Positions for Paris

Britain's Ernie Bevin journeyed to Berlin last week to have a look at history. He said: "I want to get Europe settled for a couple of hundred years. I don't think it is beyond the realm of possibility. But it will take a lot of time, a lot of patience, a lot of work."

Ernest Bevin spoke the hope of millions of people who, having feared last year that the Berlin crisis might mean imminent war, now believed that the end of the Berlin blockade was at least the beginning of peace. In many quarters, the notion grew that the Russians were undertaking a strategic withdrawal from Europe. This attitude was balanced by a note of uneasy caution. Many observers found that by & large in their press and radio the Communists were being their usual difficult selves. Said U.S. Ambassador to France Jefferson Caffery: "The flowers of peace cannot be expected to bloom in the poisoned atmosphere of lies and distortions."

The Guessing Game. The settlement of which Ernest Bevin spoke, if it ever could be achieved at all, might take a long chain of other Berlins--of similar hard-won victories from Seoul to Trieste. The West had learned that for decades to come it faced more or less permanent duty on the ramparts of freedom. The point was that the West's position had improved immeasurably since the Berlin blockade began.

In all the world's chancelleries last week men were playing the fascinating game of trying to figure out what the Russians would do at the four-power conference in Paris this month.

Lorelei Song. The Big Four had agreed to meet in Paris May 23 to consider "questions relating to Germany and the problems arising out of the situation in Berlin, including also questions of currency in Berlin." What lay behind this bland clause was clear. Russia wanted control of Germany. Having failed to get it through the Berlin blockade, Russia would try again, with different tactics, at the Paris conference.

Russia, thought the best guessers, has two ways in which it can seek its end. The first is to press for a four-power control setup with a Russian veto over German affairs (including the Ruhr). The second, and far more effective way, is to win German sympathies and establish conditions favorable to Communism. The Russians can warble a Lorelei song to woo German nationalism, as they have consistently done since war's end, by passing themselves off as champions of German unity.

To this end, many diplomats agreed, they would almost certainly demand 1) the establishment of a strong, centralized German government and 2) the end of the separate West German state now being created, or at least its stringent subordination to a central German regime. Furthermore they were expected to propose the withdrawal of all occupation troops.

The West's policy in the face of these gambits was slowly crystallizing. The West would never agree to an effective Russian veto in Germany. The U.S. and Britain would not object to a unified Germany with a central government; but they would insist that the West German constitution be used as the framework for this future German regime. The U.S. would almost certainly refuse to withdraw its occupation troops; the U.S. token force in Germany gives Western Europeans an indispensable sense of security from Russian attack.

Anxiety Is Unbecoming. The West had decided it must stand resolutely at Paris, give in to none of Russia's baited proposals. That would leave Russia an excellent chance to make the West look like the enemy of German unity. But the Russians had peddled the same propaganda line before, without notable success.

Some Western observers feared that the promise of "One Reich" would lure West German politicians away from the Western camp. But State's Robert Murphy, for one, did not share this fear. Just back from Germany, where he had helped smooth the way for adoption of the Bonn constitution, he said: "I don't think we are going to have a bit of trouble with the Western Germans. They are going to go right ahead."

Words which General Lucius Clay had spoken at the height of the Berlin crisis last year might well be written on top of the briefs which the American delegation would take to Paris: "Anxiety or nervousness among Americans here is unbecoming." In Paris, the U.S. and allies would hold better cards than they had held at any time since Yalta; this time, they were determined not to throw them away.

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