The Federal Europe now metastasizing away suffers from several substantial defects. It is divisive of the West, and indeed divisive of "European" civilization itself, which has always included the Europes Overseas. It is implicitly - and often explicitly - anti-American. It is already, with the promise of worse to come, a scene of extreme regulationism and of a Continental administrative outlook contrary to the Common Law tradition. But most of all, and fatally, what it misses is any real sense of how the feeling of citizenship arises. That feeling cannot simply be elicited by appeals or compulsions on behalf of a supra-national entity. We are still, after all, in a period where it is difficult enough to get Fleming to lie down with Walloon, let alone Croat with Serb.
The "European" answer to this is that a supra-national European state or federation will be a vehicle by which the forces of goodwill can prevent nationalist eruptions. But how? To say that a larger federal unit, once created, will provide a counterattraction to nationalism, that it will win in the political field, is sheer speculation - and a speculation not justified by the experience of other multinational federations. (It is rather like arguing that a house, once erected, will proceed to dig its own foundations.) The world has seen many such arrangements break up - not only the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia but the United Arab Republic and the Federation of the West Indies and Malaysia. Indeed, one might add in this century the union of Sweden and Norway, and of Austria and Hungary; and, earlier, two separate attempts to form a Central American union.
