ABSTRACT
Several issues dominated the period between the Hague Summit and that at Paris nearly 3 years later. First, from the Community’s point of view, was the triptych cluster – completion, deepening and enlargement. Moving outward, as it were, from this ‘central core’ conceived in Community terms, the second cluster concerned the issues raised by the international monetary upheavals both for the Community’s ambition to move toward an economic and monetary union and also directly for the ‘common price’ ambition of the CAP. The third cluster may be loosely labelled détente: although encapsulated in another ‘triptych’ – mutual and balanced force reductions (MBFR), the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and the beginnings of the process leading to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – it clearly contained a dimension of more direct relevance to the Community and the mutual suspicions felt within it, in the FRG’s Ostpolitik and the resultant eastern treaties. Fourth was the ‘defence’ cluster: the arguments in and outside France about its position; the arguments about a ‘nuclear component’ of western European security; and the rumblings over US troop reductions and western European responses.
