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The Creation of the European Union
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The UK and the European Union
In this lecture, Dr Simon Usherwood (University of Surrey) thinks about the European Union and its relationship with the United Kingdom, focusing in particular on Brexit. We begin in the first module by thinking about how the EU came into being, paying close regard to the window of opportunity for European integration that arose after the Second World War. In the second module, we think about the complex question of how best to understand the EU, introducing the ideas of ‘intergovernmentalism’ and ‘supranationalism’ to help us make sense of its structure and operation. We then move on in the third module to consider the impact of EU membership on UK political life, using this as a lens to cast light on EU-member state interactions more broadly. Finally, in the fourth module, we address the thorny question of Brexit, thinking in particular about the reasons why the 2016 Referendum was called, the sheer complexity of the UK’s entanglement with Europe, and what this means for the future.
The Creation of the European Union
In this module, we think about the creation of the institutional roots of the European Union in the aftermath of the Second World War. In particular, we focus on the confluence of three factors which created a window of opportunity for European integration: (i) a political impetus to bring European states into co-operation and create a lasting peace after the horrors of war and genocide; (ii) an economic impetus to repair infrastructure and re-forge European trade networks; and (iii) the international context of the Cold War and particularly the desire of the United States to bolster European capitalist powers and prevent the spread of communism.
Hello.
00:00:06I'm Simon Ashwood, and I'm a reader in politics at the University of Surrey,
00:00:06based in Guilford.
00:00:11In this first block, I'm going to talk a bit about why the EU exists or how it came to be,
00:00:12and I want to focus primarily on a window
00:00:19of opportunity that opened up from 1945 onwards.
00:00:23Now what happens in that window is you get a number of factors coming together
00:00:28which reinforce each other and really open up the way for
00:00:34the development of a European level of government and governance,
00:00:38which has then become the European Union.
00:00:43The first part of that clearly is the experience of the Second World War itself.
00:00:47We often hear people talking about the peace project,
00:00:53the desire to avoid a third world war between European powers,
00:00:57and that might seem rather difficult for us now,
00:01:03so many decades later to appreciate.
00:01:06But at the time it was a very powerful
00:01:08and visceral the real element within European politics
00:01:12that the destruction that had been caused,
00:01:16the loss of life, the experience of the Holocaust,
00:01:18all of these things did give people a very urgent and real sense of the
00:01:21need to try and find a different way of governing and managing European affairs.
00:01:26Now that also fed into, uh, the experiences of many Postwar leaders, people like,
00:01:32uh Konrad Adenauer, the first German chancellor, Rcd Gaspari,
00:01:38the Italian prime minister, Jean Man and,
00:01:43uh the others who were involved in
00:01:46the pro process of establishing those institutions.
00:01:50They brought an experience of the war of working across party political lines,
00:01:53which gave them, then a range of contacts and an experience and a motivation
00:01:59that was essentially important in all of that.
00:02:05But it's not just about that desire to avoid war
00:02:10that drives and opens up this window of opportunity.
00:02:13What we also have is a strong economic rationale.
00:02:18Remember that the war destroys a huge amount of European industry,
00:02:21the infrastructure,
00:02:25the trading links that have been destroyed during the interwar period,
00:02:27the autocracy that you saw in the fascist
00:02:31and nationalist regimes in Germany and Italy,
00:02:35and the other axis powers.
00:02:37All of that needed to be rebuilt managed,
00:02:38and because this was a Europe wide problem, there was a strong incentive,
00:02:43actually that by working together you could manage that process,
00:02:46rebuild those economies,
00:02:50all the more effectively and with much greater impact
00:02:51on improving the material well being of citizens.
00:02:55So it's not just about the politics. It's also about the economics
00:02:59where these two come together and be really vitally reinforced.
00:03:04Those in a third core aspect of what happens,
00:03:09which is that the end of the Second World War is also the start of the Cold War period.
00:03:13And when we look at how the EU has developed,
00:03:19really appreciating the role of the Cold War
00:03:22as a determining structure for European nations,
00:03:25I think is essential
00:03:30now that has two sides straight. On the one hand, you have the positive elements of U.
00:03:32S. Involvement and encouragement for European integration.
00:03:40The Americans were one of the really big
00:03:43supporters of continental European countries working together.
00:03:46Uh,
00:03:50the Marshall Aid that the US provided from 1947 onwards was conditioned on European
00:03:51states creating an organisation to manage those flows of aid across the continent.
00:03:59Uh, but also clearly, the U. S.
00:04:05Had an interest in getting European states
00:04:07to work together to strengthen their economies,
00:04:11not only for the U.
00:04:14S economy as a key market, but also as a defence against the Soviet Union
00:04:15and that Soviet aggression was very much a driving force.
00:04:22Remember that from 1945 onwards we have the Red
00:04:27Army occupying half of the continent of Europe.
00:04:31We have very strong communist parties in countries such as Italy and France
00:04:36and Greece.
00:04:41Real concerns that there was going to be a communist
00:04:43encroachment into more and more of Europe as a whole
00:04:46and that by working together you would be able to
00:04:52better contain and resist that and build up the bipolar
00:04:55system that came to characterise the Cold War.
00:04:59So as that stabilises and we get the Iron Curtain descending across Europe,
00:05:04as Churchill put it,
00:05:09you also see a really strong incentive to
00:05:11create more cooperation within those two blocks.
00:05:13So the U.
00:05:17S doesn't really get involved economically in that process,
00:05:17but certainly politically, it's a strong supporter of the efforts
00:05:21of Western Europe to do that in much the same way as the Soviet
00:05:25Union tried to encourage similar kinds of moves with the creation of comic con
00:05:30in Central and Eastern Europe,
00:05:35and just as a mark of that and thinking ahead from that initial post war period,
00:05:38what you also have at the end of the Cold War at the end of the 19 eighties is
00:05:43the moment at which the European Union expands out
00:05:49of Western Europe across the whole of the continent.
00:05:53And that's not a tall coincidental
00:05:56that the shape and development of the European
00:05:59Union in that initial period through from the 19
00:06:02fifties into the 19 eighties is really shapes very
00:06:06strongly by the role of Cold War politics.
00:06:10So it's very much based on economic.
00:06:14It's very much based on Western Europe, and the limits to what Europeans
00:06:16want to do and are able to do is strongly conditioned by those American interests
00:06:22and preferences
00:06:29in relation to the international system.
00:06:30And once we get out of that at the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall,
00:06:33that's the point at which the European Union
00:06:37emerges with a much broader range of activities,
00:06:40going much more clearly into political realms foreign policy,
00:06:43justice and home affairs.
00:06:48And also you get that big push of enlargement, which still continues to this day.
00:06:49So when we're thinking about how the European Union comes about,
00:06:55we need to bear in mind all of these different factors economic, political, social,
00:06:58cultural
00:07:03and the weight of history is very important at
00:07:05that particular moment in the forties and the fifties,
00:07:09when those
00:07:11individuals and organisations are starting to come
00:07:12together to think about how they can create
00:07:15a system of European governance.
00:07:18
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Usherwood, S. (2019, September 26). The UK and the European Union - The Creation of the European Union [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-european-union-and-the-united-kingdom/understanding-the-european-union
MLA style
Usherwood, S. "The UK and the European Union – The Creation of the European Union." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 26 Sep 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/the-european-union-and-the-united-kingdom/understanding-the-european-union