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PARTISAN REVIEW
observable facts; and any Russian tendency to yield bits of Central
Europe would still produce a disproportionate degree of relief. In
this sense the European (including the British) outlook is today
dangerously affected by a kind of parochialism which the more
clear-sighted observers in London and Paris are trying hard to com-
. bat. But it must be added that the United States, by sponsoring its
own brand of exclusiveness, has contributed to the spread of this
mental distortion.
It is now commonly said that what holds the NATO alliance
together is simply fear of Russian aggression; with the corollary that
were this fear to vanish so would the will of Europe to co-operate
with America in the common
aim.
To the extent that this is true
it is a reflection upon the failure of the policy-makers to endow the
Atlantic world with common institutions from which in time a uni–
fied attitude could grow. The solution lies in greater boldness
rather than in a relapse intO' traditional diplomacy. Almost certainly
it will be found necessary in the end to establish something like a
permanent Atlantic Council, on the model of the Council of Europe
but with genuine power to take political decisions and enforce them.
The fact that the United States would inevitably have the pre–
dominant position in any such supra-national organization will cease
to worry Europeans once it is understood that their national interests
are safeguarded by statute and that their representatives have a
genuine voice in decisions binding upon all. At the moment no such
common organ exists: NATO is a bureaucratic machine which func–
tions only in the military sphere, and even there it is being by-passed
by the exclusive arrangements made by Washington with Spain
and other non-members. While this state of affairs lasts, friction
will continue, nationalism and neutralism will grow apace, and
American policy will presumably remain at the mercy of sudden
gusts of opinion in Congress.
If
the British Government has not yet
taken the initiative in proposing a more sensible institutional ar–
rangement the reason presumably is that Churchill cannot relinquish
the dream of an Anglo-American condominium-that dream which
came so near to fulfilment at Teheran and Yalta, and the cost of
which has since mounted up so dramatically. But Churchill is in his
eightieth year, and his successors are less likely to be fascinated by the
spiritual legacy of Cecil Rhodes.
