AN UNCOMMON VIEW OF THE BIRTH OF AN UNCOMMON MARKET

A
lfred Mendes looks at the historical origins of the European Union

Any research into the subject of the Common Market is immediately confronted by a veil of confusing acronyms: E-this, E-that and E-the other. True, the Common Market - or the EEC, or the EC, or the EU (it transpires that they are all the same at different stages of evolution) - must be one of the most complex, if not the most complex bureaucracy ever created. That complexity, and the constant political bickering over its very raison d'etre has tended to distract public attention away from a proper understanding of it - and to achieve thisunderstanding, it is essential to recapitulate the events leading to its birth - viewed from within the context of the political/economic situation of the post-World War 2 period.

The political situation was one of ideological confrontation between the West and the USSR: between Capitalism and Marxism (the question as to whether the USSR was a Marxist state or not is irrelevant here inasmuch as the West - and particularly America - perceived it to be such). Again, the term 'confrontation' may at first seem to be an overstatement as the West and the USSR had just emerged from a war in which they had been allies, but it must be recalled that this alliance had been one of circumstance and convenience, as events in the immediate pre-war period clearly demonstrated. The French and the British had favoured a policy of appeasement towards Germany, whereas the USSR - well aware that it was Hitler's target (see 'Mein Kampf') - favoured a policy of c onfrontation backed by an alliance with France and Britain. As disclosed in the Alger Hiss trial in 1949, the US Ambassador to France, William Bullitt, in January 1938, had reported to his State Department that the French Foreign Minister, Yvon Delbos, had told him that the Soviet Ambassador had just informed him (Delbos) that "..if France should begin serious negotiations with Germany, the Soviet Union would come to terms with Germany at once". That France and Britain did not heed that warning until Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia when by then it was too late - can only be explained by the fact that their policy of appeasement was governed by the anti-communist bias they shared with Germany. They were certainly in no position to claim that they had not been warned when, in August 1939, the Soviet-German non-aggression Pact was signed! It is necessary at this point to recall that the intellectual dichotomy between Capitalism and Marxism of the late nineteenth century had become political confrontation with the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. This invalidates the popularised view of the Cold War as being a post-World War 2 phenomenon.

Another popular misconception is that at the end of the war it was the USSR that had reneged on decisions reached by the Allies (The Big Three) at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 - particularly over the question of the future of Poland. Indeed, this was precisely the reason given, more than once, by the West for the subsequent policy of 'going their own way' - one of the results being the Common Market. It therefore calls for a closer look. The American Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius (FDR's right-hand man at Yalta) later records: "The Soviet Union made more concessions to the United States and Great Britain than were made to the Soviet Union.". Again, on the 27th of February 1945 Churchill, in his speech to the House of Commons, stated: "I know of no government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite, more solidly that the Soviet Government.". Given this background, it is extraordinary that on the 23rd of April 1945, a fortnight after Roosevelt's death and while Molotov was in America en route to the Founding Conference of the UN, Truman summoned him (Molotov) to the White House and berated him (in Missouri mule-driver's language, to quote the columnist Drew Pearson), accusing the Soviets of failing to adhere to the Yalta agreements, agreements that had been reached only two months previously and the war was still being fought! (It is not difficult to imagine what Truman's response to the Soviets would have been had the roles of the protagonists in this situation been reversed: mule-driver's language would most certainly have been used!). Furthermore, the following month, immediately after VE Day, Truman cancelled Lend-Lease aid to the USSR, a country that had pledged at Yalta to declare war against Japan 3 months after Germany's defeat - namely, on the 8th of August...on the 6th of August the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, without previously notifying their Soviet ally of their intention so to do.

So why this public switch in America's attitude? It must be appreciated that the US was then (as it still is) a corporate state. In his first two years in office, of the 125 administrative posts appointed by Truman: 49 were bankers, industrialists and financiers; 17 were corporate lawyers; and 31 were high-ranking military officers. True, he had inherited a similarly oriented administration from Roosevelt, but the war had been profitable enough to sedate the latter's corporate cohorts - and Roosevelt an excellent diplomat. Now, the European war was over, Roosevelt dead, and a successfully tested atomic bomb to hand. And when it is recalled that in July 1941, Truman, on learning of the German invasion of the USSR, had stated that "if we see that Germany is winning the war we ought to help Russia; and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and in that way let them kill as many as possible.' (as reported in the New York Times on the 24th of July 1941), then the Americans' actions noted above are comprehensible. There would certainly be no more co-operation with the Red Enemy!

