And Take Long Views At home those of us who
talk about the Euro- pean Economic Community and Britain's coming place in it keep our ears as close as we can to the grinding mill of the Brussels negotiations. We are for the moment bogged down by domestic politics in its present phase of inevitable uncer- tainty and uncreative protest. We peer blankly towards the inscrutable mind of the long man across the Channel. We seldom enough stretch ourselves and consider what it is all about. From this distance Americans take the panoramic, the Tolstoyan, view. They have ideas, and they play With them. Day after day I meet people who ex- pound fluently why Britain must for.its own sal- vation (social and psychological as well as economic) go into Europe; why the American economy will eventually integrate with the United European; why it is olso in America's long-term interests that Britain should go into Europe; why the Atlantic Community will eventually develop supranational political institutions to preside over such a super-State of free and creative peoples as would have been unimaginable except to the Wildest and woolliest idealists only a decade or so ago. 'Read the New Yorker, trust in God, and take short views,' said Auden in one of his American poems, allowing his native pragmatism to break through. The first two injunctions are still in order, of course, but not the third. More and more Americans are taking the long view, and since I also happen to think it the right view, this gives me a good deal of pleasure. In the light of this generous enthusiasm and the impa- tient desire to get to and through the hard bar- gaining, our European preoccupations with sovereignty and status and the luxury of sym- bolic private deterrents (which may be comfort- ing to the provincial amour propre but cut no strategic ice) take on a dusty and unnecessarily dangerous aspect. Let's go, echoes the visitor, dazzled by the grand design which has the North Atlantic as a second Mediterranean at its centre.
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