Europe
ON THE WORLD TODAY
RUSSIA’S retort to President Truman’s GrecoTurkish aid program has been to stand pat on all major German issues at the Moscow Conference, and to stalemate the Austrian peace as well. And until the Austrian question is settled, there will be no withdrawal of Russian and Western armies from that forlorn little republic, or of Russian armies from the Balkans.
There is a strong possibility, however, that Russia’s policy of obstruction may boomerang. The Soviet Union is in desperate need of industrial recovery. Russia’s battle for quick reparations is dictated by that necessity. This need dominates her policy in every area now occupied by her armed forces. It provides the clue to her policy toward Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Yugoslavia.
Yet the primary need of these latter states, also, is industrial development. They can expect little assistance for some time from the Soviet Union except in the form of limited credits. But they can expect almost none from the Western nations, particularly from the United States, so long as the present division of Europe into two mutually opposed sections continues. The political repercussions of this situation on Russian prestige are important. In Yugoslavia, where a new and ambitious five-year plan for development has been charted officially, they may prove explosive.
Peacemaking is indivisible
The debates on the German and Austrian treaties show clearly that these treaties are only part of a larger problem of peacemaking. The sooner the Big Four face this truth and act on it, the better it will be for everybody.
What confronts the Big Four, and will eventually confront the Big Five when they turn eastward, is the necessity for a master agreement on basic principles an agreement covering the key points of their major differences in a grand design. It is not their mutual distrust in Central Europe which hobbles progress. It is their uncertainty about each other around the world.
If this uncertainty can be resolved on a world basis and that is by no means impossible — workable peace arrangements should become feasible not only for the European continent but generally. If East and West come to understanding on the essential unity of the total peace pattern, their negotiators should be able to dispense with much of the present shadowboxing.
Can Europe withstand division?
Grave flaws appear in any proposal which envisages a Western European bloc or federation. Such a grouping would by no means represent what the description suggests. The subtraction of Finland, Poland, Eastern Germany, Eastern Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia would leave, actually, not a Western European bloc but a Western European fringe.
The Swedes have already proclaimed as policy their determination not to join any bloc, whether oriented to the West or to the East. Norway, under a Labor government friendly to Moscow, probably would not care to commit herself to such a dubious experiment. And the southern flank, represented by a broken and prostrate Italy and an isolated, crisis-ridden Spain, would not be any bastion of democracy.
Moreover, the western fringe would represent a topheavy industrial concentration of peoples and machines. The bleak fact is that this area could not feed itself. It would become, consequently, a heavy continuing charge upon economies elsewhere. Would the United States be prepared to assume this burden? If so, for how long? What would happen to it in the event of industrial recession in America?
Mr. Lippmann calls the turn
Walter Lippmann urges a bold effort at making a total peace. The Churchill-Stalin-Roosevelt period, he points out, saw the great Allies marking out “standstill” lines on which the three great powers, Britain, Russia, and the United States, agreed to pause once the fighting ended. These lines thereupon became symbols of the political situation as the powers entered the period of diplomatic contest.
The Byrnes-Molotov period then opened. It continued until the satellite treaties were written and Mr. Byrnes yielded office last winter to Mr. Marshall. This period represented the phase during which each side strove to consolidate its position and, simultaneously, to penetrate into the sphere of influence of the other Russia into Iran, Turkey, Greece, Trieste, and North China; the United States into Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and China.
The third or Marshall period was foreshadowed when the United .States decided to withdraw from China; when the British moved to ease their commitments in the Middle East; when Russia’s expansionist tendencies were halted in the West; when the Truman doctrine proclaimed an effort to stabilize Greece, sustain Turkey, and thereby buttress the whole Middle East.
This last period opens up prospects of a vast increase in the burden of costs and risks confronting the United States and its associates. Simultaneously there has also developed a severe deterioration of capacity in Britain and France. The sharpening of differences between Russia and the United States is paced by decay of economies everywhere, by rising factionalism and intensified misery.
To make matters more dangerous, the two chief actors in the distressing drama of power tend more and more to deal with each other not directly but through “satellites and puppets and weak clients.” Few of these, Mr. Lippmann points out, can be counted on to follow instructions or to control trigger-happy fanatics or speculators “who have lost power and position, and hope to recoup in a war.”
Here is the real danger as the opposing diplomatic sides move toward exhaustion. They face growing tensions, which the reckless are all too ready to exploit as a “crusade” or a “preventive war.”
To avoid drifting into a situation “where we and the Russians believe this struggle can end only with the unconditional surrender of one to the other,” Mr. Lippmann proposes that the United States “take a clear stand for a negotiated settlement and for a modus vivendi .” Refusing to appease Moscow, he suggests that the United States should make it equally clear that we do not expect Russia to appease us.
What both governments should do is to set forth their over-all aims. The United States (which is in the position to do so beyond question) should unequivocally and sensibly state the terms upon which it believes a general settlement should be made — a settlement which, being reasonable, might help erase distrusts now pervading the diplomacy of all powers.
Mr. Lippmann’s program
The points wrhich Mr. Lippmann urges in setting forth basic terms for such settlement are: —
1. A proposal to maintain the status quo in China, with each side agreeing to lend aid neither to the Kuomintang nor to the Chinese Communists to a point where either would be able, through such assistance, to conquer the other.
