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By Root 3039 0

it had been under President Giscard and Chancellor Schmidt. President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl, in contrast to their predecessors, had little in common personally. Chancellor Kohl has the sure touch of a German provincial politician, which has always stood him well politically. Only recently — since German reunification in fact — has he struck out with a distinctive German foreign policy. For most of the 1980s, he seemed willing to subordinate German interests to French guidance, since this reassured Germany’s neighbours. Furthermore as a Christian Democrat, he is more of the social than of the economic Right and so sees the world from a perspective far closer to that of the Socialist President of France than would any British Conservative. President Mitterrand is cultivated and cosmopolitan, but somewhat aloof in French domestic politics. Like so many Frenchmen of his generation, he is driven by a fear of the consequences of German domination. But, whatever he said to me in private, his public line and his actions would for this very reason always be directed towards keeping the Germans bound into the European Community, where the French might be able to exercise greater influence over them. Consequently, I knew that the French attitude at the forthcoming Council would be to press hard for closer ‘European Union’, since this is the phrase which allows both nations to pursue their own national interests with respectability. These trends were, as I shall describe, to become still more important as time went by.

I had one overriding positive goal. This was to create a single Common Market. The Community’s internal tariffs on goods had been abolished by July 1968. At the same time it had become a customs union, which Britain had fully accepted in July 1977. What remained were the so-called ‘non-tariff’ barriers. These came in a great variety of more or less subtle forms. Different national standards on matters ranging from safety to health, regulations discriminating against foreign products, public procurement policies, delays and overelaborate procedures at customs posts — all these and many others served to frustrate the existence of a real Common Market. British businesses would be among those most likely to benefit from an opening-up of other countries’ markets. For example, we were more or less effectively excluded from the important German insurance and financial services markets where I knew — as I suspect did the Germans — that our people would excel. Transport was another important area where we were stopped from making the inroads we wanted. The price which we would have to pay to achieve a Single Market with all its economic benefits, though, was more majority voting in the Community. There was no escape from that, because otherwise particular countries would succumb to domestic pressures and prevent the opening-up of their markets. It also required more power for the European Commission: but that power must be used in order to create and maintain a Single Market, rather than to advance other objectives.

I knew that I would have to fight a strong rear-guard action against attempts to weaken Britain’s own control over areas of vital national interest to us. I was not going to have majority voting applying, for example, to taxation which the Commission would have liked us to ‘harmonize’. Competition between tax regimes is far more healthy than the imposition of a single system. It forces governments to hold down government spending and taxation, and to limit the burden of regulations; and when they fail to do these things, it allows companies and taxpayers to move elsewhere. In any event, the ability to set one’s own levels of taxation is a crucial element of national sovereignty. I was not prepared to give up our powers to control immigration (from non-EC countries), to combat terrorism, crime, and drug trafficking and to take measures on human, animal and plant health, keeping out carriers of dangerous diseases — all of which required proper frontier controls. There was, I felt, a perfectly practical argument