of the government – the prime minister (Clement Attlee), the foreign secretary (Ernest Bevin) and the chancellor of the exchequer (Stafford Cripps) – were absent, either on holiday or in hospital. It was thus a depleted cabinet that decided on 2 June 1950 to decline the invitation to participate in the talks which led to the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).

The meeting was chaired by the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Herbert Morrison, who would later say that the “Durham miners would not wear” participation in a ECSC. Still, a full cabinet would probably not have decided differently. Although the UK was not being asked at that stage to accept a coal and steel community under an independent supranational authority, it was being asked to confine any talks to that option. Given that Bevin had earlier described the Council of Europe in a magnificently mixed metaphor as a “Pandora's Box full of Trojan Horses” he was unsurprisingly also opposed to any “ultimatum on pooling the coal and steel industries of Great Britain with those of other countries”.

A common interpretation5 is that the UK stumbled into a fateful self-exclusion from what would become the European Communities through a mixture of accident, conceit, incompetent preoccupation with the internal politics of the Labour Party (“the Durham miners will not have it”) and suspicion of forms of European integration with supranational institutions and federal ambitions (“a Pandora's box full of Trojan Horses”). That suspicion may also have been self-defeating. Had the UK accepted the invitation to the talks it might have bent them to its own preferences for a more intergovernmental form of cooperation. As Edmund Dell put it, the UK might have “sucked the federalism” out of the ECSC had it remained in the talks (after all, even without the UK the ECSC emerged with a Council of Ministers that had not been a part of Jean Monnet's original design of the Schuman Plan).