Talk of international unity was relegated to the posturing of diplomats and officials within the halls of the UN - much as it had been under the League of Nations between the wars. European integration was the call heard more frequently in the world outside. This call was by no means a new one, but before 1939 it had been of an amorphous nature with religious (mainly Catholic) overtones - hardly surprising given the Vatican's centuries-long dominion over Europe under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire which, in an historical sense, had not long ended. The Pan-European Union (Pan Europa) formed by the Habsburgian Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 was such a one. During the war there had been other instances of movement towards European unity or federation which, because of their common aim, contributed something towards the eventual birth of the Common Market - even though it may not have been of a direct nature. After all, there would be the inevitable intermingling of ideas of those participating within the various groups formed. The call by Andre Malraux and Georges Bidault in 1941 for a post-war federal style European New Deal - excluding the Soviet Union - was such a one. There were others, but there was no possibility of fulfilment before war's end, anyway.

At war's end, the West European nations emerged economically bankrupted; the USSR with its infrastructure decimated; and America with three-quarters of the world's invested capital and two-thirds of the world's industrial capacity (thanks in no small measure to the war). On the one hand, a group of nations in desperate need of reconstruction - and on the other hand a rich nation with the capacity to satisfy that need. On the face of it, the problem so posited carried within it a built-in solution - but there was one main obstacle to such a resolution: namely, one of those nations was the USSR. The problem here for corporate America was that, although it had no intention of acceding to the Soviet's request for assistance, both countries were still part of the Big Three Alliance. Indeed, at the Potsdam Conference in mid-July 1945, the USSR had acceded to the Americans’ call for the establishment of a Council of Ministers which was duly set up, and although relations between West and East became more strained with each subsequent Foreign ministerial meeting, peace treaties with the ex-Nazi satellite nations (Italy, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary and Romania) were signed by the Big-Three in October 1946

To appreciate more fully the events that followed, it must be recalled that Britain at the end of the war had, by military intervention, supplanted the popular left-wing Greek movement EAM with the right-wing dictatorship of Tsaldaris - and had thereby found itself enmeshed in a civil war it could no longer afford to finance. On the 24th of February 1947 it notified America of its intention to withdraw from Greece, and Truman immediately told Clark Clifford, a corporate lawyer (later to be special attorney to Du Pont, GE, Standard Oil, TWA and RCA), to draft what was subsequently known as the Truman Doctrine Speech.

The next Foreign ministers meeting in Moscow, beginning on the 10th of March 1947, turned out to be a critical one in East-West relations. In the afterglow of the Satellite Peace Treaties signed some 5 months previously, the negotiators and staff met in Moscow in a hopeful mood to discuss such questions as German unity, disarmament, and an end to the Soviet occupation of Austria. As eye-witness correspondent Howard K. Smith wrote: "Molotov proved uncommonly conciliatory in the opening discussion on rules and procedure and yielded his own suggestions first to those of Marshall, then to those of Bevin. The Russians had undoubtedly assumed that all was well and that things would go according to prescription. Stalin even told Secretary of State Marshall that ..'these were only the first skirmishes and brushes of reconnaisance forces' ..Then, right on top of the Conference - two days after it had opened - burst the bombshell of the Truman doctrine speech in which President Truman had said that “nearly every nation must choose between the two worlds. It sounded like an ultimatum to the rest of Europe to be with us or be counted against us. That wiped the smiles off the Russians’ faces. " That had, indeed, been Truman's message to his Congress - and the USSR. Now the main obstacle to the flow of American capital investment into Europe had been removed and was now to be activated by means of the Marshall Plan as proclaimed by Marshall at Harvard University 3 months later on the 5th of June 1947. This speech called upon the Europeans to draw up plans for economic recovery which the Americans would then finance. He had also stated in his speech that: "our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos". But in saying this had he forgotten that two months before, he had stated, as later revealed by Walt Rostrow (Special Assistant to the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Europe from 1947 to 1949), he had told Secretary Marshall to instruct the Policy Planning Staff to prepare a general plan for American aid in the reconstruction of Western Europe. No mention here of Eastern Europe or the USSR. But in any case, had not the United Nations been created with just such a scenario in mind? So why by-pass it? Again,Walt Rostow: "..there was even in being an organisation dedicated to European economic co-operation - the Economic Commission for Europe - the ECE was, however, an organisation of the United Nations, with Soviet and Eastern European countries as members. Its very existence posed a basic question. Should an effort be made to embrace all of Europe in a new enterprise of reconstruction, or should the lesson of the Moscow Conference be read as indicating that the only realistic alternative was for the West to accept the split and to strengthen the area outside Stalin's grip? ".(Remember, Rostow had served in the ECE). This decision to by-pass the UN aroused the suspicions of the Soviets, suspicions that were confirmed at the Paris Conference of the Committee of European Economic Co-operation (CEEC) called in July 1947 to discuss the administration of Marshall aid. Molotov walked out after two days attendance.

