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But Negotiator Heath faces formidable political and economic obstacles in trying to work out British admission. After putting in twelve-hour days and seven-day weeks for months in hopes of getting what the Six call "a general panorama of solutions" by the end of this month, it seems unlikely that he will now be able to present it to Parliament before its summer recess.
The Barriers. Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle have apparently accepted Britain's entry as inevitable, but have not yet shown any signs of being willing to ease the admission price. They both consider the Common Market a Continental achievement and the British as latecomers who want to reap its benefits while trying to control and change it. Since Britain is asking special tariff concessions for the Commonwealth. Adenauer and De Gaulle suggest that Britain is in fact trying to drag the whole Commonwealth into the Common Market—and that, as they say, would be like having "an elephant in the bathtub."
De Gaulle, who did not much care for the Common Market in the first place, has by now grown accustomed to it and regards it as a cozy Franco-German club whose whole nature will be changed with British entry. Although Britain's admission is favored by most other European leaders (Germany's Ludwig Erhard calls the Common Market without Britain a mere "torso" and a "ghostly unreality"). Charles de Gaulle continues to cherish his Carolingian vision of a unified Europe under French leadership.
However, De Gaulle appeared impressed during his talks with Macmillan last month when the Prime Minister pointed out that active British membership in the European community might have prevented World War I (in one battle, Macmillan was the only survivor of 30 officers in his Guards regiment), as well as Hitler's war. Also in Britain's favor, by De Gaulle's reckoning, is her implicit support for a loose confederation of European states, along the lines of his own proposal for a Europe of Fatherlands, rather than an immediate, U.S.-style federal union. Britain cannot at this stage give France the nuclear know-how she has acquired under her "special relationship" with the U.S., but De Gaulle is well aware of Britain's potential contribution to the independent European nuclear deterrent that is only a few years distant—even though Britain shares Washington's conviction that it must be linked to NATO.
Settled Issues. At the working level in Brussels, the biggest problem facing Heath is to secure adequate safeguards for Commonwealth trade. Negotiations so far have been largely based on laborious economic studies of the Commonwealth's 27 independent nations and 47 dependencies. Two important issues have been settled so far: the British have agreed to apply, after 1970, the Market's common external tariff against manufactured imports from the Commonwealth, and the Europeans have agreed to let Britain have certain essential raw materials without any tariff. One of the remaining problems concerns tariff levels for "tropical" produce—cocoa, coffee. bananas, etc., mainly from Africa and the West Indies. To protect her own onetime colonies, France won associate membership in the Common Market for 18 African