Common Market: Tit for Tat

Europe's Common Market is doing so well that it is now worrying outsiders, both friendly and otherwise. Nikita Khrushchev has been huffing and puffing against it, and Commonwealth nations have been warning Britain not to abandon them in her eagerness to join (see THE WORLD). The Latin American nations recently sent a delegation to Brussels to protest against a Common Market ruling that will impose a 16% duty on Latin American coffee but admit coffee from France's former African colonies duty-free.

But the most decisive display of the Common Market's new sense of self-confident power was directed against the U.S. last week. Voting for the first retaliatory tariff in the market's four-year history, its six members—France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux nations—doubled their duties on a variety of U.S. plastics and textiles, and also raised tariffs on some paints. The move was in frank reprisal for President Kennedy's decision last March to boost U.S. tariffs on imported carpets and glass of a variety largely produced in Belgium. The Belgians protested that Kennedy's action would mean less work for 10,000 Belgian factory hands, and Washington's offer to compensate by cutting tariffs on a still secret list of other European products was dismissed by the Common Market as inadequate.

In deciding to retaliate against the protectionist U.S. chemical and textile industries. Common Market Eurocrats may well have been playing a little international politics. These industries have been less than enthusiastic about the new U.S.

Trade Expansion bill, which would give President Kennedy sweeping powers to negotiate lower tariffs—and which comes up for debate in the House next week.

The new European duties will affect $27 million worth of U.S. chemical and textile exports, and if chemical and textile producers hope to hold onto their European markets, they may now have to liberalize their position on tariffs. Last week's tit-for-tat action by the Common Market is a clear warning against further U.S. lapses into protectionism, and a bold suggestion that the U.S. has scant choice but to accommodate its trade laws to the new economic realities of a resurgent Europe.