The Conservative Party’s position on Europe remains ambiguous – far from resolving the issue, the promise of a referendum has the party all over the place. By contrast Labour’s pro-EU position now looks set to become clear. And yet in the past it was the Tories who championed greater integration in Europe. Richard Carr and Bradley Hart trace their journey from the party of Europe to the party of cautious Eurosceptics

Carr, Richard

Hart, Bradley

LSE Research Online

(Credit: EU Exposed)3/12/2014The historic Conservative trend in favour of participation inthe EU jars with contemporary political attitudesblogs.lse.ac.uk /politicsandpolicy/the-historic-conservative-trend-in-favour-of-participation-in-any-european-union-jars-with-contemporary-political-attitudes/The Conservative Party’s position on Europe remains ambiguous – far from resolving the issue, thepromise of a referendum has the party all over the place. By contrast Labour’s pro-EU positionnow looks set to become clear. And yet in the past it was the Tories who championed greaterintegration in Europe. Richard Carr and Bradley Hart trace their journey from the party ofEurope to the party of cautious Eurosceptics.Since 2010 David Cameron has rather thrown the traditional Conservative antipathy toconstitutional reform out of the window. He has acquiesced to fixed term parliaments, a vote onScottish independence in November and, should the Tories emerge victorious in 2015, areferendum on British membership of the European Union by the end of 2017. The Tories – partlydriven by the necessities of coalition, partly by reasons of internal party management – suddenlyseem very radical indeed.It is Europe that is arguably again most prominent of the recent manoeuvres, despite splitting theparty in the 1990s, and contributing to disastrous electoral performances in 1997 and 2001. In hisJanuary 2013 Bloomberg speech, Cameron stated that unless his negotiations with the EUresulted in the repatriation of significant powers – he is yet to define exactly what these include – then theConservative Party would be prepared to campaign to leave the European Union. He claims to hope to keep thecountry in, but he may end up leading it out.As we show in our recent edited volume on TheFoundations of the British Conservative Party, thisignores the historic Conservative trend in favour ofparticipation in any European union. Modern pro-Europeans like Laura Sandys, Damian Green andKen Clarke are not somehow alien to the Torytradition, but steadfast within it (particularly Sandys,who follows her father Duncan in such leanings). Thehistory on this is fascinating, not least because it jarswith contemporary political attitudes on the one hand,and the view that all diplomatic machinations in the1920s and 1930s involved some combination oftotalitarians like Mussolini or Hitler on the other. It istherefore worth setting out.Well before Macmillan’s various woes of the1950s/1960s and indeed Ted Heath leading the UKinto the EEC in the 1970s, the Austrian aristocrat Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi created an interwar InternationalPan-European Union (PEU). It is an often forgotten that it included a number of leading Tories (and Liberals) in itsmembership, and enjoyed extensive financial support from Conservative businessmen in the 1930s and 1940s.Circles within the Labour Party, for their part, were concerned that the PEU and pan-Europeanism more generallywas a tool of big business too closely aligned with the Conservatives to play a role in working-class politics. As aresult, as we show in our joint essay in the aforementioned volume, invitations to the crucial Hague Congress of1/31948 were overwhelmingly offered to Liberals and Conservatives with comparatively few Labour members included.Pro-European Labour MPs were even warned off expressing sympathies for the pro-European cause. Part of thereason Herbert Morrison famously declared the Durham miners ‘wouldn’t wear’ the idea of Europe was because itwas in some sense viewed as the highest stage of capitalism, a view forwarded in later decades by Tony Benn andBarbara Castle. The historic precedent indicates they had something of a point.What accounts for this apparent change from the pro-business pan-Europeanism of the Second World War period tothe Tory Euroscepticism of today? The answer seems in part to lie in Britain’s relationship with the United States,and in particular the Conservative Party’s perception of both the ‘Special Relationship’ and Britain’s place in theworld per se. It is worth remembering that even in 1940 there was no guarantee that the U.S. would intervene onBritain’s side in the war against Germany. Longer term, the Americans were also seen as emergent rivals in anumber of important spheres. In 1929 for instance Charles Howard-Bury, Conservative MP for Chelmsford, arguedin the House of Commons that the only way to combat high American tariffs was to ‘discuss the possibility of theformation of an economic united states of Europe’. American economic power, ascendant and clearly a potentialthreat to the Empire, was clearly at the forefront of these concerns.Coudenhove-Kalergi courted interwar Conservative leaders by appealing to similar concerns, telling Leo Amery in1931 that pan-Europeanism could be part of an effort of ‘forming a necessary element of equilibrium towards theSoviets and America’ in the future. After the end of the Second World War, there was widespread fear that theAmericans might withdraw from European affairs as the post-Woodrow Wilson Republican administrations had donethroughout the 1920s. With Conservative politicians increasingly aware of Britain’s imperial decline after 1945,either the United States or Europe had to serve as a partner in a likely uncomfortable international peace with theSoviet Union on the one hand, and administer whatever remained of the Empire on the other. With America’sreliability in both open to question, pan-European