Crisis Point

Europe's Common Market lives on crisis. Each sign of a major disagreement lures teams of journalists to Brussels, often to pronounce that the market is dying or dead. The Six's troubles turn a fancy profit for the telegraph companies, the hotels and the nightclubs. Even the Eurocrats find the disputes tolerable because they create headlines, drama, personal attention and, most important of all, the pressures that ultimately produce agreement In the market's six-year history, every big fight over prices or procedures has led to urgent bargaining marathons that eventually welded the Six closer together. Last week the familiar, almost delicious sense of crisis was in the air at Brussels. This time it was about a subject that no one anywhere seems able to solve: farm prices.

Bold Plan. The Common Market has already irreversibly agreed to join together on industrial policies, but the other half of the common future--farm policy--remains unresolved. The Market is bedeviled by the fact that Germany's backward farmers enjoy much higher prices than France's more efficient farmers, and thus make agreement on a common agricultural policy difficult to reach. The market had planned to equalize farm prices in fairly comfortable stages by 1970, but Charles de Gaulle recently hinted that France would pull out of the market altogether unless some action was taken this year. Though no one really quite takes De Gaulle's I-won't-play threat seriously, the marketeers realize that it can be dangerous not to.

With that as a goad, the Common Market's farm chief, Sicco Mansholt, 55, a Socialist dairy farmer and The Netherlands' former chief of agriculture, fortnight ago proposed a bold plan to equalize the Six's grain prices by next July. By Mansholt's reckoning, the French would have to raise their grain prices by 8% to 15%, while the Germans would have to slash theirs by 11% to 15%. Last week the distressed Germans pleaded for time to weigh this shocker--Chancellor Ludwig Erhard will discuss it during visits this month to De Gaulle and President Kennedy-and showdown talks were postponed until Dec. 16.

Toward Compromise. Judging by past performances, the talks will continue right up to the Jan. 1 deadline and perhaps beyond it; the Common Market's ministers will wear themselves to a frazzle in all-night sessions and finally reach agreement. Nowadays, it is not politically popular to go home empty-handed --governments and industry both have too big a stake in the success of the Common Market. The French have been particularly effective in floating stories that the market is floundering. Such reports, of course, strengthen their bargaining position. But at bottom the others are convinced that the French genuinely want the Common Market to work, for, in De Gaulle's ambition to lead Europe, his natural collaborators are his Common Market partners.

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