During his 2012 presidential re-election campaign, Barack Obama attracted Republican opprobrium when, in a speech, he pointed to the ways in which US businesses depended for their existence on government backing not only because of its social and economic programmes but also through infrastructural provision such as roads and bridges. “You didn't build that”, Obama said in words that were frequently thrown back at him. He was, Republican campaign commercials charged, insulting self-made firms.

In a similar vein to former President Obama, I should say that I didn’t build this book. It has been helped enormously by others to whom I owe an immense debt of gratitude. In particular I should extend my thanks to Alison Howson of Agenda Publishing, who proposed the original idea and has guided the project from beginning to end, for her support and ability to apply pressure with an astutely judged mix of kind-heartedness and resolution. I should also extend my gratitude to colleagues and friends at Copenhagen Business School and the Sino-Danish Center for Education and Research. A special word of thanks goes to Sebastian Ahistich, Torben Juul Andersen, Jens Gammelgaard, Thomas Heitmann, Bersant Hobdari, Steven Hurst, Mads Dagnis Jensen, Lars Bo Kaspersen, Bent Petersen, Jan Stuckatz, Grahame Thompson, Alex Waddan and Ayca Uygur Wessel. Last, but certainly by no means least, I am grateful to Gravens Rand for providing a hospitable home from home as the book took shape and developed. It goes without saying that I am alone responsible for errors, omissions and judgements.

Edward Ashbee

Copenhagen

Throughout its early years, the Common Assembly was suspended in two states. First and foremost, it existed as the parliamentary assembly of the ECSC, whose members sought to build an institution on the basis of a legal and political reality as well as political aspirations of their own. At the same time, those same members, complemented with colleagues from the Council of Europe's Consultative Assembly, formed the Ad Hoc Assembly. This institution was making plans that far extended the reality of the Common Assembly. Between 1952 and 1954, these institutions existed alongside each other. Any analysis of the early years of the Common Assembly has to reckon with this fact, and acknowledge that the proceedings of the Ad Hoc Assembly reflected experiences in the Common Assembly and thus contained aspirations for its reform.

During these two years, the members were torn between discontentment and hope. Discontentment with the very limited role they had been given by the negotiators on the Treaty of Paris. They were only there to control the High Authority and, as an ultimate sanction, to enact a motion of censure against it. Hope they derived from the idea that their institution would actually be turned into a democratically elected people's chamber through a constitutional blueprint. This hope eventually withered as the EPC hung in the balance, but this did not deter the members of the Ad Hoc Assembly to further pursue their ideals in the context of the ECSC. Their plans for an EPC had been firmly rooted in the constitutional repertoire. These ideas remained largely unchanged, but as the momentum for grand designs of European integration waned, the members of the Common Assembly sought alternative ways to pursue their political aspirations. They came up with ways of strengthening their role and competences by cultivating new practices, rather than going back to the drawing board. As a result, the practices underpinning the constitutional repertoire became much more incremental and practice-oriented than had been the case during the years of the European Movement and the Ad Hoc Assembly.

With the ECSC came projections of transnational parliamentary democracy, but it also introduced another kind of European representative: the delegates from organized labour and industry who took seats on its Consultative Committee. The fact that very little has been written about this representative institution reflects its marginal influence on the politics in Luxembourg. Yet, it was the forerunner of many more similar advisory committees that would be set up, especially following the Treaties of Rome. The Consultative Committee became the template for the institutionalized involvement of societal actors that would characterize EC governance. Part of the reason why this template proved so useful is because it demonstrated that it could overcome national as well as social cleavages, thereby fermenting a European social partnership of sorts. This partnership allowed societal actors to exercise a degree of influence on European decision-making processes, and European institutions to strengthen their representative claims and ensure that business circles and non-governmental organizations would be committed to European policies.

Another reason why the Consultative Committee merits scrutiny is that when first convened in 1953, it was unclear how the ECSC institutions would develop. We know now that the Common Assembly would position itself as the EC's Parliament, but this was anything but self-evident to contemporaries. There were good legal and political reasons for believing that the Consultative Committee would in fact become the EC's prime representative institution. The legal expert Paul Reuter, who had been closely involved in drafting the Treaty of Paris, remarked in 1954 that the Common Assembly had an “insufficiently representative character”, given its indirect democratic mandate. Members of the Consultative Committee, on the other hand, combined strong technical expertise with backing from influential sectoral organizations, which gave them a particularly strong representative mandate according to Reuter (Reuter 1954). This observation suited the postwar years during which neo-corporatism was broadly considered as fermenting democracy, also at the European level.

