"Then Will It Live . . ."

EUROPE

(See Cover)

What does it matter whether two nations are separated by rivers or mountains, or that they speak different idioms? Europe is but one province of the world: when we make war, we make civil war. I should have liked to have made of these peoples one single and uniform national body.

--Napoleon

There lives today near Paris an ascetic, unobtrusive Frenchman who may ultimately succeed where others, from Charlemagne to Napoleon, ultimately failed. He commands no armies or popular following, but his work is worth uncounted divisions to the West. He has neither title nor portfolio, but he has privileged access to every chancellery of Western Europe. He has no formal higher education, but the world's most brilliant economists regard him as their peer. He has never joined a political party, but parliamentarians across Europe flock to his summons. His name is Jean Monnet, and he is the practical apostle of European unity whose new. growing organizations--notably the Common Market--are remaking the scarred old face of Europe and changing the balance of power throughout the world.

Scarcely a decade after a war-ravaged Europe seemed hopelessly dependent on U.S. dole, a revitalized Continent is going through the greatest boom in its history, excelling Soviet progress, matching and even competing with U.S. economic power. At a time when the U.N. is in disarray and U.S. policymakers are looking to other institutions and communities for strength, such institutions and such a community are developing in Europe. At a time when so much heed is paid to the "new" nations, with all their bursting little new nationalisms, it is Europe's old nations, relaxing nationalist feuds, which are forming a fresh center of strength for Western civilization.

Revolutionary Cooperation. In Brussels last week, the Common Market's Council of Ministers took another huge step forward when it accepted Britain's bid for membership and set the first negotiating sessions for next week. At the risk of jettisoning deep-rooted ties with the Commonwealth, Britain had finally decided that her own and the West's future lay in European unity, by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's ponderous admission: "The plain fact is that the formation and development of the Community has created, economically and politically, a situation to which we are compelled to react."

What attracts the British, almost irresistibly, can be seen all over Europe. Everywhere, the quarrelsome Continent is caught up in a quiet revolution of cooperation. On a busy Turin street corner, a pretty Dutch policewoman expertly directs traffic. In Florence, work is in progress on the University of Europe, financed by six nations and scheduled to open its doors in 1962. A Bonn delicatessen owner makes his twice-weekly trip to Belgium to buy vegetables for his newly finicky customers and grumbles: ''They won't buy German vegetables any more, even when they're cheaper." Looking toward outer space, Britain, France and West Germany are establishing a $200 million project to build a European rocket. Deep beneath the Alps, workmen are blasting an auto tunnel under Mont Blanc; when it is completed next year, Paris and Rome will be 124 miles closer by car.

Meanwhile, back from a summer of skimming with passportless ease all over the Common Market countries were bikini-bronzed girls and tousle-haired boys, members of the new, low-budget international set that motor-scoots and camps with blithe disregard of frontiers--which are often posted with neat new signs proclaiming, "Another Border But Still Europe." And some 1,150 schoolchildren from a dozen nations were enrolled in Brussels' Common Market European high school--multilingual, intercultural, stocked with history texts that are no longer patriotic tracts but tell both sides of such old, bitter feuds as the Franco-Prussian War.

Uncommon Development. Europe today is a tangled skein of alliances and associations, knitting the nations together for everything from the defense of the free world (NATO) to the telecasting of the Scots Guards into the homes of Athenians and Ankarans (EUROVISION), and the exchange of trade (EFTA), aid (OECD). and commemorative postage stamps (CEPT). Some of these organizations are not radically different from the old familiar alliances that the European nations have always found it convenient to form in times of relative peace. The drastic new departure that galvanizes all the others is the six-nation Common Market, comprising France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands.

Conceived by Jean Monnet and in force for 3 1/2 years, the Common Market aims to eliminate trade barriers among the six countries--and ultimately to integrate their economies. In basic economic theory, it is as old as Adam Smith, as familiar as the United States--the world's largest common market. It aims at free trade within the largest possible area, enabling industries to cut costs, labor to specialize, capital to move freely where needed in a mass market--to the economic benefit of producer, worker and consumer. But set against Europe's age-old rivalries and stubborn economic nationalism, in which trade barriers used to be as fanatically guarded as national borders, the Common Market is an astonishingly uncommon development.

