"Regional Organization"

With the Russians, politics came first.

Early last week, amid ceremonial vodka-pouring, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov signed a 20-year treaty of alliance with Soviet puppet Hungary. Exultantly he proclaimed: this is the last link in the barrier against the imperialist states. "The Soviet Union now has pacts with all the states on its western frontier--from the Black Sea to the Baltic."

An even better indication of how chesty the Reds felt became apparent, later in the week, in Czechoslovakia. It was clear that the Russians, while screaming about a Western Bloc, had completed an Eastern Bloc of their own. Did the West have anything like an equivalent? Certainly the Marshall Plan would, by itself, create no Western Bloc. U.S. aid aimed at giving Europe enough economic stability to work out its own politics in friendly cooperation. It put economics first.

In the long run, that emphasis might be justified. But in Western Europe last week, there were fresh stirrings of the notion that politics--and political security --needed attending to. Nobody had been quite sure what Britain's heavy-handed Ernest Bevin had had in mind when he made his gesture toward Western European union last month. Europeans hoped he was talking about more than customs agreements. The British starting point on a Western Union, it had developed, was a system of pacts similar to the Anglo-French 50-year alliance (Treaty of Dunkirk) against "German aggression."

Was that good enough? One who thought not was the hardheaded Premier of Belgium, Paul-Henri Spaak. When the draft of a treaty against "German aggression" was shown to the Benelux countries (Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxemburg), they replied that such a basis was "inadequate." Spaak and his neighbors wanted mutual aid that would start "automatically" in case of hostilities with Germany "or a state connected directly or indirectly with Germany's action." Toward better definition of the Bevin Gesture, they suggested a "regional organization" for Western Europe, within the framework of U.N., on the lines of the American hemisphere defense system.

"Regional organization" and "automatic" aid against any aggressor were, clearly, part of what Western Europe expected of a Western Union.

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