Pilgrims' Progress

To make instant, front-page news, the European Common Market has only to cut a tariff or cry "Yankee chickens, go home!" What goes largely unreported is its statesmen's cautious groping toward the political unity for which economic integration is the essential groundwork. Last week, just one year after Charles de Gaulle abruptly scotched Britain's bid to join the Common Market, France's partners were once more engaged in an earnest attempt to bring Britain into an outward-looking, integrated Europe. Highlights:

> In Washington, before a joint session of Congress, Italy's President Antonio Segni ringingly rejected Gaullist notions of a European third force, argued that the Atlantic Alliance "is in fact the reality that holds us together and favors European unification."

> In London, West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, on his first official visit to Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, did much to alleviate British mistrust of Germany by emphasizing his own post-Adenauer view of "a prosperous, happy and free Europe that can only be achieved together with the United Kingdom."

In their attempts to bridge Europe's age-old nationalisms, Erhard, Segni and other European statesmen will crisscross the Continent in coming weeks. De Gaulle to the contrary, they are convinced that Europe's tenuous economic ties must be anchored in permanent political institutions if the Continent is not to remain forever a headless "torso."

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