The Summer of Europe's Content

Donoratico is a village on the Mediterranean about 140 miles north of Rome. Inland lies the delectable countryside of Tuscany, with its crumbling towers and its long avenues of shady cypresses leading to sienna-brown farmhouses. Near Donoratico is a vacation village run by the Club Mediterranee, the social and commercial phenomenon that has established 47 such villages in Europe and elsewhere. Special trains from Paris and Brussels and luggage-laden cars from a dozen countries arrive each Sunday, disgorging 250 middle-class families and turning the village's 60 acres of pine woods and two miles of beach into a microcosm of the Continent--half French and a third Belgian, with Italians, Dutch, Scandinavians, Swiss, Germans and English making up the rest. After two weeks in this Little Europe, TIME Correspondent John Shaw sent the following account of the Continent's mood at midsummer 1970:

AFTER unpacking, the village vacationers hurry to sign up for riding, tennis, sailing, swimming, fencing, judo, calisthenics, yoga. For the less ambitious there is volleyball, table tennis, bowls, pitching horseshoes or just walking in the woods. Europeans are becoming as serious about le sport as Americans, partly because of what the French call le standing, or status. There is exercise for the mind as well as the muscles. The library is handily placed next to the bar. Every evening there are taped concerts of jazz classics or chamber music, and a pretty Parisienne lectures on painting. Tired tennis players and horsemen and sailors, dressed in bikinis or tennis togs, sarongs or tie-dyed shirts and denims, sprawl beneath the pines, delaying their showers for an hour.

Skeptical Children. To Americans, the atmosphere might suggest a mixture of Tanglewood and a tennis camp. But evidence of the modern U.S. is rare at Donoratico. One wonders if troubled America is becoming remote to comfortable Europeans. Senator Jacob Javits recently criticized some European leaders for thinking small. Europeans remember that the U.S. fell out with De Gaulle because he insisted on thinking big. Europeans have also watched, first critically and now with compassion, the consequences for the U.S. of thinking big in Asia.

Viet Nam, it is clear, is simply a non-issue to many Europeans. America's all too obvious fallibility has led Europeans to think in different ways about the U.S. Once America meant excellence and efficiency to Europeans, and advertisements talked of "American-style" goods. Today, "American" is rarely a phrase of praise. Older Europeans grew up with feelings of gratitude, or at least respect, for an America that had helped liberate and rebuild their countries. Their children are skeptical at best.

Beautiful Boilers. Europeans, it seems, share the yearnings of many Americans for an older America, one they felt they knew and admired. But the Europeans have a comfortable alternative to America's unattainable past: their own present. Two years ago there was anarchy in Paris and invasion in Prague.

This summer Europe feels confident, even contented. Over roast quail and iced white wine at Donoratico, a Belgian engineer from Liege says: "We haven't got a war, we haven't got racial strife, and we're not losing money on the stock market. We're damned lucky." Not that Europe is without problems. There was talk here of pollution, obsolete schools, traffic, the cost of living. But these all look soluble. They are not issues tearing the national fabric--not yet, anyway. To the relatively well-off vacationers at Donoratico, the Europe of the '70s seems rather like the unanxious America of the '50s. Prosperity, leisure, the enjoyment of things, a touch of hedonism, are by no means universal in Europe. But they are more common than they have ever been. Fears that America would make Eu rope over in its own image are declining. Europeans have decided to be themselves, not some sort of Americans. But U.S. influence continues to spread, particularly in the form of economic inroads. A Frenchman told me after tennis that he worked for the European branch of a U.S. firm. "Good company," I said blandly. He snapped: "No, it's not. I hate it. The Americans don't take any notice of us." Serious French, Italian and German newspapers regularly run articles warning against diluting their languages with transatlanticisms. But now that the U.S. is seen as something less than ideal--which was always more of a European misconception than an American assertion--Europeans are left with their own standards and solutions. Perhaps part of the truth is that Europe has become enough like America to reduce the mystique, to shrink the image of the American colossus to more realistic proportions.

Europeans are talking about Europe, about the Common Market, about whether the Six will become the Ten, about whether Mr. Heath's Britain will become European. Much of the talk is about les Anglais, little about gli Americani. The high school girl whose elder sister asked, "Aimez-vous Brahms?" now asks, "Aimez-vous les Beatles?" A French manufacturer of boilers says: "We need them to help against the Americans. The British, they are clever. They make such beautiful boilers."

Who Needs It? If the U.S. has lost much of its magnetism for Europeans, has it also lost its pull for Americans in Europe? There may be another Lost Generation of Americans in the making.

Some parents--diplomats, businessmen, scholars--are increasingly reluctant to send their college-age sons and daughters back to the U.S. "Race riots, campus riots, drugs--who needs it?" asks a Geneva-based American businessman. He is looking for college places for his daughters in England. At the vacation village, two of the moniteurs who supervise children were daughters of a Bonn-based American economist. One starts this fall at the University of Madrid. Her sister plans to go next year to the University of Sussex.

For a quarter of a century, the U.S. nuclear shield has helped to keep Europe free of major conflict. Europeans may now question whether the U.S. can be depended upon in the event of another war. But few members of the older generation doubt that the American commitment to Europe's future, as symbolized by the Marshall Plan and NATO, helped push the Continent toward its current prosperity.

Having avoided war for 25 years, having no economic and social problems that do not seem solvable, and having cut all but vestigial commitments to fight in foreign mud, the Europeans are in better national health than the Americans. Flexing those healthy muscles in the sun at Donoratico and elsewhere across their vacationing continent, Europeans in the summer of 1970 can with some justification feel fortunate. The devil with thinking big, Senator Javits. Anyone for a sail?

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