THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 195, No. 5737

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, MAY 6th, 1950

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

A NEW FLUIDITY The Need for All Political Parties to Think Afresh THE PROBLEM OF GERMAN TRADE Should the Ruhr Sell East or West ? By Wilfred Ryder BACKGROUND TO THE DOCK STRIKES A Permanently Unstable Situation. By John Fitzsimons

CONDITIONS OF PEACE

A Review by Christopher Hollis

METHOD OF METAPHYSIC

T. S . Gregory on “ Phoenix and Turtle”

APOLLO UNBOUND A Visit to the Royal Academy. By Peter Watts.

THE ATLANTIC MINISTERS T HE twelve Foreign Ministers o f the Atlantic Powers who will meet in London on Monday week meet with preoccupations that are more military than economic. The loss of China, the unanticipatedly rapid progress, so much facilitated, have changed for the worse the whole military outlook, and deranged the time-table by which it was believed that it was safe to concentrate upon economic recovery till, a t the earliest, 1952. I t is becoming increasingly clear that the economic recovery itself is gravely compromised by the uncertainty about the future which must persist as long as the Russian power straggles half-way across Europe and Russian agents everywhere are emboldened to greater efforts to hamstring Western defence.

war which is being fought with different and less immediately lethal weapons, but is a much more deadly struggle than most of the property disputes and frontier acquisitiveness which figure as the wars of the history books.

Mr. Menzies has taken the courageous decision to outlaw the Communist Party in Australia, because where so small a population occupies so large an area in a part of the world where Asiatic Communists are advancing so fast no risks can be taken. To Communists there is no other loyalty except to the world revolution, and if it comes in Asiatic form it is no less welcome to the Australian Communist. Mr. Acheson’s “ Total Diplomacy”

Merely by maintaining a vastly greater army than other countries and promoting quite cheap forms o f sabotage, the Russians can impose a great accumulative strain on the national economy o f every Western country. What has put their calculations out has been the apparently inexhaustible capacity of the United States to support the economies and the defence preparations o f so many other countries which, left to themselves, would have vindicated the Soviet calculations that their currencies would collapse. They were expected to collapse through an extreme disproportion between the heavy Government expenditure which, whether on defence or social services, could be forced on them politically, and the quite inadequate national production o f wealth from which the revenue would have to be obtained. Such countries, it was confidently believed, would be driven to a progressive inflation, with rising spirals o f prices and wages, and the growth of Communist parties to a strength sufficient to paralyze the Government. That this has not happened has been due to the Americans possessing both the will and the power to step in.

It is largely to the credit o f the Americans that so much progress has been achieved towards clarifying the problems which evolve frorti the Soviet menace to the free world, and towards finding an effective answer. In a series o f speeches, delivered on various occasions during the last few months, President Truman, his Republican adviser Mr. John Foster Dulles, General Eisenhower, Mr. Hoover and, especially, Mr. Dean Acheson himself, have all contributed towards the formulation o f a policy designed to build a solid defence front and so save the peace. Thus Mr. Acheson’s “ total diplomacy” constitutes a logical sequel to the economic plan o f his predecessor, General Marshall. It is, despite the gravity of the Soviet danger, essentially a policy o f peace. In his Berkeley speech Mr. Acheson very clearly stated on what terms peace was acceptable to the democratic world, and these terms include not only the conclusion o f a peace treaty with a free Germany and Japan, but also the withdrawal o f Soviet military and police forces from the countries which they now occupy.

But the Americans naturally want their help to be constructive, and the years o f this abundant help to be the years in which the Europeans adapt themselves to the new and very different conditions of life. The essential change is that the guiding principles o f nineteenth-century statesmanship have to be exchanged for others. The imminence and the power of the Communist threat has made anachronisms out of two o f the most cherished principles of the statesmanship which moulded the settlement o f 1919 : integral sovereign nationalism and conceptions o f political freedom, regardless of the use made o f it. I t is intensely painful for the Western world, long nourished in political liberalism, to find itself driven step by step to the reimposition o f tests and to the kind o f investigation of individuals only previously thought tolerable in time o f war. But what is slowly but inevitably being recognized is that we are in fact engaged in war—in a

The Soviets will not accept such terms, and thus, to Mr. Acheson, no other alternative remains except to continue waging “ total diplomacy”—in other words, to go on building an adequate defence force, attempting to pierce the Iron Curtain by what President Truman calls the “ truth campaign,” expanding international trade, creating “areas o f strength” where there exist areas o f weakness, and improving the machinery of international co-operation both within the framework of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty organizations and the European and European-American bodies of political and economic unification, such as the Council o f Europe, the Western Union and the Marshall Plan organizations.

This policy, at the same time peaceful and dynamic, and so well combining ideological arguments with effective practical measures, makes the Russians realize that they are encountering a serious, and possibly an insurmountable,