The Single European Act and Majority Voting

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Get the money side of they Stor. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com Hal, welcome to Origin Story, the show where we take a word, idea, person , event, or institution from history, we explain its origins, and we discuss how it influences how we talk about politics today. I'm Dorian Linsky. And I'm Ian Dunn. This is what's good about having like quite an open con ceit for a show is every week we take a and then we'll just add by the time that we get to like see season twenty three it's gonna it's gonna be like the LGBTQY plus blah blah blah. Good idea, person, event, institution, animal, colour, proposition vibe for mystery . So we left it in nineteen fifty-five in part one with the uh failure of the European defense community. So Europe is now in the middle of an extraordinary and unexpected recovery. And partly it's there is this shared craving for cooperation and stability and prosperity. Everybody's running Partly it's technological advances, especially in agriculture. Partly it's through using an awful lot of migrant labour and fossil fuels . Partly it 's America taking responsibility for defence now. The Cold War is this very useful framework for Europe. Yeah. And Europe is already integrating informally. For many countries, up to half of exports are already going to their future partners in the European economic community. Before the Second World War, the vast majority of European migration was to America. Now it's inside Europe. West Germany in particular needs migrant workers from the south. Plus, you've got the growth of mass tourism, uh, radio, everyone has a radio, television, cinema, they're all bringing the continent together culturally. There's more of a shared sense of European identity. Political and military integration clearly not possible for the time being. So Paul Henri Spark takes the baton from Jean Monet, the founder of the European coal and steel community, and launches a new push for economic integration. Spark is another one of these guys, like a true believer. In the nineteen thirties, he joined a group called Young Europe . During the war, he negotiated the Benelux Customs Convention, which is where the word Benelux comes from. Oh right. Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg. Became president of both the European movement, the one set up by Churchill, and the ECSC. He's Belgium's former Prime Minister, a socialist, and the current foreign minister. You can't really get more European than Spark. In June 1955, he convenes the six ECSC countries, along with British trade official Russell Bretherton. Uh they haven't sent their best. Yeah. Minor trade divisional. In Messina, Italy to explore options for a common market. Very soon, Bretherton walks out with a famous mic drop. The future treaty which you were discussing has no chance of being agreed. If it was agreed, it has no chance of being ratified. And if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain. You speak of agriculture, which we don't like, a power over customs, which we take exception to, and institutions, which frighten us. Monsieur le President, Monsieur au revoir, Eponchance . Just an incredible way to leave a meeting . At this time our old friend Kalerge pops up again. Part one we, talked about how he pioneered a lot of these ideas of a united Europe. He still wants Ode Joy to be the European anthem . It is in fact finally adopted by the Council of Europe in nineteen seventy two, the year that he dies, and by the EEC in 1985. The year that we're currently in 1955, the Council of Europe designs the European flag, which is adopted by uh the EEC thirty years later. Blue and yellow. The twelve stars represent So all of those sort of images that we used during Brexit of one of the stars leaving the flag, I'm afraid that there were strictly incorrect. It's just fascinating. The Council of Europe is just like, okay, we've got this cool flag, we've got this cool anthem, and then eventually they make their way into a completely separate body. So it's no wonder people mix up these two . So the Spark Committee report in March 1956 recommends a common market. Spark's argument is that Europe has to band together because it's lost its empires, or it's losing them. It's lost its dominance in manufacturing, and it's losing its influence. He correctly thinks that Britain cannot accept those realities yet. One Whitehall memo sums up the British attitude. This is absolutely just perfect raw political cowardice. It was in the real and ultimate interest of the UK that the common market should collapse, with the result that there would be no need for the UK to face the embarrassing choice of joining it or abstain ing from joining it. Better for the entire thing to fail than for us to have to make up our minds. A decision. Incredible. So the EEC alongside a Euro , which is the Nuclear Energy Pact, are enshrined in the Treaty of Rome on the 25th of March, 1957, which becomes effective on the 1st of January 1958, with the same six. It's the same six nations that form the coal and steel community. Aaron Powell It's weird, is because they're both it's these sort of almost twin founding moments. Coal and steel and the Treaty of Rome are these sort of, you know, moments in tandem, these two founding documents that set everything up. And the establishment um I mean the accomplishments of the Treaty of Rome are really quite extraordinary. It establishes the European Economic Community. It proposes the reductions of customs duties and the establishment of a customs union. It proposes a common market for goods, labour, services and capital. It proposes the creation of a common agricultural policy and a European social fund. It establishes the European Commission. So what was previously the rather ominously titled higher authority, will now be called the slightly more reassuring European Commission. And fundamentally what it does is it expands cooperation and shared sovereignty from coal and steel to all elements of national economic life, which is not a small mission that you have undertaken. That is to be done gradually over a transition period. Those of us who followed Brexit shudder at words like transition period, but this is a rather more positive one. In fact, the exact reverse of what we showed there. Which is when you're trying to bring these countries into the same pattern. It's done in sort of three four-year stages between nineteen fifty-eight to the end of 1969 . So one four year period, then another four year period, and then another. And what tends to happen is that as you get closer to the end of those four year periods, all hell breaks loose. Right. So everyone loses their mind and then everything sort of becomes a little bit uh calmer . Alongside that, there is um a continuation of that movement we saw for social Europe started by the Italians but during the coal and steel, continu ing now. So a push again from Italy for a right of movement extended to all workers, not just miners and steel workers, not just skilled workers, also unskilled . You know, loads of states at this point want to restrict labor. They want free movement of capital and services and goods. They don't want free movement of labor because all the pathologies around immigration are not particularly any different then than they are now. But italy basically says, well, fine, if you want to do that, then we'll we'll block the free movement of capital. And I can assure you that Germany and the Netherlands are really quite wealthy and they're looking for projects to invest in and not going to enjoy that. So instead of there's Italy that makes sure that all of those four freedoms are kept in the treaty. Well it's the only one that represents the South. Exactly. South of Europe, isn't it? Exactly. Where the migrant labour's coming from. Exactly that point. That's why they became such a pivotal role for that more sort of left-wing element to the political project being that's being pursued. It's really quite historic in that coal and steel has an end date, has a fifty year end date. Treaty of Rome has no end date. And it also has, and this is gonna come I mean it sounds idealistic, but it will come to haunt them . Um an open invitation for anyone to join if they wish to. It says any European state may apply to become a member of the community. Something which I sometimes wonder