Europe: The Winds of Change

Let them, if they so wish, combine in sixes or sevens or twos. But let them not call themselves Europe. For Europe is a territory extending from the Atlantic to the Urals . . . and unless the Europe we see for tomorrow is a confederation of the whole of the European continent, our Europe-making today will be worse than useless.

—Salvador de Madariaga

For peoples so diverse in language and custom and so often bloodily at odds, the Europeans curiously will not let the dream of unity die. Last week in

Paris, Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak evoked it anew. The time has come, he urged, for the six nations of the Common Market to create new political institutions of cooperation atop the thriving economic cohesiveness the Common Market has already achieved. Spaak made plain that although a supranational, federal United States of Europe remained the ultimate goal, his plan represented a lesser aim: a confederal unity leaving each of the Six a nation sovereign and intact.

Spaak’s proposals were both a grudging vindication of the policies of France’s Charles de Gaulle and a sharp personal retreat. For confederation was, in fact, the point of the French Fouchet Plan rejected by De Gaulle’s more supranationally minded Common Market partners in 1962. And in observing that “if the British don’t want to do anything about it, the Six must go ahead.” Spaak abandoned the position that the “Friendly Five” have defended ever since De Gaulle excluded the British from the Common Market early in 1963: that further progress toward unity is unthinkable without Britain. Across the Channel, the British, caught up in the start of a crucial election campaign, in which, typically, foreign affairs are hardly an issue, could not care less.

Signs of Change. In unabashedly reversing himself, Spaak, a canny compromiser of old, was reversing toward reality. For the Europe of 1964 is in flux as never before since World War II —East and West. The war left Eastern Europe in tight military fiefdom to Russia, Western Europe in economic and military dependence upon the U.S., continental Europe thus little more than a no man’s land where the outer edges of the two superpowers’ spheres of influence menacingly met. No longer. Though the basic postwar pattern remains superimposed across the map of Europe, the nations of Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain are pulsating with new polarities and priorities, groping in new directions at the same time they increasingly assert their pride in old nationhoods.

Large and small, the signs of change are everywhere. So far, only Bulgaria has fully escaped the contagion of restiveness sweeping Khrushchev’s once-docile satellites, symbolized by Rumanian Leader Gheorghiu-Dej and Yugoslav President Tito’s collaboration in a giant power and navigation project inaugurated last week on the Danube River.

While Cyprus threatens to pit NATO partners Greece and Turkey in open war, those ancient European antagonists, Russia and Turkey, have agreed to build a joint hydroelectric complex on the Arpa-Cayi river, long their barbed and bristling common border. Hardly a week goes by without new and major infusions of capital from Western Europe into the East, as Europe’s trade, to U.S. dismay, increasingly ignores the red flags (see WORLD BUSINESS).

National Meld. Nikita Khrushchev, who five years ago sneeringly remarked he could obliterate West Germany with eight hydrogen bombs, has wangled himself an invitation to Bonn to meet Chancellor Erhard. Object: trade and propaganda, both of which Khrushchev sorely needs. Peking promptly charged Khrushchev with planning to sell East Germany down the river. This is hardly an immediate danger to Puppet Walter Ulbricht, though anxious East German bosses might be forgiven for wondering.

There is little doubt that the Wall is becoming something of a neo-Stalinist skeleton in Khrushchev’s carefully refurbished closet these days. Bit by bit, holes are being pricked into it to permit some movement between the halves of Berlin. Last week Ulbricht’s press agency announced that beginning Nov. 2, some 3,000,000 elderly East Germans will be allowed to cross the Wall for annual four-week visits to relatives in the West, and negotiations are nearly complete for yet wider visitor exchanges between the two Germanys.

Limited as these pass agreements are, no one knows better than Khrushchev that freedoms have a way of developing a momentum of their own. There is a distinctly European and growing body of opinion, typified by Jean Monnet, spearhead of the Continent’s postwar unity drive, that the solution to Europe’s largest problem—the burning question of Germany’s division—lies in the melding of all the nations of Europe.

Third Choice. In France, Charles de Gaulle, whose vision of an independent community from the Atlantic to the Urals begins with independence at home, sets out next week on another apostolic mission, this time to Latin America, to preach the gospel of a French-led choice for smaller nations between the two superpowers. Frustrated in his efforts to use the Franco-German treaty to advance the hegemony of France in Europe, he too shows signs of restiveness, turning away from the Germans toward London.

The French and British fortnight ago agreed to jointly construct a new air-to-ground missile, already have in the works joint ventures for the Concorde supersonic airliner, a jet trainer, an air traffic control system and a historic tunnel link underneath the English Channel. There are hints, too, that De Gaulle, who has long scorned summitry with the Russians as pointless and dangerous, is eying Moscow in a new light.

For Western Europe, the new independence and new nationalism were made possible by an economic resurgence set in motion by a generous America at war’s end. But for both Eastern and Western Europe, the current new freedom stems from the mood of detente that has dissolved many of the harsher fears of the cold war.

Whether, as the believers in Europe hope, the stirrings of new national life are the prerequisite for a larger Europe or simply the jigsaw puzzle fragmenting hopelessly anew, the fact remains that Europeans are becoming more and more their own men, for good or ill.