THE SUPREME CRISIS IN EUROPE

...Poland, the first country to take up arms against Hitler, was excluded from the Moscow and Teheran conferences in which decisions vital to its future independence and territorial integrity may well have been taken...

...Vast Chamber Of Horrors Europe, once the cradle and center of civilization, has become almost a new Dark Continent, ruled by terror, stalked by hatred and revenge, with famine and pestilence looming up as specters on the horizon after the war has been fought to a truly bitter end...

...Every nation that has taken an active part in this war will experience cruel losses before it is over, first of all in human lives, secondly in economic dislocation and upheaval...

...And he remarks with some anxiety that power in the future world will be in the hands of a trinity of powers, "the United States, the Soviet Union and this island, the heart of the Empire and the Commonwealth, weak in her European resources in comparison with the vast resources of the other two...

...A French Socialist, Jules Moch, in a recent article in the Nation, declared that France "could not, even temporarily, consent to a foreign military administration...

...Is it the shattered ruins of the German cities, many of them, especially in the Rhineland, repositories of the most beautiful old monuments of medieval culture, cities in which it is reported, with fair credibility, that a million civilians have lost their lives...

...While any German dreams of domination would thus be checkmated in advance, German achievements in science and industry could be put to constructive use in hastening the reconstruction of a whole continent that would have finally discovered the truth that the well-being of one part is the well-being of all...

...Whether such a large number of people, most of them highly civilized, can be permanently brushed off in this fashion is highly questionable...

...What pathetic self-deception to believe that a new European war, waged with still more destructive weapons, could have any happier result...

...The 350,000,000 people (in round numbers) who live between the frontier of Russia (wherever it may be after the end of the war) and the Atlantic Ocean are in danger of being reduced to a kind of colonial tutelage...

...but the ideal for every civilized human being should certainly be to check and balance and curb and restrain power, whether it be exercised by nation, government, corporation, or individual, in every possible way...

...Now power, by its very nature, is a thoroughly bad thing, corrupting to the individual or nation that uses it, bitter to the individual or nation suffering from its arbitrary use...

...As for Russia, Marshal Smuts says, and without conspicuous enthusiasm over the prospect: "Russia is the new colossus on the European continent . . . You will have Russia in a position which no country has ever occupied in the history of Europe...

...A united Europe should be welcome from the American standpoint because it would be a strong guaranty of future world peace and would give Europeans just what we want for ourselves and for the other peoples of this continent: a chance to lead their lives in peace and freedom from foreign interference and intrigue...

...The enormous progress achieved during the century that followed the Napoleonic Wars has been undone by the two great world wars of modern times, both of which started in Europe, both of which inflicted their worst wounds on the body of the European continent...

...One .hardly knows where to look for the most terrifying spectacles...

...When such a staunch friend and admirer of Stalin as Mr...

...And this notwithstanding the fact that the general tone of his article was so favorable to the Soviet cause as to win the approval of that stern critic, the Communist Daily Worker...

...Three nations which had made great contributions to world culture, Russia, Germany, and Italy, as a direct result of the First World War, had fallen under systems which were a complete negation of the progressive, ascending phase of European civilization during the 19th Century, a phase which was marked by an ever increasing respect for the rights of the individual personality...

...Yet if Europe remains divided into 20-odd states, large, medium and small, and at the same time is decimated in manpower and weakened through the industrial destruction and malnutrition caused by the war, the Smuts prediction will coincide pretty closely with the probable reality...

...Is it the starved, stunted children of the democracies of Western Europe, pillaged by the Nazis to begin with, refused relief by the cruel obstinacy of Winston Churchill and others responsible for the ruthless British blockade policy...

...If World War I was a disaster for Europe as a whole, World War II is nothing short of a catastrophe...

...Only a united Europe can deal on terms of friendly equality with such aggregations of power and natural resources as the British Empire on one side and the Soviet Union on the other...

...The millions of foreign workers who have been brought into Germany have probably become better acquainted with each other and may have learned that German workers, as distinguished from Gestapo taskmasters, are not such bad people, and are not so different from themselves...

...Spheres Of Influence' These three examples show what rough treatment may be in store for all Europe, ex-ally and ex-enemy alike, if the 350,000,000 people in that area are to be excluded from anything like an equal voice in future world decisions...

...Only a united Europe can be a free and happy Europe, safeguarded against the competing pull of power politics from outside that always sets in when a large region is hopelessly weak and divided...

...Yet such a brush-off, implicit in the ignoring of the food claims of the smaller powers, in the slighting attitude toward the French Committee of National Liberation, in the Soviet assumption that the future status of Poland and the Baltic states, and perhaps of many other countries of eastern and southeastern Europe, is merely a regional question, to be settled at Russia's discretion, has been plainly intimated in the recent very important speech of Marshal Jan Christian Smuts...

...What he says may reasonably be taken as indicative of assumptions on which postwar British policy is being worked out...

...The Supreme Crisis In Europe By WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN THE EUROPEAN continent, source of most of the literature, art, music, and philosophy and scene of most of the history that have become part of our own cultural inheritance, is facing a supreme crisis of its destiny...