A closer look at Marshall's planning staff is revealing. The committee charged with formulating the Marshall Plan was as follows: Chairman - Henry Stimson (ex-Sec. of State & war; Wall st. lawyer; Dir. of Council on Foreign Relations); Exec. C'tte. Chm. - Robert Patterson (ex-Sec. of War); Exec. C'tte. - Dean Acheson (Under Sec. of State; corporate lawyer of Covington & Burling); WinthropAldrich (Banker & uncle of Rockefeller bros.); James Carey (CIO Sec. Treasurer);Herbert Lehman (Lehman Bros. Investment); Philip Reed (GE Exec.); Herbert Bayard Swope (ex-Editor & brother of ex-Pres. GE); David Dubinsky (Labor Leader). The composition of this planning group confirms what has already been referred to: that the American executive administration had, since the mid-thirties been heavily staffed with corporate executives - men who, because they were unaccountable to the democratic processes of the country, could more readily act in their own corporate interests. Interests, moreover, that were co-ordinated to a high degree by inter-linked membership of numerous advisory councils,Foundations and other forms of quangoes whose common affinity was obeisance to Profit.

Here, two points need to be emphasised: the importance that America attached to the Marshall Plan, and the fact that the Common Market could not have evolved into the form it subsequently adopted without the Marshall aid. The US Congress duly authorised this aid by passing the Economic Co-operation Act (ECA) on the 3rd of April 1948, and Paul Hoffman (Studebaker, Ford Foundation & co-founder of the Committee for Economic Development in 1942) was subsequently appointed Administrator of the aid program - and since ECA approval was required before such aid funds could be supplied, this allowed US planners to influence directly the direction of economic change in Europe.

Meanwhile, as a result of the above-mentioned CEEC Conference in Paris, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) was formed in order to determine the allocation of Marshall aid. The American desire was for a more integrated organisation than the Europeans were prepared to accept. As Paul Hoffman put it: "The substance of such integration would be the formation of a large single market within such quantitative restrictions of movement of goods, monetary barriers to the flow of payments and eventually all tariffs are permanently swept away". This was a scenario within which corporate America could move its capital at will, and, as such, a statement reflecting blatant self interest. Indeed, this message was further driven home by another ECA official, Richard Bissel, at whose instigation the OEEC set up the European Payments Union (EPU) in September 1950 in order to facilitate intra-European trade, and provide a basis for European integration and monetary union. (One interesting point here: good economist he may have been, in1950, Bissel was no military strategist when, in 1961, as CIA Deputy Director of Planning, he oversaw the Cuban Bay-of-Pigs fiasco!). The Europeans, some of whom were still in the time-warp of Empire, and reluctant to relinquish any of their individual sovereign rights, opposed further integration. This not only meant that the aid became a scramble for dollars, but, more crucially , posed an obstacle to the American's aim as laid out by Hoffman. This called for a change of mind on the part of the dissedent Europeans, which would eventually be accomplished primarily through economic necessity - but also by alittle-help-from-my-friends. This help would, initially, be of a non-governmental nature, given the already noted opposition of governments whose hands, in any case, would be full coping with their day-to-day, short-term problems. Use would be made of the numerous lobbying groups formed in the aftermath of the war as a result of earlier calls for European Union.

