How to Spoil a Birthday Party

It was supposed to be a festive birthday party. The European Community turned 20 last week, and leaders of its nine member states celebrated the anniversary by gathering in the damask-lined hall atop Rome's Capitoline Hill where the unique organization was born.

But the mood in the hall was sullen. After the initial round of speeches, the delegates could agree only on overall aims. No amount of brave words could hide the fact that the lofty goals of the Treaty of Rome seem more distant today than a decade ago.

But what most depressed the Community leaders was their worry that something very fundamental may be going wrong in Western Europe and that their political careers may be abruptly shortened because of it. There was certainly enough evidence last week to spur such apprehensions. Items:

> British Prime Minister James Callaghan narrowly averted a defeat in Commons that would have forced him to resign and call new elections. Just minutes before facing a no-confidence vote demanded by Tory Leader Margaret Thatcher (TIME, March 28), Callaghan concluded a deal with the Liberal Party's David Steel, thus assuring the Labor government's survival; this actually left the P.M. in a stronger parliamentary position than he has enjoyed for months. The price that Steel extracted was a Liberal voice in the government's legislative program in order to push such Liberal pet policies as devolution for Scotland and proportional balloting in the election of deputies to the European Assembly. With the votes of the 13 Liberal M.P.s, Callaghan's Laborites were able to defeat the opposition--Tories, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, some Ulster Unionists and a sprinkling of other minor parties--by a margin of 322 to 298.

The new Lab-Lib bloc was immediately attacked by many of the 70 members of the Labor Party's left-wing Tribune Group, which fears that some favorite socialist schemes will be vetoed by the Liberals. But last week's deal binds the two parties only until the end of the current parliamentary session in November. By then, Britain's economy is expected to improve, and Callaghan might be willing to risk a national election. Today, all opinion polls agree the Tories would win an election--although once in power, they would find it nearly impossible to deal with the unions and Labor's left wing, which even Callaghan has a hard time controlling.

> Italian Premier Giulio Andreotti managed last week to keep his minority Christian Democratic government afloat--but only just. The leaders of the Communists and other left-wing parties indicated that they would end their tacit support of Andreotti's government if he tried to impose new austerity measures on the country to qualify for a $530 million loan from the International Monetary Fund. The Premier could scarcely ignore their warning: he has been able to govern for the past six months only because the opposition has abstained from voting on key issues in the parliament. To save his government, the Premier promised to renegotiate certain conditions attached to the IMF loan. In addition, the Christian Democrats agreed to Communists' and Socialists' demands for greater collaboration on government policies.

Even though Andreotti avoided what to Italians is "a crisis in the dark"--meaning the collapse of yet another unstable government with no alternative in sight--political tension mounted in the country. Some 150,000 disgruntled workers massed in Rome's Piazza San Giovanni (sometimes called "Red Square") to protest the government policy of wage curbs; an estimated 1.5 million Romans walked off their jobs, paralyzing the capital for a day.

More alarming was a continuing wave of violence, most of it the work of pistolwaving ultraleftists. In the past week alone, two policemen were murdered. Recent riots led by student ultras have been particularly embarrassing to the Communists, who control many of Italy's major cities and are committed to upholding law-and-order. The Communists have had to use force against the troublesome students, who are primarily protesting unemployment among the young. In Red-run Bologna, for instance, police in armored cars charged student strongholds. As a result, the traditional Communist-student alliance has been unraveling.

> French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing found himself rejected by both left and right in the second round of his country's municipal elections. Socialist and Communist candidates, who posted impressive gains in the first stage of voting (TIME, March 28), last week triumphed in more than two dozen additional cities with populations over 30,000, including Rennes, Nantes, Bourges, Le Mans and St.-Etienne. This gives the left control of 153 of France's 221 cities of that size. "It's double what we had aimed for," said jubilant Socialist Leader Franc,ois Mitterrand. Almost as painful for Giscard was the election, as expected, of Gaullist Leader Jacques Chirac as mayor of Paris; the President's own candidate did not even win a seat on the capital's city council.

With national parliamentary elections just a year away, most political observers concede the leftists a better than even chance of gaining control of the National Assembly. To map a new political strategy, Giscard gathered his troops last week in a rare full session of the Council of Ministers. Reported one government aide: "It was a kind of mea culpa session. We admitted our errors." Some Cabinet members may be forced to pay for these errors with their seats, for a government shake-up is expected.

Stable Symbol. There were difficulties in other countries as well. The Social Democratic Party of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt--long a robust symbol of stability--was trounced in one of its traditional strongholds: voters in Hesse, angered in part by Bonn's hedging its promise to raise pensions, swept Christian Democratic candidates into office in every major city, including Frankfurt. In The Netherlands, Premier Joop den Uyl's Cabinet collapsed last week after the moderate Christian Democratic members of his coalition refused to endorse sweeping land expropriation measures proposed by Den Uyl and his Socialist Party. In Belgium, Christian Social Premier Leo Tindemans is similarly in trouble with his coalition partners.

What is going wrong in Europe? While conditions vary greatly from country to country, one thing is clear: ideology is not the issue, nor is it the answer. Social democratic governments are under pressure in Britain, The Netherlands and West Germany; rightists and centrists are being besieged in France, Italy and Belgium. One common link for these crises is the lingering economic malaise. Continuing unemployment and inflation have restricted the ability of nearly all governments in the European Community to expand the costly social services that their citizens came to expect during more than a decade of boom. Unfortunately, notes Hamburg Economist Guenther Grosser, "all these social promises are based on a full-employment economy."

But how can Europe achieve noninflationary economic growth? There are virtually no unexplored markets left within the Community itself and no promises of vast new markets elsewhere. Moreover, one essential for expanding an economy--investment by entrepreneurs--has been discouraged by high progressive tax rates, environmental obstacles, anti-business sentiment among bureaucrats and intellectuals, and labor regulations designed to appease powerful unions.

Economic worries are undoubtedly heightened by what former U.S. Diplomat Martin Hillenbrand terms "the waning of creative political forces." Hillenbrand, now director of the Paris-based Atlantic Institute, explains that "while there is always a tendency to romanticize the past, today's leadership is simply not of the same stature" as that of such postwar giants as De Gaulle and Adenauer. Fairly or unfairly, today's leaders are blamed for being unable to do anything about crucial problems like the oil crisis, thereby contributing to a widespread mood of helplessness and frustration. Says Viscount Etienne Davignon, the Community's Commissioner for Industrial Affairs: "There is a strong sense of fatalism. People feel they can't change things." Neither can minority or coalition governments that seem to lack a broad popular mandate. Leopold Labedz, editor of Survey (a London-based journal specializing in East-West affairs), sees this immobility contributing to "the weakening of the fabric of political structures throughout Western Europe, a diminution of authority that affects all the institutions--family and church, as well as state."

Impressive Gains. No responsible analyst suggests that there are any immediate internal threats to democratic institutions in Europe. The only legitimate worries focus on how Italy's far left and right might react if that country collapsed into political chaos, and how committed the French Communists are to the democratic values they so recently embraced. A case can even be made that the rule of law and liberty has scored impressive gains on the Continent in recent years: witness the overthrow of the military junta in Greece, Portugal's survival of a radical leftist threat, the relatively smooth transition from Francoism in Spain. Many in Western Europe hope for bold new strategies and bold new leaders. None seem on the horizon. About the best that can be expected right now is slow and limited economic improvement, and a painful muddling through.

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