THE TABLET, AjrrO CIA, 1»U
THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW
PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA
VOL. 199, No. 5837
FOUNDED IN 1840
LONDON, APRIL 5th, 1952
NINEPENCE
PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER
AFRICA AND DR. MALAN Apartheid and its Consequences for the European Powers THE MOSCOW ECONOMIC CONFERENCE
Soviet Plans Under Review. By Wilfred Ryder
OPERATION WAITING-LIST Part o f the Health Service Needing Improvement. By Geoffrey Lesson
THE PURPOSE OF A UNIVERSITY
A Critic o f Yale. By Christopher Hollis
THE DEATH OF CHRIST
By Francis Bartlett
A SONG OF PASCH
By Violet Clifton have all the aspects of unreality, these nevertheless remain what German people are interested in. The memory of 1870 and Weimar is stronger in emotional appeal than the intellectual appeal of such complicated arrangements as the Schuman Plan and the European Defence Community. Soviet Policy in Germany
GENERAL EISENHOWER REPORTS T HERE could have been no better refutation of Mr. Aneurin Bevan’s argument that it is unlikely that “ thirtyfive million tons of steel would launch itself against 200 million tons o f steel” than General Eisenhower’s report on his first year as Supreme Commander in Europe. It is only, he said, when “we have the capability of building such military, economic and moral strength as the Communist world would never dare to challenge” that Moscow may be willing to participate seriously in disarmament negotiations. Whatever Marshal Stalin may say about the prospects of war, the Soviet Union will be determined in its course not by the superior steel resources of the Western Powers but by whether these resources are used for the production of tanks or of frigidaires. As long as this alternative is in the balance, the prospect of a European Korea, o r of what happened in Prague also happening in Rome, cannot be ruled out.
A cartoon in the New York Times showed General Eisenhower writing at his desk, with the slogans and the banners of his supporters for the Presidency in the far distance. The caption ran “An American in Paris,” and the question that people in Europe will be asking themselves on reading his modest statement o f one year’s achievements is what Europe will look like to him when, as Mr. Eisenhower, he may be sitting at his desk in Washington. It is with an eye on the American electorate that the General says
“ It would be fatuous for anyone to assume that the taxpayers o f America will continue to pour money and resources into Europe unless encouraged by steady progress towards mutual co-operation and full effectiveness.” Despite the large progress since last spring, the Soviet land and air forces remain in their position of superiority, and Europe cannot yet be defended from the Elbe instead of the Rhine. But it is not from a military point of view alone that the inclusion of Germany on the side of the free nations is a necessity, but for the sake of the security and economic stability of Europe. And it is from Germany that General Eisenhower’s journey back to the United States, should he now make it, will appear as the longest journey he ever made.
Like good schoolboys, the Western Powers in their reply to the Soviet Note on Germany went back to the master to ask for clarification. That is the unfortunate impression that this well-meaning and straightforward document makes. For it leaves the Soviet Union in the schoolmaster’s position of ultimate authority on the theorems not of Euclid but of German unity, German independence and German rearmament
It is, of course, the primary aim of the Russian volte face to halt the rearmament of Germany as part of the rearmament of the West. But a study of the Soviet Note, and, what is more important, of Communism in action, opens more farreaching vistas. The men in the Kremlin are realists ; they know that what they are offering the Germans will not immediately turn them into Communists, that a united and independent Germany may indeed out-vote Communism. But they also know that a united and independent Germany will probably not return Dr. Adenauer to power, and that after the first few years of a new Weimar Republic the political and military magnetism of the adjacent Soviet Union, of dose economic relations and the impact on Western Germany of the cadres of the Communist-trained youth, will make itself felt. They are working for a future, distant as yet, when the Americans may have withdrawn from Europe and Europe itself will have grown comfortable and complacent in the illusion of the one world.
No similar far-sightedness can unfortunately be detected in the reply of the Western Powers. There is, indeed, all the necessary emphasis on free elections, and on the Eastern frontier of Germany. It declares that the formation of a German national Army would be a “ step backwards,’’and that,
“being convinced of the need for a policy of European unity, Her Majesty’s Government are giving their full support to plans designed to secure the participation of Germany in a purely defensive European community, which will preserve freedom, prevent aggression and preclude the revival of militarism.” But what the Russians will read in this is surely that the West has no fixed policy on Germany which is not open to a friendly deal ; that if it desires free elections under United Nations control it might be accommodating about elections under international control ; and that, finally, there is the pull of the Daltons and Bevans and their supporters in the West who want to see nothing so much as the shelving of all plans for a German defence contribution. The Western Note lacks that determination with which the German issue must be treated if the mistakes of the past are not to be repeated.
Before the formidable audience of fifty million Germans the Soviet Union has emerged as their ingenuous protagonist. It has understood that if the division of Germany is the reality for Germany, and German unity and independence today
Nobody in the West can want Germany to remain divided. It is an unnatural situation, which no Schuman plan can put right. German unity must come about in some form or other.
