Siege of Brussels
EUROPE JOCK BRUCE-GARDYNE
I sometimes wonder whether there may not per- haps be what the Americans, I believe, call a `sweat-box' somewhere deep down in the bowels of the Foreign Office where a tiny elite of schizophrenics spend day and night dream- ing up the weird strategy of British foreign policy. The general reaction in London to Presi- dent de Gaulle's latest performance in Canada —and for once it -is surely justified—is that senile irresponsibility has overtaken him. Yet at the same time we continue, apparently, to assume that the French response to the British application to join the Common Market will, in the end, be cautious and rational at least—if admittedly not positive. Nothing may induce the General to say 'yes': but at least he won't dare to say 'no' to the opening of negotiations with Britain. The implication is that we will lay siege to the Avenue de in Joyeuse Entrée, the inappropriately named seat of the European Commission in Brussels. We will stare the General out.
Mr Macmillan likened the preliminaries to the summitry so dear to his heart to a stately minuet. What we are now witnessing is a pas de deux. 'There has,' the Prime Minister regularly assures us, 'been no flat rejection by the French Foreign Minister or anyone else.' And if General de Gaulle is to be believed, for France also, 'there cannot be, nor has there ever been, any question of a veto.'
It is only fair to President and Prime Minister to recall what is sometimes forgotten: that this is precisely the way the press conference of 14 January 1963 was interpreted in London at the time. I remember taking part in a broadcast discussion programme with one of the most fervent of the 'Europeans' that very evening. The vital thing, he blandly assured me, was that the General had not dared to say no. And this indeed proved to be the official reaction in Whitehall. The next meeting took place at the end of January in Brussels on schedule, and only when M Couve de Murville announced that he was withdrawing the French team was tile ending of the negotiations accepted.
So it is again. This time the French have pro- nounced a 'fin de non recevoir' to the British application not once, but five times: twice by the General, at his press conference and at the summit conference of the Six in Rome, twice by M Couve de Murville, in Brussels last week and before the French National Assembly on 15 June, and once by M Bettencourt in response to the Foreign Secretary's presentation of the British case before the WEU on 4 July. But are we downhearted? Not us. 'They're running scared' is the gleeful response.
It is true that passages in the French Foreign Minister's speech on 10 July were almost worthy of Harold Wilson. The enlargement of the European Community to include Britain and her EFTA partners would lead to an attempt by the United States to change the nature of her relationship with western Europe? One had been led to understand that this was precisely what the French have wanted for so long. It would bring down the Iron Curtain again? But surely the continental criticism of successive British governments has been that they were far too keen to flirt with Moscow. These glaring inconsistencies are called in evidence to prove that the French already know they have lost the battle. The General dare not block negotiations by refusing to take part, so runs the argument. So, like the Fat Boy, he is out to make his partners' flesh creep with visions so weird and wonderful they will not put him to the test.
This interpretation may well be accurate if it is restricted to the executors of the General's policies. I have always believed from talking to them at the time that those responsible for the day-to-day negotiations in 1961-2—M Couve de Murville and M Olivier Wormser—regarded the General's walk-out then as a costly and irrelevant blunder (like the British they over- estimated its impact on the solidarity of the Six). They were supremely—and I believe rightly—confident that they could raise the price to the point of no sale.
The same is true today. It would be child's play for the French negotiating team to string the bargaining along. If the Basle agreement which underwrites the pound against purely speculative pressures sees us through the autumn there will be no escape from the harsh choice next year between an indefinite con- tinuation of unemployment at intolerably high levels and another balance of payments crisis immediately provoked by any further moves to stimulate home demand. And even supposing —a wildly improbable supposition—this dilemma could somehow be postponed, -the French would only have to spell out the full implications of George Brown's WEU speech and then start bidding up the price from there to destroy the fragile Cabinet commitment to Europe which exists at present.
This is not the General's way. Devious and cynical though he undoubtedly is in day-to-day diplomacy, he does not find it becoming to his style to enter into negotiations when he has no intention of allowing them to come to a suc- cessful conclusion.
But isn't this precisely what he did in 1961-2? Not so. Right from the moment of his first encounter with Mr Macmillan in the summer of 1958 until he was given advance notice of the Nassau agreement at Rambouillet in December 1962 he was uncertain whether, in the last analysis, the British Prime Minister might not
play the- 'nuclear' card—the only one that in- terested him. Only when, at Nassau, Harold Macmillan showed that that card was reserved for another table and another game was he satisfied that Britain could not qualify for mem- bership: and so he promptly withdrew his team from Brussels.
This time, as M Couve de Murville clearly stated to the French National Assembly last month, the General accepts that Britain has made progress along the road to 'national independence.' But there are new difficulties. His critics know what these 'difficulties' are: they amount to a determination on his part not to share the leadership of Europe. They may be right. But even if they are there is another strand to the argument which France's partners find it more and more difficult to refute: and that is Britain's economic weakness.
Every time we fall flat on our faces Mr Wil- son likes to tell us that we are going to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. But un- fortunately, as the OECD has so clearly demon- strated in the first edition of its new-style Economic Outlook, the pains of self-adjustment cannot but be shared in a world of tumbling tariffs. The German recession (for which, of course, there was no sort of a balance of pay- ments justification) has already thrown France's plans for controlled reflation out of gear and edged the Belgians towards a slump. Exports to Britain and West Germany alone account for about one shilling and sevenpence in every pound's worth of goods produced in Benelux, Austria, Switzerland and Scandinavia, and this with all the tariff barriers that still exist in western Europe. Unless and until there are grounds for confidence not merely that Britain has emerged from the troubles which have dogged our steps since 1964 but that we can sustain a respectable rate of growth (by con- tinental, not Anglo-Saxon, standards) for the foreseeable future we shall appear to our pro- spective partners as a millstone.
That is why it is very likely the French will not in the end have to ban negotiations with Britain. They have given unmistakable warn- ing to their partners not to push them to the brink. In the past this has usually been enough to enable the General to get his way. Belgium and Holland will no doubt not be deterred. But are the Germans and Italians really going to stage a direct collision with the General for the privilege of shouldering an economic encum- brance? I doubt it. Even if they do, I cannot see the General allowing his civil servants to go round the course once more.
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