Headaches for Europe, Problems for Asia
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Headaches for Europe Middle Eastern cabaret comedians and TV clowns are complaining about unfair competition. They are particularly annoyed with the European cabinet...
...Oil-rich Nigeria should prosper in the new international order, but the outlook for many other African states is bleak...
...In recent months the subcontinent has been assailed by food shortages and inflation-both so severe that they have provoked riots—yet the wealthy Arab rulers it has been courting looked the other way...
...The Islamic summit conference in Lahore in late February had anti-Indian undertones...
...The Indians are less complacent...
...But the Indian Establishment, obsessed with its feud with Pakistan and fearful of Moslem subversion, preferred to cultivate the Arabs...
...Problems for Asia Most Western European governments are cutting back their aid to Africa and Asia...
...Aided by Arab oil policy and Italian and British instability, it may yet succeed in shattering the hopes of the millions of Europeans who have outgrown nationalism and are attracted by a more civilized ideal...
...It is, no doubt, only fair that Eastern cocks should take a turn at ruling the roost...
...Most of these disagreements have been exacerbated by French officialdom...
...and for years Arab rulers disliked India almost as much as they did Israel...
...On an inside page, Le Monde reported Solzhenitsyn's expulsion factually...
...Le Monde gave Aleksandr Sol-zhenitsyn's expulsion from the USSR the coy two-column headline "Sol-zhenitsyn goes to West Germany...
...what is striking is the oriental fatalism with which the West's once haughty bantams have resigned themselves to the new pecking order...
...if he displeases them they will prevent him from writing, "just as they are preventing so many others from writing...
...yet even the French do not nowadays subject writers to ordeals like Solzhenitsyn's...
...Yet while we've been taking their unskilled emigrants, the French have got the services of their officer-salesmen...
...Then came another nitwitted commentary...
...I thought the Paks belonged in our barnyard," a British officer said the other day...
...All of these issues may have the effect of strengthening extremist parties hostile to European integration...
...It was signed by a university professor named Louis Con-stans...
...Italy's fragile Center coalition-the nation's 36th government in 30 years—was broken by inflationary pressures early this month...
...The British unhorsed the Shah's father and lured uncountable Arab leaders into political quicksands...
...The French verb used—se rend?suggested to the casual browser a voluntary departure...
...India seemed once to have much in common with Israel...
...A front-page commentary, signed Jean-Michel Royer, equated the Russian writer's struggle with that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...
...Now New Delhi must not only pay higher petroleum bills but face the fact that Pakistan is going to receive financial and military aid from at least two wealthy Arab oil states in return for providing them with pilots and instructors...
...Though no longer as paranoid as it was in the 1960s, French nationalism is still appallingly negative and viscerally anti-American...
...Indicative of the new status of Western European governments were the fall of the Belgian Cabinet upon receipt of a telegram from Teheran turning down a plan to build a joint Belgian-Iranian refinery, and the haste with which two senior British ministers dropped everything and scuttled off to see the Shah of Iran when, as one commentator put it, the Shah snapped his fingers...
...Zero for Te Monde' Under the direction of Jacques Fauvet, Le Monde could become one of the world's great newspapers...
...A referendum on EEC membership, as proposed by some Labor spokesmen, could result in Britain's withdrawal from the Community...
...In the 1950s some Western officials expected collaboration between the two...
...It harmed the U.S...
...Academic standards in French universities have plummeted since the student riots of 1968 and are now among the lowest in Western Europe, so one should not expect too much of M. Constans...
...In the British election campaign, both Right-wing Conservatives and Left-wing Laborites pilloried the EEC and blamed it (usually unfairly) for the price hikes of the last year...
...Just before this latest crisis, Italians were girding themselves for a referendum on divorce demanded by an alliance of Churchmen, neo-Fascists and panicky housewives...
...Muammar el-Qaddafi also snapped his fingers after the Italian Interior Minister told Parliament that he had evidence implicating Libya in the massacre of 32 people by Arab terrorists at Rome's airport...