Dream of Order. Like many revolutionary ideas, united Europe is not a new notion but an old one revived. The dream of order and unity once embodied in the Rome of the Caesars lived on through the Middle Ages, not only in the Roman Catholic Church but in that embattled but strangely viable anachronism, the Holy Roman Empire. Even after it disintegrated, and the last remnants of feudal internationalism gave way to popular nationalism, the European idea remained; and even if Europeans themselves at times forgot it, the rest of the world could not. For most of 2,000 years the culture, commerce and conquests of the peoples of Western Europe shaped the world's destinies. European traders and explorers knit the world, European armies subdued it, European adventurers settled it, European lawgivers pacified it, European artists and philosophers remade its esthetic norms. European artisans launched the Industrial Revolution, and European capital carried it to the ends of the earth.

But as Europe's influence grew, so did the scale of its conflicts, and at the end of the second World War, Europe lay prostrate between the new giants in world affairs, the U.S. and Soviet Russia. Precisely because the old Europe seemed irrevocably dead, a great hope arose that a truly new Europe might be possible at last. In the immediate postwar years, Churchill launched his movement for a United Europe, Count Richard Couden-hove-Kalergi, a tireless Pan-Europist from the 1920s, summoned a group of European parliamentarians to discuss political unity, the European Union of Federalists urged Europe to "federate now." and in 1949 most of these groups came together to establish the Council of Europe. Skeptics refused to believe that anything practical would ever come of these idealistic and largely futile efforts. And yet the power of the ideal itself would not fade. Spanish Philosopher Salvador de Madariaga expressed it better than anyone else.

"Above all, we must love Europe," he wrote, "this Europe to whom La Gioconda forever smiles, where Hamlet seeks in thought the mystery of his inaction, where Faust seeks in action comfort for the void of his thought, where Don Juan seeks in women met the woman never found, and Don Quixote, spear in hand, gallops to force reality to rise above itself. This Europe must be born. And she will, when Spaniards will say 'our Chartres,' Englishmen 'our Cracow,' Italians 'our Copenhagen'; when Germans say 'our Bruges,' and step back horror-stricken at the idea of laying murderous hands on it. Then will Europe live, for then it will be that the spirit that leads history will have uttered the creative words: 'Fiat Europa! '"

The Common Cause. One force that, more than any other, put reality behind this poetic vision proved to be Europe's great offspring, the U.S. Americans, seeing Europe from a distance and therefore as a unit, had often been better Europeans than many Europeans. Thus, when the U.S. offered the Marshall Plan in 1947, it shrewdly insisted that the European nations cooperate in estimating their needs and in spending the funds. OEEC, the multi-nation agency through which Marshall Aid was pumped into Europe, was a crucial example of cooperation. Followed by the NATO alliance, it prepared the way for Jean Monnet's boldly planned Coal and Steel Community, direct forerunner of the Common Market.

By 1950, Europe was well on the recovery road, except for West Germany. Question was, how to rebuild Germany into NATO in a fashion acceptable to France, thrice attacked by German armies in the last hundred years? It was Jean Monnet, then directing France's postwar economic recovery, who found the answer: to pool the coal and steel resources of France and Germany--the Ruhr, the Saar, Lorraine, over which so many Franco-German conflicts had erupted--under a supranational authority.

With few exceptions, the European Coal and Steel Community has proved a huge success. In eight years, steel production in its six member countries (France, Germany, Italy, Benelux) has jumped 100%, to 73 million tons in 1960--nearly equal the U.S. output. The organization has largely eliminated the national taxes on coal and steel production, applied international through rates on coal and steel shipments. It has developed the most advanced social and job-security system in the world for its 1,500,000 workers, who have free movement to jobs anywhere within the six countries, full salary unemployment benefits up to a year. Above all, it has made supranationalism stick; it has independent authority to levy taxes, and the decisions of its nine-man international High Authority are binding on member governments.

