CHAPTER 5

British Riddle, French Mystre, American Enigma

It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma -- Sir Winston
Churchill, October 1, 1939.

Every American knows one must sacrifice part of one's selfish interests
in order to save the rest. We French seek to keep all, and thus often
lose everything. -- Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. IV, Chapter
8, 1835 (my translation).

Perhaps we should ask first, not why shouldn't we try to federate
Atlantica, but why haven't we tried already? Why is it that we the
people of the Disunited States of Atlantica have delayed so long to
attempt this? Here is indeed "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an
enigma" -- as Churchill said of Russian policy. Why have the British,
the French and, above all, the Americans -- to mention no more -- shied
away so long from even exploring the possibility of Atlantic Union?

THE BRITISH RIDDLE

Consider first what a triple-wrapped riddle this is as regards the
British. These pioneers invented representative government. Their
Parliamentary system has been copied all round the world. Their Union of
England and Scotland in 1707 was a very helpful precedent for the
drafters of the Federal Constitution at Philadelphia. The fact that the
federal union system was not invented by them but by their "colonials"
-- worse still, by colonials who had won the only war the British have
lost in centuries -- this would explain why any people, except the
British, might scorn to explore Atlantic federal union. The British
rightly pride themselves on being not petty but practical in political
affairs, on not nursing grudges and on adapting themselves to changed
conditions.

British history has long been one of turning peacefully from systems
that were no longer giving results, and trying in time other systems
that promised to work better. And so it is not surprising that they were
the first Europeans to recognize in an official report the
practicability of the federal system, and to recommend -- as did Lord
Durham's farsighted report in 1838 proposing the Union of the English
and French in Canada -- that they try it in their own territory. With
this encouragement from London, and the statesmanship of such Canadians
as Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada in 1867 became a federal union. Since
then the British have done far more to spread federal union around the
world than we Americans have (except by the power of successful
example). With London's encouragement, the Australian federation, for
which the Australian statesman, Sir Henry Parkes, had worked so long,
came into being in 1901. In 1910, thanks to the vision of such British
apostles of The Federalist as Lionel Curtis and Lord Lothian, the victor
and the vanquished of the Boer War federated in the Union of South
Africa.[1]

FEDERATION FOR SHEIKDOMS --
NOT FOR ATLANTIC DEMOCRACIES

Since then federal union has increasingly become Britain's ready remedy
for many kinds of political problems, whether in the densely populated
multilingual sub-continent of India, the Malayan peninsula or the
far-scattered islands of the British West Indies. The British Empire has
spawned ten federal unions thus far; in the Commonwealth that has
replaced it, seven of the eleven members are federations.

London's willingness to try to solve almost any problem by federal union
was perhaps never carried to a greater extreme than when The Economist
on May 24, 1958, described the dangers that Britain faced in the ten
tiny sheikdoms on the Persian Gulf and Arabian coast, and asked:

Is there any choice but federation, or else ultimate absorption by Saudi
Arabia? And if the British preference is for the former, how many
British interests would be jettisoned if encouragement were given to
federation under multi-national auspices instead of on purely British
responsibility?

To gain the full flavor of The Economist's belief in federalism, one
must add that it described these sheikdoms as feudal "fiefs" with
undefined frontiers, "poor, quarrelsome, living on little beyond hope of
oil, disinclined to be harnessed in unfamiliar traces, entailing
federations, frontiers, courts or police," and inhabited by "ragged,
hungry and unlettered" people. I confess that The Economist's faith that
federal union would work even in these conditions far surpasses mine,
although some in London have found my faith in a federal Atlantic Union
"extravagant." Be it noted that The Economist, in proposing to federate
the Arab sheikdoms, suggested that this be done under the
"multi-national" auspices of the British, American, French and Dutch
governments -- but not that the latter nations federate themselves. This
brings us to the conundrum:

Why has this great British journal not led in getting the Atlantic
problem tackled federally? Why has it not shown here half the faith it
has shown in federation elsewhere? I would not single it out for
criticism -- its attitude, in this regard has been all too common in
London since the war: The Economist, in fact, has been relatively
advanced on the subject of Atlantic Union -- though, like most other
British opinion-makers, its receptivity toward Atlantic Union was much
greater in 1939 than since 1945. Why is it that British policy-framers,
who found Union Now worthy of such serious consideration in 1939 when
they faced the Nazi dictatorship, have been so silent or negative as
regards Atlantic federation since the still more formidable Communist
dictatorship replaced Hitler as the dancer?

