European integration has bedeviled political elites in the British Isles since 1945.Footnote 1 Whether it was the lingering pretensions of imperial grandeur or stubbornly held neutrality, national leaders in both Britain and Ireland found it difficult to reconcile old political and nationalist beliefs with the new energy of cooperation and integration emanating from the continent. Initially, such difficulties of reorientation rarely caught the public's attention, giving national political elites considerable space and freedom in which to debate the issue on their terms. When the British and Irish governments changed course and requested membership in the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1961, they had little reason to anticipate a wave of public opposition. They heavily pitched their arguments around technical and economic concerns dealing with the common market and minimized the more difficult political questions regarding sovereignty and future political integration.Footnote 2
This was not entirely subterfuge on their part. The drive for integration on the continent, while of ideological origin, was fundamentally a debate about how best to perpetuate economic prosperity and forestall further war.Footnote 3 Economic issues dealing with common markets, resource cartels, and subsidy policies became the first integration efforts because they were to some extent the easiest to agree on. They were also the easiest to sell to the wider public when cloaked in the rhetoric of jobs, wealth, and prosperity. When membership in the EEC was seriously considered in the British Isles, this focus on economic nuts and bolts—how much will our farmers receive from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP); what will the price of butter be; how will an open market increase jobs—was an attractive one to the civil servants and government ministers holding meetings, writing white papers, and conducting negotiations.
However, this did not mean that political elites within the national governments were unanimous in their support for membership in the EEC. Joining Europe required considerable negotiations over both political and economic concerns between a variety of political constituencies and government ministries, all pushing their own agendas or protecting their own fiefdoms. And internal pressures only intensified as Britain and Ireland found themselves negotiating across the table from the original six members of the EEC (France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), all of which had their own visions of what the new Europe was and what the requirements of membership should be for new applicants.Footnote 4 French president Charles de Gaulle's intransigence over the implications of British membership and the goals of the entire EEC project only delayed the process further.Footnote 5
In both Britain and Ireland, the issue grew increasingly more prominent in public debate throughout the 1960s as their potential memberships in the burgeoning EEC remained in limbo. Increasing public awareness meant a greater potential for outside voices and actors to influence the debate. In particular, a diverse anti-EEC coalition in both countries threatened the dominant pro-EEC narrative on joining Europe. These eclectic coalitions attempted to harness a populist and nationalist rhetoric for their causes, which involved emphasizing the more difficult political questions in order to sway the public against membership. This nascent anti-EEC tendency challenged the old national paradigms, offering alternative definitions of what it meant to be British or Irish in the postwar world and what both countries’ relationships to the “new” Europe should be. If national elites were to maintain control of the issue, they needed to develop strategies to resist the creeping wave of anti-EEC populism. In this, they were largely successful, as both Britain and Ireland (along with Denmark) eventually joined the EEC in 1973. But the issue was never as simple as that.
When one examines the historical record more closely, particularly for the late 1960s and early 1970s, it becomes apparent that narratives focused purely on one national context are too limited. They fail to explore the full diversity of experiences throughout the British Isles vis-à-vis European integration and the role regional attitudes had in influencing debates at both the national and international levels. In fact, there were important differences between the tone and tenor of the debates at the national British level and those carried out regionally. Britain is not a unitary state but rather a composite union of several states or regions, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, dominated by the economic and demographic power of the largest state, England.Footnote 6 Historians have generally paid little to no attention to how these regions engaged the European integration issue or how a nascent but distinctly English nationalism responded to the move toward Europe.Footnote 7 And British experiences with EEC membership differed in both subtle and overt ways from those of Ireland, the other independent, sovereign state in the British Isles. To gain a fuller picture of the EEC debates in the British Isles as a whole in the run-up to membership, one must go beyond the mandarins, so to speak, in order to investigate the EEC issue's impact outside the halls of Westminster, Iveagh House, Whitehall, or Leinster House.
This article will suggest that Ireland and Scotland offer contrasting pictures of the success or failure of political elites at marginalizing early anti-EEC arguments. On the whole, attitudes in Scotland were a mixture of disinterest and apprehension, resulting in a contentious domestic debate, while the Irish experience and Irish public opinion were largely positive. Regionally specific responses to the EEC debate throughout the British Isles therefore did not always follow the pattern laid down in London and cannot simply be examined as an extension of the British national debate. In the case of Ireland, this may seem obvious in light of its status as a politically independent state, but when one also examines Scotland in a comparative framework with Ireland, there are some interesting parallels between them that mark out a differentiated “Celtic Fringe” experience. These parallels reflect not only the importance of notions of sovereignty, identity, and nationalism to the wider debate over postwar European integration in the British Isles, but also the ways elites there struggled with integrating a sense of Europeaness into their traditional worldviews.