if they could go back in time, whether they might tip x that part out, given the amount of trouble it's gonna cause them. There are significant institutional changes, but here's the core thing. Um the core element really in what follows over the next pfft I mean, really, to be honest , until now, but certainly over the next 12 years, is about the question of do you vote by majority or does each country have a veto? Do you need a unanimous decision on any particular area? Now that sounds incredibly tedious and procedural, but I can assure you that the whole of human political history is fundamentally decided by procedural issues. You know, whether you're you know, whether whether you look at the tennis court oath, you know, or any part of the French Revolution or the English Civil War, primarily go back to the documents as all procedural issues. Because of course, the question of whether it's a majority vote or not is the philosophical hinge between internationalism and nationalism. If it's fundamentally a project about countries getting together, you know, making decisions, you're going to want a veto, right? It's a national project and we might cooperate over here, but it's not a big deal. If your thing is, no, this is an international project, this is about you know chipping away at sovereignty for an entirely new way of organizing societies, then you want majority. Because you can't really have a functional institution, especially when it starts expanding, that requires unanimity on every vote. You just can't. You need majority voting. And that's the battle really over how that goes. Now the mov ement over the next 12 years is about introducing majority voting beyond things like coal price and mine closures across the whole of the economy. And that is a very fraught process. Because what you're saying is that something that could be really quite damaging to your country, you know, you you could go there, you're not going to have any chance to stop it. You'll be outvoted. It will be decided over your head. And people in those countries might start asking questions like, well, how could I vote in order to stop this outcome? And at the moment , it is not clear what the answer to that question would be. Trevor Burrus And in a little while, we're going to come to the big crunch point for that. Exactly, exactly. So the commission is decided is basically even this role to monitor the commission being the up dated authority, to monitor adherence to the rules and make proposals. The Council of Ministers, which because it has that extra degree of democratic legitimacy, because it's coming from people who've been elected in their home member state and whose names have a bit of sort of status and purchase, has been growing its authority, clawing a sense of government from the Commission. That's the one that decides on proposals by a majority. So it now has decision-making powers. It has formalized its authority. But they're losing their national veto. So you've kind of got this really quite mercurial status, right? Are you growing the national power or are you losing it to the international sphere? It's sort of traveling in both directions. The same thing is happening with the assembly . The assembly was supposed to monitor the commission, right? That's what it was doing. Nothing to do with the Council, which was some other thing that people, you know, got up to. It's supposed to be scrutinizing the Commission. So as the Commission loses power against the Council, the Parliament then starts to lose power as well. But on the other hand, for the first time, people start talking about actually, why don't we give it direct elections across Europe ? That massively increases the power of the European Parliament. It's suddenly going to be the only institution that's got that sense of democratic legitimacy to it. And pretty much as soon as that starts happening, as those plans are put forward, it stops calling itself the Assembly and it starts saying, no, no, hang on, we're a European Parliament now. And that's the formation of the European Parliament. So it's a very ambiguous treaty in those senses. The two issues that are going to dominate over the years to come, which emerge from it, are these. First one is where will there be majority voting? That's the crucial area. You can say clearly we're going to be in a world where some things have the veto, some things require unanimity, and some things require a majority , only a majority. Which areas does that count? And if you look at the debates that are happening now, we'll come to this later. You know, with Orban, with Ukraine funds in Europe, that is still the debate. This is a debate that is the core sort of operational and philosophical debate that takes place in Europe. And the second one is: this one has largely been resolved, which law takes precedence at this early stage? The question is: okay, well, if there's a conflict between national law and European law, which law wins? Right. And that's going to be a very, very emotional and and really quite profoundly philosophical conversation going forward. Because this is setting up the European Court of Justice as well, which is going to make those rulings. Now, I think from the Britain in Europe perspective, there is almost the assumption with the EEC, because Britain is on the air outside, um that that France and Germany and and the and the rest are just kind of uh you know, roaring ahead very, very enthusiastically. Actually contentious even among the six, the German economics minister and future chancellor Ludwig Erhard is an auto-liberal, which is a kind of of version neoliberalism, sort of early version. And he calls it macroeconomic nonsense and would much have preferred a free trade agreement with Britain. But the logic is the volume of trade between the six just makes that almost economically undeniable. But you know, you've literally got the economics minister not keen. In France, many conservative and socialist deputies vote against the Treaty of Rome. It's not overwhelmingly carried at all. But the French Foreign Minister tells the National Assembly very eloquently, there are two great powers, America and Russia, and China will become the third. It depends on you whether there will also be a fourth Europe. Oh wow. Really quite pressing.. Yeah So they really had to kind of marshal their arguments . So Britain and France at loggerheads. In 1957, Harold Macmillan becomes Prime Minister. And in 1958, Charles de Gaulle becomes president of France. Now remember, these guys were in Algier with Jean Monnet in 1943. It's very much kind of like characters from earlier in the show, reappearing in different combinations. Gaulle is still not a federalist, he's a nationalist. He wants France to dominate the EEC . So in 1960, Macmillan choice to find his own British solution , creates the European Free Trade Area EFTA with Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland, known as the Outer Seven. And you may know this, you know, fans of European politics as one of the potential Oh, absolutely. Now their members are mostly prosperous, mostly Protestant countries, keen on free trade uh with smaller and more efficient agricultural sectors, really quite different politically and economically. They make no commitment to integration or loss of sovereignty, it is purely trade, which seems to suit Britain at that point. But it's immediately obvious that it is much weaker than the EEC, which is going gangbusters. There's a great Time magazine article from 1961, a cover story on Europe, which we'll link to in the show notes. Really interesting. The fact that the Time magazine archive is still unpaywalled. Oh wow, I didn't know. Is it's just a little miracle. It describes Monet as an ascetic, unobtrusive Frenchman who may ultimately succeed where others, from Charlemagne to Napoleon, ultimately failed. People love this fucking love. I mean, even though it it's really very different to conquering people . So it captures both sides of it, the idealism and the pragmatism. So Time writes, From Europe's grimiest coalfields and bloodiest battlefields grew the great experiment in unity. But also what it mainly has going for it is it works, quotes one German industrialist. Within a few more years, no government will be able to pull out of the community. The businessman won't let them. As we know. You can not necessarily true. But that seemed sort of it seemed undeniable. So the