European Integration Re-Woven: British and West German Textile Employers’ Associations and European Integration, 1958–1980

Despite being famous for a skyline dotted with cranes and modern developments, a journey to Manchester is also a journey back in time. Once known for the role the city, and the textiles at the heart of it, played in the industrial revolution, Greater Manchester still has many remnants from days of past industrial glory. The derelict cotton mills and warehouses, for instance, which can be spotted on the twenty-minute train journey from Manchester Piccadilly to Bolton. Horrockses is one such remnant—a textile company with a history of nearly 200 years and a fashion line once so coveted that even Queen Elizabeth wore Horrockses dresses during her tour of the Commonwealth in the 1950s.¹ Bolton, once an important town for textile production, also commemorates its history with statues of personalities such as Samuel Crompton (born in Bolton and inventor of the spinning mule), who revolutionized the industrial production of textiles.

Although textile production in Britain has significantly declined in the twentieth century, its legacy is still ubiquitous in Manchester and other regions in the UK.² However, this heritage is not something exclusive to Britain. Many European countries, such as France and Germany, were also major textile producers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.³ In Germany, streets are still named ‘Webergasse’ (Weavers Alley), recalling the connection between these areas and the textile industry; in the Bavarian city of Augsburg, the old textile quarter, which comprises several former factories, has been renovated and now hosts the textile and industry museum and the city archives.

In both Britain and Germany, the derelict cotton mills and factories, street names, and museums are reminders of times of industrial success and prosperity, but also of deindustrialization and decay. Between these two extremes lies a ‘grim battle for survival’.⁴ Although research has correctly shown that the British and German textile industries declined after the 1920s (in Britain more severely than in Germany), there is a misconception about the industry’s end point, or rather about its continuing importance after 1945. The lack of studies covering the development of the British and (West) German textile industries after the Second World War⁵ adds to the impression that the industry simply ceased to exist from then on. My PhD project counters this view. Both the British and West German textile industries were important employers, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, and they continued to exist well into the 1980s, albeit in increasing decline. The question is: how did they do it?

European Integration

In analysing and understanding this process, it is important to consider European integration and the European Economic Community (EEC) as an arena in which the fight for survival took place, and to focus on actors who were at the forefront of this fight, namely the textile employers’ associations. My project contrasts two countries that became members of the EEC at different times—West Germany in 1958 and the UK in 1973. This offers the possibility of comparing how textile employers’ associations reacted to European integration (that is, their attitudes towards it), how integration was used to counter the perceived negative effects of globalization (the most important factor in the textile industry’s decline in Europe), and how it fundamentally transformed the interest representation strategies of these associations. My research makes clear that both the British and West German textile employers’ associations Europeanized, but in different ways, and that this shaped their ‘battle for survival’.

Europeanization and the Attitudes of British and West German Textile Employers’ Associations towards European Integration

As the Common Market was already a reality for the West German textile employers’ association Gesamttextil from 1958, it gradually Europeanized and was confronted with the direct effects of economic integration. This led to an ambivalent attitude that could best be described as Euro-opportunistic. The association’s main objection was not to increased intra-European competition, but to the slow progress of integration, which in its view caused market disruption. However, the rather protectionist international agreements on cotton negotiated by the European Commission in the 1960s under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade offered the European cotton industry—still one of the most important textile branches in the 1960s—a period of protection during which it had the chance to adapt to increased global competition from countries such as Hong Kong, India, Pakistan, and Japan and to reorganize the industry through rationalization. European economic integration, therefore, offered many advantages, but it also had drawbacks, which explains the sharp shifts between negative and positive in the attitudes of textile employers’ associations.

It was different in Britain’s case. Although the country applied twice for EEC membership (1961–3 and 1966–7), it only became a member in 1973. For these two entry attempts, the (textile) industry prepared statements on the question of how supportive it would be of EEC membership and thus had to actively engage with the prospect of joining the Common Market and decide which position to take. This went hand in hand with the fact that events on the Continent did not go unnoticed by the British textile industry, with the EEC developing into a new trading entity in the 1960s, providing a protective space for cotton. In this period, therefore, we observe strong Europeanization in the British textile industry too, although it was less salient and less contested than in the West German case. This changed significantly, however, in the 1970s, after Britain became an EEC member.

Nonetheless, the attitudes of British textile representatives are difficult to grasp, especially in the 1960s. The main difference between the West German and British textile industries was the absence, in the latter, of a single national employers’ association until 1972. This makes the attitudes towards integration adopted by the British textile industry difficult to ascertain. One of the aims of my archival visits during my scholarship at the GHIL was therefore to get a better picture of the positions on integration voiced by the various larger textile employers’ associations in Britain, and of their processes of Europeanization.

