“The Americans are the best Europeans” he sentenced, and he meant that the best European values continued to live in the American political culture. Moreover he intended also that the USA performed successfully a role of “federator” of the European states. In fact, Hallstein was persuaded that the American federalist tradition, beginning with the original experience of his transition from the Confederation Articles of 1778 until the federalist constitution by the ideologic struggle of Hamilton and Madison's Federalist, could represent mutatis mutandis a good example for the European states too.

Hallstein was very far from a definition of the Atlantic Community, which was in the 1940s elaborated either by Walter Lippmann, or Henry Luce in the Life Magazine (both authors are never appointed in NWH or in Hallstein's works). Hallstein's recognition of the American role in European recovery and development was very different from the acceptance of an "Atlantic Community". In the reconstruction of this ideological concept made by Marco Mariano9, the characters of the "transatlantic, Christian and white world" composed a framework for the USA as "leader of a transatlantic space that included North America, western European countries, and the dominions of the southern hemisphere of the «white settlers»".

Of course this vision supposed "shared political and economic principles and institutions (liberal democracy, individual rights and the rule of law, free market and free trade), cultural traditions (Christianity and western civilization), national interests" (p. 163), which the European Hallstein in according with the Atlantic Charter and NATO's political and strategical antisoviet finalities could largely share too. What Hallstein could not entirely share in this vision was probably the stress upon the minor consideration of Europe in the terms of leadership and contours of this "western civilization". He preferred anyway to speak more of an "open partnership" than of "community".

And in Europe also diminished the belief in taking measurables steps in the direction of unity, because there were growing - against Hallstein's thought - forces believing that Community had to be seen as more of a trading bloc in formation than as a political partner and military ally which would be able to ease the USA's growing burden of global responsibility.

De Gaulle Europe's politics of an "Europe of the Europeans" - against American and NATO's influence -, with his veto against Britain's accession on January 1963 in the EEC, the gaullist France's egocentric policy of the "empty chair", which ended with Hallstein's defeat, and France's withdrawal from the military integration of NATO, made grow the American disillusion as for the possibility of an "Atlantic partnership" with the Europeans.

Nevertheless, Hallstein considered that as a developing period and underlined that European integration was "a long-term undertaking" and that the present economic Europe was only the core of the future Europe. He asserted: "Only when full economic union is seen and felt by Europeans to be a real part of everyday life, will this EEC develop a strong urge in the direction of political union. Political union remains a necessary and realistic objective of European integration policy. It is the objective which the fathers of the Rome Treaties had before them, and the Treaties were framed with it in view". In this perspective, but not automatically, Hallstein foresaw Europe had to develop a foreign common policy and a common defence policy. And there, in a "world of tomorrow", had had to be a new encounter for American-European "Atlantic partnership".

How far is today's world from this vision, everybody can judge.