New Growth

When Joseph Stalin died the world knew that an era had ended. And because it was the end of a long winter, though not necessarily the coming of spring, the change which ensued in the relations between nations was sometimes called the thaw. For a while the only visible manifestation of the thaw was a general fading, ungluing, cracking of power positions on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the Soviet empire the melting process has produced popular uprising and high-level confusion as to how the empire should be managed (see below). In the free world it has showed itself in the nagging vitality of NATO, Iceland's decision to get rid ot U.S. troops, the division and rancors among the allies over Cyprus, Formosa, North Africa and Suez.

But after the thaw comes new growth. Last week, dimly and hesitantly, there appeared in one part of the world signs that a new power arrangement is taking shape. The place: Western Europe. The shape: European union.

The first summons for a new drive toward European unity came from West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who, out of a mixture of irritation and puzzlement at the so-called "Radford plan" for emphasizing nuclear strength over manpower, began to insist that Europe can no longer rely on the U.S. and must unite to save her own skin (TIME, Oct. 8). Last week, still beating the unity drum, Adenauer made a concrete proposal which he said had the concurrence of French Premier Guy Mollet. The proposal: a general scheme to convert the now-toothless Western European Union into an organization empowered to coordinate the foreign and military policies of member nations.

Differences. Although conceived partly in anger at the U.S., Adenauer's campaign got a big if inadvertent assist from Washington when Secretary of State Dulles, enthusiastically approving plans for more European unity, also told his press conference that the U.S. differed with Britain and France on some "fundamental things," particularly colonialism (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), and that in the years to come the U.S. would not give 100% support to either the colonial powers or the new anticolonial Afro-Asian powers. Even in London Dulles' candor caused outspoken anger, and in France U.S. prestige sank. Already disillusioned by U.S. "equivocation" over Suez and profoundly worried by France's isolation in her desperate colonial problem. Frenchmen should not have been surprised to learn that the U S. a Pacific as well as an Atlantic power had vital interests differing with those of its Anglo-French allies. Perhaps they were not surprised, but many were prompted into an awareness that their soundest hope for help in time of trouble would be a union of like, i.e., European, interests. The weightiest and most specific step toward integration, however, was taken by London. As perhaps the prelude to a historic shift away from her traditional aloofness from Europe. Britain last week began to talk emphatically about joining a West European free-trade area (see below).

It was potentially the most promising development in affairs of the Western alliance since the post-Stalin thaw set i --one that depended on the nature and the mood of the steps to follow. Bothered by the linking together of recent animosities and future needs, the London Economist warned of "the danger . . . of a plunge into a new European experiment, motivated by anti-Americanism and by hostility to Asian-African nationalism. On the other hand, the Economist went on there is now "a fresh chance, which should be seized, to erect on this side of the Atlantic the sturdy pillar which the Americans themselves have long wished to see bracing this end of the ocean bridge.

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