Buying the Farm with the EEC

The trumpets recede, the drums beat very softly. The vision that was the European Economic Community is fading. When Britain entered the EEC in 1972, her prime minister, Edward Heath, organized a celebration, with bands, hired contraltos, and performances of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” which he called “Fanfare for Europe.” When, this June, Spain and Portugal were admitted as members, nobody wasted time over fanfares. The preoccupation was how to handle the surplus food production of two more members and how to pay for it.

It is the irony of the EEC, built originally by genuine idealists like Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman in the Forties and Fifties as an act of reconciliation and the first step toward creating a United States of Europe, that the preoccupation of everybody is now with one thing, farmers’ prices. The EEC’s surplus problem differs from the United States’ in that the ground rule is not, “Pay not to produce,” which is bad enough, but, “Pay for everything produced.” In consequence, middling men have grown rich and rich men richer while “the Community,” as its aging supporters like to call it, writhes in quiet ecstasies of financial necessity. Since Spain is the world’s largest producer of olive oil, the term that fascinates us all at present is “the olive oil lake.”

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Edward Pearce

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The trumpets recede, the drums beat very softly. The vision that was the European Economic Community is fading. When Britain entered the EEC in 1972, her prime minister, Edward Heath, organized a celebration, with bands, hired contraltos, and performances of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” which he called “Fanfare for Europe.” When, this June, Spain and Portugal were admitted as members, nobody wasted time over fanfares. The preoccupation was how to handle the surplus food production of two more members and how to pay for it.

It is the irony of the EEC, built originally by genuine idealists like Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman in the Forties and Fifties as an act of reconciliation and the first step toward creating a United States of Europe, that the preoccupation of everybody is now with one thing, farmers’ prices. The EEC’s surplus problem differs from the United States’ in that the ground rule is not, “Pay not to produce,” which is bad enough, but, “Pay for everything produced.” In consequence, middling men have grown rich and rich men richer while “the Community,” as its aging supporters like to call it, writhes in quiet ecstasies of financial necessity. Since Spain is the world’s largest producer of olive oil, the term that fascinates us all at present is “the olive oil lake.”