Foreign News: Exit the Supranationalist

On his 66th birthday, Jean Monnet took his morning stroll through the woods near his home in Luxembourg. His mind was made up. Next day, the cheery-cheeked little Frenchman who is president of the six-nation European Coal-Steel Community stood before its governors and announced his resignation. "In order to participate more freely in the realization of European unity, I shall take back my liberty," Monnet said. He was still the practicing optimist, yet not all his brave words could hide the fact that the man who was known in 1952-53 as "Mr-Europe" no longer felt at home in the changed atmosphere of Europe 1954.

Contagious Enthusiasm. In his bustling life, Monnet, the son of a brandymaker in the French town of Cognac, has sold bonds on Wall Street, peddled wine to fur trappers of Hudson Bay, liquidated a Swedish match company and rebuilt a Chinese railroad, served in wartime Washington as a British diplomat (his passport was specially endorsed by "Winston S. Churchill"). But his finest hour came in 1950, when he persuaded French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman to propose the supranational coal-steel pool. "The pooling of coal and steel is but a beginning," Monnet argued. "The union of the peoples of Europe is the end."

Out of Monnet's contagious enthusiasm grew the great crusade for Europe, which France's Schuman, Germany's Adenauer and Italy's late great De Gasperi led and fought for. Said one of Monnet's admirers: "If he were put under an anesthetic, he would still keep repeating, 'We've got to create Europe,' as they wheeled him into the operating room."

New Pragmatism. It was Monnet's conviction that once Germany and France interlocked their coal and steel industries, they could never make war on each other. The rest would follow: first the European army, then the European political community. France's rejection of the EDC proposals spoiled all that. "The Coal-Steel Community," wrote Le Monde of Paris last week, "is the foundation stone of a building that no one is any longer in any hurry to put up."

Monnet's vision was of a Europe in which nations would progressively sacrifice chunks of their sovereignty for the common good. Pierre Mendès-France, France's new man of the hour, has substituted a tougher, harder-bargaining diplomacy in which nations make accommodations and pacts with one another, but jealously cling to their sovereign authority. In this he has the powerful support of the British Foreign Office, which instinctively prefers the more pragmatic, national approach. At the London Conference, the new pragmatism paid off triumphantly in the seven-nation Western European Union.

But many a "good European" mourns a lost ideal. Germany's Konrad Adenauer, fearing what he calls "the reviving game of European national states," has felt compelled to go along. But to the Benelux foreign ministers he said privately: "I am 100% convinced that the German national army that Mendès-France forces upon us will become a big danger for Germany and for Europe . . . My God, I don't know what my successors will do if they are left to themselves, if they are not bound to Europe."