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But is it really true that adequate resources always produce
a willingness to assume global responsibilities? The American national
experience would seem to contradict it. Through the greatest part of
its history, the United States possessed the resources but not the
inclination to play a global role. Conversely, many European states
maintained overseas interests when their resources were much smaller
than they are today.

For many European countries the process of decolonization following
two World Wars has been traumatic. These countries have been transformed
from world powers into purely European states. Having shed their
overseas interests, they no longer consider that their security is
directly affected by what happens in, for example, Southeast Asia. Rather
than run the risk of nuclear destruction for a conjectural danger, they
prefer to wait until the actual danger materializes. In other words, they
treat America's extra-European concerns in much the same way that the United
States treated Europe's quarrels until 1941. Not so committed to the notion
of ideological conflict as the United States, they are more likely to seek
a measure of protection in equilibrium. To many of them, Communist China

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is not a threat; it may even be seen as a counterweight to the Soviet Union.

This problem is not eliminated by drawing distinctions--often moralistic in tone--between "responsibility" and "interest." Under Secretary Ball echoing many similar statements by others, including Secretary Rusk, has argued that:

> ...we Americans have few national interests--in the narrow sense--outside our own territory but we have assumed vast world responsibility...The willingness to accept world responsibility--as distinct from the preservation of national interests--is, in our observation and experience not universal among the NATO membership.¹

This distinction says a great deal about the American conception of foreign policy. By disavowing interest, our policy-makers try to demonstrate the moral foundation of our actions and indicate a commitment deeper than "mere" interest. For other nations, such assertions may cause uneasiness. A responsibility not butressed by interest may appear to them as subject to revision. It is conceivable to grow tired of a responsibility but an interest cannot be shed. To our allies, a "disinterested" foreign policy is an unreliable foreign policy; nothing in their tradition leads them to think in such categories.

Above all, the distinction misses the central point. The chief

1 George W. Ball, *op. cit.*, p. 215.

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reason for the reluctance of most of our allies to assume world responsibility
is precisely because in the past decade they have been obliged to give up
their global interests.

In other words, it is not likely that even a united Europe would
be prepared to assume a greater share of world responsibility in the
American sense. Nor is burden sharing likely to provide an impetus to
European integration. For burden sharing to become an incentive for
integration, the Europeans would have to agree with us about what is at
issue in most areas and they would have to believe that but for their
assistance the United States would curtail its commitments. Neither
condition obtains. The very commitment of the United States to a global
role reduces the incentive of other countries to assume its burdens, much
as the commitment of Britain and France to the European balance of power
permitted the United States in the period prior to 1941 to evade the
problems of the international equilibrium. In any event, should our
European allies wish to carry a greater part of a common load, they may feel
that they can do so within the framework of the nation-state or of a

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fairly loose Atlantic community.

If partnership in burden sharing does not provide the incentive
some of our policy-makers expect, there is another impetus to European
unity: that of being able to vindicate an autonomous policy in a world
where only superpowers carry weight. This was the most usual argument
advanced by the Conservatives to justify Britain's entry into the Common
Market.

The old established European states are not likely to make
the wrench of breaking with their past for the primary purpose of
acting as junior partner in assuming burdens defined elsewhere. The
stronger Europe becomes, the less content it is likely to be with so
subordinate a role. This is not to say that a united Europe will
inevitably be hostile or even competitive; it does mean that one of
the motives for European unity is to acquire an *option* for an independent
policy. And the more Europe acquires the characteristics of a unitary
state the more this will be true.

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History teaches that the more abrupt the transitions, the more drastic have to be the efforts to re-establish some sort of cohesion.

A Europe which grows out of the collapse of all traditional loyalties would have as its primary problem the discovery of some specific purpose for its existence. There is a grave danger that too doctrinaire an approach to European unity will produce either a collapse of political will or, more likely, a new and virulent form of nationalism, perhaps even more intense than the nationalism of *patries*. A Europe constructed largely on theoretical models might be forced into an anti-American mold because its only sense of identity is what distinguished it from America.

It is hard to understand why many European federalists believe that a European Parliament would mitigate this danger. The decline in the role of the national European parliaments has been notorious. In no European country--not even in Great Britain--does parliament exercise an effective control over the formulation or the conduct of foreign policy. The party system has become so powerful that in European parliaments the majority almost invariably ratifies the decisions of the

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Cabinet. But where the party system is ineffective--either because the parties are weak or because there are too many of them--the result is paralysis of government rather than parliamentary control.

These conditions are likely to be magnified by all-European elections. The need to establish a consensus comprising Schleswig-Holstein and Sicily, Scotland and Bavaria will surely tempt demagogic appeals. A parliament emerging from such a process of direct elections may be completely correlated to the calm deliberative body envisaged by so many European federalists.

