Word: sampsons
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British Author Anthony Sampson, who dissected his own country seven years ago, in Anatomy of Britain, has inspected this platonic marriage in an other volume, The New Europeans. Unless radical changes of attitude take place, Sampson believes, European integration has reached its high-water mark. Says he: "Western Europe, shorn of overseas commitments and empires and protected by the American umbrella [of ICBMs] is a continent without a cause. In this situation, its components are very likely to reassert themselves...
Political Cosmonaut. European nationalism seemed to die in the agonies of the most recent war it helped cause. Yet it has become once again the dominant political emotion in Europe. No one has rekindled "la gloire" more assiduously than Charles de Gaulle. When Sampson interviewed Franz Josef Strauss, West Germany's Finance Minister mocked De Gaulle the diplomat as "a cross between Joan of Arc and a political cosmonaut." Yet, as Sampson notes, De Gaulle has "taken full advantage of the glamour of nationalism" as well as the allure of anti-Americanism. For his own lifetime, at least...
Economic Reversal. Sociologically as well as politically, Sampson found, Europe's pulls are mainly away from union. Television, for instance, unifies mostly in the sense that more and more Europeans hum the same pop tunes. Newspapers still tend to mirror only their own narrow societies. Nor do Europe's armies of tourists represent the first wave of a new pan-Europeanism. "The obsession of the new mass tourism is not to see a new country but to find two commodities: the sun and the sea." In Sampson's opinion, even the automobile, Europe's latest symbol...
Economics was a major factor in drawing Europe closer, but Sampson argues that that has changed. The EEC was conceived after Monnet persuaded Europeans to pool their coal and steel. Coal has now been replaced as an essential fuel by nuclear power, oil or natural gas. As a result, Europeans are rethinking their energy needs in narrow national terms...
...which has produced four out of every five cars on Italy's roads, has done more than any other Italian firm to shape the country's new affluence at home and influence abroad. "Agnelli has a mythology not unlike President Kennedy's," writes British Journalist Anthony Sampson in The New Europeans. "Clearly his presence fills some kind of psychological...