The US and Britain’s Approach to Europe, January to March 1967

Abstract

In his book, The Discipline of Power, published in 1968, the former State Department under secretary of state and leading Europeanist from the Kennedy and Johnson eras, George Ball, entitled a chapter ‘The Disadvantages of the Special Relationship’. Beginning with an admission that there was ‘every reason’ for such a relationship to exist because the Americans and the British ‘look out on the world through similarly refracted mental spectacles’, Ball conceded that there was ‘some foundation in fact behind General de Gaulle’s use of the generic term “les Anglo-Saxons”’. Criticising US governments for encouraging Britain ‘in the belief that she could, by her own efforts — so long as she maintained a specially favoured position with the United States — play an independent great power role’, Ball stated that this partly American-inspired pretension had ‘deflected her from coming to terms with her European destiny’.1 This was the argument that Ball had presented to the Wilson government and to President Johnson in mid-1966 just before he left the State Department. Thus, he did not see his aspiration realised while in office but the British very shortly afterwards took the decision to probe for EEC membership. They did so principally due to the economic and political realities created by the July 1966 sterling crisis yet the probe decision, like the second application that followed it, was also influenced by the encouragement given by the Americans. Indeed, for the British, the move towards the EEC did not imply what George Ball thought it should, namely an end to an exclusive Anglo-American relationship, but instead the prolongation of it. The position of leadership in Europe that Britain desired to sustain its national and international strength was not intended to succeed relations with the US, but reinforce and supplement them. As the probe got underway in early 1967, however, it became clear that although Ball’s terminal view of the Anglo-American relationship was generally considered extreme in Washington, there was an expectation that UK-US relations had entered a period of transition initiated by Britain’s new European ambitions.