rumbling problem to mention here is agriculture. Now rural poverty had been a major driver of fascism. So countries are subsidizing overproduction of agriculture for social and political reasons. Economically, it doesn't make a great deal of sense. This is a real black mark against Europe actually for a long time. But you can understand I never quite understood why, but there was that thing of like, well, if you neglect the countryside, bad things happen politically. So each country needs a bigger market and they want to spread the cost of the subsidies. So the common agriculture policy, or CAP, is introduced in 1962. So the uh EEC uses tariffs to make food imports as expensive as its domestic produce and buys up surplus food and sells it cheap elsewhere. So farmers are basically being subsidized by taxpayers and consumers. What this means is as world food prices fall in the late sixties, European food is absurdly overpriced. Plus, it it it just takes an enormous amount of time and money. So by nineteen seventy, the cap consumes seventy percent of the budget and four out of five of its administrators for a sector which employs five percent of the population. The other big expense, which you referred to, was cohesion, i.e., subsidies to poorer regions. That happens to be the Social Fund, and then later the European Regional Development Fund, because every country has regions that need additional help, not so wealthy. It remains the same today. Agriculture and Cohesion each take up forty percent of the EU budget. Yeah, fucking hell. Fucking hell. That is damning. These are the two most expensive uh things. But basically making sure that the poor regions don't get left behind and go win Yeah, well I mean look the thing is that far farming also has this sort of weird psychological national purpose element to it. Right, sure. trade deals as always come up against farming when you know you can have a million stats of like yeah the British video games industry is worth ten times and blah blah blah blah blah. Because and you see it all the time. You see it why in trade deals do they get hung up on you know geographical indicators. Because it's this it's the source of national pride. It's supposed to be some kind of connection to your past, maybe. It's not treated as what it is, which is basically just like a great big production machine in the vast majority of times. Regions. is different Right. You know, the funding towards regions . You know, that's really I think comes in that heritage of of social Europe much more. And then also starts to play into this sense that's growing over these decades of like this project's working really well. Why don't people care about it? Like, why don't they seem to know? Why don't they think of themselves as Europeans? Why is there no sense of solidarity, you know, between one area and another? Why why is there no sense of a European demos, of like a meaningful sense of a European political and social identity to go alongside this stuff? And that anxiety is partly why the regional funding just becomes the main Trevor Burrus Let's fund this, let's build this, let's make people feel that they are benefiting. Yeah. Let's put a European flag on it so they know who fucking pay. Yeah. So back to the UK in the early 60s, the longer it waits to join, the greater the economic risks of joining, and the weaker its influence. You know, it's it's in it's in a real bind. But the economic balance has changed dramatically. I mean, I couldn't believe how much this had changed so fast. In the early 1950s, half of UK trade was with the Commonwealth, and less than twenty percent with the European Six. By nineteen sixty-two, the Six had overtaken the Commonwealth. Right. West Germany had already overtaken the UK's economy. The Treasury tells Macmillan that the EEC will soon rival the US and the USSR. Plus, America is still pushing for British membership. So people will know Dean Aitchison's former Secretary of State, his famous nineteen sixty-two claim that Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. I mean, how many times was that quoted during Brexit? In that speech, he says that sacrificing influence in Europe in the name of the Commonwealth and the special relationship with America is a mugs game. I mean America is literally going, don't bank on America. Yes . So it's time to join. McMillan puts Edward Heath in charge of negotiating entry, not because Macmillan believes deeply in the project, but he says we are compelled to react. There's no choice anymore. In July nineteen sixty one, the government formally applies to join the EEC alongside Ireland and Denmark . So politically, this is useful. The Tories seize on Europe as a new modernising idea. They've been in power a decade, like all governments that have been in power for that long, they're kind of running out of steam. Plus it's a wedge issue with Labour, which remains convinced that the EEC is an anti-socialist cartel. Michael Foote calls it a rich nations club. Left wing Labour MP. Even centrist leader Hugh Gateskill says in nineteen sixty two that joining the common market would mean the end of Britain as an independent European state, the end of a thousand years of history. Yeah, wow., God And his replacement, Harold Wilson, takes the same sort of anti-Europe pro-Commonwealth line. We are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematical and marginal advantage in selling washing machines in Düsseldor f. I mean so contemptuous. Fun fact though, Italy was making 90% of Europe's washing machines, so it wasn't even he hadn't even got the right product there. But McMillan's problem isn't Labour. It's Charles de Gaulle. Yes. So the other EEC members all support British membership. De Gaulle thinks it would challenge France's dominance. Yeah, he he's sort of right. Europe is the means by which France can become again what she ceased to be since Waterloo, he says, first in the world. Waterloo's a weird thing to bring up in this context of the peace project. Plus, there's also this thing, but Milan just made a deal with President uh John F. Kennedy over Polaris nuclear missiles, which seemed to be a symbol that Britain was choosing America over Europe, and this would unbalance the whole project. I mean, I don't know if that's a serious objection. That was one of the things that was brought up. On 14th of January 1963, De Gaulle famously says no to UK membership of the EEC. That's not me being cute. This is famously Yeah, it's it's absol I think it's it's one of the most disastrous press conferences in modern political history. It's fucking dreadful. It is possible that one day England might manage to transform herself sufficiently to become part of the European community. What a dick. What a dick. And it's just like also, you were kind of like there during the war. It's not like this is some distant fucking country. You've had no you know, it's just like the the the I I don't want to be too. Memillon was helping you, the guy you're shitting on was literally helping you set up the free French government in exile. Exactly. Mm-hmm is utterly humiliated . The the five, as we'll see, are just profoundly up . It's just so it's against every notion of how Europe is supposed to work. For you just to like, despite your internal conversations about the invitation , you know, about about Britain asking to join, to then just go out and to a domestic audience using domestic arguments, wield your veto like this. Like it is just a completely against the culture and the manner in which Europe is supposed to operate. But worst is I just think it destroys British institutional and public trust in Europe. It kind of mutilates the relationship at this very early stage. You know, just think if at this point maybe not the cold and steel thing, but maybe if at this point Britain had just gone in with a really conducive, mutually beneficial, cooperative relationship, that could have been the starting basis. But instead , the st the starting trauma of Britain's relationship with Europe are these repeated, really quite humiliating and quite aggressive rejections by de Gaulle. So in terms of starting things off on the worst possible foot, he managed it. Well McMillan is crushed. He writes in his diary, it is the end to everything for which I have worked for many years. All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins. Jesus. Jes us. Um Heath, you know, probably like the most one of the most