Europe: Then Will It Live . . .

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Common Market countries were bikini-bronzed girls and tousle-haired boys, members of the new, low-budget international set that motor-scoots and camps with blithe disregard of frontiers—which are often posted with neat new signs proclaiming, "Another Border But Still Europe." And some 1,150 schoolchildren from a dozen nations were enrolled in Brussels' Common Market European high school—multilingual, intercultural, stocked with history texts that are no longer patriotic tracts but tell both sides of such old, bitter feuds as the Franco-Prussian War.

Uncommon Development. Europe today is a tangled skein of alliances and associations, knitting the nations together for everything from the defense of the free world (NATO) to the telecasting of the Scots Guards into the homes of Athenians and Ankarans (EUROVISION), and the exchange of trade (EFTA), aid (OECD). and commemorative postage stamps (CEPT). Some of these organizations are not radically different from the old familiar alliances that the European nations have always found it convenient to form in times of relative peace. The drastic new departure that galvanizes all the others is the six-nation Common Market, comprising France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands.

Conceived by Jean Monnet and in force for 3½ years, the Common Market aims to eliminate trade barriers among the six countries—and ultimately to integrate their economies. In basic economic theory, it is as old as Adam Smith, as familiar as the United States—the world's largest common market. It aims at free trade within the largest possible area, enabling industries to cut costs, labor to specialize, capital to move freely where needed in a mass market—to the economic benefit of producer, worker and consumer. But set against Europe's age-old rivalries and stubborn economic nationalism, in which trade barriers used to be as fanatically guarded as national borders, the Common Market is an astonishingly uncommon development.

Dream of Order. Like many revolutionary ideas, united Europe is not a new notion but an old one revived. The dream of order and unity once embodied in the Rome of the Caesars lived on through the Middle Ages, not only in the Roman Catholic Church but in that embattled but strangely viable anachronism, the Holy Roman Empire. Even after it disintegrated, and the last remnants of feudal internationalism gave way to popular nationalism, the European idea remained; and even if Europeans themselves at times forgot it, the rest of the world could not. For most of 2,000 years the culture, commerce and conquests of the peoples of Western Europe shaped the world's destinies. European traders and explorers knit the world, European armies subdued it, European adventurers settled it, European lawgivers pacified it, European artists and philosophers remade its esthetic norms. European artisans launched the Industrial Revolution, and European capital carried it to the ends of the earth.

But as Europe's influence grew, so did the scale of its conflicts, and at the end of the second World War, Europe lay prostrate between the new giants in world affairs, the U.S. and Soviet Russia. Precisely because the old Europe seemed irrevocably dead, a great hope arose that a truly new Europe might be possible at last. In the immediate postwar years,