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areas claiming to be developing".
He also indicated that,
if this formula was not adhered to, the U.K. would need
to further reconsider the extent to which it could grant
preferences. This, however, did not prove sufficient to
smoke out any of the other potential donor countries and we
left it at that for the time being.
4.
A propos the last sentence of paragraph 5 of my letter
of 22 September, we also agreed that it was not much use
continuing to hammer at di Martino at this stage and that we
should switch our attack to the representatives of some
of the Member States. Owen therefore gave a lunch to
Michele Guyot and Seduy from the French delegation and
Waldemar Mueller-Thuns (Germany)
we invited Wintermans as
well but unfortunately he could not come and there was no
other Dutchman of standing available.
5. In the course of the lunch we made it clear that we
were aware of the Commission's proposals for Hong Kong and
considered them to be not only disappointingly meagre but
highly discriminatory and a breach of the self-election
principle. I reiterated most of the points which appeared
in the paper translated by Tran as "Apercu sur Hong Kong" and
also the arguments in the paper I gave Tran enclosed with my
letter of 22 September. I then pointed out that the
Japanese now considered that Taiwan and South Korea were
more of a competitive danger for the future than was Hong
Kong. When were the Europeans going to wake up to this
situation? In any case the imposition of ceilings on
sensitive products and the opportunity of adding to the list
of these products provided very adequate safeguards for
Community industries. Finally, I said that the drawing-up
of the specially long "Hong Kong" sensitive product list
was a further discriminatory action.
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16.