MUST ANYTHING BE DONE ABOUT EUROPE?

AMERICA, the daughter of Europe," is the way Charles de Gaulle sometimes likes to refer to the U.S. Historically, the metaphor is accurate enough, and Americans happily acknowledge their European inheritance of culture and law, myth and memory. Yet in recent decades, the filial relationship has been reversed. As happens in individual families, too, the offspring has taken over the role of parent. After World War II, it was America that gave Europe food, shelter, the sheer hope of survival. Through patterns of aid and alliance, the U.S. also tried to help banish Europe's ancient, tragic--and sometimes childish--quarrels.

In the past two decades, Europe has undergone a stunning renaissance, its two greatest symbols being the Common Market and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Under the inspiration of Jean Monnet, Western Europe developed a common trade area that led to unprecedented prosperity and a working class with at least the start of a middle-class way of life--a fact with incalculable repercussions in the Communist world. The Market also led to the beginnings of a free, united and supranational Europe, not attempted since the nation-state was born with all its banners flying, though it has been a dream of statesmen from Charlemagne to Churchill, of poets from Dante to Goethe. Militarily, the Western Europeans joined with the U.S. in interposing NATO's "sword and shield" against Communist military aggression from the East.

Today both these major achievements are in trouble, partly because of inevitable changes in the world, but largely because of the willfulness of Charles de Gaulle. The operations of the Common Market are deadlocked by a French boycott; NATO faces a complete French pullout. For more than a year, the U.S. has allowed the situation to drift, on the theory that Europe was basically sound and not much was needed to be done. Now Washington is once again turning its attention to Europe and to the ties--uniquely close but uniquely complex--of kinship, common ideals and hard self-interest that bind the Old World to the New.

Rift in the Market

A truly new Europe seemed to take shape in the remarkable progress of the Common Market ever since France, West Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries signed the Treaty of Rome nearly nine years ago. As the tariff walls within the Six came tumbling down, trade doubled in a cornucopian flow of cars and caramels, typewriters and transistors, that made shops in the six countries part of one great international bazaar. The resulting boom fattened their gross national products by 38% since 1958 (v. 28% for the U.S.). Despite the erection of a common tariff against the outside world, the Six became the world's largest trader, and embarked, with the U.S., on the so-called Kennedy Round tariff negotiations--now stalled--designed to lower tariffs throughout the free world.

The management of this vast and intricate melding of six highly developed economies is vested by the Rome Treaty in a nine-man commission, now supported by some 3,000 international civil servants headquartered in Brussels. Though the treaty nowhere uses the word supranational, its architects envisioned an inevitable accretion of power wielded by "Eurocrats." Common decisions are taken only at the commission's proposal; the Council of Ministers, representing the governments of the Six, can only dispose, voting yes or no to specific legislation. Under the treaty, a qualified majority vote on most issues is to be binding as of next year, thereby largely eliminating national vetoes. The Eurocrats have almost invariably tried to make every economic advance a political gain for a federated Europe as well, following Common Market President Walter Hallstein's oft-reiterated precept that "we're not in business, we're in politics."

Sooner or later, this supranational thrust was bound to collide with the nationalism of Charles de Gaulle. The bang came last summer when Hallstein and his vice president for agriculture, Sicco Mansholt, tried to lead De Gaulle into accepting a quantum increase in supranationalism. The bait was nearly $1 billion in Common Market subsidies that Brussels would dole out to French farmers under a proposed common agricultural policy. In return, the Six were to hand over to Brussels several billion dollars in farm levies for Hallstein & Co. to control as the technicians saw fit. In fact, this would have created Europe's first federal treasury. At the same time, Hallstein proposed that the European Parliament, so far a purely consultative body, be given a budgetary check on the use of the European monies.

De Gaulle refused, and reportedly yelled: "Do they think we can be bought like Yemen or Italy?" He ordered French diplomats to cease attending Common Market meetings and launched a bitter public offensive against the apatrides, or stateless ones. He railed against a "technocratic, stateless and irresponsible Areopagus, destined to infringe upon French democracy." De Gaulle was irked by Hallstein, a German who acts, says one neutral ambassador in Brussels, like "the uncrowned king of Europe."

