Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004290064
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: DUBLIN, IRELAND LENGTH: Medium
"I think the Community today firmly and decisively and categorically committed itself to political union," declared Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey, host of the 12-nation summit at the medieval Dublin Castle.
"I think the whole process is now inevitable," he said.
West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, backed by French President Francois Mitterrand, pressed for a speedy merger, arguing it went hand-in-hand with rapidly approaching German unification.
"Francois Mitterrand and I, and others, want to see the European Community strengthened," Kohl told a news conference. "That in plain words means abandoning certain national competencies."
But British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in characteristically blunt language, predicted the process of European union would founder as soon as the member states faced the prospect of having to cede national sovereignty and accept collective decision-making.
"There is quite a lot of rhetoric and far too little nitty-gritty," Thatcher told reporters at the end of the one-day summit. "Clearly they do not quite know what political union means. It astounds me."
The leaders agreed to instruct their foreign ministers to draw up a draft for political union by the next summit in June, with the aim of calling an inter-governmental conference on the subject in December.
It will parallel a conference already scheduled at which governments are to discuss a single currency and central banking system for Europe. A summit declaration said both conferences should finish their work before the end of 1992.
Again, Thatcher was skeptical. While she thought the leaders could come up with an agreed formula for political union by the end of 1992, she predicted the work on economic and monetary union would run into "much fiercer debate."
Asked why she endorsed the summit's call for political, economic and monetary union, she replied that she was confident it would all come to much less than her European partners imagined.
"I would have thought two years should be enough to know certainly on political union which way you should go. Economic and monetary union is a much, much more complicated thing and will give rise to much longer consideration and much fiercer debate," she said.
Thatcher was not alone in her stance toward political union. Community officials said several other countries including Denmark, Luxembourg and Portugal also had reservations.
German unification was what prompted Ireland, as current president of the Community, to set up a summit ahead of schedule. But a Franco-German call on April 15 for political union by 1992 shifted the focus of Saturday's gathering toward European merger. Kohl and Mitterrand believe union is urgently needed to preserve European stability in the face of upheaval in Eastern Europe.
Kohl assured his partners that Germany had no intention of "sticking its hand into the money bag of the European Community" to finance the huge cost of unifying Germany.
The summit, taking place in neutral Ireland, did not go into defense questions in detail, but Kohl repeatedly assured the other leaders that a united Germany wanted to remain in the 16-nation North Atlantic treaty Organization.
Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, in an interview with the Irish Times published Saturday, reiterated that a united Germany in NATO was unacceptable to Moscow. He called for a "militarily non-aligned" Germany and suggested it could belong to both NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.
Although Western officials have rejected the idea, Shevardnadze said it was "food for thought."
by CNB