The TABLET March 9th, 1957. VOL 209, No. 6094

TH E TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Ncwsnapef

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

MARCH 9th, 1957

N1NEPENCE

The Small Shop-keeper: The Government’s Hostility

1lie future oi Europe: The Necessity of Unity. By Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick

A Century of Divorce : A Chance for the Canonists

Healthy Education : Responsibilities of Home and School. By the Bishop of Salford

Professor Ayer and I : “ The Problem of Knowledge.” By T. S. Gregory

She Bible in. Lent: I : The Word of Life. By Leonard Johnston

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

UNCERTAIN FRONTIERS

r PEIE new State of Ghana has been launched like a great * ship, with the Duchess of Kent breaking a metaphorical champagne bottle against its side, and not only Mr. Butler there from Britain, but Vice-President Nixon looking in on his goodwill tour. The very elaboration of the goodwill manifestations reflects the anxiety, barely beneath the surface, that the ship is not built for the heavy weather it is likely to encounter, and that the experience of political seamanship will prove as inadequate as it is proving in Indonesia and Burma. Dr. Nkrumah has begun in a manner reminiscent of Mr. Nehru, saying that Ghana will go neither with the East nor with the West, and will lead the rest of Africa to political independence. The implications of both these statements cannot be found reassuring. Nor can it have happened before that in setting up a people the out-going authority should have gone to such pains to reassure the public men of the new State that no very high standards of financial morality are going to be expected of them, and that if there are scandals we in Britain will at once think of what our own country was like in the eighteenth century. The Americans could be even more reassuring that political graft need not militate in the least against burgeoning economic growth. But in fact, if there is going to be corruption in Ghana, it is going to prove vastly more serious than in countries like Britain and America, where it could be absorbed because the structure of society was so strongly built.

The first great test for Ghana will develop quite soon, in the form of the question whether the North and the Centre will obey the South, or whether local rulers will arise not seeing why the process of emancipation should not be carried further. What is happening in Indonesia is parallel to what happened in Central America, where it turned largely on personalities : while a United States of Mexico was maintained where there could easily have been half-a-dozen republics, further south disunity and separate sovereignties prevailed. In a few years the republics of Sumatra, Borneo and the Celebes may be adding themselves to the Al'ro-Asian bloc, as three more votes in the United Nations. This danger of fragmentation, always present where self-determination, what the local population fancies it wants, is made the sole test of moral validity, is serious, because it leads to the creation of small Governments, desperately short both of statesmen and revenue, and with a perpetual temptation to take more and more of the wealth under their control in order to maintain themselves as States.

The chief compensation is that the existence of this danger induces local politicians of the central Government to take the United Nations seriously, because its existence helps those who have achieved a juridical status as sovereign States. The immense advantage of this status has seldom been more strikingly illustrated than in the way the world now, apart from the Arabs, accepts the State of Israel, and thinks about it quite differently from the way it would think about the physical reality, which is a million Jews settling themselves by forcible intrusion in the midst of the Arab world.

The best moment in the General Assembly of the United Nations came with the applause that greeted the speech of the Israeli Foreign Minister, Mrs. Mier, when she tried to look beyond disputed frontiers and security to appeal to all the peoples surrounding Israel to work with the Israelis in conquering the great poverty which is the condition of them all. For the first time, two new factors can transform the Middle East—the wealth from oil, which is being left in such large proportion for the enrichment of the countries where it has been found, and the readiness of the United States to make an additional contribution, up to two hundred million dollars a year, for economic development. But for the insecurity created among the Arabs by the Zionist ambitions of ten years ago, these economic prospects might by now have seized the imagination of the Moslem world. But the Arabs are still deeply suspicious, for they know that,