A HUGE thing is happening in Europe.
In a star-shaped modern building
called the Berlaymont in Brussels,
a group of founding fathers is hammering
out — a bit uncertainly, a bit clumsily,
but with rising conviction — what is
likely to be the constitution of the coming
United States of Europe. There are
sober grounds for supposing that this may
have as great an effect on the future
history of the world as did the creation
of the United States of America by those
other founding fathers one hundred and
ninety years ago.
As with all really great events, most
of the participants themselves only dimly
realize what is occurring. The mood in
Europe as we enter the last three decades
of this tumultuous twentieth century is
not euphoric, but it is again confident.
In the first sixty years of this century
many of the countries of Western Europe
were losing an empire. Now they are
rediscovering a role in their own continent. There is every reason for supposing
that in these next thirty years the
United States of Europe will be achieving
a very large increase in material prosperity:
that it will quickly follow the
United States of America in attaining
the most productive use of industrial
resources ever secured by man. It remains
to be seen whether Europe will
repeat some of America's mistakes for
the pattern of life in an affluent society.
The kernel of a West European confederation
already exists in the six
countries now joined in the European
Economic Community: the 190 million
people of Germany, France, Italy,
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
In the Treaty of Rome, signed
in March, 1957, these countries declared
their intention of moving during the
nineteen sixties to a "common market"
in which they would levy no tariffs
against each other's goods. They
achieved this objective slightly ahead of
schedule, and ,now their objective for
the nineteen seventies and nineteen
eighties is to move toward a full
economic and monetary union. Once
this union is achieved, member countries
will have a common currency, a
common tax system (with some separate
national taxes, like the separate state
taxes in the USA), pooled foreign
exchange reserves, and free movement of
capital and labor across their diminishing
frontier posts. The free movement of
labor — and, indeed, of all inhabitants
of the new European Community — is
likely to be the clinching point for full
political union. Once it becomes the
ordinary thing for people in Germany
and Britain to move to the Mediterranean
when they retire — and for people leaving
school or university in France or Italy
to consider equally job offers from Paris
or Amsterdam or Glasgow or Milan —
then some sort of central government will
have to be set up for Western Europe.
The big question for the next two decades
may be whether it is going to be a central
government with the right powers.
People at present seek three main
things through and partly from their
governmental systems: peace, prosperity,
and what may be called a more cohesively
gracious form of living together. There
now seems little doubt that the move
toward European unity will advance the
causes of peace and prosperity. That,
indeed, is why the European Economic
Community is almost certain to have
considerably more than its present six
members by the early nineteen eighties.
Applications to join the six have already
been filed by four other European
countries with a present combined
population of over 70 million (Britain,
Norway, Denmark, Ireland). The expectation
is that their initial entry will be
in 1973 and that they will become full
members by 1978. Four more countries
with a combined present population of
30 million (Sweden, Switzerland, Austria.
Portugal) have indicated that they will
want to negotiate free trade terms with
the EEC if it swells from six members
to ten; although some such interim terms
will probably be agreed, the men at
Brussels are likely to set a time limit by
which any new half-members will have
to apply for full membership. Two other
countries with a combined population of
45 million (Greece and Turkey) already
are half-members, with a firm intention
of becoming full members in the early
nineteen eighties, once their economic
development has reached a sufficiently
advanced stage; the 32 million people of
Spain also are expected to join this
category.
If all these countries join, the present
community of six will become a community
of seventeen before the end of
the nineteen eighties, with a population
of well over 400 million people. The
average income per head of these 400
million may continue to be just over half
that of the Americans (who are likely to
IPA Review—July-September, 1971
number about 240 million by 1980), but
it will continue to be much higher than
that of the Russians (who will number
about 280 million in 1980). So cold
logic suggests that these much more
numerous and wealthier West Europeans
should surpass the Russians in both power
and influence and become within the next
two decades the second superpower on
earth.
Where in Europe is the hub of this
huge industrial power likely to develop?
People who know Europe today may
guess that it will be West Germany, whose
modern industry has most successsfully
emulated America's managerial revolution
during the last two decades. But
experience in the USA suggests that there
is not likely to be just one centre of
industrial power in a technologically advancing
continent, and it will be surprising
if the United States of Europe
does not rest on three or four centers
also. Rhineland Germany will clearly
be one of these. Britain should have a
good opportunity to become the new
Europe's financial center, and the
Mediterranean will become Europe's
California as those who work in modern
scientific industries seek sunny living
places. The Paris region will struggle
to remain a fourth focus of power, aided
by the city's long tradition as a cultural
and intellectual center. But that raises
another question: can there be a cultural
center — or even a union — inside a
Tower of Babel?
Some forty different languages are
spoken in the continent, if one includes
small languages like Welsh. Pessimists
fear that people will not move to areas
where language differences will impede
their daily life. But there are some
cheerful pointers on the other side.
First, the last two decades have already
seen a far bigger migration of Italian,
Greek, Turkish, and other foreign
workers to the booming factories of
Germany and France than most people
expected. Secondly, Europe is not new
to the task of managing multilingual confederations.
