THE TABLET March 1st. 195S. VOL. 211, No. 6145
TH£7AE T A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW
Tublished as a Newspaper
Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria
FOUNDED IN 1840
MARCH 1st, 1958
NINEPENCE
The Desperate Course: The Price of Neglecting n a t o
No Longer any Horizon: Poland’s Half-Holiday Closing. By Auberon Herbert Wise Men's Findings: Achievements and Omissions of the Cohen Report. By Colin Clark Letters of a Borderer: Sidelights for St. David’s Day. By J. F. T. Prince Prometheus Bound: Georges Rouault, 1871-1958. By Winefride Wilson Lenten Meditations: II. Elim and the Seventy Palm Trees. By Sebastian Bullough, O.P.
Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess
THE NEW
|rp H E R E is another Foreign Minister besides Mr.
Selwyn Lloyd who faces mounting criticism. M. Pineau continues to make nostalgic speeches which look back to the old days—not so very long ago as measured by the years, but immensely remote in terms of human psychology—when Britain and France dominated Africa and the Middle East between them. He still seems quite unaware that it is no good hankering for a vanished supremacy. What in fact he demands of Britain and the United States is that they shall revise their whole attitude to the Moslem world, to bring it into line with the attitude of France. Otherwise their good offices are only an unwelcome addition to France’s already great difficulties.
It is a pity that this should be so, but as it is we cannot see the British and Americans getting very far, and their l|est course is to explain in Tunis and elsewhere that the French will not learn by exhortation from others—great nations seldom do—but only from experience. In the end French opinion will face and accept the hard realities of the twentieth century for Europea ns^even the reality that now their relationship with Asia and Africa has to be entirely different, and that it is the condition of a mutually advantageous economic connection that it shall be different. The North Africans need the French, as other parts of the world need the British, but we are much readier to see that than the colonial dependents of yesterday can be expected to be. Even if these peoples had not an alternative source of aid to turn to, and one growing in capacity and readiness to help, in the Soviet Union, they would still prefer to stay poor rather than to stay dependent. This is something which even the Americans, who think they understand better than the Europeans what the thirst for independence is like, are still slow to express in practice, so that the Eisenhower doctrine has not done at all what it was meant to do in the Middle East, because the help
MOSLEMS came with too many admonitions and injunctions and strings, tangible and intangible, attached.
Mr. Robert Murphy, of the State Department, has arrived. He is a man with a long experience of North Africa, a part of the world where Mr. Macmillan also had considerable experience in the war. Murphy’s visit is part of an attempt to arrest the progressive deterioration of France’s relations with the Moslem world. It is doubtful if Britain and America can do much, for the French are rather sore with them both for failing to understand the importance of the French interest in North Africa, and are not prepared to let Algeria be discussed. Many Frenchmen believe that the British and Americans, thinking of their own great oil interests, would readily sacrifice great French possessions for some political settlement that would prove short lived, and the prelude to something much worse. The British and French intermediaries, the French remark, have not come forward from solicitude for France, for they could have shown that solicitude over past months and years and have not done so. They are responding to President Bourguiba, who tells them that the French action has made it impossible for him to continue with the policy of collaboration with France, and that now the French must quit Tunisia.
Mr. Harold Macmillan has come back obviously very much impressed with the goodwill and the basic similarity of outlook he encountered in the three Asian members of the British Commonwealth, all with the West against Communism, provided their own national dignity and independence is fully and genuinely respected by those who so lately ruled over them. We wonder if Mr. Macmillan paused to think how nearly the Cabinet of which he was a leading member ruined all this possibility of an Asian part of the Commonwealth by their Suez adventure, which was stopped just in time to save the connection.