A New Tide

Out of a welter of confusion, inertia, committee meetings and high-minded oratory, three propositions last week seemed to be taking shape:

P:That while the U.S. and Europe increasingly enjoy the good life, many nations outside the Communist bloc are getting more populous and relatively poorer. P:That the U.S. should do no less about it, but that Europe should do more. P:That someone ought to provide focus, plans, and machinery for all the scattered remedies that so far have not been extensive enough, or inspiringly imaginative, or outstandingly successful.

Latest attempts to articulate this changed mood:

P:U.S. Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon, on a flying trip to Europe, preached the need to end European discrimination against the dollar and for prosperous Europe to do its bit elsewhere. The U.S., having donated or lent $75.8 billion to foreign countries since 1945, could not bear the burden alone, nor could any single nation. P: Britain's Sir Oliver Franks, onetime ambassador to Washington, and now chairman of Lloyds Bank, coined a vivid, if not quite precise, name for the new need. Instead of a familiar East-West crisis, he talked of a North-South axis, proposed that the world's industrial "north" form a committee, with the U.S. as full partner, to coordinate and share the burden of assistance to the nonindustrialized "southern" regions. "If twelve years ago the balance of the world turned on the recovery of Western Europe, now it turns on a right relationship of the industrial north of the globe to the developing south," he said.

P: The U.S.'s Paul Hoffman, pioneer administrator of the Marshall Plan and now managing director of the United Nations Special Fund, saw a need for a coordinated global effort to replace sporadic philanthropy. Said Hoffman: "All countries, whether their incomes are high, medium or low, must in their own self-interest accept proportionate responsibility for a rapidly expanding world economy."

Mission to India. In past days, proposals to pool foreign aid have met with congressional insistence that there should be Made-in-U.S.A. labels on all gifts sent abroad in order to win cold-war advantage. And until lately, European nations have talked poor mouth (Italy, for example, likes to bring up its own impoverished south, the Mezzogiorno, as one of the world's underdeveloped regions). Or they have insisted that British spending in the Commonwealth, French aid to its Community, and Belgian assistance to the Congo must be reckoned as each country's contribution to taking care of the rest of the world.

Last week, with the blessings of World Bank President Eugene Black, a new kind of international commission was being formed, to concentrate on devising coordinated aid programs for one key area --India and Pakistan, where nearly 500 million people live. The commissioners would be top-drawer private bankers--for the U.S., perhaps Chase Manhattan Bank's John J. McCloy or Detroit Bank & Trust Co.'s Joseph M. Dodge; for Britain, Sir Oliver Franks; for West Germany, Chancellor Adenauer's influential banker friend, Hermann Abs. Perhaps Jean Monnet would be added from France, and Escott Reid from Canada. In time, Japan might also be asked to chip in. The idea would be to commit combined large-scale capital investment to those economies, under control of an international authority independent of the donor countries.

In all the explorations so far, no one has yet agreed on machinery. Many are reluctant to funnel Western aid through the U.N. itself. NATO Secretary-General Paul-Henri Spaak suggests that NATO be used for the purpose, but this too meets with opposition--in the minds of touchy beneficiaries, it prompts suspicions of cold-war tactics. In Paris last week, in the wake of Dillon's visit, there were suggestions that an "Atlantic Community Economic Conference" should be convened in the near future.

Polite But Hesitant. On his tour of Europe, Under Secretary Dillon was getting a polite hearing, and a general assent that it was time for Europeans to shoulder more of the burden. The British and French were happy to point a finger at West Germany as the laggard in West Europe's aid spending. In Bonn, key Cabinet members heard Dillon out sympathetically, but the new 1960 budget introduced in the Bundestag last week earmarked less than $25 million for direct governmental technical assistance to other countries. (NATO partner Germany also spends only one-fourth of its budget on defense, while the U.S. spends half.)

At the moment, all the plane fights and the round-table concurrences had that curiously unreal air of things desired but not yet accepted as urgent. Yet Dillon's trip, said the Economist, "could just conceivably be the exploratory prelude to the most important development in international economics since General Marshall launched his plan of 1947 on that flood tide in Atlantic affairs that has so spectacularly led on to fortune . . . Now everything suggests that a new tide is racing which could determine whether the decade and a half from 1960 to 1975 will repeat the last 15 years of success, but this time with Europe allied to America as intelligent benefactors . . ."

But, cautioned the Economist, if "as seems all too dangerously possible--the tide is missed this time, it will be because Western politicians are frightened of getting too far ahead of public opinion."

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