Word: brinton
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Europe is alive, and living well at that--if Brinton's high birth rate statistics, calorie tallies, and record manufacturing figures (probably weighted down with expensive guns) are unmistakable signs of life. Plump children and comparatively merry faces on bus-riders are Brinton's evidence that the people are content. Eccentric, but by no means morbid, paintings still hang in the familiar Parisian galleries and studios, and though many landmarks are gone, Brinton concludes that Europe has changed less in twenty years than America...
Even the argumentative European temperament remains. Brinton hypothesizes that disputatious people will not succumb to Communism, and indeed Europeans maintain a stubborn diversity whether discussing compulsory Latin in the schools or policy in Korea. The conflicts in the multifactional French government often sound like bedlam, but according to Brinton this is not a pathological condition. In countries with a two-party system, compromises come from conventions, caucuses and executive chambers; in France the disputes go to the National Assembly, but in all democracies there must be dissension somewhere. The French have managed with similar systems for 164 nearly unbroken years...
...British socialism a cancer. Brinton declares that most socialized industries are really public corporations modeled after TVA. As with American corporations, British workers may strike against them, and perhaps the British people have more influence in their direction than American stockholders. Brinton neglects entirely, however, the key question--whether state control has been justified by practical achievement...
...more important than material welfare or forms of government is the temper of the people. The United Nations, Schumann Plan, Council of Europe and NATO Brinton regards as significant accomplishments in a nationalistic and individualistic climate which has compelled the Communists in France to "represent Communism as a special benefactor of the peasant proprietor and the small shopkeeper." Whether a formidable union of 300 million people with industrial might superior to that of America would really be desirable, is really academic, for Brinton's shaggy simile declares attempts to form a sovereign union in nationalistic Europe "would be like asking...
...nationalism Brinton emphasizes can hardly be pro-American; if the signs "Ridgeway la peste" were erected by Communists as Brinton contends, the more reassuring "Stalines a Moscou" may equally well spring from activity of a few Gaullists. Though moderate governments have at least a precarious hold in all of Western Europe except in Spain and Portugal, Brinton admits that most intellectuals distrust Americans. Yet Brinton's solace that there are "promising beginnings" in the average European's attitude toward America is based on subjective evidence, curiously flimsy for an historian to present...