London

ON THE WORLD TODAY

IN THE first survey of Labor’s foreign policy which Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin presented to Parliament, he scarcely touched on British relations with Western Europe — especially with France and Germany, but also with smaller countries like Belgium and Holland. This region of utmost importance to Britain consumed only two minutes in his one-hour speech.

Why? Bevin himself explained. A full statement concerning Western Europe had to await talks he was about to begin with the French government “in order to try to clear away points of difficulty and to arrive at a clearer and closer understanding between France and ourselves.” Bevin made it clear that the pattern of Anglo-French relations was not yet fixed. He implied that the same was true of British relations with all Western Europe.

It will be easier for the new British government to define its policy towards this area after October 21, when France holds her first national election since liberation. To a lesser extent the subsequent elections in Belgium and Holland will shape the politics and the economy of Western Europe. That the polls in all these countries will result in a strong swing to the left is certain.

But the leftist camp is disunited, and the differences also extend to international affairs. In France, for instance, the Socialists would adapt French foreign policy to a partnership with social-democratic Britain, while French Communists would of course put the link with Russia first.

The British Labor Government is praying for a French vote that will make the Socialists the dominant party in France and produce a Popular Front government under Socialist leadership. Herriot’s so-called Radicals would take part in such a government, and the British Cabinet would like to see the Communists, also, have a share in governmental responsibility. If the Communists were to become the strongest party in France, however, the prospect and value of an Anglo-French alliance would be shaky.

Europe’s Big Three

Negotiation of such an alliance is one of the first major tasks to which the British Foreign Office is devoting its energies. An Anglo-French pact would complete the triangle of which the other two sides are the existing Anglo-Russian and French-Russian alliances. A British-French treaty would presumably provide that the General Staffs of those two powers shall keep in close touch.

But Bevin is also likely to think in terms of balancing the economies of industrial Britain and agricultural France. That is the sort of localized effort he had in mind when he announced in the House of Commons that the Labor Government “regards the economic reconstruction of the world as the primary object of its foreign policy.”

Anglo-French relations, even riveted by a treaty, are likely to be strained by events. One minor obstacle has disappeared: the personal distaste Churchill and de Gaulle nursed towards each other.

When representatives of Britain and France sit down to prepare their treaty of alliance, both sides will have private alternatives. The French could look to the United States rather than to Britain for economic aid. Moreover the French are aware that their pact with Russia stands, and they could intensify it.

On the other hand, if the French are too difficult, Britain could strengthen her friendly relations with the chain of countries reaching from Scandinavia down through Holland and Belgium to Greece and Italy, leaving France isolated in Western Europe. Both these French and British alternatives imply crude methods verging on political extortion, and the reasonable men who form the governments in London and Paris much prefer an open improvement of Anglo-French relations.

Tug of peace on the Rhine

Strong political forces in France, of which General de Gaulle is the exponent, are pursuing a policy that is unacceptable to the British Labor Government. France’s renunciation of any intention to annex German territory in the west is not enough. Even control of the Rhineland or the Saar without annexation, or purely French domination of the Ruhr, would clash with the plans of British Labor.

There is a corresponding uneasiness in France over British Labor’s long-term policy towards Germany. Many Frenchmen remember that after World War I, British sympathy towards the beaten enemy took the form first of feeding German children, but later of feeding the Nazi crocodiles. De Gaulle insists on French control of the left bank of the Rhine. He would like avenues of French armed power extending at least fifty miles beyond the eastern shore of the Rhine towards Cologne and other strategic German centers.

If de Gaulle or his eventual successor presents such a scheme in London, he will meet opposition from the British Labor Government. “The French might establish a hundred Rhine bridgeheads,” leaders of Labor Britain are saying, “but a couple of atomic bombs could blow them off the map. So what security does the Rhine offer anyhow?”

The British Labor Government flatly opposes anyone’s annexation of German territory in the west. At Potsdam, Prime Minister Attlee and Foreign Secretary Bevin acquiesced most reluctantly in Poland’s “provisional" acquisition of a big segment of eastern Germany. Britain simply was unable to block this Soviet-sponsored plan.

But British influence swings more weight in Western Europe. Besides resisting French dominance over the Rhineland, Ruhr, or Saar, Britain’s Labor Government has been discouraging Holland’s tentative claims to a slice of German territory as compensation for flood damage which the retreating Germans inflicted on the Netherlands.

Such temporary damage, which in the opinion of the British Cabinet can be repaired in a few years, fails to justify Dutch annexation of German land. The Dutch Socialists, who are likely to play an increasingly important part in Netherlands affairs, are cold towards suggestions of annexation. Holland is likely to drop the plan.

Beyond affecting the future of western Germany, negotiation of a British-French treaty will clarify the issue of the Levant. When France ran into trouble in Syria and Lebanon last May, many persons wrongly concluded that Britain’s aim was totally to expel French influence from the Middle East.

The British in fact tried to prevent ruthless French methods which would foment disturbance among the masses of Moslems in regions of vital importance to Britain, like Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, and Persia. Both Britain and France are pledged to support independence for the Syrians and the Lebanese, and within this promise the British recognize France’s prior interest in Syria and Lebanon. But compared with the reshaping of Western Europe, the dispute about Syria and Lebanon is a minor question susceptible of early adjustment.

A Ruhr Valley Authority?

