While the statesmen in Geneva debated the future of Europe, less celebrated men were more effectively shaping it. In the drab industrial city of Essen last week, 18 young French labor leaders were learning at firsthand how labor-management relations are handled in the coal fields and steelworks of the Ruhr. In Paris four European airlines—Air France, Alitalia, Belgium's Sabena and West Germany's Lufthansa—announced plans to integrate their schedules, maintenance and foreign-sales organizations under the name "Air Union." And in a West German poll, only 37% of the citizens questioned by the Gallup-like "EMNID" Institute were anxious to see Germany remain a sovereign state; the solid majority (52%) favored membership in a European union.
Behind these apparently unrelated events lay the outstanding fact about Europe, A.D. 1959: in a quiet revolution of a kind that "good Europeans" never anticipated, the dream of European unity is coming true.
"Today you look in vain for European 'enthusiasm,' " says an official of the West German government. "What is gradually emerging is something more subtle and more durable: a European consciousness."
The Direct Approach. The men who raised the banner of European unity in the years just after World War II had no such subtle process in mind. Pointing to the gutted cities of the Continent as testimony to the folly of unrestrained nationalism, they demanded political unification. Sparkplugged by France's Jean Monnet, the intense, brilliant economist who heads the Action Committee for a United States of Europe, they planned to construct united Europe through a series of economic, political and military bodies, each of which would possess supranational powers in a limited field.
Right from the start, they ran into difficulties. The Council of Europe, hailed at its founding in 1949 as "the first Parliament of Europe," echoed with platitudes but never with the thrust of debates that got anywhere. The notion of a "European army," with everyone in the same uniform, collapsed in mutual recriminations.
Even the European Coal & Steel Community, long the shining practical example of a European readiness to surrender some sovereignty, has come upon hard times. For its first six years, its member nations (France, Germany, Italy and Benelux) went along cheerfully with its expansionist schemes to abolish coal and steel tariffs and to outlaw cartels. But in the past six months, slackening European demand for coal, plus U.S. competition, has stacked up 30 million tons of unsold coal (TIME, March 2 et seq.). Fortnight ago, when the High Authority of the community ordered its members to restrict the production and import of coal, France, Germany and Italy rejected this supranational solution in favor of individual national measures.