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.Pascaline Winand, in hermonograph on Eisenhower, Kennedy and the United States of Europe, writes, Monnet took special care to introduce Kohnstamm [.] as a very inti-mate friend of his . Writing to Dulles s secretary, Monnet asked that 168 Annemarie van HeerikhuizenKohnstamm s phone calls be treated as his own in the past, and thatthey should be directly connected through to Dulles.Monnet also wroteto Dulles himself that he could trust Kohnstamm fully (Winand 1993,96).As a result of Monnet s letters, Kohnstamm and the wise men weregiven direct access to the White House and to President Eisenhower.So Kohnstamm, while working for the future of Europe, did veryimportant business in America, a country indispensable, in his opinion,to Euratom s success (Segers 2008, 152).With the help of Monnet hesucceeded in keeping alive a network of European friends American Europeanists , as Winand calls them.Together with these friends heprepared the hotly discussed report A Target for Euratom.It sketched adoom scenario if Europe, subsequent to the nationalization of the SuezCanal by Nasser, failed to set up Euratom, which was to produce 15 kWinstalled nuclear capacity by 1967.It was no longer atoms for peace but atoms for power.In a way Suez worked as a catalyst on European think-ing and politics (Segers 2008, 164).Kohnstamm, in a conference speechat Columbia University in 1957, cited from the report:Thus without nuclear power, Europe s dependence on the MiddleEast is bound to increase.The Suez Crisis has given us a warningof what this could mean.As the quantity of oil imported from theMiddle East increases, there will be a corresponding increase in thepolitical temptation to interfere with the flow of oil from that region.A future stoppage could be an economic calamity for Europe.[.] TheEuropean economy must be protected against an interruption of oilsupplies, by finding alternative sources of energy [.].Only nuclearpower, providing Europe with a new source of energy, can achievethis.(Kohnstamm 1957, 147)However, most importantly, according to Kohnstamm, Euratom couldgive the people its confidence back. The rich past of our nations haskept us spellbound for many decades. Europe is at last turning towardthe future (Kohnstamm 1957, 149).ConclusionIn the end Euratom was not a great success, and for Europe the mostimportant goal became a common market.But, rather than discussingEuropean integration politics, the question posed in this chapter con-cerns the extent to which Kohnstamm s European vision in the 1950s Max Kohnstamm s New Europe 169was coloured by American influences, as opposed to what might becalled a specifically European Europe.The conclusion must be that, from Kohnstamm s point of view, therewas no exclusively European Europe.Behind the scenes of the ECSC andEuratom, and later on the EEC, there was a unique network of Americansand Europeans working closely together to promote the European inte-gration project.Kohnstamm also participated in the Bilderberg con-ferences, which were secret meetings the first one taking place in1954 to protect European American relations against growing anti-Americanism.We have seen that Kohnstamm had already discovered Americaand the Americans in 1938, when he first visited the country.He wasfascinated by Roosevelt s New Deal politics, which had much of whatwas lacking in European politics, such as enthusiasm, activism anddynamics.It was during the war, when Kohnstamm was held pris-oner by the Nazis, that he became highly interested in internationalpolitics and the particular problems of Europe.One can even posethe question of what Kohnstamm s Europe would have looked likeif there had been no Camp Amersfoort, no Sint-Michielsgestel andtherefore no E.H.Carr, and no necessity to find a solution for post-warGermany.The European problems definitely had a deep impact onhim; without them his post-war ideas and activities cannot be prop-erly understood.It was in the Hirschfeld nota that Kohnstamm was one of the firstto plead for the reconstruction of Germany
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