Most crucial of all Western European issues is the fate of the Ruhr. To meet this problem, the British Labor Government has a definite and a characteristically Labor solution. The British are now committed to nationalizing their own coal, steel, and iron industries. France, Belgium, and Holland are similarly moving towards socializing heavy industry. In view of the common policy of state ownership and planning within these countries, the British Labor Government proposes a public utility board for the Ruhr district.

Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg would be the principals in this proposed Ruhr Valley Authority. Russia might be admitted. If the United States with its devotion to private enterprise were to stay outside the international Ruhr board, an attempt would be made to conclude arrangements for averting rivalry on world markets between American and Ruhr steel products.

From the beginning, the British Labor Government would favor letting the Germans sit on the managerial board under Allied supervision. Britain would admit Germany as a full partner as soon as feasible.

British Labor’s scheme for an international Ruhr Valley Authority is bound to play an important part in negotiations with France, Belgium, and Holland. These are the countries which, with Britain, would form the kernel of the broader Western European entente which it has been assumed would follow the signature of a British-French alliance.

Cordon sanitaire in the West?

Attlee’s Government has not yet made up its mind about, the desirability of an alignment embracing Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, and, if she should be willing, Sweden also. Today the emergence of this group is still uncertain. It involves risks. “Against whom would the Western entente be directed?” people ask. “Against Germany?” Nonsense. Germany is writhing in catastrophe and unlikely soon to threaten anybody. “Against whom, then? Perhaps against Russia? That’s bad and dangerous.”

Rather than rush into a sweeping alliance that stretches across Western Europe but which the Russians could regard with dark suspicion, the British Labor Government will handle this stick of political dynamite warily. True, Russia has created her own system of alliances in Eastern Europe, and it is hard to see what reasonable objections she could lodge against a Western European counterpart. But the Labor Government in London would prefer to avoid a policy of bloc and counter-bloc.

Labor looks at Uncle Sam

The British Foreign Office is also uncertain about the attitude of the United States towards such a Western European group. On the one hand, Bevin knows that if Britain is to avoid becoming an appendage of American capitalism, the British must restore wages and purchasing power in Europe. Labor policy intends to form a common market in Western Europe strong enough to meet the export drive which the United States is ready to launch.

On the other hand, Bevin will be careful to refrain from building a closed market. That is not Labor’s policy. Nor can Britain, which depends on American financial help, afford to antagonize the United States. Yet the vision of a Western European entente is tempting. British Labor would naturally welcome the rise of a group of social-democratic nations in Europe able to grant the political liberty which Russia lacks and to offer a degree of economic democracy which most Europeans believe Americans have not attained.

Alone, Britain is a very junior member in an AngloAmerican partnership. Backed by a Western European alliance, the British Commonwealth would have more to put into the kitty. Again, alone, Britain faces a formidable wall of Soviet power in Europe. In a large company of like-minded nations, Western democracy without any thought of aggression would weigh more heavily in the scales now being tilted by Soviet influence. All the Western European countries concerned realize the peril of creating anything like an anti-Soviet bloc, and all repudiate any such intention. But would Moscow believe these denials?

Today a Western European entente seems to be Britain’s only alternative to an Anglo-German alliance. The mere mention of an Anglo-German alliance at this stage is enough to dismiss the idea. There are many Britons, however, and they include some influential men in the Labor Party, who believe that for the next twenty or thirty years European diplomacy will revolve on the decision whether Germany is to drift into the Soviet or the Western orbit.

Unfinished business

The Potsdam agreement left in suspense these basic economic questions: the destiny of the Ruhr and the Rhineland, whether German heavy industry is to be abolished or just temporarily controlled, and the exact meaning of a German standard of life “not exceeding the average of European countries.”

The British Labor Government’s answers to these unsolved questions seem clear: The Rhineland and the Ruhr shall not be separated from Germany. An international regime, with German coöperation, is to govern the Ruhr and its great industries on socialistic principles. German light industry is to be encouraged and German heavy industry is to be restored, on the supposition that a social-democratic regime in western Germany will nationalize and harness them to the attainment of full employment in Europe. The German standard of life must be raised so that the Reich can aid rather than retard world economic recovery.

When it is said that the economic controls in Germany are to be managed by German administrators and technicians under Allied supervision, one school of British thought, exemplified by the weekly Economist, asks: Can the Allies seriously mean that they intend to rely upon the Germans to supervise the impoverishment of Germany? Papers like the Economist, the Times, the News Chronicle, the Manchester Guardian, and others, are in favor of giving Germany another chance and of helping her back on her feet.

The British Labor Government reckons with Germany’s early emergence as a peaceful democratic nation. Labor rejects the view that militarism is an incurable German malady. After the First World War, Germany waited seven years before gaining admittance to the League of Nations. This time, if some members of Britain’s Labor Government have their way, Germany will enter the new United Nations organization in five years or less.

The revulsion of the West against the Potsdam settlement is expected to come faster and more furiously than did revulsion against Versailles. In his first public review of the Labor Government’s foreign policy, Bevin spoke against the attitude of revenge.

Bevin believes that Germany must cease to be an economic slum. Who knows better than British labor folk, he would ask, that a slum is unsuitable for cultivating the arts of peace and democracy? The British view is that a poverty-stricken Germany, hostile and frustrated, even without arms will remain a hothed of ferment. It follows that Labor Britain wants a healthy and prosperous Reich.