World: THE U.S. & EUROPE: THE WAITING GAME

THE vision was there when the smoke of World War II lifted. As early as 1946, Winston Churchill gave it breath in summoning the Old World to "make a kind of United States of Europe." In 1947, the Marshall Plan began to give it bone and sinew. In 1950, with the Schuman Plan to pool the Continent's coal-and-steel resources, it began to stir. It envisioned nothing less than a prosperous united Europe athwart one Atlantic littoral, allied with the U.S. on the other side—two giants whose joint democratic and humane stand for freedom everywhere...

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