Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Changing Moods In France EACH OF my last three visits to Paris--in 1953, 1954 and 1955 --coincided with a crisis. But in each of these years there...
...But privately Germans will suggest that the Saar Statute was a French idea, and that the Saar population has as much right to turn it down as the French Parliament had to reject EDC...
...And there seems to have been a surprising abatement of the suspicion toward Germany which was exploited by opponents of EDC...
...Franco-German relations at the present lime seem remarkably calm...
...One was also impressed by the complete breakdown of discipline among most of the French political parties...
...I went to France expecting to find wholehearted enthusiasm over Geneva...
...With one reservation...
...Curiously enough, this is not the prevalent attitude...
...But in each of these years there was a difference in the nature of the crisis and in the accompanying French mood...
...On the German side, there are two somewhat divergent viewpoints...
...Another item to the credit of Mendes-France was his negotiation of an agreement which pacified Tunisia, one of the three French North African territories, by making a down-payment on autonomy and promising more in carefully spaced later instalments...
...There was, and is, extreme difficulty in constructing a stable cabinet with Parliamentary support from an Assembly divided into six main parties and a number of smaller groups, especially as most of these are further subdivided by internal feuds...
...to obtain a majority in the Assembly for the rearming of Germany...
...Mendes-France assumed the grave responsibility of killing EDC...
...Mendes-France was tripped up before he could accomplish much in the field closest to his heart—the shaking up of France's rigid, immobile economic system...
...still more recently, by the soviet UN vote on the Algerian question...
...One of the shrewdest French diplomatic officials forecast the following development of Soviet policy: First, there would be a strenuous attempt to get the Western powers to sign a European security pact...
...One reason for this is the legalistic bent of the French mind...
...Then, after a few months, a Soviet note would suggest that NATO had outlived its usefulness and was out of harmony with the spirit of Geneva...
...This is the official German viewpoint...
...The Rosenberg case in 1953 furnished a focal point for the anti-Americanism cultivated by the Communists...
...as soon as the Western European Union was an accomplished fact, embedded in treaties, French agitation subsided...
...In the summer of 1953, it seemed impossible to get a positive majority in the French Assembly for a new Prime Minister...
...One candidate after another was voted down...
...Both had been allowed to drag on and drift for years...
...Then he made atonement by virtually dragooning through a reluctant Assembly an alternative compromise plan for German rearmament which is probably more feasible militarily, although it lacks the overtones of European integration which attracted support for EDC in both France and Germany...
...In the ornately decorated Quai D'Orsay, historic center of French foreign policy, one found a marked tendency to look the Geneva gift horse closely in the mouth...
...Behind this crisis were sharp conflicts of opinion about EDC, about the dragging, unsuccessful war in Indo-China...
...French official spokesmen, although they have been quiet in public, say privately that rejection of the Statute would be a more severe blow to Western cohesion and Franco-German rapprochement than was the defeat of EDC...
...a project which France had originally sponsored...
...On my visit to France last month, North Africa had crowded everything else into the background...
...finally agreement was reached on the colorless Laniel...
...Pro-Soviet enthusiasm among the French, except among Communists and persistent fellow-travelers, has been dampened by the inflammatory appeals from Radio Budapest to North Africa and...
...Indo-China and EDC were the issues that stirred up French public opinion in 1954...
...Chancellor Adenauer has leaned over backward in an attempt to promote acceptance of the Statute in the Saar voting...
...The reservation concerns the possibility that the population of the Saar Territory will vote against the Statute providing for provisional Europeanization of the area, on which the French and German Governments agreed...
...One would hardly know from reading the French newspapers that there was such a country as Indo-China...
...It was pretty difficult, up to the end...
...Then, with a great flourish, the Soviet Government would announce the end of the Warsaw Pact--a step which would have absolutely no significance in reducing Moscow control of the satellite armies...
...Then Pierre Mendes-France came to power...
...He satisfied the French demand for peace by signing a face-saving agreement which permitted the Communists to hold the northern portion of Indo-China and gave them an excellent prospect of conquering the whole country...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 41
