A Great Week's Work

It was wonderful how quickly diplomats could agree when they were willing to be reasonable.

When the foreign ministers of Britain and France sat down with Secretary of State Dean Acheson, almost everyone expected that their conversations would be of the dull and profitless sort that are officially known as "exploratory." The talks proved to be nothing of the kind. Last week, after months of recriminations, bickerings and mutual suspicions, France's Robert Schuman, Britain's Ernest Bevin, and Acheson swiftly compromised their quarrels and wrote what amounted to an interim peace treaty for Western Germany.

It all happened in the cordial wake of the North Atlantic pact. Thus, before the pact was even ratified, it could already claim one massive achievement. The pact, and the arms program that went with it (see below) had promised France security. In return, France stilled her fear of a resurgent Germany long enough to listen to the U.S. argument: Europe could not recover while Germany remained a despair-ridden slum (TIME, April 4). Much still remained to be settled (see INTERNATIONAL), but the German agreement was a giant step forward.

So, too, were two other events last week in Washington: the move to arm the Atlantic community, and the Senate's authorization of full ECA aid to Europe. Ernest Bevin, hurrying back to London, called it "a great week's work in the history of the world."

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