THE TABLET May I7ili. 1958. VOL. 241. No. 6156

Published as a Newspaper

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

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Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

MAY 17th, 1958

NINEPENCE

Britain and the New Italy: Reflections on the State Visit Bel ore the Italian Elections: II. The Communists. By Gunnar Kumlien Science in the Catholic Schools: Another View. By Dom Bernard Orchard Mr Mintoffs Bargain: Church and State in Malta World Shortage of Priests: IV. Priestly Lend-Lease? By .!. P. Forrestall

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

ALGIERS AGAINST PARIS

r F H E long awaited explosion of impatience has come,

and the army and settlers in Algiers have set up their own Government with the reminiscent title of the Committee of Public Safety, and have called for the same change in France itself. The soldiers and settlers in, Algiers have the will but not the means ; they need France, and what they have done will come to nothing unless it produces in France a parallel response ; and in France, great is the disillusionment with the political parties of the Fourth Republic. The main factors are quite unlike those in Algiers. There is an entirely different attitude toward the Army. To the French settlers, the army is their shield and salvation. In France it is today an institution with a great past, but also an institution viewed with a long heritage of suspicion, as a threat to the democracy of the Republic. Nor are there any glorious captains, unless de Gaulle is thought of as a soldier and not as the politician of the first two years of liberation. At the moment of going to Press the parliamentary Republic is fighting back with vigour.

Events are moving rapidly, but it seems likely that, while the call from Algiers will not be followed, the challenge from Algiers will force a drastic change in the French constitution, creating an irresistible movement for a break with the political game as it has been played in the Chamber ever since 1944. The crisis reaches far beyond the Algerian question, because any radical change must affect the whole future of Little Europe, and the close partnership projected with parliamentary Germany and Italy and the parliamentary Low Countries. In the Middle East

The rioting in the Lebanon cannot be looked upon as a flash in the pan, an outburst provoked by the decision of President Chamoun to change rules which he was himself so largely instrumental in making and to stand for a second six-year term as President. What is being challenged is much more fundamental, the separate political existence of the Lebanon, which is an inheritance from the time when the French created this State to separate the Christian Arabs and save them from being swamped in the Moslem majority of Syria. The Christian Arabs are Arabs as well as Christians, and are just as implacably opposed to the attempt to' establish the State of Israel in their midst as their Moslem fellow-citizens. They have to be as emphatic on this issue as any other Arabs, because they are suspected of being more favourably inclined to the West, and particularly to France.

The separate political structure of a sovereign State is an obstacle to the United Arab Republic of Egypt and Syria, and it is an obstacle which can most easily and effectively be removed by subversion from within. It is this process which is now gathering strength. Further east, an opposite process is going forward with the attempts to draw the Sheikhdom of Kuwait, which holds the most productive of all the oilfields, into the union of Iraq and Jordan. The Arabs will become more and more conscious of the need for unity, as the first step towards making the world take them seriously as a Power, and there are two firms in competition for the contract. One is the popularly democratic, anti-Western, firm of Egypt and Syria,-whose programme is a kind of Middle Eastern variant of the National Socialist formulas which had such a vogue in Europe a quarter of a century ago, proclaiming more social justice at home, and a forward and rewarding foreign policy abroad. The other is more moderate and old-fashioned, the firm of Iraq and Jordan, a dynastic combination, attractive to other rulers like the Sultan of Kuwait who want to stay on their thrones, and do not see why they should not lead the Arabs to unity and greatness. This combination is friendly to the Western world, but it is a friendship which has to be maintained with discretion, or it could recoil very easily on the heads of these rulers. It was only because the Suez adventure was called