Britain As Associate Of Six Proposed

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30058, 16 February 1963, Page 11

Britain As Associate Of Six Proposed

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

NEW YORK, February 15.

France is ready to join her associates in the European Common Market in developing some form of association with Britain in the interval before she joins Europe, the “New York Times” news service said today.

In a dispatch from Paris, the columnist, Drew Middleton, said this association would cover financial, industrial and agricultural arrangements.

Sources believed it should cover a two or three-year period before Britain entered the Common Market. Middleton said French comment on the subject was

a good deal less intransigent than the position the Government took when negotiations between Britain and the Six members of the Common Market broke down at Brussels last month.

Foreign diplomats saw another sign of French retreat from the position of dominant independence in the explanation given to the

Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate by the Foreign Minister, Mr Maurice Couve de Murville.

He said the concept of establishing Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals foresaw a future European settlement, in which the United States would play a role, establishing a balance of power in Europe. This appeared tq be a withdrawal from the idea of a European third force so popular in France after the signing of the French-German Treaty of Co-operation. According to important French officials, the possibility that in “two or three years” Britain would be in Europe was very strong.

By that time, presumably, they believed Britain would have been purged of her nonEuropean associations and would be prepared to enter the Common Market “as a European,” Middleton said.