No statesman of this century has been more successful than Charles de Gaulle at infuriating his friends and delighting his enemies. Last week le grand Charles did it again, throwing the Common Market negotiations into confusion, blackballing Britain's bid for membership, and disdainfully rejecting the U.S. offer of Polaris missiles.
The blow fell just as Britain and the Six were in chummy agreement that a way could after all be readily found to make Britain a full partner in the Common Market. In Brussels, even as De Gaulle was addressing a press conference in Paris, the Common Market's presiding minister, Belgium's Henri Fayat, gracefully welcomed the British delegation to the conference room in the new aluminum and concrete Foreign Ministry building on the Quatre Bras.* With equal good will, Britain's Chief Delegate Edward Heath replied, "I think the time has come for a true reconciliation."
Unusual Customs. It was already too late. As the Six discussed the agenda, runners began trotting into the chamber with bulletins hot from the Telex machines. Paragraph by paragraph, the dismayed delegates followed De Gaulle's lengthy discourse. It became clear that further discussion was pointless.
This time Charles de Gaulle made his meaning crystal-clear. To his jammed audience of some 900 newsmen in the Elysee Palace, De Gaulle said that 1) Britain should be kept out of the Common Market, and 2) France had no interest in the U.S. proposal for a European nuclear force. De Gaulle recalled Britain's refusal to participate in the Common Market when it was abuilding, and charged that London had even tried to destroy the organization by setting up the rival Outer Seven. With obvious relish, De Gaulle explained why he thought Britain was unfit for partnership.
"England," he declared, "is, in effect, insular, maritime, linked by its trade, its markets and its food supply to the most diverse and often most distant countries." Moreover, he added, it "has very pronounced and unusual customs." Shrugged De Gaulle: "How can England be brought in with such a system?"
''This is a fatal day!" cried Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns. In London a melancholy joke went the rounds: "Not since 1066 has a Harold been so badly done in the eye by a Frenchman." To the exasperated British, it all recalled the fairy story of the princess who assigns to an unwelcome suitor a series of seemingly impossible tasks to perform—but when the suitor returns triumphant to claim her hand, the princess says: "Oh, I could never marry a man with red hair." Paris wags were retailing the joke about De Gaulle's new inferiority complex: "He thinks he's Napoleon."
Behind De Gaulle's regal non is the fear that British membership would be used to protect U.S. trading interests in Europe. As one French official puts it, De Gaulle considers the British as "an invading platoon of commandos opening the way for an assault wave of Americans in division strength."