AMERICA, the daughter of Europe," is the way Charles de Gaulle sometimes likes to refer to the U.S. Historically, the metaphor is accurate enough, and Americans happily acknowledge their European inheritance of culture and law, myth and memory. Yet in recent decades, the filial relationship has been reversed. As happens in individual families, too, the offspring has taken over the role of parent. After World War II, it was America that gave Europe food, shelter, the sheer hope of survival. Through patterns of aid and alliance, the U.S. also tried to help banish Europe's ancient, tragic—and sometimes childish—quarrels.
In the past two decades, Europe has undergone a stunning renaissance, its two greatest symbols being the Common Market and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Under the inspiration of Jean Monnet, Western Europe developed a common trade area that led to unprecedented prosperity and a working class with at least the start of a middle-class way of life—a fact with incalculable repercussions in the Communist world. The Market also led to the beginnings of a free, united and supranational Europe, not attempted since the nation-state was born with all its banners flying, though it has been a dream of statesmen from Charlemagne to Churchill, of poets from Dante to Goethe. Militarily, the Western Europeans joined with the U.S. in interposing NATO's "sword and shield" against Communist military aggression from the East.
Today both these major achievements are in trouble, partly because of inevitable changes in the world, but largely because of the willfulness of Charles de Gaulle. The operations of the Common Market are deadlocked by a French boycott; NATO faces a complete French pullout. For more than a year, the U.S. has allowed the situation to drift, on the theory that Europe was basically sound and not much was needed to be done. Now Washington is once again turning its attention to Europe and to the ties—uniquely close but uniquely complex—of kinship, common ideals and hard self-interest that bind the Old World to the New.
Rift in the Market
A truly new Europe seemed to take shape in the remarkable progress of the Common Market ever since France, West Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries signed the Treaty of Rome nearly nine years ago. As the tariff walls within the Six came tumbling down, trade doubled in a cornucopian flow of cars and caramels, typewriters and transistors, that made shops in the six countries part of one great international bazaar. The resulting boom fattened their gross national products by 38% since 1958 (v. 28% for the U.S.). Despite the erection of a common tariff against the outside world, the Six became the world's largest trader, and embarked, with the U.S., on the so-called Kennedy Round tariff negotiations—now stalled—designed to lower tariffs throughout the free world.