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WESTERN EUROPE: Taking Shape

3 minute read
TIME

Undramatically and tentatively, the United States of Europe—or the closest thing to it since Charlemagne—may be taking shape in 1958. On Jan. 1, economic and atomic “communities” drawing together 165 million Europeans of six nations (France, West Germany, Italy, the Benelux countries) came into being.

Last week the Foreign Ministers of “Little Europe” met in Paris to elect officers for the Common Market and Euratom. They also chose directors for two other six-nation agencies, the thriving Coal and Steel Community and the new billion-dollar European Investment Bank. But they could not settle on a single city for their capital. Luxembourg’s white-mustached old Premier and Foreign Minister Joseph Bech put up such a stubborn fight to keep the European Coal and Steel Community headquarters (and its $6,000,000 yearly payroll) for his tiny country that the founding fathers could only agree to postpone their choice until their next meeting in June.

West Germany’s Professor Walter Hallstein, 56, representing “Little Europe’s” foremost industrial power, got the top job of the new European Economic Community. A former Frankfurt University rector who, as Under Secretary in the Foreign Ministry, ably negotiated some of Konrad Adenauer’s most notable diplomatic accomplishments (the basic treaties with the Allies, the Saar treaty with France, Israeli reparations, Schuman Plan membership), Bachelor Lawyer Hallstein has won the full confidence of der Alte as a “good European,” sure to work devotedly for the ultimate creation of a larger free-trading area that will include Britain and most other European nations and rival the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in wealth.

France’s square-set, hard-driving Louis Armand, 53, became president of the six-nation European Atomic Energy Community. A classic specimen of the topflight civil servants turned out by France’s elite schools to carry on the nation’s business while governments rise and fall, Armand is the engineer whose imaginative direction has restored French railways to a place among Europe’s best. As president of a prospecting commission, he sparked the French drive to develop Sahara oil. Appointed one of the “Three Wise Men” in 1955 to look into Western Europe’s energy needs, he has led the campaign for European development of atomic power. Louis Armand arguing for Euratom, says Paris’ L’Express, “is Saint Bernard preaching at Vezelay on Easter Sunday and leading his listeners off on the Crusade.” Though he starts, he says, with “three empty notebooks and a pencil,” Armand promises 15 million kw. of atomic-produced electric power for “Little Europe” by 1967. (U.S. atomic-power goal: 1,000,000 kw. by 1962.)

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