Common Market Dialectic.

As it becomes successively relevant in one after another nation, the issue of joining the Common Market of the West arouses an identical pattern of response that cuts across standard political lines. The extreme Left, Communist and non-Communist, and the far Right are invariably anti-Common Market; the tendencies in between are internally divided.

The motives are naturally more varied than the two bare practical alternatives. The Communists oppose entry into the Common Market because they judge that its development strengthens the West in relation to the Communist empire. The far Right reaches the same practical conclusion from the very different premise of traditional nationalism. The non-Communist Left is opposed because it thinks that the Common Market reinforces capitalism, weakens local labor through fierce competition and labor mobility, and hardens the Western Cold War posture. The globalist left flank is against the Common Market as “an instrument of neo-colonialism,” which in the words of New Statesman, tends to “divide the world into a white bourgeoisie and a colored proletariat. Peace as well as prosperity [depends] on our ability to break down this international class system. The Common Market can only reinforce it.” Moderate globalists, however, are for the Market as “a step in the right direction.”