French Views on European Union

Abstract

FRENCH opinion was prepared to give an enthusiastic welcome to the idea of a union of the Continent of Europe. It is an old Christian and humanist ideal which, ever since the sixteenth century, has been upheld by France more than by any other nation. Mr Winston Churchill, in one of his speeches at the recent Congress of Europe at the Hague, generously recalled the fact that the first plan of this kind, Le Grand Dessein, was drawn up in the seventeenth century by Sully, Henry IV's loyal minister, a few years after the king's death. The idea was later taken up again by the Abbe de St-Pierre in the eighteenth century, by Napoleon and Proudhon in the nineteenth century, and by Briand a few years ago. But it was above all Paul Valery, who, just after the First World War, pointed out the new and decisive reasons which made union of the Continent of Europe an absolute necessity. Europe had lost her former pre-eminence, which derived from things of the mind and spirit: 'The classification of the habitable regions of the world tends to become such that the different areas of the globe are ranked solely in relation to sheer physical size and statistical facts and figures-population, surface area, raw materials'. From this angle, Europe was no more than 'a headland of Asia'. This development was the result of our own dissensions, not of historical necessity. 'The wretched Europeans preferred to play at Armagnacs and Burgundians rather than to assume throughout the world the great role that the Romans were able to assume and to retain for centuries in the world of their day. Their numbers and resources were as nothing compared to our own; but they found in their oracles more just and logical ideas than are contained in all our political theories.' If we had listened to these prophetic words, if we had known how to answer the anguished appeal of Chancellor Briining, speaking as the voice of a bewildered Germany on the eve of being submerged by the wave of Brown Shirts, in short, if we had been able to organize Europe before Hitler's accession to power, it is likely that the course of history would have been changed. Once Nazi Germany had been crushed it should have been clear to everyone, although twenty years earlier only a few farsighted people had been able to perceive it, that Europe, whose regression was still further accentuated, could only recover her equilibrium by becoming united.