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 my first talk, I tried to present a picture of the underlying character of the European

community, not as it was conceived by those who set it up,

but as it has evolved over the 15 years since the Treaty of Rome entered into force.

Today I want to look more closely at the way in which this unusual and elusive arrangement operates in practice,

and in the course of that, to note how different national attitudes make their mark on European community politics.

I think I can most easily introduce what I have to say by recalling an occasion recently when I was myself the object of a rebuke by a distinguished French lawyer for being so willfully English in my

attitude to European institutions. The circumstances were these. I was a member of a committee

set up by the European Commission in Brussels to work out a set of proposals for strengthening

the European Parliament. After some months of argument,

we'd reached agreement on the main outlines of a scheme

and then went on to discuss possible ways of giving the European Parliament

some immediate practical power

without waiting for the laborious business of amending the Treaty of Rome.

It seemed to me fairly simple for the Council of Ministers,

which at present wields all the effective power, to engage in a formal act of self-denial,

to say that henceforth it would not make certain kinds of European laws without the prior

agreement of the Parliament in Strasbourg.

I presented an argument on these lines to our committee in Brussels,

and very likely I made it all sound too facile.

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