The Schuman Plan and German Revival

the unity of Europe add to the unity of the West or detract from it? To answer that question is not as easy as we might at first imagine. For there are all kinds of unity, some good, some bad. The free world has been unanimous in welcoming a political innovation such as the Council of Europe ; the impetus given to European economic co-operation by the European Recovery Programme; the common action in defence which the Atlantic Alliance envisages. Yet British diffidence towards the Schuman Plan indicates that a semi-continental unity which is overdone may serve only to undo the wider unity of the Atlantic region. Which would be better for the West a European union of which a Franco-German industrial combine is the economic core, or a perpetuation of that Atlantic partnership which was twice an agent of victory and whose role is not yet finished? For we cannot have both; it must be the one or the other. The recalcitrance of the British, when the Schuman Plan was announced, drew more fire from the United States than from France herself. Yet without promptings from Washington the French might never have put the Entente under so unexpected a strain. Franco-British disaccord over the Schuman plan was thus, at bottom, an Anglo-American quarrel. Yet the friendship of the English-speaking peoples, with their many household rifts, is tested and tried. A Franco-German industrial pool, to absorb the impact of a German productivity which postwar Allied policy itself has fostered, would be a gamble of hope against experience. How is it that the United States was eager, so soon after VE Day, to take that risk? Americans bicker over where they went amiss in East Asia. But towards Western Europe, as passage of the European Recovery Programme and the Atlantic Alliance generally attest, there has been a larger degree of bi-partisan agreement. Nor has the cultivation of West Germans or the establishment of the West German State been a subject of serious discord within the Congress. Yet, as the two world wars of the twentieth century ought to have demonstrated, no Administration policy needed a closer or more minute scrutiny. And this it did not get

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