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The Cooperators. All this seemed to justify skepticism about Europe's biggest step toward unity—the six-nation Common Market born last New Year's Day. Cynics called the Common Market a compromise between people who wanted to unite Europe without appearing to do so, and those who wanted to give the appearance of working toward European unity without actually achieving it. And when Charles de Gaulle came to power in France last June with his mystical ideas of national grandeur, doomsayers were quick to compose their epitaphs on European unity.
In fact, De Gaulle has forced a change in the philosophy of the Common Market: he is adamantly opposed to giving supranational power to any European organization, economic or political. But his government has scrupulously carried out all its Common Market Treaty obligations, and his ministers insist that they are not "anti-European," but in favor of something called "cooperative unity" the hammering out of common European policies in negotiations between fully sovereign governments.
The Joyous Entrance. To the tidy-minded who demand tables of organization and clearly drawn lines of authority, cooperative unity sounded suspiciously like a fancy phrase for doing nothing. But since 1953, European railways have pooled freight cars as U.S. railroads do, now have some 200,000 cars marked EUROP roaming one another's tracks. Another joint project soon to be established is Eurocontrol—an integrated system of air-navigational control.
So far, cooperative unity shows no sign of holding back either the Common Market or its sister organization, Euratom. Last week Euratom formally indicated its intention to build six nuclear reactors designed to provide the Six with 1,000,000 additional kilowatts of electricity by 1963. And in the spanking new Common Market headquarters on Brussels' aptly named Avenue de la Joyeuse Entree, Walter Hallstein, the German law professor who presides over the Common Market executive, could point to solid progress. Already the Common Market's European Investment Bank (capital: $1 billion) had made its first loans. Others of Hallstein's 1,000-odd employees were busily working out common tariffs and establishing procedures so that any citizen of the Six may seek a job or set up a business anywhere in Common Market territory.
Most hopeful of all, public enthusiasm for the Common Market far outstrips that of officialdom. Since last January at least 15 specialized magazines and reviews devoted to the Common Market have sprung up; so has UNICE, a Common Marketwide counterpart of the U.S.'s National Association of Manufacturers. And throughout the Six, industrial amalgamations and alliances are being negotiated at a dizzying rate. Italy's Alfa Romeo has signed car-marketing agreements with France's Renault and Germany's N.S.U. Daimler-Benz (Mercedes) is negotiating with Peugeot, and France's Conord (household appliances) has already established a subsidiary in Cologne. Even commercial banks are getting into the act: France's Credit Lyonnais and Germany's Dresdner Bank have exchanged 50 employees as part of a training scheme.