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PARTISAN REVIEW
states surrender parts of their economic and political sovereignty to
a higher European authority: we leave open the question whether
a European Gt:>uncil, or Federation, a United States of Europe or
whatever type of unit will be formed."
It is obvious that for these men, the true
homi novi
of Europe,
the "German problem" is not, as it is for•de Gaulle, the "center of
the universe," not even the center of Europe. Their main enemy is
fascism, not Germany; their main problem is the crisis of all State
organizations of the Continent, not merely the German or Prussian
State; their center of gravity is France, the country which has truly
been, culturally as well as politically, the heart of Europe for centu–
ries and whose more recent contributions to political thought have
again put her at the spiritual head of Europe. In this connection
it
was more than significant that the liberation of Paris was celebrated
in Rome with more enthusiasm than even its own liberation; and
that the message of the Dutch Resistance to
th~
French Forces of the
Interior after the liberation of Paris concluded with the words: "So
long as France lives, Europe will not die."
For those who have known Europe intimately during the period
between the two wars it must have come almost as a !>hock to see
how quickly the same peoples that only a few years ago were not
at all concerned with questions of political structure have now discov–
ered the primary conditions for the future existence of the European
continent. Under Nazi oppression they have not only re-learned the
meaning of freedom but won back their self-respect as well as a new
appetite for
respon~ibility.
This is clearly enough manifested in all
the former monarchies where-to the surprise and dismay of some
observers-the people want most of all a republican regime.
In France, a country of mature republican traditions, the repudiation
of the old centralized forms of government, which left very little respon–
sibility to the individual citizen, is gaining ground; the search for
some new form, giving the citizen more of the duties as well as the
rights and honors of public life, is characteristic of
all
factions.
The cardinal principle of French resistance was
libererr et federer;
and by federation was meant a federated structure of the Fourth
Republic (in opposition to the "centralist State which is bound to
become totalitarian") integrated in a European Federation.
It
is in
almost identical terms that the French, Czech, Italian, Norwegian
and Dutch underground papers insist on this as the primary condition
of a lasting peace-although, so far as I know, only the French
underground has gone so far as to state that a federative structure of
