ABSTRACT
As the 1960s opened the future for European integration continued to look bright. Western Europe and the world were continuing to enjoy growing economic prosperity, though there were signs, as yet unheeded, that the rate of growth was slowing down. Politically, too, despite tensions over Berlin and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the furore over the U2 incident when an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, and the shock of the Soviet lead in space exploration and technology, tensions between the two superpowers had not returned to the glacial levels of a decade earlier. Indeed, the growing rift between the Soviet Union and China, which became public and final in 1963, heralded the end of world bipolarity, something which it was hoped would give Western Europe more room to consider its own development.
