Words of Change: the Rhetoric of Commonwealth, Common Market and Cold War, 1961–3

Abstract

In January 1963, after French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community (EEC, or Common Market), Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary: ‘All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins.’2 Yet if the rejection of the application was a political disaster in the short term, Britain’s subsequent path to EEC membership appeared to vindicate Macmillan’s belief that there had been nowhere else to turn. By this token, the eighteen months between the July 1961 decision to apply and de Gaulle’s veto stand out as a seminal moment in the reorientation from Commonwealth to Europe — even though, when it came to the point, history (for the time being) failed to turn in the required direction. The period’s novelty lay in the fact that, for the first time, a British government engaged in a battle to persuade its public that the country’s future lay in Europe and, simultaneously, to persuade Commonwealth leaders that only on that basis could the Commonwealth’s future be assured. When the veto finally exposed the hollowness of the government’s argument that there was no necessary conflict between the claims of Commonwealth and Europe, Europe gained in its attractions from the fact that it was the choice that had been denied. The terms of the national debate about the Commonwealth and the Common Market, then, have much to tell us about the process of Britain’s turn from Empire in the ‘wind of change’ era.