86
PAR T ISAN REVIEW
were to lead to a federal union. Our own government, by the way, did
everything it could to facilitate these operations; and the British, for
once, at least refrained from sabotaging them. The story's been told
of how the whole thing came a cropper; and the Saar vote of November
1955 was merely a small echo to the mighty crash of August 1954. But
the point I would make here is that behind or within the official Euro–
pean movements of the po liticians there were and are small bands of
irreducibles who are bound to play their role when the next great crisis–
economic collapse or military danger-drives the politicians from their
comfortable national routines again.
These irreducibles tend to be university professors rather than
literary people as such (although this distinction, it should be under–
stood, is less sharp in France than elsewhere in Europe). There seems
to be too little ideology in European fed eration to attract the literary
people, and too much boring preoccupation with coal, steel, transports,
trade liberalization, currency convertibility, etc. But even in France,
where all the demons of the past were conjured up at once to destroy
the E.D.C., the atmosphere-except in those milieux which are subject
to Communist influence-remains favorable to the European project.
There are even some nonacademic writers of the older generation–
Jules Romains, Andre Siegfried, Bertrand de Jouvenel-who have asso–
ciated themselves actively with one or another of the European organi–
zations; and two of the liveliest and best of the newer literary reviews,
Preuves
and
M onde Nouv eau,
have undertaken the task of presenting
the whole enterprise in the proper- ideological?-language, so that
even the average French intellectual can understand.
I hope to have occasion later to go into all this at greater length,
for the various pro-integrationist groupings constitute, with their per–
sonalities and their publications, an apparently feeble, half-submerged,
but surely significant reaction to what is really going on . None of the
Western European nations is capable, by itself, of marshaling the neces–
sary resources to create a full-scale atomic energy industry, and that
fact alone is enough to suggest that, if Europe is to recover anything
like its former role in the world-a proviso which I persist in considering
as of some importance to our own cultural future- the era of the small
nations must be drawing to an end.
The "Europeans," coming as they do from practically all the non–
Communist groupings, are inevitably divided on questions of tactics and
strategy and even on the fundamental one of just how much integration
they wish to achieve. But they are united, at this writing, in their sus–
picion of Pierre Mendes-France, whose government allowed the E.D .C.
