The Creep of Crisis

At times, British statesmen, like British mountaineers, seem driven to climb the summit for no better reason than because it's there. This thought struck Germany's Chancellor Adenauer last week as Prime Minister Macmillan, fresh from leading the U.N. Assembly battle against a rampageous Nikita Khrushchev, briskly informed Britain's Tories: "We must try to get back to the mood of last spring. Negotiations on Berlin and Germany must be resumed."

Harold Macmillan's airy pronouncement shocked Adenauer and strained their new-found friendship. Caught up in defense-policy differences with his European partner De Gaulle and cut off from Washington by U.S. campaign-time preoccupations, der Alte had taken to Macmillan during their Bonn meeting last August and vastly admired Macmillan's leonine stand against Communism at the U.N. But in the private correspondence that had begun to flow copiously between the two men, there was no hint in Macmillan's last letter that he was about to go hallooing off again for the delectable mountains. "The British," said a Bonn diplomat sadly, "just don't understand how to treat the Germans."

Drift to Indecision. Unsure of his allies, Adenauer for once faced East-West affairs with irresolution. At Berlin, the Communists were edging in on the Western position by what Mayor Brandt now called "artichoke tactics"--taking a leaf at a time. In violation of four-power agreements but obviously with Soviet approval, East German Communists have applied one small pressure after another--not against Allied personnel, not even against West Berliners, but against West Germans. For two months now, they have been determining who could and who could not enter East Berlin; and by refusing to accept West German passports held by West Berliners, they have turned the West Berlin identity card into a kind of passport.

In response to this subtle drive to isolate West Berlin from West Germany, Adenauer vacillated for weeks, then abruptly proclaimed a trade embargo against the East Germans, to become effective Dec. 31, if they did not stop harassing Berlin. In their new artichokery style, the Communists did not reply with anything so dramatic as another Berlin blockade. Instead, they called for new talks with Bonn to push their claims to be officially recognized by West Germany.

More Nibbles. As a symbolic gesture to support the claim that Berlin is part and parcel of West Germany, the West German Bundestag has regularly met once a year in West Berlin. This year's session was scheduled to be held this fall, but the East Germans declared that the meeting would be considered provocative; Adenauer ordered the session postponed--probably indefinitely.

In Berlin there was gloom over the drift of events. Last week Mayor Brandt, who has always in the past opposed big-power conferences on Berlin because the West can only give something away, endorsed Macmillan's new summit call on the ground that a confrontation is needed before his city is nibbled to death. Now that Macmillan and Khrushchev have practically named the date, Berliners look for some sort of crisis soon after the inauguration of the next U.S. President.

*An affluent society's phrase for what used to be known as salami tactics.

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