Europe: The Facts of Life
IT is the conviction of this journal that, in spite of all appearances to the con- trary, the Prime Minister is engaged in a genuine and sincere attempt to get Britain into the Common Market. It is, therefore, unfortunate, for his sake as well as for the nation's, that he has not entrusted this immensely difficult and delicate task to someone with a greater experience of, and feel for, international negotiations than him- self. Mr Wilson has complained about the Community's farm policy, and not even accepted the Rome Treaty. He has told the Five, at Strasbourg, that their governments are unstable and, in Paris, that Britain's attitude to the working of the Community is 'pragmatic.' He is already well on the way to alienating the Five without im- pressing France. And all the time, of course, the General is playing him like a trout. Few things would amuse the old man at the Elysee more than to have the need for a French veto removed altogether —the way Mr Wilson least expects it. The way things have gone so far makes it abundantly plain that Mr Wilson has yet to learn a number of the basic facts of European life.
The first of these—which Mr Wilson seems to half-grasp—is that the right of veto given to France (and the others) by the Rome Treaty is an untrammelled one : the General is constitutionally entitled to say 'non' on whatever grounds he wishes. It follows that no important aspect of inter- national affairs—defence policy, the Anglo- American relationship, sterling, East of Suez, world liquidity, or whatever—can be automatically excluded from the Anglo- French negotiations.
The second basic fact is that de Gaulle cannot be forced to remove his veto if he does not want to: Once the French elections this spring are over, and the government has renewed its majority, the General will be assured of undisturbed power until 1972 —a longer expectation, incidentally, than Mr Wilson's. At the same time, the Five have made it clear that they are not pre- pared to invoke the only other conceivable threat to the General's ambitions, a break- up of the Common Market itself. Indeed, since the new West German Government has made solidarity with France a cardinal principle of its foieign policy, de Gaulle is in every way in a far stronger position to veto Britain this time than he was in 1963. Perhaps Mr Wilson's Strasbourg mini- threat that 'if we do fail . . . the fault will not lie at Britain's door' was simply the instinctive adoption of what has come to be his favourite role, that of the heroic failure—the man who would have solved all our economic problems if it hadn't been for the seamen, brought peace to Vietnam if it hadn't been for Uncle Ho, achieved a settlement in Rhodesia if it hadn't been for Lan Smith, and got us into Europe if it hadn't been for General de Gaulle. Cer- tainly, if it was intended to have any bene- ficial effect on France, it was sadly mis- judged.
The third fact of life is that British entry would, other things being equal, be con- trary to the interests of France as the General sees them since (in the words of the old Gaullist saying) one cock with five hens is better off without a second cock. So there will certainly be a second 'non' unless British accession is seen to bring with it some overriding benefit in Gaullist eyes. And this in turn can only be a major strengthening of European political inde- pendence—particularly vis-à-vis the United States. At the present time the British Government is, to say the least, equivocal about whether it even wants to achieve this objective. Certainly, if Mr Wilson is to con- vince a highly sceptical French President, words alone will not do the trick. Instead of the ragbag of quasi-Gaullist clichés that made up the Prime Minister's Strasbourg speech it is practical proposals in a key area of policy that are required. The nearest Mr Wilson has got to this so far is his kite-flying about a European technologi- cal community. But at present this suffers from the fundamental weakness that, since defence contracts are the mainspring of modern technological development, so long as British and French defence policies re- main as divergent as they are today, no really important practical progress can be made along this front.
Moreover, what concerns France most at the present time is not American tech- nological domination, but financial hegemony through the international mone- tary system. And as Mr Jock Bruce- Gardyne argues on page 95, here is an area in which Mr Wilson can, if he is prepared to risk LBJ's displeasure, reach a practical agreement with France which it would be plainly in Britain's interest to do. Even then, it might still be necessary to talk defence with the General. But at least the beginnings of a deal—valuable in itself, agreeable to the Five, and a symbol of preparedness to let go of America's apron- strings—would have been established.
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