A Reader's Notebook

...For the singular fact is that in a world of permanent war tension, the definition of national will and national purpose overrides internal class or interest-group divisions, which are oriented primarily to distributive questions, i.e., who will get the greater shares...

...In a projected campaign poster, Brandt is shown sitting with Adenauer on a settee: the old man, leaning forward, listening intently to Brandt, who is sitting back, composed and self-assured...

...Assembly in 1789 when, for example, an informal caucus of radical Breton deputies formed the Breton Club, which in Paris became the Jacobin Club because it met in the library of a Jacobin monastery...

...James Callaghan, the former Colonial Secretary, is competent but colorless...

...My first image of Berlin was a literary one, compounded from the expressionist plays of Ernst Toller, the movies of Fred Murnau and Fritz Lang, and Alfred Doblin's novel of the underworld, Berlin-Alexander-platz...

...Richard Crossman is too mercurial and personally partisan...

...Democracy becomes plebiscitarian, a dialogue between the leader and the plebes, whether it be Castro and the mobs in the town squares, or de Gaulle on the radio...

...LONDON: The big political questions in England are, first, whether Hugh Gaitskell will remain the leader of the Labor party, and second, whether the Labor party will be able to come back in the next decade...

...These inspecteurs perform the "control" function of government and from their ranks are recruited the heads of departments and the permanent undersecretaries of ministries...

...A mile to the South, on a grassy knoll near the sports stadium, is Le Corbusier's 15-floor modular "machine for living"—imperious, pretentious, looking like some lumbering land battleship on stilts, with its narrow slits of windows cross-laced by rectangular color panels...

...in self-information and self-protection, not agitation...

...But Brown lacks intellectual background and balance...

...None of this is really new...

...But all are of "elite composition": interested in elite opinion, not in mass reactions...

...Thus Gaitskell was forced to retreat into a stand which, essentially, relies on American nuclear arms for defense...

...The fight has been presented as one between the "right" and the "left" of the Labor party...

...He is not a factional fighter...

...Political talk in West Berlin centers almost completely on Willy Brandt, the hard-driving Mayor of the city who has just been named the Social Democratic candidate for Chancellor against Konrad Adenauer in 1961...

...To the voters Brandt's argument is not that he would do things any differently than Adenauer, but that he would do them more vigorously...

...They hold regular meetings...

...A READER'S NOTEBOOK By Daniel Bell Paris, Berlin and London: Decline of Political Parties Paris: The most extraordinary political development in the Fifth Republic is the rise of "political clubs" as new units of power and political manipulation...

...Some of these clubs have full-time personnel...

...Moderates and other groups formed their own clubs...

...It was a city lifted out of "The War of the Worlds...

...Whether Gaitskell can survive is a moot question...

...As in France, the pressure of foreign affairs has reduced the importance of traditional political issues and internal political divisions...

...The distinctive quality of these clubs was that ties were personal, and in reaching for power—in creating new centers in the provinces, or in seeking allies in other groups—each man made use of his personal connections...

...The second miscue was that the nationalization issue became tangled with the disarmament question...

...The old-style Social Democratic program, he knows, could never appeal to more than one-third of the electorate...

...Not only do they lack any imaginative flair in design, but almost all are of the uniform dun color which one finds in the older sections of the city...

...The failure of the parliamentary system to create strong national leadership caused erosion from within...

...It is characteristic of almost any new state struggling to define a national society...

...The Social Democrats, under Brandt's prompting, have abandoned their neutralist attitude and opposition to armament...

...Brandt has, quite deliberately, muted the Socialist program...

...Away from the city, toward the Schoenfeld airport, the Pankow authorities have done considerable rebuilding...

...So all over the world—Indonesia, Ghana, Tunisia—we find the emergence of one-party systems as agitational extensions of a strong leader...

...Pierre Mendes-France, a nationalist who led the fight which defeated France's participation in the projected European Defense Community, becomes a Left-wing Socialist...

...He may do so simply because there is no one of outstanding ability to succeed him...

...In France, the clubs are the oldest and simplest political unit...

...The left group, Richard Crossman in alliance with the old Bevanites, was against nuclear arms and the establishment of nuclear bases in Britain...

...Historically, political parties have never been organs of power...

...In France today, the key group is the administrative class, the permanent core of government...

...This was reflected in the voting patterns...

...the only gains were in the over-65 group, among those living on national assistance and in the declining economic areas in the north and Scotland...

