T E E TAB L E T , February 23rd, 1952

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 199, No. 5831

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, FEBRUARY 23rd, 1952

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE GRAVE DECISIONS Frenchmen, Germans and European Defence SOCIALISTS AND EUROPEAN UNITY Sidelights from the Socialist International. By Ursula Branston

FRENCH CATHOLICS IN DEBATE Diverse Attitudes to the Communist Challenge

A LETTER FROM ITALY Prospects for the Coming Local Government Elections

GOD IN HISTORY

By Christopher Hollis

TWO GERMAN HISTORIANS

By Alexander Dru

THE MEMORY OF A FRIEND The Translation o f Father Faber. By Mgr. R . A . Knox

ISSUES AT LISBON

T HE statesmen in London made some progress over last weekend, in that Dr. Adenauer has returned with his hand somewhat strengthened, although he too has great difficulties before him. They are well reflected in the resolution which Bavarian Trade Unionists have ju st passed, to refuse any German defence contribution. The Bavarian Trade Unionists live next door to Czechoslovakia, and next door to the Soviet Zone of Germany, and they know perfectly well that there is no safety in weakness ; yet they can weaken the alliance on which their lives and liberties depend by making declarations of this kind.

D r. Adenauer has taken home concessions, like the review of all war criminals’ sentences. But the important thing for the whole future of the defence policy is not the concessions that are made to the Germans, but the degree of the participation of Britain and America in the European end of Atlantic defence. Without that participation, the hasty restoration of the Germans to full equality will not by itself achieve the end sought. I t will merely transfer power quicker than would otherwise happen to the national statesmen who are already saying that Dr. Adenauer was and is essentially the man for the period of occupation, but not for the period of recovery and the re-assertion of national independence.

widest variety of gifts and resources, and can create such an instrument that the Germans can find a full place inside it without having that self-sufficiency which the French, like Germany’s other neighbours, so naturally contemplate with distrust. Participation at the top rather than self-sufficiency lower down is the useful formula for the German contribution. An American Confusion

It is a principal part of Communist tactics to create and maintain in Asia ulcers like Indo-China and Malaya, for they have the double advantage o f weakening France and Britain simultaneously in Asia and Europe. It is much that the Americans cease to regard the presence of France in Indo-China and Britain in Malaya as the last survivals of Colonial Imperialism, and much has been learnt since 1945. Today the Americans are fewer who like to boast of the great part they played in ending Dutch rule in Indonesia, but we cannot yet say that the Americans at all appreciate the inconsistency of seeing themselves as the liberators of Asia, a people who understand and sympathize with the upsurge of Asiatic peoples, while at the same time their solution for Asia is much more private investment.

It is by now self-evident that much more ought to have been done to develop both the European and the Atlantic communities, simultaneously with the introduction of Marshall Aid, from 1947 onwards, before the Germans were approached a t all.

It still seems premature to plan the making of armaments in the Ruhr. The Ruhr is always likely to prove a very dangerous temptation to the Kremlin, ju st as the Skoda Works have twice proved a great misfortune to the Czechs. The prospect of vast armament works tempted Hitler in 1939 and Stalin in 1949 to acts of violence in Bohemia which finally made the last optimists in the Western world despair of reasonable dealings with them. I f men are materialists, heavy industry has for them a magnetic attraction, and they think that, if they possess it, it will outweigh any disadvantages attendant on its seizure.

It is one advantage of the developments of modern warfare that effective military action today depends on the co-ordination of a large number of highly specialized units, on land and in the air, and this gives a great opportunity for the Lisbon statesmen. They possess in their various countries the

A striking illustration of this confusion is Mr. John Fischer, in America’s Master-Plan,1 where he looks at Asia and, with apparently little knowledge of what Dutch rule or British rule were like and what they achieved in providing not only law and order but economic progress, dismisses them as imperialistic with much of the moralistic rhetoric which Mr. George Kennan has been deploring in his countrymen, and proclaims that now that these nefarious influences have been eliminated, largely through American pressure, the struggle is between two revolutionary traditions—that of Moscow, and the older revolutionary tradition of the United States. But America’s master-plan is to raise the standard of living by investment, largely private, and here Mr. Fischer has to record that hardly anybody is coming forward to entrust their savings to these new Governments. It would be the height of folly for them to do so while so little is known of their power or their will to protect investments. What is clear is that the methods these politicians have used to obtain power can so easily be turned against them.

The moral of the Chiang Kai-shek regime is there, for all Asia and the world to see ; for Chiang Kai-shek began

1. Hamish Hamilton. 12s. 6d.