POLITICAL COMMENTARY VICTOR MONTAGU
Three years ago Dr Kiesinger, then West German Chancellor, said on Panorama that Britain was a Conservative country. He was of course entirely right. We are a country which conserves its historical memories. The most potent of these is that Europe has been the source of all our conflicts and all our troubles since the dawn of history. So far as the wider world is concerned, it has been the antagonism of Europe's dynasties and regimes, and not our alliances with them, which caused the Royal Navy to steam down the Channel and out into the oceans, giving us world influence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. M Pompidou quoted Sir Winston Churchill the other day in saying that if he had to choose between Europe and the open sea, he would choose the open sea. All English history is in that phrase. Geographically we cannot avoid being part of Europe, but emotionally, spiritually and traditionally — as de Gaulle himself said — we are not part of it. Churchill has used a telling phrase of which one is sensitive even today; writing about our relations with France the last time we were ruled in common, he said that our association "groped and scraped into every reach of English life, moulding and fretting the shape of English society and institutions." I can see that happening again.
In general we have entered Europe •in the past in order to dispose of a particular piece of malevolence against us. We have never succeeded in entering Europe in order to stay in it, and consolidate it. The power of Henry II in France died with him: and that of Henry V survived him a bare thirty years. We have never been able to enter Europe in order to change it and give it new permanent and peaceful relationships. Personally, I do not see how we can jump out of our skins now and participate in something which all history has taught us is futile. The massive Liberal soft centre in this country which has done so much harm to us in the last twenty-five years, will of course say that the H-bomb has changed all this. But the existence of the H-bomb does not render unnecessary frontiers between nation-states. What the H-bomb does is to guarantee that there will be no large-scale fighting between nation-states ever again, no major conventional wars on the scales of 1914 and 1939.
Of course Europe is changing — we are all changing a little bit — under the impact of rapid communications and elaborate facilities for tourism. Britain's relations with Europe, for that reason amongst others, are better than they have been for years. Communications and travel facilities soften the bounds of nationalities for these people who communicate and travel, as hundreds of thousands of people all over Europe increasingly do. Nevertheless, the people who travel all the time on business are a very minor fraction of the population. The bulk of the travel is done by holiday-makers, and only for a fortnight or at most a month in the year. The rest of the time they sit permanently in their home setting absorbing their national cultures. Democratic leaders must take account of this — they cannot, like potentates of the past, make dynastic unions of countries or, like Nasserite dictators of the present, join an Egypt instantly with a Syria or a Yemen. If large populations want to live peacefully at home behind their frontiers within a traditional setting, they will do so, and their statesmen must arrange for this. I cannot see what is wrong with the independent nation-states of Europe, and why we have to make an omelette out of them, and break all their precious eggs. Indeed for once the eggs in the shells are better than the omelette, if we are discussing Europe and not cooking! The different qualities of living, the configuration of towns and countryside, the different nations' arts and cultures, make a glittering and fascinating kaleidoscope, thus increasing the sheer pleasure there is in travel to discern the differences.
Conservatives are, or ought to be, content with this, but Liberals are never happy with any situation, even if it is peaceful. There is in the Liberal mind a perpetual surge towards changes and merger, in business towards super-companies, in politics towards supra-nationalism. Let us imagine the state in which we might arrive if all the governments of Europe began to eliminate their frontiers so that at some time in the lives of the younger generation there would be a federal structure of Europe with a single government and parliament. Now it would be impossible to suppose that Russia would become part of it unless she lost the whole of Siberia to the Chinese. It would be impossible to suppose that Britain would become part of it unless she completely dissolved the Commonwealth, withdrew all her forces from positions all over the world, and cut her ties of language, trade and investment with the US. There would also be grave difficulties in engineering the break in South-East Europe — for example where would the line be drawn in Turkey, Persia, and the Arab states?
Pro-Europeans like Sir Tufton Beamish seem obsessed with the idea that the Hbomb is not enough to guarantee the peace, and that to avoid another GermanFrench or Anglo-German or Anglo-French confrontation, we must all get jolly maty inside an ultimately federated structure. The danger is precisely the opposite from what Sir Tufton and his friends believe. It is the danger of hideous tensions being set IV within a federated Europe by the uneasy state of the union. This is in fact the experience of the world since the end of the last war. Every time an American Liberal dreams in public of creating one world, another strident nation-state is born and -added to the quarrelsome United Nations. Every time Lord Gladwyn says that Britain must immediately become part of Europe there is a report in the papers of vehement claims for separatism of some sort — in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. Indeed the situation in Northern Ireland, grave as it is, cannot be compared in frightfulness to what has happened in Nigeria and what is now happening in Pakistan. The pains of parturition are the greatest of all : and wars of partition can be just as horrible as wars of aggression across frontiers. It is quite interesting to note that it was the Anglo-American theme of 1945, for which incidentally our serving men fought and died, not to unify Europe — but to set up again its old historic nationalities. I firmly believe that any concerted attempt to do away with these nation-states by grandiose schemes of federation, so far from unifying Europe, will result in its disintegration. • The best theme for statesmanship at all times and in any part of the world is "leave what is at peace alone." Or, in the words of Lord Falkland in the seventeenth century, "when it is not necessary to change it is necessary not to change.', Europe is a dangerous place to meddle with. Remember it was a bull that Europa rode, and not a sheep. The sheepish, the woebegone and the starry-eyed who want to conduct a permanent love-in in Europe, are likely to be overborne by her ferocity. History teaches us just that.
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