The Pittsburgh Press (March 25, 1943)
Editorial: United States of Europe
When Prime Minister Churchill last Sunday suggested the grouping or confederation of European states, he was not grabbing a fancy idea out of the blue. It has been advocated by leading European statesmen for 30 years, and was proposed to the League of Nations by Briand in 1929. Mr. Churchill as early as 1930 wrote in favor of a “United States of Europe.”
By happy coincidence, or perhaps by design, Mr. Churchill now publicizes this idea on the eve of the fifth Pan-European Conference, which opens tomorrow in New York. The conference is led by Count R. N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, former Briand associate, head of New York University’s Seminar for Postwar European Federation.
Others connected with this conference include: Former Premier van Zeeland of Belgium, former Premier Hodža of Czechoslovakia, former Foreign Ministers of Norway, Finland, Spain; distinguished British, French, Polish, Danish, Greek, Romanian and Yugoslav representatives; the German Thomas Mann, and the American diplomat, William C. Bullitt.
The movement is not without opposition from some factions of the governments-in-exile, which still stress extreme nationalism. By a strange paradox of war, however, this old dream may be easier to realize now than ever before, for several practical reasons:
Europe learned the hard way that the pre-war division into small states, trade barriers, political balances of power, and competing armaments, did not work; they produced neither prosperity nor security, but the weakness which made each and all easy prey for Nazi conquest.
Hitler, by attempting to impose a conqueror’s unity on Europe and destroying many economic lines and some political frontiers, has unwillingly driven the separate nationalities into a common defensive alliance.
But much of the most powerful argument for European federation is the historic fact that nothing less can give the smaller peoples a better chance for security on a continent which Germany – by sheer population, natural resources, industrial organization, and geographic position – can otherwise dominate. Germany or Russia, or Germany-Russia, are too powerful for a divided Europe.
A United States of Europe, including a chastened German population, might provide the prosperous and peaceful Europe, with which Britain, Russia, China and the United States of America could cooperate for international order and security.
But the European people themselves must be allowed to make a free choice. It is not for us, or other large powers, to impose any system on them.