WESTERN EUROPE: The Quiet Revolution

While the statesmen in Geneva debated the future of Europe, less celebrated men were more effectively shaping it. In the drab industrial city of Essen last week, 18 young French labor leaders were learning at firsthand how labor-management relations are handled in the coal fields and steelworks of the Ruhr. In Paris four European airlines—Air France, Alitalia, Belgium’s Sabena and West Germany’s Lufthansa—announced plans to integrate their schedules, maintenance and foreign-sales organizations under the name “Air Union.” And in a West German poll, only 37% of the citizens questioned by the Gallup-like “EMNID” Institute were anxious to see Germany remain a sovereign state; the solid majority (52%) favored membership in a European union.

Behind these apparently unrelated events lay the outstanding fact about Europe, A.D. 1959: in a quiet revolution of a kind that “good Europeans” never anticipated, the dream of European unity is coming true.

“Today you look in vain for European ‘enthusiasm,’ ” says an official of the West German government. “What is gradually emerging is something more subtle and more durable: a European consciousness.”

The Direct Approach. The men who raised the banner of European unity in the years just after World War II had no such subtle process in mind. Pointing to the gutted cities of the Continent as testimony to the folly of unrestrained nationalism, they demanded political unification. Sparkplugged by France’s Jean Monnet, the intense, brilliant economist who heads the Action Committee for a United States of Europe, they planned to construct united Europe through a series of economic, political and military bodies, each of which would possess supranational powers in a limited field.

Right from the start, they ran into difficulties. The Council of Europe, hailed at its founding in 1949 as “the first Parliament of Europe,” echoed with platitudes but never with the thrust of debates that got anywhere. The notion of a “European army,” with everyone in the same uniform, collapsed in mutual recriminations.

Even the European Coal & Steel Community, long the shining practical example of a European readiness to surrender some sovereignty, has come upon hard times. For its first six years, its member nations (France, Germany, Italy and Benelux) went along cheerfully with its expansionist schemes to abolish coal and steel tariffs and to outlaw cartels. But in the past six months, slackening European demand for coal, plus U.S. competition, has stacked up 30 million tons of unsold coal (TIME, March 2 et seq.). Fortnight ago, when the High Authority of the community ordered its members to restrict the production and import of coal, France, Germany and Italy rejected this supranational solution in favor of individual national measures.

The Cooperators. All this seemed to justify skepticism about Europe’s biggest step toward unity—the six-nation Common Market born last New Year’s Day. Cynics called the Common Market a compromise between people who wanted to unite Europe without appearing to do so, and those who wanted to give the appearance of working toward European unity without actually achieving it. And when Charles de Gaulle came to power in France last June with his mystical ideas of national grandeur, doomsayers were quick to compose their epitaphs on European unity.

In fact, De Gaulle has forced a change in the philosophy of the Common Market: he is adamantly opposed to giving supranational power to any European organization, economic or political. But his government has scrupulously carried out all its Common Market Treaty obligations, and his ministers insist that they are not “anti-European,” but in favor of something called “cooperative unity” the hammering out of common European policies in negotiations between fully sovereign governments.

The Joyous Entrance. To the tidy-minded who demand tables of organization and clearly drawn lines of authority, cooperative unity sounded suspiciously like a fancy phrase for doing nothing. But since 1953, European railways have pooled freight cars as U.S. railroads do, now have some 200,000 cars marked EUROP roaming one another’s tracks. Another joint project soon to be established is Eurocontrol—an integrated system of air-navigational control.

So far, cooperative unity shows no sign of holding back either the Common Market or its sister organization, Euratom. Last week Euratom formally indicated its intention to build six nuclear reactors designed to provide the Six with 1,000,000 additional kilowatts of electricity by 1963. And in the spanking new Common Market headquarters on Brussels’ aptly named Avenue de la Joyeuse Entree, Walter Hallstein, the German law professor who presides over the Common Market executive, could point to solid progress. Already the Common Market’s European Investment Bank (capital: $1 billion) had made its first loans. Others of Hallstein’s 1,000-odd employees were busily working out common tariffs and establishing procedures so that any citizen of the Six may seek a job or set up a business anywhere in Common Market territory.

