The commission, the council and the Irish application for the EEC, 1961-73

This chapter traces the evolution of both the Council of Ministers and the European Commission's perceptions of Ireland during the 1960s and the early 1970s. In a volume devoted to tracing and analysing the respective attitudes of the Six (the original founding member states) towards the inclusion of Ireland in the first enlargement, it is also necessary to study the working out of the different national positions at a multilateral level and in the context of the complex relationship between the Commission and the Council of Ministers. These are inseparable facets of the European Economic Community (EEC) decision-making process. The 'pulling and hauling' between the member states, and their diverse and interacting views on Ireland's application, need to be examined. To a degree it is unavoidable that it was the EC entry negotiations of the United Kingdom which 'would ultimately determine whether Ireland joined or not'.1 This is a central thread that binds the Commission's and Council's ongoing deliberations on Ireland's candidacy. However, it is important to consider the wider Commission and Council assessments of Ireland in terms of her level of economic development (agriculture, industry), willingness to comply with Community strictures, political and foreign policy outlook, the Troubles, and Irish public opinion. This chapter reveals that the EEC had begun to pay attention to Ireland in 1959 and the implications of the emerging trade split between the EEC and the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) for Ireland. The commercial counsellors of the missions of the EEC member states in Dublin established a committee to monitor Ireland's evolving attitudes and policies for the EEC. This committee was to provide regular lengthy and detailed reports to the EEC member states and the Council throughout the entire duration of Ireland's EEC application from 1961 to 1972. Its reports were forwarded to the Commission unless there were objections by COREPER ('Comité des Représentants permanents', Committee of Permanent Representatives). The COREPER members were in fact the ambassadors of each member state in Brussels. One of their functions was to prepare the meetings of the Council, thus the commercial counsellors played an important information- gathering and evaluative role. In assessing the role of the Commission specifically, N. Piers Ludlow has cautioned about the difficulties in trying to provide an accurate picture of what exactly the Commission thought about the issue of Community enlargement. Generalisations, based on official documents issued by the Commission, should be avoided by historians, he argues, for the following reasons: Firstly, the category of official documentation known as an 'Opinion' should not be read as meaning that unanimity existed among the Commissioners. Instead it was more likely to be the majority viewpoint. Secondly, there is a time factor. For example, the situation in the Community in 1961 was not the same as in 1967, when Ireland reactivated its application and the United Kingdom submitted its second one and, as a consequence, its Opinion might well have changed in the meantime. Thirdly, the Commission had to be aware of the political climate within the Community when it issued an Opinion. It should indeed be borne in mind that it did not decide about who was going to join the Community or not and that this power was in the hands of the Council, whose ministers reflected the opinions of their respective governments (of the member states). Finally, there was the question of the Commission's presence and role during the entry negotiations, on which opinion among the member states was initially divided. In 1961, France and the Netherlands believed that, under Article 237 of the Treaty of Rome, the presence of the Commission was not required in the enlargement discussions. When other member states disagreed, however, the Commission won its seat at the table. It knew that there were differing national views about the role of the Commission in the enlargement discussions. For all these reasons, Ludlow argues, the Commission was very reserved in its official and public statements on enlargement: 'A proper analysis needs to go beyond the highly Delphic public statements and look for evidence of what the Commission really believed,' he concludes. This chapter, based on research in the Council of Ministers and Commission archives, together with an evaluation of the material found in the respective foreign ministries of the Six (Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) and in personal papers, seeks to tackle the challenge set out above. The Commission's evolving perspective on Ireland is unveiled and the fullest account to date of national positions in the Council deliberations is provided here. The chapter will not go into the details and minutiae of the entry negotiations, which began in 1970. The negotiations ran very smoothly and without any major difficulty, except on the issue of fisheries. By then, Ireland had had enough time to adapt to Community demands and, realistically speaking, once France and the United Kingdom agreed to solve their outstanding issues, Ireland's entry was only a technicality.