Thus from Europe's grimiest coalfields and bloodiest battlefields grew the great experiment in unity. For, argued Monnet in 1955, why not expand the Coal and

Steel Community to embrace the total economic life of the six members and create a European Economic Community, including a Common Market and an atomic energy pool, Euratom. France had doubts but was swept along by the other members. In 1957 the Common Market was ratified in the Treaty of Rome--and no one missed the memories of past unity which the name of that city still evoked in Europe. A year later, France was in serious economic straits, and De Gaulle had come to power with scornful views on supranational ventures. Economists predicted gloomily that France would have to delay the first, crucial 10% tariff cut. But France met its commitments on time, and, under De Gaulle, continued as an enthusiastic Common Market partner.

Largest Importer. In less than four years since it began operating, the Common Market has become one of the fastest-growing economic units on earth. Industrial production soared an astonishing 12% last year alone. Gross national product zoomed some 7% v. the U.S.'s 4 1/2% in 1960. Russia claims a somewhat larger G.N.P. than the Common Market, but taken together, the U.S., the Common Market, and (if the merger is completed) the United Kingdom form a potential economic force that could overwhelm the Russians.

The Common Market is now the world's largest importer of all kinds of goods ($30 billion worth last year), the second largest exporter of manufactured goods. Its monetary reserves have swollen to more than $16 billion, nearly equal the U.S. reserves of $18 billion. In its internal drive toward economic integration, the Common Market has performed even more spectacularly. Trade among the Six has increased 45% in three years, this year is averaging $1 billion per month. As a result, the Six have reduced tariffs among themselves by 30% on almost every commodity except agriculture and petroleum products, are speeding up their timetable for more cuts. What was initially to be a twelve-year transition to an integrated economy is now scheduled to take place in eight years or less.

Cleaned Out. In a protectionist Europe, where everybody from parsnip growers to paving-stone makers was sheltered by tariffs, businessmen almost to a man fought the Common Market right up to the moment it became fact, fearful that it would put their protected industries out of business. Monnet's answer was to bring the Market into existence gradually, reducing tariffs at easy stages to allow industries time to adjust to the new competition. It has worked surprisingly well. In Belgium, some inefficient coal mines have shut down. In France, whose industry was the most highly protected of the Six, perhaps 20% of the marginal electrical firms and 30% of the small textile shops (up to 20 employees) have shut down; most had been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for years. But France has also had pleasant surprises. While French industry always feared that it could not compete with the Germans, particularly in the electrical field, the French have found that they can not only compete in price and quality, but often beat the Germans at their own game.

Jean Monnet's creation is also working a revolution in the taste and preferences of the West European consumer. Paris' Galeries Lafayette, biggest department store in France, in 1957 imported only 1% of its goods. Today its counters sag with Italian clothes, furniture and glassware, German linen, leather goods and housewares, Dutch clothing and pottery--and some 8% of its sales are imported goods. Thanks to reduced tariffs, Dutch blouses that in 1958 sold for $10 now sell for $2.50, are one of the bestselling items in the store. A 1958 French refrigerator sold for $187. Today the same French company, under pressure from German competition, sells a larger and better refrigerator for only $120. "Before 1958, no French firm would dream of putting out a cheap, well-designed, ready-to-wear range of women's clothes," says Galeries Lafayette Chief Buyer Jean d'Allens. "Now several are selling women's skirts for as little as $10, and selling them all over the Common Market."

A Bonn wineshop now sells Hennessy cognac at $3.75 a bottle while the best German Weinbrand at the same price gathers dust.* From tiny Fiats to elegant Ferraris, some 400,000 imported cars have been sold in West Germany. In a posh Dusseldorf shoe salon last week, a matron, eyeing the latest square-toed model, snapped: "Is It Italian?" Replied the salesgirl: "Madam, we sell only Italian shoes." German sausage and French pate are pouring into Belgium at twice the pre-1958 rate. One of Brussels' largest stores laid on a Common Market exhibi tion earlier this year called "Europe on Your Plate." Supplies were cleaned out.

"I don't know what to do about this

European craze," complains a West German adman. "Once, all you had to do to sell a product was to say, 'Made in Germany.' Now take cigarettes, for example: to make our German brands competitive, we have to imply that people are smoking them all over Europe. It's the same with everything from soup to schnapps--you have to show people using it in Paris, in Brussels, in Rome."

