Dead, Dying or Durable?

EDC THE EUROPEAN ARMY

IN a prefab tacked on to the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, a dozen staff officers are huddled in talk. They are the advance guard of the European Defense Community (EDC)--the curious alphabetic device that is supposed to fuse the armies of France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries into a single European Army. Among them is the first German general ever to participate in Western strategic planning: Hans Speidel, better known as Rommel's chief of staff.

The officers' common language is French, and one bitter phrase dominates their conversation. "En principe [in principle]," they say, there is a European Army uniform. No one knows what color it will be, but en principe it exists. Nor has anyone laid eyes on the European Army boot, though en principe, footwear will be worn by every one of the 2,000,000 soldiers who, en principe, will serve.

EDC is like that: it exists only in principle. All its members, except West Germany, have long since committed their armies to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose Supreme Commander is an American: General Alfred M. Gruenther. West Germany has no army, and as a defeated enemy, may not legally rearm until a peace treaty has been signed and sealed. To make German arms palatable to Europeans who still bore the teethmarks of Nazi aggression, a Frenchman (ex-Premier Rene Pleven) suggested EDC, which would add German strength to NATO, but still enable the West to keep an eye on German militarism.

All of a year's hopes have gone into pleading EDC's case before the Parliaments of Europe, yet in mid-1953, nearly three years after Pleven's proposal, West German rearmament is still a chimera. On both sides of the Atlantic, suspicion is hardening into the conviction that EDC 1) will not be ratified this year, and 2) may never be ratified at all.

The Girl Was a Boy. Only in the Low Countries have parliamentarians shown any real enthusiasm for EDC. The Netherlands' lower chamber ratified EDC by 75 votes to 11 (TIME, Aug. 3). A special committee of the Belgian Parliament has also approved the text, but Belgian lawyers insist that a constitutional amendment is needed.

Bigger obstacles block EDC in the three big nations that are its centerpiece:

ITALY'S Alcide de Gasperi is the most singleminded advocate of European "integration." Last week his cabinet fell.

WEST GERMANYs Parliament, goaded by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, is the only European legislature that has passed EDC through both houses. But is German rearmament constitutional? The German Federal Court will not decide until after the German elections on Sept. 6, and if it obeys Mister Dooley's law, the judges will follow the election returns. Adenauer's Socialist opponents are pledged to ditch EDC in favor of "German unity"--although they have not explained how they will achieve unity.

FRANCE, where EDC was born, is now trying hard to disown it. The French cabinet demands an impossible price for ratification of EDC: that the Franco-German dispute over the Saar be settled in favor of France; that the U.S. bail France out of Indo-China; that Britain throw in with EDC as a counterbalance to the Germans; that "the integrity of the French Army" (but not of anybody else's) be written into EDC by means of nine protocols. A German diplomat, reflecting his booming country's self-confidence, scoffed: "Father Pleven expected a girl. It turned out to be a boy."

Twin Pillars. EDC is designed to dovetail the armies of Western Europe so that none can be easily withdrawn for aggressive adventures of its own. This is a more complicated ambition than simple rearmament; the result is a complicated blueprint. At the top, EDC will have 1) a Council of Ministers, 2) an 87-man Assembly, 3) a nine-man Commissariat, serving as a six-nation general staff. Together, EDC and the Schuman Coal-Steel Plan will form the military and economic pillars of a still more visionary federation: the U.S. of Europe.

To allay French fears that German recruits might coalesce into a new, nationalistic Wehrmacht, EDC will integrate its units at the division level. There will be no German General Staff; goose-stepping is verboten. The main contributions to the proposed 43-division force:

France: 14 divisions, 750 planes.

Germany: 12 divisions.*

Italy: 12 divisions, 450 planes.

Benelux: 5 divisions, 600 planes.

By signing the 131-article treaty, all six EDC members promise to regard an attack on one as an attack upon all. And all 14 members of NATO, including the U.S., are treaty-bound to come to the aid of any part of EDC attacked by an aggressor. The U.S. and Britain, who would not belong to EDC, separately guarantee to treat a "threat to the integrity or unity of EDC" as a "threat to their own security." A German attempt to bolt EDC would presumably constitute such a threat.

Ancient Dream. The urge--and need--to add German divisions to NATO is the No. 1 reason for EDC. Reason No. 2 is a long-term political objective: European Union. By intermingling the armies of France and Germany, Pan-Europeans like Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi and France's Jean Monnet confidently hoped to staunch the national rivalries that have convulsed their Continent for centuries.

This mixture of distant idealism and a more practical military expedience has won EDC the kind of high-minded support that simple, naked German rearmament could not hope for. "Some seem to think that EDC has no purpose except to meet the threat from the Soviet Union," said John Foster Dulles recently. "That is not the true case at all." European unity, said Dulles, is "necessary in itself."

Adenauer has even suggested that EDC, a "purely defensive alliance," should give the Soviet Union a guarantee against attack, in return for a similar--and enforceable--undertaking from the Communists.

Alphabetic Cipher. If EDC were fact, the Communists might respond to these stirring challenges. As it is, they can thumb their noses at an alphabetic cipher. Three years of delay and cavil have convinced many Europeans and more Americans that nothing so troublesome, and so lukewarmly supported, as EDC can ever work well. The case against EDC:

P:That having lost its momentum, EDC is stalled, and likely to stay stalled.

P: That EDC is too complicated. "An imperfect treaty, full of faults," complained a Dutch supporter.

P: That EDC demands too great a surrender of a nation's sovereignty (control of its armed forces) to be politically acceptable. Coalitions are consistent with a nation's selfesteem; a common uniform and an intertwined command are not.

