E.E.C. BROUGHT SUBTLE CHANGES

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33448, 1 February 1974, Page 15

E.E.C. BROUGHT SUBTLE CHANGES

{By

FRED McLEAN)

The ancient city of St Malo still lay dreaming behind its fortress walls when I saw’ it again the first time for 15 years. It had not changed much during that time. It was the same typical Breton town with its high, slated, pointed roofs topping granite walls, its medieval stone fish market and its decaying casino, a twentiethcentury compromise. But the Common Market had wrought subtle changes. A new affluent crowd of European tourists (sorry “citizens”) strolled with a confidence as if in their native Berlin, Brussels or Rome. Though with degrees depending on which currency you proffered. The hotelkeeper eyed me sympathetically in reply to my question addressed to her in French, Yes, she did have a room, but at a price which appeared to me exorbitant in the light of my depreciated English currency. “Still,” she said hopefully, “we are in need of waiters, if Monsieur?” But monsieur wasnt interested. He was on holiday, even if France was booming. Lois to <lo And there was lots to see and do in St Malo, so floridly and aptly described by the French tourist office as “the pearl of the Emerald Coast.” But it was the people who interested me the most. What did they think of the recent U.K. membership of the community? What did they themselves think of the communitv?

In the lour de Grogne where I went to see Chateau Briands letters and met two French Marist brothers who, incidentally, had heard of Napier, I had a clue. The tall, shifted from the poet's intended tomb to an old Frenchman who had joined us. “The British are natural leaders. They will want to dominate the Market and France won't like that. Empress of Europe “And where will the Queen fit into all this? The crown, that is, as a political institution.” Where indeed? Though a Belgian woman in the hotel suggested she would now become Empress of Europe. In the bus going to Mont St Michel, the abbey-cum-fortress-cum-cathedral immortalised by Guy de Maupassant, I had the great good fortune to be seated next to _ German teacher. As the spacious chromiumplated vista-dome bus -sped through the incredibly green countryside bordered by vast expanses of flat beach which merged so discreetly with the sea so that one scarely

knew where the sea began and where the beach ended, I listened to what he had to say. “It is generally agreed,’’ he opened in his precise academic English, “that the British don’t work hard, that they are beset with anarchic trade unions, and that their industry is antiquated compared to the Germans.” “But the idea of Common Market is co-operation, surely.” “Only on basic economic issues,” he replied. ’‘There is still competition between member states, and poor as well as rich countries. Look at Italy.” Would the U.K. become another Italy — the Cinderella state of the community? “Then there is another as-

pect — the political. It is thought by some in Germany that Britain is, how you say, flogging a dead horse in trying to revive the European Parliament at Strasbourg.” I thought of Peter Kirk and his unsuccessful efforts to revivify liberal parliamenterism a la continentale. It is true that political emphasis is, and always has been, on the commission at Brussels. The European parliament can only advise it. It can never dictate to a commission which has the power to over-rule it on all vital issues. And that this power is generally accepted proves the community would never have made such progress, dealing as it has with such vast economic reorganisation

on a continental scale, had it been bogged down with parliamentary inefficiencies. I thought of the coming organic epoch preached by Henri Comte de St Simon, who first advocated a political and economically united Europe in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, with the now quaintly generous voting preferences to be given to Britain as the most powerful nation-state at that time, and shivered. Political autocracy “But this presupposes a political autocracy,” my mentor shrugged. “Who can tell?” We approached the long causeway at the end of which floated ethereally the granite gossamer lacework of the Cathedral of Mont St Michel, a building which, merging in the heat. haze, seemed to defy the law of gravity in its tapering elegance. I thought when eyeing rusty manacles in its cavernous halls, relics of when it was a prison in the nineteenth century, of how even the highest ideals can be corrupted. If such a graceful monument to God can be put to such a use what might a mere political ideal become?

Holy Roman empire “This abbey,” said the guide, “has lasted longer than the Holy Roman Empire, said to be the longest lasting political entity in the world,” “But the Holy Roman Empire never had England in it,” remarked an American Episcopalian, succinctly. “Some Americans think the Common Market is the Holy Roman Empire revivified,” “No man is an island. We are all part of the main.” An English spinster quoted John Donne, reprovingly. British teen-agers Back at St Malo sipping a hock at an open air cafe and watching a gendarme energetically waving on a bevy of gleaming, opulent, automobiles bumping with resignation over the cobbled roadway, I became aware of a crowd of disconsolate British teenagers at the next table. “It’s difficult to get work here without knowing French,” said one. “We can get the dole here now,” said another, hopefully. “What. By blooming sign language,” replied the first. I leaned over. “Excuse me.” I said, “but our hotel needs waiters.” The next time I saw them they were darting between the’crowded, animated tables with consummate ease like any French garcon. I heard one, struggling

with a sort of pidgin French and giving it up in disgust, say, “Well, now’s the time for you to learn some blooming English. That’ll be 10 francs, please.’’