The Europologists

Napoleon once slept there, but the occupants of the moldering Grand Hotel in Bruges, Belgium do not boast about the fact. A dedicated band of scholars and students, they are trying to shape a new kind of Bruges--one in which Napoleons will be impossible. The institution they belong to is the highly visionary College of Europe. The college was born at the 1948 Congress of Europe in The Hague. There, Salvador de Madariaga, onetime Spanish Ambassador to the U.S., suggested that a special school be set up for the study of continental unification. A Flemish Franciscan, Anton K. Verleye, seconded the motion, moved that the school be located in Bruges ("There is a European spirit in the very stones of this city"). In 1949 an experimental, three-week course began; in 1950 its founders decided to expand the school, picked Dutchman Hendrik Brugmans, professor of French literature at the State University at Utrecht, to be its head. Last week, having just received the first fruits of his recent U.S. tour in the form of a $10,000 donation from the Ford Foundation, Rector Brugmans had reason to feel that the college's mission has become even broader than its name. "Our concept of Europe," says he, "goes as far as liberty goes." Underlying Themes. Today, financed by grants from the Belgian, Dutch, Luxembourg and West German governments, the college has 37 students from 16 different countries, including three refugees from Eastern Europe. All are university graduates, and except for two American Fulbrighters, all get college scholarships. They are allowed to stay only one year ("If we made it longer," says Brugmans, "we would, I fear, attract the eternal student"), but in that time, they are confronted by a course of studies duplicated nowhere else. Its purpose, says Brugmans, is to expose the student to a new attitude and a whole new field: "Europology." Under such teachers as Jan Tinbergen, The Netherlands' top economist, Walter Hoffmann, director of the Institute of Economic and Social Studies at the Westphalian State University of Munster, Paul Guggenheim, professor of public international law at Geneva's Graduate Institute of International Studies, and British Historian John Bowie, each student concentrates on three out of eight broad subjects offered: history, political science, economics, law, sociology, geography, administrative science, European institutions. Every year, before the term begins, the faculty picks the various themes that will underlie the year's work. Parallel Lives. In anthropology, students may concentrate on underdeveloped areas. In law, they may study the unification of legal systems and the transition from national to supranational law. In history, they study what Brugmans calls "parallel lives"--e.g., the careers of Richelieu, Bismarck, Cavour. "A Frenchman," says Brugmans, "reacts favorably to Richelieu and unfavorably to Bismarck. Yet these men accomplished the same task in roughly the same way." In five years the college has had only one failure. A young Frenchman whose father was killed by the Nazis found that he just could not live with Germans around. The rest of the college's alumni have gone either into their own foreign services or gravitated to such international organizations as the Council of Europe and the Coal and Steel Community. "The curious thing," says Europologist Brugmans. "is that when they get back to their countries, they find their countries have changed. They haven't, of course. The students have."

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