The Concert of Europe

James Chace

From Foreign Affairs, October 1973

Summary:  Ten years after President Kennedy stood at the Berlin Wall and proclaimed, "Ich bin ein Berliner," his sometime rival Richard Nixon is about to make his own Grand Tour of the Old World. The very notion of a Grand Tour calls up the Jamesian theme of an innocent abroad. One might ask whether President Nixon will discover, as did the Jamesian hero, often to his sorrow, that innocence and goodwill are not enough for such an undertaking; the ability to deal with subtleties and complexities is the necessary virtue in order to apprehend the European experience. But then, President Nixon is not going alone, and, unlike his avowed model, Woodrow Wilson, he is unlikely to abandon his Colonel House after his disembarkation. On the contrary, he will most likely leave it to his European-born adviser, Henry Kissinger, to guide him through the labyrinth of European diplomacy.

Ten years after President Kennedy stood at the Berlin Wall and proclaimed, "Ich bin ein Berliner," his sometime rival Richard Nixon is about to make his own Grand Tour of the Old World. The very notion of a Grand Tour calls up the Jamesian theme of an innocent abroad. One might ask whether President Nixon will discover, as did the Jamesian hero, often to his sorrow, that innocence and goodwill are not enough for such an undertaking; the ability to deal with subtleties and complexities is the necessary virtue in order to apprehend the European experience. But then, President Nixon is not going alone, and, unlike his avowed model, Woodrow Wilson, he is unlikely to abandon his Colonel House after his disembarkation. On the contrary, he will most likely leave it to his European-born adviser, Henry Kissinger, to guide him through the labyrinth of European diplomacy.

Moreover, ten years after President Kennedy's visit, President Nixon will be confronted by a new set of perceptions that the Europeans (and by Europeans, I mean West Europeans) hold of America, and vice versa. The Europeans see America as Raymond Vernon has described her, as a "rogue elephant in the forest" whose economic might is such that she can lash out, despite the recent downturn in her monetary fortunes.1 But she is also a beast wounded in pride, after an Asian war which seemed to the European mind a reckless adventure.

Alastair Buchan, now at Oxford, has written that "the United States has come, for the time being, to be regarded in Europe . . . less as the mainspring of civilization and more as the generator of crude power." Since perceptions are the forces which guide statesmen, our own self-image as a somewhat put-upon, rather benevolent creature, who did not seek an empire and who has emerged chastened and wiser after a debilitating war, may not coincide with what General de Gaulle-expressing what many Europeans often felt-characterized as a people animated by a will to power cloaked in idealism.

But what of Europe? Surely our perceptions of Europe are no less changed over the past decade. In 1963, France was riding the high tide of Gaullism. That was the year when General de Gaulle, having extricated France from the hopeless mire of the Algerian War, asserted the renewed vigor of the nation-state by vetoing British entry into the Common Market. Though France did not, in fact, speak for Europe, President de Gaulle acted as if she did. And when his infrequent, carefully managed press conferences, his coups de théatre captured the attention of the world, who was to say that there was any other figure on the European stage who could project a clear vision of what France's-and, by his extension, Europe's-role was to be? The specter of Yalta haunted de Gaulle, and along with his desire to restore France to the first rank was his further view of a "Europe of the Fatherlands" that would challenge the hegemonies of both Russia and America. It was a Europe of the nation-state, to extend if not from the Atlantic to the Urals, then at least to the Carpathians.

West Germany at this time was generally perceived as a crippled giant, still bearing the moral wounds self-inflicted from World War II. Though her economic recovery was prodigious, her political power was limited. It was the last year that West Germany was led by an aging Rhinelander, Konrad Adenauer, the good European who had turned increasingly to de Gaulle for re-insurance against both real and imagined softness by the Americans toward the Soviets. German policy seemed rooted in the cold war. While Paris spoke boldly of détente, entente and coöperation with the East, Bonn quietly expanded trade with Moscow and the satellite capitals at the same time. While de Gaulle used the American nuclear guarantee to defend Europe in order to pursue his own more independent policy-to undo, as it were, the bonds of Yalta-Adenauer held tenaciously to the notion that such a guarantee might be abandoned; thus, he could never perceive the freedom of action that such a commitment allowed him; his was a noble provincialism, but a provincialism nonetheless.

It was also the last year that England was governed by perhaps her most successful postwar Prime Minister. Harold Macmillan was indeed a pivotal figure, since it was he who took it upon himself to restore the strained "special relationship" between Britain and America after the Suez debacle in 1956, then tried to counteract the Common Market in the last years of the decade by setting up a European Free Trade Association, the so-called Outer Seven that would challenge the Six, which were labeled inward-looking.

In 1958 Macmillan had urged the political directorate of America, Britain and France, proposed by de Gaulle, upon a sympathetic but finally recalcitrant Eisenhower. By 1963, Macmillan had changed course. The "special relationship" no longer loomed as such a crucial link in England's perception of herself as a world power. She had sued for admission into the Europe she had spurned in 1957 when the Treaty of Rome was signed. Rejected as an American "Trojan horse" by de Gaulle, England would have to bide her time until she could make a proper Canossa before the Elysée, casting off the remnants of the special relationship as her penance.

Ten years ago America still enjoyed a surplus in her balance of trade. Her role in Vietnam was growing but there was as yet no obvious moral or financial crisis. Nevertheless, for those who looked carefully there were dangerous portents: in 1959 the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury had been sent to Europe to ask help in shoring up the U.S. balance of payments. Under Kennedy, Treasury Secretary Dillon sounded the tocsin more loudly, for by now we were running a continuing deficit in our overall balance of payments. And in Vietnam the American involvement had increased to approximately 16,000 advisers-both military and civilian-and the Saigon government of Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown, with Diem murdered in the aftermath.

Ten years later perceptions on both sides of the Atlantic have been affected by irreducible facts. The Europe of the Six has been replaced by the Europe of the Nine. Britain, Ireland and Denmark have been admitted into the Community. France, while trying to maintain the trappings of neo-Gaullism, no longer speaks with her old authority, and her power of veto is less firmly exercised. The expulsion from the Defense Ministry in 1973 of that most loyal Gaullist, Michel Debré, signals the very real possibility of new forms of coöperation between Great Britain and France. And on the other side of the channel, the "special relationship" with the United States has been quietly buried.

France today, while enjoying an industrial boom and a tranquil relationship between labor and capital, still trembles from the grave social dislocations which lie just below the surface of an affluent society.