In Switzerland there are
four official languages, and in Belgium
and Finland two. In the Berlaymont,
business is conducted with extraordinary
expedition with everybody using whichever
of four languages he likes. Moreover,
the problem of communication . is
less serious with the new generation than
with the old. In part, this is because
languages are being taught better in the
schools, especially with the spread of
language laboratories. In even greater
part, it is because the young generation
is so mobile in its free time; most young
Europeans will spend a holiday in other
European countries before they are
twenty-one, and many students take vacation
jobs abroad. This carefree mobility
has another useful consequence as friendships
and marriages across international
frontiers become a cohesive force.
Europe's march toward unity has been
a supreme peacemaking achievement and
one that most people would not have
dared to forecast in 1945. The peoples
of the present six member states of the
European Economic Community — particularly
those of France and Germany —
have already so unified their economies
as to make it virtually impossible that
they will ever go to war with one another
again. This is a dramatic reversal of
more than 2,000 years of history, and
it has come in the nick of time. With
nuclear weapons, another major European
war could presumably have destroyed
the planet It was this realization
that drove the passionate advocates of
European unity to forge the Treaty of
Rome in 1957. The men who paved
the way for that treaty were a dynamic
private pressure group of idealists, master-
minded by an extraordinary Frenchman
called Jean Monnet. More than
any other man of our time, Jean Monnet
delivered us.
IPA Review—July-September, 1971
Building the New Europe (continued)
With Western Europe itself no longer
the threatened cockpit, the danger point
is obviously Western Europe's frontier
with the East. One of the reasons for
the drive to West European unity has
been the realization that the United States
of America is unlikely to keep 300,000
troops in West Europe forever, defending
rich nations which ought to be very well
able to defend themselves. This thought
has also been one of the barriers in the
way of some neutralist European countries
(such as Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria)
joining the community; some of
them have been afraid that a new West
European superpower might eventually
be too hawk-like, or at least (from their
viewpoint) insufficiently dove-like, toward
the Communist East.
This fear, felt by Sweden and others,
should have calmed a great deal in the
past year. The one West European
country which must be unhappy with the
frontiers created by World War II is
divided Germany; but the West German
government, mostly with popular approval
in Germany, is set upon trying to
improve trade and other relations with
the East. There is still hope in Europe
that the growth of consumer societies in
the present Communist bloc will help to
melt the Iron Curtain; and that the proved
advantages of the Western economic
system may lead to a gradual fusion within
one community of a Europe from the
Atlantic to the Urals.
The economic prospects before Western
Europe look almost incredibly good.
Although productivity per man in U.S.
industry is almost twice that in West
European industry, Western Europe has
an increasingly well-educated young labor
force; and the crucial point is that knowledge,
which is transferable between
peoples, has become by far the most
important world economic resource. The
task of observing how the Americans
organize their production, and then
copying them, is not immensely difficult.
In the next thirty years there is every
reason to expect that the American
managerial revolution will spread across
Western Europe and will continue to help
to raise productivity in the old continent
at an accelerating pace. What could
prevent this from happening?
One snag would be if Europe's labor
force remained tied to declining and lowproductivity
industries for various social
reasons. The classic example here is
agriculture. Agricultural policy in the
six countries of the existing European
Economic Community still keeps about
12 per cent of their labor force in agriculture,
although everybody knows that they
could feed themselves if they had only
about 6 per cent there. The proportion
has in fact come down from as much as
25 per cent in 1955, and it will certainly
go on falling. As in other declining industries,
a very large number of those still
on the farms in the six countries are
elderly people — more than half of
EEC's farmers are above the age of fiftyseven.
The community has felt obliged,
as a sort of social service, to keep agricultural
prices high enough to give these
inefficient old farmers a decent income
in their remaining years. And the maintenance
of high agricultural prices has
made it necessary to keep out imports of
cheap foreign food.
This creates a special problem for
Great Britain, which has hitherto imported
cheap food from all the world and
has run down the proportion of its own
labor force in agriculture to a bare 3 per
cent. Once in the EEC, British housewives
will find themselves paying more
for high-priced European food. If some
satisfactory compromise is not reached,
the British may stay out of the EEC
until those elderly farmers die off and
bring Europe's farm population down to
only about 6 per cent of the working
population. But I think the British will
be unlikely to break off negotiations on
this point. British farmers will certainly
IPA Review—July-September, 1971
increase their output as soon as they
receive EEC higher prices; simultaneously,
the structural reforms in which
the EEC is engaged will reduce the army
of redundant farmers.
A main feature of Europe's economic
growth in the last decade and a half has
been the spread of investment there by
big American corporations. These corporations
had various managerial, technological,
and other advantages. In
Europe they saw rising prosperity creating
good local markets. They also saw reasonably
well-educated labor forces drawing
wages below the American average.
They therefore came on over, and that is
how the multinational company has
spread.
Some people foresee a possible check
to this American investment in Europe
because of nationalistic reactions from the
European side. But Europe's fears are
likely to diminish as European industry
itself moves to a continent-wide scale.
