European Document/The EEC Spectacle

...The principal difficulty is that once the U.K...

...1: (1873-1892) "Glitter Around and the Darkness Within...

...In addition to this depressing (for the enthusiastic proponents of the Market) phenomenon, the crankier small parties of the Right (in France) and the Left (in West Germany) did very well, leading to the conclusion that the political systems of Western Europe are, at least in the European c o n t e x t , heading f o r bankruptcy...

...Rowland Evans and Robert Novak called him "the first American presidential candidate to fully embrace the Third World political agenda: anticapitalist, anti-democratic, antiZionist, anti-Western, anti-American...

...She did consider marriage with the Liberal demagogue and reformer Joseph Chamberlain, and in fact remained in love with him for much of her life...

...m North Poznt Pres.s 850 Talbot At'e,lue Berkeley...

...And there was nothing Castro could do to take away the sting of that...

...After Greece it has become 7 x 6 = 42...

...However, on the continent also--with the perhaps surprising exception of Denmark--the polls were badly down from the last election of 1979...

...In her book The General Says No, Nora Beloff says that M. Couve added "I am no longer Foreign Minister of France...

...CA 94706 Now, General de Gaulle was tiresome, and he was difficult to deal with...

...The residue of nineteenth-century radical chic has been less dramatic in the free societies, but no less real...

...He was near-giddy...

...When General de Gaulle concluded the first volume of his memoirs he wrote that "France is the cape of a continent, Britain is an island, America is another world...

...Their heavily cut version of Mrs...

...g l. he rr~ heaviest cross 1 have to bear," wrote Winston Churchill at the height of the Second World War, "is the Cross of Lorraine...

...Part of its origin can be explored in The Diary of Beatrice Webb, ' the first two volumes of which appeared last year in a new edition by ~qorman and Jeanne MacKenzie...

...During the recent (June) campaigns for elections to the European Assembly (which usually sits in Strasbourg, but has occasionally sat in Luxembourg and may, one day, sit in Brussels) we were told (in the United Kingdom at any rate) that the EEC had helped to keep the peace in Western Europe, and had certainly prevented the French and the Germans from fighting one another yet again...

...they cast a particularly cold light on why, as one of her family wrote, she crowned her life's work by commending " t o her countrymen and the whole world a system of servitude more far-reaching and comprehensive than any hitherto known_9 B e a t r i c e Webb, n~e Potter, was born and bred in the very heart o f nineteenth-century capitalism_9 Her father was a war profiteer, and the individualist philosopher Herbert Spencer remained her close friend until he died...

...Nonetheless, it emboldens me to suggest that we are your only genuine allies in Western Europe...

...Nor have the NATO allies--whose number include Turkey and Norway as well as, now, Spain and Portugal--had any difficulty in understanding one another for a generation...

...Most reporters do...

...It is proposed, moreover, that Spain and Portugal should become members and that will mean a jump to 72 language combinations for the translators to wrestle with...

...Herb Greer is an Arnerican writer and playwright living in Europe...

...A crisis with no foreseeable end" was how she characterized him...

...But then the British have always taken a sullen, not to say surly, view of the EEC and all its works and pomps...

...By this Miss Beloff meant to imply a difference between the president of France and his minister for foreign affairs...

...Its damage here is more subtle, mostly occurring in the minds of intelligent, honest, and genuinely compassionate people who still work unselfishly and long (as the Webbs did) for a dream which--as hard experience now shows--is a peculiarly horrible nightmare plausibly disguised...

...Webb's im' Vol...

...Finally, Mary McGrory of the Washington Post, a holdout in the condemnation of Jackson, turned on him...

...Miss Belofg is one of those Britons who believes that, not accommodation merely, but understanding, is possible between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Western European powers...

...We--that is, the Anglo-Saxon powers--had a better friend than we knew at the time...

...The disagreements of the original six members of the European Economic Community will, in due course, reduce the Community to the spectacle of M. Couve's remark...

...These books, together with Beatrice Webb's autobiographiesfl do much to explain the bizarre politics of this complex and fascinating woman...

...In the normal course of events she, like her sisters, would have grown up into a society wife in the upper-middle ruling class of Britain...

...The balance of power in Europe may well be precarious, but the EEC is doing nothing to make it less so...

