Europe, Russian the Future

As a guidebook to what is being thought on the Left in England, this forecast of the contours of Europe’s future by a. leading Labor Party publicist is illuminating and valuable. The Labor Party parliamentarians are sometimes accused of being stodgy and unimaginative; no such accusation could reasonably be lodged against Mr. Cole. He thinks Germany may well prefer a soviet to a parliamentary system after the war; that Eastern Europe will be absorbed into the Soviet Union; that there will be a SinoJapanese Soviet Republic; while India is to be the “centre of a great supra-national state covering the whole of the Middle East” and presumably not ruled by a British viceroy. All of which gives Conservative backbenchers in England and Babbitts in the United States much material for meditation. Mr. Cole is convinced (and on this point many who do not share his left-wing economic views will agree with him) that the day of the unlimited sovereignty of the small state is over. He believes that the part of Europe which is not sovietized after the war must be unified on a socialist basis and, although he is certainly no friend of Hitler, he suggests that unification under the Nazis might be preferable to the old anarchy of numerous small states. Notwithstanding some discouraging experiments in the past, he is convinced that rapprochement between West European and Russian socialists is not only possible but imperatively desirable. W. H. C.