New France, New Europe
Front DARSIE GILLIE
an epoch. You may take it grudgingly, and say the French had not the necessary spirit to object; or nobly, and say they showed a Christian forgiveness. What matters is that seventeen years after the end of the Second World War it was possible. It was not possible after the First World War. The reason is not far to seek. In the Second World War all the con- tinental nations north of the Pyrenees and west of Russia, except Switzerland and Sweden, suf- fered at one stage or another total defeat and occupation. All learned what it was to be walked across whether by friend or foe, but at all events by people organised better and on a far larger scale than themselves. All went through a period of feeling themselves outclassed and all want to feel that being a European is not a definition of old-fashioned inadequacy. The problem of Great Britain's place in the new era is perhaps that she experienced neither the desolating inferiority nor the new super-greatness.
A dozen years ago one of the most depressing refrains in French middle-class conversation was: 'What else can we do? The Americans insist.' In fact, France was already doing very important things on her own initiative. It was in May, 1950, that she laid the basis for the six- power Europe by proposing the Coal and Steel Pool. Less fortunately, her colonial policy in Indo-China and North Africa was then a defiance of America's essential conception. At all events she long ago lost the habit of pleading American compulsion, but in her foreign policy under the present regime there is more than a trace of reaction against her post-war sense of inferiority.
What matters is the method by which France, like other European nations, has recovered her self-respect. It is by remembering that she is European as well as French. Europeanisrn, with its sense of larger elbow-room on the home con- tinent, has come to take the place of the old assumption that you were indeed crowded at home but could make up for it by stretching your legs overseas. It is no accident that the Adenauer visit to France should come within a few days of the proclamation of Algerian inde- pendence.
The process is not simple. President de Gaulle is very European by comparison with the out- looks current twenty-five years ago. But when it comes to the dispute between those who want each step forward to be taken already in the form of integrated institutions and his own insistence on a 'Europe of States' on the ground that at present you cannot obtain acceptance by the minority of a majority decision above the level of a State, it can appear to many people as an antiquated nationalism. He is moving towards Europe but with a desperate insistence on France's role within it. He has been disbanding the French empire but very carefully consolidat- ing the links between France and the new States. To one set of men he looks like a reactionary, to another orte of those perverse anti-patriotic intel- lectualist traitors. Still more profoundly another and more im- portant factor has been at work, a factor which is determinant for the decay of parliamentarism and for President de Gaulle's position in France. In becoming more European the Frenchman is not only becoming less nationalist, he is becom- ing more economic and less political. The Euro- pean approach was from the start an economic one, even though the motives of men like M. Robert Schuman and M. Jean Monnet in launching it were ultimately political. It places the French more and more in the context of big economic organisation and draws them out from that of the small peasant farmer, the small artisan and the small shopkeeper which bred the old-style argumentative French citizen. It has not replaced the old party system or the old national emotions, but it is steadily reducing their importance.
This week a political match is being played out in Paris between President de Gaulle and the parties who constitute a majority in the Assembly, but which represent points of view so different from one another that they would be quite incapable of forming a government coali- tion. The President has insisted that his Prime Minister obtains from the Assembly assent to a small initial credit for the Pierre Latte isotope separation plant; the credit is wrapped up with a number of others of quite a different character (refugees, old-age pensions, postmen's salaries) for which the Assembly's approval is demanded cn bloc. The government can obtain the negative assent by making the Bill a question of con°. deuce in which case a vote is only necessary If a resolution of censure is moved, and even in that case only the votes against the are counted. It will be enough for a majority deputies not to vote to see the Bill through. The Pierre Latte credit is of importance since it com- mits France to paying for her own isotope Plant instead of seeking a joint European enterprise. The nature of the future European structure is therefore to some extent at stake. The deputies are talking as if a great political battle was in the offing. But a great political battle would imply the participation of public opinion on a old! scale. In fact, the French are packing for their holidays. They may well disapprove of spending so much money on isotopes. But they do not want their holiday disturbed by an election or 3 political crisis. There will not be a great political battle but a close-fought political match ntnch the President will almost certainly win. government
Previous page
