THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC COMMUNITY IN THE PRESENT INTERNATIONAL SITUATION

At that very moment when the realization of the old pet project of the United States concerning the general liberalization of the trade among all Atlantic and Pacific industrial countries is likely to get more and more remote as a consequence of the crisis, the European Community has to demonstrate with facts that the opinions saying that the Community is merely a distortive factor in international trade are unfounded. The Community has to prove its capability of assuming a growing international responsibility and of solving its own structural problems, rising above the forms of monetary co-ordination that leads necessarily to penalizing and neglecting the developing regions of the very Community. The existence of a strict relationship between these two demands -which can be expressed, in the simplest terms, by the obvious consideration that each international subject can be the readier to confront the problems of others the stronger its own inner cohesion -means that the very challenge deriving from the present world crisis constitutes a decisive opportunity for the growth of the European Community.