Speeding the Timetable

The European Common Market is racing so swiftly toward its goals that even its most optimistic prophets have had to tear up their timetables. Last week, in Brussels, the Common Market Commission predicted that internal trade restrictions among the Six, which have already been cut 50% in five years, should be entirely eliminated by Jan. 1, 1967--three years ahead of schedule.

But the Common Market countries, which by then will have adopted uniform external tariffs, are in no mood to wait until 1967 to move ahead with the next stage of economic integration. The commission's planners have presented a daring new program for the next six years that will inextricably mesh the economies of the Six and clear the way for the final goal of a politically united Europe.

The "action program," as the Eurocrats call their accelerated plan, proposes that the Common Market nations start next month on the complex task of coordinating social welfare schemes. In time, to equalize opportunity, the Six--plus Britain and other likely members--will standardize antitrust laws, transport rates, wage levels, and business and consumer taxes. Still more ambitious are the Common Market's plans to draw up a "single economic budget for the whole Community" and to "orchestrate" all its investment, production, consumption and credit patterns, starting in 1964. As a momentous first step, individual nations' budget and growth estimates for 1963 have already been filed with the commission, which has worked hard behind the scenes to prepare a unified strategy to weather a potential recession next year.

Ultimately, the Common Market's most far-reaching reform may lie in its plan for a monetary union, starting in mid-1963, that will accelerate its progress toward a U.S.-style federal reserve system. Francs, marks, lire and guldens may continue to carry different inscriptions and have different values, as their holders speak different languages; in time all will be interchangeable and backed by the Community's massive gold and foreign exchange reserves, which at present stand at $16.4 billion.

France's Robert Marjolin, the Common Market vice president chiefly responsible for drawing up the action program, foresees that such sweeping economic changes will lead almost imperceptibly to a politically united Europe. One of his few critics is West Germany's free-trade-minded Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard, who objects that the "planifiers" will end by throttling free enterprise. Not so, reasons Marjolin. Supranational planning "will not hinder competition,'' but "guide its expression into the most fruitful channels."

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