Supranational Stall

Angry Charles de Gaulle had threatened to boycott the Common Market, and last week boycott he did. First, French officials were forbidden to at tend any policy-making Common Market meetings. Then France's Jean-Marc Boegner, permanent delegate to the community's Brussels headquarters, abruptly returned to Paris without so much as an au revoir to Common Mar ket President Walter Hallstein.

The calculated diplomatic slap underscored De Gaulle's highly personal view of who is responsible for the crisis: Hallstein's Eurocrats dedicated to building a supranational Europe, for whom De Gaulle reserves his worst epithet--les apatrides, or stateless men. It was Hallstein's package proposal, aimed at winning French acquiescence to an enlargement of the supranational powers of the Eurocrats and the European Parliament, that touched off the crisis--and De Gaulle's ire--in the first place. The bait was a farm policy worth billions of dollars to French farmers. "Do they think we can be bought like Yemen or Italy?" De Gaulle is reported to have roared when he heard the proposal. The boycott was his answer.

Slightly Ajar. It is a costly answer, particularly for the surplus-laden farmer. Since the Common Market began in 1958, French farm exports to the other five members have soared 253%, and the EEC was on the verge of heavily underwriting French produce beyond the Community as well. To ease the blow of his diplomacy, De Gaulle announced last week that Paris itself would subsidize French farmers to the tune of some $1.1 billion next year.

In the hope that his partners would cave in and drop their supranational proposals, De Gaulle carefully kept the door slightly ajar. By "inviting" Boegner home rather than formally recalling him, the general avoided an outright break in diplomatic relations that would have signaled the end of the Common Market. French officials continued last week to attend technical EEC sessions hammering out the implementation of previously approved business like pig-meat subsidies and inland-waterway rates. Still, so complex have the Six's economic ties become that De Gaulle's veto on any new business has the effect of slowly strangling the Community. With the summer holidays approaching, there was little likelihood of negotiating an end to the crisis until after the German elections in September.

Apoplectic Purple. Gaullists privately insisted that France had no intention of pulling out of or breaking up the Common Market. What Paris does want is to reshape the EEC's structure. Above all, De Gaulle wants to trim the wings of the Eurocrats, stop what one French official angrily described as the "supranational escalation in the commission's daily method of action." A rarely aroused Hallstein retorted in a speech at Duesseldorf that, if De Gaulle throttled the Common Market's drive toward unity, "this would be the greatest destructive act in the history of Europe, and even the free world, since the days of Hitler." Which only caused Paris to underline in apoplectic purple yet another priority on its list: the need for a new EEC president.

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