Toward a United Europe

In May 1948, young flax and green wheat grow on the plain of Waterloo. In the midst of the battle monuments, which include a cast-iron British lion glowering toward the French frontier, a humble seller of ice-cream cones, Jean Boewet, last week spoke his mind.

"The wheat grows taller here than anywhere else," said Jean Boewet. "All farmers know that human blood is good for the soil."

Jean Boewet thought human blood too costly a fertilizer. He went on: "I stand here and think about all the blood from so many corners of Europe which was spilled over this plain. Every month someone digs up a new skeleton. They can usually tell by the buttons of his uniform whether he was French, British, Prussian, Belgian or Dutch.

"Frontiers seem pretty foolish from where I stand. Skeletons don't know anything about frontiers."

Jean Boewet was a Belgian, but he was speaking as a European. As a European, he and many like him had for centuries wanted a Europe without frontiers. Though they included distinguished statesmen and intellectuals, their voices had always been drowned out.

Halfway House? Nevertheless, last week the urge toward European federation--or consolidation, or "Western Union," or whatever men might call the first steps toward a United States of Europe--was more vigorous than at any time since Napoleon's dream of unity-by-conquest crashed at Waterloo. Jean Boewet, looking out over Waterloo's rippling wheat, might well be skeptical. What could the statesmen show him besides the skeletons?

There was quite a lot:

P: Five nations--France, Britain and the Benelux countries (Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxemburg)--had signed at Brussels a 50-year mutual assistance pact, with emphasis on a military alliance. Last week the five defense ministers met in London, established a permanent five-power military committee, pondered common defense problems.

P: In Brussels, the finance ministers of the five met to thresh out the economic aspects of their alliance.

P:In London, delegates to a six-power conference (the Brussels-pact nations and the U.S.) discussed a government for Western Germany.

P: In Paris, where the 16 Marshall-Plan nations had created an Organization for European Economic Cooperation, a Committee on Methods worked on import needs, scheduled a report to OEEC's Council on May 10. German experts arrived to advise on meshing Western Germany into the European economy.

P: In Washington, the State Department studied legislation to authorize shipment of arms to the 16 Marshall-Plan nations. A House committee finished work on a selective service bill (which encouraged Europe more than the proposed 70-group air force).

What would Jean Boewet say to all that? He would probably just shrug. Experts with briefcases, speeches in committees! If he had a word for it, it would doubtless be le mot de Cambronne.* And even those committees, most of them, were hardly more than at Halfway House : nobody was surrendering any national sovereignty just yet. But there was more to come. At The Hague this week, Europeans who want a United States of Europe will gather to talk it over. No government has sponsored their meeting, but hundreds of British and French publicists and politicians, including Winston Churchill, will attend. Some of them have a precise objective: to rouse so much backing for a U.S.E. that, by fall, delegates can assemble to draft a Western European constitution.

The Heritage. What is this Europe that once more--this time with U.S. help and encouragement--gropes for unification? It is not actually a continent; it is a relatively small peninsula of vast Eurasia. It is marked off from Asia not by geography but by its heritage: Greek art and intellect, Roman law and government, the Christian religion. It is the heir to England's Magna Charta, to France's cathedrals (and France's revolution), Italy's Renaissance and Germany's Reformation, to Don Quixote, the Divina Commedia, the Nordic sagas. Lacking a fixed geographical border, it has included the Slavs and Magyars of Eastern Europe when they chose to accept the European heritage. It has never included more than the fringes of Russia.

"One Single Family." In 1922, Aristide Briand, greatest of France's 20th that it Century must "unite"-- internationalists, not only warned "to prosper" but "to live." This was only four years after the "war to end war." In 1871, when France was crumbling under Prussian force, the author of Les Miserables spoke up. Said Victor Hugo: "I will demolish my fortresses. You will demolish yours. My vengeance, it is fraternity. No more frontiers, the Rhine for all! Let us be the same Republic! Let us have the United States of Europe, let us have Continental federation, let us have European freedom!" But Hugo's voice, too, was lost in France's frightened nightmare of revanche.

The earliest aspirations toward European unity were mostly military. Rome unified those parts of Europe that it cared to lay hands on; but Europe as an entity did not exist. Charlemagne, a brief beacon in the Dark Ages, headed a "Roman Empire"--with the blessing of a new force for unity, the universal Church. Since then, most of the would-be unifiers have been secular--Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler.