Answering the European Question
In the 1960s, the dominant Fianna Fáil party of Ireland, under the leadership of the Taoisigh Seán Lemass and Jack Lynch, abandoned the state's traditional protectionist and British-oriented economic policies in favor of liberalization, free trade, and integration with Europe.Footnote 8 The economic disaster of the late 1950s, a period Ireland's most prominent civil servant T. K. Whitaker once described as the “dark night of the soul,” demonstrated the dangers of maintaining protectionism and relying too much on Britain as its main trading partner.Footnote 9 A crisis in the agricultural sector led to increasing numbers of people leaving the land, only to find that the inefficient and inadequate industrial sector was unable to absorb this influx of workers. This led to greater levels of emigration (over 400,000 between 1951 and 1961), declining wages, and higher levels of unemployment (as skilled workers left to find better-paying jobs overseas, often to neighboring Britain and the United States, where the average British or American worker earned substantially more than his or her Irish counterpart). Thus, the postwar Irish economy declined relative to similar states in Western Europe, failing, as Gary Murphy has described it, “to maximise its opportunities in the expanding European economy and consequently [to] share in the affluence that accompanied it.”Footnote 10
In response, Lemass and Lynch believed they had the answers to Ireland's economic ills. Their new policies aimed to liberalize the Irish economy, break down protectionist tariff barriers, further industrial expansion and export potential, and make Ireland more attractive to foreign investment capital. In doing so, economic liberalization would sever the neocolonial economic link with Britain, with potential membership in the EEC eventually coming to symbolize these important goals. The motivation for this shift was not purely economic; Lemass and Lynch believed that Ireland's future political freedom depended upon economic prosperity. Thus, as Lemass declared to the Fianna Fáil party conference in January 1962, the internationalization of the Irish economy, as symbolized by attaining EEC membership, was a “condition essential to our national survival.”Footnote 11 And, as Lynch said in the Dáil in 1967, “Our strength and our capacity to develop as a political entity derive from our ability to maintain our position as a viable economic unit in an increasingly competitive world. Cut off from the opportunities for economic growth, our political freedom of action would be weakened.”Footnote 12
By and large, and with a few notable exceptions, the Irish political establishment and the Irish public accepted Fianna Fáil's arguments and overwhelmingly supported Irish membership in the EEC. Polls in the 1960s regularly mirrored the results of the first Gallup poll on Irish membership in July 1961, which showed 75 percent supported joining the EEC, with 7 percent in opposition.Footnote 13 And in the May 1972 referendum on Irish membership, 83 percent voted yes versus 17 percent voting no.Footnote 14 Early anti-EEC opponents in Ireland had immense difficulty overcoming the political consensus for membership constructed by Lemass, Lynch, and Fianna Fáil. No major political party supported an anti-EEC line, except for the Irish Labour Party's brief and rather reluctant support during the 1972 referendum, a decision largely taken to maintain some comity in a party riven by factionalism over the wider issues of coalition with Fine Gael and the worsening violence in Northern Ireland.Footnote 15 There were also no anti-EEC pressure groups in Ireland until 1970, when the Marxist republican academics Anthony Coughlan and Raymond Crotty founded the Common Market Study Group, an anti-EEC think tank in 1970, and the Common Market Defense Campaign, a political campaign organization in 1971.Footnote 16 Ireland overwhelmingly rejected the anti-EEC position.
In Scotland, the situation was markedly different. In the early 1960s, most Scottish political elites were generally disinterested in the EEC issue. This was because they initially perceived the issue primarily as a British foreign policy question that had little direct impact or relevance to peoples’ lives in Scotland. Few Scottish MPs participated in the debates in the House of Commons regarding European integration. Those who did, such as the former Labour Secretary of State for Scotland Arthur Woodburn or the Conservative MP Michael Clark Hutchison, treated the matter as an issue of British high politics and rarely referenced any potential Scottish interests in the debate.Footnote 17 Partially this reflected a wider parochialism toward foreign affairs questions among Scottish MPs, particularly Labour members.Footnote 18 However, the manner in which Parliament conducted Scottish business by relegating it to the Scottish committee system (entities such as the Scottish Grand Committee or the Scottish Standing Committee) may have also contributed to disinterest in foreign affairs, as the committees never dealt with such questions. Nevertheless, this parochialism led some in Scottish Labour to characterize the EEC issue as a red herring designed to deflect attention away from more important social and economic debates taking place in Scotland.Footnote 19 The inability to perceive and articulate specific Scottish interests in the EEC issue left an opening for elements of the Scottish labor movement, particularly those in the Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) and the emerging Scottish National Party (SNP) to exploit. In particular, after the stunning Hamilton by-election in November 1967, when the charismatic solicitor Winnie Ewing overturned a majority of 16,000 in one of Labour's safest seats, the SNP used an anti-EEC position as a fundamental component of its independence campaign.Footnote 20
As questions over its EEC membership muddled through British politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, opposition to British membership grew in Scotland. By 1971, influenced by the increasingly aggressive opposition of the STUC and the SNP, the activities of Scottish branches of the British anti-EEC pressure groups, the nationalist campaign on North Sea oil, and a steadily worsening industrial economy, a clear majority of the Scottish population opposed membership.Footnote 21 Although Britain achieved membership in 1973, opposition in Scotland remained high, with one poll showing that 45 percent of Scots wanted Britain to withdraw from the EEC in February 1975.Footnote 22 Thus, Scottish support became critical to victory for pro-Europeans in the June 1975 EEC Referendum. Anxieties over Scottish opposition were such that advisors in British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's office wondered in late 1974 whether a Scottish negative vote in the referendum would doom British EEC membership and his premiership along with it.Footnote 23 Victory, therefore, was an absolute necessity and could only be achieved by out-campaigning and marginalizing anti-EEC opponents and their arguments. After a referendum campaign dominated by the pro-European campaign's financial advantage—a phenomenon Winnie Ewing in Scotland castigated as buying “Scottish votes with English gold”—Britain voted to remain in the EEC by 67 to 32 percent.Footnote 24 In Scotland, the margin was closer but still a victory for pro-Europeans: 58 to 41 percent.