THE CHURCHILL PUZZLE

The puzzlement grows when one turns to Sir Winston Churchill. His gifts
of leadership are magnificent, his prestige vast throughout Atlantica,
and particularly in America. Why has he not urged that the United
Kingdom and the United States lead in uniting the Atlantic community by
the federal principles that had united so successfully the British and
the French in Canada? In 1936 he had the vision to write in While
England Slept:

I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly
the stairway that leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at
the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on
there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break
beneath your feet.

Ten years later, he spoke in Fulton, Missouri -- after events had proved
his prophetic powers. Why did he not make his island still more famous
then by leading boldly toward Atlantic Union? Did he think that Britain
must await American leadership? Such considerations never kept him
during the war from standing up stoutly for his ideas, however much they
differed from President Roosevelt's. After the latter's death left Sir
Winston the one towering statesman and hero of Atlantica, he did not
hesitate to give a lead to America in his Fulton speech of March 5, 1946
on "The Sinews of Peace." But the lead was toward Anglo- American
alliance -- to base peace on the sinews that had failed the Thirteen
States in the Articles of Confederation and that Washington in his
Farewell Address had warned against, as bound always to fail. Sir
Winston had offered Union to a falling France when alliance failed
Britain in 1940; why did he not propose Union to America in the we even
explore the possibilities for peace that lie in an Atlantic-wide
development of the federal sinews that made his motherland no less
famous than his father's isle. Why?

TO THE LAND OF LOCKE, CAN THE LANDS OF LINCOLN
AND OF LENIN BE EQUAL?

Why have his successors in London continued to shy away from any
proposal -- whether on an Atlantic or a European scale -- that applied
to the United Kingdom the same federal principles that London was then
encouraging the people of the Empire, from India to the West Indies, to
apply in more difficult circumstances? Did these Prime Ministers feel
that, lacking the Churchillian prestige, they must follow Washington's
lead? But they, too, did not hesitate to differ from Washington. They
recognized Red China. They opposed General MacArthur's strategy in
Korea. They landed at Suez. They led a skeptical President Eisenhower to
seek peace through the Summit meeting ... that blew up in Paris.

Some Britons say the reason is that federal union and written
constitutions are foreign and distasteful to the British spirit, which
prefers the "functionalist," "gradualist" approach. But none of this
has deterred the British from recommending written federal constitutions
for Britons from Canada to Australia -- and proposing one even for
illiterate sheikdoms. Certainly no one would say that the United Kingdom
has never proposed trying to solve its own Atlantic problem by this
method because the British feel themselves to be less politically mature
than the Americans, Australians, Burmese, Canadians, Hindus, Nigerians,
South Africans, West Indians -- (not to mention again these sheikdoms).

Who can explain the postwar attitude of the British -- parent of
Parliaments, godfather of Federal Unions, nurse of John Stuart Mill,
tutor of Lord Acton, -- situated on their famous island, the natural
bridge between Western Europe and North America . . . this practical
people, this magnanimous people, whom Churchill called "unique in this
respect: They are the only people who like to be told how bad things
are, who like to be told the worst" (of course, about themselves, too)?
Here is this people, of all peoples, helping divide Europe in Sixes and
Sevens, helping balance the Earth between Communism (Chinese and
Russian) and Freedom (American and British) and preaching federal union
to everyone, but themselves. They talk as if it were practical to base
disarmament on the assumption that equality in weapons counts more than
inequality in the will to kill ... that if only they can get the Russian
or Chinese Communist believer in violence, and the American believer in
the ideals of freedom and peace (which the finest spirits of Britain
itself have always held high) both to agree to outlaw or limit atomic
weapons, all will be well -- that gunmen are no more likely to attack
than pacifists ... if only both are armed equally with .22 caliber
pistols.