P: That EDC is militarily cumbersome and impractical. General Gruenther insists that EDC is "completely feasible and workable," but a lot of lesser hands don't think so.

P: That EDC is part of a "crash" buildup program to meet an emergency that no longer exists in so threatening a form. Those now unwilling to make the sac-rifi es demanded in EDC point out that the U.S. (despite its talk of no relaxation) is now cutting its arms budget and its foreign aid. General Gruenther, called home to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee on becoming head of NATO, said: "I do not think war is ever going to come [in Europe]. We are going to stop it from starting . . ."

Counterforces. To be sure, Gruenther added that "if ever there was a time for relaxation, this is not it." But Europeans are resigned to this kind of U.S. moralizing. Not even EDC's most ardent champions expect ratification before mid-1954. Three big counterforces bar the way:

The First is Russia, which can be expected to pay a high diplomatic price to prevent German rearmament on the side of the West. In France, the Russians peddle the line that German arms are no longer necessary because the danger of Soviet attack is "remote and receding." In Germany, its agents hint that the Red army might be withdrawn from the rebellious East Zone in return for a German pledge of "neutrality."

The Second counterforce is German unity, the only campaign issue that could upset Konrad Adenauer in the September elections. Adenauer's Socialist opponents charge that the integration of the West German Republic into a West European alliance will make permanent the partition of their country.

The 77-year-old Chancellor vigorously repudiates this point of view. So does the U.S. "I do not and have never accepted the theory that EDC and [German] unification are mutually exclusive," wrote President Eisenhower in an open letter to Adenauer. "Quite the contrary." EDC, said the President, is "the simplest, most unequivocal, and most self-evident demonstration of strength for peace . . ."

The President's letter was primarily intended to boom Adenauer's chances in the West German election by associating the West (and therefore Adenauer) with the vote-compelling issue of German unity. It also confirmed what the Washington conference of Big Three Foreign Ministers had previously implied: that U.S. policy is groping towards a new order of priorities in Europe. Instead of telling the West Germans: "First join EDC, then worry about reunification afterwards," the U.S. is now inclined to give EDC and reunification equal priority, letting events prove which one has the better chance of being achieved. The change is one of emphasis more than of direction: Washington has simply recognized that 1) revolt in East Germany has given reunification a political appeal; 2) German unity is probably inevitable in the long run anyway, and therefore should be supported.

The Third stumbling block is the French Assembly. Many of its members fear German arms more than they do the Russians. Divided and politically stagnant, Frenchmen are appalled at the "miracle of West German recovery," which has already outstripped French industry. They greet the prospect of German soldiers, even in European Army suits, with cries of "German militarism."

French fears are not groundless, even if exaggerated. A united Reich, 68 million strong, would quickly dominate Western and Central Europe. It might use its weight to play off the West against the East; it could conceivably pull a second Rapallo in exchange for Soviet concessions at the expense of satellite Poland. (Russia and Poland occupy 44,500 square miles of former German territory east of the Oder-Neisse Rivers.) Or, if it did not make a deal with Russia, a united Germany might do the opposite: plunge Europe into a war for its lost provinces.

France Must Ratify. French reactions to the reviving German problem are a mixture of fear and wishful thinking. Gaullists, while saying that they recognize the need for German arms, seriously propose that Germany should be forbidden by treaty to grow stronger than France. Communists, and many Socialists, point to Soviet peace gestures, hoping, in an undefined way, for a Franco-Soviet arrangement to keep Germany "neutralized."

The fact is that EDC is the best political bargain France can hope to make over German rearmament. A European Army offers controlled German arms, watched over by the U.S. and Britain. It is possible only because Konrad Adenauer also fears a revival of the German "military monster" and what it might do to democracy's precarious hold on the German people. Yet still the French stall.

Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery of Alamein recently put into words some of the exasperation that French stalling provokes. "EDC," said Monty, "has got to be started. Get the damn thing launched and push it, you chaps, push it along . . . The French must ratify it. They must! They produced this thing, and they must jolly well ratify it . . ."

Alternatives. The U.S. State Department is convinced that EDC could be ratified (by a narrow five-vote margin) if the French cabinet would really put the heat on the Assembly. But no French government has so far shown the political courage to force the issue.

It is official U.S. policy not to talk of alternatives to EDC. Yet they obviously exist:

P: To continue NATO without German arms. But Western military men insist that German arms are needed "to plug the gap in the middle."

P: To press for German membership in NATO itself. Advantage: German troops could be speedily recruited for Western defense, without the cumbersomeness of intermixed commands. France almost certainly would veto this plan; it could make the veto stick not only as a NATO member, but as one of the three Western powers occupying Germany.

P: To negotiate a U.S. pact with Germany outside NATO, as the U.S. has already done with Spain. But geography alone would make it difficult for the U.S. to support the Germans without French collaboration: the very supply lines for U.S. bases in Germany traverse France. Even more disastrous would be the sundering of the Western alliance implicit in any break with France.

The hard fact is that Germany can only be safely and effectively allied with the West through some multinational coalition in which the French acquiesce. Yet the threat of a separate U.S. agreement with Germany may well prove the strongest single weapon in the U.S. diplomatic armory. Washington cannot forever let French political weakness keep Europe (including France itself) at the mercy of the Red army.

EDC, with all its faults, seems better than any alternative that now appears realizable. The question is whether the energy, courage and imagination necessary to put it across can be summoned up at this late hour by the U.S. and by an increasingly lethargic Western Europe. The opposition is not someone with a better plan, but the complacent figure of old Mr. Micawber, always hoping that something better will turn up somehow. In Micawber's case, it never did.

* Germany will have an air force, but a clause in the EDC Treaty forbids it to build warplanes, atomic weapons, guided missiles and battleships.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.