The European Parliament considerably strengthened its position in the Community from the 1950s onwards. MEPs, however, did not content themselves with anything less than the wholesale democratization of the Community – that is to say, with the direct election of their institution. This had been the aim of most European federalists, the promise of the EPC and, now that a veritable European Parliament existed, an ambition that finally had to be realized. This ambition became fixated on Article 138 of the EEC Treaty, which offered the Parliament the opportunity to draft a proposal for its own election. Hailing this opportunity as the key to strengthening the Parliament and democratizing the Community, MEPs immediately started working out their plans for European elections, which they presented in 1960. The draft convention for direct elections eventually ended up being shelved by the Council. Losing sight of the ambition of European elections contributed in a big way to the sense of inertia that pervaded the European Parliament during the 1960s, as described in the previous chapter.

How did European elections become such a lodestar in the way in which MEPs thought of the future of their institution and the Community? And, crucially, how did they envisage electoral democracy at the European level? In addressing these questions, this chapter will show how the idea of European elections had evolved since the days of the Ad Hoc Assembly. What distinguished the debate from the late 1950s from earlier debates in the decade was the institutional development of the European Parliament. Drafting their plans in a new institutional environment, the members of the Ad Hoc Assembly essentially projected their plans and ideals onto a blank canvas. Some years on, by contrast, MEPs had become attached to and invested in an institution with an established institutional culture. European elections were therefore no longer about creating something new, but about reforming existing structures. The tensions this chapter explores therefore revolve around this dilemma between reform and conservatism, change and continuity.

Despite having been shelved, historians have recently started to delve into the election debates around the turn of the 1960s, driven by a growing academic interest in the legitimating principles underpinning European integration (Piodi 2009; O’Connor 2014; Tulli 2017).

In building their institutions, European representatives sought to present themselves as agents of democratization in the European Community. To that end, they sought to acquire more prerogatives and influence, and they did so with considerable success. They did so in the face of adversity, yet above all, their story is one of conformity – with the guiding pro-European spirit of these institutions, with the mechanism of depoliticized technocratic governance that underpinned the European project, and with the written and unwritten rules that governed their institutions. Their harmonious relations with the Commission and the Council of Ministers allowed for a considerable degree of competence creep. It also meant, however, that European representatives were more enveloped in aligning themselves with supranational power than in fostering arenas for transnational European politics.

In seeking to establish themselves as supranational actors, the European representatives inadvertently perpetuated and legitimated the depoliticized character of the European Community rather than challenging it. This left the representative institutions and their dynamic with other Community institutions under-politicized (Mair 2013: 99–125). Scholars have remarked upon this under-politicized character of Community governance, yet its dynamics are less well documented. This book has shown how within a generation, European representatives settled firmly into a political culture that favoured consensus over contention and allowed little room for politicizing internal and external relations. Even considering the muted postwar political climate in which they emerged, these institutions were remarkable exemplars of concordance, prudence and stability. That is not to say that this status quo did not have its discontents, only that it was rarely challenged. On the political left especially, European representatives often felt constricted in their room for manoeuvre to pursue their ideal of a more social and democratic European Community.

Rather than accentuating the differences that might exist between the collectives they represented, the European representatives underlined what they now all had in common: they were Europeans. MEPs especially bought into the idea, vented by the likes of Jean Monnet and Walter Hallstein, that the representative institutions were crucial in permeating a European spirit throughout European society from the top down. In concordance with that ideal, they fashioned themselves as extensions of supranational Europe rather than as platforms for channelling interests from below.

Just as the Schuman Plan had been launched, the escalation of the Cold War on the Korean peninsula in the summer of 1950 upset debates about European integration. The Korean War refuelled concerns about West German rearmament, and opened up the option of doing so through membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Seeking to bind the Federal Republic to the European project, Jean Monnet therefore drafted a plan for a European Defence Community. The French Prime Minister René Pleven announced the Plan in November 1950 (Ruane 2000: 15–30).

The prospect of a European army prompted a lobby for the creation of a political union that could accommodate such an initiative. Two years later, the task of drafting the statute for a European Political Community (EPC) was entrusted to the Ad Hoc Assembly, a body that was set up for the occasion, consisting of delegates from the Consultative Assembly and the ECSC Common Assembly. It was a testament to the unwavering belief of federalists who had recognized in the ECSC the possible prelude to political union. This chapter further explores this constitutional moment between 1950 and 1954, using the Ad Hoc Assembly's proceedings as a unique glimpse into the ideas on pan-European democracy that circulated in Strasbourg and beyond.

