The White Falcon - 21.01.1961, Síða 3

Saturday, January 21, 1961
WHITE FALCON
■6
Fact and Fiction of the Atlantic Community
A political opponent of NATO
recently wrote in a British journ-
al that the Atlantic Alliance is
an artifical one with no argu-
ments to sustain it except the
questionable one of military con-
venience; the countries of Europe
have a common civilization and
are right in seeking to give it in-
stitutional shape, but the countries
of the North Atlantic area have
no such links. The argument is
not so different in kind from one
that was, at least until recently,
heard more often in Britain,
namely, that there is a genuine
partnership in origin and purpose
between Britain and the United
States, and that is the attempt
to bind Britain to the Continent
that is the artfical one. Against
this latter view I have argued
elsewhere, and would do so again;
but the argument against the At-
lantic Alliance on cultural grounds
is a directly dangerous one and
ought to be tackled here and no'w.
Not a Restoration
Such arguments are always dif-
ficult to deal with. There is the
temptation when one is trying to
construct something new to pre-
tend that it is something that has
existed in the past, and that all
one wants is a restoration; all
revolutionaries know how useful
the appeal to an imaginary past
can be. This tendency to myth-
making has often bedevilled the
movement for European unity,
and is still something of a handi-
cap to it. If European unity really
meant: ‘Back to the Middle Ages!’
I should be against it. So we must
be careful not to lay too much
stress on Atlantic unity, not to
pretend that the Atlantic count-
ries are in some sense destined to
act together in perpetuity. The
Atlantic Community has to be
worked for and built from the
ground up; Article II of the
Treaty expresses an aspiration,
not a fact. The differences be-
tween our countries are profound
and not to be dismissed by any
easy talk about common ideals
and aspirations. Not only in the
big fields of political, military
and economic co-operation do dif-
ferences between national organi-
zation and national habits of work
persist; they affect even our es-
says in cultural co-operation.
Basis for Institutions
AH one can say, I think, is first
that the Atlantic countries, for
all their differences, still have
things in common which they may
share with some few countries
not themselves members of the
Alliance—Australia and New Zea-
land, or Sweden and Switzerland
—but which mark them off rath-
er clearly from the other main
human groupings. In the second
place, what they have in common
is so important that it provides
at least a basis upon which the
statesmen have every opportunity
for constructing some institutions
durable enough not to be shaken
by every gust, warm or cold, that
may come from the Kremlin. And
this intimacy of contact which is
essential to the fruition of our
joint enterprise is not something
new; it is genuinely this time a
product of history. Nor is it his-
tory that we need dig up or in-
vent. The history of the North
Atlantic Community is a continu-
ous one. America and Europe did
not suddenly rediscover each other
during the First World War, the
Second World War or even dur-
ing the ‘cold war’; their contacts
have been continuous, not inter-
mitting, and American isolation,
except in the narrowest diplo-
matic-military sense, is largely a
myth.
But before we look at this as-
pect of the matter let us briefly
consider the first of these points.
What is it that marks off this
group of countries from the rest
of the world? By and large and
first of all, a high level of mater-
ial prosperity, not equally, dis-
tributed throughout the area; the
south European members of
NATO and parts of the United
States lower the general average
and this is a reproach to the solid-
arity of our Alliance. But even
when this is taken into account,
the average still makes most of
the rest of humanity look very
poor indeed. Does this matter?
There is the oft-retailed dialogue
between two famous American
authors. ‘The rich’, said Scott
Fitzgerald, ‘are not like us.’ ‘No,’
said Ernest Hemingway, ‘they
have more money.’ But having
more money does make a differ-
ence—to nations perhaps more
than to peoples.
Prosperity gives the Atlantic
Alliance some of its principal
problems. Its principal external
problems is how to bridge this
gap between have and have-not
countries fast enough to prevent
it engulfing the world in war,
chaos and general disaster. This
all-important fact about the in-
ternational scene is so crucial
that I would feel that the struggle
against communism is only a par-
ticular aspect of it. Indeed, the
virulence of the communist chal-
lenge would be meaningless excepr.
in this context. But it also gives
us many of our most obvious in-
ternal preoccupations, from town-
planning and traffic-control to
juvenile delinquency.
The ‘Affluent Society’
Most of the world is still busy
desperately trying simply to keep
alive, is still continuing the strug-
gle for life against the forces of
nature—famine and plague. Only
a small group of peoples have got
to the point where any but the
minority can afford to trouble
about the ‘good life’. We worry
about the ‘media’ of mass-com-
munication’ making our young
people quasi-illiterate and insensi-
tive to the finer elements in our
cultural heritage. In much of the
world it is a question of getting
enough people with bare literacy
(and ‘numeracy’, to use a helpful
neologism from a recent British
report on education) to man the
essential productive and admini-
strative framework of even quite
primitive societies. For us in the
West, the ‘affluent society’ has
rapidly passed from being a new
idea to being a tired cliche; for
much of the very non-affluent
world, it must ring out like an
insult. So there are moral as well
as material problems involved.
And it is unlikely that they can
be solved except by a joint effort,
through probably not within
NATO.
In this context much that is
loosely talked of as ‘Americaniza-
tion’ can be understood in a far
more revealing light. Some people,
let us face it, dislike the Atlantic
Alliance precisely because they
feel that it involves the ‘Ameri-
canization’ of European life.
