Another Step

It was cold and snowing as French President Charles de Gaulle stepped out of his plane from Paris and headed down the icy highway by car for the quiet Black Forest spa of Baden-Baden. Military helicopters whirred overhead, and heavily armed police patrolled the streets. At last De Gaulle's Citroen limousine drew up to Brenner's Park Hotel. Out he stepped to shake hands with the smiling friend who awaited him, West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

This was their ninth private meeting since 1958, and as usual, they had a substantial agenda. For the first hour they went down the list: the state of NATO, negotiations with Russia, the Berlin crisis.

NATO's disarray was obvious to both, what with General Lauris Norstad's estimated 25 divisions in Europe today, as against the 98 that the alliance originally planned to put in the field.. Both statesmen also were considerably less enthusiastic than the U.S. and Britain about the usefulness of summit negotiations with Russia (see THE NATION). Both were steel-strong in the determination to hang onto Berlin at any cost.

Plan upon Plan. But the main reason the two had come together involved a more distant and elusive question--Europe's political unity. The goal might be still a generation or more away, but the breathtaking prospect of one big continental "nation" now was on the lips and in the hearts of statesmen throughout Europe.

As a start, the six Common Market countries (France, West Germany, Italy and Benelux) last July set up a committee under French Diplomat Christian Fouchet to suggest a plan for a politically unified Europe to move parallel with the growing economic community.

There was only one trouble: Fouchet's own boss, Charles de Gaulle, jealously husbanding France's sovereignty, was dead against the whole idea of supranationalism in any form. He rejected even his own French officials' first mild draft. In its place last month came a substitute French proposal ordered by le grand Charles, which even seemed to kill the long-accepted supranational economic control built into the Common Market. More than that, France's new draft suggested a European defense structure that made no provision whatever for liaison with or membership in the NATO system. De Gaulle himself dropped some hints of what he really was after: a "Europe des patries [Europe of fatherlands]," meaning a confederation of cooperating and sovereign nations. Since France is the only continental power developing a nuclear force, De Gaulle obviously expected his own patrie to be Europe's military leader.

Starting Again. This was hardly palatable to the other five of the Common Market six, who promptly began their own secret discussion of a draft to counter De Gaulle's new proposal. It was in the hope of avoiding a head-on collision that West Germany's Adenauer pressed Paris for a face-to-face meeting with De Gaulle at Baden-Baden.

Before tackling this momentous question, Adenauer, 86, and De Gaulle, 71, paused for lunch and a siesta. Then it was time for the three-and-a-half hours of hard bargaining on European unity. As it turned out, it was Charles de Gaulle who trimmed his sail a bit by agreeing to withdraw France's latest draft. In return, Adenauer promised not to push too swiftly the idea of a European political superstructure, with an executive to tell governments what to do and a secretary-general and bureaucracy to decide how to do it.

In other words, the Common Market's Fouchet committee could start from scratch again this week when it begins another round in planning One Europe --an irresistible idea, which Charles de Gaulle may dislike but which will be left for the generation after Charles de Gaulle to achieve.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.