Frontiers, armaments and lost lands

A plague of relatively small problems will always bedevil Europe and inhibit its development until we face the future together in Europe a Nation. I have never for a moment deceived myself that Europe will readily summon this resolution until small policies have failed, but many symptoms indicate that this point may now be reached before long. Humanity only steels itself for a hard effort in case of necessity, and until then is always well content to drift along with any makeshift arrangement which can work for the moment. The decisive factor in the making of Europe will be economic in the modern age, because it will be found that nothing short of a European community with its own government can overcome the imminent economic problems.

Other questions menace the harmony of Europe and postulate the same solution even before the economic question becomes acute. There is really no acceptable settlement of the problem of frontiers within Europe, until frontiers within Europe cease to exist. While the boundary marks of the old national states still stand they will be disputed with increasing acrimony, and they can only vanish within Europe a Nation. Major questions of economic policy, mutual defence and foreign policy, should be the duty of a European government subject to a European parliament. Inhibiting memories, rivalries and animosities would then gradually disappear. Questions closely affecting the daily lives of the people should be dealt with by regional parliaments. We need devolution throughout Europe, and should begin at once with Scotland and Wales. Dialogue of central and regional government, and of both with the people, should be frequent. I long ago suggested: 'Government should always know what the people are thinking, and the people should always know what government is doing'.

Shall I again be met at this point with the long-exposed fallacy that we should lose our national cultures and individualities? Previous unions of peoples within the national states of existing Europe did not turn Englishmen into Scotsmen, Bavarians into Prussians, Normans into Marseillais, or Sicilians into Lombards. On the contrary, all present evidence indicates that the only way of avoiding a universal amalgam in the melting-pot of an American or Soviet civilisation is to make Europe so strong that it has the power as well as the will to guard and preserve its vital, precious, individual roots.

Not only will frontier questions between European peoples prove insoluble until Europe a Nation is a fact, but it will also be found that nations with long military traditions will never permanently accept the armament position of second-rate powers. The question of nuclear weapons within Europe will not be settled until we are so merged together that we cannot use them against each other, and this once again postulates a common government within Europe a Nation. Otherwise we shall have continuing and increasing friction between leading European powers on the subject of armaments until universal disarmament is achieved; unfortunately, an ideal still remote.

Closely related to the question of frontiers and armaments is the vital question of the return of Europe's lost lands. Frontier questions between these nations and the fear of arms in the hands of Germans are the main inhibiting factors. The only solution is the end of frontiers and the complete merging of German military strength with Europe as a whole: again, Europe a Nation. There will be no final peace and ease in Europe until the union of Germany is achieved and other lost European lands are free. The problem is soluble once the questions of frontiers and armaments are realistically settled. Fourteen times in the period of Khruschev the Russians offered to withdraw from Europe, if America would likewise withdraw. The offers were ignored because the small and divided European powers feared to live in face of Russia without the support of American occupation. Fear was the begetter both of military dependence and ultimate economic servitude. Again and again in these years I pressed that these offers should be seriously considered, together with the related policies which alone can translate possibilities into achievement.

Europe a Nation has the sole chance of regaining the lost lands, because it can eventually eliminate European fears and Russian fears by the strength of Europe deployed in a wise and conciliatory diplomacy, which will combine the physical impossibility of an individual German attack with further guarantees such as no military installations in liberated lands.

 

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