WESTERN EUROPE: Paying the Price

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Paying the Price Diplomats called it "the meeting which must not fail." As they settled down around the conference table in Paris last week, the Premiers and foreign ministers of Western Europe's six Common Market nations* knew that they must either reach final agreement on their plans for a super-customs union or renounce the most plausible step yet towards a united Europe.

The meeting did not fail. As the price of French participation in the Common Market the other prospective members agreed to invest $381,250.000 in France's overseas territories during the next five years. This concession—a painful one for West Germany, which will supply more than half of the money—removed the last serious obstacle to completion of the Common Market Treaty, raised the prospect that it will come up for parliamentary ratification some time this spring.

In this uniting-Europe mood, the six Prime Ministers also agreed on the establishment of Euratom, a European Atomic Energy Community. A supranational council will hold title to all fissionable materials possessed by the Six. save those reserved for military use. With the aid of the U.S., which has already agreed to supply technical advice and nuclear fuel, Euratom's planners hope to be producing 3.000,000 kw-h of electricity annually by 1963. This would carry Western Europe into the age of atomic power just about as fast as the Soviet Union (whose hoped-for goal is 2,500,000 kw-h in 1960) and considerably faster than the well-electrified U.S., whose goal for the early 1960s is only 1,000.000 kw-h a year.