The Squeeze on Europe

...Hungary and Europe were deserted while the United Nations busied itself, almost ostentatiously, shoring up Nasser...

...These two factors, fright following exhilaration in rapid sequence, combined to give Europe its profoundest political shock of the postwar veais...

...The gradual reversion of the Socialists to their familiar position has thus produced a rare unanimity regarding American-European relations...

...Against American opposition, free Europe's two leading military powers could not complete what was in itself a minor military operation against a noxious, second-rate dictator...

...But in the rush of events crowding air "waves and news columns in the United States the tremors which have shaken free Europe beyond Britain and France have been only faintly recorded...

...This was true particularly because conservative wrath against Washington began to elicit more response from the public than the moral preachments of the Socialists about the evils of aggression...

...Only when bombs began to rain on Egypt did the Russians give the fatal command to their tank armies in Eastern Europe—this was the theme of countless editorials and conversations...

...Richard W. Sterling, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth, recently returned from a European tour on a Rockefeller grant, where he observed British, French, German and Swiss reaction to the Hungarian and Suez crises...

...It also set off the sudden short-circuit of political and ideological lines of which Aneurin Bevan's eulogy of President Eisenhower was one of many sensational examples...

...It was a freshly-lost bastion where men, women and children had risked and given their all because they saw Europe and freedom beckoning...

...These waves of conflicting emotion drove crowds all over free Europe to attack Soviet diplomatic missions and to storm and burn Communist party headquarters...

...It is a difficult task to estimate their consequences...

...There is a suggestion of a "Europe for the Europeans" psychology among those who quote the words Chancellor Adenauer used at Brussels a month before the crisis broke: "The vital necessities of European countries need not always be identical with the vital necessities of the United States...

...The catastrophe of future world conflict had appeared to recede, too— perhaps it wasn't inevitable after all...

...Hungarians were no longer alien people from an alien world but once again the European men and women whose ancestors long ago had fought the Turks in the name of European civilization...

...In this way there was effected a merger between the much-publicizd waves of anti-Americanism in England and France and the more complex and less fully reported reactions of the rest of Europe...

...It will be remarked that the power of their combined voices derives not from their military strength but from the fact that they are "uncommitted" and thus the recipients of ardent proposals from both the Soviet Union and the United States...

...Without American support, nothing could be done to save Hungary...

...In 1953 and 1954, he conducted a survey of the teaching of international relations in Southern universities for the Southern Regional Education Board...

...In order to enhance their effectiveness, the Soviets will not hesitate to use blandishments on those whom they threatened with atomic destruction just four months ago...

...In the East, the October revolutionaries in Hungary suddenly transformed Budapest from a provincial capital of the Soviet Empire into the heart of Europe...

...There seemed to be instead a world conspiracy aimed simultaneously at downgrading the importance of the butchery in Europe's heart and at humiliating the only two nations in free Europe which still claimed great-power status...

...So also was it unable fully to comprehend the stunning nature of the blow which the Soviets dealt these hopes when the Russian tanks reversed their directions and ground in on Budapest on November 4. The revolutionaries' anguished cries for help shattered European nerves and consciences...

...But the shattering demonstration of helplessness which took place in November 1956 reached below and beyond the level of reason...

...Their Socialist rivals rubbed salt in the wound by holding up American policy as an example of political virtue in an effort to add to conservative discomfort on the home front...

...The British and French had been guilty of poor timing and appalling strategy, but they had been sorely provoked and their motives and objectives were not dishonorable...

...Galling thoughts like these must have provoked the rash remark of Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak that the UN threatened to become intolerable for white nations...

...Bluntly put, Europe felt that it was being attacked on two fronts...

...They will be felt for a long time to come—particularly in Europe, where the crisis has cut most deeply...

...He is now completing a book on the German intellectual historian Friedrich Meinecke...

...There will be new talk of a "Third Force" and many a despairing reply that there is too much "third" and not enough "force...

...Within the space of two weeks, two incredible stories flashed over the news wires: Khruschchev had capitulated to Gomulka...

...Now, if ever, was the time for the United States and the United Nations to be resolute in meeting the Communist challenge...

...It was at this precise moment of European community that the sense of European weakness hit hardest...

...and Soviet tanks had yielded Budapest to the victorious revolutionaries...

...from this situation could ensue diverging political convictions which, in turn, could lead to independent political action...

...It contributed to that brief but ominous diplomatic revolution which joined the United States and the Soviet Union in common cause in the United Nations...

