Europe: To the New Generation

When Harold Macmillan was pleading with Charles de Gaulle last year to let Britain into the Common Market, he spoke of the historical imperative to build a united Europe. “We three old men must make this work,” he said. “If we don’t, the new generation of politicians and leaders will not succeed, because they have not been through what we have been through.” Last week two of the three old men were suddenly only that—old men. West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer resigned at 87, after clinging to his office longer than had seemed possible. Macmillan himself gave up the leadership of the Tory Party at 69 because of illness, both physical and political.

Concrete Symbol. These two had never been particularly close, but they had indeed been through a lot. To begin with, World War I, that wasteful struggle which began in frivolity and ended with the death of 19th century Europe, turning a golden age into an iron age. And they had been through the incredible half-century that followed, in which technology outraced the dreams of men, a new form of tyranny grew from a crank’s Utopia to challenge a thousand years of Western tradition, and in which, amazingly, the promise of a new Europe sprouted from the ruins of the old. Yet that new Europe was not only for these two men, or for their generation, to build. Nor was it for the third old man, Charles de Gaulle, to tear down.

De Gaulle dreams of Europe only to the extent that Europe is France. The symbol of his nationalist policy took concrete shape last week when the French government let it be known that it now has two Mirage IV bombers capable of delivering atomic bombs (probably 60 kilotons each). While to hardheaded U.S. military men the name of the bombers summarizes the whole project, to De Gaulle it is the beginning of his independent force de frappe, and as such a modest guarantee of an independent course for France. The rift between the U.S. and De Gaulle over the shape of the Western Alliance has never been wider. When French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Nurville conferred with President Kennedy last week, paving the way for a De Gaulle visit to the U.S. next year, the difference of their opinions made it, in the words of one diplomat, “a dialogue of the deaf.”

Real Solution. The U.S. is once again pushing its scheme for a multilateral force (European sailors on ships armed with U.S. Polaris missiles), which is of debatable military value and which is really only a thin international disguise for continued U.S. nuclear monopoly in the West. No matter how desirable this monopoly is to the U.S., De Gaulle argues with compelling reason that a sovereign nation, long urged by the U.S. itself to stand on its own feet, cannot totally surrender its defense into the hands of another—even an allied—nation.

History may well decide that the real solution lies neither in the American seagoing deterrent nor in De Gaulle’s national one, but in a truly united Europe with its own army and nuclear striking force. For the present, that solution is being pursued neither by Washington nor by Paris. It will fall precisely to the “next generation of politicians and leaders” to work toward this prospect. And though the newcomers may not have been through the trials of the Old Men, their vision of Europe is not necessarily less noble, and it may just possibly be more practical.