Europe: Then Will It Live . . .

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The New Civil Servant. The shape of a United Europe is already evident in the institutions of the Common Market. The cerebral cortex is housed in a new concrete-and-steel nine-story building on Brussel's appropriately named Avenue de la Joyeuse Entrée. Here the European Commission, a nine-man executive, plots the grand strategy and supervises the daily details of the Common Market's operation.

The only national check on the commission's decisions reposes in the Common Market's Council of Ministers—one from each of the Six. But it is a limited check at best. The council cannot initiate proposals to the commission, only pass on the commission's proposals to it—and it can modify them only by a unanimous vote. The commission usually prevails. In addition, the Six have also established a seven-man Court of Justice, which arbitrates technical disputes. The Six have set up a 142-member Parliament that meets periodically in Strasbourg, consists of parliamentarians elected by and from the members' national legislatures. But the Treaty of Rome stipulates that in time the representatives are to be elected by direct vote of the Community's populations. Though their work is often highly technical, the men who run the Common Market seldom forget ultimate purpose: "Make no mistake about it," says the European Commission's president, German Economist Walter Hallstein, "we are not in business, we are in politics. We are building the United States of Europe."

In the process, the Common Market has developed a new prototype of the European civil servant. The members of the Common Market executive and their staff drive cars marked with special European license plates, send their children to the European high school, and, except for accents, have lost many of their national traits or concerns. Of all these new civil servants, still the most tireless at 72 is Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet, the most dedicated international ist of them all—although at the same time he remains as thoroughly French as Cognac, the town of his birth.

Primitive Pooling. Monnet's tough peasant heritage is stamped in his broad face and his short, stocky, muscular body. His paternal grandfather, a farmer-mayor of Cognac, lived to the age of 102. Jean Monnet's mother lived to be 87, his father, Jean Gabriel, to 83. A staunch conservative. Jean Gabriel used to warn young Jean that "every new idea is bound to be a bad idea." There is no evidence that Jean paid any attention.

Jean Gabriel Monnet founded the brandy firm of J. G. Monnet & Co., groomed Jean and his brother Gaston to be his international salesmen. There was to be no nonsense of a university education for his sons. And in the local Cognac high school, Jean showed little intellectual promise anyway: he had, and still has, a poor memory, and floundered in the rote system of French instruction. At 18, Jean was sent off to Canada to peddle brandy in the raw Canadian boom towns of 1906 such as Calgary, Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat. He was pleasantly surprised by the absence of class barriers and the ingrained suspicions that so characterized the European mentality. One day in Calgary, while looking for a horse and buggy to rent, he came across a stranger hitching up his horse. When Monnet asked him the whereabouts of a livery stable, the man