TIIB TABLET December 7th. 1957. VOL. 210, No. 6133

THE TA ELET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 184 0

DECEMBER 7th, 1957

NINEPENCE

W l l O S e Hand on the Switch?: Parental Control of Television

The Coming Lambeth Conference: nr. Maiines to South India. By j . j . Coyne

The Religion of Joseph Conrad: By Adrian Green-Armytage

Meditations for Advent: II. Penance. By Illtud Evans, O.P.

CHRISTMAS BOOK SUPPLEMENT Reviews by Christonher Holiis, Patrick McGrath, Li.-Generai H. G. Martin. John P. White, M. Beliasis, Sister Mary Jordan, O.P., Thomas Gilby, O.P., A. C. F.

Frank Liftier, Maryvonne Butcher,

Beales, Leo Gradwell, A. J. Brooker, Edward Hutton, Janet Bruce and Rena Bosanquet.

PAYING F

TT is rather a poor prelude to the important mid-December meeting of NATO, if the British and German Governments get at loggerheads over so relatively small a sum as £50 million, which the British Government is asking the German Government to pay for the British troops in Germany. It is a great pity that Dr. Adenauer has not been well enough to come to London before the NATO meeting, and that his Foreign Minister, Herr von Brentano, was apparently only empowered to make counter-proposals, by which a roughly similar sum would be found but in ways the Germans would prefer. The sum in dispute is small by comparison with the military budgets of either Britain or Germany, for the Germans are providing 9,000 million DM, or something like £750 million, for the rebuilding of their forces, and declare that this will be insufficient by some 2,000 million DM. They say they need to spend nearly half the cost of the British defence budget. This German figure seems, indeed, remarkably high for what is planned.

When two of the countries with the strongest economies in the European end of NATO take issue with one another, it is largely because to neither party does the presence of these troops have the same urgency that it had three years ago. The German attitude is part of the same feeling which has made it such an exceedingly slow business to bring any German contribution to the military strength of NATO. There is reluctance all along the line—a reluctance to burden the buoyant German economy by taking men from productive work and making them instead a charge on production, and an individual unwillingness to embrace the military life, from the feeling that either it will lead to nothing except a much smaller income than a young man might hope to make in industry or commerce, or that it will lead to annihilation or capture under the new conditions of warfare, in which the role of the infantry in particular remains so obscure.

But the fundamental reason is the spread of the belief that, whatever may have been the case earlier, in the immediate post-war period, the Russians have no intention of attacking Western Germany, but only of holding Eastern Germany. Just as the Americans always have Pearl

OR NATO Harbour at the back of their minds, so the Russians have Hitler’s treachery to them in 1941; and the great reluctance of the Germans of today either to become soldiers or to pay for soldiers, although it is not directly intended as a contribution to the alleviation of tension, undoubtedly has that incidental good effect. The international position would be more dangerous if the Germans were showing any appreciable desire to get back into uniform, with a programme of reunification as the first stage in rebuilding a great Reich.

There is one German argument that ought to be dropped, the suggestion that Britain and France want to leave more of the defence of Europe to the Germans, so that they can employ their own soldiers outside Europe, and particularly in North Africa, in Colonial enterprises of a selfish character. There is no substance in this as far as Britain is concerned; but just as the Americans recognise that the United States cannot only be defended on the North American Continent, so is it equally true that Europe cannot only be defended in Germany. That is one frontier, but only one. There is a European interest, in which the Germans as European manufacturers and traders have a great and growing interest, to keep Asia, the Middle East and North Africa in open trading relations with the Western world.

There is a parallel with South America at the time of the Monroe Doctrine, when Britain and the United States were both afraid that if Spain reasserted its authority over its American Empire, British and American trade and investment would be shut out. They were determined by championing the new Republics to keep their foothold. Today it is a great common interest that no more of the world shall go the way of China, with foreign trade becoming the Government monopoly of a Communist regime. If the Germans cannot make any direct contribution towards the struggle that is going on in Asia and Africa, and all their contribution has to be inside their own country, that is a reason why it should be the more substantial there.

The French Conservatives have been strongly reinforced in their pessimistic disbelief that French interests in Algeria can be effectively or for long protected by a policy of concessions, when they contemplate what has happened to the