THE TABLET November 16th, 1957. Vol. 210. No. 6130

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840 NOVEMBER 16th. 1957

NINEPENCE

The Uneased Tension: Preparedness is Not Enough

Conversations in Turkey: No Coffee for the Turks. By J. E. Alexander

Industrial Arbitration : The Need for New Legislation

Laymen ol New Orleans: Resistance to Racial In tegration: II. By James McCawley

Piers Plowman Modernised : The A ttw ater Rendering. By Frank Goodridge

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

THE ARABIAN PENINSULA

\ / I R . MACMILLAN was not talking idly when he spoke * of some sacrifice of sovereignty, hard though the doctrine is for his own party to accept. In a sense every treaty by which obligations are accepted limits that complete freedom of action which is the mark of the sovereign body. But then sovereign communities can understand exactly what they are doing, when they pledge themselves as to what they will or will not do, like coming to the help of another country. But the larger the group, the more indefinite the obligation, the more people will hesitate, and the more its statesmen will be tempted to insert those escape clauses which can so easily withdraw again the substance of what appears to have been conceded.

A good example of the question that has to be faced is that presented by the visit of the Crown Prince of the Yemen to London for talks at the Foreign Office, designed to eliminate fitful and vexatious hostilities, with charges and counter-charges of aggression, along the frontier of the Aden Protectorate and the Yemen kingdom. All round Saudi Arabia and up to the Persian Gulf there are British legal positions, established by treaty—either a direct cession like Aden, or a treaty with the local ruler whose close connection with Britain is the chief safeguard of his independence from more powerful neighbours. No one can say that the presence of Britain in the Persian Gulf is outraging anybody’s national independence. Politically it is a stabilising factor. It is in a part of the world where there are very few people for the size of the area. Yet there are many signs of an increasing Arab restiveness that Britain is there at all, a feeling that Arab nationalism is wounded in its pride by the existence of these treaty rights and the presence of a European Power.

The Minister of Defence has just announced that Aden is to have a new and much more important military role as a British base from which we can give the help we have promised if the Sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf should have occasion to call on us.

We have obligations which might not seem so important to an international committee of allies, who might well think that these interests on the periphery are only of secondary importance. In the long view they might well be right, that the future of oil supplies will be best secured by making and keeping the relationship as commercial as possible. But at the moment, when stability is still so important, we can truly claim that it is in the interests of our allies, and not least of the Americans, that we should maintain our treaties, and keep in a condition to implement them if need be. It must be a cardinal principle of our policy never to use force in the Middle East except in support of some local State or ruler; never for ends that can be described as foreign and external—in short, as imperialism—for that Unites all the Arab world against us. But it is doubtful how far the other NATO countries would be prepared to inherit the obligations we carry today.

It is very much less likely that French policy ip North Africa would be underwritten by any Western alliance of countries recognising their interdependence. There is no easy solution by leaving countries pursuing separate national policies as well as the common policy, where, as is the case with France, the national policy is so costly in men and money that there is little left for the purposes of an alliance. While Britain and France are still Asian and African Powers they will therefore tend to have the countries of the Afro-Asian bloc against them.

These interests may thus put a very effective limit on the extent to which interdependence can be established. Yet it is precisely here that the Russians judge they have found the weak spot of the West, and have the easy task of encouraging the movements to be rid of the last survivals of the age of European domination.

The conclusion seems to follow that, if we judge the achievement of a real measure of interdependence to be of the first importance, we should show the partners of tomorrow what we shall be asking them to share, and we should be ready at the same time to re-shape those commitments so that they are as defensible as possible, both physically and in terms of the battle of propaganda, which is the main form that contemporary warfare takes.

It is presumably uneasiness at what may be the future ambitions of King Saud of Saudi Arabia as he grows rich