Europamudigkeit

Paris had no answer for West Germany's question. Instead, French politicians last week seemed determined to let EDC die the death of a thousand delays:

P: Marshal Alphonse-Pierre Juin, France's top soldier and the man most likely to command the European Army, if ever it is formed, seriously damaged its prospects by denouncing the EDC treaty as "insufficient . . . not clear enough," a "misdeal" at France's expense.

P: Premier Joseph Laniel, obsessed by a grande passion to stay in office, refused again to set a date for the Assembly's debate on the treaty, and thereby served notice that his government will not agree to German sovereignty before the Geneva Conference (April 26)--if ever.

P: Foreign Minister Bidault (who three times had promised to bring up EDC for ratification before Geneva) postponed this week's scheduled Brussels meeting of the six European foreign ministers.

P: Paris instructed its high commissioner in Germany to veto the amendment to the West German constitution, passed by the Bundesrat, to enable the Germans to rearm within EDC. Later, the French agreed to approve the amendment on conditions that would require a delay of four or five months in German ratification of EDC. The Germans jutted their jaws. Editorialized Hamburg's influential Die Welt: "If the French had intended to produce Europamuedigkeit [a state of being fed up with Europe], they could not have acted otherwise." The West German Cabinet bluntly told Paris that its conditions would be ignored as "extraneous."

Americans and British backed the Ger mans, and in the end, under severe pressure, Paris gave way and allowed Bonn to go through with the amendment. Next day, President Theodor Heuss added his signature, and it was promulgated as the law of the land in West Germany.

In a sense this was progress, though only because the French, `a la Molotov, had taken an untenable position, and then retreated from it. The hard fact remains that the Germans cannot start rearming until France has ratified EDC. To persuade the French to get moving, Britain leaked the news that some of its troops on the Continent might be placed under an EDC general. More important, the U.S. bluntly served notice that it soon plans to press for West Germany's return to sovereignty, with or without EDC. "The occupying powers are agreed," said U.S. High Commissioner James B. Conant in Bonn, "that the West German Republic shall become a sovereign state. If by chance this should not come to pass in the near future, I feel sure that ... it is in the best interest of all concerned that [German independence] should be put into force. In other words, the period of occupation is coming to an end . . ."

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