Common Market: Ten Years Old

In Brussels last week, the European Economic Community celebrated its tenth birthday. Since March 25, 1957, when the Treaty of Rome brought the Common Market into being, many of the Community's aspirations have remained unattained—and perhaps unattainable. Yet the record of accomplishment is impressive.

The combined G.N.P. of the six Common Market nations has grown 52%, to $253 billion, while trade between them has skyrocketed by 238%, to an estimated $23 billion this year. Internal tariffs on agricultural goods have dropped more than 60%; on industrial products, they are down 80%. On July 1, 1968, eighteen months ahead of the schedule set forth in the Treaty of Rome, the last tariffs within the EEC will disappear. Also taking effect will be an agricultural program with common farm prices and supports, plus unified levies on imports from outside the Community.

Most of the Market's problems have resulted from politics, not economics. As a result, the 1957 hopes of Jean Monnet and friends for a United States of Europe "speaking with one voice" have been frustrated. In 1965, the French walked out of the Common Market for eight months, ostensibly over agricultural policies but actually because President Charles de Gaulle thought that the Community was inhibiting France's independence. The EEC held its line and France returned, but since then the togetherness spirit of the Market countries has noticeably diminished. Among other things dividing the Six are the delicate questions of Great Britain's admittance—which all members except France strongly endorsed just two weeks ago—and adoption of a common policy for trade with Eastern Europe, which France likes to handle on her own terms.

Still, if political leaders have been laggardly, businessmen have not. And perhaps the Common Market's most notable achievement is a new state of mind in Europe's business community. "The most important success of the Common Market," says Baron Jean-Charles Snoy et d'Oppuers, Belgian banker and a signer of the Rome treaty, "has been in changing the attitudes of Europe's businessmen. An immense amount of capital investment has been made on the assumption of the larger market. This is something indestructible, and this huge stake in the success of the Common Market is the guarantee of its solidity."