THE TABLET December 13th, 1958. VOL. 212, No. 618G
TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER'& REVIEW
Published as a Newspaper
FOUNDED IN 1840
Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria
DECEMBER 13th, 1958
.NINEPENCE
African Racialism: Dr. N k rum ah ’s Other Face
Solution for Berlin?: in the Setting of Disengagement. By Eugene Hintcrhoif
Pius XII as I Knew h im : Memories of his Private Secretary. By Robert Leiber, S.J.
Meditations in Advent: III. Thinking with Christ. By William Burridge, W.F.
Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess
PROGRESS AT GENEVA
1 1 looks like real progress that can be recorded from
Geneva — two articles agreed on for a nuclear disarmament treaty, with acceptance of the principle o f . control. Optimisim must always be restrained in negotiations with the Russians, which can go on for a very long time, and then be suddenly brought to nothing. But the Democratic Senator Humphreys, of the Foreign Affairs Committee, after extended conversations with M. Khrushchev, has returned to America expressing the belief that the Russians genuinely want an agreement, on very cogent grounds of security and economy, and recognise that some system of control and inspection is essential. Provided this control is agreed to, the West would be making a mistake to reject a limited agreement because it was not part of a general disarmament scheme covering land forces. Experience has shown this to be almost impossible, since the whole Russian political system of iron control is underpinned by the existence of a very large army, and would crumble without it. But the very reason which compels the Russians to remain so .heavily armed, the latent hostility of the satellite populations, is in itself a great deterrent to war. Whatever may have been the situation in Stalin’s time, the NATO countries do not in fact now act as though they believed there was any serious likelihood of the Russians trying to come westwards. The deterrent considerations are much wider and more varied than the nuclear one, and they will remain if the nuclear one recedes.
Now the danger confronting British policy is that in incurring immense expense to remain a nuclear Power, able to participate in a kind of warfare which will not, in fact, happen and would be final if it did, we shall go on facing a quiet front and failing to face an active one ; incurring defeats in the battle of ideas now raging in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, where money could do a great deal to strengthen the hands of those in the local populations who want close ties with the Western world. This is a dilemma which confronts the French in an even acuter form—whether to lay out their re sources in joining the nuclear war, or to employ them in North Africa in the struggle to maintain the French pressure against the very strong hostile subversive movement which is seeking to eliminate it. No doubt the Russians would have done more in the way of promising loans and gifts in Asia and Africa, but for the crippling burden which the nuclear arms race has imposed upon them. No doubt they too will benefit, will feel able to offer more to places like French Guinea if their budget at home is relieved. But a competition in investment and an increase in consumer goods everywhere, whether it is Soviet Russia, Asia, or Africa, is to the advantage of the West in the cold war.
In proportion as all the world can become prosperous, the World Revolution loses its point, and that must be, in its largest terms, the long-range political strategy of the West. The Russians point to their short-term achievement, what has been done in forty years in Russia, and we need not belittle it. But we have something much more impressive to point to, what has been done in the Western world not only in the last fifty but in the last hundred, and hundred and fifty years : all the pioneering on which the Russians among others have drawn. As far as material progress is concerned, which, though by no means the whole business of man, is of great importance to him, the secrets have been discovered and trium phantly applied, pre-eminently on the North American continent. The secrets are not only technological but political and solid as well, the creation and maintenance of conditions of confidence in which private energies are released and stimulated to the full. The Future of Berlin
The people of Berlin have demonstrated, as their municipal elections gave them a well-timed opportunity to do, how completely unacceptable Communist ideas remain to the overwhelming majority of those who have seen them translated into action at uncomfortably close quarters. Dr. Adenauer does not need to have his hand strengthened in order to make sure that policy is concerted, for it is recognised here that in these matters the West Germans are the people immediately and closely concerned. But we hope Dr.
