European Diary, 1977-1981 Read Online Free PDF Page A

Community institutions: the Court of Justice, the Parliament (then nominated from the Parliaments of the member states and not directly elected), the Council of Ministers and its Brussels-resident shadow, the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER).
    The allocation of Commission portfolios was much the most difficult of these tasks. Despite the efforts at Ditchley before Christmas there was substantial work on the fitting of pegs into holes still to be done when I arrived in Brussels on 4 January. It was made more difficult by the fact that the rules (two Commissioners for a big country, one for a small one) created more Commissioners than there were proper jobs for them to do. And it had to be completed, unless the new Commission was to start very much on the wrong foot, by the night of 6/7 January.
    This led to the first days in Brussels being dominated by bilateral negotiations with individual Commissioners. The story has a certain retrospective interest, but not I think sufficiently so for the reader to be thrown into a long account of these proceedings. I have therefore abstracted it and put it in an appendix which appears at the end of the book. This abstraction may have the effect of making the first days seem undercharged, rather than overcharged as in reality they were.
    In mid-February I began a customary round of inaugural visits to the governments of the member states. Such visits typically lasted a day and a half, and I did them over five months in the not entirely haphazard order of Italy, France, Netherlands, Luxembourg,Germany, Ireland, Denmark and Britain. The Belgian Government received a non-travelling visit in September.
    On the second of these visits—the Paris one—a tiresome and in some ways ludicrous issue of form and prestige which was to dominate much of that spring (and to continue with diminishing reverberations throughout the rest of my presidency) erupted to the surface. In November 1975 President Giscard had inaugurated a series of ‘intimate’ meetings between the leaders of the Western world. He had brought together at Rambouillet the heads of government of the United States, Germany, Britain and Japan, with Italy somewhat reluctantly added almost at the last moment. In June 1976 President Ford had responded almost too quickly by organizing a meeting at Puerto Rico. On this occasion Canada had been added at the request of the Americans. There had also been some movement away from the genuine informality of a country house gathering at Rambouillet towards the international circus trappings of more recent Western Economic Summits.
    There was considerable feeling amongst the Little Five of the European Community that Ortoli, my predecessor as President, ought to have been present at Puerto Rico. The gatherings were specifically ‘economic’ and not political or military in their intent. The countries of Western Europe had charged the Community with a significant part of the responsibility for conducting and coordinating their economic policies, particularly but not only in the field of trade relations. In these circumstances it appeared both perverse and divisive for four of them to go off and try to settle matters with the Americans and the Japanese, leaving the coordinating body in the dark and five of the member states of the Community unrepresented.
    There had been some suggestion that Ortoli ought simply to have packed his bags and arrived forcefully even if uninvited at the Summit. However no invitation was forthcoming and Ortoli, wisely I think, did not attempt to gate-crash. This issue was left unresolved but with a settled determination on the part of the Little Five, supported with enthusiasm by Italy and with moderate enthusiasm by Germany, that there should be no repetition of the crime.
    A repetition of the Summit itself was however by then inevitable, and by the time that I took office one had been firmly arranged forLondon in May 1977. The only