It was to have been Edward Heath's big moment. Britain's Prime Minister and the Premiers of Ireland, Denmark and Norway had just arrived in Brussels' Palais d'Egmont to sign a Treaty of Accession to the European Common Market, thus officially marking the end of 18 months of tough negotiations. The occasion, the next-to-last formal step before the four nations become full members of the Common Market next Jan. 1—if all goes according to schedule—was being carried live on Eurovision. Then, just as Heath walked through the Palais doors, a blonde woman stepped out of a group of photographers and threw a canister of black printing ink in his face.
The incident delayed the signing ceremony for only 50 minutes; it turned out that the woman, a 31-year-old psychologist named Karen Cooper, was protesting the government's handling of an urban renewal project in London's historic Covent Garden market, not Britain's joining the Common Market. But on a day devoted to symbolic ceremony, the affair could be viewed as an unhappy omen of the sort of political accident that can still upset the plans of Britain and its partners on their way to market in Europe.
Each of the four heads of government must win approval for the treaty at home before the documents signed in Brussels last week take effect. That will be no easy task, as Norway's Trygve Bratteli cautioned: "The distance must not be too great between vision and reality. It is of little use to find solutions in Brussels to common problems if we do not succeed in convincing our peoples that the common goals are also theirs."
The wisdom of Bratteli's observation was evident in counter-ceremonies staged last week in Ireland and Norway. In Dublin, all the ghosts of Irish nationalism are being dragged out by the anti-Marketeers ("Mansholt, the second Cromwell" reads one slogan, a reference to Sicco Mansholt, Dutch author of the Mansholt Plan to halve the number of Europe's agricultural workers by 1980). While the ceremonies were going on in Brussels, Dublin demonstrators read out a declaration of allegiance to the 1916 proclamation of the Irish Republic. In Oslo, anti-Marketeers staged a torchlight parade through the city's snow-covered streets and almost mobbed Bratteli at the airport as he left for Brussels. And in Brussels itself, 50 Britons demonstrated against the Market, with signs reading NON, NEIN, NO.
The odds are that each country will eventually vote to join the Common Market, and that Europe's Six will become the Ten on schedule. But the odds are not long, and whether the treaty will be ratified is still a betting proposition. Each government faces a different set of political and constitutional hurdles. A brief survey: