The Insiders Club

A nightmare is haunting that nation of shopkeepers, the British. Within ten weeks the six nations of "Little Europe" (France, Germany, Italy, Benelux) will start their 160-million-customer "common market"--and Europe's senior trading nation will be outside it, not in it.

When the common market idea first came up, the British saw a surer future in their own Commonwealth and held aloof from any such untried continental combine. But to safeguard their European trade stake, they cooked up a plan for a wider, 17-nation Western European "free trade area" which would include the inner six and would also start in business on Jan. 1. Last week, at a showdown meeting of representatives of the 17 free trade area nations in Paris, the French threw up such a solid wall of resistance that the British feared for their chances of keeping equal access to their continental markets.

This fear came just as the British were celebrating, in mannerly fashion, the fact that for the first time in this century they succeeded in closing their trade gap in the first half of this year. Achieving a $383.6 million surplus of visible exports over imports was a satisfying feeling, even if the victory was apt to be temporary and was largely owed to the currently depressed price of raw materials. When the common market comes into being, however, they will be faced with a probable 29% duty on all English cars they hope to sell on the Continent. This duty is not higher than at present, but the difference is that German Volkswagens will sell in France, and Renault Dauphines in Germany, without paying such heavy duty.

Out of the Market. In Paris last week the French tactic was to propose what the British presumably could not accept--that the 17-nation area become the same sort of tightly preferential trade club with common tariff walls as the French expect the six-nation community to be. That, of course, would require the British to throw over their whole imperial preferences system of trade. Behind this French position was heavy pressure from French industrialists and farmers to stick with the six-nation community now that the West Germans and other members have conceded them practically all the special protections and privileges they held out for.

Fighting for some compromise that would head off costly continental "discrimination" against British steel, chemicals and other manufactures, Britain's Paymaster General Reginald Maudling offered to stay in Paris indefinitely (not exactly a fate worse than death) if necessary to negotiate.

Out of the Lung. Even after General De Gaulle assured Germany's Chancellor Adenauer last month that he would lead France into the common market, as promised, the British remain half-convinced that De Gaulle is too visionary a leader to confine France in a Little Europe. They argue that the general is a deliberate man doing one thing at a time, first putting through his constitution, then holding elections, later laying down the lines of an Algerian settlement--and that he has yet to turn his magistral eye to economic problems.

By the time he does, they say hopefully, De Gaulle may have freed the French economy from the ruinous burden of Algerian war and found it fit at last to throw away its iron lung and breathe the bracing air of free competition. But they are also uneasily aware that the general (who respects but does not love the British) intends to chart an international course independent of his allies. The British now fear that they cannot change events before Western Europe splits into two groups--the "ins" of the six-nation community, and the "outs."

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