Report on an Uneasy Common Market

From the beginning I have made no secret of my conviction that the Common Market was a very risky experiment, because the possible disadvantages threatened to outweigh the expected advantages. Over against political enthusiasm a word of economic reasoning had to be said to demonstrate that we were dealing with the creation of an economic bloc whose consequences might be unforeseeable.

We opponents of the Common Market had that to say, and much more. We were especially concerned with the prospect that agriculture, too, was to be drawn into this unitary scheme. How could one succeed in amalgamating the various national systems of protectionism and crop control into an international system without creating a perfect maze of unforeseeable problems such as, for example, the present pernicious “chicken war”? How could one lower the trade barriers among the Common Market countries without raising the trade barriers against the outside?

WR

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Wilhelm Roepke

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From the beginning I have made no secret of my conviction that the Common Market was a very risky experiment, because the possible disadvantages threatened to outweigh the expected advantages. Over against political enthusiasm a word of economic reasoning had to be said to demonstrate that we were dealing with the creation of an economic bloc whose consequences might be unforeseeable.

We opponents of the Common Market had that to say, and much more. We were especially concerned with the prospect that agriculture, too, was to be drawn into this unitary scheme. How could one succeed in amalgamating the various national systems of protectionism and crop control into an international system without creating a perfect maze of unforeseeable problems such as, for example, the present pernicious “chicken war”? How could one lower the trade barriers among the Common Market countries without raising the trade barriers against the outside?