Nationalism and European Integration
Why did Ireland overwhelmingly support membership in the EEC and Scotland, in relative terms, less so? In the first instance, the changing definition and role of nationalism within both Irish and Scottish societies ultimately influenced these differing dynamics. Each country was undergoing a change in how political elites and, to a lesser extent, the public at large perceived their national interests. New nationalist narratives began to appear, and political actors and the general public began to integrate these into the traditionally dominant nationalist ideologies. And as public discourses on constitutional and nationalist issues became more prominent in the media, the question of EEC membership began to take on a whole different frame of reference. Resurgent and reformulated nationalisms altered popular political understanding of European integration in both Ireland and Scotland, although the results were somewhat different.
Ireland in the 1960s was a nationalist bastion searching for a new role, a new conception of what it meant to be Irish in the twentieth century. The old standards of Irish nationalism developed and strengthened during the separatist agitation of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Catholicism, conservatism, and isolationism—were breaking down. The economic stagnation of the 1950s, marked by high emigration and the decline of Irish agriculture, took its toll on de Valera's island idyll and its people.Footnote 25 As the Irish political scientist Brian Girvin has argued, this “distinctive form of nationalism”—an essentially conservative vision of national sovereignty, cultural retrenchment, and austerity institutionalized by the Irish Free State after 1922 and strengthened by Fianna Fáil after 1932—had become “exhausted by 1961” and continued under increasing stress.Footnote 26 Economic decline had caused many to think that “the entire fabric of Irish society was unraveling” and that the state was unable to handle the problems.Footnote 27 And organized Irish Catholicism, which had for so long dominated the state's social institutions and cultural life, found it much harder to resist international cultural influences in music, dress, magazines, and television, weakening its role as guarantor of social convention and national identity.Footnote 28
Stimulated by Lemass's economic reforms, Irish nationalism in the republic was beginning to change in the 1960s. What this meant in practical terms was the abandonment of the ideal of a closed, self-reliant economy, of military neutrality, and even of the goal of ending partition.Footnote 29 As John Horgan has noted, what Lemass was doing, and what Lynch later carried on, was redefining Irish nationalism: “Although it still had an irreducible geographical aspect, its principal components were now human and economic: uniting people, and building a new society.”Footnote 30 The goals of Irish nationalism were no longer autarky and protectionism, neutrality and isolationism. Under Lemass and Lynch, economic prosperity, internationalism, development, and growth defined Irish nationalism.Footnote 31 They left behind the traditional tropes of Irish nationalism centered on the “unfettered control of Irish destinies” and replaced them with a narrative of economic prosperity under the aegis of Europe.Footnote 32 What further accelerated this shift in nationalist rhetoric and goals was the breakout of communal violence in Northern Ireland after 1969. As Patrick O’Mahony and Gerard Delanty have noted, after an initially bellicose response among some in the republic (resulting in the 1970 Arms Crisis), political and public opinion soon became “on the whole hostile to northern nationalist violence and Northern Ireland dropped quite rapidly to a low priority on the political agenda.”Footnote 33 Rejecting its territorial claims to Northern Ireland (due to both practical political considerations stimulated by Lemass and later public revulsion at northern political violence) and reorienting focus toward Europe marked a sea change for Irish nationalist perceptions.Footnote 34
Thus, these two developments in the 1960s and early 1970s helped rewrite Ireland's national narrative in a more cosmopolitan manner. This new narrative conceptualized Ireland not as an island unto itself but as a wealthy country on the dynamic edge of a growing and prosperous Europe.Footnote 35 Such a process, driven primarily from above by the Irish government, forced traditional Irish nationalism to adapt to this new reality of consumption and prosperity. As the Irish historian Alvin Jackson has put it, “The spiritual nationalism of the revolutionary era was replaced by a more materialist ideology, still assertively Irish but promising tangible comforts rather than an empty stomach and an ascetic conviction of moral superiority.”Footnote 36 And, before a nationalist opposition could deploy an anti-EEC argument framed around the spirit of 1916, Lemass and Fianna Fáil created “a new nationalist consensus around economic expansion and Common Market membership.”Footnote 37 As Anthony Coughlan complained, this consensus falsely cast opponents of Irish EEC membership as “out-of-date nationalists, ignorantly and vainly trying to uphold antiquated conceptions of national independence in a world dominated by political giants.”Footnote 38 Anti-EEC campaigners attempted to rebut this view repeatedly but largely failed in their efforts.Footnote 39 The Irish public, implicitly or explicitly, validated the new Lemass consensus by supporting Irish membership in the EEC and supporting Fianna Fáil in the 1961, 1965, and 1969 general elections, as well as the Irish EEC Referendum in 1972.
