Little Europe
The six Foreign Ministers of continental free Europe met in the Hague last week, ostensibly to discuss the institutions of a united Europe. • They there discovered that after four years of talk, not one of them wanted a united Europe if that was to mean a surrender of sovereign powers to a representative European institution. The most they wanted was some institution. which provided a link between, and to some extent a check upon, the activities of the Coal and Steel Pool and the European Army. It is easy for outsiders to say that dreamers have to wake sometime, and that nothing will have been lost but the dream. But the idea of:Europe uniting in a way that would create a common market and a common purpose is something that the separate nations of western Europe can ill do without. It was a kind of 'phoenix from the ashes of the second world war, one sign of renaissance among many signs of decay. There can be no doubt that the blame for the death of this idea, as much as the credit for its birth, must lie with France. The treaty of the European Army contains the following statement of intent: "The final organisation which will replace the present provisional organisation should be so conceived as to be able to constitute one of the elements in a subsequent federal or confederal structure. . . ." But in the French Assembly the other day, M. Bidault defined France's position in a very different way: "It will not be a federation of states, nor a confederation of states but an associa- tion of states of a novel type." It is true that the other countries are now equally re:uctant to enter a more complete kind of union. But, as the Dutch explained at the Hague, the main attraction of union was economic—the access to each other's markets, the free competition with each other's industries. And it is the French economy which is so inefficient that it could not survive such exposure. There is, however, one more hopeful prospect. If united Europe, in the supra-national Sense, is no longer a practical goal, and if the European Army Is no longer an integral part of such a supra-national scheme, the reasons that led Britain to dissociate herself from it have largely disappeared. It is time that Whitehall was honest enough to admit the fact.
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