...In recruiting for the administrative class, France has long followed a "West Point" system whereby the best college graduates compete for admission to the Ecole d'Administration and the top graduates of this school become inspecteurs de finance...

...Adenauer relies heavily on expensive private polls to test the mood of the electorate...

...But legislative agencies are being eclipsed—even in England, where a serious debate about the decline of Parliament has been initiated by Professor Max Beloff of Oxford—or shut down: and with them goes the decline of the political parties...

...The rise of the clubs reflects the simple fact that in France—as well as in many other parts of the democratic world—Parliament is an empty shell and power is, and probably will remain, in the hands of the executive...

...Even more striking in East Berlin is the lack of people on the streets...

...It is from this group that much of the initiative for the formation of the political clubs has come...

...Some clubs are of "the Left," some of "the Right"—to the extent that these labels apply...

...Both present the counterpoint of harsh slum and large green acreage: the "back-of-the-yards" and the north shore in Chicago...

...The initial Gaitskell position, formulated by Denis Healey, favored limited deterrence, but was undercut by Britain's inability to develop its own nuclear striking force...

...The emphasis, in both parties, is now largely on personality and the show of authority, rather than issues...

...And any intermediary institution which may become an autonomous center, such as a political party, must go...

...Wedding, a working-class slum in the north, and spacious, genteel, Dahlem, Zehlendorf and Wannsee in southwest Berlin...

...Thus, the dilemma of the "two fronts...

...The liberal and Left-wing clubs, so far as can be discerned, have sought primarily to establish their influence now, and to commit de Gaulle to specific economic and social policies which will be hard to reverse...

...But the big question is, of course: After de Gaulle what—or who...

...This was Berlin as another Chicago—and, as John Mander has pointed out, there are some startling comparabilities between the two...

...Gaitskell's first step was to press for the repeal of Clause Four in the party constitution, which committed Labor to nationalization of all the means of production...

...These are small groups, usually 100-200 members, made up of high civil servants, academicians, journalists and others of the administrative and intellectual class...

...In the last election, when Social Democratic party Chairman Erich Ollenhauer wired Brandt of his willingness to speak at a large rally in Berlin, Brandt replied ingenuously that the program was full, except for a 15-minute spot, and there was no point in having the party chairman come to Berlin just for 15 minutes...

...However correct Gaitskell and Crosland were in their analysis of British society, they made three miscalculations in beginning their campaign on the nationalization issue...

...But all are aware of the transient nature of a contemporary regime built on one man, and lacking an institutional base...

...Labor's heaviest loss was in the 21-30 age group, the prosperous working class and the New Towns...

...Turkey had a one-party system until 1950, when in an act of rare abnegation the dictatorship of President Ismet Inonu allowed the victorious parliamentary Opposition to take office...

...the new prosperity of the young, etc...

...The supposition always was, at least in the West, that given "time and maturity" democratic forms would evolve in these countries...

...Robert Lacoste, the Socialist, becomes a strong partisan of the Algerian colon...

...In France, it is gone in all but name...

...And in some cases they have undertaken full-scale economic and social studies, which are circulated privately or in a few instances published, in order to influence Government policy...

...But in fighting off the left thrust, Gaitskell's main support had to come from the trade union group, and Gaitskell, in his effort to transform the public image of the party, was already in the position of having to divorce himself from the stand-pat unions...

...BERLIN: This was a return visit to Berlin, my first since 1952, and the city revealed a "third" face...

...His gifts are lucidity, the ability to evaluate conflicting points of view and come up with the sensible kernel, and impressiveness in face-to-face conversation...

...And the emergence of Brandt as a national figure, while giving a high gloss to his party, has also meant its diminished importance as an ideological force...

...the increase of home ownership among workers...

...Shortly after the 1959 election fiasco, the Gaitskell group—including C. A. R. Crosland, Ray Jenkins and Douglas Jay—began a hard-headed analysis of the British scene...

...In Italy, parliamentary government has been unable to work out a consensus...

...They take "symbolic" names, sometimes after Resistance heroes...

...This week's Labor party conference at Scarborough should settle the issue—for the moment...

...In these cases, the relation of a strong executive to the people is direct...

...One was that the electorate was not the party, and the party itself—slow-moving, habit-ridden, tied to the slogans and emotions of the past—was unhappy with the thought of severing the "silver cord...

...Mexico has had a one-party system since the inauguration of General Obregon in 1920, following a decade of civil wars...

...My second image, which arose during my visit after the airlift, was suggested by some of H. G. Wells' science fiction...

...He presents himself, therefore, as a national, all-party figure...

