Europe: Then Will It Live . . .

EUROPE

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What does it matter whether two nations are separated by rivers or mountains, or that they speak different idioms? Europe is but one province of the world: when we make war, we make civil war. I should have liked to have made of these peoples one single and uniform national body.

—Napoleon

There lives today near Paris an ascetic, unobtrusive Frenchman who may ultimately succeed where others, from Charlemagne to Napoleon, ultimately failed. He commands no armies or popular following, but his work is worth uncounted divisions to the West. He has neither title nor portfolio, but he has privileged access to every chancellery of Western Europe. He has no formal higher education, but the world's most brilliant economists regard him as their peer. He has never joined a political party, but parliamentarians across Europe flock to his summons. His name is Jean Monnet, and he is the practical apostle of European unity whose new. growing organizations—notably the Common Market—are remaking the scarred old face of Europe and changing the balance of power throughout the world.

Scarcely a decade after a war-ravaged Europe seemed hopelessly dependent on U.S. dole, a revitalized Continent is going through the greatest boom in its history, excelling Soviet progress, matching and even competing with U.S. economic power. At a time when the U.N. is in disarray and U.S. policymakers are looking to other institutions and communities for strength, such institutions and such a community are developing in Europe. At a time when so much heed is paid to the "new" nations, with all their bursting little new nationalisms, it is Europe's old nations, relaxing nationalist feuds, which are forming a fresh center of strength for Western civilization.

Revolutionary Cooperation. In Brussels last week, the Common Market's Council of Ministers took another huge step forward when it accepted Britain's bid for membership and set the first negotiating sessions for next week. At the risk of jettisoning deep-rooted ties with the Commonwealth, Britain had finally decided that her own and the West's future lay in European unity, by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's ponderous admission: "The plain fact is that the formation and development of the Community has created, economically and politically, a situation to which we are compelled to react."

What attracts the British, almost irresistibly, can be seen all over Europe. Everywhere, the quarrelsome Continent is caught up in a quiet revolution of cooperation. On a busy Turin street corner, a pretty Dutch policewoman expertly directs traffic. In Florence, work is in progress on the University of Europe, financed by six nations and scheduled to open its doors in 1962. A Bonn delicatessen owner makes his twice-weekly trip to Belgium to buy vegetables for his newly finicky customers and grumbles: ''They won't buy German vegetables any more, even when they're cheaper." Looking toward outer space, Britain, France and West Germany are establishing a $200 million project to build a European rocket. Deep beneath the Alps, workmen are blasting an auto tunnel under Mont Blanc; when it is completed next year, Paris and Rome will be 124 miles closer by car.

Meanwhile, back from a summer of skimming with passportless ease all over the