The Possible Compromise

The French still refuse to deal with Hallstein, still boycott meetings of the Market's Council of Ministers. They do participate directly in some technical meetings and in others by mail. Though not quite sure of its legal status, the Council not only continues to meet but enacts legislation, cockily firing off letters to the French government that begin: "The Council decided . . ." The other Market partners also invited France to attend a session in which Hallstein and the other commissioners will be excluded.

Despite all this acrimony, the outlines of a possible compromise are already evident. Hallstein and Mansholt will probably have to step down. De Gaulle is not the only one who wants Hallstein out; privately, Germany's Ludwig Erhard is not likely to mourn his countryman's retirement. Beyond trimming the power of the Eurocrats, France wants:

A new farm-financing agreement--bound to benefit France as the most efficient agricultural producer of the Six. This should cause no real trouble.

No increase in power for the European Parliament. This issue is likely to be deferred.

A formal change in the Rome Treaty to prevent majority voting on the council, thus retaining control of veto power. France will probably have to settle instead for an informal gentleman's agreement that no country will be overruled on a matter of vital national interest.

Such a compromise, still far from certain, is about as far as France's Common Market partners can go. For supranational machinery is not an idealistic luxury but a necessity for the continuing growth of the Market. Already, for example, there is a clamor to harmonize business taxes among the Six--the old national systems have become an impediment to intramural trade. Some central authority must increasingly arbitrate and enforce common rules and laws beyond the sovereign confines of the member states.

Even De Gaulle's detractors doubt that he will ultimately try to destroy the Market; as Jean Monnet pointed out long ago, whatever else he may do, De Gaulle hesitates to act in a way that will make him look foolish in history's long view. Last week De Gaulle hinted that he might be ready to reverse the veto by which he kept the British out of the Common Market nearly three years ago. Whatever De Gaulle is really up to, he is finding in the current French election campaign that his policy on European unity--or rather, disunity--is the one issue on which he is opposed by all

French opinion, from farmers in Brittany to industrialists in Lille.

Beyond any Common Market compromise, a basic conflict will remain. On one side are the federalists--or "Federasts," as the more Utopian advocates of the cause are sometimes called--who feel that no single European nation can ever again play the Great Power, that the only true power on the continent must be a united Europe. On the other side is De Gaulle, who argues in ringing 19th century tones that each country must enjoy unrestricted nationalism in order to be, and to feel, strong. Admittedly, he has made France feel stronger than it has in decades. Only through a loose aggregation of such sovereign nations, he says, can the true Europe come about. Moreover, only by pulling away from the Atlantic Community can Western Europe hope to woo Eastern Europe--a debatable proposition, because it is just possible that the Eastern countries might trust an association including the U.S. more than one in which they would be alone with Germany and France.

The U.S. can do little directly to influence the outcome of this debate. Indirectly, however, the issue is related to the NATO problem, in which the U.S. is deeply involved.

The military Communist threat to Europe has so markedly declined in recent years that NATO's importance is increasingly a matter of politics and status. De Gaulle is correct enough when he asserts that NATO is essentially an American command. The NATO "sword" remains the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The NATO shield is the 27 divisions, six of them American, twelve West German, that are assigned for integrated use in the event of a Soviet land attack on Western Europe. Many of NATO's divisions, including German ones, are equipped with tactical nuclear weapons--but in all cases the warheads remain under U.S. control.

NATO without France

De Gaulle protested against this situation as early as 1958, when France had only just begun building its own independent force de frappe, and Eisenhower had turned down a proposal for a U.S., British and French triumvirate to direct the West's global strategy. From that point on, the general gradually withdrew more and more of the French military part of the shield from NATO. Last September he proclaimed: "In 1969, at the latest, the subordination known as 'integration' which is provided for by NATO and which hands our fate over to foreign authority shall cease."

Though the NATO Treaty is for perpetuity, beginning in 1969 any member may resign. De Gaulle presumably was threatening to do just that--but it will hardly mean the end of NATO. The headquarters of the Alliance will have to be moved from Paris, some NATO supply lines rerouted, and the status of U.S. air and logistic bases in France renegotiated. All this might not prove too damaging, for Paris has hinted that it is willing to consider bilateral defense arrangements with Washington. For NATO, France's departure could be awkward but hardly fatal; for De Gaulle, it would be easy and would hardly change a thing. Sheltered behind Germany, France will have to be defended by NATO's sword and shield, member or not, in the event of Russian attack. So De Gaulle can have his gateau and eat it too. The U.S. simply intends to keep an empty chair waiting for France's return at some future date--A.D.G., or apres De Gaulle.

