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An Opportunity or a Threat? 13the 1970 deadline allowed to pass by unobserved. 4 Such calls had been justified onthe grounds that a Community so at odds with itself and so chronically unable toreach agreement on any significant measures as the EEC of 1969, could not possiblyhope to complete its transitional phase on time. The summit communiqué, especiallywhen taken in conjunction with the flurry of Council of minister agreementsthat both preceded and immediately followed the Heads of Government’smeeting, appeared to demonstrate that the Commission had been right to disregardthe Cassandras and press on with the Treaty timetable. 5Equally important was the summit’s recognition that agreement would have tobe reached, prior to the year’s end, on the financial regulation establishing how theCommunity’s ever more costly agricultural policy would be paid for, creating thesystem of Community own-resources the Commission had long awaited and settingup a higher degree of European Parliamentary control over the EEC budgetary process.(Paragraph 5). This package of measures was not just the outcome of alengthy and delicate preparation process within the European Commission (althoughscrutiny of the Commission minutes for 1969 demonstrates that the draftingprocess had been both time-consuming and divisive); it was also a set of provisionsof immense intrinsic and symbolic value to Brussels, which, if agreed upon, wouldconsolidate even further the CAP – very much still the Commission’s flagship policyin 1969 -, would give the Commission a much greater degree of financial independencethan it had hitherto enjoyed and would at last bring some tangible rewardfor the Commission’s long-standing campaign to see some increase in the powersof the European Parliament. 6 And, perhaps still more important, the package was avirtual re-run of those proposals which, when submitted in March 1965, had precipitatedthe most serious crisis of the Community’s twelve year history. 7 Giventhat one of the key problems in 1965 had been that several member states – Germanyand Italy most obviously – had not been prepared to accept that the deadline foragreeing to the financial regulation was nearly as sacrosanct and as unbreakable asthe French maintained, the recognition by all of those present at the summit that4. The Commission decision to ignore calls for postponement is in ECHA, COM(69) PV 76, 2 e partie,30.04.1969. The institution’s earlier doubts are clear from COM(69) PV 72, 2 e partie,19-20.03.1969. The Commission was very open about its ambivalence on this issue in theTroisième Rapport Général sur l’activité des Communautés 1969, Commission, Brussels-Luxembourg,1970, pp.15-16.5. The most important of the Council agreements was that on CAP finance, reached on December 22,1969.6. Some indication of the internal Commission debate about this can be gained from ECHA, COM(69) PVs 76, 78, 83, 85 & 86.7. See e.g. M. SCHÖNWALD, Walter Hallstein and the “Empty Chair” Crisis 1965/6 and M.VAÏSSE, La politique européenne de la France en 1965: pourquoi “la chaise vide”? both in: W.LOTH (ed.), Crises and Compromises: The European Project 1963-1969, Nomos, Baden-Baden,2001, pp.157-172 & 193-214.