Traveling from the West to West Berlin to attend a 1 conference, you are advised to go by air, to avoid the irksome border formalities of the East German Volkspolizei. You can fly to the former German capital from any of three West German airports, on Pan-Am, British Airways, or Air France. You will pass … Read more
As I begin to write, I am riding on a fast train along the river Rhine, making my way from Holland to an old “Schloss” near Lake Constance in Austria, where I am to speak at a summer school on the future of European-American relations. The train is not very crowded; the camping sites along … Read more
John Paul II in the Netherlands From May 11th to the 15th, four cold and windy days, Pope John Paul II made his 26th Apostolic Pilgrimage to the Netherlands. It has, no doubt, been a moving and memorable pastoral visit; but how does one measure its success or failure? By the crowds who turned out … Read more
When I was a boy, pastoral letters were read from the pulpit on a Sunday in all our churches. They replaced the usual sermon and took a bit longer to read, though not much longer. Only the pastoral letter read on the first Sunday of Lent took longer. It was a subtle reminder of the … Read more
The alliance between Western Europe and North America derives its strength and acquires its meaning in this nuclear age, from the joint commitment to democracy, freedom and the rule of law. According to a study recently published by the Atlantic Council of the United States (The Teaching of Values and the Successor Generation, Washington, D.C., … Read more
On September 3, 1984, the official opening day of the U.S. presidential election campaign, three distinguished and experienced Democrats — W. Averell Harriman, Clark M. Clifford, and Marshall D. Schulman — called for a restoration of a serious, bipartisan U.S. approach to Soviet-American relations and the issue of nuclear weapons. (See their article, “U.S. Needs … Read more
In my previous “Letter from Europe” (C in C, July 1984), I briefly recalled the early initiatives towards European unification taken in response to the postwar totalitarian challenge. As it then appeared, the ideal of a federal European state seemed to serve a variety of purposes such as: the safeguarding of democracy, the overcoming of … Read more
For many Europeans, who have still not overcome the moral and political confusion of two world wars, it is all too attractive to forget the past and nurture present illusions about European influence, progressive forces and American incompetence. On June 6, 1984 national leaders from many Western countries assembled in Normandy to commemorate the allied … Read more
To many Americans who read about Europe in their newspapers, who watch Europeans demonstrating against American nuclear weapons or American policy in Central America on their TV screen, Western Europe must have become a place difficult to understand. What went wrong in a relationship and an alliance that has been more successful in keeping the … Read more