For Scotland, the situation was different and reflected in part the differing stages of development between the Irish and Scottish nationalist movements in the later half of the twentieth century. Scotland in the 1960s was a society very much in flux. The traditionally dominant industries of coal, steel, shipbuilding, and heavy engineering began to experience serious problems in the 1960s, causing a ripple effect in the Scottish economy that led to declines in productivity, national earnings, wages and incomes, and GDP.Footnote 40 Subsequent governments—both Tory and Labour—embraced the panacea of planning to turn the tide, pushing new industrial development into Scotland (such as the British Motor Corporation's 1962 truck plant in Bathgate, West Lothian), encouraging foreign investment (primarily by American-based firms), and creating and implementing regional planning development plans.Footnote 41 But planning efforts largely proved futile, as unrealistic targets were never met, entities such as the Highlands and Islands Development Board overstepped their bounds, and the British Treasury kept a tight check on the spending initiatives of the Scottish Office.Footnote 42 Although there were signs of increasing prosperity and better standards of living for many Scots, the perception was that Scottish industry was seriously underperforming and unable to “maintain its position in a world of increasing international competitiveness.”Footnote 43 As the Scottish economy increasingly lagged behind the overall British economy, discontent with the British political establishment and the whole idea of “Britishness” grew.
Since the Act of Union in 1707, Scotland had been a constituent part of the British nation, with its identity intermixed with a wider British identity framework. This framework, superimposed atop a wide array of social, religious, economic, and local concerns, was centered on the three pillars of Protestantism, unionism, and imperialism.Footnote 44 These identity pillars anchored Scots to the political and economic benefits of participation in Britain and particularly the British Empire.Footnote 45 However, after 1945, this attachment to British identity began to weaken. Secularization, the centralization of government administrative machinery (such as Scottish Office reforms), and decolonization all began to lessen people's attachment to church, state, and empire.Footnote 46 Industrial decline was an important component of this process as well. Part of the union's appeal north of the border had been the perceived material benefits it provided to Scotland, mainly through opportunities in the British Empire. When this was no longer the case in the postwar period, and Scotland's economy suffered at the hands of both an indifferent British government and the loss of economic power and capital to international big business, it was not surprising that Scots began looking for an alternative.Footnote 47
These factors, in turn, contributed to the rise of a distinct Scottish political nationalism (the SNP) that agitated for Scottish independence, from both London and, ultimately, Brussels. Initially, the SNP was lukewarm, almost favorable, to British membership in the EEC. In the late 1940s, it adopted a position predicated on a “clear and positive linkage between Europe and self-government” for Scotland.Footnote 48 But in the 1960s, greater electoral success, increasing anti-EEC public sentiment, and fears within the party that EEC membership would destroy Scottish national identity caused the SNP to drop its obscure arguments about Scottish participation in the application process. Instead, the party took an explicitly hostile anti-EEC position backed up by a series of hard-nosed and aggressive campaigns. The election of Winnie Ewing to Parliament in 1967 was important in this shift. From the beginning, Ewing made opposition to EEC membership for the sake of Scotland's future independence a fundamental part of her by-election campaign.Footnote 49 In a Wallace Day speech at the site of William Wallace's execution in London in 1305, Ewing drew an explicit connection between Wallace's struggle for freedom and Scotland's present-day fight to keep Britain from dragging it into the EEC, the implication being that Scotland would not join even if given the choice.Footnote 50 Following her victory, Ewing increasingly pushed the SNP's anti-EEC line while in Parliament: she repeatedly questioned ministers, including the prime minister, about producing a white paper on the implications of EEC membership on Scotland, and spoke out in a 1970 Commons debate on the EEC in the face of laughter and interruptions.Footnote 51
The SNP's increasing electoral success forced the main British parties to adapt to the new political reality instead of controlling it. But the fact that both Labour and the Conservatives were intensely divided over the EEC question initially hindered these efforts at push-back, contributing to the increased success anti-EEC advocates in Scotland had in garnering public support. For instance, attempts by both parties to use the devolution issue to stamp down on Scottish nationalism increased public awareness of constitutional issues and the problem of sovereignty that had implications for the EEC debate. The most striking example of this was the debate surrounding the report of the Royal Commission on the Constitution, better known as the Kilbrandon Report, released in 1973.Footnote 52 The main report, which argued for the creation of devolved assemblies in Scotland and Wales, concluded that future EEC membership posed no “major specific consequences” for the devolution question.Footnote 53 But two members of the commission, Lord Norman Crowther-Hunt and Professor Alan Peacock, in a memorandum of dissent, took the opposite view. They argued that serious restructuring of the British constitutional system could not proceed without a more profound understanding of the role of Brussels in the equation, that is to say, that it did not make sense “to seek to devolve legislative power and sovereignty to the different nations and regions of the United Kingdom in those matters where legislative authority [was] in fact moving from London to Brussels.”Footnote 54 Although the specific details of the Kilbrandon Report quickly become subsumed in the wider political struggle over devolution, it serves as an example of how the nationalist struggle in Scotland overlapped with and gained traction from the EEC issue.
