The Official History of Britain and the European Community, Volume II: From Rejection to Referendum, 1963-1975. By Stephen Wall

Abstract

In 2002, Alan Milward published the first volume of the official history of Britain’s relations with the European Community, covering the period from 1945 to 1963. Taking sides in a rich historiographical debate on whether Britain had missed an opportunity by failing to join from the start, Milward developed the thesis that Britain had actually followed a consistent and essentially rational national strategy in her European policy, which he then traced from the end of the Second World War up to Britain’s first application to join the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1961–3. In so doing, Milward digested his scrupulous primary source research into an academically rigorous interpretative framework for British policy towards Europe; it is likely to remain the leading work on the subject for decades to come. Sir Stephen Wall’s approach to the second volume of the series is markedly different, as his book deliberately offers no basic thesis or central argument (p. 2). Instead, he wants the decision-makers of the time to ‘tell their own story as far as possible’ in their own words (p. 2), relying in his narrative almost entirely on the official government records of the day. Above all, Wall wants to explain why, between 1963 and 1975, ‘three very different Prime Ministers all concluded that, in the British national interest, there was no viable alternative to joining the Common Market’ (p. i).