Piecemeal Approach. "Western Union" was one of the commonest phrases for the unity which men were trying for in 1948. The phrase was Ernie Bevin's. He had floated it out on the air in January, without ever quite defining it. A fortnight ago at a private gathering, somebody asked Bevin just what he had meant. He replied passionately and well for 25 minutes, leaving his hearers under the double impression that he 1) believed in it with all his heart, and 2) did not know what "it" was. But one thing was clear enough: some kinds of unification were more pressing (and feasible) than others. Perhaps the problem could be approached on different levels, at different rates of speed.

Military coordination would come first, because the time was short and the compulsion (fear of aggressive Communism, sharpened by the coup in Czechoslovakia) was powerful. Said a Frenchman last week: "Stalin's greatest service to humanity is that he has driven Western Europe to rationalization." Some good observers thought that military cooperation, extending to virtual military fusion of The Five, would be a fact by year's end.

Defense or Liberation? If war came, would the U.S. fight in Western Europe? The Europeans are uncertain about that. Harry Truman's St. Patrick's Day speech to Congress, which implied a promise of military help, was not enough for them. Belgium's Premier Paul-Henri Spaak appeared shortly in Washington and asked for a definite commitment. It was not forthcoming. Pundit Walter Lippmann and others noted that the U.S. could hardly help going to war if Russia attacked Western Europe, since U.S. troops east of the Rhine would have to be pushed aside first. But Europeans wondered whether, in that case, the U.S. would pull its troops out or pour more in.

To Europeans, no imaginable military unification on their part made much sense unless it was really backed by the U.S. Europe wanted a promise of defense, not a promise of eventual rescue.

Fiat or Citroen? Close up, some of the economic obstacles, too, become brutally visible. Cabled TIME'S Paris Bureau Chief Andre Laguerre last week: "It is only when the nations really start to talk about abolishing economic frontiers that the Belgian brewers think about all the beer that the Dutch can make. Or the watchmakers of Grenoble begin to agonize at the thought of competing with the Swiss. Or the owners and workers of Italy's Fiat auto plants point trembling fingers at the Renault and Citroen production in France. Or the French masons and building unions become indignant at the prospect of cheaper Italian labor. These are human and understandable fears, which, spelled in human terms, mean loss of jobs and painful reorientation or conversion."

Party chauvinism among Britain's Socialists is another headache. They fear, and feel, that Europe is moving to the right, that Socialism is losing weight on the Continent. Many of them seem to want a Socialist United States of Europe or none at all. In Paris last fortnight, at a convention of European Socialists, former Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Daiton told why he and other Labor M.P.s who shared his views would boycott The Hague conference. Said Dalton: "As Socialists we must make sure that the success of the Socialist policy ... is not jeopardized by the premature creation of a political union . . . The federation of Europe will work only if it is led by Socialists." Cried the Laborite Daily Herald: "There is only one way to organize a world in difficulties, and that is our way."

Clement Attlee and Ernie Bevin dissociated themselves from this dog-in-the-manger attitude--but they had both been angry when France (which shed its Socialist Premier for a Popular Republican) devalued its currency and permitted free trade in the franc. For one reason, it violated British Socialists' notions of a properly managed currency, and it hurt them worse to discover that it did not seem to hurt France at all.

Rocks in the Stream. The Socialists were not the only Britons in a dilemma. Western Union, or economic federation, raised all-too-sudden questions about standards of living. Would the British be able (and entitled) to sustain a living scale at home which, although low by U.S. standards, is very high by general European measurements? And what of Britain's special ties with the Commonwealth and Empire?

These were some of the main perils on the course of European union and eventual federation. Yet, despite these, the Brussels 50-year pact had been signed; the defense ministers of The Five had met and reached understandings in London last week; the finance ministers were busy; The Sixteen were meeting in Paris on self-help under the Marshall Plan; Churchill and many others were going to The Hague.

The obstacles were there, but to Europeans like Jean Boewet at Waterloo they loomed smaller than the past and present anguish of divided Europe. Too many Europeans had come to feel that union would come because it had to be. TIME'S London Bureau Chief John Osborne, after a long look last week, cabled this opinion: "A strong current is running toward Western European association and integration. The negative factors working against it are immense, and they loom large at this stage of European affairs. But viewed against the European whole, they are rocks in the stream. They are not the stream."

To Jean Boewet it could fairly be said that the sum of the pluses & minuses was still an intention to unite.

* Merde, meaning excrement. At Waterloo, General Cambronne was said to have used this defiant vulgarism as a reply to a British demand for surrender.

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