                          BOOK II

                         UNION NOW


                A Proposal for an Atlantic
                Federal Union of the Free



For the Great Republic, For the Principle It Lives By and
      Keeps alive, For Man's Vast Future. -- Lincoln


                      The Basic Parts
               of the 1940 Concise Edition
                    By Arrangement with
               Harper & Brothers, Publishers
                         New York


To the memory of Emma Kirshman, My mother


And to all those for whom she spoke when with two sons away in the war
she wrote:

Surely some great good will come out of so much suffering... Our home is
broken and empty, but I am not without hope. Some day you will return
improved by this awful experience, for by experiences we grow bigger and
get a deeper insight in life and its mysteries.


Introductions

I. TO THIS EDITION

This book deserves to be read by those who have not done so, and read
again now by those who read it years ago. Although one does not have to
agree with every detail, it has proved too right too long to be
neglected now.

Many books on world affairs are dated in a year or two. That Union Now
has remained alive now for twenty-one years speaks volumes. At
twenty-one it has the strength and maturity of manhood, and yet has kept
the fresh vigor of youth. Twelve years ago I wrote in the Introduction
to its Postwar Edition:

"The truths and principles set forth in Union Now are fundamental --
they will never grow old or dated. Time and experience add to this
book's undeniable logic."

Reviewers agreed. "If this book was important in 1939, it is more so
today," Orville Prescott declared in The New York Times. August
Heckscher wrote in The New York Herald-Tribune: "With realism, faith,
audacity and prudence ... the postwar edition of Union Now comes with
earmarks of a classic. A book with a life of its own, one of the very
few in any generation that rise above the influence which gave them
birth to shape and direct the future."

The Minneapolis Tribune found "Streit's case was a formidable one when
he first made it in 1939. It is even more formidable in this postwar
edition which ought to be read by every citizen concerned with the
survival of free institutions." And in my own State of Tennessee, the
Memphis Commercial-Appeal, said: "It was a Book-of-the-Month then
(1941), and time, the ultimate test of a classic, has only enhanced its
prospects of becoming the Book-of-the-Century."

These were strong statements, but the past twelve years have made them
stronger. Meanwhile history has moved relentlessly if painfully in Union
Now's direction. Consider:

When Union Now was first published in March 1939, our people believed
that neutrality would keep us out of war.

War converted us to wholehearted acceptance of the United Nations in
1945. Within three years we learned that this too was not enough. By
1949 the United States led in establishing the North Atlantic Treaty.

In proposing that the democracies unite, Union Now launched a frontal
assault on the assumption that regions could only be continental In 1939
when people took for granted that oceans divided and land united
nations, this book saw "the enormous advantage of being ... grouped ...
around that cheap and excellent means of communication, a common body of
water," which the Atlantic nations enjoyed.

Written before transatlantic commercial flights became commonplace,
before jet planes were known or the sound barrier broken, Chapter V told
of the many bonds that already united these peoples. No one before, to
my knowledge, had recognized that they formed what we now commonly call
"the Atlantic community."

In 1949 the prevailing view was that the NATO alliance would be enough.
A goodly number in both Houses of Congress, however, had already been
impressed by Union Now's warning that alliance would no more suffice
than did the United Nations which it supplemented. They joined me in
introducing in that year a resolution asking the United States to call a
convention of delegates to explore how we might unite the democracies
more strongly, federally or otherwise.

By 1955 an annual Conference of Members of Parliament of NATO nations
was established. In 1957 I was a delegate to the Conference they held
the month after sputnik went into orbit. It unanimously endorsed the
Convention idea. In Book I, Clarence Streit has dealt with the approval
of it by the Atlantic Congress in 1959, the authorization of the
Convention by the United States Congress in 1960, the pledge of a
"broader partnership" which the Democratic Platform gave the Atlantic
Community and the Nixon-Rockefeller proposal of Atlantic Confederation.
All this makes the chapters of Union Now which follow timely indeed. A
book that has so consistently proved so right through so many years of
upheaval is worth reading now -- or re-reading by previous readers.

"Clarence Streit," I wrote in my previous Introduction, "is a great
American. He has faced many obstacles in securing consideration for
Union Now, but with vision and determination he has persisted."