Merger Bender. European industry has not only learned to cut costs and compete, but to cooperate. Some 250 private trade and merchandising associations have mushroomed, ranging from the huge Common Market Association of Chemical Industries to the European Bed Union, from the Common Market Association of Beer Wholesalers to the European Brush Man ufacturers. Acronyms abound: Euromalt (malt makers), Euromaisers (corn producers), Unecolait (dairymen) and Uni-pede (the European Committee for the Producers and Distributors of Electrical Energy).

Common Market businesses have gone on a merger bender. Germany's Messerschmitt and France's Fouga are jointly making aircraft. Italy's Innocenti and Germany's Hans Glas are making cars together, Luxembourg's Dostert and Germany's Wilhelm Seibel truck trailers. Agfa and France's Vedette are collaborating on cameras. Eurista is a new FrenchGerman coalition making electrical resistors. Gasoline is now distributed in France and Germany by Desmarais. The Societe Franc,aise PIC and Krupp recently signed an agreement to build a petroleum plant. "Within a few more years," says a West German industrialist wonderingly, "no government will be able to pull out of the Community. The businessmen won't let them." This is precisely what Jean Monnet is counting on.

The New Civil Servant. The shape of a United Europe is already evident in the institutions of the Common Market. The cerebral cortex is housed in a new concrete-and-steel nine-story building on Brussel's appropriately named Avenue de la Joyeuse Entree. Here the European Commission, a nine-man executive, plots the grand strategy and supervises the daily details of the Common Market's operation.

The only national check on the commission's decisions reposes in the Common Market's Council of Ministers--one from each of the Six. But it is a limited check at best. The council cannot initiate proposals to the commission, only pass on the commission's proposals to it--and it can modify them only by a unanimous vote. The commission usually prevails. In addition, the Six have also established a seven-man Court of Justice, which arbitrates technical disputes. The Six have set up a 142-member Parliament that meets periodically in Strasbourg, consists of parliamentarians elected by and from the members' national legislatures. But the Treaty of Rome stipulates that in time the representatives are to be elected by direct vote of the Community's populations. Though their work is often highly technical, the men who run the Common Market seldom forget ultimate purpose: "Make no mistake about it," says the European Commission's president, German Economist Walter Hallstein, "we are not in business, we are in politics. We are building the United States of Europe."

In the process, the Common Market has developed a new prototype of the European civil servant. The members of the Common Market executive and their staff drive cars marked with special European license plates, send their children to the European high school, and, except for accents, have lost many of their national traits or concerns. Of all these new civil servants, still the most tireless at 72 is Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet, the most dedicated international ist of them all--although at the same time he remains as thoroughly French as Cognac, the town of his birth.

Primitive Pooling. Monnet's tough peasant heritage is stamped in his broad face and his short, stocky, muscular body. His paternal grandfather, a farmer-mayor of Cognac, lived to the age of 102. Jean Monnet's mother lived to be 87, his father, Jean Gabriel, to 83. A staunch conservative. Jean Gabriel used to warn young Jean that "every new idea is bound to be a bad idea." There is no evidence that Jean paid any attention.

Jean Gabriel Monnet founded the brandy firm of J. G. Monnet & Co., groomed Jean and his brother Gaston to be his international salesmen. There was to be no nonsense of a university education for his sons. And in the local Cognac high school, Jean showed little intellectual promise anyway: he had, and still has, a poor memory, and floundered in the rote system of French instruction. At 18, Jean was sent off to Canada to peddle brandy in the raw Canadian boom towns of 1906 such as Calgary, Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat. He was pleasantly surprised by the absence of class barriers and the ingrained suspicions that so characterized the European mentality. One day in Calgary, while looking for a horse and buggy to rent, he came across a stranger hitching up his horse. When Monnet asked him the whereabouts of a livery stable, the man countered: "Can you ride?" Monnet said yes. "All right," said the man, "take my horse. When you're through, just hitch it up here." Monnet remembers it as his first lesson in pooling resources.

Matches & Railroads. When World War I started, Monnet was rejected for the French army because of a kidney ailment (nephritis), entered the French Ministry of Commerce as a junior official. At the time, France and Britain were bidding against each other for badly needed raw materials, despite the fact they were allies, and no one seemed to know what to do--except Monnet, who proposed an Anglo-French high commission to coordinate procurement and supplies. By war's end, Monnet had made such a brilliant impression in Paris and London that, though only 31, he was appointed Deputy Secretary-General of the League of Nations.

