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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, OCTOBER 2, 1981
PAGE 6
Such appeals to move the ten-nation Common Market off dead center and down
the road toward real unity have an increasingly hollow ring to them. After
Genscher made his original appeal in January of this year, an article in the
magazine EUROPE, semi-official organ of the European Community (Common
Market) said: "Anyone who raises the idea of a European Union these days
risks being laughed to scorn." With good reason. Prior appeals have all
gone for nought.
This writer was present at a Common Market's summit conference held in
Paris in October, 1972. After very much haggling the assembled Community
leaders set a target date of 1980 for a "European Union." But they did not
define what such a union would entail.
The final communique with this
imprecise, visionary goal was late in coming out of committee in the final
day of the summit. We reporters waited and waited for hours on that final
night, finally running out of sandwiches. At last Willy Brandt and other
heads-of-state made their appearance with the agreed-upon document. It was
already about 2:00 a.m. the next day but the clock had been stopped at 11:59
the day previously, a gimmick used many times by Common Market officials to
make sure they always reached agreement "on time."
A few years after the 1972 agreement, Belgium's then Foreign Minister, Leo
Tindemans; was urged by his colleagues to produce a set of recommendations
on how to achieve a European union. He did so--only to have most of them
ignored.
Later still three so-called "wise men" were appointed at the
suggestion of the President of France to examine the unity question.
"Their proposals," notes the article in EUROPE, "have been so little dis
cussed that even European Community experts can hardly recall what they
were."
The target year of 1980 came and went, without a "European Union." Mean
while, erises in Iran and Afghanistan revealed Western Europe's vulner
ability in the Middle East and impotence with regard to Soviet expansion.
And now relations between the EC and the United States are becoming
increasingly strained, especially over Western defense matters.
Mr. Genscher fears that unless a new political impetus can be given to the
Community now, the result will be not simply stagnation but erosion of the
EC's influence. In Genscher's view, the EC must move beyond economics to
the formulation of a joint foreign policy, and even coordination of secur
ity policy--meaning joint defense. Genscher would like to enshrine all of
these extended activities in a new treaty, supplementing those of Paris,
which set up the European Coal and Steel Community and Rome, which estab
lished the European Economic Community and Euratom. Neither of these prior
treaties covers either political union or security matters, notes the
EUROPE report, although the preamble to the Rome EEC pact speaks of a
determination to lay the foundations of an ever closer union among the
peoples of Europe.
It should be obvious that a United States of Europe is not going to arise
out of the Common Market via the slow process of gradual strengthening of
the Community's centralized institutions. National sovereignty stands in
the way. France's new Socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, put it
succinctly when he explained French foreign policy this way: "No one will
dictate our conduct to us."