The six nations of the European Common Market agreed to move toward a monetary union by Jan. 1, 1981.

“We are like the couple who have an engagement party,” explained The Netherlands’ Foreign Secretary Hans de Koster. “If over the next five years we don’t get married, we return the gifts.” The simile aptly described the momentous agreement last week by the six nations of the European Common…

A meeting at The Hague last week, Premiers of the three Benelux nations looked back on eleven years’ experience of union, and found it good.

Back in 1946, in a historic meeting at The Hague, the leaders of Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg committed their nations to a far-reaching experiment in cooperation and trust among Europe’s sovereign states—an economic union that obliterated economic borders to let goods, capital and labor flow as freely as…

In The Hague, Dutch and Indonesian delegates signed a protocol to end the political union. The Dutch took satisfaction in the fact that the economic links were left intact.

Of the empires that crumbled at the shock of nationalism after World War II, few fell apart so abruptly as The Netherlands’. Just three days after Japan’s surrender, Indonesia declared its independence and proclaimed the end of The Hague’s richest and biggest colony, The Netherlands East Indies. By late 1949,…

Delegates to the Western Union conference of Foreign Ministers at The Hague last week got a small practical demonstration of the need for Western Union.

Delegates to the Western Union conference of Foreign Ministers at The Hague last week got a small practical demonstration of the need for Western Union. On the Étoile du Nord, the international luxury express which makes a daily Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam run, they had to show their passports, railroad tickets or cash…