The Regal Rejection

No statesman of this century has been more successful than Charles de Gaulle at infuriating his friends and delighting his enemies. Last week le grand Charles did it again, throwing the Common Market negotiations into confusion, blackballing Britain's bid for membership, and disdainfully rejecting the U.S. offer of Polaris missiles.

The blow fell just as Britain and the Six were in chummy agreement that a way could after all be readily found to make Britain a full partner in the Common Market. In Brussels, even as De Gaulle was addressing a press conference in Paris, the Common Market's presiding minister, Belgium's Henri Fayat, gracefully welcomed the British delegation to the conference room in the new aluminum and concrete Foreign Ministry building on the Quatre Bras.* With equal good will, Britain's Chief Delegate Edward Heath replied, "I think the time has come for a true reconciliation."

Unusual Customs. It was already too late. As the Six discussed the agenda, runners began trotting into the chamber with bulletins hot from the Telex machines. Paragraph by paragraph, the dismayed delegates followed De Gaulle's lengthy discourse. It became clear that further discussion was pointless.

This time Charles de Gaulle made his meaning crystal-clear. To his jammed audience of some 900 newsmen in the Elysee Palace, De Gaulle said that 1) Britain should be kept out of the Common Market, and 2) France had no interest in the U.S. proposal for a European nuclear force. De Gaulle recalled Britain's refusal to participate in the Common Market when it was abuilding, and charged that London had even tried to destroy the organization by setting up the rival Outer Seven. With obvious relish, De Gaulle explained why he thought Britain was unfit for partnership.

"England," he declared, "is, in effect, insular, maritime, linked by its trade, its markets and its food supply to the most diverse and often most distant countries." Moreover, he added, it "has very pronounced and unusual customs." Shrugged De Gaulle: "How can England be brought in with such a system?"

''This is a fatal day!" cried Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns. In London a melancholy joke went the rounds: "Not since 1066 has a Harold been so badly done in the eye by a Frenchman." To the exasperated British, it all recalled the fairy story of the princess who assigns to an unwelcome suitor a series of seemingly impossible tasks to perform--but when the suitor returns triumphant to claim her hand, the princess says: "Oh, I could never marry a man with red hair." Paris wags were retailing the joke about De Gaulle's new inferiority complex: "He thinks he's Napoleon."

Behind De Gaulle's regal non is the fear that British membership would be used to protect U.S. trading interests in Europe. As one French official puts it, De Gaulle considers the British as "an invading platoon of commandos opening the way for an assault wave of Americans in division strength."

No Cause for Alarm. What De Gaulle fears, of course, is any threat to French hegemony in the Common Market--and that is exactly what frightens other European nations. Belgium's Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak said that only because Britain "stood alone in 1940 is it possible for us to speak today of a Europe that can integrate itself." West Germany's Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroeder reasserted his conviction that Britain should be admitted to the Common Market. But Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, fearful of offending his old friend De Gaulle on the eve of a visit to Paris this week, suggested that there was no cause for alarm.

Le Monde called De Gaulle's grandiose words "exacerbated nationalism" that "can only engender disorder and lead to isolation." But De Gaulle meant business. Suddenly, France's Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville rose to demand that the discussions with Britain be ended. "What," he asked the delegates, "is the sense of going on with these negotiations after the press conference of General de Gaulle?" What, indeed? At week's end the delegates gratefully took a scheduled adjournment, agreed to defer a final decision until Jan. 28.

Thus the door was slammed on Britain, but was it finally barred and bolted? De Gaulle is too skillful a tactician ever to be trapped in an absolutely rigid and negative position. Even his acrimonious Paris discourse contained the hint that Britain might be welcomed in the Common Market in five years or so, i.e., after France has had ample time to weld the political unity of the European Economic Community. Venerable Jean Monnet, the father of the Common Market, took issue with De Gaulle by insisting that Britain should be admitted now because it has already "renounced all preference for the Commonwealth and has agreed to place itself with the Continent." But even Monnet seemed to echo De Gaulle by adding that "we should move toward a unity of action between Europe and America, acting as equal partners."

* Brussels was the scene of another indignity last week when student pranksters during a blizzard kidnaped the legendary statue of Mannckcn-Pis from its fountain near city hall. When police later recovered it, a Brussels councilor described the indelicate statue as the city's "most cherished patrimony."

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