...and central to the functioning of the bureaucracy are the inspecteurs de finance, the elite group of the civil service...

...The caption reads: "The Old Chancellor and the New...

...inside, quiet green, and the hum of the air pumps, filtering out the fumes and circulating a steady, yet precarious, supply of oxygen...

...Where the Kurfiirstedamm runs into the blackened Gedachtniskirche—the bombed-out church which is a memorial to the miseries of war—a series of modern buildings curve along a concave rim, creating a spacious ring around the church...

...Across the border sits East Berlin—heavy, gloomy, rubbled, the bombed-out shells of buildings still empty and windowless, baroque, with trees growing through wide cracks, spreading their leaves against the granite and stone to form a Piranesi etching...

...The Hansa quarter, just west of the Tiergarten, with structures built by Aalto, Gropius, Niemeyer and 40 other architects, is a living manual of the International Style...

...Living in Melvin Lasky's quiet house in Dahlem, picnicking at Tegel, strolling past the blackened tree stumps in the Tiergarten where the last street fighting had taken place, sitting on the rough bank of the Spree looking at the ruins in the Eastern sector, and walking gingerly around Potsdamer Platz (or other points of crossing into the Communist sector) gave one a feeling of living in a hothouse: Outside there were noxious fumes and wild beasts at prowl, ready to rush against the glass...

...But what strikes one immediately, in contrast with West Berlin, is how drab these structures are...

...Harold Wilson, the economist, who served as President of the Board of Trade in the Labor Government, is ambitious and a hard-working organizer, but he has engendered bitter personal dislikes, particularly among the Gaitskell group...

...West Berlin, 1960, presents a different kind of unreality: In the center, it is the model city—clean, scrubbed, airy, beautifully planned...

...the concentration of leisure in the home rather than the union branch...

...George Brown, who has spoken on defense issues for Labor, comes from the Transport and General Workers Union, and although politically to the right is friendly with Frank Cousins...

...So, "after Charisma what...

...The conclusion was obvious: Labor could no longer be a "class" party and hope to win again, and a new "image" of Gaitskell as a man of vigor and forthrightness had to be presented...

...The large, impersonal party system, as we have come to know it, took shape only after the middle of the 19th century—in the period of relative stability of bourgeois society—and reflected the different class interests...

...It is that only in part, for actually Gaitskell is involved in a two-front war: against the neutralists on the nuclear disarmament issue, and against the doctrinaire stand-pat unionists on the nationalization question...

...But the disquieting fact is that not only have such evolutions not taken place, but the retrograde process has begun in the "advanced" countries...

...Brandt is shrewd, tough and knowledgeable, but friends have begun to warn him against being too slick in his campaigning...

...Strong leaders who come to the fore, even when they use the army as their base of power, do so by rallying a nation for presumed common objectives...

...The rise of para-military parties, Communist, Fascist and Nazi, was a smashing blow to the parliamentary system from without...

...They go back to the days of the National Daniel Bell is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University who has just returned from Europe...

...American election techniques have become de riguer in West Germany...

...Both stands are dictated more by emotional choler than political philosophy...

...in the politics of inside maneuver, not of street power...

...and in seeking ways and means to influence executive policy, not the Parliament or the public...

...Social analysis by Crosland (in Encounter), election scrutiny by the Nuffield psephologists (vide "The British General Election of 1959," by David Butler and Richard Rose), and social surveys by Mark Abrams (in Socialist Commentary) documented the obvious reasons for Labor's loss: the decline in manual wage-earners...

...The process of dissolution in France has been accelerated by the collapse of ideology...

...Both began their growth at the same time...

...It is, then, a fight between the "forward" and the "backward" as well as between the left and the right...

...The Right-wing clubs, with ties to Army officers, are spinning multiple conspiratorial webs in preparation for "the day...

...Why the East Berliners have not reconstructed their sector, which includes Unter den Linden, Leipziger-strasse, Alexanderplatz and other prewar centers of the metropolis, remains a mystery...

...The Bertold Brecht-Kurt Weill operas (Mahagonny and Threepenny Opera) with their thieves, prostitutes and lazzarone, capture, at almost excruciating pitch, the nervous, raucous, jazzy beat of Berlin of the '20s...

...they have been instruments for obtaining representation in a legislature...

...He would make an excellent "chairman of the board," but he is not an in-fighter, nor does he know how to organize a staff for research or guerrilla operations...

...The third problem is Gaitskell himself...

...Gaitskell is in a fight for his political life...