Some people who echo the slogan:
‘Yanks go home!’ are thinking of
the social effect of having large
numbers of American in our
midst, and not simply subscribing
to the lunatic belief that the pre-
sence of American forces makes
us less, rather than more, secure.
But in point of fact, all that is
happening is that some of the
physical resources available to
Americans for a generation or so
are now coming to be widely
available here. And it is not sur-
prising that many of the uses of
these resources are the same,
whether it be more convenient
kitchens, or television and paper-
backs. And with this goes, espec-
ially among the young, a more
informal and freer social life.
One may or may not like this.
I suppose I am old enough to
find the European pattern more
agreeable; I feel more at home in
Paris or Rome than in New York
or Chicago, intellectually as well
as physically; I prefer the cafe to
the drugstore and (except in very
hot weather) vin ordinaire to
coca-cola. But I see no reason
why these preferences should be
shared by the young .
The Western Story
If similar responses to similar
stimuli accompained by a good
deal of imitation and importation
explain our changing pattern of
consumption and social habits, it
is not surprising that the same
thing should be true of our social
and political institutions. A pro-
fessor of government may be per-
mitted to attach importance to
the latter. The reason for the af-
fluence of Atlantic society does
not lie only in the natural ad-
vantages of climate and raw ma-
terials; it is also that our count-
ries have shown unique capacities
for the organization of their af-
fairs in ways which make the
best of the resources given them
by a bountiful providence. They
have shown a unique talent for
self-government, first at the local
event, later at that of the State,
and now internationally. Practical
reason has been put at the ser-
vice of man; and advances gained
in the understanding and mani-
pulation of nature have been
transformed into advances in
social welfare. This is, after all,
our Western story.
At no time since the American
colonies seceded from Britain,
taking with them the fruit of a
thousand years’ experiment in the
art of government, have the de-
velopments on the two sides of
the Atlantic been independent of
each other. Even before air travel
even before the cable and the
steamship, the mutual awareness
of the two sides of the Atlantic
was one of the basic facts of our-
cultural history. We tend to see
only the peaks of this exchange
of ideas, to note that the best
book on America in the second
half of the nineteenth century
was written by an Englishman, as
the best book in the first half
had been written by a Frenchman.
But de Tocqueville was unique
only in genius, not in purpose or
performance. The idea of deriving
lessons for Europe from the study
of America was common form in
the Europe of his day. A French
scholar, M. Rene Remond, has
found out that in France alone
no fewer than four hundred books
about the United States were pub-
lished between 1815 and 1850, and
at an accelerating tempo—as
many in the 1840’s as in the whole
preceding period.
And, of course, this was not
just a French phenomenon. A
British historian, Professor John
Hawgood, in a recent volume of
the New Cambridge Modern His-
tory points out the extent to
which American ideas and ideas
about America were part of the
great intellectual ferment in
Europe that preceded the revolu-
tions of 1848. The Americans took
over in their institutions and poli-
tical thought the most advanced
forms that eighteenth-century
Europe had to offer and upon
this basis developed the first mod-
ern democracy. For - much of
Europe, through much of the
nineteenth century, this demo-
cracy provided the model to be
imitated or shunned as interest
BY MAX BELOFF
Gladstone Professor of Govern-
ment and Public Administration
in the University of Oxford, and
author of Europe and the Euro-
peans, The Great Powers and
other books. (Reprinted from
NATO Letter, December 1960.)
$>-
or prejudice might dictate. Later
the current of ideas was the other
way. Twentieth-century Europe
moved faster in much of its social
thought and action than did the
United States—the ‘New Deal’
was in part an effort to catch up
with same aspects of Western
Europe. Today the interchange of
ideas is so rapid and so continu-
ous that it is hard to disentangle
what is by now almost a single
story; though it still falls short
of what we need.
Americans of European
Origin
But this interchange of ideas,
which means that the institutions
and ways of thought of the two
sides of the Atlantic have kept
sufficiently in step to make pos-
sible the intimate co-operation
that the machinery of NATO and
its possible future developments
demand, is only a reflection of a
still more important factor in the
situation; all but about ten per
cent of Americans are directly of
European origin. The most recent
and best book on the subject,
American Immigration, written
by a British scholar, Maldwyn
Jones, of the University of Man-
chester, and published by the Uni-
versity of Chicago (here is the
Community at work!) puts the
matter succinctly: In the hundred
years between ‘Waterloo and the
outbreak of World War I, no
fewer than thirty million people,
drawn from every corner of
Europe, made their way across
the Atlantic. They came in a
series of gigantic waves, each
more powerful than the last and
separated from one another only
by short periods of time.’ Since
the First World War the stream
has slackened without ever dying
up altogether; though much of it,
as in the quarter-century before
1914, has come from parts of
Europe politically today outside
the bounds of the Atlantic Com-
munity.
It is, of course, true that migra-
tion has played its part in mould-
ing the history of the European
peoples; but over some centuries
this has been the exception rather
than the rule. And countries which
have furnished migrants as well
as those which have proved espec-
ially receptive—France for in-
stance—can be fairly easily iden-
tified. It would still be a matter
of surprise to find Sicilians with
cousins in Norway, or Belgians
with close relatives in Portugal.
In the conclusion of his article
next week, Mr. Beloff takes up
"Emigration a Popular Move-
ment.”