Remember the Common Market?
Richard West
Brussels The British need not feel homesick in Brussels, where they can dance at the British Rugby Club Disco, test their wits at the Anglo-Belgian Wargames Group or watch the English Comedy Club play Not Now Darling. British property developers have built many of Brussels's new office blocks, several of which, in true British fashion, are standing empty. British pressurised keg beer is found in most of the dozens of British 'pubs' and members of the Campaign for Real Ale in Brussels were not greatly upset to learn recently that their arch-foe among brewers, Watney's (Belgium), had been swindled out of £3 million by an American businessman, calling himself an 'assetstripper'.
England's involvement with Belgium goes back through three world wars—if one includes the battle of Waterloo--and I note that the recently-opened metro line has a Montgomery Station. In the 1950s, long before package trips to Spain had grown popular, hundreds of thousands of British tourists first got to know the Continent at the seaside resort of Ostend, which even then boasted a Café-Restaurant Manchester and a Pension Oldham. To the journalist, there is poignancy in the sign over a Brussels news-stall advertising the Daily Herald, the Daily Sketch, Reynolds News and the News Chronicle, all of which are folded and forgotten.
The British presence has grown still more marked since that day in 1972 when Edward Heath signed us into the European Economic Community and, far more memorably, had Ink thrown over his suit. For Brussels, of
course, is the EEC headquarters. I say 'of course' because only sixteen months ago the whole of Britain was locked in the 'great debate' on a referendum about whether to join the Common Market ; both sides battered us with information about the EEC, so that everyone must have known that its capital was in Brussels; yet during the sixteen months since the 'Great Debate' ended, I have scarcely heard anyone mention the EEC and many of us may have forgotten that it exists. One could hardly forget its existence in Brussels, where it is now a major industry.
The size and affluence of the European bureaucracy (paid for from VAT by the member states) is best grasped by taking the cae of the Irish Republic (population 3i million) whose Brussels Commission includes 140 people, of whom more than twenty earn more than £20,000 p.a. plus excellent perks and allowances. Yet even the most committed 'Europeans' (as they used to be called during the 'great debate') tend to complain of the hardships of life in the capital of the Community.
These are some of the remarks that! noted from British, Irish and Danes in Brussels: 'Belgium is a very tough society. It's a mixture of the wild capitalism of the nineteenth century and the tough capitalism of today. It's an appalling society but it's so insignificant that it has no resonance anywhere outside. Sometimes we feel we'll go mad unless we get over the border to Breda [Holland] only for a weekend'.
'Once I fell down and broke both arms. I queued two hours for X-rays and then another hour for a doctor, who eventually said he hadn't got any time to see me, so a nurse just put on some plaster. I'd been asking for hours for some pain-killer but they just said they hadn't got any'.
'It's the only country in Europe that has Ministry for the Middle Class but the middle class are fairly crushed. Small restaurant owners have to pay £1000 in bribes to the police to get a spirit licence'.
'Few people in the Community have any Belgian friends. The wives are like the memsahibs under the British Raj, bored stiff because all the housework is done by the two Moroccan au pairs. The conversation at dinner parties is nothing but office politics and gossip. One woman I know got a severe attack of religious mania, another was deep into radical women's lib, which you might call a trendy version of Women's Institute work. Others sleep with the gardener, I suppose. .
Belgium has been the cockpit of Europe so long that Belgians tend to hate foreigners just as the Flemish and.Walloons hate each other. The Flemish dislike the Dutch who speak the same language, and the Walloons dislike the French who speak the same language. Only last week, the Belgian authorities tried to prevent children coming from France over the frontier to study M Belgian schools.
Strolling under the concrete overhang of the Common Market HQ (a building whose atmosphere, though not its architecture, recalls the Brussels HQ of the Congo trading company in tonrad's Heart of Darkness) I thought how irrelevant it all now seems to the 'great debate' of the last quarter-century, to Churchill evoking the spirit of Charlemagne, to Gaitskell anguishing over Commonwealth preference, to Macmillan depicting visions of affluence and Wilson writing them off as arguments over the price of washing machines in Dusseldorf; t° Heath with ink on his suit; to the newspaper manifestoes, wall-charts and supplements 'You and Europe', 'How the Six Live', to the television discussions—New Zealand butter on one channel, the Strasbourg Parliament on the other . . . How little it all seems to, matter now. Was all that boredom in vain.
Even in Brussels the 'great debate' is now confined to advertisements in the Schuman metro station for what is described as 'the world's largest trading community'; and even that claim may now be false. This week Italy, one of the main EEC members, has clamped restrictions on trade to try to ston the inflation that threatens catastrophe also to Great Britain, Ireland and Denmark. Even France, one of the two principal members of the EEC, is squabbling with Great Britain and Italy for a share of the loans from the International Monetary Fund. Even West Germany suffers, slightly, from inflation. The three truly prosperous countries in Europe—Norway, Sweden and Switzerland —are outside the EEC and do not have to squander their taxes upon the immense, probably useless bureaucracy centred on Brussels. It was a great debate about nothing.
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