Talks Hope to Revive European Economic Area

Foreign ministers from the European Community and neighboring countries were set to meet today to try to break deadlocked negotiations on creating a vast consumer market of 380 million Europeans.

The ministers will be under enormous pressure to keep the talks, which opened last June, from collapsing and dashing hopes for a European Economic Area in 1993.

“There is still a pretty general determination to secure some sort of an agreement,” said a British official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

But he acknowledged that difficult issues remain to be solved before an accord can be signed between the 12 nations of the European Community and the six of the European Free Trade Assn.

The negotiations are designed to tear down the many trade barriers that bar the free movement of people, money, goods and services among the nations. If successful, a single market would be created from Iceland in the north to Greece in the south.

The project would extend the community’s plans to form its own single market in late 1992 to the EFTA countries of Austria, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland plus Liechtenstein.

The two trade blocs have agreed to initial an accord by June 24, but the failure of negotiators to make progress on some issues has raised doubts about the outcome.

The thorny disputes center on Spanish demands for access to the fishing waters off Iceland and Norway and for the EFTA nations to pay into a fund for the less-developed regions of the community.

Some officials expect the EFTA nations to urge the community to make a choice between fishing rights and money for a development fund as their price of admission to the trading bloc’s markets.

Despite the tough issues, the British official said it was unlikely that the talks would be called off at today’s daylong negotiating session. The foreign ministers, he said, “will be anxious to avoid a breakdown.”

The EC nations are Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.