A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JUN E 20th, 195?_______________________N[NEPENCE

NATO and the H-Bomb: Obligations of an Alliance The Values of the Atlantic Community : A striking address. By Jean Danielou, S.J, Hamlet’s Sin of Diabolic Hatred: By the Bishop of Galway Professor Toynbee's “ Hellenism": By a . h . Armstrong

Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess embarrassing for the Republicans as they enter the last stretch of President Eisenhower’s second term if the French Government presses the issue of North Africa. The demand th a t America and Britain support France in North Africa, without being told just what it is they must support, because President de Gaulle himself cannot see very clearly what kind of connection the French will be able to maintain. De Gaulle is in power in France to keep Algeria, and the Sahara, for France, and there is a constant temptation to subordinate the NATO Alliance to the exigencies of this national policy, and not only the NATO Alliance but the Common Market policy as well. There is little appreciation in Paris of the idea, so popular in London and Washington, th a t it is to the mutual advantage of all the NATO Powers if Britain and America, and particularly America, are friendlier to the Arab States than the French are able to be. The Other Seven

“ NOT WITH A BANG BUT A WHIMPER'’ AS we go to press, the Geneva Conference seems to ^ dying on its feet, and if it does, it is better with a whimper than a bang. As recently as last February, M. Khrushchev was speaking scathingly of Foreign Ministers’ Conferences, asking what Foreign Ministers had ever settled, and this was taken as expressing the impatience of an uninhibited individual at the official world of experts, without whom Foreign Ministers cannot move. Each international question has its departmentalised specialists, briefing their political chief and determined that if any concessions are made to a foreign point of view, they shall be at the expense of some other specialists elsewhere in the department. But all this complication and restraint from below is less cramping for Foreign Ministers than the instructions from above, and Mr. Gromyko’s performance at Geneva is not something over which Mr. Khrushchev is entitled to make cutting remarks, for he is really responsible. The major moves plainly come from him, the attempts to fix definite dates by which something must happen, the pressure of in transigence, and then the obvious shift of emphasis lest intransigence should have gone too far. Fie has used the Foreign Ministers’ Conference to test the temper, the unity, the impressionability, of the NATO Allies. But in doing so he has made it certain that a Summit Conference if it is held at all, will start under much worse auspices, with the Germans and the French stiffening President Eisenhower, and Mr. Macmillan needing to be careful not to get far out of line. It will be a Conference which the Americans, the Germans and the French have not wanted, which the British have quite welcomed, thinking it on the whole a good thing to meet and talk, provided no great expectations are aroused among the public. Only Mr. Khrushchev has attached a large im portance to such a meeting, and yet it is his attitude which causes and justifies the scepticism in the West about the value of holding it at all.

The larger cause of Free Trade has been helped a step further by the Stockholm proposal, whereby seven European countries, of whom Great Britain is commercially much the most important, who are all outside the European Common Market, propose to reduce tariffs among themselves at the same rate that the barriers are coming down inside the Common Market. There is, of course, a danger that two free trade areas will come into existence, with a high wall between them. But there is just as good a chance th a t the dividing wall can be kept low, and might be got rid of altogether. West Germany does.something like a quarter of its trade with the seven, and Italy a fifth. Once again it is France that is likely to be much less interested than Germany or Italy in a larger free trade area, because France imports less than ten per cent of her total imports from the seven, and only exports under fourteen per cent of her total in their direction. • Of the seven countries, Austria and Switzerland are much the most dependent on the Common Market countries, their immediate neighbours, and have the strongest interest in persuading the Common Market countries to keep their external tariff low. Their presence among the

Since Mr. Macmillan’s visit to Moscow, President de Gaulle has been asserting the claims of France inside NATO, in a way that effects adversely such prospects as a Summit Conference might have. I t will prove very