The Europeans
Barzini, Luigi
THE EUROPEANS Luigi Barzini/ Simon and Schuster/$14.95 Franz M. Oppenheimer After reading The Europeans, one can think of few greater pleasures than being at a dinner party with Luigi Barzini. He...
...The essentials done with, however, and launched on his survey of the history, culture, politics, and personality of the British, the Germans, the French, the Italians, the Dutch, and the Americans (included, as it were, as "honorary" Europeans), our dinner guest makes sure that conversation never flags by setting off a fireworks of provocative, and sometimes paradoxical, propositions...
...His lawyer offered two defenses: (a) the count did not know the victim was an American...
...their objectives and schedules (like everything else in the USSR) bureaucrat-ically predetermined and unchangeable...
...While opposed to a complete surrender of national sovereignty, de Gaulle was equally opposed to anarchic drift, if for no other reason than his knowledge that only by some united structure could Germany be tied to Western Europe...
...In the invocation of the concept of a "great nation," and in the significance attributed to the division of Germany, Luigi Barzini sounds almost Gaullist himself...
...Nevertheless, he does not consider that philosophy, nor the nationalism of the French, to be the principal obstacle to a united Europe...
...abigger bang for a dollar," and a garbled quotation from Heinrich Heine: "Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht, bin ich urn meinem Schlaf gebracht...
...About two years ago, Germany changed from a country of aggressive confidence to one of depression bordering on despair...
...He ridicules the philosophy, predominant in Europe after the Second World War, that the economy is the principal motor of history, and that an ever growing GNP is a sufficient means of salvation...
...Everything on the Russian side is already in place, in battle formation, plans drawn up...
...On the other hand, I know of no evidence to support Barzini's view that what de Gaulle wanted for Europe was "a fragile patchwork of weak, vulnerable, and self-centered nation-states, without authority, each blindly struggling to defend its own petty and immediate interests against everybody else...
...Barzini's questionable views on specific aspects of de Gaulle's policies are redeemed, however, by flashes of insight into de Gaulle's general impact, such as: "de Gaulle gave the French the monarchy many of them longed for under every republic, and, at the same time, the republic many of them longed for under every monarchy.'' There are comparable insights and generalizations in the chapters on "The Flexible Italians," "The Careful Dutch," which also discusses both kinds of Belgians, and "The Baffling Americans," the discussion of which would make this review approach the length of Barzini's book of 265 pages...
...This belief in the early determined 'championship of European unification by the French is made even more difficult to understand in the light of Barzini's acquittal of de Gaulle from major responsibility for the failure of European integration...
...Surely what was true of Jean Monnet was not so of "the French," and one wonders what Barzini knows that the rest of us do not know...
...Barzini believes that this mutability, military exposure, and irrational political movements for neu-trality and unilateral disarmament make Germany "dangerously vulnerable...
...Yet it may be true that swings of mood and attitude are more sudden and extreme in Germany than elsewhere...
...She rejects the view that de Gaulle's policies may all be reduced to one goal, promoting the grandeur of France, and considers the Fouchet Plan, which contemplated an indissoluble "Union" with executive and legislative organs, "clearly the prototype for de Gaulle's vision of future pan-European co-operation...
...We are told things equally surprising about the French such as that after World War II they "were at first among the earliest and most determined champions of European unification...
...Ensor, that "[n]o one will ever understand Victorian England who does not appreciate that among highly civilized, in contradistinction to more primitive, countries [England] . . . was one of the most religious that the world has known...
...a ramshackle coalition that would immediately crumble in times of crisis or depression . . ." De Gaulle may have been old-fashioned, but he was not blind...
...West Germany is no more an obstacle to European unification than the separation of Austria from West Germany...
...Barzini's assessment of Germany today is probably right...
...But his assessment of Germany's history is sometimes surprising...
...moment...
...The shirts sent to London were always sent back...
...For instance, he concludes, on no better authority than that of Machiavelli and Madame de Stael, that before 1870 the Germans counted "for little" as soldiers: "German soldiers frightened nobody...
...The consummation of Barzini's happy vision of a United Europe may have to wait, as Barzini says it must, but it must wait for a change of heart and resolve, not for some miracle on the Elbet fit is a pity that the pleasure of reading The Europeans is marred by the book's exceptionally slovenly editing...
...to have swallowed unwittingly the argument for unilateral disarmament and neutrality by the same German pacifist fringe that he castigated in his chapter on the Germans: namely, that only West Germany's ties to NATO and the European Community prevent the Soviet Union from giving its blessing to a Germany of 79 million inhabitants...
...Why, he seems to ask, did foreigners know little of what he calls the "terrifying social turmoil that troubled British life...
...JL/ike many, Luigi Barzini is perplexed, and worried by the Germans on whom, he believes, the future of Europe depends...
...Neither extreme could be justified by economic indicators...
