Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Impressions of Europe in 1957 I recently returned from a three-month trip to six European countries: Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany,...
...Last, but not least, free Western Europe continues to attract a continuous stream of fugitives from the Communist-ruled East, including Tito's Yugoslavia and Gomulka's Poland...
...For instance, the picturesque narrow streets of old European cities and towns, and the highways, most of which (except for Germany's Auto-bahns) are not designed for heavy motor traffic, are jammed with passenger cars, trucks and motorcycles...
...One nowhere finds industrial depression or serious unemployment...
...But, as it actually worked out, it probably helped rather than harmed the German economy, which was able to start out fresh with more modern machinery...
...Another characteristic of Europe now is the tendency to seek compromise solutions in politics and economics, instead of taking to the barricades...
...Switzerland, Germany and Belgium have held the line best against inflation, with Great Britain and the Netherlands somewhere in between...
...The first of these, if one looks back a decade, is the speed of European recovery from the destruction of war...
...And the industrialization of the Netherlands has more than compensated, in national wealth, for the loss of Indonesia...
...Every country has its own special characteristics and problems, and Poland and Turkey are much poorer than the four Western European countries...
...The degree of inflation, to be sure, varies substantially from country to country...
...They have now been absorbed so successfully that the political party which was formed to defend their interests has collapsed and failed to win any seats in the recent election...
...Most economists diagnose the inflation as a product of two causes: an attempt to do more—to build faster than the real savings of the country permit—and a rise in money wages that outstrips the increase in labor productivity...
...The brutality of mass deportations of people on ethnic grounds cannot be condoned...
...Still more politically significant, perhaps, is the complete absence in Germany of the unrest, the fermenting discontent which was so marked between 1918 and 1933...
...The majority of the British people have probably never been living so well as at present...
...The dismantling of German industry was a cruel and stupid idea...
...It is most acute in France, where the Government has found itself compelled to admit a 15-per-cent decline in the exchange value of the franc...
...But one finds everywhere, even in a country of rocklike stability like Switzerland, symptoms of inflationary pressure on the cost of living...
...It is remarkable how many postwar problems that seemed almost insoluble ten years ago have been reduced to manageable proportions...
...And, although Britain does face serious economic and financial difficulties (the result, as the Economist puts it, not so much of trying to do too much as of trying to pay themselves too much for doing it), these have nothing to do with the fact that India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Malaya and Ghana are independent states...
...Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this is in Austria, where Socialists and conservatives are amicably sharing power in what looks like a permanent coalition...
...Although the division of Germany is a great international wrong and may have explosive possibilities in the future, at present the mood of the German Federal Republic is that of a bigger Switzerland...
...Consider, for example, the expellees and refugees—some 12 million at the last count—who were either driven from their homes in the German provinces east of the Oder-Neisse line or in the Sudetenland, or else found living conditions in East Germany intolerable and migrated to the Federal Republic...
...Europe's most serious economic problems today are associated with growth, not with stagnation...
...I believe this is more significant, although productive of fewer spectacular headlines, than the Soviet "first" in launching a satellite in outer space...
...There is no European country that is not well beyond prewar figures of output...
...But in the course of such a trip one gets, along with impressions of each individual country, some impressions that apply to Western Europe as a whole...
...The German people are intent on peaceful expansion of their now flourishing industry and trade and are quite without dreams of military domination...
...But these new citizens, on balance, have been a source of strength to the German Federal Republic...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Impressions of Europe in 1957 I recently returned from a three-month trip to six European countries: Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Poland and Turkey...
...Nor has the disappearance of the greater part of the former British and Dutch colonial empires inflicted any visible serious harm on the well-being of the British and Dutch peoples...
...German-French relations have not been so friendly for generations, with the return of the Saar to German sovereignty removing the only grievance that might have poisoned Germany's relations with the Western powers...
Vol. 40 • October 1957 • No. 42
