Here Comes the "European Idea"

ONE of the most-quoted remarks of the ubiquitous Henry Kissinger was that 1973 was to be "the Year of Europe." Americans may not see it that way, but Europeans certainly do. Not since the turbulent transition from shooting war to cold war 25 years ago has Europe found itself at the center of so many different currents of change.

Some of those currents flow from the two superpowers who have guided Europe's destiny since the end of World War II. With Viet Nam out of the way at last, a measured American recessional resumes with negotiations on trade and troop reductions that may well have a profound--and perhaps traumatic --effect on both Western European prosperity and security. At the same time, the old U.S.European "Atlantic community" is rapidly evolving into a spirited international rivalry. While the U.S. obviously remains vastly stronger, and Western Europe is still far from a unified world power, the new sense of rivalry is real, not only in trade, but in less tangible matters, including the nature of progress and the good life.

The U.S.S.R., meanwhile, is seeking to revise its own relationship with Europe. Striking a benign new posture to match their talk of detente, the Russians hope to achieve their longstanding goal of a pivotal role in the affairs of Western Europe--a role that they have not been able to win simply through the presence of 31 divisions in Central and Eastern Europe.

The Europeans, for their part, are generating powerful currents of their own. The dissatisfaction of East bloc nations--colonies in the world's last great empire--with the halting pace of their economic progress was one factor that impelled the Soviets to seek a new accommodation with the West. Perhaps wishfully, many Eastern Europeans now look forward to a period of gradually increased economic and human ties with the prospering West.

It is the West, though, that seems likely to make the most out of Europe's year. The British, after so many years of trying, have not just joined the European Economic Community; they are shaking it up and acting as if "they think they've invented it," in the words of

France's Jean Monnet, spiritual godfather of the EEC. In a way they have. With the expansion of the Common Market from six to nine members--and, more important, the breaking of the French-German deadlock that paralyzed it through the De Gaulle era--Europe now seems at what Italian Author Altiero Spinelli describes as "the brink of a moment of creative tension."

But creating what? Historian Arnold Toynbee finds that "a real beginning of fusion" is under way, raising the prospect of the first genuinely European era since the early 16th century of Erasmus and St. Thomas More, when Latin-speaking scholars could still wan der freely over a continent that had not yet been divided by the Reformation, the first stirrings of nationalism and embryonic dreams of empire. On the eve of Prime Minister Edward Heath's talks with West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in Bonn last week, the normally restrained London Times not only praised Brandt's "moral authority" and transnational appeal, but even suggested that if European integration were further along, it would be "almost in conceivable that he would not be elected President of Europe."

Viewed from a greater distance than London, Europe's forward march seems more ambiguous. The central fact of the early '70s in the West may well be that "the European idea" has finally won general acceptance, as Italy's Spinelli argues. Nonetheless, that idea is still perceived in different and often contradictory ways by Europe's eager men of commerce, its wary, jealous politicians, its skeptical workingmen and its restless, tribal minorities (see story page 36).

However uncertain the prospects of real unity may still be, Europe is clearly groping toward some new equilibrium, as yet undefined. For the first time in Europe's modern history, none of its nations sees war as a means to achieve its diplomatic ends. Except for a minority of long-memoried emigres, the West has long since ceased to worry about liberating "the captive nations" of Eastern Europe. Communist leaders no longer speak--publicly, at least --of "burying" the West. It seems at least plausible that Europe's 28-year peace could well last through the close of the 20th century.

The reason is not simply that Europeans are exhausted after two devastating wars in a half-century. Increasingly, they are finding their future in a Europe where national frontiers are demarcation lines rather than barriers. Unrestricted travel, of course, is still a rare luxury for Eastern Europeans.

But in Western Europe, the 20th century versions of the Renaissance wandering scholars can be found any morning, boarding Caravelles or Boeing 727s at Munich or Orly, Heathrow or Schiphol. These are the dark-suited businessmen and technocrats, many in their late 30s or early 40s, who serve the border-hopping new multinational corporations. Clutching identical document cases, conversing in any one of several languages--including English, the new Europe's universal medium--these passengers are often indistinguishable by nationality even when they reach for the newspapers being passed around by stewardesses.

A source of emigrants in the past, Western Europe has itself become a pole of attraction for other peoples. Yugoslavs and Turks swarm to factory jobs in West Germany; Portuguese and Spaniards looking for work in France crowd beside tens of thousands of North Africans in bidonvilles outside Paris. Switzerland's 5.5 million ethnic Germans, French and Italians fret about the nearly 1,000,000 "foreigners" who have taken up permanent residence in their cities. During the Fascist period, an Italian had to have a permit to leave his farm to visit the nearest city. Today, ordinary Italians are among Europe's most eager and acquisitive tourists. The ideas they bring home from their travels--abortion and Women's Lib are the latest subjects of fascination and controversy--are slowly, if not smoothly, finding their way into Italian life and law.

