Walter Hallstein: the British Perspective

Abstract

Walter Hallstein was a far less familiar figure to the British elite — and to the Anglo-Saxons across the Atlantic — than many of the other leading figures in the shaping of West European integration. Partly for that reason, he received less attention in the English-language press at the time, and in the subsequent histories and analyses of European integration which flowed from British and American publishers. It was the ‘Hallstein Doctrine’ — with its imagery of unbending anti-Communism — which first made his name familiar to the British political class. His professional preoccupation with the creation of an integrated Western Europe within which West Germany would regain respect and authority took him to Paris, Rome, Brussels and The Hague, but not across the Channel to a state which had chosen to stand aloof from the small group of ‘defeated countries’ — as many in London patronizingly regarded them — prepared to sink their sovereignty into supranational institutions.² The British image of Hallstein, indeed, reflects as much of the British elite’s self-image in relation to the European continent in general and to Germany in particular as it does the qualities of Walter Hallstein himself.