Man Of The Year: On the Road to a New Reality

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time limit on ratification by the Bundestag. If the treaties of Moscow and Warsaw remain unratified for more than a few months, however, Bonn's relations with the Soviets and Poles are bound to deteriorate. Soviet diplomats have privately warned that Moscow will "punish" the West Germans if they do not follow through on the treaty. By punish, the Russians most probably mean that they would put the old German card back into play to block Bonn's overtures to other East bloc countries. But Brandt is hoping that the Soviet impulse will be offset by Moscow's hunger for West German technology. That may not be a bad calculation. Notes Richard Lowenthal, an expert on Eastern Europe at the Free University of Berlin: "Despite Moscow's increasingly active global role, the Soviets are on the road of decline—not in the military-or political-power sense, but in the economic and technological sense —compared to the West. They are falling behind, and they are beginning to notice it."

It is especially noticeable when compared with the lusty prosperity of the Common Market. The gap will widen if the European Economic Community is enlarged to include Britain, Denmark, Ireland and Norway. It will have a population of 250 million, somewhat larger than either the U.S. or the Soviet Union. Its gross national product will be an estimated $650 billion v. $932 billion for the U.S. and as much as $600 billion for Russia. The Market will be the world's largest steel producer, and it will outstrip even the U.S. in auto production.

Brandt's Ostpolitik gives West Germany far greater leverage within the Common Market than it had before. The Western Europeans cannot afford to let West Germany slip its Western moorings and drift to the East; accordingly they are intensifying their efforts to tie Bonn more securely to the Western European structure. That is precisely what Brandt wants.

Despite recent polls showing that Britons are 66% against even applying for membership, largely because food prices might rise by as much as 26%, Prime Minister Edward Heath's Conservative government is deeply committed to "joining Europe," and Tory leaders are convinced that they will carry the public with them once an actual entry agreement has been worked out. Also convinced is Jean Monnet. The Common Market's architect told TIME Correspondent William Rademaekers: "Two fundamental things have happened. First, England will join the Common Market. Make no mistake about it; they will come in. Secondly, we will have a monetary union. I am not saying that we will have it by exactly 1980, but we will have it."

Sicco Mansholt, the Dutch vice president of the EEC Commission, noted that European big business slowly has created an irreversible momentum toward integration. He explains: "The European industries merged, one after another, and they grew bigger and bigger. They escaped the control of their national governments." Thus, he believes the Common Market will be forced to provide the control, with technocrats in Brussels wielding power over what is already the world's largest trading area, with no barriers on the interchange of goods from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. Last November, the foreign ministers of the Six held their first formal meeting since 1962 to orchestrate common policy; they agreed to meet