Yet the "European adventure" is still a paradox. To most Europeans, reports TIME'S Chief European Correspondent William Rademaekers, "this is not a period of expanding opportunities but of sinking horizons. The very predictability of Europe's fu ture has led to a certain deep malaise within its societies. Europe has lived on a steady diet of nationalism and imperialism for most of its recorded his tory, and that diet opened careers be yond the wildest imagination of this modest age. But now there are no men on horseback, no new ideologies, no great ideas. Unity? Europeans are--or think they are--being asked to give up their separateness, the customs and habits that not only make them different but proud of the difference. And for what? That is still tragically un clear. The faceless men who now plot and plan a European future talk about butter and currency rates and customs duties, not blood and sweat. That is hardly the stuff to fire the imagination."

Many nations, moreover, are shrunken relics of what they once were. Without the Congo, Belgium is only a way station between Germany and France. Without Indonesia, the Dutch find their "swamp" delta uncomfortably confining. The headlong charge of Edward Heath's bowler-hatted Tory envoys across the Channel is only one of several telling indications of a general European identity crisis. "It is not talked about," says one Labor Party leader, "but one of the strands that brought us into Europe was neoimperialism: 'We've lost an empire, so we'll run Europe, my dear sir.' "

But having lost old colonies, Western Europe's nation-states have not created a new communion. Despite detente and 15 years of Common Market experience, Europe, in certain respects, has hardly moved at all. A Spanish laborer may be able to get himself on a factory payroll in Stuttgart, but a French attorney cannot plead in a court in Milan or Rome, and a Danish physician cannot hang out his shingle in Paris or Lyon. The massive inequities in education and income distribution that drove students and workers to the barricades in Paris and Rome in 1968 still persist. Meanwhile, puzzled West European bureaucracies joust uncertainly with newer and even more slippery problems that defy solution by individual countries: overcrowding, environmental pollution, a desiccated sense of the monotony of life, seemingly incurable inflation.

Grip. Would a unified Western Europe be better able to deal with such problems? In Eastern European capitals, the worry is that Moscow will come to think so, and react to the emergence of a united, successful West by tightening its grip on the bloc. "So you see," explains one Hungarian official, "we're caught in the middle--between the Soviets' perpetual fear of capitalist powers aligning against them and the West Europeans' aspirations for union."

Actually, the depth of those aspirations is open to question. Much as they talk about unity, the men in power in Europe's central governments are understandably reluctant to yield national sovereignty, as witness the jealousies that flared during last month's monetary crisis. Many other Europeans are not sold on unification either. For some of the same reasons that they are no longer lured by the American example, young Europeans are turned off by the prospect of a united Europe. They see it as an economic abstraction, designed mainly to serve the needs of the multinationals. As it does to millions of ordinary Italians and Frenchmen, the Common Market so far means little more to millions of ordinary Britons than higher food prices and the mammoth trucks known as "Continental juggernauts" that shatter the peace of quiet country towns--a rude sample, they worry, of other horrors to come.

"If you say 'federal,' " laments Lord Gladwyn, a member of Britain's delegation to the European Parliament at Strasbourg, "they think you are going to abolish the Queen. If you say 'supranational,' they think a French gendarme is going to hit them over the head. Eventually, if prices do not rise too much, if there is not great unemployment, if there hasn't been an invasion of Italians raping all the women, then people will simply accept it."

Even if they do accept it, and even if the Nine achieve their next goal of a monetary union by 1980, Europe will still be a long way from the political union that Jean Monnet and his fellow prophets of the new Europe envisioned in the 1950s. It is a commonplace by now that Europe's 19th century nation-states are simply too small for the scale of modern commerce, as the uncertain flight of the Concorde shows. So far, they are being asked to pull together only enough to deal with a limited range of needs: to organize monetary stability, to control multinational corporations, to counter Japanese competition, to have a louder voice in the new multi-polar world. What might Europe expect beyond these narrow economic assignments? The seers disagree.

Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, Ukranian-born director of Geneva's respected Center of Industrial Studies and a convinced European, argues that the flow toward unification is "irreversible." The Common Market may turn out not to be the main instrument of unity, he concedes. Other concerns, particularly the environment, will have a role in forcing the Europeans to make common cause. Eventually, Hawrylyshyn predicts, Western Europe might evolve into "a loose federation along, let's say, the Swiss pattern." NATO will fade; Eastern Europe and the West "will draw closer together, but remain on different wave lengths."

Others argue that there is nothing predestined about the European adventure. Political unity? If that is to be added to the present economic goals, says Richard Mayne, one of Britain's most eloquent Europeanists, then "we have to rethink the idea of Europe." Italy's Spinelli emphasizes the crucial role of the men at the top. Depending on the perceptions of its leaders, he believes, Europe could just as easily return to crude nationalism, or seek unity and security in some other "system of vaster and more diverse dimensions."

The safe prediction is that bloc politics will continue, on both sides of the old Iron Curtain. Western Europe will continue on its present track: toward a fairly sophisticated economic federation, but probably well short of a situation in which a Liverpool docker, say, or a Turin auto worker would actually have to ponder, as he steps into a voting booth, whether Willy Brandt would indeed make a good President of Europe.

That may not be enough to please the new Europe's more ardent advocates. But given the Continent's past --its dreadful wars, its fierce rivalries --the arrival of "the European idea" is unquestionably one of the signal events of the decade.

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