"A Better Europe?"

Alive and well today are thousands of young Europeans who would likely have been corpses by now if War II had taken the course of unprecedentedly murderous War I. Meantime, one big plan for Peace II has been shaping up in Anglo-French minds on an unprecedentedly thoughtful and humane pattern. Last week there were signs that the Nazi Government had begun to realize and fear the extent to which millions of Europeans are turning to the Allied formula of ending the war not in victory & defeat but by setting up a more-abundant-life European federation into which any German regime save the Nazis would be welcome. This amounts to inviting a revolution by the German people or a coup d'etat at Berlin, and suddenly at Ankara the Nazi hierarchy tried to outbid the Anglo-French formula of peacefully proffered federation by proffering one of its own, with a sword.

Arriving in Ankara from conferences with Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Ambassador to Turkey, famed Lieut. Colonel Franz von Papen, declared: "It is quite clear what Germany is fighting for. It is to avoid a repetition of the tragedy of Versailles and to build a better Europe. It is to do away once and for all with the necessity of European nations fighting each other twice in a century to establish 'European equilibrium'.... England proposes a European Commonwealth for the future. She had had ample time since the last war to establish it. Now it will be Germany's turn to look after this plan."

In contrast to this political diagram for a European superState, the appeal of the Anglo-French formula (now being bruited by diplomatists and pundits in all European capitals--even in Berlin through secret emissaries) is that it envisions a mainly economic European union.

As it is now taking shape, the Anglo-French peace pattern envisions that hereafter uneconomic duplication of production would cease, industrial specialization by nations would be encouraged, pertinent raw materials would be made available to all, and exploitation of new territories would be mainly carried out by economic organizations like the Suez Canal Co., in which investors of many States participate, instead of by smash-and-grab political tactics like the Italian war to bring "civilization" to Ethiopia.

In Toronto recently Correspondent Hugh S. Watt of the London Daily Telegraph, with the Times the newsorgan closest to the British Government, significantly told Canadians: "I can say on the very best authority that British political circles are thinking in terms of federation after the war. I believe they are ready to give up certain essential elements of sovereignty in order to establish some form of world order."

Chicago Daily News's Helen Kirkpatrick cabled last week from London: "The decisions reached by the Allied Supreme War Council in yesterday's London meeting may mark the beginning of that federalism which many here and in France believe to be the solution of Europe's problems."

Whether anything would come of all the union talk that was going on, at least it showed that big Europeans were able to think lofty socio-economic thoughts--if only in wartime.

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