Here are the people who produced and who cherish Locke (and the Labour
Party), seeking to prevent war by putting the Power that produced and
cherishes Lenin on a par, as regards peace, with the Power that produced
and cherishes Lincoln. Here are the great British people, through whom
I, like so many others, have learned so much, and come to expect so much
... putting their trust now in the antitheses of all that made them
great -- not in trying themselves to practice on an Atlantic scale the
federal principles they have spread to all the races of mankind ... not
in working with bulldog tenacity to create the oceanic nucleus of
Tennyson's Parliament of Man ... Is this not "a riddle wrapped in a
mystery inside an enigma"?

THE Mystre OF DE GAULLE'S FRANCE

When we turn to President de Gaulle's France, the riddle is no less
baffling, if we have some of the understanding of the French (and of
what they have done for freedom and union) that we have of the British
and Americans.

No other people has in their blood the spirit of individual freedom
through union of sovereign states so much as have the Americans --
except the French. The very name of France stands, indeed, for the
political ideal of all the Atlantic Community -- as the names, America,
Britain, Germany and that of other nations do not in their derivation.
France and French come from the Franks; that Teutonic tribe left their
name even in English as an adjective, frank, originally meaning
"free-not in bondage," and now meaning in a positive way, "free in
uttering one's real sentiments" -- the same as franc means in French.
And francais meant freeman -- what we all aspire to be -- long before
nationalism reduced its meaning to the present one, a citizen of one
nation.

Before nationalism became a disuniting foe of freedom, it was a force
for union. I would agree with Bernard Shaw that it began among the
French, with Jeanne d'Arc, to unite people of the same language in an
ever-wider community and government. The French were not only the first
great people on the European (continent to be united under a common
government; as Tocqueville pointed out in his Ancien Regime, they had,
long before the French Revolution, gone much further than any other
nation there in breaking down feudalism's multitudinous barriers.

The French Revolution has some striking things in common with the
American Revolution that immediately preceded it. It wiped out the
customs barriers among the provinces of France as the Federal
Constitution removed those among the Thirteen States. Both peoples
established free trade over an immensely greater area than it had known
before, and both did it by peaceful agreement, and at one stroke -- not
gradually over a long period, as elsewhere. What is more important, both
achieved this miracle by tying economic union to free political union.

Most strikingly similar of all, both the American and the French
Revolutions began their work of union of the free in the same way. They
both began by declaring in writing fundamentally the same principles of
individual freedom and equality as the basis and the purpose of
government. Practically no other peoples on earth accepted these
principles then; now practically no people on earth does not at least
pretend to practice, or aim at some of them. Having thus agreed on their
aims, both the Americans and French proceeded to set up written
constitutions to provide institutions by which to attain them.

As the United States led in the New World in uniting states by its
federal example, so France has led in the Old. First, it set the example
of uniting people of the same language, divided by feudal sovereignties,
in the modern nation-state -- an example that Italy and Germany followed
in the 19th century. Then Prance led in trying to unite nation states by
federation.

Blind to the fact that nationalism could be a balkanizing as well as a
uniting force, the United States raised Woodrow Wilson's banner of the
"self-determination of nations," and the ideal of a League of all
nations rather than a Union of any. It was France that then raised the
federal banner. As The New York Times correspondent at the League in
Geneva, I had the ironic experience of reporting the efforts of Aristide
Briand to unite Europe as early as 1929 on principles more American
(though not fully federal) than those of Wilson's League.

