Introduction: This Book's Aim

If you would be freer than all that has been before,
come, listen to me. -- Whitman, By Blue Ontario's Shore

Twenty-one Years after Union Now was first published, its basic idea
reached the Rubicon. The idea was summed up in the book's sub-title: "A
Proposal for a Federal Union of the Democracies of the North Atlantic."
The Rubicon took the form of an Act of Congress in the summer of 1960,
authorizing the calling of a Convention of "representative citizens" of
North Atlantic nations to explore how to advance their freedom by
greater political and economic unity, and report by January 31, 1962.
The fact that it is patterned on the 1787 Convention which worked out
the world's first Federal Union -- the revolutionary United States
Constitution -- seems evidence enough that the turning point which the
Atlantic community and the Union Now proposal have now reached is indeed
significant.

To add to its significance, Senator John F. Kennedy, after voting for
this Act, won the White House under the banner of "the new frontier," on
a platform pledging "the Atlantic Community" a "broader partnership" ...
while Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who almost won, urged a "North
Atlantic Confederation." These developments are dealt with further in
this book, notably in Chapters 1, 3 and 11.

Earlier, the State High School Debate Leagues had, with singular
foresight, voted to make free world security their topic for the 1960-61
scholastic year, with the No. 1 debate proposition under it: "Resolved:
That the North Atlantic Treaty Organization be transformed into a
federal government." As a result more than 50,000 students in some
10,000 American high schools are already debating the subject which will
face some 100 leaders from NATO nations when the Atlantic Convention
meets in 1961.

The high school decision led Dr. Bower Aly, Executive Secretary of the
National Committee on Debate Materials for these students, to write: "I
wish I knew some man with money and enough perception to supply a copy
of Union Now to each high school debate squad in the United States. It
is the best single book for our purposes." He found this man in the
person of F. Gilbert Lamb, President of Lamb-Weston, Inc., of Weston,
Oregon. He generously offered to give a copy to all the 10,000 debate
squads but there were only 200 copies of the 1949 Postwar edition left
in print.[1]

In these circumstances, it was decided that another edition should be
published, with the five Postwar chapters replaced with others written
now. The political developments thereafter led me to change plans and
write this new book, to which I have added the basic parts of Union Now.
The result is virtually two books in one. Because of the debaters'
demand for Union Now, I had to write this book more rapidly than I would
have liked. It is, however, the product of research, study, experience
and thought through more than a quarter- century. In it I aim at three
targets -- yea four, as the ancient Hebrews loved to say.

First (in order of appearance), I have considered afresh the proposal
and philosophy of Union Now in the light of the world changes since
1939. Then I have tried to do the three things I think most need doing
if we are to realize our present opportunity -- or even escape
catastrophe -- namely, a) to clear away the confusion over sovereignty
which keeps the free divided and fog-bound, b) to clarify the
misunderstood but momentous and inspiring lessons of American history on
sovereignty and Union, and c) to provide the powerful motive force
needed for the free to reach the new world to which they alone can lead
mankind.

The fog over sovereignty has kept the free circling for fifty years in a
sea of troubles -- instead of sailing on to make this the century of
individual freedom-and-union in an even higher, broader degree than was
the period from 1776 to 1910. We cannot remove this fog by removing
dictatorship; we ourselves create it -- the confusion lies in us. I have
done my best to clarify the subject of sovereignty, and show that it
centers in no body politic but equally in our individual selves or, more
accurately, in the intangible self that Tocqueville called "the angel in
man."

To do this, I have turned perforce to the history of the United States.
I say perforce for four reasons: 1) The history of no other people has
so much to teach on sovereignty; here, as an English author taught me,
one can see its workings as one may study "bees in a glass hive." 2) No
people is more befogged now over sovereignty. 3) To clarify Americans on
it is essential; while they remain fog-bound, the Atlantic Community
cannot sail on. 4) The best way to de-fog us is through fresh air from
our own history -- which also helps make others understand us.

