The World: Common Market: Breaking Out the Bubbly

IT was a fitting finale for Britain's ten-year quest for membership in the thriving European Economic Community. Dawn had already broken and sleeping reporters were sprawled around the press quarters when the Foreign Ministers of the Six invited British Chief Negotiator Geoffrey Rippon to their conference room to hear his formal acceptance of their conditions for British entry. As Rippon stepped into the room on the second story of Luxembourg's modernistic Kirchberg European Center, the rumpled, bleary-eyed ministers spontaneously broke into applause. The gesture was as much an indication of relief as of...

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