The EPC never materialized, because in August 1954, the French parliament voted against the EDC Treaty, thereby terminating the ratification process. The French “non” has a prominent place in the standard account of European integration history, as it ushered in a crisis which was subsequently resolved at Messina in 1955, eventually resulting in the Treaties of Rome. In this account, the EDC and the EPC feature as aberrations in the progressive economic integration of Europe. Instead, historians have studied the fate of the EDC in the context of the geopolitical relations of the Cold War (Dumoulin 2000; Ruane 2000; Loth 1995; Risso 2007).

Despite these communities never seeing the light of day, this episode is worth studying. At a time when the Consultative Assembly had convened in plenary only three times and the ECSC Common Assembly had only just been created, the Ad Hoc Assembly was a veritable proving ground for European parliamentarism.

In the 1980s, the European Economic and Social Committee issued the brochure The Other European Assembly, with which it unapologetically put itself on a par with the European Parliament (AEI, The Other European Assembly). Appearing just after the first European elections, the brochure clearly conveyed the message that the EESC was a representative institution too, voicing social and economic interests in the Community. As the powers of the Parliament grew, however, the contrast between the two institutions became increasingly marked. Above all, the Committee was an advisory institution that built on the experiences of the Consultative Committee, and therefore struggled to reconcile the ideas and practices underpinned by the repertoires of representation and expertise.

Because of the Committee's limited influence in European integration, few studies have delved into its functioning and history (Westlake 2016b; Varsori 2000). Part of the reason why it never achieved a more prominent status is that the promise of a social Europe, contained in the Treaties of Rome, never materialized (Andry 2022). The EESC therefore never became the central European locus for a social dialogue. Beyond narratives of a “failure of Euro-corporatism”, however, the Committee lends itself as a lens through which to study ideas and dynamics of political representation in the European Community (Streeck & Schmitter 1991; Van de Grift 2018). Also, the EESC is not some isolated example of institutionalized interest representation at the European level, but the largest of a host of committees, set up to assist the Commission in its decision-making. Many of the dynamics that characterized the functioning of the EESC played out in these committees on a smaller scale. As such, the EESC is indicative of the way in which the Commission shaped its relations with societal groups.

Where Chapter 6 showed how the Consultative Committee established a template for the institutionalized representation of socio-economic interests at a transnational level, this chapter looks at how the lessons of the Consultative Committee at the sectoral level translated to the breadth of policy areas the EESC concerned itself with. Taking a deeper dive into the machinery of the institution, it asks how and why it became, in many ways, an exemplar of the Community's consensus culture.

In the history of European integration, the late 1940s and the early 1950s were an era of experimentation. Federalist movements, activists and thinkers explored ways in which the unification of Europe could be achieved, yielding a wide array of blueprints and methods. There was considerable momentum behind the federalist ideal, with federalist movements amassing considerable support. The successive creation of new European organizations, moreover, fed into the hope that in a next step, governments could be convinced to join a political union. With Benelux, a regional customs union had already been founded during the war. The year 1948 saw the creation of a European military alliance through the Treaty of Brussels and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), charged with administering the Marshall Plan. The exploration of possibilities that characterized this era not only occurred among the federalist ranks, but at the offices of these new European organizations as well. Although these federalist movements and European organizations were entirely different environments, they were sites where new avenues of European integration were explored and experimented.

This chapter traces the different ideas of European unity that were considered in these postwar years, and what place a European assembly had in these imaginaries. It also analyses how the creation of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe in 1949, as the first pan-European assembly, transformed these different imaginaries. In that sense, this chapter examines the intersection between unofficial and official forces labouring for European unity. The links between these two were quite strong – both in terms of people, but also in terms of ideas and practices. What characterized these parliamentary pioneers of European integration, especially compared to those in the more technical organizations, was a preoccupation with the democratic dimension of European unification.

During these early years, there were two opposing ways of thinking about the legitimation of European integration. The first revolved around technical decision-making by strong executive institutions; the second around democratic decision-making through a strong parliamentary legislative. These ideas, respectively underlying the repertoire of expertise and the constitutional repertoire, were rooted in longstanding political and intellectual traditions of state formation, international cooperation and technocratic internationalism (Kaiser & Schot 2014).

Having established itself as a sovereign Community institution and christening itself a parliament, the European Parliament had far transcended the institution that the Treaties had created on paper. Building on its successful use of customs as a way to further acquire new competences, moreover, the Parliament would further cement its position throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. The previous chapter has already shown that there was a strong tendency in Strasbourg, because of its composition and pairing with a supranational executive, to cultivate a consensus culture from below. Delving deeper into the inner workings of the Parliament, this chapter asks how MEPs exercised their representative function within their institution and the Community at large. As delegates from national parliaments, the question for them was how to orient themselves – toward their national electorates and citizens of the Community, or the supranational executive, which they were supposed to control. This chapter charts this tension between constituency and Community through the lens of the constitutional repertoire and the repertoire of representation.