The nervousness has been greatest in
countries which have felt that, while contained
within their own national boundaries,
they cannot build up big enough
firms to meet American competition.
For example, in the automobile industry
in Britain today there are three firms
owned by Ford, General Motors, and
Chrysler, plus one English firm, British
Leyland. There probably would be
British government resistance if an
American bid were made for this last
British contender, even if British Leyland
seemed too small to meet world competition.
But once Britain gets into the
EEC, it seems highly likely that there
will be a tie-up between the British company
and some continental motor manufacturer.
Large American multinational firms
operating in Europe in the nineteen seventies
will probably find themselves competing
against an increasing number of
large European multinational firms. This
competition will be healthy for all con-
71
cerned. There will probably be a diminution
of European protectionism against
American investment, because laws about
mergers and take-overs will be codified
on a European basis. Such codification
generally moves policy to the more
liberal end of the spectrum.
It is recognized in Germany, Britain,
and other big industrial countries that
the Americans can bring to Europe the
fruits of the best-tested research and the
best modern managerial techniques. It
would be very silly of Europe to lock
them out; and in economic matters
Europe does not seem likely to be very
silly during the nineteen seventies and
nineteen eighties.
There may still be reason to question
whether Europeans will find a cohesively
gracious form of living together. As
West Europeans gradually attain free
movement of labor across each others'
frontiers — aided by the multinational
corporations with their plants in different
countries — there will be a need for
some unification of criminal law and
sociological policies in a united Europe.
In a Europe where people move freely,
great difficulties will arise if there are
important differences between countries
in the way civil liberties are interpreted;
the way police forces and the judiciary
are run; in the interpretations put on
laws controlling gambling, drug use, or
any other morally controversial activity;
in the level of social security benefits;
in the way universities and the affairs
of cities are managed. It can be argued
that the United States of America has
run into difficulties because of differences
in regulations between separate states;
but the USA has had a tolerably strong
federal government from the beginning.
Now the United States of Europe is being
slowly formed, yet many politicians in
the separate states still pretend that it
will have no need for a central federal
government at all.
At present the embryo government of
the European Economic Community is
a tripod, resting on three legs. One leg
consists of the European Commission,
which means the 5,000 European civil
servants who work in the Berlaymont
building in Brussels. The second leg is
the Council of Ministers, made up of
the external affairs ministers of the member
states who meet regularly in Brussels.
The third leg is the European Parliament,
which consists of nominated members of
parliament of the separate countries who
meet once a month at Strasbourg in
France.
The founding fathers of the European
Economic Community — Jean Monnet
and his devoted disciples — deliberately
set out to make the European Commission
the most important of these three
legs. It is the Commission which makes
the policy proposals for the new Europe.
The Council of Ministers then has to
meet to approve or disapprove these
policy proposals. Because the commission
was created as a forcing house for
ideas, it was from the beginning an
exciting place in which to work. Immediately
after the Treaty of Rome was
signed in 1957, there flowed into this
commission possibly the brightest collection
of young public servants to be found
anywhere in the world.
The next democratic advance in
Europe may be the direct election of
members of the European Parliament,
instead of their 'nomination by the national
parliaments as now. These direct
elections may very well happen before the
end of the nineteen seventies. But it is
doubtful if the European Parliament will
ever become the strongest leg of the
tripod.
In successful parliamentary democracies
in Europe, like Britain and West
Germany, the parties stick together
through thick and thin. In a European
Parliament they would tend to be less
cohesive; just as southern Democrats in
the US often vote differently from northem Democrats, so Italian and British
and German members of a European
Parliament would often vote on regional
or national grounds rather than obeying
a party whip.
For this reason it is almost certain
that the eventual United States of Europe
is going to have to be a presidential
democracy like the USA, not a parliamentary
democracy like Britain. Someday
a president of Europe will be elected by
direct popular vote. He would probably
take up office in Brussels, bringing some
personally chosen members of his administration
with him, but also relying
considerably on the permanent civil
service already in the Berlaymont. Unfortunately,
the politicians of Europe are
not yet ready for a president of Western
Europe. Even optimists like myself
think that it will be twenty or more years
before Europe takes this final step to
political union.
In the meantime, economic and
monetary union is going to come; and in
the process this newfound Western Europe
is likely to mark up some extraordinary
economic and industrial advances.
Twenty-two years ago, when Jean
Monnet was beginning to found his
European movement, Winston Churchill
came to a congress at The Hague and
made one of his most memorable
speeches:
"We must proclaim the mission and
design of a United Europe whose moral
conception will win the respect and
gratitude of mankind and whose physical
strength will be such that none will dare
to molest her tranquil way . . . I hope
to see a Europe where men and women
. . . will think as much of being European
as of belonging to their native land, and
wherever they go in this wide domain
will truly feel, 'Here I am at home'."
During the nineteen seventies and
nineteen eighties there is a real prospect
that that sort of Europe may be coming
up through the bud.
