European Diary, 1977-1981 Read Online Free PDF

question at issue was therefore whether or not I would be present. Ortoli’s absence had unfairly been seen as a blow to his prestige and to that of the Commission. Part of the role I was expected to perform was to restore this prestige. My credibility as an effective new President was therefore somewhat at stake.
    But there was more to it than the questions of pride or position. The Little Five regarded my own determination to get there as an essential test of whether I was to be a true spokesman of the Community as a whole or a lackey of the big countries, from one of which I came and by another of which my appointment had been initiated. Almost independently of my own views, I therefore had no choice but to fight for a place at the London meeting. And when Giscard at the conclusion of our Elysée discussion on 28 February announced with silken politeness that he was equally resolved the other way, a battle between us became unavoidable. While it was being fought it was, like most battles, disagreeable. The outcome however was reasonably satisfactory, particularly as the ground gained was never subsequently lost. But the price paid was a long-term deterioration in the relationship between Giscard and me (interrupted only by a brief and cautious second honeymoon in the summer of 1978), which probably mattered more to me than it did to him.
    At the time I could see no merit in his position. At best it could be explained, but not excused, by political difficulties with the Gaullist wing of his coalition. In retrospect however I can see a little more in his case. He had successfully initiated a new forum for Western leaders to talk to each other in semi-spontaneous intimacy. It was a formula which he and his friend Schmidt particularly liked, because they were the best at it. Already he had been forced to admit first Italy and then Canada. Now there was me. Furthermore the Americans, with their need for back-up, were already making the meetings more bureaucratic, and the Commission was famous for bureaucracy. Where was it going to stop? The Australians were already knocking at the door; and was the Prime Minister of one of the Little Five, when his country held the presidency of the European Council, also to be admitted?
    However Giscard’s status-conscious and schematic mind did not see things in these quantitative and practical terms, which mighthave appealed to Schmidt. Instead he raised theoretical issues in a
de haut en bas
way. In his long letter to me of 22 March (see page 74
infra)
he based his attitude on the syllogism that the Summit was a meeting of sovereign governments, and that as the Commission was not a sovereign government it manifestly could not participate. This had the advantage of appealing to the British, who react to the word ‘sovereignty’ with all the predictability of one of Pavlov’s dogs, but the disadvantage (from his point of view) of repelling the others, including the Germans, because it struck at the heart of Community doctrine.
    Despite my partial Summit victory (but with the circumstances of the Downing Street meetings on 6–8 May hardly enabling me to feel that I was taking part in a triumphal parade), the summer of 1977 was for me a period of low morale. Apart from anything else the Belgian weather that year did not lift the spirits. One of the advantages of my large room at the top of the Berlaymont was that a great deal of sky was visible from its windows. One of the disadvantages of that Brussels summer was that the sky was hardly ever even partially blue. There were seventeen consecutive days in June during which the sun never appeared.
    At a more serious level I did not feel that I had so far found a theme around which I could hope to move Europe forward. My first European Council in Rome in March had been dominated by the peripheral issue of representation at the Summit. My second European Council in London in late June was perhaps the most negative of the