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Buried Antagonisms. Both business and labor have sought to bury their ancient antagonisms, and the presence of U.S. firms and methods in Europe has helped. In Britain, for example, Esso has introduced productivity bonuses for its workers. In Sweden, which has not suffered a major strike since 1953, managers and labor leaders meet yearly to decide upon wage guidelines for all industry. With its top members on most major corporate boards and a $250 million treasury to invest, the West German Trade Union Federation has become absolutely capitalistic: it owns dozens of businesses, from the country's biggest housebuilder to a supermarket chain. Last week, Building Workers Chief Georg Leber presented Chancellor Ludwig Erhard with an ambitious plan under which management would channel 1.5% of labor's wages into a huge investment fund that would later pay benefits to the workers.
Europe's businessmen, on the other hand, have softened their opposition to government involvement in private enterprise. Sir Leon Bagrit, the computer king of Britain's Elliott-Automation, has campaigned to get the government to take a greater interest in modernizing industry. Even the British Conservatives have called for more centralized planning. In order to get loans from state banks, many French industrialists embrace "Le Plan"-the government's program for expanding certain industries and restraining others. Governments own outright most of Italian oil and steel, French automaking and banking, British coal and gas, as well as the larger part of Europe's shipping, railroads and broadcasting. Continental businessmen, many of them connected with Catholic-oriented political parties -as in Italy, Belgium and Germany-have also been influenced by the softening of the Catholic Church's position on socialism, as evidenced by Pope John's encyclical Mater et Magistra.
Dead Issue. More important in the long run is the increasing reluctance to turn to nationalization, almost all of which took place before 1945. Nobody expects much more of it in the future. Britain's Laborites will try to renationalize steel, but will probably leave private industry in general untouched; most politicians on the Continent are extremely careful about how they use the word nationalization. Says Lars Erik Thunholm, president of Stockholm's Skandinaviska Bank: "The nationalization of industry is a dead issue as long as private enterprise shows the ability to continue expanding the economy." There is no sign that Europe's neocapitalists, who have gathered new strength from the fusion of ideas and methods, are about to lose that ability.