Ultimately, then, what both Irish and Scottish nationalism were experiencing during this period was, in a word, Europeanization. Broadly described as the impact of European integration upon European nation-states and societies, Europeanization has a multiplicity of scholarly definitions and uses, reflecting widespread disagreement as to exactly what the process entails.Footnote 55 Thus, the term can refer to both a top-down process of change initiated by the development of various European institutions (e.g., the EEC, the Council of Europe, and the later European Union) as well as the organic blending of ideas, concepts, and cultural discourses between various European states, both of which shaped Irish and Scottish experiences during the 1960s and early 1970s. The differences in how Irish and Scottish nationalism internalized the European narrative played themselves out in the political battles over membership in the EEC. Whereas Ireland largely embraced Europeanization and the connections that facilitated it, Scotland attempted to resist, reflecting in part the different stages of nationalist development between them.
The Role of Britain
Another important factor in understanding the differing levels of support for European integration in Ireland and Scotland was the largely negative role Britain played in the process, both as a distinct political entity and as a more abstract shibboleth. Both Ireland and Scotland, despite the many overt examples of political and cultural independence, were firmly integrated into the wider British economic and cultural orbit. Although it had achieved independence in 1922 as a free state, and republic status in 1948, the logic of its relations with its largest trading partner drove Ireland's economic policy. Despite the nationalist rhetoric of self-reliance and autarky, the state's main export market for agricultural goods remained in Britain, and no matter the ultimate goal of decoupling the Irish economy from the British economy, Irish economic developments were largely at the mercy of decisions by British politicians and economic planners.Footnote 56 When the late 1950s economic disaster hit, it became apparent to many people that self-reliance was a myth and that an overdependence on the British export market for agricultural goods was in fact subjugation of another kind, little different from the days under the Act of Union.Footnote 57 Along with this economic relationship went a cultural imposition through Anglicization that kept Ireland firmly within the British social orbit, this despite the efforts of Irish nationalists after 1922 to build up Gaelic language and culture and de-Anglicize the state.Footnote 58 One can see this phenomenon in many places: for instance, in the structure of Irish government, civil service, trade unions, and employer organizations, which duplicated British models; in the widespread consumption of British magazines, literature, and newspapers; or in the simple fact that much of the programming on the national television station RTÉ, first opened in 1962, was of British and American origins.Footnote 59 As Todd Andrews, the former Irish Volunteer and chairman of both Bord na Móna and RTÉ, wrote in 1970, Anglicization was “making us a Province [of Britain], no less than the six counties have in fact become a Province [of Britain].”Footnote 60 The same was true for Scotland. Although not politically independent, Scotland had maintained what Tom Nairn has described as “institutional nationality without statehood” through its control over its own legal, religious, and educational systems.Footnote 61 However, Westminster and Whitehall primarily set economic, national, and international policy, and for the most part Scottish political parties were merely adjuncts of the national British organizations. Anglicization was also an important element of Scottish society and culture, particularly within the government apparatus and the media, although in the mid-twentieth century this was beginning to change as a distinct Scottish identity became more prominent.Footnote 62
Therefore, in Ireland and Scotland, the issue of Britain influenced the debate over Europe in different ways. For both pro- and anti-EEC campaigners in Ireland, joining Europe became a means to extract the country from this unequal neocolonial relationship. The Irish Labour politician Barry Desmond described this belief as a determination “to break the apron string of our dependence on a declining UK economy for future economic growth.”Footnote 63 However, the economic benefits meant more than just abject wealth and economic opportunity; for some, they afforded an opportunity to move Ireland beyond eight hundred years of English/British colonial domination. Todd Andrews was one of many who argued that “Ireland could [only] survive as an entity distinct from the Anglo-Saxon world which surrounded … by identifying itself with the continent of Europe culturally, and … commercially. I … felt very strongly that unless we absorbed something of the traditions and manners of Europe and acquainted ourselves with its art, architecture and literature we would inevitably degenerate to the level of a province of Britain, second-rate suppliants for small privileges.”Footnote 64 Anti-EEC campaigners also understood Europe in these terms, but their emphasis was different. They believed rejecting Europe was the key to breaking the relationship. If Britain joined and Ireland remained outside and isolated, the EEC's economic and political institutions would fundamentally remake the unequal relationship between them, to Ireland's boon. Instead of following an independent course, if Ireland joined the EEC, it would be like “crawling in on England's coat-tails.”Footnote 65 By refusing to join the EEC along with Britain, Ireland could reclaim its historical European role, which British imperialism had severed and suppressed. As one anti-EEC pamphlet characterized it, “Until Britain got control of Ireland, we had a lot of trade with the Continent as well as many cultural contacts. If anything, British domination has isolated us and brought us under strong Anglo-American influences.”Footnote 66 Such views never gained much currency outside the left republican circles in Sinn Féin. Instead, the argument that EEC membership would help Ireland achieve greater independence from Britain won over anti-EEC arguments.