To lift a fog is not enough; all can be clear and yet one can stay
becalmed, or fail to move fast enough to reach port in time. But as the
breeze that lifts a fog can drive a ship ahead, so what clarifies
confusion may not only give us our direction but help us reach it. By
nature the sovereign -- whether king, nation, or citizen -- must seek to
exercise his sovereignty and grow in power. When we recognize ourselves
as sovereigns, we feel more impellingly the need, and responsibility,
to develop ourselves, to free our persons in the myriad ways liberty
requires, to fulfill our potentialities. No one else can do this for us
-- yet no one can free or fulfill himself alone.

Heaven itself needs more than one star, more than a galaxy or Milky Way,
to be Heaven and "declare the glory of God." To be sovereign, to be all
we each can be, each man and woman requires the help of a myriad men and
women. Each is weak in more ways than strong -- but we are so richly
varied that there are always others who fulfill themselves by supplying
what we lack, as we each do for them.

This subject is vast; in this book I am concerned only with some phases,
particularly the political and moral. I have tried to indicate how, by
extending our sovereignty to create a Union of the Free, each can
fulfill himself in four of our embodiments -- as part of mankind, as a
member of the free world, as one of our nation, and (I would add, above
all) in our individual self -- as homo sapiens, citizen, patriot and
person, or soul. By Atlantic Union we develop ourselves, the country we
love, the freedom we cherish and the whole human species -- everything
we are and belong to.

To this end I have sought to bring out better than I have before the
positive rather than the negative motive in the philosophy of
freedom-and-union and in the proposal of Federation of the Free. To be
against and to seek to escape danger are natural motives, but they are
not the things that move us in the highest measure. We cannot be
ourselves without being for something. To be a man is to act, create,
do. Our eyes are not aimed sidewise and backward, as a fly's, to flee
with. Our eyes look forward; our hands and feet are shaped to move
ahead; we must turn to see pursuers. Man is made to hunt rather than be
hunted; his genius lies in building rather than letting alone, or
destroying.

Like all living creatures we are often moved by fear; unlike them we are
also moved by faith. And it is faith that has moved Man to do all the
great things he has done, and all the minor things that he is proud of,
too -- everything that he calls manly, womanly, humane, heroic. And the
more prodigious his achievement, the more sublime was his faith. In the
end, faith moves men more than fear.

We know this almost instinctively. We often prove it by our action. Yet
more often we speak as if we believed the contrary, at least about our
fellows. I must confess I have. What set and kept me working for Union
of the Free, for twenty-seven years now, was not merely the dangers from
dictatorship, depression and war that result from disunion; it was, much
more, the freer, fuller, better individual life and greater civilization
that would result from the creation of this Union. As I have continued
in this endeavor, I have been strengthened in this faith by experiencing
the freer, fuller, better life which even the continued effort to help
create this Union brought me personally -- and seeing many others
engaged in it with me enjoy these rewards, too.

Yet I have written and talked of Union of the Free much more in terms of
the dangers of disunion we could escape than in terms of the advantages
we would gain, individually and collectively. It is no excuse to say
that this is common practice. (Certainly the major reason given by those
who hope to realize quickly such things as disarmament or world
government is that it is "a matter of survival." They expect to work
stupendous miracles by invoking the fearful animal in man, rather than
the stuff that miracles and men are made on -- willingness to sacrifice
the body to the spirit and risk survival in order to do what one
believes in.)

Compared to disarmament, which so many practical politicians and
newspapers treat as if it could he achieved in a few years, Atlantic
Union requires only a minor miracle. Though I have not tried to bring it
about by appealing to fear of non-survival, I have appealed too much to
fear of dictatorship and war, and not enough to the faith that moved me,
myself. Nor is it an excuse to say that the dangers of disunion seem
immediate and concrete, while the rewards of Union are relatively
distant, or intangible.

It was not fear, but far greater faith than Atlantic Union now requires
that made Mecca, Mecca. Since we all move from low as well as high
motives, both to escape the club and to reach the carrot, it seems to me
necessary to invoke both, to achieve any political aim. But realism
requires me also to admit that, the greater the miracle one seeks to
make, the more we need to arouse faith rather than fear. And so I have
sought -- particularly in Chapters 12 and 13 and in the Last Word -- to
correct this balance.

