Blue for Progress

At half past nine one night last week, Germany put the clock forward. Bonn's Bundestag ratified the European Defense Community treaty providing for an integrated European defense force (including 360,000 Germans) under NATO's supreme command. It was the first of the six "Little Europe" powers (the others: France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands) to do so. This was the quo; a few minutes earlier, the Bundestag had already approved the quid: the allied peace contract restoring to Germany increased but not complete sovereignty after eight years of occupation. With these two votes, Western Germany took a decisive step in its emergence from defeat into a partnership in the free world.

The man who won the victory was 77-year-old Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. In his moment of triumph, his face was grimly impassive, as usual. At the decisive session, it was his schoolmasterly logic that carried the day: "We are still under occupation law ... We still have no right to follow our own foreign political line. We are still without protection against threats from the East ... We Germans have nothing, really nothing, to protect our country. All this will be changed quickly and fundamentally after the ratification of the treaties. We will be secure and included in the greatest defense organization which mankind has created. [We can help] save Europe from threatening ruin and decay."

The old chancellor's insistence on passage of the two treaties was accepted in good part by perhaps the majority of Western Germans. Stirred by Russia's tightening control in East Germany, the Western Germans day by day become less reluctant to rearm. In the Bundestag, Socialist Leader Erich Ollenhauer, no firebrand as Kurt Schumacher had been before him, was determined in his opposition, but not vehement.

Neon tubes lit the huge, glass-walled Bundestag against the night as the members dropped their vote cards--blue for yes, pink for no, white for abstaining--in the small black ballot boxes. The vote on EDC: 224 blue, 165 pink, 2 white.

Before the treaties become effective, they must be ratified by the Bundesrat or upper house, and face a court test of their constitutionality. Above all, EDC must be ratified by the other five participating nations--including France.

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