Basic HTML Version
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER
30,
1986
PAGE
23
transgressions.... When Americans hear the strident voices of
opposition Social Democrats and some of the younger
CDU
spokesmen, as well as Britain's Labor Party [which says
U.S.
nuclear missiles in Britain must go if it comes to power], they
have
to
wonder about the future of the historic European tilt
in
U.S.
policy.
Increasing numbers of Europeans feel their future lies with a much closer
economic and even political-security arrangement with the Soviet bloc.
In the Winter 1986-87 issue of FOREIGN POLICY there appeared an article
entitled "The Third Way," written by Jolyon Howorth:
.
There have been only two coherent postwar scenarios for Europe.
The first rests on..."Atlanticism," that concept positing a
community of purpose between the peoples of Western Europe and
those of North America. The second scenario centers on a
process of trans-continental reconciliation, implying gradual
progress toward a regional security structure from, say, the
Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains. Atlanticism once reigned
supreme. But today, historical forces are, with increasing
urgency, nudging Europeans at every level toward the latter
[scenariol.... The West Europeans, after all, are condemned by
geography to live as neighbors with the Soviet empire, while
the Americans are condequred by geopolitical strategy to
function
as
rivals....
Detente helped Europeans recognize their common cultural
roots...r generating a widespread feeling throughout Western
Europe that the Continent
is
a cultural unit--at least from
Wales to Warsaw, if not from Madrid to Moscow.... As more and
more West Europeans, especially young ones, travel to Eastern
Europe, they discover what their grandparents took for granted:
that Prague and Budapest and Warsaw are European cities and
that, in some ways, Leningrad is the most European of them
all....
For
whatever reasonr
Euro
ans tend
to
believe that a
historic a reement
can
be reac
+
e
w i t r t h r Soviets, x l g
Americans b p u t x e E f
m
a'6nTzitry b-.
In sum, an East-West non-aggression pact, ushering in "peace in Europea?-
with America on the outside looking in.
--Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau