Miriam Camps and European Integration: Scholarship as Diplomacy

'So I was the chairman, and the Russians kept putting these little glasses of liquid around - colourless liquid, you see - and I was busy chairing and steering things where I wanted them to go and knocking back these little glasses from time to time. We had a very successful meeting.' (Camps 1988). The vodka-fuelled meeting Miriam Camps describes here is the founding moment of the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), a regional organisation operating under the umbrella of the United Nations. Camps (1916-94) was a US diplomat, scholar, journalist and economist. Involved in the design of early post-war European integration organisations such as the ECE at the US State Department in the 1940s, she remained close to the centre of US foreign policy formulation towards Europe until the late 1960s. She left the State Department in 1954 following her marriage to a British citizen. A member of elite foreign policy think tanks in Britain and the United States, Camps took up roles that allowed her to continue to operate as an informal diplomat, commenting on, and at times influencing, European integration and transatlantic relations. And vice versa, her practical experience as a formal and informal diplomat informed her output as a scholar. Camps published prolifically on European integration, transatlantic relations and the post-war international trading order. Like other female international thinkers and experts, Camps was well-known in her time, but her contributions both to US foreign policy and scholarship on European integration have since been largely overlooked by historians of European integration and IR scholars, myself included.

As a scholar of European integration history, I had encountered Camps as the author of the book Britain and the European Community, 1955 to 1963 (1964). There were many things that eluded me about Camps then: that she had been involved in early post-war European reconstruction as a civil servant in the State Department; that for decades she was a prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Chatham House, two of the oldest and most prestigious foreign policy think tanks. And crucially, that Camps' academic output was rather more varied and extended far beyond her book on Britain and the EC to cover free trade, transatlantic relations and, later, GATT reform.

Camps' own career trajectory was characterised by crossing institutional boundaries while maintaining one consistent aim, that of continued diplomatic activity and influence. In a forthcoming article, I explore Camps and her inseparable roles as a diplomat engaged in shaping transatlantic relations and as a scholar and international thinker. Camps' experience in wartime and post-war Europe were crucial in shaping her thinking on international relations. She entered the State Department in 1943 and was posted to the US Embassy in London dealing with war-time and then post-war relief. In early 1945 she joined the Secretariat of the Emergency Economic Commission for Europe, one of three international relief organisations under the auspices of the United Nations, her first experience of an international organisation. As mentioned, she was instrumental in writing the terms of reference for the ECE and was subsequently involved in the setting up the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, the organisation administering the Marshall Plan. In this period she acquired a vast network of contacts in Washington, London and continental Europe.

Following a short stint at the magazine The Economist, Camps sought out employment in elite foreign policy think tanks. Having first worked at Political and Economic Planning in London and as a researcher at Princeton University, in September 1963 Camps joined Chatham House as a Senior Research Fellow. At the same time, she became affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in a 'job share' arrangement. These positions allowed Camps to fulfil the role of what could be called a think tank diplomat and thus to remain active in the 'transatlantic knowledge network' (Roberts 2015).

As a scholar, Camps was one of the founders of a new academic field, European Studies. Far from unusual, her background as a practitioner was also shared by other early scholars of European Studies such as Uwe Kitzinger, who had worked at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg before joining Oxford University, or Roy Pryce, who had been press and information officer at the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community's London office before joining the new Centre for Contemporary European Studies at Sussex University. Yet, it is Camps, who never held a formal university role, who saw her work labelled as 'journalism' by recent historical scholarship (Daddow 2011). Such labelling does not do justice to Camps, an experienced civil servant and trained historian with a meticulous approach to research and sources. Journalism is also a term that seems to be used as a shorthand to deal with the variegated careers many women scholars have had compared to their male colleagues whose university careers seemed to qualify them to undertake 'real' research (though Susan Strange in 1989 [in this blog] thought being called a journalist was a compliment). This piece and forthcoming article on Camps is a plea to scholars assessing early writings of European studies to pay more attention to alternative outlets for scholarship and alternative locations of scholarship that were rather typical for a) women scholars and b) the early phase of the establishment of European studies as an academic field.   

In the mid-1950s to late 1960s instant analyses of European integration were in high demand. The British government needed expertise on European integration while it was considering its future relationship with the ECSC and, from 1955 onwards, with the Common Market. So did the United States' government, which remained supportive of closer economic and political integration in Europe and supported British membership in the European Economic Community. Camps' research outputs were addressed at decision-makers in London and Washington, including diplomats, civil servants, politicians, journalists and also academics. She would also disseminate her views and her work informally, through direct correspondence with people in influential positions.

Camps' scholarly output covered a variety of topics. To give two examples, Camps was one of the first scholars to discuss the merits of a free trade area in Europe, providing commentary and assessment on the free trade area negotiations of 1956-58. As an anglophile, Camps was very sensitive towards Britain's post-war difficulties and preferences and was not a strong proponent of British membership in the European Economic Community, at least not at first. For Camps, a free trade area that included Britain and the Six, as well as the Scandinavian countries, would have been ideal as her main concern was not for a particular type of integration but for creating strong economies in Europe that would result in strong US allies in the cold war (Camps 1959). Her practical experience in running and designing intergovernmental organisations and early writings thus do not chime with a claim made in more recent scholarship that Camps was the arch-priestess of an 'Orthodox School', which argued that Britain had 'missed the bus' and should have committed to supranational integration from the start (Daddow 2011, 194).

Further, in her book European integration in the Sixties, Camps contributed theoretical reflections on the driving forces of European integration. She used the language of neofunctionalism, a theory devised by Ernst B. Haas, IR professor at the University of California, Berkeley, to describe the 'process' of European integration, drawing on the idea of the 'spill over' or 'logic' of integration. However, while she felt that European integration did have some inherent 'logic' in that integration in one sector made integration in another, neighbouring, sector more likely, she did not think that this was an automatic movement. To her, there was no 'iron law of "spill over",' 'nor an irresistible internal dynamic that is bound to carry the Six to full economic union and beyond to some form of political union (Camps 1966, 211). More aligned with intergovernmental theory, Camps thought that the member states had an important role to play in the integration process and that any transfer of more powers from the nation states to the Community depended on the agreement and willingness of national governments. Based on her own observation of, and participation in, post-war European integration and transatlantic diplomacy, she pragmatically concluded that neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism were not mutually exclusive with both theories explaining different aspects of European integration. 

In conclusion, for Camps scholarship and diplomacy were two sides of the same coin. Traditional ideas of suitably 'academic' affiliations and publication outlets have led to categorisations of individuals into 'scholars' on the one hand, and 'diplomats', or indeed 'journalists' on the other, and are therefore not helpful in capturing figures such as Camps. Individuals with rather more unconventional career trajectories like her have thus too easily slipped through the net cast by researchers narrating the founding story of European Studies and regional IR.

References

Camps, Miriam. 1988. "Interview with Miriam Camps by Francois Duchêne, London, 31 August." Historical Archives of the European Union, Florence, INT 492.

Camps, Miriam. 1966. European Integration in the Sixties. New York: McGraw Hill.

Camps, Miriam. 1964. Britain and the European Community, 1955-1963. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Camps, Miriam. 1959. "History of the Free Trade Area Negotiations." P.E.P. Planning XXV, no. 432, 13 April.

Daddow, Oliver. 2011. Britain and Europe: Historiographical Perspectives on Integration. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Roberts, Priscilla. 2015. "A Century of International Affairs Think Tanks in Historical Perspective." International Journal 70, no. 4: 535-55. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0020702015590591