The Third World War: The Untold Story

The worries being felt by the five Atlantic powers of Europe's far west — Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Ireland — were well summarized in the views of a prominent member of the new coalition government in Britain, in a brilliant speech at Harvard soon after the end of the war.

In what is now generally known as the Harvard 'Address', this thoughtful, perhaps heretical, British politician told an American audience that for some time before the war many Europeans had seen a degree of stability — precarious but precious — in a world in rough balance between two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. Now one of the two superpowers had gone, but it was unlikely that the whole globe would wish- to live for ever under a single pax Americana. The burden of world domination today was certainly too heavy for any one country to bear, and there would be constant revolts if any country tried to take it on.

It would therefore be greatly to America's advantage, and good for everybody's peace of mind, that there should soon be either two or three friendly superpowers again. As the unorthodox British politician put it, 'The President of the United States should be hell-bent on the dissolution of the unintended American empire.' If there were two superpowers, most people would guess they would be the United States and the Japan-China co-prosperity sphere, facing each other (one trusts in amity) across the Pacific Ocean.

There were much greater attractions in this possibility than there had been in the pre-war system where the two superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union faced each other in some enmity with Western Europe in between. But if the centre of the world were to move to the aptly named Pacific, with one of the two superpowers on each side of it, said the British politician, 'this would have some disadvantages, both for us in Europe and for you on this east coast of these United States.'

The main disadvantage of 'this east coast' of the United States was that it was already enormously attractive to live in California, if only because of the weather (the speaker looked out on the driving snow of Massachusetts in January). If the Pacific were now to become the ocean across which passed most of advanced world trade, the pull to California would become much greater. 'There is a danger that this east coast may become a depressed area in North America.'

That had serious implications for Europe, on 'the other side of our Atlantic millpond'. For the first time in its history, there was a danger that Europe, in the new Pacific century, could become isolated from the centre of the world. It was therefore greatly to the advantage of all eastern Americans, and of all people in the United States who valued the European heritage, that Europe should become the third new superpower.

Europe would not quickly become a coherent superpower. At best it would be a confederation that was 'untidy and not at all well-organized but very well meaning'. At worst there were two dangers in this Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals which might be called the danger at the peripheries and the danger at the centre.

The trouble at the peripheries was that the Urals were at present the border between Western civilization and an eastern part of the old Soviet Union where new and uncertain structures had to be created out of a chaotic void. 'It is not a comfortable posture for any new European superpower to have one foot on these Urals and one on an Atlantic Ocean that may be about to become a waterway through a depressed area.'

The danger at the centre of the new Europe was one that diplomatic people were less willing to talk about, but it should be brought out into the open. 'With all respect to the great German people, who have behaved better, since 1945, than any European people except the Poles have done for centuries, there are worries on my continent about the emergence of a reunited and thus possibly re-Prussianized Germany.

'It is important for us in the EEC to see that the sort of Europe we rebuild should not be one liable to tribal wars. The rest of Europe, both East and West, will be frightened if the two Germanies unite. They would then form too dominant a European power. It is important that each Germany should be a member of the EEC, and be united within the EEC to the same degree that France and West Germany are, but no more than that. The same applies to all the former communist states, including the European states of the former Soviet Union. This is how we must build our new Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.'