The Price of Victory

Post-war Labour and Conservative governments saw the UK’s global interests as lying primarily with the United States and the Commonwealth. They took no part in the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community or in the proposed European Defence Community, though, when the EDC idea foundered, Prime Minister Anthony Eden played a prominent role in promoting European defence, just as Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had done in fostering the establishment of NATO. The British sent only an observer to the Messina Conference (1956) that negotiated the terms of the Treaty of Rome establishing the European Community (EEC). The UK set up its own trading bloc (EFTA) but it could not compete politically or economically with the EEC and, in 1961, the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan applied for EEC membership, despite the opposition of France’s President de Gaulle.