2. A statement that in the Middle East our policy of guarantees of aid to Greece and Turkey is, in fact, a bid for a treaty settling the question of the Dardanelles and the Turkish and Greek boundary issues. Such a treaty would provide full security for Russia in the Straits and would grant recognition of Russian interest there. It would provide for freedom of passage in time of peace, and only such military operations as the United Nations would sanction. The Russian veto would protect Russia on this point.
3. A frank declaration that the United States insists upon a federated Germany with political decentralization; that we will federate the western zones if Russia refuses to join in, but that we will do so in a way clearly designed to permit entrance of the German states of the Russian zone on equal terms, whenever Russia consents.
4. Joint evacuation of occupied Europe (save for a small token force in Germany) by the British, the Americans, the Russians, and the French. Joint sponsorship by them of a European economic union, open to all European states, without local Communist obstructionism.
5. “We should say then, that when such a union is formed, we shall be prepared, on terms equivalent to Lend-Lease, to provide it with the working capital required to start the economic life of Europe on a productive basis. We should then say that on the basis of such a general world settlement we are prepared to consider assistance to Russia, in her reconstruction, in the form of current reparations from Germany, which would then be able to work productively, and also of credits from the United States.”
Plans and realities
One fact usually escapes attention in assessing the diplomatic struggle for a European settlement. There exists a wide gulf between present realities and eventual treaties.
The delayed peace intensifies existing dilemmas. These arise from the staggering losses in crops and cattle in England this spring, the ruin of 4,000,000 acres of French tillage by storm and flood, the shifting of the channel of the Oder, entailing devastation of a rich agricultural area counted upon for the 1947 harvest, incipient famine in parts of Poland and the Ukraine, and the general sharpening of the food crisis on the Continent.
Europe faces, between now and the early summer harvests, one of her most dangerous periods since liberation. While inflation sows bitterness among the ranks of labor, the political pressure is rising. An immense apathy about the future competes with general weariness over the acidulous wranglings of parties and factions. Nearly one fifth of the entire adult population of the Netherlands signifies an interest in migration.
France: the barometer of Europe
France is opening a powerful drive for direct commercial treaties with all occupied zones in Germany. Political uncertainties everywhere are underlined by difficulties over production, consumers’ goods, raw materials, soaring currencies, economic racketeering, and black markets. France, as always, is the barometer of European social and cultural pressures.
The march of reaction, long delayed, is beginning in earnest. The signs of it are everywhere: in the concerted hoarding of manufactures by business interests, which adds to the difficulties facing the coalition government; in the emergence of the Rally of the French People, led by General de Gaulle, which threatens to wreck the powerful balance wheel in French politics, the MRP; in the sporadic reports of renewed drilling by the Cagoulards, those precursors of the debacle of the early forties.
It appears also in the formation of committees of vigilance by both Communist and Socialist parties among the French towns and villages to counter possible attempts at a coup d’état: in the comings and goings of emissaries of foreign business and finance, who have contacts with the powerful spokesmen for the French Right; in the public admission of the Minister of the Interior—who directs the police — that “there are caches of arms hidden virtually everywhere”; in the pressures being applied by the ranks of French labor against the wage-freeze agreement.
Since General de Gaulle re-emerged in the political arena, the divided forces of the Right have taken heart. There is no doubt that many in France applaud the desire of the leader of the Liberation for greater political stability.
De Gaulle on horseback?
But de Gaulle’s refusal to set forth the program of his vast, politically amorphous faction arouses French suspicions. By attempting to cut across all party lines in his search for supporters, he gives rein, justly or not, to the criticism that he seeks to eliminate parties— all save one: his own.
The four largest parties confront this threat in characteristic fashion. The Communists demonstrate. The Socialists hold mass meetings. The MRP bids its followers reject the appeal for membership in de Gaulle’s Rally. The Radical Socialists, who once led France under the Third Republic, throw what is left of their support to the moderates.
The tug of war grows fiercer within each party of the Center and Left. The Communists show signs of internal schism as French patriotism wrestles with externally applied discipline. The Socialists reappraise their collaboration with the Communists on the one hand and lean toward the more resolute of the reformists of the MRP on the other.
As for the MRP, its right wing was never cheerful about the more drastic reforms approved by the party leadership in agreement with the other political heirs of the Resistance. Now it leans unmistakably toward the Gaullist portent, and threatens to split off — if and when the masquerade now marking the Rally is dropped.
The question is: When will this happen? General de Gaulle himself shies off from specific decision. There is, he explains, no hurry. Is he merely seeking to discover how much support he might be able to muster in this attempt at a political comeback, rather than actually attempting the comeback itself? Is there any significance in the keen interest shown in him and his movement by the American ambassador at Paris? Is there any connection between the Gaullist Rally and recent indications of a more generous policy toward France on the part of the United States?
France has displayed politically a vast talent for common sense during the past two years, regardless of extravagance normal to her politics. It is still too early to believe that she proposes to abandon her sanity, under present internal stress, for the alternative of civil war.