Neoliberals saw the EEC as continental protectionism, not true integration
Evidence
The most vocal Euroskeptic of the 1950s was the ubiquitous Wilhelm Röpke, who enjoyed both the ear of West German economics minister (and MPS member) Ludwig Erhard and ready access to the press as a public intellectual. Röpke feared that the EEC would be an extension of the “bloc solution” of the European Coal and Steel Community created in 1952, protecting the continent’s products behind a shared tariff wall, sheltered from foreign competition and managed collectively by a supranational bureaucracy. He felt that the “bloc” version of Europe had no claim to be labeled “integration.” It reproduced the precise symptoms of protectionism and state control that had characterized the 1930s. What looked like integration for Europe would perpetuate disintegration at the scale of the world. Such an arrangement would “turn national autarchy to a continental one and repeat the old problems at a higher geographical scale.” — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 606
Categorization
- QUESTION: Ropke’s distinction between continental bloc and global integration — worth chasing the ideological roots of present-day Euroskepticism among free-market thinkers.
- SEED: Angle: how ‘integration’ as a word was contested — global-vs-continental — and how that rhetorical battle echoes in today’s debates over regional trade blocs vs. globalism.
- XREF: connects to: Mestmäcker fused Hayek with Böhm to scale the economic constitution to the EEC level — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 684; The EEC exception to GATT rules unleashed wider protectionism — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 716
Broader Connections
- Mestmäcker fused Hayek with Böhm to scale the economic constitution to the EEC level
#responds-to(0.85) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 684 - The EEC exception to GATT rules unleashed wider protectionism
#corroborates(0.75) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 716