This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Europe Journey to an Unknown Destination

given by Andrew Seanfield was originally broadcast in 1972.

In this and the next lecture, I'm going to talk about the European community's relations with the rest of the world, starting with the United States.

In the early days of the European Common Market, the six managed to achieve a kind of illusion

of privacy within the international system. What I mean is that they treated the often

quite profound effects which the arrangements that they made with one another had on the rest of the world,

as if they were wholly subsidiary matters, certainly of no particular concern to them.

They behaved for much of the time, rather as though they were living inside a charmed circle bounded entirely by their own problems and preoccupations. The special circumstances

of the later post-war period when Europe finally withdrew from empire and experienced the longest

uninterrupted run of prosperity ever, based on cultivating its own garden, certainly helped. And the forward march of American

world power, which accompanied the European withdrawal, was another major factor. The Europeans

were provided with a sure military defense through the American nuclear umbrella, and American

power, abetted to a diminishing extent by the British, supplied sufficient security

for the movement of world trade to guarantee European requirements of vital raw materials like oil.

At the same time, the American dollar provided an extremely effective international medium of exchange and a common reserve

currency for the Europeans. So why should the countries forming the European community have

cared very much about what happened in the world beyond Western Europe? Meanwhile, the politics

of the European Charmed Circle led to the building up of a network of special agreements between the community and a number of favoured states on its southern periphery.

Many of these were Mediterranean countries, others were in Black Africa, former colonies of France and Belgium.

What has been established as a result of all this is a fairly well-defined zone of client states,

more or less dependent commercial partners of the community.

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