Pulling Apart

Grand dreams of European unity have dimmed in recent years, buffeted by resurgent nationalism. "Integration is like a bicycle," says Walter Hallstein, the former president of the European Economic Community and one of the fervid dreamers. "You either move on or you fall off." Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat, describes the present arrangement of economic partnership without political integration in lustier Italian metaphor. "There is not yet a united Europe. As law scholars would say, the marriage among European countries was not consummated."

British Author Anthony Sampson, who dissected his own country seven years ago, in Anatomy of Britain, has inspected this platonic marriage in an other volume, The New Europeans. Unless radical changes of attitude take place, Sampson believes, European integration has reached its high-water mark. Says he: "Western Europe, shorn of overseas commitments and empires and protected by the American umbrella [of ICBMs] is a continent without a cause. In this situation, its components are very likely to reassert themselves."

Political Cosmonaut. European nationalism seemed to die in the agonies of the most recent war it helped cause. Yet it has become once again the dominant political emotion in Europe. No one has rekindled "la gloire" more assiduously than Charles de Gaulle. When Sampson interviewed Franz Josef Strauss, West Germany's Finance Minister mocked De Gaulle the diplomat as "a cross between Joan of Arc and a political cosmonaut." Yet, as Sampson notes, De Gaulle has "taken full advantage of the glamour of nationalism" as well as the allure of anti-Americanism. For his own lifetime, at least, he has blocked the dream of fellow Frenchman Jean Monnet for a United States of Europe. De Gaulle is by no means Europe's only neo-nationalist leader. Strauss and the West Germans played some of the same tunes of glory recently when they refused to revalue the Deutsche Mark in order to aid the franc.

Economic Reversal. Sociologically as well as politically, Sampson found, Europe's pulls are mainly away from union. Television, for instance, unifies mostly in the sense that more and more Europeans hum the same pop tunes. Newspapers still tend to mirror only their own narrow societies. Nor do Europe's armies of tourists represent the first wave of a new pan-Europeanism. "The obsession of the new mass tourism is not to see a new country but to find two commodities: the sun and the sea." In Sampson's opinion, even the automobile, Europe's latest symbol of liberation and status, provides a chrome-trimmed distraction from serious subjects, including the concept of unity.

Economics was a major factor in drawing Europe closer, but Sampson argues that that has changed. The EEC was conceived after Monnet persuaded Europeans to pool their coal and steel. Coal has now been replaced as an essential fuel by nuclear power, oil or natural gas. As a result, Europeans are rethinking their energy needs in narrow national terms.

In Sampson's opinion, European industry has rejected the lure of unity. Sampson sees Fiat's recent takeover of French Citroen as an exception, not a trend. Intra-European mergers are discouraged by the ancient special relationships between many large companies and their governments or by a maze of outmoded corporate law. More than that, European businessmen still do not really trust one another. Given a choice, they prefer to merge, if at all, with U.S. firms rich in technology and capital and free of old prejudices.

The U.S., contends Sampson, shares the blame for Europe's lagging unity. U.S. postwar policy was based largely on the assumption that there would be an eventual union of Western European nations. Yet the U.S., says Sampson, impedes progress as much as anyone. Americans who live on the Continent make too few efforts to intermingle. Their private lives are clannish ("Frankfurt is the capital of Euro-America"), they are poor linguists, and "their real power, like that of the British in Victorian India, stems from their capacity to animate the natives." NATO could have become the basis of a strong European defense industry, argues Sampson. Instead, it became a profitable market for U.S. fighter planes, rockets and electronic gear.

Though not anti-American, Sampson is upset by the U.S. impact on European tastes and values. As an alternative to American cultural and economic patterns, he feels that Europe must become strong and interrelated enough to shape its own destiny, evolve its own distinctive societies. His plan of action is typically British: admit Britain to the Common Market. Britain's attractions, he says, are trade experience, political stability, a potentially strong industry and "a dowry of research." The British, moreover, could help cope with "the German problem," which is the author's term for a renascent German nationalism that many Europeans dread. All that, of course, is true, and British admission would probably be a good thing. Even so, Sampson may overestimate Britain's ability to alter Europe's basic trend. No longer a world power, plagued by sterling crises and looking ever more inward, today's Britain displays many of the same narrow tendencies that Sampson finds so disheartening in Europe as a whole.

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