Although there have been studies on the role perception of MEPs, these overwhelmingly focus on the period after 1979, when the first European elections were held. The received wisdom, especially among political scientists and legal scholars, is that 1979 was really the zero hour of European parliamentarism, marking the transition of the European Parliament from an alleged “talking shop” to a “powerhouse” (Kohler 2014; Rittberger 2005: 3). By extension, the preceding period is depicted as one of inertia – a waiting room, in which the Parliament was wholly dependent on the benevolence of the member states for small extensions of its competences and, ultimately, elections. As the previous chapter has shown, it bears underlining that the European Parliament had developed strongly even before its first direct elections, and that the first elected MEPs entered an institution with an established institutional culture, working method and role perception (Patel & Salm 2021; Dinan 2021).

On the morning of 11 March 1969, a group of French students stormed the public gallery of the Maison de l’Europe in Strasbourg. They shouted slogans, sported banners and scattered pamphlets to an aghast audience of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), who were just about to debate plans for organizing European elections. The students, who were members of a European federalist youth organization, were hardly satisfied with these plans. They demanded the convention of a European constituent assembly that would draft a federalist constitution for Europe (Dulphy & Manigand 2020). The mass social upheaval that had erupted throughout Europe in May 1968 thus seemingly trickled through to the otherwise so impenetrable institutions of the European Community (EC).

After a brief suspension, the debate resumed to ceremonious disapproval at the students’ crude and unwarranted disruption. Most MEPs, however, clearly welcomed the protest. They saw it as an encouragement for their pursuit of a more democratic European Community, to which some of them had now been committed for the best part of two decades (HEP, 11 March 1969: 1–4). The protest allowed them to claim that Europeans expected to be more directly involved in European integration, even if the student protest was hardly representative of public opinion or of the concerns of young people (Patel 2020: 127–9; Andry 2022: 60–74). Regardless, to most MEPs, it was the people that spoke in Strasbourg that day.

Never before had the voices of European citizens resonated so directly in the Maison de l’Europe. From 1952 onward, MEPs had grown accustomed to operating at great remove from their constituents, both in a physical and a mental sense. Their insular position, as delegates from the national parliaments, was largely by design. After all, the European Community was first and foremost a project of technocratic market integration, aimed at achieving greater political and economic interdependence between the six member states. In this constellation, MEPs were well aware that they occupied an awkward position. As the Italian socialist Alessandro Bermani remarked in response to the student protest, he and his colleagues were little more than “pseudo-representatives” in the absence of European elections (HEP, 12 March 1969: 50).

INTRODUCTION

For someone always seeming to doubt his own originality, Lionel Robbins had a considerable effect on economists’ professional self-image (Backhouse & Medema 2009b: 810). The very first paragraph of his autobiography asks his reader to think of him merely as someone who repeatedly found himself in the right place at the right time to comment on what others were doing to reshape economic thought (Robbins 1971: 11). The Preface to the first edition of his most famous work, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, strikes the same tone. It positions him as simply rendering increasingly legible analytical themes that were the creation of other, more visionary economists (Robbins 1932: xlii). This chapter focuses primarily on Robbins's definition of economics as the study of choice under conditions of scarcity, because it provides another important turning point in the prehistory of economics imperialism. Even in relation to his most celebrated achievement, though, Robbins said that he was merely doing other people's intellectual bidding for them, in particular that of the English marginalist pathfinders, Stanley Jevons and Philip Wicksteed (Robbins 1984 [1935]: 22). At most, he allowed himself credit for seeing more clearly than anyone else what united the otherwise disparate advances of those he considered to have reworked Jevonian and Wicksteedian insights most effectively. He always held the promise of scientific unification in exceptionally high regard.

Robbins has been taken at his word by other economists, as he is today best remembered as the foremost theoretical synthesizer of his day. More attention was being paid in the 1930s than previously to trying to bridge the gap in Anglophone economics between the English marginalists and Carl Menger's Austrian followers (Vaughn 1994: 14). Robbins was well placed to succeed in this venture, being fluent in German and therefore able to read for himself countless works that were yet to be translated into English (O’Brien 1990: 162). He also used his position as Head of the Department of Economics to bring to the London School of Economics Austrian economists he had previously befriended during his visits to Vienna (Robbins 1971: 91).