The earliest of these groups, and one which was to play a significant role in alleviating any discord among the Europeans, was the Independent League for Economic Co-operation (ILEC) - still in existence today, but now known as the European League for Economic Co-operation). This lobby group, ostensibly motivated by its desire to find an economic solution to Europe’s problems - as implied by its title - was responsible for the subsequent establishment in May1949 of the Council of Europe (COE) which, contrary to the aspirations of those who had laid the foundation for it at the Congress for Europe the previous year,ended up as a purely consultative body with no economic mandate, due primarily to the reluctance of Britain and the Scandinavians (as noted above). Be that as it may, the COE was established in Strasbourg with all the key Europeans onboard - and is still in existence today. Indeed, it is often referred to as the Mother of the Common Market - with some justification: was not its flag adopted by the EC in May 1986? To gain a clearer understanding of the above, it is necessary to take a closer look at the means by which the ILEC evolved into the COE. ILEC was the brainchild of a 60-year-old Pole, Dr. Josef Hieronym Retinger, a man with a history intriguing enough to warrant a biography. Suffice it to say here that,as a result of comprehensive political dealings in both Europe and the New World stretching from pre-WW 1 to post-WW 2, he had become the archetypal broker - an eminence grise. In Sir Edward Beddington-Behren's words: "I remember in the UShis picking up the telephone and immediately making an appointment with the President ; and in Europe he had complete entry in every political circle as a kind of right". Having set up the ILEC with the assistance of Paul Van Zeeland (Belgian Prime Minister-to be), Retinger went to America at the end of 1946 seeking financial backing for the group. In his own words ( as reported by his biographer and Personal Assistant, John Pomian): "At that time I found in America a unanimous approval for our ideas among financiers, businessmen and politicians: Mr. Leffingwell, senior partner in J.P.Morgan's; Nelson and David Rockefeller; Alfred Sloan, Director of the Dodge Motor Company...(et al)...and especially my old friend Adolph Berle Jnr. were all in favour, and Berle agreed to lead the American section". (Berle was a prestigious corporate lawyer).In March 1947, ILEC was established at a meeting in New York, with Van Zeeland as President of the Central Council and Retinger as General Secretary. In December 1947, as a result of Retinger's approaches to a number of other groups of similar aims of European unity - either of a co-operative or federalist nature (Churchill's UEM; Coudenhove-Kalergi's IPU; the Catholic NEI; the CFEU and the UEF), the International Committee of the Movement for European Unity (ICMEU) was formed, with Duncan-Sandys (Churchill's son-in-law) as Chairman and Retinger as Honorary Secretary. This Committee, more commonly known as the European Movement (EM), convened the Congress of Europe in the Hague in May 1948 which, in turn, established the Council of Europe (COE) by the Treaty of Westminster in May 1949 (as already noted).

In July 1948 Retinger and Duncan-Sandys went to America to seek financial backing for the EM, accompanied by Winston Churchill and Paul Henri Spaak, the Belgian Prime Minister. This resulted in the launching of the American Committee on a United Europe (ACUE) at a luncheon in honour of Churchill on the 29th of March 1949. The significance of ACUE lay in its stewardship: Chairman: William Donovan (ex-Director of the OSS); Vice-Chairman: Allen Dulles (then Deputy Director of the CIA); Secretary: George Franklin (Director of the Council for Foreign Relations); and Executive Director: Thomas Braden (Head of CIA Division on International Organisations). Funds for the EM (by now transformed into the COE) were soon flowing into the COE's headquarters in Brussels - most of it from State Department's secret funds. ACUE was also the channel subsequently used to fund the Youth Campaign for European Unity, formed in1950 by Retinger and Duncan-Sandys as a result of a deal they had made with John McCloy US High Commissioner for Germany (later Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank), and Robert Murphy, US Ambassador in Brussels (later consultant on Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board). Between 1951 and 1959 this group received approximately 1.5 million pounds.

Perhaps the most intriguing of Retinger's contacts during this period was Dr. Hermann Josef Abs, who then set up the German section of ILEC. Abs, as Director of the Deutsche Bank during the Third Reich, had been responsible for laying out the economic base the Nazis would adopt on attaining hegemony over Europe and the USSR. Arrested for war crimes in January 1946, he was released three months later on the intervention of the British - who then appointed him economic advisor in their zone! More pertinently, in March 1948 Abs was appointed Deputy Head of the Loan Corporation as well as President of Bank Deutsche Lander, and, as such, was in charge of the allocation of Marshall aid to German industry. Another fascinating link was that, among the 40-or-so Directorships Abs had held, one was in the I.G.Farben conglomerate which had been a client of the corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell - whose senior partners were the Dulles brothers.

