THE NATIONS: Integration

Everybody was talking integration. In Paris, ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman had urgently warned Western Europe that it must take steps to integrate its separate economies (TIME, Nov. 7). Barely had Hoffman returned to the U.S., when Secretary of State Dean Acheson took off for Paris. For two days this week he would confer with Britain’s Ernest Bevin and France’s Robert Schuman on various problems of Western policy, including dismantling of German industries. But Washington let it be known that the matter of Western European unity was uppermost in the Secretary’s mind.

A little bewildered by the fervor with which the U.S. demanded that they must forthwith be one big happy family, West Europeans busied themselves with projects dedicated to unity, but the projects did not get very far.

The Magic of Action. In Paris for three days, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe met to discuss the recommendations which the Council’s Assembly had sent up last summer (TIME, Aug. 15 et seq.). By unanimous vote, the ministers approved the admission of the West German Republic and the Saar territory to the Council as an “associate member.” But on almost every other question the ministers passed the buck to U.N., to OEEC and other organizations.

In the economic field, there was scarcely more progress. Responding to Paul Hoffman’s plea, OEEC produced a resolution calling for the elimination of import quotas by Dec. 15 on half of Western Europe’s private trade (this would leave out a large volume of trade carried on by governments). Paul Hoffman made it clear that this measure had not gone very far to satisfy him. “There is no magic in words . . . the magic lies only in action,” he said. “If there is a failure to act … we may have a new kind of dark age in the world.”

Britain’s Sir Stafford Cripps last week declared flatly that Britain could not integrate her economy with Europe’s “in any manner that would prejudice” Britain’s responsibilities toward the Commonwealth and the sterling area. In plain English, Cripps was saying “count me out” to any further plans for economic union.

Meanwhile, French Finance Minister Maurice Petsche was sponsoring the idea of “regional integration.” So far, after more than two years of fiddling with the project, the Benelux countries still had no coordinated monetary policy, encountered rough going toward economic union, largely because The Netherlands’ economy is geared more closely to Britain’s than to those of her continental allies. Now Petsche was plugging a new regional grouping, to be known as Fritalux, i.e., France, Italy and Benelux. Object: monetary union.

No Magic In Union. In the U.S. a belief was growing that 1) all of West Europe’s economic ills would cease overnight if integration could be brought about; 2) what held up integration was the cussed stubbornness and shortsightedness of European politicians. The view did not fit the complicated realities of the case.

European leaders, stubborn and shortsighted though many of them may be, believe that the U.S. does not know what it is really asking when it presses for integration. They argue correctly that integration—even in easy stages—would cause a serious crisis in Western Europe before it could start doing any good.

Industrialists soundly fear that more efficient competitors in other countries would put them out of business if trade barriers were lifted. Economists are afraid that the dislocations necessary to attain the long-range objective of integration would interfere with Western Europe’s urgent short-range objective of earning more dollars. Politicians are afraid that economic hardships would give the Communists a chance to recapture lost ground. Said London’s Economist last week: “[It] is not possible … to telescope into one great act of policy a process which took over three generations to complete in the preindustrial United States.”

The U.S. was relearning a lesson of its own history: to unite is never so simple as it sounds.