Geneva: The Spirit

The evening after he returned from Geneva, President Eisenhower warned his people and the world: "We must never be deluded into believing that one week of friendly, even fruitful negotiations can wholly eliminate a problem arising out of the wide gulf . . . between the concept of man made in the image of his God, and of man as a mere instrument of the state."

The negotiations had been friendly in tone; they had even held out hope of specific fruits which might ripen in a second Geneva conference of Big Four foreign ministers. The amicability and the hopes came to be summed up in a phrase, "the spirit of Geneva." As the foreign ministers' conference concluded last week, the Russians, on point after point, prevented any practical harvest from the July meeting.

Some Western observers thereupon cried havoc. The cold war was on again; the leopard had not changed his spots; the fat was in the fire, and, said one liberal U.S. commentator, the defense budget should be immediately increased as a result of the failure of the second Geneva conference. The observers most downcast by the failures of Geneva II were those who, forgetting the essential limitation Eisenhower had placed upon it, had exaggerated Geneva I.

In fact, the two Genevas taken together vastly augmented the West's strength, and thereby the chances of peace. True, the ball had not been advanced at Geneva II. But the West was not engaged in that kind of football game with the Communists. The motion that counted most lay inside the West, which could be beaten only by its own confusion or disunity.

In this field the gains were impressive. The West had remained united under Russian smiles and frowns. It had expressed, more clearly than ever before, its devotion to peace, without suggesting any abandonment of principle. The Russians had obliged with a demonstration of the old truculence and rigidity that had been such a helpful lesson in anti-Communism in the immediate postwar years. As a result, the basis of neutralism in Europe and Asia was undercut; it would now be harder than ever to claim that the Communists and the West were equally aggressive forces.

Meanwhile, Communism was still pressured by the forces of discontent at home and disunity within the satellites that had made the U.S.S.R. welcome Geneva I as a diversion and a symbol of hope amid the tyranny of life under Communism. To the extent that the spirit of Geneva has been harmed (by the Communists' hand), that hope has been struck down. The anti-Communist world prospers, economically and politically. West German prosperity is the marvel of Europe. Talk of European unity revives. The U.S., breaking production records, is in sight of balancing its federal budget. President Eisenhower is up and around. And even in the far-off Philippines, friends of all-out collaborators with the U.S. win a re sounding election victory.

Is all this peace? If Eisenhower was right in July, the situation after Geneva II is as much like peace as could be expected.

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