...If one asks how nineteenth-century English merchants earned the reputation of being the most honest in the world (a very real factor in the nineteenth-century primacy of English trade), the answer is: because hell and heaven seemed as certain to them as to-morrow's .sunrise...
...In reality, few Western Germans under the age of 50 or so seem to be any more concerned about reunification with Soviet-occupied Germany than they are with prospects for the "Anschluss" of Austria.* But they are concerned about the survival of human rights and decency in their country...
...And he knows where alone the threat of war comes from: "a Soviet attack might come without warning at any Franz M. Oppenheimer is a Washington lawyer...
...An American officer, so dressed, crawling behind a bush, was shot dead by the count, whereupon the count was arrested and tried...
...In his conclusion, Barzini explains why the notion of a merely economic European union "is a dead-end street...
...Barzini also has his doubts on whether Germans can become "democratic," and to illustrate the com' plexity of that question, he relates a story told him by John McCloy: Shortly after the war, a German count invited American officers to go shooting...
...All it takes to start the war today is one code word telexed from the Kremlin...
...He does not explain why that social turmoil was so "terrifying" when compared with the nineteenth century's revolutions on the continent in 1830,1848,1871, and the Civil War in the United States...
...and equally suddenly, after this year's.elections of March 6, the country returned to its earlier optimism...
...The notion that Austria is not a country of German nationality and culture, or that there are greater differences between Austria and Bavaria than, say, between Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein, is a myth...
...It is far more likely that "la France profonde" would have followed de Gaulle's leadership in the sixties when the tide for unification was running strong and that but for de Gaulle's determined opposition a federal Europe would exist today...
...h um den Schlaf gebracht...
...instead of, "dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht...
...Although he notes that the pacifists are a small minority, he is alarmed-and rightly so-by the "fanatic intensity of feeling animating the crowds and their bizarre composition" as well as by the "nucleus of their Weltanschauung [a] hatred of the United States...
...He is a passionate and agreeable man about the essentials, an "agreeable man" in the Dis-raelian sense of "a man one agrees with,'' for he believes in what he calls "the European Dream," a united Europe with a common currency, a common foreign policy, and "above all" a common defense policy...
...Nor does he, in searching for the causes of Britain's sway over minds and manners, give proper weight to the religious nature of Victorian England, which was an essential element in her role...
...b) the count did not know the victim was an officer.'' Apparently it occurreid neither to John McCloy nor to Luigi Barzini that this story may be less relevant to the archaic nature of the German soul than to the incidence of incompetence among German lawyers...
...We read in the Oxford History of England, England 1870-1914, by R.C.K...
...t]hey came dressed as Americans do in shabby old clothes...
...the Enemy, the cause of all evil...
...While Barzini gives us the list of the major acts of de Gaulle that defeated Jean Monnet's splendid vision-the veto of British entry in 1963, of Hallstein's plan to assure independent resources to the European Community in 1965, and of majority vote, provided for in the Treaty of Rome, in 1966-nevertheless, he puts the blame on the prejudices and feelings of the French people, of "la France profonde," that he says existed before de Gaulle's coming to power, but, presumably, after the "earliest" enthusiasm of the same people for unification...
...For Barzini, the principal obstacle is "the German problem" created by the partition of Germany into an Eastern and a Western half...
...The Vision of Charles de Gaulle (1977) by Lois Pattison de Menil, comes to quite different conclusions...
...Every time he was in Germany on a journalistic mission, he saw "a startlingly new country, only vaguely resembling what [he] had seen before or what [he] had read about...
...The best study of de Gaulle's policy for Europe, Who Speaks for Europe...
...It is generally forgotten that after the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War, Austrians overwhelmingly voted for unification with Germany, and that the vast majority of them welcomed the Anschluss under Hitler...
...attribution to de Gaulle of the expression 'TEurope des etats," instead of "L'Europe des patries...
...The unification of Europe without Germany would be impossible, but unification with Germany would entail "acceptance, for all members, of the German problem...
...Why, he wonders, did "the more difficult to please" of the upper class in Italy and elsewhere "sen[d] their shirts to be laundered and ironed in London...
...He begins by wondering about the reasons for the enormous moral and material influence of the British in the nineteenth century...
...He "never found out why, English laundries not being noticeably better than others...
...One might reply that all modern countries, like people, do not stay the same for long...
...In believing that the partition of Germany is the principal obstacle to European unification, Barzini seems •The separation of East Germany from...
...Par "le" guerre (instead of "la...
...and they know, for the reasons so eloquently presented by Barzini, that a unified Europe would be...
...the surest protection of that survival against a military attack launched from Soviet-occupied East Germany...
...So much for the Teutonic knights, Emperor Otto the First's defeat of the Magyars, the German mercenaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, King Frederick I of Prussia and Frederick the Great-to mention just a smattering of the evidence ignored by Machiavelli and Madame de Stael...
...To give only a few examples: "La" mat francais, instead of "le...
...No great nation," he writes, "can survive cut in half...
Vol. 16 • August 1983 • No. 8