sort of pro EU figures in British politics, is unbelievably emotional about it. Like you know, so a few days later he says to the six in the room, We in Britain are not going to turn our backs on the mainland of Europe or of the countries of the community. We are part of Europe by geography, tradition, history, culture, and civilizations. We shall continue to work with our friends in Europe for the true unity and strength of this continent. At which point the interpreters were struggling to translate because they were close to tears. Then the five join Britain and go to a minus France. when I say the five, I mean the six with France being had up. And go call them and basically have an a meeting that evening where they call themselves the new six. There's this incredibly insane. This incredibly feebiler , very emotional evening where people are saying some fighty shit right there . A profoundly anti-Gaulist moment. The Dutch even start speculating about creating a new organisation with Britain and excluding the French. Wow. And the others sort of canceled caution, including Germany, just being like, look, we've achieved quite a lot here. We're not just gonna burn fucking all this to the ground. Really wound people up. Nah, they fucking hated him. Uh the German delegate afterwards said when we departed from our hotels the next day, nothing remained of the new six of this emotional night This episode is brought to you by Expedia and Visit Scotland. Start your story in Scotland. Experience the pool of wide untamed landscapes and fresh cuisine that feels rooted in place. Discover castles steeped in legend and feel the genuine warmth from locals you meet in a place that will stay with you long after you leave. Start planning your own Scottish holiday. Today at expedia.co.uk slash visit scotland. Hit that perfect, hit that perfect, hit that perfect big boy. Back in the 80s, one record label conquered the charts and turned outsiders into household names. In the 90s, that label turned rave culture into smash hits and owned the dance floor. Discover it all on the brand new podcast. Hit that perfect beat, the London Records Story. Out now, wherever you get your podcasts. So Britain tries again in nineteen sixty seven under Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who is chronically ambivalent about Europe. We will get more of that to come. But like Macmillan, he sees it as a rejuvenating mission for a government which is losing momentum. And in fact the economy, of course, is is is in trouble at this point. But he's still got lots of Eurosceptics in the cabinet. One of them, Richard Crossman, predicts the general will save us from our own folly. And he is right. De Gaulle remains opposed. And And I yeah, I suppose the consolation for Britain here is that he is getting on everybody's tits and bringing the EC to maybe its sort of first crisis moment. Yeah, and probably I mean probably the closest it comes to extinction, I think. So this is called the empty chair crisis. And that's just sort of to give you a sense of what of what's going on in his mind. I mentioned before that there were these two sort of major issues, the majority. Do you make take decisions by majority? Yeah. And does European law have precedence over your national law? And both of these are really acute emotional issues for if you think about this in terms of nation states working together a bit, or if you think that this is a giant new experiment in international politics. A couple of court cases have really upended things. One of them in 1963. This is where the European court just starts behaving in revolutionary ways that are , you know, very shocking to people at the time, and even in retrospect, you think are very extraordinary judgments indeed. This is the Van Gend and Luz case. So it's a haulage firm transporting several tons of plastic from West Germany to the Netherlands and they get this increased import duty slapped on them. Take the case. They lodge a complaint with Dutch customs and they appeal to the Treaty of Rome. And a Dutch judge at this point goes, Oh, I don't really know if the treaty like Treaty of Rome grants rights to individuals, or is it just a a states thing? Right. So I'm going to pass it to the European court. And suddenly once that happens, everyone gets very nervous. The Belgians, the Dutch, the Germans, the governments always just start lodging protests at the court, being like, What the fuck are you doing over here? Like this is not there's no reason that you should have any discussion about individuals. We've signed a treaty between member states. And if we breach it as a member state, then you can come in and have a conversation with us. But one of our citizens doesn't get to go over our fucking head and come to you and go, well, my individual rights under the Treaty of Rome have been breached because there are no individual rights in the Treaty of Rome. The European Court on February 5th, 1963, says we disagree . They give a basically a revolutionary internationalist interpretation of what happened in the Treaty of Rome. The community constitutes a new legal order of international law for the benefits of which the states have limited their sovereign rights, albeit within limited fields, and the subjects of which comprise not only member states, but also their nationals. They have basically created the notion of direct effect of European law. And not only that , they've included everyone in this. It's not just states anymore. This you couldn't be have a more internationalist interpretation of the European project than this. It's not just states starting, it's consumers, it's employees, it's manufacturers, it's wholesalers. And not only that, but you think about the the the sort of consequence of this, all judges in all member states are now now have two hats. They're sort of national judges, but they're also sort of European judges adjudicating on European law. Another case comes up in 1964, the Costa and L ruling. So dispute between an Italian consumer and the electricity board. And again, it's passed up to the European court and, again the Italian government protests very effusively, and again it loses. The ruling. The law stemming from the treaty could not, because of its special and original nature, be overridden by domestic legal provisions, however framed, without being deprived of its character as community law, and without the legal basis of the community itself called into question. In other words, if your national law rubs up against European law, European law wins. And not only that, but that is the only basis upon which you could logically pursue the project that you have undertaken. This is like the full-blooded, undiluted strength of the most internationalist interpretation of what had been done in the Treaty of Rome. And really going back to the Coal and Steel Treaty as well. So it's in that kind of legal context where just people like DeGaulle are just looking at the courts being like, what the fuck is it doing? Right. We signed up to some kind of treaty, and now we're apparently engaged in some extraordinary new adventure in humankind . And so he starts getting very , I mean, he would eventually just start getting cross about what seems to be about sort of financial propositions. But really, the truth is that the heart of the crisis is the transition to majority voting, the end of the veto. That each as you expand these areas of competence away from coal and steel towards other parts of the economy, they're gonna lose any power of veto over them. They're gonna lose any kind of national sovereignty about deciding what you do with plastics or some other air washing machines. And that's what makes them nervous. It's in the second four-year block as they're driving forwards towards the January 1966 deadline, getting closer and closer towards it, that they start getting very, very nervous indeed. They know there's like the veto's coming to an end. Internationalism is coming. Like, internationalism is here. It's sweeping up on the nation state . And you've got this period where the commission is suddenly kind of in that long power play with the council is just suddenly starting to amass all of the momentum. Right. You know, that period where the the council of ministers look like it has basically just got the crown and was acting like the government. The Commission under President Walter Hallstein is getting very excited. He starts, he he at