Mood of the West

At the end of their three-day conference in Washington last week, the foreign ministers of the Western Big Three emerged with springlike smiles and cheerful words. "A very satisfactory meeting," said the U.S.'s Secretary of State Christian Archibald Herter. "Agreement was reached," said France's Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville, echoing an earlier report by Britain's Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd that "we agreed on everything."

What the foreign ministers had agreed on, with this display of cheerful unity, was a united Western stance for the Big Four summit conference scheduled to begin in Paris on May 16, with President Eisenhower, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and President Charles de Gaulle facing Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Other way stations still lay ahead--De Gaulle's eight-day visit to the U.S., beginning this week, and another foreign ministers' meeting in Istanbul on May 1--but essentially, the position that the West would take to the summit had been settled:

1) A willingness to discuss a nuclear test ban and disarmament.

2) A hope that the Russians will refrain from stirring up the dormant Berlin crisis.

3) A determination not to back down from the Western insistence that any permanent change in Berlin's status must come about by way of free, supervised elections in East and West Germany.

Something New Added. Facing the first East-West summit conference since the Eisenhower-Eden-Faure-Bulganin meeting in Geneva in July 1955, the West showed a prevailing mood of optimism. It sprang in part from the human tendency of statesmen to congratulate themselves on the mere absence of crisis; in part from the West's prosperity, with its assurance that, economically, Western democracy was outperforming Communism; and in part from the fact that at present the world's great issues are dormant.

But something new had been added to summitry: the four statesmen who would meet next month were men of great prestige in their own lands, each freshly and widely traveled in the era of personal diplomacy. It was this evident new worldliness in Russia's Khrushchev that led the West to hope that he would bring to the summit a desire to avoid crises rather than to stir them up.

Western statesmen expect no dramatic agreements, but never during the cold war has the West, in moments of realism, expected any sweeping settlement of East-West conflicts. The hope underlying U.S. policy has been that if negotiation could keep resolving crises without war, internal changes within Russia would gradually transform it into a less monolithic society, ruled by a less hostile government.

New Fact of Life. During the Stalin era, that hope seemed completely unrealistic. But during the Khrushchev years, the West has slowly, warily concluded that forces of change are at work in the Red world, evidenced by greater emphasis on consumer-goods production, the partial dismantling of the police-state terror apparatus, the parting of the Iron Curtain to permit travel and cultural exchange. From his recent talks with Nikita Khrushchev, Charles de Gaulle brought away a firm impression that Khrushchev now feels compelled to take into account a new fact of life: Soviet public opinion.

As many Western statesmen see it, internal changes have given Khrushchev a stake in international tranquillity. A plunge back into cold war would require a reversal of his "less terror, more consumer goods" policy, and leave the Russian people all the more discontented because they had tasted a little freedom and glimpsed an image of abundance. Accordingly, the argument runs, the forthcoming summit conference may be the beginning of a spell of peaceful negotiation rather than a mere lull between crises. Moscow seemed to echo this springtime mood of the Western world with a Pravda statement that the U.S.S.R. was "prepared to do everything to solve the German problem on a basis acceptable to the West as well."

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