The Future of the European Community: A Strategy for Enlargement
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WIDENING AND DEEPENING HAS been a recurrent theme since the foundation of the Community, when Britain refused to join in taking what the Schuman declaration, which launched the European Coal and Steel Community in May 1950, called ‘a first step in the federation of Europe’. When Britain sought membership in 1961, Jean Monnet, who had drafted the Schuman declaration, got his Action Committee for the United States of Europe to affirm that the British would be joining, not just the Community as it then stood, but ‘the economic and political union which is in the process of formation’; and the Committee called -for the establishment of a European Reserve Union as ‘the first step’ towards the goal of a European currency. Both the widening to include Britain and the deepening in the direction of a union were vetoed by President de Gaulle. But both projects outlasted him; and, when British membership was once again considered after his departure in 1969, the French government devised the formulation that widening must be accompanied by ‘completion’ and ‘deepening’.