A Little More Real?

When Aristide Briand proposed a "United States of Europe" to the League of Nations Assembly in September, 1929, he knew and his audience knew that no such plan would be adopted. The intense nationalism that blocked European federation went right on growing until, just ten years later, World War II began.

Last week Winston Churchill amid a five-day fete of welcome at The Hague made a proposal similar to Briand's. Said Churchill: "We hope that the Western democracies of Europe will draw together in ever closer amity and ever closer association. . . . This ... if found wise, should be pressed from many angles with the utmost perseverance. I see no reason why, under the guardianship of a world organization, there should not ultimately arise the United States of Europe, both of the East and of the West, which will unify this continent in a manner never known since the fall of the Roman Empire and within which all its people may dwell together in prosperity, in justice and in peace."

Was Europe any more ready for Churchill's federation than it had been for Briand's?

Freedom and Hunger. Certainly the sentiment of nationalism had not waned. But some new facts and forces were working in the direction of European unity. In every European country social and political struggles were in progress, but these struggles did not greatly differ from, nation to nation. Basic issues everywhere fell into the same pattern, all turning on the contest between those who sought security even if they had to give up freedom, and those who thought that, in the long run, the security of the individual would only be possible if freedom was retained.

In Briand's day, the economic argument for European federation was one of the strongest; since then its cogency had increased. Seventeen years ago economists knew that the European level of life was held down by the division of Europe into tiny fractions. In 1946, plain men everywhere knew it. Unless the standard of life in Europe rose, European civilization would not be possible. Anyone who doubted that could look at Europe's diet statistics, or, better, at such typically present-day European scenes as took place daily in Italy. As U.S. Army trucks carry garbage to dumps, Italians on bicycles fall in behind. When a truck stops, they swarm over it, snatching its scraps (see cut).

Churchill's European federation--even a federation of the West without the East --was not a matter of tomorrow or the day after; but perhaps the grisly necessities of life in Europe in 1946 made Churchill's dream a little more real than Briand's.

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