In Scotland, Scottish nationalists relied heavily on the linkage between anti-British sentiment and anti-EEC attitudes to garner popular support for independence. They did this by emphasizing the differences between British and Scottish interests as a member of the EEC. A key nationalist argument for independence from Britain was to point to the postwar rise in political centralization, a by-product of the British welfare state and more corporatist management of the economy. This centralism, they argued, covered Scotland in a layer of bureaucracy incapable of governing effectively and was reflected in the increasing divergence between the English and Scottish economies. Thus, EEC membership for Britain was simply another layer of bureaucratic control over Scotland, which threatened the very core of the emerging Scottish identity. As the SNP chairman William Wolfe claimed at a rally in 1970, just as the “frightening nightmare” of political centralism in Britain was damaging to Scotland and its people, “the centralism of the Common Market would be a cancer which would eat the very heart out of Scotland with no hope or cure.”Footnote 67
The Role of the State
The maturity and independence of the state sector in both countries played a role in fostering the development of key supporters and interest groups for EEC membership. One can see this in two respects. First, as the work of the Irish historian Gary Murphy has demonstrated, the ability of the Lemass government in Ireland to bring industrial, farming, and trade union organizations into the policy process regarding EEC membership and economic modernization was vital in keeping many of those groups from opposing membership later on.Footnote 68 This effort was part of a larger “corporatist-style initiative by Lemass to involve the unions and industry in the policy of economic development” through the creation of organizations such as the Committee on Industrial Organization (CIO) in 1961, with the goal being “the development of a political structure which integrated the organised socio-economic groups through a system of representation and co-operative mutual interaction at the leadership level and social control at the mass level.”Footnote 69 By offering organizations such as the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), the Federation of Irish Industries (FII), and the National Farmers Association (NFA) an avenue to provide input on EEC membership through this corporatist process, Lemass lessened the likelihood they would oppose future government initiatives on the EEC.
In Scotland, the extent of economic interest group input into the decision-making process regarding EEC membership is unclear and needs further research. But tentative indications are that these groups had limited access to such channels of communication and found it difficult to advocate specifically for Scottish interests in the debate. This in turn contributed to increased anti-EEC sentiment among many such interest groups, such as the Scottish trade union movement. On the whole, the STUC found its limited interactions with the British government on EEC issues rather frustrating. For instance, after passing a motion critical of European integration at its 1962 conference, the STUC's general council attempted to enter a dialogue with Edward Heath, then Lord Privy Seal and chief British negotiator with the EEC, on the motion. Heath largely rebuffed the STUC's communications and rejected their concerns; in response, the STUC later that year refuted Heath's claim that EEC membership would bring jobs to Scotland: “That [Heath] should hazard this opinion without apparently a scintilla of evidence to support it, can only be characterised as an attempt to raise false hopes in the minds of those thousands of men and women in Scotland who are at present without jobs.”Footnote 70 The later Heath government of 1970–74 would repeat this pattern of disregard toward the STUC on the EEC issue.
Second, the Irish civil service was largely pro-EEC and promodernization and therefore played a vital role in creating the new consensus on a pro-EEC economic policy. In many ways, the economic modernization drive instituted by Seán Lemass owes much to T. K. Whitaker in the department of finance and a general change in temperament in Irish policy circles regarding economic policy.Footnote 71 Whitaker argued that “something had to be done or the achievement of national independence would prove to have been a futility” and then articulated a deceptively self-evident answer in his study “Economic Development” in 1958.Footnote 72 This later became the basis for the 1958 Programme for Economic Expansion, which set forth an economic plan to end protectionism, move toward free trade, and encourage foreign investment in Ireland. As the former General Secretary of the Irish Labour Party Brendan Halligan has characterized Whitaker's conclusions, “Whitaker said a) what's wrong; b) we’re hopeless as an economy; [and] c) Europeanization or whatever you want to call it is coming down the road. We’ve got no alternative but to be part of that. And in these circumstances, we’ve got no alternative other than to be competitive, especially as we have a fixed exchange rate. So the name of the game is competitiveness. So get rid of your protectionism and open the economy to the winds of competition, suffer a transition, and get through it.”Footnote 73 Thus, as Halligan summarized it, Whitaker said that “a European economy is emerging [and] we’ve got to be part of it. And the political class by and large said: ‘You’re right. Okay, right.’”Footnote 74 Therefore, long before EEC membership had become an important policy issue, the Irish civil service behind Whitaker and in conjunction with Lemass as Taoiseach had reached a consensus that proved a powerful interest in favor of membership.