union was seen as perhaps the only alternative.Partly then, this was the result of pragmatism. If America could not defend Britain against the Soviet Union thenwider Europe might have to do. Yet such a view would ignore the cosmopolitan nature of 1945-era Conservatism onthe one hand, and an aversion to the ‘little Englander’ type on the other. As with the most openly pro-Europe partyleader in current British politics – Nick Clegg, a half Dutch man whose wife is Spanish and whose children speak anumber of European languages – many of the Conservatives who were most in favour of European engagement oreven federalism were themselves au fait with other tongues. Anthony Eden spoke fluent French, with Ted Heath’slater accented variant an attempt to do similar. During the interwar period Leo Amery and Edward Spears were buttwo of many Conservatives proficient in a foreign language. In a literal sense, Conservatives of this era could talk totheir potential European partners. How many Tories have such skills, or admit to them, today?As events turned out, the United States did not disengage from Europe after 1945, instead pursuing a policy ofContainment against the spread of Soviet communism. The Marshall Plan invested billions of American dollars intothe rebuilding of European cities, putting the Soviets on the defensive as they prevented the Eastern Bloc fromaccepting the Truman Administration’s offer of funds. The Americans would clearly be a more reliable partner after1945 than they had been after 1918, moving the responsibility for maintaining collective security in Europe fromLondon and Paris to Washington. Even with the British Empire on its deathbed, Europe would take a backseat to therising economic and political power of the United States, particularly as the Bretton Woods system effectively endedBritish complaints about American tariffs in favour of U.S. dominance. The $5bn loan negotiated by John MaynardKeynes on behalf of the Attlee government lent the British a direct financial tie to their American cousins, as much ofEurope negotiated similar bilateral deals. London-Washington or Frankfurt-New York became arguably moreintertwined than relations between the UK and the new EEC.Where does this leave the Conservatives and the question of Europe today? Paradoxically, much the same as theywere in the late 1920s. Britain today no longer fears American protectionism, in part because it has integrated intothe European marketplace in much the way the pro-business factions of the Conservative Party might have wished.To withdraw completely from Europe would likely have devastating consequences for the British economy. UKIP’s2/3appeal is to some degree predicated on withdrawal from the EU (as well as a general anti-politics agenda), but howexactly this would occur remains unclear. “Brussels,” “bureaucrats” and “banking regulations” may mark anti-EUTory discourse, but “business” is surely the order of the day, particularly in these days of financially straitened timesand five year projections from the OBR which rely on economic stability. Fundamentally, these interests make theConservatives a party of ‘in’ more than ‘out’. Yet to wholeheartedly embrace these views would be politicallydangerous, particularly at a time of rising right-wing populism abroad, and Nigel Farage at home. The rationalbusiness case on the one hand, and the longer term belief in a common European civilization on the other, are notperhaps as high up the political agenda as they have been.There are many paradoxes in all of this, not least the fact that there are many lessons the Conservatives can learnfrom Europe – especially, as recently noted on this blog, from Germany. Equally, whilst the Tories often allege thatLabour has ducked the big questions on the economy because of the desire to remain popular, it could well beargued that the Conservatives are about to lead the country out of the EU against what a significant tranche of thatparty would acknowledge to be in the economic national interest. Far from resolving the issue, in many ways thereferendum has the party all over the place. And by contrast, on Europe, Labour’s position looks set to becomepretty clear. Ed Miliband has now pledged not ‘to hold a gun to [our] own head’ on the issue of EU reform, suggestinga binding commitment to an EU referendum is not exactly forthcoming from across the parliamentary aisles. Ifpeople like the EU they will very likely vote Labour in 2015 (Lib Dem diehards apart), and if they viscerally hate it,they will vote UKIP. The Conservative position remains ambiguous for all the reasons given here.Throughout this parliament David Cameron’s aristocratic, Etonian background has received much public comment.Ironically however, he may be about to turn his back on the cosmopolitan tradition of his more patrician Conservativepredecessors, and take Britain into territory unknown for over forty years. The Tories have set out a fudge designedto crush squabbles on the right. They have not achieved this. Now they will have to deal with the consequences.Note:  This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of theLondon School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting. About the AuthorsDr Richard Carr is a Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University and a member of the LabourHistory Research Unit. He is the author of One Nation Britain: History, the Progressive Traditionand Practical Ideas for Today’s Politicians, published by Ashgate this summer. Dr Bradley W. Hart is a Lecturer at the Department of Political Science, California StateUniversity, Fresno. He is the co-editor of The Foundations of the British ConservativeParty: Essays on Conservatism from Lord Salisbury to David Cameron, published by BloomsburyAcademic last year.3/3

The historic Conservative trend in favour of participation in the EU jars with contemporary political attitudes

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