More difficult for the U.S. and NATO is the problem of West Germany, which far from wanting out, wants farther in. Though forbidden by treaty to manufacture its own atomic arms, West Germany, as the most powerful industrial and conventional military power in Europe, has of late come to feel keenly its second-class nuclear status in the Alliance--particularly beside Britain and France. Later this month Erhard will visit President Johnson, and a preview of what is on Erhard's mind came not long ago when he told the Bundestag that the U.S. allies "must be given a share in nuclear defense according to the degree of danger they face and the degree of their burden."

Other West Germans are even more outspoken. The clear long-range danger is that if Germans are to be cast permanently in the role of serfs to the Alliance's nuclear knights, the resulting bitterness will lead to a new outburst of German nationalism. The West Germans know that for the foreseeable future they cannot have nuclear weapons of their own. Germany with the Bomb is a prospect that alarms Western Europe nearly as much as it does Russia and the satellites. What Erhard does want is a greater share in both nuclear planning and in the control over the "hardware" of the tactical weapons on German soil. De Gaulle does not want the Germans to have even that much. "The Germans have lost the war," he reportedly says, "and they must pay for it." This notion overlooks the fact that France did not exactly win the war either.

On the other hand, the U.S. itself does not want to go too far in offering nuclear participation to the Germans. For one thing, Washington is committed to the idea of preventing proliferation. For another, West Germany's acquisition of any real nuclear capacity would almost certainly doom any prospect of continued detente with Soviet Russia --including eventual reunification of Germany.

This is the bind in which the U.S. is caught. One attempt to squirm out of it was the ill-fated MLF, which called for nuclear-armed surface ships to be manned by NATO crews in order to create an illusion of participation (actually the warheads would have remained under U.S. control just as they are on land). The Germans liked MLF and still do, but nobody else does. A British variation known as ANF (for Allied Nuclear Force) is disliked by the Germans because it would let Bonn help pay for British weapons and still have no say in the deployment of the U.S. weapons that directly protect Germany. The nub of the problem is that nuclear weapons simply cannot easily be shared if they are intended to be ever used in a hurry.

The U.S. is now pushing the less-than-sensational idea of a "special committee" to bring the Alliance closer round the nuclear hearth by simply giving the members more information and more responsibility in planning. In Paris last week U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara met with nine other NATO defense ministers for a kind of initiation session into the top-secret technicalities, awesome responsibilities and costs of nuclear forces. The committee concept suggests that the U.S. hopes that nothing really new has to be done about NATO.

The Coal of Unity

The larger problem remains and would exist even without De Gaulle: to create within the Alliance a situation, as Jean Monnet puts it, "not of equality of power, but equality of rights." It is a problem that has grown rather than diminished since NATO's founding, for the disparity between American and European might has grown rather than diminished since 1949. Indeed, some Europeans insist American strength has so burgeoned that even Russia has been outstripped, and the bipolarity of the 1950s has given way to a world of "monopolarity," where a single superstate, the U.S., overshadows all others. The only way in which the Europeans could in fact gain near equality of power with the U.S. would be to achieve their own, Europe-wide nuclear force. This idea of a separate European force balancing the U.S.--and linked with it by a common arm of policy--is known, in a particularly unfortunate metaphor, as the "dumbbell" (after the two equal, connected weights of an exercise bar). The concept depends first on Europeans' willingness to pay the tremendous cost of such a nuclear force--and so far few Europeans have shown this willingness. More important, it depends on the creation of true political unity, which is undoubtedly far away--and thanks to De Gaulle, farther away today than five years ago.

Washington does not like the concept, remote as it is, because a dumbbell Europe might some day swerve out of control. In the long view, however, it could provide an inspiring goal for Europe to pursue, if only because it would encourage Europe to unite. Until and unless Europe makes progress in that direction, it will simply have to accept the fact--cheerfully if it can, Gaullishly if it must--that in the common interest, the U.S. is in charge of the West's defense.

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