T H E T A B L E T , December 13th, 1952.

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

VOL. 200, No. 5873

LONDON, DECEMBER 13th, 1952

NINEPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1840

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

POLICY FOR AFRICA The Declarations o f the Capricorn Society

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY The Dangerous Myth o f a Natural Political Alignment

WHO RUNS RUSSIA ? The New Middle Class Comes of Age. By Victor S . Frank

HOMAGE TO FRANCOIS MAURIAC On the Occasion of the Award of the Nobel Prize. By Robert Speaight

THE PRIMATE OF YUGOSLAVIA Cardinal Griffin’s Address to the Sword o f the Spirit

THE NON-EUROPEAN MAJORITY T HE United Nations, the majority of whose members come from outside Europe, has a bias towards nationalist movements. The great corrective influences ought to be the United States and Britain ; but the United States, while it is the chief provider of capital for overseas investment, also has its own long-established tradition, perpetuated in the American schools, of an instinctive sympathy for colonial aspirations for political independence.

we should as a nation show ourselves to Marshal Tito, we must watch the tendency to jettison essential principles in the cause of winning the cold war. The Disturbances in French North Africa

We are not opposed to such independence, provided its advocates are realistic and notmerelyromantic,orthereflection of the political ambitions of groups which do not really serve the causes they claim to serve. By “realistic" we mean realizing that the juridical conception of absolute sovereignty is a mistaken and over-ambitious aim for small Powers. The greatest Powers now realize their mutual independence; the more politically mature they are, the more prominent is the part they take in the movement for greater unity, European or Atlantic or African. Defence today must be concerted in permanent alliances ; so must much else in the security measures against Moscow ; so must economic development.

We await the clarification of the official American attitude to private companies which want to buy oil from Persia which, if it comes from the British plant, is the condonation of acts of spoliation which are none the less spoliation because committed by a Government ; and we hope that we are not going to be confronted with a short-sighted American policy of shoring up Dr. Mossadeq by giving him a success when so much of the Middle East and all Asia, Africa and South America is watching to see what happens when local Governments tear up agreements and help themselves to the property that they have encouraged foreigners to create inside their frontiers.

We print this week an article on “ Islam and Democracy” which carries its warning that there is no tradition of the kind of political regime that Americans imagine all the world can follow ; and, whatever may be said in the early stages of agitation to give a contrary impression, there is no ground for thinking that, with the departure of European Powers, the way is open for a local parliamentary life that will prove more than a brief transitional phase to some more endemic form of native autocracy ; very likely quite unco-operative with the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Great Britain must not be left alone to maintain the vital principle of the sanctity of agreements and contracts. As in the matter of how cordial

Calm is only slowly returning to Tunis and Morocco, and it is not difficult to sec the connection between the outbreak of violence in the French Protectorates and the Arab and Asian interventions against France at the United Nations. Indeed, the murder of M. Fehrat Hached, the Tunisian Labour leader, had hardly been announced when one of the Arab delegates at Lake Success placed the responsibility for it upon the French. But French interests are singularly illserved by this deed. It is difficult to believe that, with all the present French troubles in Indo-China and North Africa, there should be any patriotic Frenchman desiring anything but interior peace.

The Figaro and other journals suspect that the cause of the murder was much more probably the intention to excite Tunisian nationalist opinion against France. The choice of the victim seems to corroborate this view. Fehrat Hached was practically unknown in Tunis, but not in Paris or the United States. He had been a Communist for a short while, many years ago, but later regarded himself as a progressiste. He represented the Tunisian revolutionary democratic tendencies, not at all to the liking of the nationalist forces of the Neo-Destour which dominates the Bey. This attitude gained him the support of liberals in France and elsewhere who were ignorant of his extreme fanaticism, which he kept from them. Recently he himself admitted that, even if he wanted to stop the outbreaks of violence in Tunis, he was no longer in a position to do so. He played skilfully on American opinion, and there is good reason to seek the inspiration for his murder among the fanatical elements in the Middle East for whom terror is part of their religious duties. Hached’s determined opposition to the Tunisian Communists prevented them from dominating the Tunisian trade union movement, and his death helps the Communist cause, as well as the independence movement. Communists on the Run

The expulsion of MM. Marty and Tillon from their posts on the Central Committee of the French Communist Party clearly anticipates their final expulsion from the party itself. The announcement comes after several weeks of exciting