Continent in Motion

Not since the Iron Curtain clanged down across Europe and the pattern of postwar alliances was forged by the U.S. and Russia has the Old World seen such a flurry of political cross-pollination, of intra-alliance flux. After 20 years of rigid cold-war separatism, East and West Europeans are talking again.

Rumanian Trade Minister Gheorghe Cioara has just finished a nine-day tour of West Germany. Rumanian Foreign Minister Corneliu Manescu is headed for Rome, and Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki for Sweden. French Foreign Minister Couve de Murville in recent weeks has popped up in Warsaw, Sofia and Bucharest. Fortnight from now Charles de Gaulle goes to Moscow.

The most unprecedented confrontation will take place in the coming home-and-home debates between East and West Germans next month.

SHAPE to Brussels. Thus far, Europe's East-West exchanges are more a faint patina than a deep-running break in postwar patterns and allegiances. But they are a part of the stirrings of nationalism and independence, a reflection of the willingness to re-examine the status quo that is inevitably having its effect on the twin military blocs facing off in Europe: NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries.

This week NATO's foreign ministers meet in Brussels to wrestle with the consequences of De Gaulle's withdrawal from the alliance's integrated military commands due July 1st. One consequence is that SHAPE, the command headquarters, must leave Paris. Most likely new home: Brussels. Another matter to be decided is the fate of some 27,000 French troops now stationed in West Germany under NATO. Both Bonn and Paris, for their own reasons, would like the French to stay. But if France is not in NATO, how can the troops' presence be justified? The Germans will not accept any solution that smacks of renewed occupation, and France will not accept any status that implies renewed integration. The solution may be that the French will simply stay on "provisionally"--meaning indefinitely.

Curtain Calls. Last week the Warsaw Pact's defense ministers were wrestling with similar problems in a Moscow meeting. The Gaullists of the Communist alliance are the Rumanians, who argue that the pact should be loosened and some Russian troops be sent home from the satellites (TIME, May 20). Private arm twisting having failed to move Bucharest, twice last week Russian First Secretary Leonid Brezhnev publicly appealed for the "unity of the Communist movement."

In April, Moscow noised the notion of a joint meeting of the nations of Eastern and Western Europe to discuss their "collective security." By the terms of the Soviet proposal, the U.S., not being European, would be excluded. Such a conference would also imply de facto recognition of East Germany. Thus the notion was ignored in the West, except by the Danes, who may well broach in Brussels a joint NATO-Warsaw Pact conference--including the U.S. But Washington has an antipathy to any major conference in which the outcome is cloudy, and even the Danes cannot see any way around the problem of East Germany's representation at such a gathering.

Still, scarcely a few months ago no one would have dared envisage East and West Germans exchanging through-the-Curtain calls in uncensored electronic view of both Germanys' populations. The West German Socialists will appear in Karl-Marx-Stadt July 14, the East Germans in Hanover a week later.

Prime mover behind the scheme is Social Democrat Deputy Chairman Herbert Wehner, who effectively argued within party councils that for all the hazards involved, the time had come to reopen the lines of communication in the divided country. West Germans seem to agree: public-opinion polls indicate 76% of them favor the debates.

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