The only quasi-equivalent to the West German organization Gesamttextil in the 1960s was the Cotton Board, which was the most important central representative body of the cotton industry in Britain. However, being a ‘Development Council’, it was not a classic lobby group but aimed to improve the industry’s situation by increasing its efficiency or providing statistical services to its members. Nevertheless, in the 1960s it also represented the cotton industry’s interests at governmental level.⁶

As the archives revealed, the attitude of the Cotton Board to European integration was quite clear: EEC entry was the cotton industry’s ‘last chance’.⁷ One major incentive was the restructuring of the industry through more aggressive trading and vertical integration, which could only be achieved through EEC membership.⁸ However, other organizations, such as the Bolton Master Cotton Spinners, were not as rigorous or enthusiastic as the Cotton Board. As the two following paragraphs of the association’s annual report for 1962 show, it regarded membership as a challenge and an inevitability, but also hoped for benefits:

Although not everyone in the industry shared this rather positive view,⁹ it is an important example of the different expectations industries had of European integration. Gesamttextil, for instance, certainly did not, at least not openly, perceive the EEC as a ‘last chance’ or as a source of ‘prosperity’; this was also because the West German textile industry was, at that point, not in such heavy decline.

However, there was another incentive for the British industry: many of its representatives hoped for better treatment or greater recognition of the problems they faced at the European level than they had received from their national governments. There are many examples of industrial representatives levelling the criticism that they were being neglected, or, in their words, ‘sacrificed . . . on the altar of the Commonwealth’’,¹⁰ by their government. They regarded the EEC as a lesser evil that offered more opportunities to fight for survival. This fight, on both the British and West German side, is intrinsically linked to a conflictual engagement with European integration and the contested processes of Europeanization that evolved from it. Without taking this into account, I argue, we cannot properly understand the development of the British and West German textile industries after 1945.¹¹

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Feature Image: The cranes of Manchester. Photo by Katharina Troll

1. Horrockses, Crewsdon & Co, Preston. Lancashire City Council Archive, accessed 5 Nov. 2024. [↩]
2. Yorkshire, for example, used to be an important area of wool production. [↩]
3. Britain, France, and Germany were also colonial powers, and they exploited the possibilities their rule offered. An excellent book about the role of the British Empire in the success of its textile industry is Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2015). [↩]
4. Manchester Archives and Local Studies, GB127, Box 319, Newspaper cuttings: MEN, ‘Cotton “fighting for life”’, 5 Mar. 1962. [↩]
5. Exceptions in the German case include Stephan H. Lindner, Den Faden verloren: Die westdeutsche und die französische Textilindustrie auf dem Rückzug (1930/45–1990) (Munich, 2001); Alex Gertschen, Klassenfeinde—Branchenpartner? Unternehmer und Gewerkschaft der westdeutschen Textilindustrie vor den Herausforderungen der Internationalisierung, 1949–1979 (Baden-Baden, 2013); for the British case, see David Clayton, ‘Buy British: The Collective Marketing of Cotton Textiles, 1956–1962’, Textile History, 41/2 (2010), 217–35; Steven Toms and Qi Zhang, ‘Marks & Spencer and the Decline of the British Textile Industry, 1950–2000’, Business History, 90/1 (2016), 3–30. [↩]
6. Bolton Archives and Local Studies, FET/3/1/4: Darwen Cotton Manufacturers Association Minutes, Special General Meeting of members re. Cotton Board, 24 Oct. 1955. [↩]
7. Manchester Archives and Local Studies, GB127, Box 319, Newspaper cuttings: Daily Telegraph, ‘Last Chance for Cotton’, 22 Aug. 1962. [↩]
8. Ibid. [↩]
9. Bolton Archives and Local Studies, FET1/5/19: Bolton Master Cotton Spinners’ Association, Annual Report for 1963, 16 Jan. 1964, p. 19. [↩]
10. Bolton Archives and Local Studies, FET/1/44: Bolton Master Cotton Spinners’ Association, Annual General Meetings and Management Committee, Report of Speech, 1962, p. 2. [↩]
11. Of course, Britain’s engagement with European integration was shaped by its former role as a colonial power until well into the 1970s. The Imperial Preference system, introduced in the early 1930s, played an important part in Britain’s trade with the Commonwealth countries. In the case of textiles, it allowed countries such as Hong Kong, India, and Pakistan to export cloth free of duty to Britain. The main aim of this system was, however, to favour British over foreign goods in the Commonwealth countries and to provide Britain with a trade advantage over other Western states. The textile industry was probably one of the industries in Britain most negatively affected by Imperial Preference, because, from the 1940s, some Commonwealth countries made big advances, which meant their prices became more competitive with those of other Western countries. While some of these countries, such as France, imposed high tariffs and quotas on cloth produced in some Commonwealth countries, most notably Hong Kong, the British government was reluctant to do so, as it did not want to risk damaging either its trade relations or its standing in the Commonwealth. This explains why the British textile industry felt it was being ‘sacrificed on the altar of the Commonwealth’. It was only in the second half of the 1960s that the British government backed off from the principle of open markets and introduced import quotas on textiles. See John Singleton, Lancashire on the Scrapheap: The Cotton Industry 1945–1970 (Oxford, 1991), esp. 121–40. In fact, Imperial Preference also played a crucial role in Britain’s two EEC entry negotiations in the 1960s, as this colonial remnant did not comply very well with EEC Common Market regulations and caused conflict with other member countries. Unlike France, which was a founding member and had been able to sustain its colonial ties in the EEC, Britain struggled as an applicant for membership. Only recently has research on European integration engaged not only with the colonial heritage of member states, but most importantly with the question of what EEC membership or association meant for former colonized countries. [↩]

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