A Question of Heart

The differing architects of the West assembled in London this week to plan a new structure of European defense, replacing the crumpled blueprint of EDC. The task was devious and formidable, for out of ancient hates and modern misgivings the diplomats had to design an arrangement strong enough to withstand the Russians, flexible enough to let the British and Americans stand half in and half out, and roomy enough for Frenchmen and Germans to live peaceably under the same roof.

Each nation had its own ideas of how the fortress should be built.

France wanted a tight little Europe embracing Britain and including a strong fence around Germany. On the eve of the conference, Premier Pierre Mendes-France outlined his ideas: 1) a British "association" with the Continent; 2) the admission of Germany and Italy to the 1948 Brussels Pact; 3) a system of "strict and severe controls" on the armies and arms of all Brussels Powers, but especially on the Germans. On German admission to NATO, Mendes hedged. Brussels first, said he, and then perhaps consideration of a NATO seat for the Germans.

West Germany reacted with scorn. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer made plain that he will accept controls on German arms "only if others are controlled too." He said he favored the plan sponsored by Britain's Anthony Eden: full sovereignty for Germany and simultaneous membership in the Brussels Pact and the NATO alliance.

Britain saw in the seeming Franco-German contradiction hope of a workable plan which would involve Britain more surely than EDC (through Britain's role as a Brussels partner) and also commit the U.S. more emphatically (through the NATO all-for-one agreement). Mendes-France seemed to be insisting on controls unacceptable to Germany. Adenauer's demands for all-at-once concessions were unacceptable to an aroused France. But neither, in Anthony Eden's view, had closed the door. He calculated optimistically--but perhaps not too much so--that theirs were bargaining terms, not final ones.

The U.S. refrained from proposing or endorsing. But as John Foster Dulles left for London, he warned: the U.S. will no longer "gamble [its] safety and survival on arrangements and programs that have no reasonable prospect." The U.S., in other words, wanted what Eden's proposal offered--German sovereignty and a German army operating within NATO.

Popular passions were aroused on both sides of the Rhine, and it was asking much to ask a handful of men to devise a formula that would make the Germans strong enough to worry the Russians, yet keep them restrained enough to comfort the French. A blend of such opposites could not be attained through some safe, ingenious blend of legalisms and restrictions. For the Western allies, and for the French in particular, one of the men best qualified to discuss Europe's military needs had this advice on the London Conference's eve. "If you are going to have . . . every baby-carriage factory inspected to see whether it's making guided missiles, it's going to be very difficult to make it work," said U.S. General Alfred M. Gruenther, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. "The only real safeguards that you are going to get are those that come from the heart."

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