...In 1940 Walter Lippmann wrote that the security of Western Europe was of material concern to the United States...

...mense manuscript takes her story up to the last quarter of 1905, just before the redoubtable Fabian and social researcher was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Poor Law and the Relief of Distress...

...After all, he twice vetoed our membership in the European Economic Community, perhaps unwittingly seeking thus to do us a favor which we spurned...

...M. Couve denies that there was any such difference...

...The difficulty of understanding between ourselves and the Western continental countries is sufficiently illustrated by the fact that the EEC budget has to allow for s million a year simply to translate its various bits of paper into the languages of the member countries...

...Time zinged him for "displaying little regard for the unfortunate consequences of attacking his own government in unfriendly countries" and for having "gratuitously injected himself into the flammable arena of Central American politics...

...Nonetheless, I feel it is high time we British made up to his ghost for Churchill's remark...

...Further: During the whole period of the existence of NATO it has not been found necessary to establish the kind of enormous battery of experts and translators which the Community, evidently, requires...

...The only true redeemer was to be the state, with its ultimate sanction of coercive force...

...Harvard University Press, $25.00 each...

...This judgment did not express a real sense of sin...

...Before Greece it was 6 x 5 = 30...

...As I write it seems that yet another compromise will be Moreover, the elections in June to the European Assembly suggested that, to a disturbing degree, the voters of Europe are losing faith, or at any rate patience, with the sole democratic institution in the Community...

...It would be hard to imagine a more ridiculous piece of effrontery, or a more ludicrous affront to the truth of recent history...

...My hope is that, as this melancholy prospect unfolds before unbelieving eyes, the United States and the United Kingdom will have the good sense to preserve their alliance, the intelligence gradually to distance themselves from continental squabbling, and the wisdom to see the alternative steps they must take...

...Even if the translators are given their favorite new toy--a computer called "Eurotra"--I fancy we shall have to get accustomed to a singular lack of comprehension, l~t alone a singular lack of mutual understanding...

...2: (1892-1905) "All the Good Things of Life...

...It came as no surprise to anybody that the United Kingdom, with just over 30 percent of the electorate voting, was the least enthusiastic of the participating nations...

...but it is of solely military concern...

...More dangerous than any of this, in my view, is the potentially destructive effect of the existence of the EEC on the whole Western defense system...

...That works out to s per thousand words translated...

...That was tough criticism...

...had become a member the contradictions of the organization cobbled together on the Community budget, but that no significant steps will be taken toward the longer term reform, particularly of the Common Agricultural Policy...

...That is still, of course, only half of the American rate...

...So he sweetened the pot to improve Jackson's press clips...

...Not only has the EEC nothing to do with the security of Europe, but the very terms of the Treaty of Rome (its founding document) and of the Tr eaty of Brussels (by which the United Kingdom acceded to the Community) exclude all questions of defense frorfi its deliberations...

...The alliance foundered_9 Beatrice turned first to social work and then discovered her vocation with research into the great puzzle of the age: why, amidst the spectacular scientific and commercial progress of the nineteenth century, poverty was so ~My Apprenticeship and Our Partnership...

...or the work of altruists like Heinrich Himmler, whose corps of efficient public servants included such stars as Adolf Eichmann...

...A generation from now we will, I think, wonder what it was all about, as the nations of Western Europe take their collective place in history with the once mighty medieval combination of German city states in the Hanseatic League...

...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984...

...Today this is a less respectable idea, because of what has happened where statism triumphed: the slaughter of millions upon millions of Russians (at a time when the Webbs were hailing the USSR as a "new civilization...

...Collectivism was the latest cry, and as Beatrice Webb put it in the first volume of her autobiography: _ 9 in the world of philanthropy as in the world of politics as I knew it in the eighties, there seemed to be one predominant question: Were we or were we not to assume the continuance of the capitalist system as it then existed...

...This paradox has puzzled many observers, not least some of the "liberals" themselves...

...Webb and her colleagues was to extirpate what they saw as a corrupt, anarchic individualism and replace it with a clean efficient "housekeeging s t a t e , " in which everyone would be to some extent a public servantmnot with the dirty motive of profit, but for the honorable rewards of praise and promotion...

...The aim of Mrs...

