Satellites and Planets

Jagged cakes of ice jostled each other in the Danube last week as lights flashed in the Royal Palace overlooking Budapest where statesmen sat down to nibble caviar and quaff champagne. The party was a meeting of the Rome Protocol States, organized over three years ago when Benito Mussolini succeeded in more definitely attaching Austria and Hungary to Italy as satellites. What was afoot was a whole series of moves by Fascists and Fascist sympathizers: 1) against Leftist Spain; 2) against the League of Nations; 3) against Communism; and 4) against France.

>> To the conference in Budapest, symbolic of the other Fascist moves last week, went Premier Mussolini's son-in-law, Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano; keen, Jesuit-trained Chancellor Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg of Austria; and, as host, Hungarian Foreign Minister Kalman de Kanya. Unfortunately for them, Austria and Hungary are no longer so important to Italy as they seemed when they were the only sizable satellites II Duce could get to revolve around Rome. In recent months Yugoslavia has come under strong Italian influence (TiME, Dec. 20 et ante) and Germany, the planet at the other end of the self-styled "Rome-Berlin Axis," has brought Rumania under its influence. Therefore Premier Mussolini had not considered it necessary to go personally to Budapest, and Count Ciano quickly finished off the main Fascist business in hand, got official diplomatic recognition by Austria and Hungary of the regime of General Francisco Franco as the "legitimate" Government of Spain.

>> Important for the immediate future was a communique in which Chancellor Schuschnigg and Foreign Minister de Kanya declared that "if the League of Nations should become an ideological group" then Austria and Hungary will have to "revise their relations" with it. These guarded words referred to the possibility that the League, now that it lacks Germany, Italy and Japan, may come to be considered as primarily a Democratic alliance opposed to Fascism. The Swiss Government has already served notice that the League cannot remain at Geneva if it loses its universal character. Reason: The neutral Swiss dare not let their country be used as base by any group for operating against another--not even by Democracy (favored by the Swiss) to oppose Fascism or Naziism (which they detest).

>> Mussolini and Hitler are now out to try to smash the League, and last week they were assisted by Poland's Foreign Minister Josef Beck, who scarcely conceals his Nazi leanings. Colonel Beck, before leaving Warsaw to visit Foreign Minister Constantin von Neurath in Berlin, roundly declared: "The present world crisis is primarily a League crisis, caused by the League's failures. . . . The fact that the League from its inception did not embrace all countries, and particularly the stronger countries,* was the origin of this crisis."

>> Jesuit-trained Chancellor Schuschnigg, on returning to Vienna from Budapest last week, ingeniously straddled: "Like all human enterprises, the League of Nations has in no wise fulfilled its initial aims. We consider it our right and duty to try to bring new life to the great old League. . . . We have never doubted that the Rome Protocols are our best orientation. . . . An anti-Communist pact long has been a practical reality for Austria and Hungary."

>> Indications that Yugoslavia is now tempted to edge away from the constellation of Little Entente satellites of France (Czechoslovakia, Rumania & Yugoslavia), and draw near the Protocol States--which Germany may soon join--were furnished last week by Yugoslav Premier Milan Stoyadinovich who turned up in Berlin the day after Colonel Beck. "We are," declared Stoyadinovich, "aware that Germany plays a decisive role in the Danube basin and that no solution of the so-called Danube problem can be achieved without German co-operation!"

Thus Yugoslavia served notice that she no longer considers France, still nominally her ally, "dominant" in the Danube basin. The recent tour of Danube states and Poland by French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos (TIME, Dec. 20, et seq.) was followed immediately by the setting up in Rumania of a pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic regime unfriendly to France. When Premier Stoyadinovich sounded off, the Delbos journey appeared to have been almost a total loss. However, M. Delbos' worries were at the moment closer home. His Government had fallen (see p. 16).

*Not members of the League when it was founded were the U. S., Germany and the U. S. S. R. which together comprise more than a fifth of the earth's area. Russia entered the League in 1934; Germany entered in 1926, re-signed in 1933.

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