("Single issue" booklet for the XXXV Congress of The Radical Party - Budapest 22-26 april 1989)

The political leader who takes the most interest in Europe and the Community is without doubt Her Britannic Majesty's Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Of course, she sets about it in her own way, not missing a chance to stress her convictions to ward off any supra-national development of the Community, any strengthening of the powers of the European Parliament, or any step towards the greater political integration of the 12 Member States. As far as Margaret Thatcher is concerned, "Europe should never be allowed to come into being".

Isolated at the Council of Heads of State and Government on the proposal to set up a commission of experts to study the rapid realisation of monetary union and a single central European bank, she concurred reluctantly and put up with it. But she then immediately described the idea as "ridiculous", and added, that to found a European Bank it would first be necessary to dissolve the House of Commons! Were the two British representatives in the Brussels Executive Commission, (one Conservative and one Labour) too Europeanistic? She fired them, substituting two more docile followers of "Thatcherite" orthodoxy. Did the majority of the Euro-MP's support a solemn declaration for the convocation of the "General States of Europe" and the acceleration of the process of political unity? She responded by proposing a closer understanding between the governments and the institutions of an inter-governmental secretariat which would deprive the Community institutions of all their functions.

In short, General De Gaulle found a worthy heir in the Prime Minister of that United Kingdom whose request for entrance to the EEC he twice rejected scornfully, in the Sixties. No statistics better interpret or defend the policy of "a Europe of nations" than Margaret Thatcher's policy that is ready to allow only a huge European market, but not Community or supra-national laws, regulations or powers.

This policy may or may not be acceptable, but it has the merit of voicing clearly what it wants and pursuing its ends coherently. The Iron Lady is not altogether wrong to look down upon those European statistics which speak of European Unity but take great care not to advocate it wholeheartedly, and to oppose it with a policy which is just as clear and coherent.

The German, French, Dutch, Belgian, and Spanish Governments are all tumbling over one another to declare the primarily political need for a better integrated Europe, subsequently to betray these declarations of willingness by their actual behaviour. President Mitterrand has tended to become the symbol of what risks turning into the "Europeanism of words". During the presidential elections, he opposed Chirac's nationalism with his Europeanism , proclaiming "La France est notre Patrie, l'Europe est notre avenir". Now, his Prime Minister, barely installed, has requested the revision of the fiscal decisions which have just been made in accordance with the Single Act, adopted by all twelve governments.

A series of episodes similar to this contradictory policy could of course be cited as regards the governments of other countries: whether Kohl or Gonzales, the Government of Brussels or the Hague, or the Italian Government itself.

Not only is this wait-and-see-policy not counterbalanced, but it is favoured and encouraged by the great Christian Democrat, Socialist, and Liberal political forces that in the past, thanks to the conviction of a few great personalities,(Adenauer, De Gasperi, Schumann, Spaak, Monnet, Mansholt, La Malfa, Einaudi) made a decisive contribution to the start of the Community's integration process and to the Treaties of Rome. Today the international sections of the Christian and Socialist Parties have a bureaucratic management which stifles every great political ideal and design, every effort for European renewal. They are dragged along in the wake of the European Business Community, which is only interested in exploiting a great continental market without regulations, an authentic jungle of contemporary capitalism which the national States would be incapable of governing, just as they are incapable of governing all the great crises - transnational and supra-national- of our epoch.

They naturally continue to exist within the parties which head the leading international Christian Democrat, Socialist and Liberal traditions and the main trends which remain Federalist and Europeanist. This is one of the motives for the lip-service which the governments and party bureaucracies continue to pay to a policy of European Unity which they do nothing to pursue. Furthermore, these Europeanist and Federalist majorities are as suffocated by concrete governing policies, as the aspirations of European public opinion, which in every EEC country - even those which pass as the most anti-Community and anti-European - continue to show consistent majorities in favour of a reinforcement of the European institutions, in spite of being frustrated and suffocated. It is singular that in Great Britain itself, periodic surveys carried out by the "European Barometer" reveal that 64% of those questioned are in favour of a Community government in charge of security and defence, 62% favour similar measures as reg

ards preservation of the environment, 57% as regards development of research and technology, 52%, international relations, and 50%, investments destined for co-operation in the development of Third World countries. All this in Mrs. Thatcher's country!

The only voice for this public opinion is the European Parliament. This is a parliament elected directly by the people of the 12 Member States, but it lacks the power to make laws, decisions or to control.

This Parliament had finalised a project for a Treaty, at the end of its first term of office, which would have been a first, substantial step towards political union. This project was blocked by national governments. The European Parliament has now appealed to national parliaments to ask for the convocation of the General States of Europe, a great session of the European Parliament and of the 12 national parliaments. If this proposal is approved, exactly two centuries after the French Revolution, in the third term of the European Parliament, a constitutive phase of the new Europe could begin, with the direct election by the General States of a President of the European Council of Heads of State, the direct election for the first time of the President of the Executive Commission of the EEC, and by the entrusting of the constitutive powers of political unity to the European Parliament. But national governments, party bureaucrocacies and their international sections cannot be relied upon. On the contrary,

they are the source of the greatest resistance from former interests and powers. Only European public opinion, only emerging forces concerned with Europe and its integration, and only parliamentarians without bureaucratic and governmental mediation, can restore to Europe what it needs: its own unity. But these forces lack power and the means of expression which they must be given: by referendums calling the people in each of the 12 countries to decide, by the attribution of constitutive powers to the European Parliament, and by summoning the General States of Europe.