Europe: Then Will It Live . . .

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Churchill launched his movement for a United Europe, Count Richard Couden-hove-Kalergi, a tireless Pan-Europist from the 1920s, summoned a group of European parliamentarians to discuss political unity, the European Union of Federalists urged Europe to "federate now." and in 1949 most of these groups came together to establish the Council of Europe. Skeptics refused to believe that anything practical would ever come of these idealistic and largely futile efforts. And yet the power of the ideal itself would not fade. Spanish Philosopher Salvador de Madariaga expressed it better than anyone else.

"Above all, we must love Europe," he wrote, "this Europe to whom La Gioconda forever smiles, where Hamlet seeks in thought the mystery of his inaction, where Faust seeks in action comfort for the void of his thought, where Don Juan seeks in women met the woman never found, and Don Quixote, spear in hand, gallops to force reality to rise above itself. This Europe must be born. And she will, when Spaniards will say 'our Chartres,' Englishmen 'our Cracow,' Italians 'our Copenhagen'; when Germans say 'our Bruges,' and step back horror-stricken at the idea of laying murderous hands on it. Then will Europe live, for then it will be that the spirit that leads history will have uttered the creative words: 'Fiat Europa! '"

The Common Cause. One force that, more than any other, put reality behind this poetic vision proved to be Europe's great offspring, the U.S. Americans, seeing Europe from a distance and therefore as a unit, had often been better Europeans than many Europeans. Thus, when the U.S. offered the Marshall Plan in 1947, it shrewdly insisted that the European nations cooperate in estimating their needs and in spending the funds. OEEC, the multi-nation agency through which Marshall Aid was pumped into Europe, was a crucial example of cooperation. Followed by the NATO alliance, it prepared the way for Jean Monnet's boldly planned Coal and Steel Community, direct forerunner of the Common Market.

By 1950, Europe was well on the recovery road, except for West Germany. Question was, how to rebuild Germany into NATO in a fashion acceptable to France, thrice attacked by German armies in the last hundred years? It was Jean Monnet, then directing France's postwar economic recovery, who found the answer: to pool the coal and steel resources of France and Germany—the Ruhr, the Saar, Lorraine, over which so many Franco-German conflicts had erupted—under a supranational authority.

With few exceptions, the European Coal and Steel Community has proved a huge success. In eight years, steel production in its six member countries (France, Germany, Italy, Benelux) has jumped 100%, to 73 million tons in 1960—nearly equal the U.S. output. The organization has largely eliminated the national taxes on coal and steel production, applied international through rates on coal and steel shipments. It has developed the most advanced social and job-security system in the world for its 1,500,000 workers, who have free movement to jobs anywhere within the six countries, full salary unemployment benefits up to a year. Above all, it has made supranationalism stick; it has independent authority to levy taxes, and the decisions of its nine-man international High Authority are binding on member