Europe -lost 1960s crossroads of most state continent model of what was possible before networking post-industrial age

[chris macrae]

1960s Golden Oldie- NM: 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