European integration avant la lettre

I have recently had the pleasure of reading William Pickles' 1950 article "The Strasbourg Illusion" in the Political Quarterly (Vol 21). Pickles writes in a humourous prose style that went out with bakelite and the zeppelin, reminding me of F M Cornford, and like Cornford was slightly overshadowed in literary terms by his own wife.

This is a report on the then-recent goings-on in Brussels and Strasbourg of a European parliament-like Assembly for the Council of Europe; indeed the body continues to exist today, though now much overshadowed by the European Parliament, which I guess plays the role of Dorothy Pickles in that story.

The Council of Europe is the body associated with ECHR, rather than the European Union.

What is most entertaining about the short article is not the style of language, but three aspects of the situation, two of which have almost completely reversed, yet one of which is the same:

public and elite opinion about European integration

the role of the Labour and Conservative parties

the ultimate political and constitutional arguments about supranationalism

Now in 1950, the UK's nationalist, Eurosceptic government faced a globalist pro-European opposition. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. But of course in those days, and until about 1987, the Eurosceptic nationalists were the Labour party and the Tories were the ones pushing European integration.

Pickles' account of the situation is partly contingent on the times in which he lived; he was grounded very much in the political reality that public opinion and elite opinion was at the time completely unreconcilable with the implications of European integration. Opinion has completely reversed in all of the countries that were then members of the Council of Europe, except in the UK, where support for membership of the EU has never been stable (see historic opinion polls linked below).

Much of the charm in his article is the gentle fun it pokes at the sort of University debating society style of the "irresponsible" and powerless assembly in Brussels. He is careful to stress that by "responsible" he means responsible in the sense of "answerable" and in the sense in which it is used in the term "Responsible Government". What comes to the fore is the particularity and specificity of the national/linguistic traditions, e.g., the complete lack of common parliamentary procedures or common definitions of important legal and political terms, which places Ireland, Anglophone but not Anglophile, very firmly in the same boat as Britain.

Yet the abstract questions posed about supranationalism in the 1940s were never answered, simply ignored. Supranationalism, which is federalism minus democracy, was simply adopted and implemented with almost no debate or understanding. These sit (as J M Kelly would put it) as unexploded bombs in the intellectual furniture of Europe, doomed to detonate in the future.

Responsible government

https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/european-union-membership-trends