Ginger's Progress

Nine Western European statesmen met last week in a sun-flooded room atop Paris' Hotel du Tabac. Britain's Sir Stafford Cripps suggested bluntly that they might feel freer without the usual corps of advisers at their side. The advisers snapped their briefcases shut and left the room, looking hurt. Sighed Eire's Foreign Minister Sean MacBride: "Alone at last." Thus alone, the executive committee of OEEC (Organization for European Economic Cooperation) got down to business. Its decisions could leave the Marshall Plan a stopgap aid to European reconstruction--or it could shape the Plan into a historic instrument for European unity.

The Man from Eire. OEEC had been formed last year to whack up EGA funds, and to get Western Europe's economy out of its spastic state, into some kind of coordination. Last week, Ambassador-at-large Averell Harriman, the ECA's second-in-command, pointedly told OEEC that the U.S. Congress wanted to see a lot more coordinating done.

The ministers tried hard to oblige. The first proposal before them concerned establishment of new top-level leadership for OEEC. Laboriously, Britain's Cripps argued for a five-man steering committee. He ran up against Eire's MacBride, a veteran of the Irish Republican Army, who charged into the fray as though Sir Stafford were just another Black & Tan. What OEEC needed, he declared, was an executive council composed of responsible ministers, empowered to make decisions on the spot. Cried MacBride: "OEEC must never be permitted to become just another world organization!"

He carried the day. A permanent executive council of five ministers was set up. The British, who hoped that the council would put some snap into its work, called it "The Ginger Group."

Two days later, the Ginger Group made its first proposals. OEEC promptly adopted them. The chief points called for:1) stabilization of Western Europe's weak currencies by the end of 1949; 2) a further cut of dollar imports by all Marshall Plan nations; 3) modernization of plants; 4) coordination of investment among various nations. OEEC also formally decided to stay in existence after 1952, when U.S. aid will stop.

It was a good program. Whether OEEC could make it work was another matter. Western Europe last week seemed ready to go a longer way than ever before toward abandoning some of its economic nationalism. But there were no signs that any nation was ready for the actual, and inevitably painful, sacrifice of economic sovereignty without which real economic integration is impossible.

Accent on Patience. Perhaps the most sensible proposal made last week for the streamlining of OEEC was to call it something else. Said Chairman Paul-Henri Spaak: as a name, "OEEC was pas grand' chose [not much to write home about]." He earnestly asked the general public to think of a new name. He said he would even consider offering a 100,000 franc (about $300) prize for the best entry.

At week's end, no entries had been received. Said Spaak: "We need audacity, hope and patience." For all its new ginger, OEEC's accent was still on patience.

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