POLICIES & PRINCIPLES: One Europe

It is our conviction that dismemberment of our continent or its partition into spheres of influence would inevitably lead, in a near future, to World War III.

Fifteen ex-Europeans in the U.S. last week raised this warning against Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks, the whole trend of Big Three power-thinking. Their alternative: a European confederation of independent states, linked by a continental Parliament, Cabinet, President and Army.

Principal sponsor of last week’s “Declaration of European Interdependence” was Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, a Bohemian citizen of the world turned visiting professor of history at New York University. His best-selling Crusade for Pan-Europe (TIME, Nov. 29, 1943) vividly diagnosed the “incurable disease” of nationalism, advocated a United States of Europe as the best palliative.

Last week he lined up a gallery of Pan-European supporters. Among them: Austrian Novelist-Playwright Franz Werfel (The Song of Bernadette, The Twilight of a World, Jacobowski and the Colonel); Fernando de los Rios, onetime Ambassador of Republican Spain in Washington; French Playwright Henry Bernstein; Nellos Camellopoulos, onetime member of the Greek Parliament; Businessman Edouard Müller (Nestlé Chocolate), formerly of Switzerland. Said they: only a continental confederation can “coordinate the common political, economic and military interests of Europe and the personal rights of all Europeans.”