What's the Use?

In the stale language of the cold war, this was the conference that could not succeed; rarely in history had an international meeting been so discounted beforehand. "What is the use of a foreign ministers' meeting?" asked Russia's Mikoyan. "We'll just send Gromyko here, he'll spend a few weeks talking and he'll come back with nothing, so what's the use?"

So long as it takes two to make a deal, and four to make a peace treaty, Russia's cynicism was justified. Khrushchev wanted only a summit: Eisenhower agreed that Khrushchev ''is the only man who has ... the authority to negotiate." The proxies, their homework done, gathered in Geneva before a thousand staring cameras, with no high hopes. The very first interplay--over tables round or square, over Germans at the table or beside it (see below)--was the kind of picayune fuss that discredits the whole practice of diplomacy. The quick-witted journalists surrounding the closed room, flitting from one briefing to another, comparing notes, were agreed on one thing: that East and West would disagree, but not disastrously --and pass the buck up to Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Macmillan and De Gaulle. If Geneva ended that way, many would say a plague on both your houses, and assume that each side had only put forward what it knew the other would reject.

Surprisingly, Geneva turned out to be a cause for pessimism perhaps, but not for cynicism. The proposals put down jointly by the West--the product of countless study papers, countless conferences--proved neither unyielding nor narrow. They took account of what was legitimate in Russia's past positions on Europe; they moved away from the position, no longer tenable after 14 years of peace, that the conquerors could still impose on Germany the shape of its future government. They gave the U.S.S.R. the chance to prove what it professed to desire. In their careful phrasing and attention to detail, the Western proposals showed a willingness to negotiate, not merely an eagerness to propagandize. Those whose trade it is to analyze documents could see in this one an impressive vision of a sensible European future, and that momentary glimpse of what Europe might become made Geneva seem less tawdry, even if no more hopeful.

So long as it takes two to make a deal, and four to make a peace treaty, Russia had it in its power to make Geneva a failure. But diplomacy is a continuous game, and there are other ways of scoring it than at the end of each inning. It took 400 seemingly fruitless meetings to end Rus sia's obduracy and achieve an independent Austria; a similar process of exploration, cross-questioning and testing of intentions would be needed if mutual agreement, in stead of the caprice of history, is to settle the future of Germany and of European security. Anyone who took the trouble to study the Western position at Geneva would find it an honest attempt to reach agreement. That mysterious, ephemeral and debatable quality, the diplomatic initiative, was the West's once more. Khrushchev could talk resoundingly of seeking peaceful agreement -- but how much did he really care?

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