The end result of the foregoing was the Council of Europe which, although it had failed to create an economic climate in Europe amenable to the free flow of American capital, was nonetheless the first post-war organisation of European unity, and, as such, was of political importance. From now on, in order to create the necessary economic climate, the dissident British and Scandavians would be by-passed. This was accomplished by the formation of the European Coal & Steel Community (ECSC) in April 1951, the result of the French Prime Minister Paul Schuman's call the previous year for the placing of French and German coal & steel production under the control of a supranational body, by which means the French hoped to gain some control over the future of Germany, and thus, at the very least, hinder the American's plan to re-arm the latter. Schuman, born in the Alsace region, served in the German army in WW 1 and subsequently adopted French nationality. He later joined the right-wing group Energie of professor Louis de Fur - who was later to serve under Petain during the Vichy regime. In July 1967 the six ECSC members, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and Holland, formed two more analagous bodies: the European Economic Community (EEC - or Common Market), and the European Atomic Energy Committee (EURATOM). Thus, in spite of the non-membership of Britain and the Scandinavians, the Common Market was born - later to evolve into the European Community (EC) in 1986, and finally into the European Union (EU) in 1992.

The ECSC (or Schuman Plan), which entailed a close Franco-German relationship, exemplified on the one hand the important role played by the coal and steel industries in their respective countries, and on the other hand the role played by post-war American aid in the resurrection of those industries. But it must be kept in mind that aid was being distributed as early as 1946, primarily in the form of grants, and prior to the distribution of Marshall aid. The popular conception of this aid is that it was primarily for the reconstruction of West European democracies ravaged by war. This was not so. From 1946 to 1951 five right-wing dictatorships (Greece, Turkey, South Vietnam, South Korea and Formosa), with a total population of 75 million, received more American economic aid in grants than Western Europe, which had a larger population. Again, the five dictatorships received 7.9 billion dollars in military aid (this excludes such aid to South Korea during the war there) - whereas Europe received 7.5 billion dollars in military aid, of which 4 billion dollars went to France (2.5 billion dollars of which was for her war in Indochina), and 0.5 billion dollars for fascist Spain (which had received 1 billion dollars in economic aid). From 1946 to 1953 West Germany received 3.6 billion dollars in economic aid. It is thus hardly surprising that it was debtor France who formulated the idea leading to the ECSC (an organisation whose federalist structure conformed to America's wishes), and that fellow-debtor Germany was a willing accomplice.

The aid so allocated reflected corporate America's political orientation in a nutshell, and a further example was the warning given by Secretary of State Marshall - aimed primarily at France and Italy - that no aid would be forthcoming if communists gained any positions of political power. Result: the Italian communists lost the general election in 1948 (which they were expected to win); and French communists were removed from cabinet posts they already held. Then, one year after the implementation of the Marshall Plan, NATO was created, ostensibly to act as a shield against Soviet expansion westwards. However, the Americans were well aware that the Soviets posed no serious military threat in the post-war period: had they not for the last three years of the war been supplying the USSR, under the Lend-Lease program, with military equipment that the latter lacked? Moreover it is inconceivable that they were not aware of the devastation caused by the strategy of Total War waged by the German army on Soviet soil. A cursory glance at the statistics of thatdevastation would have been enough to convince them of the improbability of any military aggression from that quarter. The passage of time has proved that NATO's purpose was primarily political, not military. Had it been the latter, it would have been made redundant on the collapse of the USSR. Its political role assumed two functions: primarily to ensure the hegemony of American capital (or American Leadership as propounded by all post-war US Presidents - and most recently by Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in her address to the House); and secondarily, to satisfy the more immediate need (at the time of its foundation) for an organisation that would embrace all the key European nations, including Germany and the then dissident Britain.

The Truman doctrine of containment of the USSR having struck a sympathetic chord among some European governments, and Marshall Aid having bolstered that sympathy with the added sense of indebtedness, NATO was the logical outcome. As noted above, this would be an ostensibly military organisation with a command s tructure fenced with statutory clauses which ensured American control - to say nothing of the financial largesse that would accompany it - but the American's plan to induct Germany into the organisation and thereby re-arm her met with stiff European resistance. And the setting up by the French of the ECSC and its supplementary European Defence Community (EDC) did not help matters. Enter Josef Hieronym Retinger - once again. As a result of his approaches in the early 1950's to the most influential West European leaders, he and Prince Bernhard of Holland went to Washington in 1953 to lobby support from Walter Bedell Smith (Dir. of the CIA) and Charles Jackson (National Security Advisor to Eisenhower) for a group that would serve as a forum for lobbying at the highest political level in order to ensure that consensual policies would be adopted by the members of NATO in particular. A US committee was formed: John Coleman (Chm. Burroughs Corp.), David Rockefeller (Chase Manhattan Bank), Dean Rusk (Rockefeller Foundation), Henry Heinz II, Joseph Johnson (Pres. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), and George Ball (Corporate lawyer & partner of Lehman Bros.). This committee, in turn, resulted in the formation of the Bilberberg Group in May 1954. Since that date, all doors to the seats of power in the West have been accessible to the Bilderberg. According to George McGhee (ex-US Ambassador to West Germany), who attended all Bilderberg meetings from 1955 to 1967: " The Treaty of Rome which brought the Common Market into being, as nutrured at the Bilderberg meetings.".. Germany Joined NATO on the 6th of May 1955. The movement of American capital could now be facilitated.

