The Community Is Working

Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.

"Deficit" seems to be the word for Europe these days. The Community of the Nine, so we are told, has a democratic deficit, a social deficit, a deficit of visionary power and, most noticeably, a deficit of unified political will in world affairs. It is hard to deny that there is a great deal of truth to such jeremiads. The Community does indeed find itself in the awkward position of being neither here nor there. Its member-states no longer possess a number of important political instruments; collective tools have not yet been fashioned. Clearly, the evolution of joint political institutions has not reached the point where they match the problems in the world.

But if there are glaring deficits in today's Europe, there is also, perhaps, a surfeit of skepticism. For despite all its obvious deficiencies the Community is definitely on the move again. Europe lost the 1950s through British aloofness, then the 1960s through French obstinacy. Now the moment of slack water in the tide of European affairs is obviously past. The Community of the Six has finally grown into the wider grouping of the Nine. At the Paris summit last October, the leaders of the new Community made a number of important decisions about the internal structure of their association. They defined a long-term political goal-European union by 1980- and set themselves a provisional timetable. Whatever procedural snags this renewed effort at pulling together may run into, and whatever vagueness may still becloud the ultimate objective, the relance européenne is finally underway. If the Treaty of Rome is the Community's Old Testament, the Paris Communiqué is its New Testament. And it goes a long way beyond the earlier document. Nowhere will this become more clearly visible than in the Community's external relations.

The range of choices has narrowed considerably since Herman Kahn sketched 88 possible Europes in the mid-1960s, even since Alastair Buchan's ISS study of 1969 outlined six different models of thinkable European futures. We may not see a federated Western Europe emerge by 1980, but we will see something close to it, arrived at in a much more pragmatic fashion than the European idealists of the early postwar period were able to visualize.