European co-operation in the fields of armaments standardisation and military aeronautics: with or without Great Britain?

In the history of Europe, since the Hundred Years' War, Great Britain has often adopted an aloof attitude towards the rest of the continent. This is an enduring cliché that we need to mention when we talk about Great Britain. There is no doubt that this stereotype has been reinforced in the last fifty years since the United Kingdom, after initially refusing to become a member of the EEC, finally joined it in the early 1970s to better express its often dissenting views. Anglo-European relations in the field of defence have only reinforced this commonplace. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, London, because of its global aspirations, was initially reluctant to create a regional security association with its "neighbors" in Western Europe. When the Brussels Pact was finally signed in 1948, the British reserved the right to mainly co-operate through aerial and naval means, preferring to keep a presence on the continent that was as small as possible. In May 1949, the United Kingdom established the "special relationship" with the United States as the cornerstone of its international policy. Having refused to join the ECSC, it was no more forthcoming towards the EDC. The small states of the Benelux and Italy had to fight to establish co-operation between Britain and the nascent European army on the one hand, and to bridge the gap between the organisation of the planned military body and the British conceptions for European co-operation in the field of defence on the other hand. Our research in the past year has led us to believe that British policy underwent a similar evolution in the field of defence as it did vis-à-vis European integration as a whole. We can study this evolution through a comparison between the attitude of the British authorities in the second half of the 1950s and that shown during the 1960s up to 1973, not only from the point of view of the standardisation of weapons (FINA-BEL) but also in respect to production of military aircraft. This observation pushes us to try and answer the following questions: how did this change take place and for what reasons? To what extent was it linked to the turnaround in the British attitude towards the EEC?