Under the Rainbow

The flags of 14 nations made a fluttering rainbow above the portals of the House of Europe in Strasbourg. Inside, before a semicircle of 200 desks, Belgium's portly Paul-Henri Spaak, president of the Consultative Assembly, spoke heatedly. His pugnacious lower lip was thrust forward, his left hand plunged into a pocket, accenting his resemblance to Winston Churchill.

". . . For five years [we] have lived in the fear of the Russians and from the charity of the Americans," he said. "Before such a spectacle we are listless, as if history would wait, as if we had time--decades and decades--to transform our mentality, to suppress our customs barriers, to abandon our national egotisms ... I have been astounded by the amount of talent that has been expended in this Assembly to explain that something could not be done." In particular he attacked Winston Churchill, who more than any man had set the idea of federation to rolling, and now--in so far as Britain's participation was concerned--seemed to be doing his best to stop it.

Spaak glared at the assembled statesmen. "I cannot in conscience approve any longer of the timid policy of this Assembly," he thundered. "Therefore, I have decided to resign at this critical point and devote myself more actively to the fight for a united Europe."

Out of the Salons. It was a precarious moment for federation--that old dream of the intellectual salons of Europe* which now stirs the streets of Europe. The notion of federation has seeped so deep into Western Europe's consciousness that practical men are now looking hard at it. It has become important enough to have to resist.

In every important West European capital last week there were almost daily meetings of diplomats, economists and soldiers, engaged in a kind of piecemeal federation. The six key nations of Western Europe were closer than ever before to adopting the Schuman Plan (see above). They were solemnly (if disputatiously) engaged in negotiating the even more revolutionary Pleven Plan for transforming their land, sea and air forces into a single European army. Under it, France and Germany would fight shoulder to shoulder, side by side with Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg.

Its boldness could be seen in the words of France's Robert Schuman last week: "A complete merger of our armed forces in one uniform, under common discipline, under single command and responsibility --not to individual governments but to all the member governments." A High Authority made up of representatives of the six countries would oversee its 43 divisions, its 560,000 ground combat troops. A Commissioner of Defense with broad powers would boss it, assign military commanders, set a common military budget, allocate military aid. Important undertakings such as U.N. and NATO involve no such surrender of national sovereignty.

Patchwork Fences. Western Europeans are balking. At Strasbourg, visiting U.S. Congressmen and Senators had voiced crotchety impatience at Europe's failure to dash off a constitution and proclaim a U.S. of Europe (TIME, Dec. 3). Dwight Eisenhower spoke impatiently of Europe's "patchwork territorial fences."

To Americans it seemed as simple as that. But Europe is not only a patchwork of national borders; it is also a bramble-bush of different languages, different currencies, different social customs, ambitions and hatreds that go back to Caesar's day. "There will be no sound basis for understanding," complained London's weekly Spectator, "till a great many more Americans recognize . . . that between the federation of 13 small and contiguous Anglo-Saxon states in 1788 and a proposed federations of European states today there is virtually no similarity except a name."

First, Valley Forge. In fact, Europeans sometimes point out that the U.S. had a common army at Valley Forge before it had a common constitution at Philadelphia. Western Europe is more intent now on surviving a Valley Forge than in building a Philadelphia. Even impatient Paul-Henri Spaak realized that. "The new Europe [cannot] be born full-panoplied from a few men's brains," he said. "We shall first have to solve a whole series of difficult practical problems." Foremost is the European army.

Men who helped conceive it seemed suddenly taken aback by its revolutionary scope. The Belgians, most prosperous of the West Europeans, complained that a common budget would hurt their standard of living, argued that a common army would gobble up all their armed forces. Belgians proposed a loose coalition. The

Dutch feared that the European army would be controlled in its first years by the French (whose defense-mindedness they mistrust) and later by the Germans (whose ambitions they mistrust more). Germans were balking--some because they wanted German unity first, others because they thought they could delay until the U.S., in desperation, gave them their own army and general staff. The French themselves were besieged with second thoughts.

Difficulties & Dangers. Far more than the Schuman Plan, the European army is a test of Western Europe's intentions. "When it is [only] a question of tons of steel and coal," said Belgium's foot-dragging Foreign Minister Paul van Zeeland, "one can make large concessions." Yet just as real as the difficulties are the dangers: the plain fact is that no European nation can by itself defend itself. The federation proposed by Spaak is a long way off; the partial federation proposed by

Messrs. Schuman and Pleven need not be. While Western Europeans hesitated to make this lesser step, Joseph Stalin was making a federation of his own in the satellite states of Eastern Europe--not the kind of federation which Europeans had long dreamed of, only the kind they saw in nightmares.

* Among earlier federationists: William Penn, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Cou-denhove-Kalergi and Aristide Briand.

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