Mending the Hole

The question before the house was: After EDC, what next? Four years' effort to rearm the Germans and forge a united Europe had reached dead end. The Atlantic alliance was confronted with what one English paper called "a hole in the wall." Confidence between the allies was dissolving into distrust--the U.S. playing "hands off," the Germans beating their chests, the French thumbing their noses and threatening to run away.

Deteriorating Situation. It was also summertime, and the living was getting easier in most European countries. Parliaments were in recess, and the news out of Russia was not of cold threats but of warm toasts with obliging British Socialists. Puzzled newsmen seeking to measure French public response to the defeat of EDC found pockets of Frenchmen dejected by the destruction of a European ideal and other pockets newly passionate in their fear of Germany. But the general tone was "we couldn't care less."

The Germans cared a lot--not because they were dying to get into uniform, but because they were keen to get back their sovereignty. The result in West Germany was a sodden despair, which was bound to revive the old nationalism, and spread the conviction that good behavior does not pay any more than bad behavior had.

The indifference of the one, the despair of the other had one quality in common: a public unreadiness to hurry into new ventures. Moscow could not have wished for anything more. In this context, the scurryings of Western diplomats had an unreal, almost irrelevant air.

Search for Substitutes. Yet the statesmen at least seemed to recognize that something had to be done and fast. In France, Germany and Britain, Cabinets met in special sessions with the same urgent agenda: to find a substitute for EDC that would safely rearm the Germans without losing the French. Their emphasis was on speed, for some new formula would have to be ready and waiting in the next few weeks before the Bundestag reconvened to lay German disappointment at Konrad Adenauer's door, before the Bevanite "No Guns for Huns" campaign seduced Britain's Labor Party into opposition to any German rearmament, before the U.S. got too involved in its fall election campaign, before France's Mendes-France could upset the applecart with another of his drastic alternatives.

Almost everyone seemed agreed that there must be "some kind" of German rearmament. But what kind?

The U.S. State Department, with no plan of its own to offer, acted as if this were a problem for Europeans only. Talk of an EDC without France died almost as soon as it began. Konrad Adenauer contended that EDC might still be revived, but he sounded neither convinced nor convincing. Mendes-France proposed a looser European coalition that would include Britain, but Sir Winston Churchill (for all his high-minded talk of European citizenship in 1947) had said before, and last week said again, that Britain was unwilling to get too involved on the Continent.

Germany in NATO. Churchill, nevertheless, made the week's most helpful suggestion: a conference in London of the six EDC powers plus the U.S., Britain and Canada. They would talk first of giving West Germany its sovereignty, though perhaps not so sweepingly as the Adenauer government demanded in its first angry reaction to the death of EDC. Then some careful formula would have to be worked out for German rearmament within the framework of NATO. Limits on German strength would be harder to negotiate now that the Germans were stronger and in no mood to be discriminated against. But looking again at the text of EDC, diplomats noted that some of its devices, like the pooling of arms production, might be used to keep the Germans in check. . The vital question remained: Could France's allies persuade it to admit the Germans to NATO? The British thought that Mendes-France, at least, could be made to listen to "reason" because, after finding himself a minority of one against five at Brussels, he would hardly dare isolate his country seven to one in London.

It was also becoming clear to many worried Frenchmen that the rejection of EDC had set in train a series of allied reactions which Mendes had not sufficiently anticipated. Shaping up before the French was one of those logical questions that French Premiers have a habit of putting to their allies. France might reject EDC, but is it prepared to go all the way and discard its NATO shield?

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