ABSTRACT
Joining the Community involved, in the main, acceptance of or adaptation to its existing policies. The most striking and complete of the Community's existing policies was of course its Common Agricultural Policy; and it was this policy from which almost all our main problems and difficulties derived. Thus the problems of sugar, New Zealand and Community finance, and indeed the problem of Fisheries also, were all created by the nature and consequences of the Community's Common Agricultural Policy. So were the problems of increased domestic food prices and of our own agricultural transition arrangements. So were most problems of traditional suppliers of our market, such as Australia. So were a large number of lesser but still important problems, such as that of animal health. In most other areas—economic and monetary, transport, social, regional, technical barriers to trade, energy, harmonisation of taxation, company law—the Community's common policies were fortunately still, at the time of our negotiations, relatively rudimentary, though beginning to develop fast. Free movement of labour was an advanced area, but it caused us few difficulties. Indeed apart from agriculture the only other major and fully developed common policy of the Community was its Common Commercial Policy. To this also we had to adapt ourselves, and a very large proportion indeed of our negotiations, from the very beginning to the very end, was concerned with this process.
