Europe's Bumpy Road to'92
VALLS-RUSSELL, JANICE
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK Europe's Bumpy Road to '92 BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL Paris On July 13, the eve of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution, a giant blue balloon representing the...
...The outgoing European Parliament bullied the Brussels Commission into tightening regulations on automobile exhaust fumes and helped it persuade aerosol manufacturers to make a 90 per cent reduction in their use of ozonepuncturing chlorofluorocarbons by the end of 1990...
...Additional steps along the road to '92 include changes in the Treaty of Rome that will require a special intergovernmental conference to be called...
...Polls in other member countries suggest similar trends, and foreign ministers are trying harder to speak with one voice...
...The first phase of the plan for union was approved by EC leaders at their Madrid Summit on June 26-27...
...Socialist and moderate Conservative EuroMPs have already agreed to work together in pressing for European union and seeking increased powers...
...So Austrian diplomats will have to hang around the waiting room until 1992, the date the Single European Act has fixed for economic and monetary union...
...setting up a central European Bank...
...Mitterrand will try again in Strasbourg, where he is similarly determined to push through his " Social Charter, " intended to harmonize workers' rights...
...LAYING THE GROUNDWORK Europe's Bumpy Road to '92 BY JANICE VALLS-RUSSELL Paris On July 13, the eve of the Bicentennial of the French Revolution, a giant blue balloon representing the planet floated up from centralParis...
...This too was blocked in Madrid by Thatcher, because she is afraid it will push up labor costs and mean yet more bureaucratic snags for employers...
...More mildly, regionalist parties as far apart as those of Scotland and Catalonia expressed concern about closer union eroding local identity...
...Gonzalez failed to get an agreement on a date...
...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...
...Jacques Delors attended as Chief Commissioner of the 12-nation European Community (EC), and was entrusted with coordinating international economic aid to Hungary and Poland...
...Nevertheless, conflicting national views of the world outside the Community persist...
...They may fast become essential if a unified Europe is to have a house to dwell in come '92, not to mention 2089...
...The new Parliament needs to concentrate on Mediterranean problems...
...Inconsistencies within the EC manifest themselves in other ways, too...
...Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher conceded in Madrid that the pound should enter the EMS when "conditions are right...
...An opinion poll conducted before last June's European Parliament elections found Britons favoring a common defense as well as foreign policy by 47 per cent and 58 per cent, respectively...
...Presiding over the EC enables Mitterrand to play his favorite role: international statesman...
...Along with unity, people cast their ballots for the health of Europe...
...Just before the meeting began, Prime Minister Gonzalez took the Spanish peseta into the Economic Monetary System (EMS), which controls fluctuations among member currencies...
...The attempt to knit 12 outlooks into one will be further strained if the EC becomes a baker's dozen...
...Bathers this summer waded out of the Adriatic wearing slimy bodystockings of pollution-born algae that are slowly choking the life out of the sea...
...The next day—Bastille Day—the President rounded up the representatives of the world's top seven industrialized nations for their annual summit...
...And the head of government occupying this six-month, rotating office supervises and works with the unelected Commission that the unelected Delors directs in Brussels...
...Labor's big win means a Center-Left majority in the hitherto Center-Right European Parliament, but this will not change much...
...Labor unions generally support the scheme...
...so do internationally minded businessmen, who hope it will encourage Europeans accustomed to adequate social coverage at home to migrate in search of work...
...Spain and Ireland will remove theirs in 1992, Greece and Portugal in 1994...
...Delors was France's Economy Minister before Mitterrand—eager to put him out to pasture—sent him off to Brussels in 1985...
...In contrast to the French President, she opposes the next several stages leading to unification: reducing the large national differences in the Value Added Tax levied on consumer goods...
...The occasion was, in fact, rife with symbolism...
...Many people felt it pointless to choose a Parliament whose powers— even as expanded by the 1987 Single European Act—are laughable compared with, say, Westminster's...
...Gorbachev's talk of a "common house" for Europe has revived old German dreams —and French fears—of a strong, reunited Deutschland...
...A pre-election survey pointed to the outcome when it found that 55 per cent of Britons are happy with EC membership...
...Thatcher exchanged sharp words with Mitterrand in Madrid, and she is unlikely to make things easy for him at the Strasbourg Summit he has scheduled for the end of theyear...
...Since helping to push through the 1987 Single European Act that commits the 12 to greater interdependence, he has been draping himself in the Community's Mediterraneanblue flag...
...That is of particular significance now, for on July 1 Mitterrand took over the Community's presidency from Spain's Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez...
...For the Brussels Commission, however, "internal development takes priority over enlargement...
...Still, his attitude lacks consistency...
...Thatcher has made her nightmare vision of a "Socialist superstate" run by an octopus-like Eurocracy well known...
...Those in Britain who did go to the polls gave the freshly Europeanized Labor Party its first victory in a decade...
...July's rash of brush fires, often caused by careless smokers and picnickers, once again turned thousands of acres of wooded hillsides into a slagheap landscape where erosion sets in quickly...
...Restrictions on the movement of capital will be lifted in eight countries by July 1,1990...
...President François Mitterrand invited 35 heads of state to his Bicentennial weekend and subject ed them to areadingof the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man—a salutary embarrassment for those of his guests who deny their own people's civil rights...
...On July 17 Austriaappliedformembership, and stressed that it would remain neutral...
...His government preaches cooperation in defense and the pooling of military technology research, yet clings to its own nuclear deterrence program and refuses to participate fully in NATO...
...Consider the different responses to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev following his visits to Germany and France this summer...
...The optimism is not disinterested...
...It has also heightened Mitterrand's resolve to try to weave the EC into the kind of strong, cohesive whole that would make it difficult for any member nation to disengage itself...
...Mainstream parties campaigned on Green lines, too, responding to widespread concern over a succession of recent scares that range from the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant and the chemical fouling-up of the Rhine to local instances of water pollution and food poisoning...
...and giving the EC a single currency—though Lord Plumb, a British Conservative who was President of the European Parliament until June, considers a standard currency as essential as the meter and the kilogram...
...While 52 per cent of the French people consider his position precarious, 82 per cent of the Germans trust he will succeed in his herculean efforts to modernize the USSR...
...He has even earned Mitterrand's admiration, and can count on his close cooperation...
...Although faith in a unified Europe prevailed over resistance to the concept, more voters stayed home in June (41 per cent) than is the case for national elections...
...Stern Euromeasures can achieve more in the environmental war than any national laws...
...Hardly antiEuropean, they advocate abolishing national boundaries and creating a "Europe of regions...
...The Group of Seven—France, West Germany, Britain, Italy, Canada, Japan, and the United States—were actually eight...
...It was "Adieu to Little England," to quote the title of a Sunday Times editorial...
...She favors holding out until 1992, but her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, and most British businessmen want to join well before then...
...Environmentalists—organized into "green," "ecologist" and "rainbow" groups— reaped an average 10 per cent of the vote in seven countries, more than twice their score in 1984...
...But as head of the EC's Administration Delors has won international respect for himself and his post...
...In June's Euroelections far-Right nationalists played up such fears on the most primitive level, with limited success...
Vol. 72 • September 1989 • No. 13
