Wanted: Diplomacy

The governments of France and Great Britain dutifully joined the U.S. last week in delivering to Khrushchev the toughest warning yet on his self-started Berlin crisis (see THE NATION). But just how willing were the peoples of Britain and France, who have suffered cruelly from the Germans in two world wars, to fight a showdown battle for Berlin? The answer: not very willing, at least now.

Britain has long had a vocal minority of unilateralists on the Left. In the atomic age, war to them seems senseless for any cause--even their own freedom--as is evidenced by their slogan, "I'd rather be Red than dead." Inevitably too, anti-German prejudice persists. In Swansea fortnight ago, 300 marchers demonstrated against the NATO plan to train West German Panzer units in Wales this fall. The real point--that the defense of Berlin is ultimately the defense of Britain--is only now beginning to dawn on the mass of Britons enjoying the summer sun.

Speaking in the House of Lords last week, Britain's Foreign Secretary, the Earl of Home, summed up the nation's prevailing mood and hope: "We are in danger of becoming prisoners of our own pronouncements and of rigidity growing up which nobody can escape and which might possibly lead to war. I would like to revert to the quiet, serious patient techniques of diplomacy, free from the threat of force or use of force."

In France, the West's tough, new line is referred to pointedly as "the American policy." Though De Gaulle's sweeping powers have virtually reduced the French people to kibitzers, a nuclear war over Berlin is unthinkable to the pragmatic Frenchman sipping vermouth in his sidewalk cafe. With the French army tied up in Algeria, the thought of even a limited-war tactic such as driving an armored column through to a blockaded Berlin frightens the French, who are only 150 miles from Russian armies in East Germany. "To deliberately create such an international crisis in the thermonuclear age is not merely frivolous but criminal." French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville told an applauding National Assembly last week. "There are other ways of making a serious approach to serious problems. As for France, we have never refused to negotiate."

Both the French and the British were clearly counting on a Big-Four summit meeting this fall to defuse the Berlin crisis. Prime Minister Macmillan indicated in answer to a Commons question that Britain was already corresponding with Russia, would be willing to discuss Berlin if Russia is reasonable. There were signs that the strong U.S. stance, though it might have made its allies a bit nervous had impressed Khrushchev. Pravda last week asserted, in the wake of the Allied notes, that Russia "was and is ready for talks both on the German question and all other outstanding issues."

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