When National Socialism seemed on the verge of victory, it was again a
Frenchman, Jean Monnet, who led with the proposal for an Anglo-French
Union. And it was General de Gaulle -- as his Memoirs[2] relate -- who
urged Churchill to make this offer then. It was again from France (after
an ephemeral Churchillian gesture) that came the leadership which
produced the Schuman Plan, Euratom, the Common Market.

PRIME MINISTER DEBR FOR ATLANTIC UNION

President de Gaulle himself picked for his Prime Minister, Michel Debr,
who in the book, Peace by Oceanic Union,[3] which he co-authored in 1945
with Emmanuel Monick, eloquently called for Atlantic Union in such words
as these:

Let the Atlantic Peoples unite in the same union that brings together
the inhabitants of a great city when threatened, and there will then
immediately be an opportunity for peace.

How then to explain the Atlantic policy that President de Gaulle has
pursued? Does it result, as so many say, from an "obsession" with the
"grandeur" of France? In an "Open Letter" to him, entitled "'Grandeur'
or Greatness?" which I wrote in the April, 1959, Freedom & Union on the
eve of his visit to the United States, I explained at length why I
believed that this explanation was not valid. To quote it:

Why am I so bold as to differ so completely on these basic matters with
the multitude? Partly because I believe that France means to you
basically what America means to me. It does not mean primarily the land
or even the people (though we love the land we were born in and have a
sublime faith in its people). It means certain ideals for which our
country stands and which to you are the soul of France as they are to me
the soul of America.

If this intangible, immortal spirit were not France to you, if the land
and the people came first, then you would have agreed with Petain that
all was lost when the latter two were occupied and surrendered. Instead,
from another country and all alone, you broadcast, "France is not lost!"
You held that the true France was not then on the Continent but on an
island, and that its true spokesman was not its government, but a lone
Frenchman in London. You proved that your concept of France was the
latent concept of your countrymen.

Another reason why I am so bold as to differ with the multitude about
you is that even you can not be more passionately devoted to your
concept of France than I to my concept of America. Nor can even you --
with all respect -- have more faith in your fellow-citizens than I in
mine, nor be surer that what we love above all in our countries is not
only latent in our compatriots, but the thing they will sacrifice most
for in the end.

GREATNESS NEEDS NO PASSPORT

The basic question, I added, was this: Shall France, America, Britain,
continue to seek greatness ill nationalistic terms that convince no one
of their greatness least of all Mr. K -- who boasts that Communist
dictatorship will soon "bury" even the greatest of the three by this
definition? Or shall we all seek the kind of greatness that we all know
at heart is truly great -- that History will confirm and that will
meanwhile bury dictatorship? Shall we seek it together, in union -- and
thereby, incidentally, put behind our common free ideals or more of the
armed and industrial power we now prize so much than any of our nations
can possibly gain alone or in mere alliance? I then appealed to
President de Gaulle personally to lead:

To change our present concept of national greatness to the one by which
we ourselves judge the past, and by which the future will judge us in
turn, some statesman with a deep sense of History must point the way.
You have that sense of History, Mr. President, to a rare degree. You
have also the courage and the Atlantic-wide personal authority that are
needed too, for this is no little change. And so I turn to you.

I suggest no sacrifice of the true greatness of France, nor of America,
Britain or any other people. I firmly believe that France's greatness is
beneficial and essential to us Americans as ours is to the French. I
know the inspiration, courage, faith that I myself have drawn from
Jeanne d'Arc, from Valmy, from Verdun, and, if you will pardon me, from
you. I have seen plenty of proof that the virtues of those who incarnate
the greatness of America, as do Washington and Lincoln, help make
Frenchmen and France greater, too. Greatness needs no passport. The
quality that permits this transfusion of spirit across national
boundaries, oceans, ages, is to me a precious asset of human nature and
it is found throughout our species. It is no less human -- but no asset
-- that we all see the faults in other men and nations much more easily
than our own.