This suggests the need to re-examine the passionate commitment of so many American policy-makers to one particular formula of European integration, that of supra-nationality. Jean Monnet's career has been a testimony to his devotion to Atlantic partnership. De Gaulle's career is filled with examples of abrupt tactics designed to exalt the status of France above all else. It would be one of history's frequent ironies if the structure for Europe proposed by Monnet would generate the greatest pressures for the kind of policy generally described as Gaullist, while

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the structure advocated by de Gaulle turned out to be best suited for
flexible Atlantic arrangements. Our bent for structural remedies sometimes
blinds us to the fact that institutions produce their own momentum which
cannot necessarily be foreseen from the intentions of their founders.

While the United States should welcome any structure that
reflects the desires of Europeans, it is not easy to discover the
specifically American or Atlantic interest behind our passionate commitment
to the "twin pillar" concept of Atlantic partnership. A very schematic
and rigid conception of Atlantic partnership can easily fail to do
justice to the richness and variety of relationships possible within the
Atlantic context. Is it really possible or useful to group the countries
of Europe on all issues? Is each always inherently closer to its European
neighbor than to the United States? If we separate the question into
political, military or economic components, is the answer always uniform
and does it always point in the same direction? Would it not be wiser to
retain some flexibility? The more rigid the structure within Europe, the
more complicated will be the problem of American influence.

[Y]

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There may be various roads to Atlantic partnership and European cooperation. The one traced by the Fouchet Plan--calling for institutionalized meetings of foreign ministers and sub-cabinet officials-- is not the least plausible, and indeed it is the one most consistent with British participation. It has the advantage that it would produce some immediate progress without foreclosing the future and thus put an end to the process of demanding the desirable in order to defeat the attainable. It would also permit a more flexible arrangement of Atlantic relations than the "twin pillar" concept. A confederal Europe would enable the United States to maintain an influence at many centers of decision.

In reassessing our Atlantic policy, it seems high time that we cut through slogans to such questions as: Is it wise to insist that the only road to European unity is by institutions unacceptable to both France and Britain? Is the best way to promote Atlantic cohesion by staking our prestige on a device--the Multilateral Force--which compels us to oppose the existing nuclear programs in Europe while bringing a host of presently non-nuclear countries (among them Germany, Italy, Greece and

[4]

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Turkey) into the nuclear business, occasionally with only their reluctant assent? Can it be in the interest of NATO, of the Federal Republic or of the United States to make Germany the senior European nuclear partner in NATO and to create an institution which can rally all anti-U.S., anti-German and anti-nuclear sentiments against us?

Every European state was formed through some process of integration during the past four centuries; and Germany and Italy achieved unity less than one hundred years ago. European history suggests that there is more than one way to achieve integration. In Italy, it came by way of plebiscite and annexation abolishing the individual states. In Germany, unification occurred under the aegis of one state but as the act of sovereign governments which remained in existence after unity was achieved. The resulting structure clearly did not lack cohesiveness. History is rarely so linear and simple a process as some of the enthusiasts for a particular form of European integration suggest.

European history demonstrates further that stability in Europe is unattainable except through the cooperation of Britain, France and Germany.

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Care should be taken not to resurrect old national rivalries in the name of Atlanticism. The United States should not choose a special partner among its European allies. Our attempt to woo the Federal Republic or to force our allies to choose between us and France--a tendency which, despite all disavowals, is real--must magnify the European nationalism which French policy has already done so much to foster.

Our concern thus returns to the somewhat out-of-scale figure of President de Gaulle. Irritation with de Gaulle's tactics does not change the fact that in his proposals of 1958 for a Directorate he put his finger on perhaps the key immediate problem of NATO. If the Atlantic Alliance is to retain any vitality, it requires a common foreign policy--or at least an agreed range of divergence. In its absence, the attempt to devise a common strategy is likely to prove futile. Lord Avon and Dean Acheson have come to the same conclusion. The time seems ripe to create a political body at the highest level--composed perhaps of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Federal Republic and Italy--for concerting the policies of the nations bordering the North

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Atlantic. Such a body should discuss how to implement common Atlantic purposes and define the limits of autonomous action where interests diverge.

Such a body could give political guidance for the military arrangements described in the previous chapter. It could be charged with developing a common strategic doctrine. Within its framework, the European countries could, if they wished, form a closer association. Thus, the West European Union might well be revitalized by being given the task of working out the European contribution to joint NATO plans.

As Europe gains structure, conceivably this could end the sterile scholastic debate over the benefits of integration as against coordination.

It might heal a rift which if continued is bound to hazard everything that has been painfully built up over fifteen years. Both the United States and France are able to thwart each other's purposes. Neither can create an alternative structure--France even less than we.

It has become fashionable in the West to compare its disagreements to the rifts in the Communist bloc. But this comparison does an injustice

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to the possibilities of the Atlantic area. In the Communist world, schisms
are inevitable and unbridgeable. Western societies have been more
fortunate. Their evolution has been richer; they have forged unity by
drawing strength from diversity. Free from the shackles of a doctrine
of historical inevitability, the nations of the West can render a great
service by demonstrating that if history has a meaning it is up to us
today to give it that meaning.