Once More to Market?

Officially, it was simply a pomp-and-panoply state visit as Queen Elizabeth of Britain last week paid a five-day call in Brussels on King Baudouin of Belgium. But Brussels is more than just the capital of Belgium these days. With each fresh agreement of the Common Market Six (see WORLD BUSINESS), it becomes more and more the headquarters and repository of the Continent's hopes for unity. Mindful of that, the Queen had some carefully chosen words to say: "Like so many things in life, the desirable is not always immediately attainable, but I join with you in hoping that a way may be found before long to enable us to cooperate in building that wider European unity."

The words were, of course, chosen by British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and they emphasized the quiet campaign he has begun to reopen negotiations with the Six for British entry into the Common Market. Those negotiations, broken off in 1963 by De Gaulle's blunt veto, were not very popular with Labor at the time. For Harold Wilson to espouse them today is as surprising as it is important for Britain and Europe.

Like a Spaniel. During the British election campaign two months ago, De Gaulle offhandedly suggested that Britain might now be welcome in the EEC. When Tory Leader Ted Heath immediately challenged Wilson to respond, the Labor Prime Minister cuttingly retorted: "One encouraging gesture from the French government and the Conservative leader rolls on his back like a spaniel." But scarcely a week after his reelection, Wilson revised his Cabinet to give two ministers, George Brown and George Thomson, special responsibility for paving a road toward Brussels. They soon were dropping hints all over Europe that Labor wanted in, and fortnight ago in Stockholm, Brown said it plainly: "We want to join."

Labor's about-face is possible in part because many of the reasons that led the party to oppose the Tory bid five years ago no longer apply. At that time it was concerned about preserving Commonwealth trade ties. But the Commonwealth nations are trading increasingly within regional areas, and since 1964 Britain's trade with Europe has exceeded that with all the Commonwealth put together. Getting Britain's six partners in the European Free Trade Association into the Common Market no longer seems as pressing a problem either. Austria has been negotiating with Brussels for a year on its own; Norway and Denmark are sure to follow Britain in any event.

Red & Green. The economic sticking point is still Britain's cosseted agricultural structure. But Wilson seems privately resigned, as the Tories were not in 1961 and 1962, to the fact that Britain will probably have to accept the existing club rules as the price of admission. For the Europeans, even the West Germans and Dutch, who most desire Britain's partnership in the EEC, still have lingering doubts about London's commitment to the European ideal of unity. And there is always the giant question mark of Charles de Gaulle, who said non once before and could do it again. So Wilson is probing carefully and cautiously, and this time actual negotiations are not likely to begin until all the major issues have been quietly settled in advance--probably late this year or early next. As one British diplomat put it last week: "We're not going in until we get the green light and a red carpet."

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