...These persons, it was felt, had to be rescued along with the rest of mankind from the bondage of their own selfishnessmbut not by individual conscience or grace or common sense...

...and if not, could we, by taking thought, mend or end it...

...Of all the member nations of the European Economic Community only my own country, in spite of all the difficulties of her own recession, has kept to NATO's defense-budgeting requirements, increasing real spending at the rate of 3 percent each year...

...But the two of them were like positive magnetic poles: He demanded absolute submission while she, brilliantly intelligent and self-educated, clung to her independence of mind and character...

...In my judgment the island and the other world are more surely and more inevitably joined in interest and sentiment than the island and the cape can be, or than the other world and the cape can be...

...Just over 2,000 people are employed at the business and--wait for it, dear reader-The entry of Greece into the Community significantly increased the possible number of language combinations...

...F o r the brightest and the best of a hundred years ago in Britain, an individualist was by definition morally depraved...

...Our own generation has its examples of altruistic efficiency in more remote places like Vietnam and Cambodia, and of course in the Soviet system of psychiatric hospitals and the wide clean precincts of the Gulag...

...Unlike Miss Beloff I believe that M. Couve said what he meant to say, that the European Community would become a spectacle, in the derisory sense of that word...

...James Reston of the New York Times accused Jackson of "interfering with the constitutional rights of the President and Congress to conduct foreign policy...

...Soon he was mugged by reality in the form of press coverage and commentary...

...Americans, who in general saw only the prickliness of de Gaulle, should be reminded of the fact that he alone among European leaders offered unconditional support to the United States when President Kennedy imposed his naval blockade on Cuba...

...To believe that Castro handed over the 26 Cubans in response to the press, you've got to have a highly inflated concept of your role in the world...

...Both Mrs...

...Joseph Kraft referred to Jackson as "a scoundrel...

...Alack, there are still many such Britons...

...started to become more and more manifest...

...So it is...

...But when American politicians--Senator Nunn 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 in particular--ask them to ante up and pay a proportionate (to the United States) cost of their own defense they run scared...

...This," said M. Maurice Couve de Murville of the EEC, at Brussels in 1962, "will become just a spectacle...

...To fly with Jackson into Dulles International Airport outside Washington along with a cargo of prisoners was to see a man, Jackson, absolutely certain that he would be warmly welcomed home as a conquering hero...

...EEC heads of government are fond of stressing the enormous economic potential of their alliance...

...The prime minister who took Britain in, Edward Heath, was so fervent a Euro-enthusiast that he accepted terms which were bound to be seen by a more robust leader--which Margaret Thatcher is--as producing recurring anomalies, while the disputes necessary to resolve them had increasingly debilitating effects...

...The finanCial burdens it has imposed on its members, however, the attendant hubris that inflicts upon otherwise relatively sane political leaders the destructive ambition of creating a foreign policy independent of and different from the United States, and the sheer consumption of political energy through its continual and often squalid quarreling, has more than a little tarnished the bright dreams shared by those who drafted the Treaty of Rome...

...Patrick Cosgrave is a free-lance journalist living in London...

...When de Gaulle twice excluded the United Kingdom from the EEC he, and I repeat, did us the favor of telling us where our heart lay...

...To what purpose is all this energy and treasure being expended...

...For thirty-five years the peace in Europe has been kept by the armed might and the grim watchfulness of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the readiness of NATO has been sustained throughout its life by the United States...

...It was a token of outrage at the bad (i.e., selfish) behavior of a relative few who possessed large amounts of money and property...

...He was referring to the chosen symbol of the Free French, selected by its notoriously tiresome leader, Charles Marie Andrd de Gaulle, who had consigned the tricoleur to the broom cupboard for the duration of the fight with Hitler...

...The brutal fact of the matter i's, however, that over the early years of the Community's existence so many vested intereSts--of the farming community in particular--had been created that tackling changes in them has become virtually politically impossible...

...In one respect, of course, the CommuniTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 29 ty has served a vital purpose of its founders: It has been the instrument of procuring reconciliation between France and West Germany...

...The fractious arguments of the continental powers are of no concern, except a military one, to the Englishspeaking nations...

...Thatcher and President Mitterrand of France have made recent calls for root and branch reforms, and the Germans --who, of course, pay most of the bills--make such calls continually...