In Scotland, the situation could not be more different. Its nominal civil service, the Scottish Office, played virtually no role in shaping elite or public opinion on the EEC or in protecting Scottish interests during the various negotiations surrounding British membership, although further research might reveal different shades of nuance on this question. No Scottish officials or the Secretary of State for Scotland participated directly in any of Britain's negotiations for EEC membership, a fact that both pro- and anti-EEC campaigners criticized repeatedly. The absence of the Scottish Office from the EEC debate, at times, became the object of political mockery. For instance, during the 1975 referendum campaign, the Liberal MP David Steel, speaking at a Scotland in Europe (SIE) rally in Edinburgh, took a brief shot at the Labour Secretary of State for Scotland, the anti-EEC Willie Ross, by stating, “And I have argued that there is nothing to stop us now having a Scottish Office presence in Brussels were it not that unhappily the present Secretary of State for Scotland still believes that the Common Market doesn’t exist.”Footnote 75
Understanding Sovereignty
Finally, a differing understanding of the idea of sovereignty may also explain why early anti-EEC activists were more successful in Scotland than in Ireland. The former Irish Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald has argued that British and Irish problems with the transfer of sovereignty inherent in EEC membership were different in origin. For Ireland, the problem came from the fact that the state's independence had been so recently acquired, thus creating a greater desire among many to retain it. According to Fitzgerald, “Countries that have recently acquired sovereignty naturally attach a special value to it. It is scarcely a coincidence that the only country which negotiated membership in the Community but was finally forced by its own public opinion to withdraw its application was Norway, which with Ireland is the only Western European State to have achieved independence in the [twentieth] century—albeit with much less trauma than in the case of Ireland!”Footnote 76 For Britain, he argued, this phenomenon was the opposite. British sovereignty was deeply rooted in the past and centered on the political conviction that Britain was an island free from continental entanglements and safe from European invasion. Therefore, relinquishing sovereignty into the EEC threatened this deeply held certainty in British political life. How each country dealt with this, he argued, also varied. Whereas British elites had considerable difficulty accepting the political implications of membership both before and after joining the EEC, Irish elites not only embraced the reality of its limited sovereignty but also came to believe that pooling sovereignty with the EEC would enhance Irish sovereignty in actuality.Footnote 77
For Ireland, this analysis appears persuasive, especially when one considers the attention given to explaining the practical reality of Ireland's limited political sovereignty in the 1972 white paper “The Accession of Ireland to the European Communities.”Footnote 78 The document itself was a comprehensive statement of the government's case for membership in the lead-up to the May referendum contest. In it, the government asserted that Ireland enjoyed “very little effective economic sovereignty” but that membership in an economic trading bloc would only enhance Ireland's control over its economic destiny.Footnote 79 According to the white paper, “Such limitations on national freedom of action which membership of the communities will involve for us will be more than counter-balanced by the influence which we will be able to bring to bear on the formulation of community policies affecting our interests.”Footnote 80 Or, as Joseph Lee put it more pithily, “Critics who held that accession would amount to the sale of the national birthright for a mess of common agricultural pottage, and that the jewel of Irish sovereignty was a pearl of too great price to be bartered for the flesh pots of Brussels, were bluntly told Ireland could not lose what it had not got.”Footnote 81 Ultimately, sovereignty as a theme was an important component of the government's campaign for a yes vote in the 1972 referendum, becoming what Dermot Keogh has described as the “central focus” of the campaign.Footnote 82
For Scotland, the issue was a bit more muddled. This was because both pro- and anti-EEC Scottish campaigners’ hesitancy regarding sovereignty and British membership flowed from different motivations. Unionist politicians such as the Scottish MPs Edward “Teddy” Taylor and Michael Clark Hutchison had great affection for Britain's long-standing sovereignty as enshrined in the union, the monarchy, the empire and commonwealth, and the centrality of Parliament. Thus, EEC membership threatened to prorogate Britain's ancient powers and privileges and was therefore unacceptable. As Hutchison said in a 1967 Commons debate on EEC entry, “In all these matters I am guided by two principles; first that I will not support policies which cause Her Majesty's subjects overseas and in the Commonwealth to be treated worse economically than foreigners, and secondly, that I will not see a lessening of the sovereignty of Britain or of Parliament. Nor was I elected for this purpose.”Footnote 83 On the other hand, Scottish nationalists framed concerns regarding sovereignty differently. As an active populist movement struggling to free Scotland from the chains of union, EEC membership threatened to strangle an infant Scottish nation in its crib before it could stand on its own independent feet. This was a sentiment that underlay most of the SNP's rhetoric on the EEC in the early 1970s. For example, a party handbill for the 1970 general election wrapped up the threat to Scottish sovereignty in rather excited language:
These men (and their parties) are dangerous! Heath, Wilson, Grimond. Heath and Wilson (and Grimond too) are hell bent on dragging us into the Common Market with neither choice nor voice. do you want:—Soaring food prices?—Macaroni for your Sunday joint?—An influx of cheap foreign labour, depressing your wages?—To share the instability of France or Italy, tottering between Anarchy and Communism?—To be dominated by the might of Germany? There will be no room at Brussels for the Tories “Scottish Assembly” or the Liberals federal nonsense. We would have no voice at Brussels. the common market is not an election issue for them, but it is for you.Footnote 84
In other words, not having achieved absolute political sovereignty, Scottish nationalists reacted against the further bondage of EEC membership. As political nationalism was ascendant in Scotland during the EEC debate, opposition to the EEC was more prominent.
