Franco-German discord threat to the Common Market

THE Common Market has been shaken to its foundations by what amounts to a French threat to break it up.

Although the question of agricultural prices was the immediate occasion for the blow up in Brussels last week, the differences between France and her five partners obviously lie much deeper.

Not that the agricultural issue is of no importance. French agriculture desperately needs a wider market and it is still a lagging section of the economy. Moreover, peasants comprise a still sizeable section of the electorate.

De Gaulle's sharpness can only be understood in relation to the history of the Common Market.

In the fifties the political custodians of West European capitalism saw that if the system which they represented was to survive, something had to be done to break down the restrictions on the development of the productive forces represented by the old state frontiers.

U.S. investment

Washington was also interested in closer European unity as a barrier against the threat of social change and as part of its strategic policy in Europe. Behind this was the need to establish a stable field for investment and trade.

The Common Market began by the reduction of tariffs between the member countries, moving on to the establishment of a single tariff for the whole area.

But the Rome Treaty of 1957, which brought it into being, envisaged also a general and systematic movement towards economic and political integration. This involved the surrender of control over certain aspects of policy by the participating states to a central authority.

Although European statesmen paid a great deal of lip-service to European cooperation, they continued to see the principal question as that of furthering the national interests of their own bourgeoisie.

While in the age of modern technology the national state has become an anachronism, the attempt by the bourgeoisie to carry out what is an historic task of the working class-the abolition of national frontiers—is bound to be abortive.

Inadequate area

To begin with, the territory of the Six member countries was not in itself an adequate basis for the development of the productive forces. Then the material interests of the national ruling classes still expressed themselves through the historical states.

From the moment of its inception, therefore, the Common Market became an area of struggle between the participating states as well as for opposing or bargaining with states outside it.

At first, for example, the British Conservative government, unconvinced about the success of the Common Market and not sure that its policy could be shaped to British needs, remained outside.

By the time it changed its mind, de Gaulle had consolidated his power in France with a worked-out policy for ensuring French hegemony in Europe, using the Common Market as a means.

Meanwhile, de Gaulle had been wooing the Bonn government with some apparent success.

In January 1963 a military and political treaty was signed between France and Germany and in the same year Britain was brusquely refused admission to the Common Market.

Monopolies' alliance This laid the basis for a close and profitable alliance between the big monopolies of France and Germany - an De Gaulle: wooing German liance which continues is day.

West Germany, in any case, remains by far the most powerful industrial component of the Market, but Bonn's interest remained very much bound-up with the preservation of the so-called Western Alliance.

When France came into en confrontation with the SA, Franco-German relations oled. Bonn preferred to be America's soundest ally on the continent rather than play second fiddle to France.

Germany's alliance with France strengthens her position in Europe but cannot satisfy her appetite for markets and for capital exports. In any case Germany's trade with the Common Market countries is less than 40 per cent. At the same time German big business co-operates with U.S. finance and industry on a large scale which gives German industry access to new productive techniques and scientic innovations.

The revamping of American defence strategy and the conflict with de Gaulle over the Multi-Lateral Force has given the German ruling class a new opportunity to press its claims for European hegemony and, incidentally, nuclear weapons without which it will remain a third-rate capitalist power.

No surrender The question of the surrendering of national sovereignty to Common Market institutions fits into this pattern. De Gaulle is unwilling to surrender any shred of French sovereignty because this would make French policy dependent upon countries susceptible to American pressure. For de Gaulle, the Common Market is useful as a bloc which could stand up to the USA, and further French interests.

If it cannot be this, then it becomes a danger which has to be countered, or perhaps destroyed.

Whether it is possible for de Gaulle to proceed very far along this road is an open question into which enters all the contradictions of imperialism at the present stage.

In many ways French capiism is not well placed for carrying on an independent policy in opposition to the USA. It is industrially weaker than Germany, as well as being much weaker than the USA.

American investments in key sections of French industry are of growing importance. Many French enterprises are now handicapped by a lack of reserves for the expansion and re-equipment demanded under present conditions of intensified competition.

Dollar octopus

American big business is not limited in this way and has been more active in France than in any other continental country in buying its way into the control of industry. This extending grip of the U.S. dollar octopus is disagreeable to de Gaulle and to sections of French business.

Although de Gaulle holds few cards, he clearly hopes to take advantage of the present entanglements of American imperialism and of its weak balance of payments position.

Leading organs of the French press comment astringently on the policy of Johnson.

French foreign policy pursues a determined anti-American course.

De Gaulle threatens to use France's present monetary strength to halt the dollar invasion. Resistance to carrying forward the Rome Treaty seems to flow from the same general policy.

The situation thus remains extremely unstable.

Against a background of' gathering economic problems, the contradictions between the l different capitalist interests become sharper. The Common Market, instead of proving a solvent of conflicts, only becomes an additional field which they find expression. Labour Party, commented:

'Barnes has reasons other than the noble ones which some will ascribe to him. He and Ollie Roe have something in common; they both are in trouble and hope to buy their way out with the "right" answers at the right time?

This outright and blatant frame-up is part of the wholesale attack by the police and courts on behalf of the capitalist class on youth all over the world. The capitalist class still fears and hates youth who will not accept the conditions in which they live and work.

The whole struggle of youth internationally was adequately expressed by one of the six in a parting shot as he was led from the court:

"There is a way to freedom and courts and judges don't know the way.' ONE of Stalins chief literary hacks, Ilya Ehrenburg attempts to cover up his subservience to the bureaucracy in the latest instalment of his memoirs, being printed in the Soviet literary magazine, 'Novy Mir' Speaking of the period the Moscow Trials, he says:

TRIALS PERIOD 'In 1937, I was only aware of certain isolated crimes. Like so many others, I tried to whitewash Stalin in my own eyes. I attributed the mass executions to the struggles which were going on in the middle of the Party...

From years of experience in their struggle against imperialist aggression, the Vietnamese people have refined their methods of guerrilla warfare. Here MICHAEL BANDA explains these developments against their historical background.

A section of the ever-growing South Vietnamese Liberation Army. July 10, 65 HE capture of a number of provincial capitals by the Vietcong, despite increased military activity and aerial bombardment by U.S. imperialism, shows clearly that the struggle in South Vietnam is approaching a climax.

Capitalist commentators and sections of the U.S. ruling class are very nervous that the U.S. has lost the initiative in South-East Asia, and the manifest failure of the Wilson 'peace' mission indicates the military-diplomatic imbroglio, from which there is no escape. have refined distributed to the peasants by the Communist Vietminh.

This brutal repression was cloaked under the euphemism VIETNAM liberate their country and unify it.

In 1959 the long simmering wrath of the peasants and workers exploded into open revolt. Peasant uprisings and The Vietcong met terror with terror. Hundreds of district officials and local commanders were shot or assassinated. Rural administration crumbled, then collapsed.

Even the British government began to get worried. In 1961 British autnorities in ivalaya despaicned over 55,000 rites and small arms and over 700 armoured vemicies to Vietnam. As a furtner gesture of solidarity a police mission headed by General G. K. Thompson was sent to Saigon to advise and instruct the Diem regime on how to repress the Vietcong.

New tactics were worked out, each one as hopeless as