...Jacques Fauvet knows, even if M. Constans does not, that authors in Britain, the United States and most other democracies are neither exiled nor otherwise prevented from writing, no matter how much they displease their governments...
...Abu Dhabi, which has no pilots, has ordered more than 30 Mirages...
...The crushing of intellectuals is a subject the Communists really know something about...
...Islamabad has arranged with Paris for qualified Pakistanis to man the sophisticated military hardware France is selling to Arab states that do not possess sufficient trained per-onnel...
...Having persuaded African governments (sometimes by bullying or bribery) to break with Israel, the Arabs have refused even to discuss oil prices with the OAU committee sent to Cairo for that purpose...
...The loans promised by some oil producers will not compensate for costlier fuel and industrial imports...
...Royer would no doubt lump in the same category the Nazi troops who invaded France in 1940 and the Allied soldiers who invaded it in 1944 (I have heard the comparison made in France...
...French Foreign Minister Michel Jobert, that doughty advocate of standing up to the Americans, is an even doughtier advocate of bowing toward Arabia...
...This one declared that Western governments will allow the Nobel Prize-winning author to write only if what he writes pleases them...
...The Pakistanis—who get a rakeoff in cash and know-how-are meanwhile persuading their fellow Moslems to buy French...
...The new Labor government should be humane and social-democratic at home, but it may be Wimpish in foreign affairs—nostalgic for Commonwealth privileges and reactionary, even xenophobic, in its attitude toward Europe...
...And they have learned that Islamabad is pressing for the establishment of a major arms industry at home: The capital would be Arab and the technology French...
...They are particularly annoyed with the European cabinet ministers and officials who have taken to playing the oil circuit...
...But one has a right to expect something better than mindless verbiage in France's best newspaper...
...Unsurprisingly, the European Economic Community is in disarray, rent not only by the scramble for barter deals with oil producers but by hassles over relations with the U.S., currency parities, agricultural policy, subsidies for backward regions, and aid for Africa and Asia...
...These outsiders jump through hoops, stand on their heads and dive into muddy pools in search of piasters—and don't even ask a fee...
...Efforts to patch together a replacement were hindered by a major political bribery scandal involving petroleum companies...
...The feeling in the Organization for African Unity (OAU) is that the Arabs have taken Africa for a ride...
...To pretend, however, that the Rosenbergs, willing accomplices of Stalin's tyranny, were "fighting the same fight" —against "the same police"!—as Solzhenitsyn, a victim of the Soviet system, is simply indecent: It is to spit in the face of a heroic man...
...In olden times it was Western telegrams and finger-snapping that set Asian dignitaries scurrying and resigning...
...Both states have more democratic institutions and a freer press, and give women a higher civic status, than their Moslem neighbors...
...As if all this weren't enough, Western Europe's intellectuals are faced with "social, political, cultural and moral crises" of "extreme gravity" as capitalism crushes them and makes work increasingly difficult, according to a recent report compiled by representatives of several Western Communist parties...
...The Rosenbergs' execution was an act of moral and political idiocy...
...He will be Heinrich Boll's guest...
...the next day Foreign Minister Aldo Moro declared that Libya had not been connected with the outrage...
...Many educated Indians now say that their leaders' Mideast policy has been a flop...
...But from time to time, as if to convince its readers that all journalism is crass, it perpetrates the sort of howler or value judgment that would disgrace a junior high school magazine...
...They believe that some Arab governments have agreed to release their Pakistani mercenaries—with their aircraft—in the event of hostilities between Pakistan and India...
...It should, perhaps, receive careful study...
...But Africa's problems are less daunting than India's...
...Unkind colleagues say he was almost obsequious during his recent tour of Arab capitals: He even acquiesced in the Saudis' exclusion from his party of a French Mideast expert who, although impeccably hostile to Israel, happens (inconsiderate man) to be a Jew...
...and indebtedness to them will simply substitute Arab economic colonialism for the Western variety...
...far more than the Rosenbergs ever did...
...France, it is true, is less attached to freedom of expression and more inclined to accept arbitrary behavior by bureaucrats and the police...
...Isn't that just our way of arranging things...
Vol. 57 • March 1974 • No. 6
