The Widening Channel

So gracious were the bows, so lavish the assurances of esteem, so charming the exchanges of mutual praise, as Britain's Foreign Secretary arrived in Paris last week that one would think Britain and France were on the best of terms. "There is and must be a special relationship between our two countries," smiled Selwyn Lloyd, and French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville reciprocated with murmurs of "profound solidarity," as the two sat down for talks in a gilded salon of the Quai d'Orsay. At the Elysee Palace, where Lloyd extended France's President an invitation to visit Britain as a guest of the Queen in April, Charles de Gaulle was notably friendly.

Outside Looking In. In hard fact, Britain's relations with France--and with much of the rest of Western Europe--were at their lowest ebb in years. To intimates. West Germany's Konrad Adenauer confided his dark suspicions that British foreign policy was prepared to offer the Germans up on a platter to achieve easier relations with Russia. The six continental nations who had allied themselves in the budding Common Market were convinced that Britain, with its free-trade counterproposals, had been trying to destroy unity on the Continent. The suspicions were often exaggerated, but Britain, whose influence on the Continent was once enormous, now finds itself more and more on the outside looking in.

It need not have turned out that way. After World War II, Britain had the chance, even the open invitation of the weakened nations across the Channel, to join and assume the leadership of a new united Europe. Britain refused, though Winston Churchill's eloquence rang in the halls of the Council of Europe on behalf of the ideal. Britain's explanation for staying out has always been the theory of the three overlapping circles of British policy. One circle is Britain and its Commonwealth; another is Britain and the U.S.; a third, Britain and Europe. Of these three circles, Common-Market Europe--representing only 15% of Britain's trade--comes third. The British argue that they could not join the Common Market without weakening their ties with the Commonwealth (some Commonwealth members dispute this), or accept common footing with the continental countries without destroying Britain's "special relationship" with the U.S. Though no longer a dominant power, Britain thinks of itself as more than one of the middle or small powers. "We are for Europe, but not of Europe," is a familiar saying in British officialdom.

Historic Error? "We are now in grave danger of being a permanent outsider as far as Europe is concerned," warned a letter writer to the Daily Telegraph recently, and the Economist noted last week, after De Gaulle's press conference in Paris, that "the British government cannot but have been painfully reminded how completely, for the moment, the power to influence events in continental Europe has been taken from its hands."

Some influential British civil servants now privately concede that Britain's postwar isolation from the Continent may have been a historic mistake in foreign policy. But dominant forces in both the Conservative and Labor parties seem reluctant to leave the safety of the three familiar circles. The old isolation speaks to something basic in British pride. The government's attitude toward Europe still seems to be to procrastinate and to improvise. Britons argue that Franco-German amity is unnatural, that a European movement without Britain is bound to fade once De Gaulle or Adenauer is gone, and that the Common Market structure of the Inner Six may well pass into history under the pressure of events. But despite these complacent prophecies, the evidence indicates that the alliance of the six continental nations has momentum on its side. Belgium, with the support of France, is now proposing that the Common Market mechanism be broadened to include political consultation. Greece, Turkey and Spain are clamoring to join the Common Market. As a pallid substitute of the Free Trade Area that it once demanded, Britain is forming its own economic league, an Outer Seven, bringing Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Austria and Portugal into a loose tariff agreement. But the British, who privately admit that the Outer Seven is a patchwork job, now describe it as "a pier from which we can build a bridge with the Common Market." It promises to be no more than that.

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan now feels the need to draw closer to Europe. When he first came to power after Suez, he gave top priority to repairing Britain's strained U.S. relations. Since his election victory in October, he has shifted his concern to Europe. That was the meaning of Selwyn Lloyd's visit to Paris last week, which produced more assurances than achievement. Next on the agenda: a long-postponed state visit to London this week by Konrad Adenauer.

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