Old Habits

An unhappy exception in the generally flourishing economies of Western Europe is the coal glut; mountains of coal rise high alongside the smoking industrial chimneys. More than 14 million surplus tons clog Germany's Ruhr, and 20,000 miners have been laid off. Continued production at Belgium's notoriously uneconomic Borinage shafts (TIME, March 2) added to the stocks of 7,000,000 tons of coal already piled up in Belgium, so that, as one coal producer put it, "we literally have no more room anywhere to put the coal we produce which nobody will buy."

The glut is giving the six-nation European Coal and Steel Community the severest test of its six-year history. Eliminating frontiers and the barriers that go with them, the Community had progressed smoothly on a rising market. But coal's current slump provides a painful reminder that although barriers may technically be gone, barrier mentality is far from dead. The pressures of economic self-interest have begun to resist the supranational powers originally granted by treaty to the Community's nine-man High Authority.

For months, warning of a coming coal crisis, the High Authority urged member nations to cut back production. The Belgians largely ignored pleas to modernize their mines, close marginal producers. Germany's Ludwig Erhard resisted any imposition of production quotas. He preferred to slap domestic tariffs on imports from outside the area (including $4.76 a ton on U.S. coal) and higher taxes on other fuels to boost coal sales. Italy and Luxembourg want to continue buying cheaper U.S. coal, even if this is considered disloyal to surplus-ridden Community producers. The French hinted that they might not obey orders to restrict production, which, though helping the Belgians, would be merely "exporting unemployment into France."

Prodded by desperate Belgium, the High Authority last week proposed to the Community's Council of Ministers that "a state of manifest crisis" be declared, permitting imposition of mandatory quotas. But in the Council of Ministers, composed of cabinet ministers of all six nations, supranationalism meets nationalism. Despite Belgium's crisis, the ministers seemed in no hurry to act against their own national pressures.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.