...The Swiss Government, ever a symbol of stolid calm and caution, used the dread phrase World War III in a desperate official plea to save the peace...

...Macmillan's cabinet has the "Eden look," and there is no intention of disowning Eden's decision to occupy Suez...

...The mixture of dismay and disapproval which dominated Europe's mood during the week of Anglo-French military operations was blotted out by the drama going on in New York at the United Nations...

...Now the heavy artillery of Soviet propaganda has turned its gun-sights from Britain and France back to its natural target, and seeks to fan any and all resentments against the United States...

...Since free Europe as a whole counts more than the individual countries which compose it, it is vital that we understand what the crisis meant not only to Britain and France but to the whole of this free Europe where we have made such far-reaching commitments in the quest for security...

...The confluence of these attitudes has the effect of putting Europe into a triangular box: Hatred of the Kremlin kindles a desire for strength to resist Soviet designs...

...The first reactions were that the British-French assault on Suez had betrayed Europe's cause by provoking a crisis in the Mideast which obscured the tragedy on the Danube...

...Amorica...

...Greater fluidity and more room for maneuver were the words used by many an editorialist to describe the autumnal juncture in world politics...

...The cautious but confident words emanating from Poland and the joyous shouts from free Hungary brought to Europe a sense of exhilaration it had not known since 19'15...

...Two factors should be noted if one is to understand the depth of bitterness which these feelings reflect...

...But when the United States withheld both comfort and oil from its oldest friends, morality seemed more like hardness of heart...

...Intellectually Europe had long since accepted its declining place in the organization of world power...

...The profile of the British Government remains substantially the same even though its leader fell...

...The bitterness in Britain and France has been widely observed...

...The Soviets are excited by the breach which has occurred between America and Europe...

...At the same time, the fresh memories of apparent Russian weakness were too pleasurable to be abandoned immediately...

...Yet we are not without portents...

...At this point, the attack from the West was no longer perceived as emanating from London and Paris...

...Certainly Europe has never been more anti-Soviet than in the wake of November's double crisis...

...And the length to which the United States went in proclaiming its solidarity with the Asian-African nations in uncompromising opposition to Britain, France and Israel suggested that America had found friendships in other parts of the world more important than those in Europe...

...As the panic and confusion gave way to an anxious appraisal of the significance of the persisting crises, another set of reactions became discernible...

...Aggression is aggression—this was the argument, born of confusion or calculation, which was used by those who tossed Egypt and Hungary into the same moral pot...

...These words from Adenauer took on the tones of prophecy in the wake of the Suez debacle...

...It would be a betrayal of our hopes for peace and justice if we failed to give sympathetic encouragement to responsible European efforts toward greater self-reliance...

...The massed crowd of 100,000 Berliners who gathered to honor Hungary's struggle, the silent marches in Scandinavia and the Low Countries, the tenderness with which Austria ministered to the refugees, the belligerence of the Swiss and Italians—all these were products of a common outpouring of sentiment in which the dream of a united Europe was for a brief moment reality...

...Churches were filled with people praying for peace— and also for courage if peace was not to be...

...But at the same time never has there been more deep-cutting criticism of American policy...

...Rage, fear and shame shook the Continent as it watched, horrified and helpless, the pulverization of its new-found citadel...

...The Soviet masters were making one hasty concession after another until it seemed as though the whole colossal structure of Russian power was buckling...

...If the costs of firmness seemed at one moment too terrifying to contemplate, the next moment's sense of rage and outrage made caution seem criminal...

...The conservatives, more inclined in the past to lean on America, were cut to the quick by what they regarded as the callousness of a friend...

...But we would do well to foster the positive elements in this new relationship which may, more surely than the one which has passed, enable Europeans to "recall to mind their own strength and responsibility...

...Sterling spent two years in Europe as a soldier at the end of World War II, then served as a Foreign Service officer in Berlin and West Germany from 1947 to 1951...

...The soaring hopes of the previous week were replaced by a bottomless fear that the fires in Hungary and the Middle East would unite in an all-consuming nuclear conflagration...

...Gradually it became clear that the UN was not prepared to come to Hungary's rescue...

...Despite the glowing hatred for the Soviet system, there will be a tendency to speak softly to the Kremlin...

...The more our epoch emerges from the effects of World War II and this war becomes past history, the more the European peoples should recall to mind their own strength and responsibility—if only (I repeat) because it would be unreasonable to expect the United States to think mainly in terms of European interests...

...An integrated European market and system of atomic development are suddenly on the verge of realization...