BOOK II -- Union Now

Book II gives the basic parts of Union Now. I have drawn them from the
condensed version of the original 1939 text which I made for the Concise
edition in 1940. To present the proposal and philosophy of that book in
that text separately, yet combined with this new book, permits those who
read Union Now years ago to refresh their memory easily. It is no less
convenient for those who have heard of Union Now, read reviews or
digests of it, and -- I like to think -- meant to read it but left this
intention unfulfilled (as I so often have with other books). Most of all
I hope that Book II will introduce Union Now to those who have never
heard of it, particularly to the generation still unborn when it
appeared, or too young to read when the 1949 edition was published.

The twenty-one years since its first publication permit readers now to
put it to a far more searching test than any other proposal in the
field, provided the author resists the temptation to revise the text as
hindsight may suggest. Readers rarely can put any idea to such a test.
Many, I think, will find this experience more interesting than they
anticipated. Those who assume that any book that appeared even a year
ago must be too dated now to waste time on, can easily test that theory
by turning to Book II and scanning the opening paragraphs of 1939.

Certainly I believe the greatness of our present opportunity, and
danger, justify the severest test of any proposal and philosophy for
meeting them. We live in a time when the world grows incessantly more
complex, confusing. Long before change became so widespread, Lord Acton
warned that "political calculations are so complex that we cannot trust
theory, if we cannot support it by experience." But how are we to
distinguish sound theory from false today? How to reduce the cost, and
danger, of learning by trial and error when time rockets, and error may
annihilate? How to cleave to reason when leaders in whom we trust are so
often proven wrong, once their policies are tried? "To govern is to
foresee," a French king said. But how are we to know foresight in time?

The surest way we can hope for is by some test of time. A policy that
met changing conditions in the past five, ten, twenty, fifty, 150 years
better than alternatives offers sounder hope of meeting future needs
than do policies that permit no such test, that are pure theory, or that
have just been tried and failed, or have never worked in history. Yet
how seldom do we -- or can we -- apply any test of time before we try
proposals in the present field. Pause for a moment to think of the many
policies for advancing peace and freedom that we have tried in the past
fifty, twenty, ten, five years -- only to find their foresight false,
their reasoning unsound, and freedom and peace in greater danger than
before ...

... And now pause again -- perhaps we read too rapidly and think too
little while reading -- and let your mind roam over the many solutions
that were not tried out but did gain much attention because they had
behind them men of high position or great wealth, or mass media,
respected institutions, important organizations. Try to recall at
least one of these proposals that had their day on Page 1, or in the
halls of learning, and are now mercifully forgotten ...

... Is it surprising that through these fifty years we have seemed to go
in circles, yet really spiraled downward ... that so many lament today
"a lack of purpose"? How can we hope for better while we give so little
thought to the test of time? Some say that I attach too much importance
to the lessons of experience that American history teaches. Since I do
weigh heavily the time factor in human affairs, and since the proposal
and philosophy of Union Now have had to face some test of time, I think
it only right that you should have the opportunity Book II gives of
applying to Book I a more searching test than most books permit.

I wish, indeed, there were space to include all of Union Now, but
various factors limit this volume. And so I have had to omit six
chapters and one annex, and some paragraphs in others. The parts omitted
deal with conditions that no longer obtain, such as American neutralism,
or that I consider secondary. All that is basic has been retained, with
no change whatever in the original text.

I regret, too, that there is no space to mention by name even some of
the many to whom I am deeply indebted for their part in this enterprise,
and book. I hope I have made clear in the Last Word of Book I, and in
Chapter XIII of Union Now, how grateful I am to each of them. I must
mention one: Without my wife, Jeanne Defrance, I could not have done my
part in this work, nor have the proof I have of the truth and beauty of
freedom-and-union.

C.K.S.
Armonk, New York, November 10, 1960
____

1. This was the last of Union Now's seven editions for the United
States: my private one (1938), Unabridged (printed in France for Harper
& Bros., 1939) Unabridged (printed in the United States by Harper &
Bros., 1939) Concise (1940), Book-of-the-Month Dividend (1941), Wartime,
with three new chapters (1943), Postwar, with five new chapters (1949).
Also exhausted are the foreign editions. Jonathan Cape, London;
Librairie de Medicis, Paris, (Union ou Chaos) and Natur och Kultur,
Stockholm (Union Nu), all in 1939. More than a quarter million copies in
all have been sold, not counting a pirated edition in China and a Dutch
edition in Indonesia in 1941.

