THE NATIONS: Debate over Dates

With a rolling of diplomatic drums, the world this week was informed that Dwight Eisenhower, Britain’s Macmillan, France’s De Gaulle and Germany’s Adenauer would meet in Paris on Dec. 19 to lay their plans for East-West summit talks. After the immemorial manner of chancelleries, the announcement was made to seem an example of renewed Western unity. In fact, it was simply an admission that granitic

Charles de Gaulle had won the day and that the summit has been postponed indefinitely into 1960.

De Gaulle’s triumph was one in the eye for Harold Macmillan, who, in the heat of the recent British election campaign, airily proclaimed that the summit date would be set “within a few days.” It was a setback for Ike, who had publicly expressed (as had Khrushchev) a preference for a summit before the end of this year. The quarrel over dates reflected a deeper difference among the Western allies: a disagreement over what summit talks could and should be expected to achieve.

The Other Topic. All of the Western Big Four agree that disarmament discussions at the summit might bear eventual fruit. Although there is no chance that a single summit meeting could achieve the complete worldwide disarmament piously proposed by Khrushchev (TIME, Sept. 28), his seeming eagerness to shed some of the economic burdens of the arms race might lead him to make concessions on the all-important question of armaments inspection and control. “Reciprocal concessions” must be made, Khrushchev told the Supreme Soviet last week, and this must not be interpreted, he warned his people, as meaning he would give ground on basic ideology.

The real confusion on the unquiet Western front is over the German problem. On this the Western powers are in disarray. At one side stands the U.S., still inclined to feel that the division of Germany into two nations is, in the long run, both untenable and dangerous, but pledged to seek new ways of solving the “abnormal” situation of isolated West Berlin. At the other extreme stands De Gaulle, who sees no reason to want any change in the German situation, opposes reunification of East and West Germany on the ground that it might mean the end of West Germany’s integration into the Western European community.

Setting the Switches. Somewhere in the unhappy middle is craggy Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Anxious not to lend further credence to the charge, popular in Britain, that he is an inflexible old nationalist bent on sabotaging the peace, Adenauer is content to let his friend De Gaulle impede the headlong rush to the summit. Accepting De Gaulle’s spring timing, Adenauer suggested that early rather than late spring would be better in order to keep the summit from becoming involved in next year’s U.S. election.

Privately Adenauer looks forward to a summit, where no Germans will be represented, with extreme nervousness. Fortnight ago he cryptically suggested that Germany might yet have to make more sacrifices in order to complete “the liquidation of the effects of World War II.” What Adenauer fears is that the West may agree to some erosion of its position in West Berlin and may, at least by implication, accept Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe as legitimate. The simple French position is that to renegotiate on Berlin is to call into question the West’s existing right to be there.

In effect, two summit attitudes are in conflict. The British are decided on one, the French on the other, and the U.S. gives the impression of not having finally resolved how it feels. One side argues that to negotiate with Khrushchev in Russia’s present moon-cocky phase is to pick the worst possible moment. The other side argues that events are on the move, old attitudes are out of date, and if the atmosphere is right, new arrangements that are of mutual advantage may result. The debate over dates means indefinite postponement of a trial of the second thesis.