one point talks about, quote, the executive of Europe, which is kind of like taboo. Not quite as bad as saying the government of Europe, but you know, you just don't talk in those terms. He's on a trip to the US when he stays in a place called Blair House, which is usually reserved for heads of state. He speaks with the president, he speaks with the Secretary of State for Defense. Suddenly the nation says like why is he acting what is he acting like a president in some way? But like a president of Europe . He's asked about his function when he's in the US, and he describes himself as quote, a kind of Prime Minister of Europe. Emblematic of a very high degree of institutional self-confidence coming from the Commission. And the truth is that many of the Commissioners are kind of dreaming of like a tennis club oath, of like these kind of they keep on looking at these core moments in the French Revolution, you know, where the assembly gives itself these legal rights. Sort of thinking like it's gotta come soon. There's gotta be this moment of kind of constitutional epiphany that we're sort of entering into. So Orsen comes up with some plans on financing of agriculture, on the community budget, on parliamentary competence in 1965. One of his plans is that it would give the Assembly, the Parliament, the right to change the budget against the wishes of as many as four Member States. And he announces that plan to the Assembly before he announces it to the Member States. He is basically addressing European Parliament and a European public, kind of, over the heads of national leaders. France is outraged, and on July 6th, 1965, De Gaulle withdraws his entire council delegation, essentially just chucking a bomb under the project and trying to kill it. This is the politics of the empty chair, and it's called the empty chair crisis. France basically withdraws. Now it's immediately obvious that Hulstein from the Commission has basically overplayed his hand in a quite terrible way. And the thing is the Commission actually never really recovers from what happens. I beg your pardon. The Commission does recover from what happens here, but it takes until the laws in the eighties until it regains its confidence. It's immediately clear once France removes its delegates, you're in a battle for survival now. You know, this is not about being able to pursue your previous agenda and you're certainly not going to get the kind of federalism and I'm kind of the prime minister of Europe that you were envisioning before . The five, the remaining five, gather anyway as a council. Now that's crucial because it's perfectly possible that they would have just been like, well, we can't gather as a council because we're losing the sixth member. That actually you would have shown that if a member withdraws, the institution dies. But no, the institution lives, even if one of the members chooses not to go. DeGaulle whipping himself up into a state of hysteria brands Europe technocratic, stateless, and irresponsible and calls for a complete revision of the founding text. He is basically just as he saw that internationalism building, he wants to pull to the other pole. Just go, no, we're rewriting the original text. It's going to be a a national interpretation. It's quite sort of late Thatcher. Yeah he's yeah. He's a dick. There's no you know, there's there's the ghoul in the wall which is a whole other kettle of fish. You know, I guess well in the future we'll have good de ghoul, bad de ghoul. This is bad de Gaulle right now. But you know, Monet during the war, you know, as McMillan said, he can't say whether the De Gaulle is a a demagogue or a mad or both. Yeah, yeah. No, fair enough. So this must have been in him there as well, but obviously the context made him . Monet at this point, by the way , it has to be said, is is tearing his hair out . I cannot believe this. The Gaulle goes for election in December and just tries to rally mass support for his attack on Europe. And this is the crucial thing. He doesn't get it. Like the farmers, which in France at that point at 20% of the electorate, massively pissed off by what was happening because they basically lost all of the proposals that were for farm The business world, actually along the lines of what you said earlier, businessmen won't let you. The business world's just completely aghast. And it's like, well, what are you doing to stability? This is a disaster. You've got to change course. De Gould says, look, I want mass support so I can win an absolute majority in the first round of the French presidential election. He doesn't get it. He does win the elections, but he doesn't get it. It's considered this moment of humiliation and it sends him back to the table . So the five once again secure talks with France to try and figure out a way through this. They make a series of concessions, pretty big concessions. For a start, they agree to meet without the commission. Commission's fucked. It's going to take a subservient role from now on. Secondly, they agree. I mean, the Gaulle says, I won't meet you as a council. But this is what philosophy, this is what political philosophy is. I won't I'll meet you as five independent states. I won't meet you as a represent as the council. We're not a council when we sit. And they go, fine, but we will hold it in the Hotel de Ville in Luxembourg where Monet held the first meeting of the high authority. But don't worry about that. Th'eres no symbolic meeting . They love symbolism, don't they? It's like what you can't achieve practically, you might as well just do through theatre, basically. Um, and they do include the general secretary of the council in the meeting. Importantly . What What they refuse to buy, John, is rewriting the original treaties. They just won't do that. In fact, they sign a solemn declaration between the five of them that they won't make any changes to the founding document. And then they come up with what is called the Luxembourg compromise. What it finds is: if a decision is very important for one member, a council will try to find a solution with unanimous support. There's no time limit on how long that can take. And then there is a second point of the accord, which is just amazing, which reads: The French delegation considers that where very important interests are at stake, the discussions must be continued until a unanimous agreement is reached. Now that obviously is basically a veto. Yeah. But the thing is, they just say the French delegation is essentially what they're saying is like, we don't know, man, we just agreed to disagree. Honestly, that's that what that really says is let's agree to disagree. So it seems , and the vast majority of interpretations of this are that it is a French victory Because as DeGaulle tells his government, the supranational ity has gone. France will remain sovereign. There's basically a veto. And culturally, the thing is what's written down doesn't really matter. What really matters is culturally what's the approach. And France just feels like, well, I've got a fucking veto, I'll use it. So they use it initially in 1966 to block a majority decision. It's honored. The five, the remaining five, who have promised each other not to do this, once it's clear that there's a veto power just sitting on the table, it's like, well, I'm gonna use the fucking veto. They go on and do it. And veto culture prevails between nineteen sixty-six and nineteen eighty-seven. This is viewed as quite a bleak sort of couple of decades, really, where very little gets done. Because even though the veto is very rarely invoked, just ten times in fifteen years, it hangs over the fucking table. You know, at every meeting, once there's a disagreement, you think, oh, it's no bothering but to pursue it Well let's talk about this period. I suppose it is like a sort of twenty year period where we're it's sort of in search of the next big project, right? To keep it going, to keep it exciting. For Britain, the logjam is broken. De Gaulle resigns in nineteen sixty nine, he dies in nineteen seventy . You got a new French president, Georges Pompidou, and German Chancellor Willi Brandt, and they're both much more welcoming. I mean, the importance of personalities, domestic politics and personalities. I mean it it's it's everything. And there's other factors that that West Germany has been rebuilding ties with East Germany, and France is quite freaked out by that. Plus, Commonwealth trade is