Conclusion
What then are the legacies of the struggles over European integration in Ireland and Scotland between 1961 and 1975? In the near term, the answers were not much. The EEC opponents largely failed to sway the public against membership in both countries and quickly became labeled as simply more groups swept away by the inexorable march of progress, modernization, and the idea of Europe. Political matters in Ireland quickly returned to a focus on the violence in Northern Ireland and the subsequent defeat of Fianna Fáil in the 1973 general election. In some circles, Ireland's entrance into the EEC in the face of dogged opposition from militant Irish nationalism served as a rejection of those organizations and their tactics. As the Labour politician and intellectual Conor Cruise O’Brien later put it, “Sinn Féin IRA (including both factions) was a paper-tiger electorally speaking.”Footnote 85 In Scotland, European integration as a domestic issue began to recede from public view, with even the SNP quietly dropping its overt opposition to the EEC in order to move in a more pro-European direction, emphasizing a positive message about Scottish representation in community institutions.Footnote 86 The immediate focus shifted to Scotland's further economic difficulties and political war over the 1979 devolution referendum.Footnote 87 Despite all the “sturm und drang” during the lead-up to membership, once it was over, politics seemed to move on in both countries.
However, although it is dangerous for a historian to deal too extensively with the present, it is important to note that, in taking the longer view, resistance to European integration as a phenomenon has not receded in either country. In fact, in some respects, it has grown more prominent in public discourse. In Ireland, subsequent EEC and later European Union (EU) treaties have had to survive a public referendum before going forward. And in each of those referenda, the EEC opponents noticeably increased their support.Footnote 88 From 1973 to 2001, opposition to Europe went from 17 percent to 53 percent before dropping back down to 37 percent in 2002.Footnote 89 Notwithstanding the fact that the defeat of the 2001 Nice Treaty was generally the result of apathy on the part of the government and the public at large (turnout was only a little under 39 percent), modern-day opposition to European integration in Ireland has built upon its early experiences in the late 1960s and early 1970s to increase its public support.Footnote 90 If nothing else, the recent Irish referendum defeat for the Treaty of Lisbon, with approximately 53 percent voting against the treaty versus 46 percent voting yes on a turnout of 53 percent in a June 2008 poll, clearly demonstrates the unease with which more and more Irish voters view the expanded EU.Footnote 91
Nevertheless, this does not mean that the anti-Europe tendency is poised to become the dominant strain of Irish political discourse any time soon. Irish public support for Irish membership in the EU is constantly near the top of the community table per the EU's Eurobarometer polling (unlike Britain, which is almost always near or at the bottom).Footnote 92 And it is important to note that the manner in which Irish political elites debated Irish membership in the EEC helped pave the way for public acceptance of the result. Yet it ultimately remains to be seen what the effect of Ireland's upcoming status as a net contributor to the EU budget process (meaning they pay in more money than they receive in aid) will have on public attitudes toward the EU, particularly in light of the rapid changes affecting Ireland because of the meteoric rise and recent fall of its Celtic Tiger prosperity.Footnote 93
In Scotland, evaluating the growth of anti-Europe attitudes is more difficult. Because of the comingling of British and Scottish identities and the shifting positions of the main political parties, evaluating the motivations behind opposition to Europe proves problematic. The SNP's conversion in 1988 to a pro-EEC position with its “Scotland in Europe” policy, which argued for Scottish independence within the context of the EEC, has no doubt complicated this.Footnote 94 As one of the main forces against membership in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the SNP's shift toward support for Europe should in general represent a decline in anti-European attitudes. The SNP certainly campaigned as if Scots were more European than their English neighbors to the south, characterized as being more “obsessed about keeping warm beer and cricket safe from Johnny Foreigner” than embracing the unity ideals of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman.Footnote 95 But anti-Europe attitudes toward the EU have remained high in Britain, and Scotland too has maintained its own pockets of die-hard anti-Europe campaigners.Footnote 96 Thus, one can understand the years 1961–75 not as the completion of a contentious public debate in Britain's “Celtic Fringe” but as merely the opening salvo in a wider struggle over the meaning, role, and importance of Europe in the British Isles.
