ABSTRACT
The last two chapters have identified some pretty large tasks that lie ahead of the European Community, tasks which will demand definite decisions from it. Perhaps the most urgent of them is to sort out a collective position for the nine member states vis-á-vis the Americans on the wide range of questions connected with the reorganization of world trade and money to replace the Bretton Woods system. Yet the Community as it stands is an extremely inefficient instrument for decision-making. Indeed it may have been felt that there was a certain contradiction between the character of this organization as I have described it, growing out of a somewhat amorphous mass of complementary activities of a very varied kind with a central authority wholly dependent upon securing a consensus among its members, and on the other side the series of major decisions that I suggest are required of it. In fact, I take the view that the Community will be able to manage its relations with the rest of the world, with the Soviet bloc, Japan, the underdeveloped countries, as well as with the United States, only if it arrives at a more efficient method of making its decisions. That is the subject of this chapter.
