Toward a Winter of Discontent

Ever since World War II, Western Europe has been struggling, fitfully and sometimes unhappily, toward unity. The latest Middle East war has shown just how tenuous that unity still is. Last week in Copenhagen, the Common Market Foreign Ministers met and agreed on a French-sponsored plan for periodic summit meetings. The first will be held Dec. 14 and 15 in the Danish capital in an atmosphere of unusual intimacy--even the Foreign Ministers will not be allowed into the discussions by the heads of state. Such a format, the Ministers reasoned, will allow their bosses to talk on a few key subjects and, with luck, reach a consensus. TIME's Chief European Correspondent William Rademaekers reports on the new mood of Europe:

After a soft summer and a brilliant fall, this promises to be Europe's cruelest winter of discontent. Like America, Europe has celebrated more than a quarter-century of spiraling conspicuous consumption, and it is not mentally prepared to do without. Cars clog the cities. Lights burn through the night. Parents plan their precious ski holidays around the Christmas vacation, assuming that they can all go on living as they are. But that will not happen. The fourth Arab-Israeli war and its consequences have brought Western Europe to the point of no return.

If necessity, as Jean Monnet insists, is the great federator, then Europe's time has finally come. In fact, it may already be too late. First, there was the profound humiliation of a community of 253 million people, with a gross national product of some $700 billion, reacting like a pitiful, helpless giant in a conflict far more vital to its well-being than to that of the United States or the Soviet Union.

Second, the Europeans were profoundly disturbed by what they thought was American arrogance in demanding that they support U.S. Middle East policy and in calling a military alert without consulting them. The U.S., of course, feels that its allies let it down in the confrontation with the Soviet Union. "The countries that were most consulted proved among the most difficult in their cooperation,"* Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sarcastically noted at his news conference last week. "And those countries that were most cooperative were least consulted." Lack of information was not the point; the Europeans broke ranks because they saw their interests totally differently from the U.S., and that, added Kissinger ominously, would have "profound consequences" for them.

There quickly followed an unseemly scramble to ensure oil deliveries on a purely nationalist basis, an "I'm all right. Jack" attitude that prompted London Times Columnist Bernard Levin to write: "The fact is that nothing in the realms of cowardice, selfishness, cant and shortsighted folly is beyond the bounds of possibility in view of what has actually happened already. The first time--the very first time--that any external strain is put on the Common Market alliance, the ties that bind its members snap. No, they do not snap; the members themselves rush forward to snap them."

The same members are now rushing forward in pursuit of the Grail of European unity. "Europe has been treated like a nonentity," complained French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert in a remarkable turnabout. "Europe has been humiliated by the superpowers..." Willy Brandt, preaching to the converted, promised the European Parliament in Strasbourg: "We can and will create Europe." Ted Heath and Georges Pompidou, meeting at Chequers, exchanged vows of the same sort.

If unity rhetoric could be converted to energy, the Community would undoubtedly be self-sufficient. European diplomats insist that this time the drive toward unity is serious. The Foreign Ministers said in Copenhagen last week that the heads-of-government summit will "lay the groundwork for significant cooperation in matters of foreign policy ..." The problem with these promises is that they have been made before. The summits of '69 and '72 were supposed to lay similar groundwork, but precious little changed.

It can be argued that this time Europe has no choice but unity--what French Political Analyst Raymond Aron calls "the shock treatment." But Aron adds: "The problem with such treatment is that it either cures or kills, and one is not really sure until you try it." The signs this time are somewhat auspicious. When a French Foreign Minister begins mouthing "European" phrases, one can judge the impact of recent events on the time-honored French policy of lonely grandeur.

Quite obviously Pompidou was deeply shocked by France's inability to play a role in the Middle East, despite a carefully cultivated "special relationship" with the Arab world. He is also distrustful of the "collusion" between the superpowers in the Middle East. So, to varying degrees, are other European leaders. Their perceptions of American power have changed dramatically.

French Pride. Europeans feel that detente between Moscow and Washington is a diplomatic way to describe a situation where two states are drawn together by the sheer power they exercise, and their ability to exclude others. They are unhappy with Kissinger's brutal but accurate description of Europe as a minor power with regional interests, while the U.S. is a power with global interests. They are no longer sure of their individual relationships with the U.S., and because of this they are backing into more dependence on each other.

Yet foreign policy for the European nations, as the oil crisis has demonstrated, is still overwhelmingly nationalistic. Even while passionately talking unity, Europeans continue to develop along purely national lines. In the midst of the energy crisis, for example, the French proudly announced that they would build nothing but nuclear power plants for the remainder of this century. The problem is that the French nuclear power system, like its television sets, is incompatible with Britain's or West Germany's.

* Notably Britain and France.

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