Mr. Chairman, Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, Monsieur le Président de l'Alliance Française, Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am not aware, particularly on this day, of any justification for my being called upon to make a speech, or of any qualifications for doing so on this occasion which would not have been exhibited more adequately by the other speakers. However, I was asked to say something and I was given no directives as to what to talk about. That is left entirely to my own fancy and resourcefulness. This afternoon will be given to practical business matters and I shall have to introduce the report of your “sous-Comité Culturel”; it is therefore suitable this morning, if I am to speak at all, to make a few observations and general reflections about the value and place of the Fédération of the Alliance Française in contemporary civilisation.
We have all had constantly before our minds, during the last few years, the problem of European unity and co-operation. Various schemes have been advanced by theorists; several modes of organisation are already in being and going through those stages of struggle inevitable when men's minds and habits have to be re-adjusted on a large scale to new situations. With these I am not concerned, but rather with the parallel movement in what is called – I do not like the term very much, but we have to call it something – the cultural field, and with the enhanced consciousness of the importance of all those relations between peoples with which politicians and statesmen are not directly concerned. In particular, more people have begun to be aware of Western Europe as one community and, more dimly, of the need to relate our ideas of the conscious unity which we desire, to deeper feelings of cultural kinship which struggle against equally rooted habits of local feeling and behaviour. Again, I shall not here allow myself, in consideration of the various questions in which I am personally interested, to talk about those organisations which have been formed for developing the consciousness of the fundamental identities of culture between, in particular, the peoples of Europe as a whole. I only want to touch here upon two conditions which seem to me necessary to keep in mind for the realisation of unity between France and England.
The first is, simply, that to be a “good European” does not seem to me to require any diminution of local and national loyalties or, on the part of any people and language, of any abatement of self-esteem. It seems to me on the whole a very good thing that each people, in a family of nations such as that of Western Europe, should regard itself as in some respect superior to all the others. This makes for good and even affectionate relations. To be able to regard oneself as superior in some respect to somebody else makes it easier to get on with them. I say “in some respect”, for the effect of close relations with another culture ought to be to make one more critical of one's own, more conscious of it in such a way as to see more clearly its defects and weaknesses as well as its merits and strength.
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