Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In the European search for security the two dominant aims have been security against a Soviet attack and nuclear war and security against economic collapse such as occurred in the 1930’s and opened the way to Nazism and World War II. The disorganization of Europe in the immediate postwar period allowed the United States to play a dominant role in both of these aims. However, by the later 1950’s, as fear of war and depression subsided, it became possible for Europe to adopt a more independent attitude. At the same time, the personal influence of President de Gaulle gave this new independence anti-American overtones, which, however justified by the general’s personal experiences with incompetent American foreign policies, none the less were injurious to the solidarity and prosperity of Europe.

As long as American influence was dominant, the security of Europe was based primarily on America’s strategic nuclear power, supplemented in an ambiguous way by the fifteen-nation NATO Treaty, which included both the United States and Canada. On the economic side, European prosperity was based, for many years, on American economic aid. Both of these influences were exercised to develop, as an ultimate goal, an integrated western Europe that would include Britain and be closely allied to North America.

As we have already seen, these efforts gradually bogged down in a complicated morass of partly integrated systems on a functional, rather than a federative, basis and by 1965 were stalemated over a number of unresolved inconsistencies of approach. These problems will be analyzed in a moment, but before we do so we should point out that a new Europe is clearly being formed on lines that have little in common with the Europe of prewar days. That earlier Europe was based on the social and ideological patterns of the past, and continued to reflect them, even when the real forces of military and economic technology were creating quite different relationships. Moreover, these older patterns were quite rigid and doctrinaire. In most of Europe they showed sharp, almost irreconcilable, divisions into three political groupings that we might designate as conservative, liberal, and Socialist. These represented, in order, the social forces of the eighteenth century, of the mid-nineteenth century, and of the early twentieth century. The conservatives stood for an alliance of all the forces of the period before the French Revolution of 1789: the agrarian and landed interests, the old nobility and monarchy, the clerical interests, and the old army. The liberals stood for the bourgeois interests of the commercial, financial, and industrial revolutions; they were concerned with maintaining the dominant position of property, were usually rigid supporters of laissez faire, were opposed to influence based on birth or land, were opposed to extension of state authority, and were usually anticlerical and antimilitarist. The Socialists represented the interests and ideas of the working masses of the cities. They were in favor of democracy and individual political equality, and wanted the activities of the state to be extended to regulate economic life for the benefit of the ordinary man. The Socialists were generally opposed to the same social groups and older interests as the liberals, but added to these enemies the bourgeoisie also. In general, these three diverse groupings were rigid, and put more emphasis on the things that divided them than on matters of common concern. Their hatreds were more dominant than their common interests.

These divisions of Europe along lines of selfish interests, old slogans, doctrinaire hatreds, and misconceived rivalries made possible the rise of Fascism and the disasters of World War II. Out of these disasters, in the turmoil and violence of the Resistance, there began to appear the lineaments of a new Europe. This new Europe was much more pragmatic, and thus less doctrinaire; it was much more cooperative and less competitive; it was much more receptive to diversity, partial solutions, and the need for mutual dependence than the period before 1939 had been. On the whole this new spirit, found among the leaders rather than among the masses, was much closer to what we have defined as the tradition of the West than the Europe of 1900 had been.

It must be recognized that this new Europe had its roots in the Resistance, and, as such, had traces of those elements of self-sacrifice, human solidarity, personal integrity, and flexible improvisation that appeared so unexpectedly among the hardened Resistance fighters. We might say that many of the elements of outlook and leadership of the new postwar Europe emerged from underground, and were unnoticed by those who had not been in active contact with the underground. Thus they were not observed by the leaders in Washington and in London, even by De Gaulle, and, above all, were unreported by Allen Dulles, who was supposed to be observing the underground for the OSS from Switzerland. Supporters of this new outlook were determined to break free from the nationalistic hatreds of the prewar period and to emphasize instead Europe as a cultural entity of diverse nationalities. Above all, they were insistent on the urgent need to heal the terrible breach, running through the heart of Europe, between France and Germany. They were eager to establish some kind of liaison between religion and Socialism, by way of Christian charity and social welfare, in order to repudiate the unnatural nineteenth-century alliance between the clergy and capitalism. They were determined to use the power of the state to settle the common problems of man, unhampered by doctrinaire liberalism and laissez faire. And they recognized the joint role of capital and labor in any productive process, although they had no way of measuring or of dividing the rewards of each from that process. In two words this new outlook was determined to make Europe more “unified” and more “spiritual.”

This new outlook was unable to influence the fate of Europe for at least a decade after the ending of World War II in 1945 because of the urgent material need to repair the devastation of the war, the overwhelming threat to Europe from the Soviet Union and from doctrinaire Communism, and because of the dependence of Europe, both for reconstruction and defense, on the United States and Britain, both of whom ignored the new forces stirring on the Continent. By 1955, however, as these urgent problems receded into the background and Europe became increasingly able to stand on its own feet, the new structure began to become visible, indicated by the cooperation of Christian Socialists and Social Democrats in the constructive process and by the continued decline of the forces of the extreme Right and the extreme Left.

It was the new spirit, rooted in the Resistance and the tacit agreement of the Christian Socialist and Social Democratic political groups, that made it possible to work toward European unity and to use this unity as the foundation for a rich and independent Europe. The task is still only partly done; it may, indeed, never be completed, for nothing is more persistent than the old established institutions and outlooks that stand as barriers along the way.

The central problem of Europe remains today, as it has for a century, the problem of Germany. And today, as before, this problem cannot be solved without Britain. But such a solution requires that Britain accept the fact that it is, since the invention of the airplane and the rocket, a European, and not a world, or even an Atlantic, Power. This the leaders of Britain and the American branch of the British Establishment have been unwilling to accept. As a consequence, Britain remains aloof from the Continent, committed to the “Atlantic Community” and to the Commonwealth of Nations, and, accordingly, the political unification of Western Europe stands suspended, part way to fulfillment, while the German problem, still capable of triggering the destruction of Western society, remains unsolved.