...Prosperity and the relative absence of East-West tensions combined to make the catastrophe of World War II seem a long time ago...

...In Europe it has mainly been the property of liberals and Socialists, or of those with a special axe to grind in regard to Britain and France or their governments...

...The unsubtle ultimatum from London and Paris made it all too easy for the naive as well as the cynics, for people otherwise occupied and for those with ulterior motives...

...The Kremlin mercilessly crushed not only the Hungarians but also hopes that a way out of the Soviet-Western impasse was at long last beckoning...

...But the Socialist line, particularly in Britain and Germany, was clearly a tactical maneuver which was soon soft-pedaled...

...Its action was an adequate measure of the intensity of Europe's war scare—one which has not had its equal since Hitler's day...

...By exposing themselves to the charge of aggression, Britain and France had foredoomed the moral unity which might have joined Europe and the rest of the world in an unambiguous condemnation of the Soviet crime...

...The consequences of the tragic days in October and November 1956 are still piling up...

...The successes of the Asians and Africans in forming a bloc in the United Nations will be scrutinized...

...The bitterness was intensified when Europe looked to the West and saw that there, too, it was under attack...

...Washington's devotion to peace, understandable as it might have been, seemed like weakness in the face of Russian brutality, particularly in the light of a previous American penchant for the slogan of liberation...

...they hoarded...

...Then came the rumbling and cracking noises from behind the Iron Curtain...

...First in Poland and next in Hungary, the Kremlin's moves were characterized by hesitancy, awkwardness and confusion in the face of rebellion...

...Those who frighten easily responded as they had done in past crises...

...In a recent Parliamentary by-election in Paris, the Communists lost 20 per cent of their vote, and a conservative candidate who defended the Suez expedition triumphed...

...They caused a German admirer of America's staunch friend Adenauer to snort that American foreign policy was more appropriate to Luxembourg than to the world's leading power...

...The desire to remove the Soviet threat from the heart of Europe will suggest plans designed to persuade the Russians that a retreat to the East need not have dangerous consequences for Soviet security...

...The first horror was immediately followed by a second—Bulganin's...

...They flavored the tart editorials of more than one Swiss newspaper which proposed that the West would do better to have the courage of its convictions even in ambiguous situations than to pour ashes on its head at the sound of the word "aggression...

...Hungary was no longer just another name automatically appearing on the roster of Soviet conquests of the last ten years...

...coldly ambiguous threat of atomic retaliation against Britain and France...

...But the more important cause was the long-range attitude of most European Socialists that Europe must loosen its ties to the United States if it hopes to reduce the Soviet threat...

...occupied with its Presidential election, was in no position to share in the heart-bursting hopes which animated Europeans...

...The momentary unity with which the United States and Russia startled the world has necessarily passed into oblivion...

...There is a certain intransigence in Europe's mood...

...It was an atmosphere to which the British and French Governments were obviously not immune...

...The intensity of Soviet efforts to widen the split between America and its historic allies suggests better than anything else where our security lies...

...Conservatives and nationalists were the first to voice them, but they soon found a growing echo in the public at large...

...In the gray November days when the Hungarians were being forced back into their iron prison, Europeans felt their own life blood ebbing...

...The energetic haste with which the world organization acted to halt violence in the Mideast was contrasted with ever more hollow-sounding words lamenting Hungary's fate...

...But anger at American conduct and doubt as to America's objectives have tended to turn Europe back upon itself and the contemplation of its own powerlessness...

...First, Europe had begun the fall of 1956 in a confident and expansive mood...

...The mighty ally across the Atlantic had garnered brief praise for the firmness of its moral principles which professed to judge friend and foe alike...

...Some of these phenomena will irritate us and others may well coincide with our own purposes...

...This set of reactions was and is common in the United States...

...The most obvious source of strength is the United States...

...But people who had faced other dangers without flinching were frightened now...

...Moreover, both Right and Left in European politics now find them appealing...

...These reactions persist today, and they are still largely unstructured...

...It is certain that this atmosphere will nourish men and policies dedicated to a reassessment of Europe's political status and to a renascence of European influence in the world...

...deference to Arab-Asian neutralists combine to stimulate new desires for a strong and independent united Europe The double crisis of Hungary and Suez is now four months old...

...In any case, Europeans will be more self-conscious and touchy allies than we have known in the past...

...Reports from France interpret the Eisenhower Doctrine as new evidence of American dissociation from Europe as the United States moves on its own to bolster the Middle East...