Seeds of Agreement

Outside, the Brussels streets were enlivened by gay Christmas lighting and the trudge of desperate last-minute shoppers. Inside, just as desperate, 20 Cabinet ministers from six nations gathered in the boxy Palais des Congres to try to reach agreement on Common Market farm policies and prices by year's end--or face the threat of Charles de Gaulle to break up the Market. So intricate did their discussions become that the question was who needed the most blackboards to diagram his proposals. At week's end delegates seemed satisfied that important progress had been made. Said Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak gamely: "There will be no breakup of the Common Market."

Toward Compromise. Each minister was mindful of the men whose needs--and whose votes--he had to consider: Europe's stubborn, stolid farmers. Germany's farmers are high-cost operators. They still mostly use horse-drawn power and till tiny, tired plots that have been handed down and subdivided over the generations. Bonn's farm-strong Christian Democratic Party insists on protecting them with some of the world's steepest subsidies and tariffs. France, which has half of the Common Market's arable land and its largest and most efficient farms, wants to eliminate all of the Market's internal barriers to agricultural trade so that France can increase farm exports and reduce its own heavily subsidized farm surplus. Germany is cool to the idea.

As the preholiday week went on, the mood swung between exhilaration and gloom. Having threatened to torpedo the Common Market, Charles de Gaulle kept up the pressure by telling a visitor: "After all, we could always be a large Switzerland"--a reference to the separate path that France could take. But the spur of a deadline and the ministers' eagerness to get home in time for a peaceful Christmas produced some compromises in Brussels.

The Common Marketers all but finished hammering out a complex formula under which Germany would agree to common prices and policies covering beef, rice and dairy products. In return, the French were expected to support lower Common Market industrial tariffs. Germany wants to reduce these tariffs so that the Market will have a stronger bargaining position in the upcoming "Kennedy Round" of negotiations with the U.S., through which the Germans hope to be able to increase their industrial exports. The ministers must also thresh out policies covering wheat and other grains, but De Gaulle's ultimatum, it turned out when the fine print was read, applied only to beef, rice and dairy products. Belgium's Spaak introduced a pacifying proposal to put the grain problem off until early next year.

Penalties of Failure. There was still a possibility that the negotiations could collapse and that De Gaulle would bring down the whole Common Market. But failure this time would mean that France would lose the chance to become the Market's breadbasket, that Germany would lose the opportunity to expand its industrial exports, and that the U.S.'s postwar policy goal of establishing a united, free-trading Europe would be crushed. The best grounds for optimism is that failure would cost everyone--including France--so dearly.

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