Europe: A Second Renaissance

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On both sides of the Atlantic last week, men paid homage to a renaissance.

"The nations of Western Europe," said President Kennedy on the Fourth of July in Philadelphia, "long divided by feuds far more bitter than any which existed among the 13 colonies, are today joining together, seeking as our forefathers sought, to find freedom in diversity and unity from strength." Echoing Europe's own Jean Monnet, Kennedy called for a "concrete Atlantic partnership" that would help "achieve a world of law and free choice." He looked forward to a "declaration of interdependence . . . between the new union now emerging in Europe and the old American union founded here 175 years ago."

As Kennedy spoke, the two aged leaders of the "new union" held a meeting in Paris that symbolized Europe's revival. Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle decided to press for resumption of talks on Western European unity before the matter of British admission to the Common Market can be settled, but they expressed the hope that Britain would be admitted. Still troubled by all too recent memories of the Boche, Parisians showed only muted enthusiasm for the visitor, but at a state dinner at the Elysée Palace, De Gaulle offered an emotional toast and a special history lesson: "However badly founded were the immediate motives of our wars, however inopportune their execution, however ruinous their results, it was a great cause which was fundamentally at the source of our quarrels. In seeking to impose their domination, Germany and France were in truth pursuing the old dream of unity which for some 20 centuries haunted the souls of our continent."

New Façades. The force that Kennedy saluted and wooed, that De Gaulle contemplated with "joy," and Khrushchev regards with fury is, in fact, a New Europe—proof of the Continent's ability always to find in the ashes of its destruction the foundation for new triumph. After the moral and material devastation of World War II, perhaps the worst since the Black Death, Europe once again rose up with a new façade, new customs, a thriving culture, and a booming new prosperity that has made it the industrial rival of the two great powers. On the following twelve color pages, TIME presents a panorama of this extraordinary rebirth.

Its heart is the Common Market, but it reaches beyond the six countries that presently constitute it. Britain, while not yet a member, shares in the new affluence and in the ever-widening ways of life. A typical incident occurred a few years ago, when a Hollywood movie company went on location near Nottingham to film Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence's somber novel about life in the sooty, poverty-ridden English Midlands. Before the scene could be made to look properly depressing for the camera, the film makers had to go from house to house, asking townspeople to take down their television antennas.