Thatcher’s European Policy II: Sovereignty and Nationalism

Abstract

It is remarkable, in retrospect, that the British government saw the 1983 Stuttgart summit as significant for establishing the principles of a final budget settlement, and not for the Solemn Declaration on European Union. The Solemn Declaration committed members of the European Council to ‘… broad action to ensure the relaunch of the Community’, and to providing ‘… a general political impetus for the construction of Europe’. As such, it took its place in a long line of similar calls for European unity stretching back to the Treaty of Rome and beyond. Economic integration, according to key figures like Paul-Henri Spaak and Walter Hallstein, was the means to eventual political union, and the Paris summits of 1972 and 1974 had committed the Community to achieving this goal by 1980. To facilitate this, they had commissioned a report by the Belgian Prime Minister, Leo Tindemans, which called for: the establishment of economic and monetary union; reform of Community institutions; and the implementation of common foreign, regional and social policies. The Solemn Declaration was itself a response to an initiative launched by the foreign minister of the Federal Republic, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, with the assistance of his Italian counterpart, Emilio Colombo, two years previously.