Most hopeful of all, public enthusiasm for the Common Market far outstrips that of officialdom. Since last January at least 15 specialized magazines and reviews devoted to the Common Market have sprung up; so has UNICE, a Common Marketwide counterpart of the U.S.’s National Association of Manufacturers. And throughout the Six, industrial amalgamations and alliances are being negotiated at a dizzying rate. Italy’s Alfa Romeo has signed car-marketing agreements with France’s Renault and Germany’s N.S.U. Daimler-Benz (Mercedes) is negotiating with Peugeot, and France’s Conord (household appliances) has already established a subsidiary in Cologne. Even commercial banks are getting into the act: France’s Credit Lyonnais and Germany’s Dresdner Bank have exchanged 50 employees as part of a training scheme.

The State of Show Biz. Visions of a vast new market of 166 million people account for most of the enthusiasm. But equally important is a growing and unforced sense of common identity. Citizens of the Six are now able to visit one another’s countries without passports, and in the process, wartime resentments are disappearing; many a French family now spends its summer vacation in Germany.

The cultural unity of Europe, once an intellectual ideal, is also becoming a reality to ordinary people. Techy there is scarcely a university in Germany that does not regularly exchange professors with sister universities in France and Italy. More than 200 French and German towns have entered into “sisterly” alliances; early last month the mayor and municipal council of Bergisch-Gladbach in the Rhineland climbed into half a dozen buses, along with the local band and singing society, and headed off to France to help their sister town of Bourgoin celebrate World War II Armistice Day with speeches, music and wine.

From Scotland to Rome. Europeans are all exposed to the blandishments of a twelve-nation TV link called Eurovision (TIME, May 12, 1958). And to capture all possible audiences, French. German and Italian moviemakers increasingly tend to get together in co-productions. The result is that Germany’s Curt Jiirgens is big box office in France, and French Comic Fernandel is a favorite in Italy. Two months ago. when Germany’s schoolgirlish Actress Romy Schneider announced her engagement to France’s Alain Delon, fans in both countries glowed. Inevitably, such cultural and economic intermeshing has its impact on European politics. The coal and steel partnership has helped to destroy the old German lust for Alsace, has helped to resign France to returning the Saar to Germany.

The Outsider. Looking on at all this, a little forlornly, is Britain, which feels left out. After rejecting membership in the Common Market because of the superior attraction of its American and Commonwealth connections, Britain now discovers that against a Paris-Bonn axis, it has no way to apply its ancient and instinctive balancing act between combinations of European powers.

Britain’s first countermove—an attempt to link all Western Europe in a Free Trade Area with far looser ties than the Common Market—was defeated by adamant French opposition. This week in Stockholm, British negotiators will meet with representatives of Scandinavia, Switzerland, Austria and Portugal (the “Other Seven”) in the hope that a “Little Free Trade Area” of their own would force the Common Market Six to come to terms with them. But even some Britons fear that, instead, such a maneuver would only divide Western Europe permanently into two hostile economic camps.

London’s influential Economist recently concluded that British membership in the Common Market would not necessarily involve the great risks that Britain had previously feared—too strong a commitment to European political union, too much of a strain on Commonwealth ties. So far, the Macmillan government shows no sign of coming around to this view—and the Common Market nations themselves, so caught up in all the intricacies of their new opportunities, have no desire to renegotiate everything to bring the British in.

Capturing the Conservatives. What now makes the Common Market more appealing to some Britons—its present lack of supranational goals—should presumably make it unattractive to those who dreamed of a united Europe. In fact, most of them are thoroughly content with cooperative unity. Says Walter Hallstein: .”Perhaps it’s common sense to do it this way because we are dealing with conservative forces.” And by capturing the conservatives, advocates of European unity have destroyed the most effective argument against them—the charge that a man cannot be a good European and a French or German patriot at the same time.

Besides, the original dream is not dead; it is only seen to be more evolutionary, just as the German nation ultimately emerged out of the North German customs union. And even such an ardent supranationalist as Monnet is now inclined to believe that a European federation, if it comes, will spring from a gradual change in the habits, tastes and prejudices of Europe’s peoples. It no longer takes the huffing of a Stalin or the threats of a Khrushchev to make Western Europeans unite naturally.