The Death Struggle

In France, where EDC began, EDC faced a lingering, disorderly death last week. Its demise was an agony, for in choosing to resist an ideal and reject a safeguard, the French Assembly brimmed over with the kind of patriotism it so often summons up at moments when patriotism can only be negative.

After having kept everyone waiting two years, Frenchmen found themselves alone, and many took pride in the fact. They felt a semi-righteous anger, as if everybody else was to blame for putting France on the spot, for failing to understand that EDC really never had a chance. To the end EDC partisans fought for a compromise which, even if successful, was the end of EDC as it had been set up.

In the last cruel moments, Premier Mendes-France did not conceal his hostility to EDC or his sense of personal humiliation. He sought to promise everyone that West Germany would get its sovereignty soon and its arms later (some day, some way), that the Atlantic alliance is still the foundation of French policy. Nothing about the way the French Assembly handled EDC suggested that it was ready to accept the logical alternative: a West Germany rearmed on its own.

With EDC gone, so would be the pattern of postwar diplomacy. Mendes-France, in releasing his country from the bonds of EDC, was also breaking the chain that kept Germany, Britain and the U.S. committed to France.

Each nation talked of alternatives. The time for reappraisal was at hand. There would be hurried attempts to shore up Chancellor Adenauer, whose devotion to the West had been rebuffed at tremendous cost to his own prestige at home. The U.S. and Winston Churchill were still anxious to have German arms by whatever speedy way could now be found. But it would be harder than before to persuade a powerful and rejected Germany to accept the restrictions on its rearmament that everybody still thinks are necessary.

At this moment of dead end, the impulse was to say: "The French be damned." Yet all the complexities which originally had fathered so complex a blueprint as EDC remained to plague its successors. France had acted as if European defense could be had without Germany, which was a mistake; it would be equal folly to think that the West could do without France. France is the key piece of real estate between the Atlantic and the Rhine, the communications line, supply depot, and headquarters of NATO. France still would have to be taken into account.

Yet the impulse to court and cajole successive French governments was past, for it had not paid. The West could never again accept France at quite the same valuation, which was a sad fact but one that the French nation had created for itself.

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