This calls for the posing of a very common-sense question: who benefited most from the Common Market?. The answer to this question was spelt out clearly by the French newspaper owner Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in his well-researched book ‘The American Challenge of 1967’. (In fairness, it should be noted here that the message of the book was the somewhat naive one that Europe should copy the American way of doing-business!). The following are taken from that book, and, unless otherwise noted, are as of the year 1967:

[1] America had invested 14 billion dollars in fixed assets in Europe - working capital being as   much again (US Dept. of Commerce).

(2) From 1958 to 1957 " American corporations have invested 10 billion dollars in Western   Europe - more than a third of their total investment abroad. Of the 6000 new businesses   started overseas by Americans during that period, half were in Europe."

(3) " The US Department of Commerce finds it 'striking' that from1965 to 1966 American   investment  rose by 17 percent in the US, 21 percent in the rest of the world, and 40    percent in  the Common Market".

(4) By1963 "American firms in France controlled 40 percent of the petroleum market, 65    percent of films & photographic paper, 65 percent of farm machinery, 65 percent of    telecommunications equipment, and 45 percent of synthetic rubber. (quoted from Foreign   Investment in France by Giles Bertain)."

(5) "As early as 1965 the Commerzbank estimated American-controlled investments in    Germany at 2 billion dollars, while the gross capital of all firms quoted on the German   stock exchange was only 3.5 billion dollars".

(6) "More than half of the US subsidiaries in Europe belong to the 340 American firms  appearing on the list of the 500 largest corporations in the world. Three American giants   are responsible for 40 percent of direct American investment in France, Germany and Britain.

(7) "During 1965 the Americans invested 4 billion dollars in Europe. This is where the money came from:

1. Loans from the European capital market (Euro-issues) and direct credits from European    countries - 55 percent.

2. Subsidies from European governments and internal financing from local earnings - 35    percent.

3.Direct dollar transfers from the United States - 10 percent. Thus, nine-tenths of American investment in Europe is financed from European sources. In other words, we pay them to buy us".

(8) "In the words of M. Boyer de la Giroday of the Brussels Commission: 'American investment in Europe has its own special nature. When we set up the European Economic committee (EEC) we did something useful, but simple and still incomplete. So far its    major result has been to speed our economic prosperity by creating the most favourable   climate for a growing invasion of American industries. They are the only ones to have acted on the logic of the Common Market'".

Implicit in the truism that the child is the product of its parents is theequally valid truism that in order to know the child well, one must know its parents. In the case of the Common Market, in view of the incestuous nature of its parentage (to say nothing of the strange midwives attending its birth), it is hardly surprising that it turned out to be a most uncommon market.

Alfred Mendes was born in Trinidad in 1920 and is of Portuguese extraction. His varied career included  wartime service both at sea and in the British Army and work as a coal miner and oil driller in several parts of the world. He has been retired for twenty years. If you want to read more on this and related subjects, he recommends the following:

C.William Domhoff : Higher Circles (Vintage Books 1971)

Robert Eringer: The Global Manipulators (Pentacle Books 1980)

David Horowitz: The Free World Colossus (Hill & Wang 1965)

John Pomian: Joseph Retinger (Sussex University Press 1972)

W.W.Rostow: The US in the World Arena (Harper 1960)

J-J Servan-Schreiber: The American Challenge (Hamish Hamilton 1968)

John Chabot Smith: Alger Hiss (Penguin Books 1977)

H.K.Smith: The State of Europe (Knopf 1949)

Alexander Werth: Russia at War (Pan Books 1965)

Pasymowski & Gilbert: Bilderberg, Rockefeller & the CIA (Temple Free Press 1968)

Statistical Abstract of the US 1996 - 116th Edition (The National Data Book)