Prime Minister Harold Macmillan flew home from Washington last week and ran headlong into a thunderhead of trouble.
A press report of his U.S. visit told of an astounding meeting between Macmillan and Secretary of State Christian Herter, at which Macmillan talked ominously of economic war between Britain's Outer Seven and Europe's Common Market unless the U.S. steps in. As the report had it, Macmillan warned that Britain would not sit idly by while a German-led Common Market squeezes it out of Europe and achieves hegemony on the Continent. Macmillan reportedly recalled that in the past Britain had joined hands with Russia to crush Napoleon's France; the British now might be forced to lead another peripheral alliance against Europe, particularly in view of what he allegedly called the revival of Naziism in Germany.
Flat Denial. In Paris, the crack about Napoleon brought cries of British perfidy; in Bonn, banner headlines screamed:
MACMILLAN DENIGRATES BONN IN WASHINGTON, THREATENS REPRISALS . . . EUROPE FACING RIFT. Alarmed and angry, West German Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano summoned the British ambassador for an official explanation.
Macmillan himself was amazed and outraged, and the Foreign Office put out an official statement denying that Macmillan had ever mentioned Naziism in Washington or threatened an alliance with Russia against Germany and the Common Market nations. Macmillan went before the House of Commons to insist: "We believe that the new friendship between Germany and France is absolutely vital to the future peace in Europe. We agree . . . that not only do the Six have the right to make this commercial treaty, but that it is a good thing—we have said it over and over again—to have that degree of stability and unity in Europe." Then he added: "What I have pleaded for ... is that we should not allow an economic gap, a sort of division, to grow up." Leaks & Bleats. The flap was the result of Macmillan's taking his informal clubman's manner to Washington, a city where today's club conversation can become tomorrow's headline. Developed in relatively leakproof London, Macmillan's style is more frank than diplomatic, and he likes nothing better than to ramble amiably from subject to subject, drawing liberally on historical parallel. In Washington, Macmillan had indeed discussed Britain's trade troubles with the Common Market.
But his complaints, first reported by a second-string Associated Press State Department correspondent, were misinterpreted and garbled until the thought came out almost in reverse.
What Macmillan was objecting to was the speedup in the Common Market's plans to lower its internal tariff walls while raising barriers against other traders. A plan before the Common Market already proposes to chop internal tariffs 20% in July instead of the planned 10%; at the same time, external tariffs in West Germany and the Benelux countries, with which Britain does $850 million worth of trade annually, will rise sharply. Macmillan's fear was that the move would only widen the gap between the Common Market and the Outer Seven, divide Europe into two economic camps and, eventually, two backbiting political camps.