A Link for a Continent

The Romans, always alert to omens and portents, would never have gone through with the ceremony. A tremendous mountain storm sent vengeful bolts of lightning slashing across the slopes of Mont Blanc, and their thunderclaps shook the valleys below. The helicopter bearing Charles de Gaulle had to grope its way in heavy fog through the pass to Chamonix, and a nagging rain dropped a chill in the air.

Despite these problems, De Gaulle and Italian President Giuseppe Saragat snipped two symbolic ribbons one morning last week to open the world's longest auto tunnel (7 1/4 miles) under Western Europe's highest mountain (15,781 ft.). Then they climbed into Saragat's Fiat limousine and drove from France through the mountain to the Italian town of Courmayeur. After thousands of years of wishful thinking, eight decades of frustrated planning and six hard years of toil, Europe's greatest physical barrier had been conquered.

Two Views. Not so the political barriers, which had kept the tunnel on the back burners from 1881, when the French first decided to build it, until 1953, when France and Italy signed a formal agreement to begin work on it. Although both De Gaulle and Saragat last week bravely hailed the event as a milestone toward European political unity, they were, as usual, talking about two different Europes.

For Saragat, a devout advocate of the Common Market, the tunnel was a major link uniting "the six European nations that live in the same human and idealistic climate," i.e., the Common Market. Such restrictions were not for De Gaulle, who saw it as a step toward his great vision of a Europe united from the Urals to the Atlantic--and independent of the U.S. "Now we are showing peace," he intoned, "and one day this peace will spread from Western Europe to the whole Continent. Then all of Europe will be a factor of capital importance in keeping the world in peaceful balance."

Polite Plea. It was not a day for unity. The very ceremony at which they spoke played its own part in creating new tensions. Perhaps miffed at the absence of the Swiss President, De Gaulle had refused to allow a low-level delegation from Switzerland--which donated 2% of the tunnel's cost--to take part in its inauguration. He even denied the Swiss access to the tunnel, the only link between the ribbon-cutting ceremonies on the French side and the speeches on the Italian. Small wonder that one passionate European Federalist in the audience found the session disturbing enough to break through police lines and fling an envelope toward De Gaulle. As Italian carabinieri hauled him brusquely away, De Gaulle opened the envelope. Inside was a politely worded plea to both Presidents on behalf of European unity.

None of the political problems, however, could obscure the very real triumph that the day was meant to observe. The two-lane Mont Blanc tunnel, air-conditioned and equipped with ultramodern radar traffic control, will shorten the road between Paris and Rome by 125 miles--even more when the long winter snows close the Alpine passes. It is expected to be used by at least 1.2 million vehicles a year, each of which will pay tolls ranging from $3.25 (for a small European car) to $20 (for a bus). Just before its Italian entrance, a proud new road sign told the essential fact: FRANCE, 15 KILOMETERS.

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