Word: commoner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dispute was sharp and bitter, and for a time the British, having lost, darkly muttered threats of trade-war reprisal. But as the Common Market showed every sign of flourishing, with once-reluctant French and West German industrialists delighted by the prospect of a tariff-free market of 168 million people, the stakes became too high for sniping. And the British decided that if they couldn't lick 'em, and wouldn't join 'em, they would try another tack. With the inspired doggedness that characterizes British diplomacy at its best, the British set to work...
...Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria and Portugal-gathered to put the finishing touches to their own free-trade association, known familiarly as the "Outer Seven" (though some of its members think the name invidious). Recognizing, in the words of one British official, that "we simply cannot let the Common Market Six build up walls we may never be able to scale," the Outer Seven have decided to get their commerce into step with the Common Market. Thus their draft plan envisions a tariff reduction of 20% on July 1, 1960, the date on which the Common Market takes...
Dangerous Medicine. All this aims at an easy economic meshing of the Outer Seven and the Common Market inner six if the day of political rapprochement ever arrives. For it is politics, not economics, that led to the bifurcation of Western Europe's trade, particularly politics between England and France, part of their centuries-old struggle for hegemony in modern Europe. It was France, with its history of narrow economic nationalism, that vetoed Britain's hopes for a free-trade area with the Common Market, and it was Britain's reluctance to give up its freedom...
Denmark symbolizes the uneasy position of most of the Outer Seven nations and their fundamental long-range desire to join the Common Market proper. Much of Denmark's food exports go to Common Market countries, 25% to Germany. (As a whole, the Outer Seven nations trade more with the twice-as-large Common Market than with each other...
Germany's Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard. sympathetic to the cause of freer trade everywhere, promised Denmark not to discriminate against it for joining the Outer Seven. Germany hopes in time to put pressure on France to widen the Common Market club. But as Erhard points out, the Outer Seven is "dangerous medicine," even though "chances are good that it will work." And, as one of Erhard's aides adds: "Separate groups tend to form habits, generate loyalties, encourage parochial thinking. On the other hand, they can produce creative friction...