Interpreting the Ideological Make-up of European Integration: Remarks on the Failure of a 'Dirigiste' Europe in the 1960s

The European Union (EU) is today widely regarded as reflecting a neoliberal ideology. Historians have sought to substantiate and explain this by underlining the influence of neoliberal networks, and especially of German ordoliberals, during the negotiation of the Treaty of Rome: from its beginning, European integration would thus have been bound to become a neoliberal device. This paper aims at proposing another way of interpreting the making of a neoliberal Europe. While it will not challenge the view that the EU as it is today reflects neoliberal conceptions, it will insist that this was by no means certain during the early years of European integration: this is rather the result of a competition between different economic ideologies in which the neoliberal view succeeded to become the most legitimate interpretation of the European Economic Community (EEC). In order to make this point, I will examine the fate of another economic ideology in the EEC: economic “dirigisme”. Using archival material, I will first recall that, beside ordoliberals, supporters of an active direction of the economy were important actors in the negotiation of the Treaty of Rome. Hence, the Treaty should not be read as a theoretical text drawing on one ideological inspiration, but rather as a political text shaped as a compromise between different conflicting options. In a second moment of the paper, I will then show how this “dirigiste” potential of the EEC failed to be implemented: while it inspired economic policies during the early years of the EEC, it was challenged on political, scientific and practical grounds. Its legitimacy was thus increasingly undermined at the European level. As a conclusion, I will thus argue that, to study ideologies in European integration, one should not only focus on their origins, but also on their uses in the course of European integration.