The Paris Conference: Mixed Verdict

In London near week’s end, Britain’s House of Commons passed judgment on the Paris conference. Twice during the day’s debate, shouts of “Treason!” were hurled at Prime Minister Harold Macmillan from the Visitors’ Gallery. Snapped Aneurin Bevan, Labor’s left-leaning spokesman on foreign affairs: “We are profoundly depressed when representative after representative of the British government . . . has no advice to give to the nation except to build up one more tier of ridiculous armaments on the useless pile we have created.” The government won the vote, 289 to 251. But its majority was smaller than usual, and five right-wing Tories abstained.

All over Europe such enthusiasm as there was for what the NATO Prime Ministers had wrought focused not on the missile-base plan but on the possibility of new talks with Russia. In Britain even the Times of London, voice of the established order, endorsed the idea of negotiations to determine “whether there cannot be some limited agreement affecting the type of arms to be stationed in Central Europe,” and the conservative Economist followed suit.

Le Populaire, organ of France’s Socialist Party, praised the Prime Ministers for establishing “an equilibrium between political and military imperatives.” And in Belgium the Roman Catholic Het Volk took comfort in the thought that “the Russians will be placed face to face with clear and concrete disarmament proposals. If the Soviets refuse again, a period of painful pessimism may follow, but at least the world will know where it stands.”

Happiest of all were the West Germans who, along with many other Europeans, were convinced that Konrad Adenauer had been the star of the show. Even the pro-Socialist Frankfurter Rundschau, ordinarily hostile to Adenauer’s Christian Democrats, hailed the old Chancellor as “the rock of Bonn … a brilliant tactician who can credit himself with having given the conference the twist that allowed all participants to gohome satisfied.”

There were specific disappointments. French nationalists complained that the NATO leaders had not given France the ringing endorsement it sought for its Algerian policies. In the Arab nations of the Middle East there was widespread wrath at Turkey’s Adnan Menderes. “The Turk will never understand the Arab,” complained a Lebanese daily, outraged because Menderes had not pushed at Paris for the current Arab dream of forcing Israel back inside the restricted borders granted it by the U.N. in 1947. Fearful of just such a maneuver, Israel’s Premier David Ben-Gurion tried to counter by sending a high-level emissary to Bonn to ask West Germany to plead Israel’s case with the other NATO nations, almost was forced to resign when left-wing members of the Cabinet raised a hue and cry.

Most universal sentiment was satisfaction that the U.S. had bowed gracefully to its allies’ views, though the expression of that satisfaction varied from spiteful to appreciative. Gloated the pro-government Frankfurter Neue Presse: “The conference turned into an uprising of the continental Europeans against … the U.S.” In more balanced appraisal, London’s News Chronicle reported with quiet satisfaction that “the European tail has wagged the American dog to a new and unprecedented degree.”