journal of european integration history revue d'histoire de l ...

6
Fernando Guirao
of individual countries to put the question of their relations with the Community on
the top of their respective political agendas. The contributors to this volume try to
answer this question in their respective case studies.
Among the countries examined here, Ireland stands out but showing how political
and economic elites can deliberately engineer a move away from self-imposed
isolation. According to Maurice FitzGerald, the Irish political leadership understood
that the closer they moved towards multilateral interdependence, the sooner
they would leave behind an asphyxiating bilateral dependence upon their powerful
neighbour, a relationship which was increasingly being perceived as disruptive for
long-term political stability, social cohesion and economic growth. The author
forcefully insists that EEC membership was part of a development strategy and not
the government’s emergency response to external and accidental pressure. In other
words, the British application would have only hurried up the implementation of
the already-decided strategy to reverse the inward-looking economic policies that
had prevailed for thirty years. These had only led to severe economic distortions,
massive emigration and considerable unemployment. In support of this view, the
author argues that, following de Gaulle’s veto of Britain’s membership application
in January 1963, the Irish government continued to put pressure on economic interest
groups and social and political representatives in order to go on implementing
those changes necessary for the country’s future EC entry. At the failure of the first
attempt to join the Community many governments felt relief because this led to a
situation of standstill. Not so in Ireland, where the government used the delay “to
ready itself, as well as the rest of the country, for the uncertain vagaries that full
EEC membership implied”. In the end, an overwhelming majority of the Irish electorate
was persuaded that the country’s future lay within the Community. An impressive
eighty-three per cent of those polled voted in favour of acceding less than
five months after Ireland signed the Treaty of Accession in January 1972.
Norway represents the opposite experience. The terms of accession the government
negotiated were rejected in a referendum in September 1972. Any attempt to
explain the fundamental differences in outlook with respect to the question of
Community membership between the government on the one hand, and the people
of Norway on the other, has to analyse deeply-rooted socio-political dilemmas. In
contrast to earlier scholarship, which had highlighted foreign policy issues,
Hans-Otto Frøland emphasizes the perceived threat to the existing national consensus
on agriculture and fisheries, the preservation of which constituted the core of
the national pact that – in the eyes of many Norwegians – would have rescued the
country from the uncertainties of the 1930s and the post war years. The willingness
to defend the wide set of agreements reached co-operatively by representatives of
the economic interest groups and the state and involving income protection in the
primary sector, undermined the case for Community membership in two important
ways. First of all, it was responsible for a late and half-hearted effort at political
mobilisation in favour of membership. Second, it was a crucial element in the population’s
rejection of accession. Membership was perceived as a potential threat to
the kind of socio-political stability and lifestyle to which Norwegian population