In 1923 Monnet left the League to come home and save the family brandy business, devastated by the war. In two short years he had it bubbling money again, then went wandering as an international banker and economic troubleshooter. He spent a year (1933-34) in Peking as financial adviser to the Chinese government, raised money to repair China's vast, decrepit railroad system. He opened a Wall Street brokerage house, made a fortune and lost it in the 1929 crash. The Polish government called him in to plan a currency reform it never carried out. The Swedish government appointed Monnet one of the liquidators of the complex, bankrupt Kreuger match empire.

Meanwhile, Monnet's personal life took an international turn. At a Paris dinner party in 1928, he met darkly handsome Silvia de Bondini, a painter and wife of an Italian diplomat. Silvia soon left her husband; after five years of trying to obtain an Italian divorce, she was whisked to Moscow by Monnet, for a quick Moscow divorce and wedding. The gay Gallic bachelor became a devoted family man (the Monnets have two grown daughters). At their home at Houjarray, some 20 miles west of Paris,, he often talks through his notions with Silvia while she paints.

Worth the Gamble. As World War II started, France and Britain pressed Monnet back into his old World War I job of organizing their joint production and rearmament to meet the Nazi challenge. In London, during the big German offensive of June 1940, it was evident to Monnet that the French government would soon surrender, and in a desperate attempt to keep France in the war, he suggested one of the few impractical schemes of his career: the immediate unification of France and Great Britain. Monnet put it to De Gaulle, who agreed it was worth the gamble. Both men went to Churchill, and the result was Churchill's historic but futile "declaration of Franco-British Union." Monnet then flew to Bordeaux in a big Sunderland Flying-boat to try to evacuate the whole French Cabinet. The Cabinet refused to budge, for fear of being labeled cowardly emigres. A disappointed Monnet returned to London with the flying-boat full of refugee families.

Winston Churchill thereupon endorsed Monnet's French passport personally, sent him to Washington to help coordinate Anglo-American war-supply planning. It was Monnet who conceived the idea of Lend-Lease. And it was Monnet who coined President Roosevelt's famous fire side-chat slogan: "We must be the great arsenal of democracy."

Long before the war ended, Monnet was planning ahead. In 1943 he went to Algiers to coordinate U.S. aid to Free French forces in North Africa. There, De Gaulle was orating almost daily about "la grandeur franc,aise." Monnet told him bluntly: "If you are not very careful, there will be no grandeur. We are a small country, we have been plundered, and our economic base has been largely destroyed. France may become a backwater of Europe." Grumbled De Gaulle: "Well, what do you propose?" In an incisive, seven-page memorandum, Monnet suggested rebuilding France's economy under the guidance of a central committee made up of representatives of labor and management and every French political party. The plan was put into effect in 1947, with Monnet as its chief until 1952; it has since grown into a permanent agency that still supervises the French economy as part of the Common Market.

Unfinished Business. For all their success, Monnet's institutions still have a long way to go toward his goal.

Despite Europe's growing international sentiment, old animosities remain, from the South Tyrol to Flanders, and might flare up again in time of stress. Economically, the biggest stumbling block so far to a fully integrated European economy is agriculture. Like the U.S., the Common

Market nations together are nearly self-sufficient; they produce 90% of the wheat they consume, 70% of the feed grain, 92% of the sugar and 95% of the meat. They actually overproduce pork, potatoes and vegetables. And, as in the U.S., agriculture is everywhere highly protected with state subsidies and price supports.

Another bit of unfinished business consists of cracking down on Europe's notorious net of cartels. For the moment, Europe's continuing boom has provided enough trade for everybody, put the problem of the competition-restraining cartels far down on the priority list. Also, free movement of labor within the Market area is still more theoretical than real. The Community has provided migrant workers with comprehensive social security, but the age-old reluctance of workers to move persists, though Italian workers now provide more than 60% of the Belgian mining industry's labor force. The fact is, unemployment is so low all over the Community that few workers need to migrate. The Market's boom has even reduced chronically underemployed Italy's jobless total to a bare 800,000.