collapsing with the UK. So that means that the UK is less likely to kind of like make that a big negotiating point, have a carve out. Ted Heath is now Prime Minister. A child of Monet . The only truly Europhile Prime Minister we've ever had, I think. The only one who really, really Blair . I think Blair counts. Oh but I would say Heath more so. Heath the real dreamer. But he's a but he's still a Europe. But Blair I think counts as the Eurofile Club. So he pitched his membership to the public th,ough as, economic salvation. He says for twenty-five years we've been looking for something to get us going again. Now here it is. You know, between sixty-one and seventy-four, the GDP of the six has grown two and a half times faster than the UK's. Yeah, Jesus. You know, by nineteen sixty-eight the customs union was finalized and all the tariffs were down. It it it's very enticing. Most MPs only support the economic benefits, but Heath and his Labour al ly Roy Jenkins, they really believe in the whole enchilada, the political union as well. In a radio broadcast, Heath, again who we think of as a rather kind of stiff and charmless and unsuccessful politician just absolutely fucking operatic when it comes to Europe. I think he's a great man. Like there's you know, there's a real time for people to just reassess him . You know, and he deserves to be defended by the kind of rabid Yeah. No, you know, he was a good, decent, dignified man, and he deserves much better treatment by history than the one that he's been given. So on the radio, he says, when we achieve our ambitions, then history will indeed know that the spirit of man has at last triumphed over the divisions and dissensions, the hatred and the strife that plagued our continent for a thousand years. See that's what we're fucking talking about. I mean that's really lovely. But that that thing, of course, European civilization, that idea of Europe as an idea, as a value, as a dream. And he's very good at that. So it explodes as a political issue for the first time, 1971. Uh this is remarkable. The white paper on membership sells one million copies. Oh my god . Wow. It warns that if we don't join in a single generation we should have renounced an imperial past and rejected a European future. This year, 1971, is also the first use of the word Eurosceptic . So it becomes very, very divisive. The commons vote on the principle of membership on the twenty eight ofh October nineteen seventy one. Very complicated. The Tory rebellion is the biggest since the vote of no confidence in Neville Chamberlain in nineteen forty. Oh wow. And it only passes because sixty-nine Labour MPs, including Roy Jenkins, vo te with the government. Harold McMillan celebrates he lights up this is lovely. He lights a bonfire on the white cliffs of Dover, and supporters on the French coast, when they see it, light one in reply. Oh, I love this. And watching the debate from the Commons Gallery is 82-year-old Jean Monet. He says, This is what I've been waiting for during the last 25 years. This is lovely these a lot of these people have very long lived, so they get to see This is also kind of a sense, right, that you can't really call it Europe properly until Britain's involved, you know what I mean? Like it's just like it feels like this really quite visible caveat to what's going on. And that's the point that it clocks and it's like, hang on, this is a continental project. Yeah. The UK finally joins the EC on New Year's Day 1973, along with Ireland and Denmark. Norway applied as well, but rejected it in a referendum. The six becomes the nine, but it's too late for Britain to take a leading role. Tony Jutt writes, the EEC was a Franco-German condominium in which Bonn, the capital at the time of West Germany, underwrote the finances and Paris dictated its policies. It has missed that opportunity to be in the driving seat. Meanwhile, America, previously the great supporter of European unity, has become hostile. President Nixon describes it as a Frankenstein monster. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger , listeners will know this line, allegedly once asked, who do I call if I want to talk to Europe? Now we know Volta Halstein. That Kissinger line really voices something that becomes this profound anxiety in European politics, which is who speaks for Europe. You go back to the start of this thing, right? All of that stuff about, well, it's got to have something that's not Washington or Moscow, we've got to have something that's standing up for a third way in global politics. Well, that's not really what's happened so far. What's happened so far is you've just got into the weeds on economic policy. It's like good valuable stuff. It will make you richer. But it's low politics. It's not high politics. You know, it's it's not the great geopolitical game and uh war and peace. And you really feel it in like 73 during the OPEC oil crisis, which is sort of it's kind of one of the hinges of history really. Everything revolves around that. And at that point, this moment of high geopolitical drama, Europe just feels utterly irrelevant to what is going on, and no one cares, no one gives a shit what it says. Um, the German Chancellor Willie Brandt visits Washington and he's asked that Kissinger question. W whell,y not? W doho we talk to? Who represents Europe? Who are you? What are you doing here right now? And what hat are you wearing? And he replies, extraordinary European, very, very EU kind of answer. None of us meets you any longer, solely as the representative of his own country, but at the same time, to a certain degree, as a representative of the European community as well. So I too am here not as the spokesman of Europe, but definitely as a spokesman for Europe, which obviously confuses everyone. And Kissinger writes, I think really quite perceptively, Brandt in fact faced us with a catch-22 dilemma. If every European leader was a spokesman for Europe, but could not represent it , and those who represented Europe were civil servants with no authority to negotiate, who then could act authoritatively . And so there's this sort of confusion then really deepened the heart of the project, which is like, okay, we need someone to speak for us. It can't be a national leader, because even if they say they're wearing two hats, they're fundamentally a national leader. It can't be one of the institutions because all the national leaders are gonna say, hang on, why is that institutional leader going off and doing this stuff just as they've been pissed off for the last 20 years over the Commission doing it? And even if that weren't the case, the institutional competition between the Commission and the council means that they're always going to be battling one another to be the figure that gets to speak for Europe. So there's this really big problem that feels like it fundamentally cannot be resolved. Why go small? When you can go grand. Meet the new Vauxhall Grandland Griffin. Striking alloys. Sleek black roof, heated front seats, and 10-inch touchscreen. Everything you need for life on the move. Grand on style, grand on tech, grand on value. And during the voxel sales event, get a grand of the new Grand and Griffin. Or any other new Vauxhall on top of all other offers. Search Fox car offers. Offer to private individuals. £1,000 including VAT saving on new car orders between 15th to 31st of May. Must be registered by 30th of June 2026. 18 plus TC supply. Changes in sexual performance are more common than And support doesn't need to feel awkward. With MedExpress, everything happens privately online. Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress.co.uk slash podcast to learn more . America's war on Iran has made one thing absolutely clear. It's this. Under Donald Trump and his ideological friends, America will do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. And former friends and allies just have to suck it up. What does the world look like when America is no longer a dependable ally and for some looks more like a predator? I'm Gavin Essler, and in a brand new mini-series from This Is Not a Drill, I talk to experts, diplomats and analysts about this harsh new reality. Do democracies have what it takes to protect themselves? And who, if anyone, can step into the void that America has left. That's America Against the World, a new four-part series. Search This Is Not a Drill on your favorite app for twice-weekly episodes, or get the complete series right now when you support us on Patreon. Search Patreon . This is not a drill to find out more . So the UK has joined, it is not enthusiastic at all. In March 1974, this is like uh 15 months after joining, only twelve percent of voters say the country has benefited for membership. Miserable sorts. Harold Wilson back in Downing Street, he's wrestling with this toxic split over Europe in Labour. It's not strictly left right, because uh Jim Callahan he's on the right, he's Euroskeptic, but it's broadly so. Michael Foote, Tony Ben, Barbara Castle, people if you've heard the Labour episodes, you know, you you'll you'll know the scene here, are opposed. Roy Jenkins and his allies, uh like Shelley Williams, are in favour. And it's very, very bitter in a way that it's quite hard for me to understand why. We talked about this i in the Labour episode. When Jenkins rebelled in 1971 to vote with Heath's government, fellow Labour MPs, as he was walking through uh the the is it lobby where you're voting? Yeah. Called him a fascist bastard and a rat fucker. Oh fuck. Yeah, that's philosophy. Nothing fascist about voting to join the EC. So Harold Orson, he's this arch pragmatist. He he basically all he's interested in is trying to hold the party together. He tells some people he's instinctively pro-Europe, some people are instinctively anti Europe. He says I've never been emotionally European. I don't stand on the south coast, look towards the continent and say, There's a new Jerusalem. I mean that pretty much sums it up. It's really telling that Heath agreed to build the Channel Tunnel in 1973, but Labour cancelled it in nineteen seventy-five. Really? Allegedly for cost reasons, but it became a symbol of Labour's failure to commit to Europe. Yeah. Interesting. So 1975, the year of the first referendum on membership. 1972, Wilson had bowed to shadow cabinet pressure to support the referendum, pushed by Tony Ben. Roy Jenkins resigned the deputy leadership in disgust. The big old split rolls on into the 80s, this kind of this thing. Scheduled for the 5th of June 1975. Jenkins is now free to lead the cross-party Britain in Europe . Briefly, Tories and Liberals, yes, nationalist parties, no, Labour officially neutral, very, very divided. Most of the business community and the press are in favour . Immigration interestingly barely features in the debate. It's a non issue. It's mostly about food prices, the economic crisis that is still ongoing, fear of the Soviets, the memory of war. The language gets very, very very, heated. People bringing up all kinds of analogies from the war. One journalist says the competing apocalyptic arguments trapped voters in the middle of a nightmarish duel between Dracula and Frankenstein. I mean the phrase project fear did not exist, but I think both of them were Are you frowning because Frankenstein is the doctor, not the creature? Yeah, culture just 'cause it upsets all the worst people. The way I always think back on that period, and we had this in our sort of centrism book, was it was just this moment of realisation for basically like a bunch of reasonable people in the middle who were just like this is fine and then just these lunatic extremists on either side to say it doesn't feel like a Dracula Frankenstein. No, no, but no, it's weird how bitter it seemed to feel at the time. The yes campaign is unbelievably successful. Between January and June nineteen seventy five it turns a fifty-vense percent preference for leaving into a sixty-seven percent vote for staying in. Oh wow. I mean those are the days. Love to see it. Monet actually winds up his action committee because he thinks his job is done and Britain's role in Europe is settled. In his memoirs, he says, Britain has accepted the obvious. Great Britain had no choice now except solitary decline or integration into a larger grouping. To tell the truth, that had been obvious for 25 years. But it takes a good quarter century to efface the illusions that dead realities leave in the minds of nations and men. Well if he's wrong about anything, he underestimated how long people can cling to dead realities. If you were to tell him that in 2026 that shit's still going down, he would probably be as depressed as I feel now. His memoir, I haven't read it cover to cover, I've seen just bits of it. And in nineteen seventy six, the European Council proclaims Monet the first honorary citizen of Europe. Lovely. So a lot of other people now are trying to do what Monet did, which is to rejuvenate the project. So there was this big crisis in the early 70s , to do with the the oil shock, the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system. Um they had this this kind of currency union known as the snake in the tunnel, which sounds like a saucy game, uh which was basically was was uh was smashed. I don't need to explain it because it didn't last very long. They were also trying to move towards political union. So at Copenhagen in nineteen seventy three, the nine member states, because member now including Denmark, they attempted to find Europe, its values, the first ever declaration of European identity. And the objectives would be the needs of the individual, the principles of representation So in 197y6, Ro Jenkins loses the Labour Leadership Contest and becomes the first British president of the European Commission. Of course. Really important sort of landmark. He's learned from Monet the EEC needs these new projects to keep it alive, otherwise it stagnates. He writes The lesson he taught me was always to advance along the line of least resistance provided that it led in the right direction. That point, the line of least resistance is monetary union, still not political, still not military. Becomes tricky because the leaders have changed again, right? So in Germany and France, you've now got Helmut Schmidt and the ghoulist, Valeri, Giscard, Desta g, amazing name. I'm so glad that you're the one that has to because I've got that name in the notes and I just thought I'd just run at it. I'll just run at it and smash through it and then deal with the consequences afterward. So I'm very pleased that you're the one that says it. Incredible character. Um but they're less pro-European than than Brandt and Pompey do, yeah, their predecessors. Schmidt changes his mind on this, does a U-tem because he accepts that Germany can't take the lead politically, militarily, has to do it economically through the Bundesbank and the Deutsche Mark. This is Germany's way to be powerful. And Jenkins notices while he's in Brussels that the smaller countries routinely get fed up with the Franco-German dominance. We don't talk so much here about the Benelux countries and Italy, but they they really they really get quite annoyed by this. And they turn to the UK to be like, come on man, you've got a chance to kind of change the balance of power. And the UK is very bad at taking the opportunity. So Jenkins is chairing discussions about monetary union, and Labour's Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, you're a skeptic, is just staying on the outside, not getting involved to quote Jenkins like a farmer judging a pig show rather than a statesman settling the future of his country . All terribly annoying. But in 1en979, Jkins succeeds in introducing the European monetary system and the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, minus the UK, obviously. This creates the European currency unit or ECU, which is weird because it's like a symbolic currency. It's used in finance, but it's not in circulation. You can't go into a shop with an eCU. It's sort of an abstract currency. Okay. Um kind of like Bretton Woods, the whole point of the European monetary system is this grid of these fixed bilateral exchange rates. They're linked by the ECU and they are unofficially underwritten by the Bundesbank, by the Germans. That's where Germany gets its financial dominance. And 1979 is this landmark year for three other reasons. The first is direct elections to the European Parliament. Second is the death of Jean Monnet on the 16th of March. Just a wonderful figure. Just to sum him up, finally, his vision of the world and indeed the universe. Is his response to the 1969 moon landings ? Conflicts between men are almost always a matter of fronti ers. The astronauts now have destroyed what looked like an unsurmountable frontier. They have shown us that we cannot any longer think in limited terms. There are