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

twelve that I attended. Schmidt and Giscard were firmly in control of Europe, but for the moment had no direction in which they wished to take it. They were rather hostile to Callaghan, whom they saw as semi-detached towards Europe, too attached to the unesteemed President Carter, and running an ineffective economy to boot. Towards Italy and the Little Five they were in a rather sullen phase. The Franco-German axis was working internally well, but, temporarily, it was doing no good for Europe.
    In these circumstances, which were also unfavourable to Commission initiatives, I cast around for ideas and pondered the advice which Jean Monnet had given, both publicly and privately. On at least two occasions his ideas had been spectacularly successful in gaining the initiative, and on the second occasion he had done it by rebounding from setback and switching from one blocked avenueto another which was more open. The successful inauguration of the Coal and Steel Community in 1951 had been followed by the juddering halt to the plan for a European Defence Community in 1954. By the following year the Messina Conference was meeting to plan the Economic Community and by 1957 the Treaty of Rome was signed. The lesson he taught me was always to advance along the line of least resistance provided that it led in approximately the right direction.
    It was against this background that, during July, I came firmly to the view that the best axis of advance for the Community in the circumstances of 1977 lay in re-proclaiming the goal of monetary union. This was a bold but not an original step. At least since the Werner Report of 1971 (named after the Prime Minister of Luxembourg) ‘economic and monetary union’ had been a proclaimed early objective of the Community. But no obvious progress towards it had been made, and in a curious way the Janus-like title had the effect of making rapid advance seem less likely. If economic convergence and monetary integration were never to move more than a short step ahead of each other, there was no place for three-league boots.
    I decided that there was a better chance of advance by qualitative leap than by cautious shuffle. And such a leap was desirable both to get the blood of the Community coursing again after the relative stagnation of the mid-1970s and on its own merits—because it could move Europe to a more favourable bank of the stream. The era of violent currency fluctuations, which had set in with the effective end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, had coincided with the worsening of Europe’s relative economic performance. In the 1960s, with fixed rates, the Europe of the Six had performed excellently, at least as well as America or Japan. In the mid-1970s, with oscillating exchange rates, it had performed dismally. Nor was this surprising. For the other two main economies the fluctuations had been external, affecting only trading relationships across oceans. For the Community they had been viscerally internal, with the French franc and the D-mark diverging from each other at least as much as either had done from the dollar or the yen.
    The key dates for the promulgation of the ideas were: 2 August, when I discussed them at a day-long meeting of my
cabinet,
held at my house at East Hendred; 17–18 September, when I discussedthem at a Commission strategy weekend held at an hotel in the Ardennes; 8–9 October, when I presented them to the regular six-monthly meeting of Foreign Ministers, at another hotel in the Belgian countryside; 27 October, when I launched them on the public in a Monnet Memorial Lecture to the European University Institute in Florence; 5–6 December, when I expounded them to the heads of government at a European Council in Brussels; and 8 December, when I chose Bonn as the most appropriate capital in which to try to refute such sceptical comment as had been forthcoming.
    I did not end the year with any lively expectation that early 1978 was going to