U.S. industry recognized the Market's potential from the start. U.S. corporations have been pouring capital into Europe at a record clip ($844 million in 1960 alone). And though the Common Market was expected to import fewer goods from the U.S., American exports to the six-nation area last year actually soared 42% (to $3.4 billion) over the 1959 level. In time, Common Market manufacturers, including U.S. subsidiaries, will undoubtedly supply a far higher proportion of the consumer goods, from plastic ice buckets to portable TV sets, that now come largely from the U.S. But the loss will be more than canceled out by rising sales of U.S.-made capital goods--sophisticated electronic control systems and specialized heavy machinery.

Six Plus What? While the U.S. cooperated enthusiastically, Britain hesitated. But with last week's British move to join, the Common Market faces perhaps its greatest opportunity. Negotiations are likely to be long and difficult. But if Britain comes in, much of the rest of Western Europe outside the Six is likely to follow. The result could be not only a true United States of Europe, but the creation of a mighty economic powerhouse dwarfing Russia in the world's industrial hierarchy.

As early as 1952, Monnet urged the British to join the Coal and Steel Community. Motivated by its historic aloofness from the Continent, as well as respect for its Commonwealth ties, Britain said no. The answer was the same when the Common Market was born in 1957. "We crushed Napoleon and his idea of European unity," snorted a Cabinet minister, "and we can do the same again." Britain's response to the Common Market was to assemble a rival-bloc European Free Trade Association--but with little enthusiasm, since Britain was convinced that the Common Market would never work. Its runaway success caused a painful about-face. While the Six's growth rate swelled, Britain's per capita output rise stayed at a stagnating 2%. As the Six traded more and more with one another, Britain's vital exports to the Continent declined. The vaunted Commonwealth re lationship proved less and less profitable: trade between Britain and the Common wealth nations has actually declined in the last five years.

Coming late with hat in hand, Britain is in poor position to do much bargaining with the Common Market. But it must try to get safeguards both for British farmers--more highly protected than even the Six's--and for its Commonwealth trading partners, whose agricultural products would be forced into competition with Europe's own. One after another, speakers at a Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference in London last week warned that British membership may even spell the end of the Commonwealth. Warned Laborite Emanuel Shinwell, onetime Minister of Defense: "We shall suffer disillusionment before many years are passed. We shall discover we have made a tragic mistake."

Within the Common Market, the main opposition to British membership comes from France, whose own colonies produce many of the same raw materials that are exported by the Commonwealth. There is suspicion also that Britain intends to reap the economic advantages of membership but resist political integration with the Continent. In fact, by overruling France's delaying tactics and welcoming Britain's application last week, the other Common Market countries recognized the wisdom of Jean Monnet's prophecy: "Once a Common Market interest has been created, then political union will come naturally."

Preaching Mission. Monnet continues with almost Pauline dedication to this gospel. Recently, one of the cutters at Monnet's London tailor, Lesley & Roberts, stopped while measuring him for a suit and said: "I hear you're connected with the Common Market idea. Can you explain what it's all about?" Monnet sat-down and preached to the tailor for an hour.

More and more, preaching is his mission. Since 1955 he has been working full time as the apostle of European unity, at the head of his own private lobby called the Action Committee for a United States of Europe--one of the most potent political pressure groups ever assembled. It is premised on Monnet's conviction, "In a democracy, the people who matter are the political parties and the trade unions," and the committee's membership reads like a Who's Who in European politics and labor. Thus when Monnet proposes an idea, the governments of the Six know it already has the backing of an impressive group of politicians and labor leaders. His most recent proposal: a plan for a European monetary reserve fund, leading eventually to a common, single European currency.

Ahead is an even greater dream--an Atlantic Community in which the U.S. and Europe will be full partners. No one realizes better than Monnet the meaning of such an Atlantic union for the fractious, fragmenting world, chaos-riven as it is from the East River to Elisabethville, from Berlin to Namone. "Union is not an end in itself," says Monnet. "It is the beginning on the road to the more orderly world we must have in order to escape destruction. The partnership of Europe and the United States should create a new force for peace."

*Recalling Goethe's lines:

Ein echtcr dcutscher Mann mag kcincn

Franzen leiden,

Dock ihre Weine trlnkt er gern.

(A real German cannot abide a Frenchman,

Yet he likes to drink his wines.)

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