My appeal to President de Gaulle to lead in bridging the Atlantic
concluded with these words:

A bridge so wide cannot be built from either shore alone. It must be
built simultaneously from both, and from solid bases. What firmer bases
does History offer for bridging the Atlantic by political union than
France and the U.S.A.? The momentous enterprise seems about to begin on
the American shore. It depends now on you, Mr. President, in France.
Shall France not continue to lead in the Old World as America in the
New, in this, the great line of their history? In this greatest venture
toward Union of the Free, it rests now with you whether they shall lead
together.

Is it not another "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" that so
great a man, with so great a love for France, should not yet have given
this honor to the land of Lafayette, Tocqueville and Victor Hugo -- to
the people from whose Congrs, Parlement, Constitution and Union
Fdrale the English-speaking world drew the words for our most
cherished free institutions?

THE AMERICAN ENIGMA

The enigma of America's long failure even to explore Atlantic Union is
the greatest of all -- but it is so obvious as to need the fewest words.
We Americans created federal union -- or the Federal Constitution
created the American people, as a body politic -- whichever way you
prefer. We have more experience with federation than has any other
people, or than we have with diplomacy, alliance, league, confederation
or any other system of inter-state relations.

No people has ever been so immensely rewarded by any political system as
we have been by federal union. Nor has any people ever been warned so
strongly against the other inter-state systems as we by rightly revered
statesmen. In his Farewell Address, Washington stressed that alliance
would never work even among our own Thirteen States. He said:

To the efficiency and permanency of your Union, a government for the
whole is indispensable. No alliance, however strict, between the parts
can be an adequate substitute; they must inevitably experience the
infractions and interruptions which all alliances at all times have
experienced.

Both Washington and Jefferson warned against entering into entangling
alliances with the nations of Europe -- never against our federating
with other democracies. Yet we have risked Atlantic alliance rather than
attempt Atlantic Union.

How can it be that in our federated "home of the brave," presidential
candidates, party platforms and Congressional resolutions do not dare
even breathe aloud such honored American words as "Union" and "Federal,"
when they refer to the Atlantic democracies? Why is it that, however
much they may stress the "imperative" need to unite effectively, they
speak instead of "unity," "community," "cooperation"?

Those who would be tomorrow's leaders call on the American people to
open "new frontiers" ... and never recall the means by which we have
always pushed the frontier forward -- Federal Union. Or they call on us
to "have the courage and the confidence that inspired our forebears" ...
but would have us show this by moving "toward confederation" in
Atlantica -- not toward the goal of "a more perfect Union" in which our
forebears put their trust, and to which they dedicated us, in the
Preamble of the Federal Constitution. Why? Why? Why? Is this not the
greatest "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" that any
Atlantic people presents? Here even the Kremlin must concede we lead.

If any one thing is the answer to this British riddle, this French
mystre, this American enigma, is it not the confusion over sovereignty
that afflicts all the free people of Atlantica? Let us seek again to
clear it away.

____

1. Both Lionel Curtis and Lord Lothian gained by study of American
constitutional history, an understanding, of and a devotion to federal
principles and a willingness to try to solve the toughest problems by
them which I have rarely seen equaled by my compatriots. I cannot
recommend too strongly World Order (Civitas Dei) by Lionel Curtis
(Oxford Press, 1939). As for Lord Lothian, my own belief is that had it
not been for his untimely death in 1941 while he was ambassador in
Washington, the Great opportunity to build an Atlantic Union which we
had during the war would not have been lost.

2. See "De Gaulle Urged Federal Union on Churchill in 1940," July 1958
Freedom & Union. A reprint is available from it for $0.10.

3. This book was published serially under this title by Freedom & Union,
starting in July 1959, from the original French book entitled Demain La
Paix (Plon, Paris). These reprints of chapters in it may be had from the
magazine: "National Sovereignty -- an Obsolete Dogma" ($0.30), "Let the
Atlantic Peoples Unite" ($0.20), and "Oceans Unite Men" ($0.20).

