The Other Bastion

At San Francisco, the free world had buttressed its bastion in the Pacific. Last week the Big Three's Foreign Ministers looked to their Atlantic defenses. Under the impetus of a new sense of solidarity, they swiftly reached tentative decisions as far reaching as those made in San Francisco.

Flying back from the West Coast together, France's Robert Schuman. Britain's Herbert Morrison, and the U.S.'s Dean Acheson began their conversations in the noisy intimacy of an Air Force plane. The discussion continued around a long elliptical table on the top floor of the State Department Annex, a block from the White House.

Agreement on Germany. The chief problem, long deferred, was how to establish Western Germany as a contributing partner to the West's defense without recreating the threat of German militarism. By week's end, the following points were agreed on:

P: German units will be integrated into a "European Defense Community" under General Eisenhower's SHAPE command. There will be no German general staff or separate German army. P: The occupation, as such, will end. The three occupying powers will negotiate new terms looking toward "integration of the Federal Republic on a basis of equality within a European community itself included in a developing Atlantic community."

P: A "peace contract" (not a treaty) will be signed with Germany if the Bonn government agrees to contribute troops to the European army and to share the Ruhr's coal and steel under the Schuman plan. The peace contract would go far toward restoring to the Germans full rights over their own affairs. There would be certain safeguards. The Allies will retain the rights 1) to station troops in Germany, though these would become defense forces instead of occupying troops; 2) to settle all questions about Germany's frontiers, precluding any attempt by Germany to make separate deals with Russia or a bargain with Poland on Silesia; 3) to govern West Berlin; 4) to intervene if the Bonn government is threatened by either fascist or Communist uprisings; 5) to approve basic changes in foreign policy or trade policies (e.g., no deals to ship steel to Russia would be allowed).

It was on France's proposals and concessions that agreement turned. Schuman won his argument for the Pleven plan of integrating German troops into a supranational European army. But, at Acheson's urging, he agreed to allow German troops to be called up by the Bonn government and trained by the U.S. before the European army was fully set up. Morrison abandoned Britain's opposition to the Schuman plan of international control of the Ruhr. But he got Schuman to concede that Britain need not be a full partner, promising only "the closest possible association."

Off to Ottawa. There was no argument on other points. The ministers agreed to try once more to negotiate a peace treaty for Austria. They noted "contradictions" in the treaty with Italy--notably the limits on its armed forces. And in a gesture toward Soviet Russia, they reiterated their "fidelity" to the principle that "international differences must be resolved by peaceful processes," declared that they hoped to explore such processes at the meeting of the U.N. Assembly in Paris in November.

At week's end, the three ministers took off for Ottawa for the first full-dress meeting of the North Atlantic Council since last December. There, the U.S. pressed ahead with construction of another rampart in the West's defense: the inclusion of Greece and Turkey in NATO.

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