In my campaign for renomination this Summer, my opponent spoke
disparagingly of my friendship with Clarence Streit. My answer was:

"I am proud to be counted among Mr. Streit's friends, and I have a deep
respect for his dedication to an ideal which seeks to find a real answer
to the problem of peace in a world which can blow itself to cinders at
the touch of a button. We need more Clarence Streits today."

And he deserves to be read, and re-read, today.

ESTES KEFAUVER

NOV. 19, 1960  U.S. SENATOR FROM TENNESSEE


II. TO THE 1949 POSTWAR EDITION

Union Now is remarkable because it was born out of the kind of
circumstances which produced the few great books of the world's
political literature. Our matter-of-fact era commits a great mistake in
believing that the really significant accomplishments of political
literature are simply the result of long and dispassionate research,
which the investigator carries on from sheer curiosity or -- what is
worse -- from the exigencies of professorial competition. This is
manifestly not enough. Those few works that constitute landmarks in our
political history were creations of men who on the one hand were keenly
suffering under the burdens of unsolved problems which threatened to
crush their own lives and who on the other hand grasped those problems
with the greatest sincerity and the most universal human outlook
possible.

And when these two conditions of creative activity are present, works
appear like the Republic, the De Monarchia, the Defensor Pacis, the
Prince, the Vindiciae, the Six Books of the Republic, the Two Treatises
of Civil Government, the Spirit of the Laws, the Social Contract, the
Wealth of Nations, the Essay on Liberty, Das Kapital -- to mention only
the most portentous for the future. Accomplished scholarship,
sophisticated terminology are not necessary attributes of these works.
Many of them appeared to contemporary scholars as dilettante attacks
against their professional monopoly.

I do not hesitate to class Mr. Streit's Union Now among these great
works of human emancipation. One might say that it combines the acute,
realistic analysis of a Hamilton with the exuberant vision of a Walt
Whitman. As a matter of fact, his book is the new Federalist, a
carefully and minutely elaborated plan for a federal union of
democracies, which may serve as a stepping stone to broader and more
universal union. In writing this book, he has practically written his
own personal history, from the moment when the World War snatched him
from his own home, through his experiences as war correspondent, and
through his sad disillusionment with the League of Nations. [See Annex,
"My Own Road to Union," p. 296; some prefer to begin the book by reading
this first.] From that time he realized keenly that the present anarchy
of the world, with all its disasters, was and is primarily not a problem
of the states but a problem of the individual; that the League of
Nations was doomed to failure because it was not a union of free men but
a league of jealous and egotistic governments; that our present
misfortunes were due not to narrow-minded and wicked statesmen but to a
system which must necessarily and inevitably sacrifice the individual to
the Moloch of national sovereignty.

And here appears the great eighteenth century animus of the book, by
which it became a successor to the spirit of the American and French
Revolutions. It shows magnificently how a system in which the individual
abandons his moral sovereignty will make of him a tool or slave of the
state [Chaps. VI, IX]. It shows no less forcefully that a truly
individualistic conception of society leads unavoidably to the highest
amount of human cooperation, both inside and outside of the state, until
it reaches the ultimate possibilities.

These are not all new ideas. On the contrary, there is nothing in the
author's argument which would not be understandable to the Stoics, the
philosophers of Christian universality, the founders of international
law, and the fighters for English, French and American democracy. But
his new and creative vision is the sober and at the same time inspired
elaboration of the remedy. He demonstrates that the task for the union
of the democracies is not essentially different from the task which the
United States has accomplished, and that this union would not only be a
protection against war but the most spectacular step ever taken to solve
our social problems while maintaining individual liberty and human
dignity.

I venture to say that from no textbook or series of textbooks will you
understand the essence of the political process and the dynamics of
international relations so clearly as from the study of Union Now. At
the same time, it makes you conscious participants in a supreme moral
task. It will convince you that the future does not lie in the hands of
the dictators or of the bankrupt democratic statesmen of Europe but
rather in the determination of courageous individuals conscious of their
own power. Or, as Mr. Streit puts it: "For man's freedom and vast
future, man most depend on man. It is ours together or no one's, and it
shall be ours."

OSCAR JASZI

P.S. I gave the preceding introduction first as a review of Union Now
on April 13, 1939, at Oberlin College Chapel. The eventful years since
then have confirmed, not changed my opinion of it -- O. J., PROFESSOR OF
POLITICAL SCIENCE, OBERLIN COLLEGE, August 16, 1948. [He died in 1957.]

