(2 of 2)
Heady Promise. While Ludwig Erhard dreamed of his home-grown Sherman Act, other Europeans had been dreaming even headier dreams. Spurred on by France's Jean Monnet and Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak, six Western European nations (France, West Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries) early this year finished drawing up treaties to establish both a European Common Market and a European Atomic Energy Community (TIME, March 4). The first of these promised to create within 15 years a single West European market, comparable in size to the continent-wide U.S. market, with free trade within and a common customs barrier against the outside world. The second treaty, by pooling nuclear-research and power facilities, held out the hope that Western Europe might one day be close to self-sufficient in energy (and thus, among other things, no longer vitally dependent on the Suez and Middle East oil).
Last week, only a day after it passed the anticartel law, West Germany's Bundestag ratified both the Common Market and Euratom Treaties. The next step is approval in that graveyard of European aspirations, the French National Assembly. Last week, as the French Assembly moved into the final stages of debate on the two treaties, attendance was scant—at one point only 18 Deputies were in the chamber—and the sole outburst of passion occurred in the parliamentary bar, where insulted Communists felled an aggressive right-wing Deputy with a broken beer bottle. Cynics blamed the apathy on the heat which blanketed Paris as well as Bonn, but a more accurate explanation was that everyone knew that the treaties would pass with a comfortable majority. Not even the French National Assembly could ignore the cold logic of Socialist Deputy Alain Savary: "The choice which France has is not between the European Community and the status quo, but between the European Community and solitude."