no limitations left. We can think in terms of the universe now. Lovely. I got a little choked up there. If the world made any sense, people would be walking around with t-shirts saying what would Monet think? Yeah, I know. Just a remarkable I mean he's definitely front uh of the queue for our next merchandise. Yeah, yeah. We can think of terms of the universe now . And then the third thing, which is very, very important, is the election of Margaret That cher. Who seemed like to a lot of people a pro-European, because that was the sort of Tory tradition Giscard d'Estaing recognizes immediately. Thatcher was hostile to the European community from the beginning. And the problem is she saw it in purely utilitarian economic terms, had no interest in political union. She basically sort of claimed that she'd been conned 'cause she wasn't really paying attention. She was like, Oh, it was never about United States of Europe. And it's interesting that Attlee, in staying out of Europe, said, no, no, there's a bigger project here, and we're not ready for that. That cher, in supporting European member, British membership . She kind of missed that whole intention and went, it's basically just about selling washing machines to Dusseldorf. Yes, exactly. You know, yeah. And she was wrong. And this is why she immediately then starts this battle, you know, to get a UK rebate. And this is where Tory Euroscepticism becomes a real force through the 80s. I mean, she basically just acts as if that dispute between internationalism and nationalism doesn't exist. And it was clearly just this nationalism project the whole way. But no one She's coolist. She's a cool yeah, but no, but it's a but the thing is, but as if none of that shit had fucking happened. You know, so it's just like you know, as if anyone who'd been paying any attention at any point would recognize that there was a fundamental tension there. And there were people pushing for one interpretation, the conservative one, and people pushing for a much more progressive one in world in world affairs. And for her to just go, well, it was always obviously this is completely wrong. And yet what you see in a matter you know, if she likes a single market and she likes certain things about Europe, you know, in terms of commodity trading. But her rhetoric is always plainly and obviously on the national side , and wasn't definitely. You know, when she talks about financial contributions, she talks about our money. Yeah. Our money. Now what th that is tacitly and implicitly just a rejection of the idea that there is a European us, you know, that of course there isn't. There's just a Europe, a British us, and we happen to be going into a trading relationship with a bunch of European them to give us our fucking money back because we gave you too much of it. Even on the assembly, I mean, she basically refuses for years to call it the parliament. She just keeps on calling it the assembly. You know, so when we were like, Come on, man, like it's been it's been a while now. You know, just any sort of sign or indication of of of of of a claim on people's sense of identity, she absolutely rejects. Um and in the end, I think that this actually is one of the things that that helps bring about the end of the veto era. Because her objections, when she's in place, are so vociferous, they're so pers istent, that people just eventually think, well, we're gonna have to get rid of the fucking veto. Because you can't just have this woman, she just's destroying everything. There are other reasons. I mean, like, you know, Greece has just joined, Spain and Portugal are about to join, membership's about to go to twelve. You know, I mean, having a veto with six people isn't different to having a veto with twelve, basically. Francois Mitterrand is elected in France, he can rule without the gaulists. You know, it's very rare that you can get the gaulists outside of a French government. You know, you're not relying on them for votes. He's got much more room to maneuver. He does a speech uh three weeks before the European elections of June 1984, um, to the Strasbourg Parliament, which is interrupted multiple times by applause. He says, How can the complex diversified unit that the community has become, be governed by the rules of the Dia of the old kingdom of Poland, where every member could block the decisions. We all know where that led. It is time we return to a more normal and more promising way of The French government, which was behind this compromise, has always proposed that it be used only in specific cases. The more frequent practice of voting on important issues and important questions, heralds a return to the treaties, which by the way is complete bollocks. He's not really returning to the treaties at all. He wants, you know, the more sort of progressive interpretation of things. But essentially he's saying, let's do majority voting again where,ver possible and get rid of this culture of the veto. What year is this? 1984. So leaders agreed to set up a new inst itutional committee, they decide a formal change is required, it's wrapped up into a single European Act and all members agreed to majority decision making for tri treaty articles. Look, there's still loads of votes that are unanimous that have a veto. Foreign policy is the obvious area. There's always just gonna nations are just not gonna give up their their their decision making on that. There's an emergency break that's kept in there. But in terms of the cultural change, in the same way that it was during the compromise twenty years earlier, the cultural change is what matters. Right. And suddenly there's this feeling of like you really try to secure concessions and then offer support. You don't want to be the odd man out. You are trying to create a culture of consensus and most countries tend to move towards that. So you get this scenario, by the time you get to here, to 1984 , you get a really powerful sense of European law. All those early questions doesn't take precedence over national law. Sorted, done, solved. Yes, it does in every instance. It's area that it applies, expanding outwards, expanding outwards, including basically, you know, the majority of economic activity and now an acceptance of majority voting in huge swathes of it, where countries accept that they can be outvoted even on things that apply to them and that the institution will keep on making decisions on this term. So it's a real high point and it serves as a springboard for the period that's to come, which is the laws and the creation of the single market, this 1980s sort of process where the next chapter of European history, with a much more ambitious uh mindset and a much greater sense of confidence and momentum going forwards. So yeah, so that's where we're gonna pick up the sort of the road to the European Union, expansion, all of the you know, all of these uh big things and the clashes between Delore and That cher and the rise of Euroscepticism and a lot. The Eurozone crisis. And sort of mastrict and where we are now. Exactly. Brexit and where the European has been left. And also how the European Union can operate in an age of Trump. I'm quite sad though that as we leave this episode, that Calegay has died, Monet has died. Like our guys. Like our kind of like OG visionaries are gone . There's still a couple around. There are still a a coup cle are still kicking. Um but anyway, we will we will conclude the story next time. Uh guys, we would love you to become patron supporters um and to back us in what we are doing. You can do so online if you search Origin Story Patreon. You get money off live shows in advance notice of them. Though that'll be pertinent very soon. You get um uh editions of the podcast that aren't available for anybody else, including some of our Q<unk>As and the book club that we do after a topic area. And you get access to our Patreon community, where we all have quite a chat and where people tend to say very, very funny th ings. And if you don't want to do that yet, obviously you'll do it eventually. It's inevitable. Like European Union. Uh you can just uh tell your friends, you can race it on iTunes. The twelve European stars are unnecessary. Five stars is is perfectly adequate . And just uh spread the word, because we're very proud of what we do and we want to reach as many people as possible. So thank you for listening. Cheer here, guys. Talk to you next week. Au revoir et bon chance .