Word: monnet
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They were all there, those aging statesmen who years ago committed their dreams to the ideal of European unity. Jean Monnet, 80, "the father of the Common Market," last week convened a session of his nonofficial Action Committee for a United States of Europe in Brussels. Former Common Market President Walter Hallstein was there, along with veteran French Politicians Antoine Pinay and Maurice Faure and dozens of other ranking European statesmen. Together, they constitute a sort of European shadow government. They had come to Brussels in an attempt to spur Common Market bureaucrats and the respective ministers...
...Even as Monnet and his supporters issued ringing calls for unity during their session in the Charlemagne Building, over at the new Common Market headquarters began the first ministerial meetings since the dethronement of Charles de Gaulle. Would the old obstacles of yesteryear suddenly melt away? Hardly. The six agriculture ministers started what seemed likely to turn into a marathon discussion of the Common Market's costly farm-support issue. They got bogged down in disputes about a unified support price for butter and beef...
This week it will be the foreign ministers' turn to meet in Brussels. The overriding issue will be the question of British entry into the Common Market. The rest of the Six concur with Monnet's proposal for immediate preparations. But French President Georges Pompidou first wants to hold a summit of the Six, perhaps in October, before sitting down with Britain. The French view is likely to prevail...
...main threat to Britain's application seems to be the British themselves. While Monnet was speaking at a press conference in Brussels about the desirability of European political federation, former British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home glanced up from a crossword puzzle and told newsmen that "we British are a practical people. We want to confront a situation first before we think about setting up an institution to handle it." During the same session, British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart said that plans for a European Parliament were "premature." Such statements made many Europeans wonder whether the British...
...dream of a new harmony in Europe has faded unborn. "Three grand visions of the future have at various times captured the political imaginations of various of our leading men," Harvard Professor Francis Bator wrote late last year in the Brookings Institution's Agenda for the Nation: "Jean Monnet's united Western Europe; the Atlantic Community, and, least congenial to most, some scheme of U.S.-Soviet disengagement in Europe which would allow the unification of Germany. It is now clear that none of these three visions is about to be fulfilled...