GUI' to the EEC

The wording of the "Referendum on Europe" submitted to French voters was as flat as an overcooked souffle: "Do you approve within the new perspectives opening in Europe the proposed law submitted to the French people by the President of the Republic, authorizing the ratification of the treaty relative to the entry of Great Britain, Denmark, Ireland and Norway into the European community?"

Few Frenchmen, though, missed the implications of the first national referendum conducted since Georges Pompidou succeeded Charles de Gaulle as President of the Fifth Republic. In view of France's seven-year presidential term, occasional popular votes are desirable to infuse a measure of excitement into the body politic--and, perhaps, to demonstrate the viability of the President's mandate. De Gaulle himself called for five referendums during his term of office, resigning after the fifth when the voters surprisingly rejected a program for government reform on which De Gaulle had demanded a vote of confidence.

The substantive issue of Pompidou's first referendum, held last Sunday, was not as controversial as De Gaulle's last. By now, most Frenchmen assume the expansion of the Market to be a fait accompli. The only real question was how many of the 30 million eligible voters could be lured away from "le weekend" and "la residence secondaire" to vote in what their President insisted was a pressing matter. The expectation was that about 60% of the voters would go to the polls, with about two-thirds of them in favor.

The issue itself was never much in doubt. The treaty of accession admitting the four new Common Market members could have been routinely ratified by the French Parliament. But Pompidou had political ends in mind. One was to demonstrate by popular vote his shift away from De Gaulle's old and increasingly unpopular anti-British foreign policy. Another was to increase Pompidou's own luster. To whip up a large oui vote, he made his first provincial tour as President, but crowds on a 30-town tour of Lorraine were neither large nor passionate--in part, perhaps, because Pompidou's speech-making was mediocre.

Pompidou also sought to split his opposition, and he succeeded. The French Communist Party ordered its partisans to vote non, in order to signify their rejection both of European capitalism and Pompidou's "social regression." Socialists, on the other hand, decided to abstain, and parties of the center were divided. It remained for the Gaullists to turn out the decisive oui and thereby provide Pompidou with demonstrable proof of his popular support when European leaders meet in Paris next October to draw up terms for turning the Six into the Ten.

Last week British Prime Minister Edward Heath also won a small but helpful vote of confidence on the EEC. Pro-Market Labor Party M.P.s, led by the rebellious Roy Jenkins (TIME, April 24), abstained on an antiMarket resolution, proposed by a group of backbench Tories who are fighting Heath on British membership, that would have submitted Britain's entry into EEC to a national referendum. The handy margin of Heath's victory on the vote--284 to 235--suggests that Britain's formal entry into the Ten will proceed unimpeded.

That inevitability has not quashed the passions of antiMarket Britons. Last week a determined group of them boarded the ferryboat Invicta at Dover and sailed across the English Channel to Calais to demonstrate against Britain's entry into the Common Market. The police were sanguine when the demonstrators unfurled banners reading "L'Entente Cordiale mais pas un mariage." But when they began to shout "Down with Pompidou!" French flics rushed aboard the ferry, tossed the banners overboard and reportedly roughed up some of the passengers.

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