An Optimistic View
Hughes, H. Stuart
THE NEW EUROPE: TODAY-AND TOMORROW, by George Lichtheim, New York: Praeger, xv + 232 pp. $5.50. As with his book on Marxism, George Lichtheim has given us a study of a centrally important...
...For Americans, the tone of admonition is at least as salutary...
...and we are warned of the folly of trying to enter the Common Market ourselves, a step that would "hurt all the backward countries and formally separate the rich from the poor, the white from the colored, nations...
...Thus the class struggle is far from finished (on this point Mr...
...And this suggests his latest book's great merit, just as it explains a lack of personal commitment which holds him back from the more radical implications of his own arguments...
...THE NEW EUROPE: TODAY-AND TOMORROW, by George Lichtheim, New York: Praeger, xv + 232 pp...
...Despite his openmindedness and breadth of view, the Europe he depicts is surprisingly stable...
...These he treats as remote eventualities: I would regard them as present possibilities, or even probabilities...
...only trouble is that it is far from cerLichtheim has little to say about the consequences of the opposite choice...
...The author is an independent intellectual, if ever there was one...
...tualities of 1970...
...but I am sure Mr...
...Whatever they may claim at election time, in fact they all accept the status quo of a mixed economy, and the actual political battle goes on over the precise balance between the public and private sectors, and the marginal economic advantages accru , ing to each group in the society...
...Both the humanist-socialist hopes and the apocalyptic warnings of the war and post-war years have remained unfulfilled...
...We have had the spectacle of De Gaulle rampant, Adenauer dethroned, a domesticated Communist Party legitimating itself in Italy, and, most wondrous of all, the Pope extending his hand across the ideological divide...
...A France stripped of De Gaulle's anachronisms—which obscure the long-range character of the regime he has founded—technocratically-governed and independent of the United States, may well be establishing the most pervasive model for the Europe to come...
...Lichtheim is at his most persua sive...
...We are reminded that the ruler of the French is something more than an annoying historical curiosity, that his intransigence expresses, in eccentric fashion, the legitimate impatience of Europeans with a client role...
...Here Mr...
...All this is wise and helpful...
...It is just because so many of their predictions have come true—not, as is sometimes argued, because things have worked out differently— that socialist doctrines have begun to wear an...
...In this "indeterminate" society of industrial democracy, ideological lines have largely lost their mean ing, and the traditional verbiage of political debate has become obsolete...
...Since the Cuban crisis of last autumn, things in Europe have been moving at a disconcerting pace...
...The commercials will run for one week"-'Bos ton Herald...
...The parties continue to call themselves conservative, liberal, or socialist—but they no longer argue, as in the past, from incompatible views of the social universe...
...The U. S. government radio said it would beam musical advertisements by a Mohlam group on its short wave broad cast to listeners in Laos...
...What has come to pass, instead, is a situation in which "Western Europe is beginning to resemble the United States—in respect to income levels, social fluidity, and the breakdown of inherited class and caste structures...
...we are told that Germany is not quite so important as we are accustomed to think (it "may already have neared the limit of its capacity for rapid expansion, while countries like France and Italy are still far from having exhausted their reserve potential...
...Lichtheim differs, and most correctly, with conformist American commentators...
...It is on questions such as these that Mr...
...Such is the central difficulty his book presents...
...Lichtheim's book figure as no more than a "cloud on the horizon" may become the acSING FOR YOUR SUPPER "WASHINGTON (AP)—The voice of America will sprout 'singing commercials' for the first time starting Sunday...
...Here the debate may seem to have been closed by De Gaulle's peremptory gesture of last winter...
...He assumes the continued East-West division of the Continent, and although he concludes his volume by speculating that Europe will "experiment with a variety of social forms, political patterns, and intellectual creeds," he fails to specify what these may be...
...The virtues familiar from the earlier volume are again in evidence: urbanity, a thorough command of the materials, and a slightly amused detachment from the warfare of ideological schools...
...antiquated look...
...Lichtheim would agree that the question is bound to be reopened in a form in which his own analysis will still be relevant...
...What if prosperity recedes and the present latent class warfare suddenly becomes ugly...
...Perhaps events overtook the author when he had scarcely finished his book...
...Since the death of Stalin and the onset of general prosperity, a new situation has been emerging in Europe which almost nobody had predicted...
...Lichtheim offers only fragmentary answers...
...In addition to this long-range assessment, The New Europe has a double polemical purpose...
...In the future, he sug gests, Western Europe will have to do for Africa the same things that are in cumbent on us in Latin America— "pour in the necessary investment funds in the form of grants rather than loans, and at the same time sup ply a guaranteed market for export crops...
...For British readers (to whom it was originally addressed) it carries a warning to get into the Common Market before it is too late...
...The tone is so assured—and reassuring...
...The aim is to promote interest in a prize contest...
...He reminds us that Europe has its own problems of underdevelopment in its Mediterranean regions, and that the extent of European overseas aid— particularly that of France—is becom ing comparable to our own and is like ly to increase...
...it simply proceeds in a blander and more bureaucratic style...
...As with his book on Marxism, George Lichtheim has given us a study of a centrally important topic that is both a general introduction and an advanced interpretation...
...The tain that it will be done, and Mr...
...Possibilities that in Mr...
...Toward its close he ruminates on the recent "remarkable outcrop of technocratic tendencies" appearing "in such unlikely places as France," and on the threat of Europe cutting itself loose militarily from the United States...
...How then will the example of Eastern Europe—more particularly of Poland—begin to influence the "mixed" societies of the West...
Vol. 10 • July 1963 • No. 3
