Abstract
The socialist contribution to the creation of the European Economic Community has long been overlooked and misunderstood. Existing scholarship emphasises short-term considerations in explaining why the French Socialist and German Social Democratic Parties supported a European Common Market in 1956–7. This article offers a new perspective by placing these parties’ decisions within a longer context of socialist views on free trade, tariffs and regional economic organisation. Based on fresh archival materials, this article explores how socialist proposals for securing an economic peace after the First World War continued to influence socialist policies on European economic integration in the 1950s.
Highlights
The socialist contribution to the creation of the European Economic Community has long been overlooked and misunderstood
The SPD had begun a rancorous campaign against the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), a French proposal supported by the SFIO
A year before the SFIO had opposed the inclusion of West Germany in a six nation customs union including France, an initiative supported by the SPD
Summary
The socialist contribution to the creation of the European Economic Community has long been overlooked and misunderstood. Disappointed by the emasculation of US President Woodrow Wilson’s proposals for a liberal peace, in the 1920 and 1930s they developed a woeful narrative of alternatives not taken These alternatives, which married free trade with regional organisation, became fixtures of interwar congresses, international meetings and party programmes. The article reinterprets SFIO and SPD support for the European Economic Community (EEC), a six nation common market, by highlighting a long tradition of socialist thought on trade liberalisation in transnational and national spheres. This approach contributes focus and precision to the more abstract discussions of interwar ideas of ‘Europe’ in studies by Willy Buschak and Tania Maync.[3] It accomplishes several historiographical innovations.
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