Three Gentlemen in Spain

Your correspondent goes every year, if he possibly can, to the Congress of the European Center for Documentation and Information (CEDI), which brings together (as guests of the Spanish section of that organization), from all over Europe, what are pretty certainly the most conservative Conservatives, for several days of quiet and thoughtful discussion near El Escorial. The question is always on your correspondent’s mind, why has Europe not generated an anti-Communist intellectual community as alert as can be found among the American Right? There is, he judges, no more vital inquiry to be made, believing as he does that at the margin America might be able to go it alone militarily, yet that we can never win without saving the intellectual and moral resources of the West; and they are rooted in Europe.

One notes the level of seriousness suggested by the titles of the set papers for the first day, and notes, once in the conference room, that the familiar faces wear expressions of unaccustomed gravity: for these men and women are deeply disturbed by the failure of the Summit conference (they had, many of them, expected great things from it) ; by the events in Turkey and Korea and Japan; and most of all by the news, very bad indeed the last couple of days, from Cuba. Throughout most of this first day they will be obliged, in one way or another, to toy with the possibility that the neat formulas on which they have been relying (to bring everything out all right) are inadeqate to the situation. Only very late in the day, after they have seen a little of what might be involved, intellectually and emotionally, in abandoning the formulas, will they—and their expressions—get back to normal. Happily or unhappily (depending on the point of view), the faces will not, that is to say, be grave tomorrow; and three days hence their owners will pass a set of resolutions that will read as they would have had they not even been present today.

Your correspondent goes every year, if he possibly can, to the Congress of the European Center for Documentation and Information (CEDI), which brings together (as guests of the Spanish section of that organization), from all over Europe, what are pretty certainly the most conservative Conservatives, for several days of quiet and thoughtful discussion near El Escorial. The question is always on your correspondent’s mind, why has Europe not generated an anti-Communist intellectual community as alert as can be found among the American Right? There is, he judges, no more vital inquiry to be made, believing as he does that at the margin America might be able to go it alone militarily, yet that we can never win without saving the intellectual and moral resources of the West; and they are rooted in Europe.

One notes the level of seriousness suggested by the titles of the set papers for the first day, and notes, once in the conference room, that the familiar faces wear expressions of unaccustomed gravity: for these men and women are deeply disturbed by the failure of the Summit conference (they had, many of them, expected great things from it) ; by the events in Turkey and Korea and Japan; and most of all by the news, very bad indeed the last couple of days, from Cuba. Throughout most of this first day they will be obliged, in one way or another, to toy with the possibility that the neat formulas on which they have been relying (to bring everything out all right) are inadeqate to the situation. Only very late in the day, after they have seen a little of what might be involved, intellectually and emotionally, in abandoning the formulas, will they—and their expressions—get back to normal. Happily or unhappily (depending on the point of view), the faces will not, that is to say, be grave tomorrow; and three days hence their owners will pass a set of resolutions that will read as they would have had they not even been present today.