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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MAY 25, 1984
able of meeting the Pacific threat because its own internal mar
ket remains fragmented and its economies badlycffstorted .QY the
excesses of the welfare state. Jacques Maisonrouge, a Frenchman
who is a senior vice president of IBM in New York, exploded with
impatience at the European laments: "After listening to all
this," he said, "! want to � simply: Europe, stand ..!:!E for
yourself!"
At least some of the actions Europeans need to take are already
clear. In order to compete with the flood of innovative products
coming from the Pacific Basin, they will have to overhaul an an
tiquated university system, integrate the Europ 4; an �
ket,•.•and--probably most impertant--promote cooperat1on among
competing and duplicative European firms. "No single country can
fight the Pacific challenge alone," says France's Laurent FabTus.
At the same time, other European observers, while recognizing the Pacific
challenge, refuse to either panic before it or to consign Europe to the
dustbin of history. Roy Denman, who heads the Delegation of the Commission
of the European Communities to The United States, attempted to counter
growing "Europessimism" in an article in the May 6 NEW YORK TIMES:
Europessimism.
Fiasco and failure in Brussels.
The Common
Market collapsing. Some recent reports would make one think that
•..the Eurocrats had taken to the hills.
But...whatever
disasters strike, there will never be another great European
civil war. The European Community has made that impossible.
Over the last 37 years, the one world trading system--set up with
American support under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
in 1947--has meant the biggest increase in prosperity in the
recorded history of the West.... Without the internal discipline
of the European Community--no tariffs or quotas between member
states--Europe might well have gone protectionist after the oil
shock of 1973. We would have dragged the rest of the world with
us. Without the telegraph line between Washington and Brussels,
the world
trading system
would
have
gone bust
several
times over
during the last 10 years. And we would have slid back to the
terrible wasteland of the 1930s.
So Americans have no cause to regret their generous act of
statesmanship in the 1950s in supporting a uniting Europe. But
will the adventure continue, will it flourish? Take heart from
the Italian statesman Giuseppe Mazzini [who counseled against]
doubts and jeers about unification of Italy.... For like the 19th
century Italian states, there is nowhere else for us to go.
In the May 20 LOS ANGELES TIMES, journalist William Pfaff, writing from
Paris, brought forth some statistics to show that, economically speaking,
there is considerably less to the Pacific Basin than meets the eye:
The new American fascination with the Pacific Basin has a less
solid base than many think, although important questions are
posed for the future. There is much enthusiasm in the United
States about the development of a vast Pacific market that would
leave the Atlantic a trade backwater. There are many in Western