Stocktaking

When Spain's Francisco Franco set out for hot, dry Ciudad Rodrigo last week to meet with Portuguese Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, a rustle of speculation swept through Madrid. What, asked the wags, could bring the dictators out of their palaces in weather like this?

The answer, it soon appeared, was an urgent need for stocktaking, such as was taking place all over Western Europe last week as the result of the passage of the Euratom and Common Market treaties by the French National Assembly.

For Franco and Salazar, as for Britain and Scandinavia, the problem was whether they could afford to remain outside the Common Market (a super-customs union of France, West Germany, Italy and Benelux). If Spain and Portugal join, they are likely to be swamped with tariff-free industrial imports, cheaper and better than comparable products of their own; if they stay out, French and Italian farmers and merchants, operating behind the Common Market customs wall, may take away the European markets for such Spanish and Portuguese products as citrus fruits, cork, wine, sardines and pyrite.

Misgivings. Inside the Common Market there was stocktaking too. Despite reassurances that the first effects would not be felt for years, Dutch authorities gloomily predicted that increasing minimum wages and raising tariffs on raw materials purchased outside the Common Market would cost Dutch manufacturers $84 million in the next five years. French authorities, plagued by a dangerously unfavorable balance of trade, gloomily decided that, for the time being, they would have to disregard the fundamental principle of the Common Market, and temporarily restored import quotas on about 2,000 items that France buys from her European trading partners.

But nowhere was the soul-searching more intense than in London. From the moment the Common Market idea was born, British industry has been keenly aware that it will be badly hurt the day that Germany can sell her manufactures in a tariff-free market of six nations and 160 million people, while Britain is walled out. Impelled by this vision, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft last year proposed a plan for a wider Free Trade Area of 16 European nations--including the Common Market six--which would exchange manufactured goods free of tariff but keep national tariffs on agricultural products. This would allow Britain to continue giving imperial preference to agricultural imports from the Commonwealth, and enable her to escape an agonizing either/ or choice between the Commonwealth and Europe.

Britain's dream of sharing a common cake while hoarding a few goodies of her own riled some of the Common Market nations. Fortnight ago during the French debate on the Common Market, Foreign Minister Christian Pineau flatly declared that a Free Trade Area which did not include agricultural products was unacceptable to France. The Danes and the Dutch felt the same way. In a less noble tone some continental economists insisted that Britain need not fear the Common Market plan so much since all signatories were equally sensitive to their own farm lobbies and had already built all sorts of agricultural protectionism into the machinery. Nonetheless the British hesitated. "If there should at any time be a conflict between the calls made upon Britain," Macmillan told a television audience, "the Commonwealth comes first in our hearts and minds." He felt better when Australia's Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies, in London for the recent Commonwealth conference, said that Australia did not think Britain should stay aloof from the economic integration of Europe.

Loss of Authority. Last week, on the night of the French Common Market vote, Macmillan and his old chieftain, Sir Winston Churchill, addressed a rally of the United Kingdom Council of the European Movement. Sir Winston worked up a little of his oldtime vigor in his peroration: "My message to Europe is still the same as it was ten years ago--unite!" When Macmillan got up to speak he was heckled by a group of empire-minded Tory diehards (seven were evicted). Macmillan pitched his arguments to their prejudices: he knew that they fear the diminution of Britain's stoutly held independence and deplore the retreat from empire. Said Macmillan: "Anybody of my age [he is 63] who looks back upon his life must reflect with sorrow on what Europe has done to itself in that time. Twice in a generation Europe has torn itself apart in bitter, internecine struggle. By this means (let us face it) the nations have largely destroyed or at any rate threatened the supremacy of Western civilization. Many of our present troubles really flow from the loss of authority which followed the demonstration to less advanced peoples of the civilized areas of the world destroying each other."

To those in Macmillan's audience who remembered the recent despairing warning of that old internationalist Gilbert Murray, in the last days of his life, that the colored races are not ready for leadership of the world but are inheriting it by default, Harold Macmillan was plainly suggesting that empire-minded Tories, to preserve the values they cherish, should become good Europeans.

Macmillan was more determined than ever to push ahead with a European Free Trade Area, linked with the six-nation Common Market. "This is an opportunity which we cannot miss," said Macmillan. "It may not come again."

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