...Now, Marshal Smuts is one of the most influential of British Empire statesmen and he is not a man given to loose or irresponsible talk...

...Is it bloodsoaked Yugoslavia, overrun by Germans and Italians and torn by the most savage kind of fratricidal strife among its own imperfectly welded peoples...

...Some of Europe's great thinkers, like Victor Hugo, have cherished this dream of a United Europe...

...For a united Europe would imply federal control of armed forces and munitions industries and the Germans would be outnumbered more than three to one in any federal assembly or council selected on a representative basis...

...Only a united Europe, which could probably be organized most effectively as a federation of regional federations, can achieve the wide markets which would give full scope for modern mass production methods, with their lowering of the cost of living...

...The Only Alternative The difficulties in the way of the organization of a free united Europe are so great that it might seem that only a miracle could bring about this achievement...

...But relatively the European continent will emerge from this war most weakened in political prestige and in the power to shape its own destiny...

...Germany...

...I was in Paris when the Second World War began and I can recall and reprint, without any sense of exaggeration, what I wrote immediately after the news of the outbreak of the conflict: "This, I thought, was the beginning of the last act in the decline and fall of European civilization...

...Is it Poland, fighting its desperately uneven struggle against Nazi tyranny and faced with the bleak prospect of Russian troops coming in not as liberators, but as conquerors...

...And what he has to say is not calculated to bring cheer to continental Europeans...

...Never in history has there been a situation comparable with the present when the vital decisions affecting Europe are being taken by three non-European powers, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, in such non-European cities as Moscow and Cairo and Teheran...

...It is only within the framework of a united Europe that the German problem can be solved...

...Wendell Willkie inserts one or two pious hopes to the effect that the Atlantic Charter will not be altogether trampled under foot in Eastern Europe, he is subjected to coarse abuse in Pravda, second most influential of the Soviet government-controlled newspapers...

...will be written off the slate in Europe for long, long years...

...Measures of economic unification in such fields as industry, transportation, commerce, currency, that were introduced to clamp down Nazi domination might be beneficial if placed under the control of an international European authority...

...Pravda Abuses Willkie What an inferior status would mean to Europe has already been made eloquently clear...

...But there are crises so profound that their solution calls for miracles...

...France has gone and will be gone, in our day, and perhaps for many a day...

...The old continent would be reduced to a status comparable with that of China in the 19th Century, divided up into "spheres of influence...

...Europe has become a vast chamber of horrors...

...Large and ever increasing areas of Europe have been reduced to a state of desolation and barbarism scarcely equalled since the Thirty Years War ruined Central Europe and almost depopulated some areas...

...If Europe is not to languish in subjugation and poverty it must unite on a federal basis...

...Is it the millions of war prisoners and of men who have been uprooted for forced labor in other countries ? Unique In History The outlook for European civilization, whether one takes a short view or a long view, is black almost beyond the imagination of Americans who, the millions of men on the fighting fronts excepted, are still leading almost incredibly comfortable and sheltered lives for an era of total war and total world tragedy...

...A certain amount of it is necessary, unfortunately, in complex society and in international relations...

...Europe Must Unite Such a solution of the European problem would be thoroughly bad, from every standpoint...

...Now the realization of this dream has become a necessity, the only alternative to a bleak and declining period of subjugation under the control of extra-European powers...

...An unequal partnership, I am afraid...

...There would no longer be the impulse to kill and die for little strips and pockets of territory when frontiers would have lost most of their military and economic significance...

...Europe is at a crisis of its destiny when only a great imaginative decision can save it from long and perhaps irretrievable decline...

...Italy has completely disappeared and may never be a great power again...

...The fabric of this civilization, with its basis of individualism, had survived the shock of the First World War, but with terrible rents...

...What this would amount to, in practice, would be an Anglo-Soviet hegemony over Europe...

...The very fact that M. Moch felt it necessary to reject such an idea shows what a second-rate or third-rate position has been assigned to France by Anglo-American policy—again no hopeful augury for the future...

...Some recent Soviet actions, the treaty with Czechoslovakia, the veto on East European federation plans, the fostering in Moscow of a group of stooge Poles who very inappropriately call themselves "The Union of Polish Patriots" point in the same direction...

...It is such a crisis that Europe will face after this war...

...And some developments of the war, introduced for bad purposes, might conceivably work out to good ends...

...The requests for aid to starving women and children by the govern-ments-in-exile of Belgium, The Netherlands, and Norway have been stubbornly turned down by Winston Churchill, although the chronic undernourishment of the democratic peoples of western and northern Europe is scarcely conducive to effective European reconstruction...

...His remedy for this prospective situation, with the Russian colossus bestriding great parts of Europe and Asia, is to invite the smaller democracies, presumably The Netherlands, Belgium and Norway, to enter into some kind of close association with the British Empire...

...It is only within the framework of a united federal system that the eternal jangling feuds of Europe's nationalities, large and small, could be composed...

...With the exception of a few small neutral cases, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, the enr tire continent has been involved in an ever widening process of impoverishment, devastation, near-starvation, brutalization...

...A divided hegemony of this kind would almost certainly lead up to war and Europeans, like Chinese, would become heartily sick of being given second-class status and divided into spheres of influence of extra-European powers...