Canberra, 13 November 1962
Now, Sir, the next matter that I thought I might say a word to you about is, and I suppose it can’t be avoided, the Common Market. I am not going to endeavour to say anything very fresh on this matter because there is nothing very fresh to be said. I think the outstanding development in the Common Market negotiations since the Prime Minister’s Conference has been that the Government of the United Kingdom has had an overwhelming vote in the Conservative Party in favour of going in and only the other day, had an overwhelming vote in the House of Commons to support the steps that had been taken. 1 Now you may, as I sometimes do myself, wonder whether that is a very good negotiating position to be in. You may wonder whether that is a very, very strong position to be saying to the Six when you are negotiating with them, ‘Well, look, we must go in anyhow.’ I would have thought it was still not, but still, they know their business better than I do. But I think we have now got to a point when, in all probability, Great Britain is going in. Therefore, we will have to think of this matter increasingly as one of the facts of life. In all probability, within twelve months, Great Britain will be a member of the European Community. What effect that will have on the Commonwealth structure I have spoken about at great length with considerable emphasis and I don’t want to argue about it. Personally, as you know, I think that loose confederations either break up or they get closer. They end up by a dissolution of the idea or they end up as federations. That has been the history in the United States; it has been the history in the West Indies where they began to think they had a federation but because the pulling-apart forces were too great, it broke up and now we have a series of separate Commonwealth countries in the West Indies. In the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, where Sir Roy Welensky2 is struggling hard to preserve the Federation though the odds appear to be slightly, at any rate, against him, the pulling-apart movement is on. Therefore, I have resolved all this constitutional thing in my own mind by saying, ‘Well, you go into Europe, you tell us, and I believe you, that you don’t want to go into a federation, you don’t want to become a state in a federation of Europe, but you go in like that, you must want it to succeed, you must want to get the highest possible measure of economic unity and the more of that you get, the nearer you are to a political federation.’ Well, I hope I will be wrong on that matter, but as nobody would engage in the nonsense of going into the European Community with the idea of breaking it up but only with the idea of building into it and helping it to build itself to more and more unity and more and more strength, then it seems to me to be practically inevitable that federal political principles will come to be applied, that there will be a considerable concerting of political policies of all sorts and that in the result, Great Britain will tend to become a State in a European federation. That is not a view that is universally held. I hold it myself very strongly and have expressed it in the Conference in London as clearly as I could. The British Government doesn’t agree with it, but they will be making the decision, and if they make the decision and if their movement into Europe becomes a profound success and if this strengthens the economy of Great Britain, then we will all be happy, but we will have to revise some of our ideas of what the Commonwealth means. Still, I have had to revise so many myself in my own time that perhaps I can accommodate myself to another revision.
But one thing does emerge from it, that the old days of the pattern of trade in the Commonwealth based on free entries and on preferences—all these mutual arrangements that have been going on for so many years—are coming to an end, and we will therefore increasingly have to stand on our own feet and pursue our own trading policies and try to persuade countries all round the world to agree with them.
[ matter omitted ]
1 Macmillan had secured an overwhelming endorsement of EEC entry at the annual Conservative Party Conference at Llandudno. Some days prior to the conference, British Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell had spoken out firmly against EEC membership, declaring that a decision to join on unfavourable terms for the Commonwealth would mark ‘he end of a thousand years of history’. This statement seems to have silenced the EEC dissenters within the Conservative Party—presumably out of reluctance to side with the Opposition—and the Llandudno meeting provided a spectacle of almost unanimous praise and enthusiasm for Macmillan’s European vision. Buoyed by their success at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, British ministers spoke of their European enterprise in lavish terms, comparing it to the ‘challenges of the Elizabethan age’ and the ‘great undertakings of the Victorian era’. Foreign Minister Lord Home declared, amid rapturous applause, that ‘we should finish with all speed the translation from Empire to Commonwealth’.
2 Prime Minister of the Central African Federation.
[NAA: Al838, 727/4/2 PART 5]