THE MEDITERRANEAN POLICY OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY FORMS an important part of its general external policy. Since this paper can, therefore, be considered as a case study, it is worth trying to define at the outset the concept of ‘external policy’. The Treaties did not delegate to the common European institutions any of the powers of foreign policy-making traditionally exercised by the nation state, but the granting of wholesale economic competences and the consequential obligation of evolving a common commercial policy ensured that the Community would come into direct contact with non-member states. Through its diplomatic relations with other countries, the Community has become an actor on the international stage, whilst the scope of its external relations has frequently exceeded that of purely commercial policy. It is both meaningful and useful to consider the Community as exercising an external policy – a kind of half-way house to full foreign policy.

1 SHALL ARGUE THAT TOLERANCE IS CENTRALLY A MORAL CONCEPT (although it is also used in a variety of non-moral ways). My differences with the two papers, with which I in many ways agree, derive from this observation. I shall argue that the definition they use must be extended to allow for claims to legitimacy characteristic of cases of tolerance, and I shall further argue (against Dr King) that tolerance characterizes social groups in a less formal sense than he allows, and (against Professor Crick) that tolerance is primarily a social rather than a political phenomenon.

DR KING AND PROFESSOR CRICK ARE BOTH MAINLY CONCERNED TO discuss the concept of tolerance as the deliberate acceptance of what is disapproved. They wish to reserve the use of the word ‘toleration’ for a variation upon this general idea, but their proposals are not quite the same. Dr King wants to use ‘toleration’ as ‘a label for those ideas, doctrines, ideologies or movements’ which have opposed specific types of intolerance. The dictionary label for this is ‘tolerationism’. Toleration is what the ideas, doctrines, etc. advocate; it is not a label for the ideas and doctrines themselves. Professor Crick, at the beginning of his paper, says that he too will use the word ‘toleration’ for ‘theories or doctrines’ which advocate a form of tolerance. But his actual usage later on suggests that he did not intend the word to mean the theories or doctrines; rather that he proposed to say a doctrine was a doctrine of toleration if it advocated a certain kind of tolerance. His distinction between ‘tolerance’ and ‘toleration’ is intended to restrict ‘toleration’ to tolerance in general, tolerance of wide classes of action, and not to use it for tolerance of one specific type, e.g. tolerance of religious worship (which is how it is in fact used in the Act of Toleration and in Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration).

THE NOW FAIRLY EXTENSIVE LITERATURE ON THE EUROPEAN Communities, much of which sets out to analyse ‘the European decision-making process’, has tended to concentrate on how this process looks from the perspective of the Community itself and of its institutions. National governments and actors in the six political systems have been discussed primarily in so far as they are participants in the Community system. However, if we are to reach an understanding of the impact of the Communities on national processes, then some attention must be given to how the Communities are viewed from the national capitals, to the extent to which Community business impinges on the governmental systems in the member states and to the importance given to European matters among the competing issues which vie for prominence in national politics. Any analysis of the politics of European integration which looks from the Communities outwards makes the assumption that European issues are the only ones that count; but if those same issues are examined from a national perspective, we need to ask whether they represent simply one bundle of issues among many, or whether they have come to add a new dimension to the full range of governmental business and political debate. In other words, has the advent of the European Communities changed the political configuration of the six national systems, and, if so, marginally or fundamentally?

ONE HIGHLY SIGNIFICANT ASPECT OF THE PROCESS OF INTEGRATION in the European Community is the transfer of social sectors from the national political systems to the Community system. One such sector is agriculture. This article will focus on a limited, but significant part of the activities performed by the Community institutions: the collective decision-making process with reference to the common agricultural policy.

I HOPE I SHALL OFFEND NEITHER PROFESSOR CRICK NOR DR KING if I do not discuss their papers in detail. With almost all they say I have no disagreement; and to what they say I think I have little to add. The first thing I wish to do is pursue a point which Crick makes early on in his paper and then drops. Crick says there that one aspect of toleration is ‘putting up with’ whatever it might be; to say that the weather, one's colleagues, or last night's party were ‘tolerable’ amounts to saying that one could put up with them. Of course, as he and King agree, to call any of these tolerable certainly implies that we did not actually like or enjoy it or them; whatever we regard with favour we do not simply tolerate. Crick thinks there is not much to be done with the notion of ‘putting up with’ something; but I shall try to show that we can get further than he thinks.