The Spiritual Disunity of the West

On January 22, 1948, Britain’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, got to his feet in the House of Commons to lay the foundations of the Western world’s postwar order. Bevin—a working-class titan, trade-union leader, and fierce critic of Communism—set out the urgent need to “organise the kindred souls of the West” in the face of the emerging totalitarian reality of the Soviet Union.

Addressing his fellow members of Parliament—some of whom remained sympathetic to Moscow, Britain’s wartime ally, and its philosophy—Bevin said the British government wished to see the “spiritual unity of Europe,” but had been dealt a fait accompli in the East, which had fallen into Soviet domination. “No one there is free to speak or think or to enter into trade or other arrangements of his own free will,” Bevin said. “Neither we, the United States nor France is going to approach Western Europe