EASTERN EUROPE: The Bloc-Buster

In the days before the Balkans became greyed over by Communism, writers of mystery and history made intrigue the chief occupation of the southeast corner of Europe. Even Communism cannot break all,old habits; it merely regularizes the worst ones. Last week Rumanian Communist Premier Chivu Stoica, rising from deserved obscurity, set a bright little intrigue going. He invited five neighbors—Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey—to a conference to form a Balkan nonaggression alliance. Obviously, Communist Premier Stoica is by definition incapable of independent thought. Then who put him up to it?

Soviet satellites Bulgaria and Albania immediately accepted the invitation. So far, predictable. Yugoslavia’s Comrade Tito called the proposal “very useful,” but did not immediately accept. He indicated that he wanted to consult with Greece and Turkey, his partners in the dormant anti-Kremlin Balkan pact of 1954. It now became obvious that the proposal came as no surprise to him, and must have grown out of Tito’s meeting with Khrushchev in Rumania last month. But it was considerably less clear who fathered the scheme, and who stood to gain most by its acceptance or rejection.

Tito has long dreamed of a Balkan federation dominated by Tito: his ambitions in this direction were one cause of the 1948 quarrel with Stalin, who never tolerated the notion of “many roads to Socialism.” Tito also is a man who talks of the need to break up the rival Eastern and Western blocs, though he makes a good living by playing one off against the other. He thus becomes a potentially useful middleman. In his old worrisome days, he sought the help of capitalistic Greece and Turkey against Moscow. Now Khrushchev would like to revive this moribund Balkan pact, hoping thereby to loosen the ties of Greece and Turkey to NATO. Greece and Turkey, of course, could be expected to say no, and to reaffirm their loyalty to NATO. But since they are themselves on the outs over Cyprus, and each in its own way a little out of sorts with its Western partners, neither really minded getting a chance to show the West that someone else was bidding for its favor.

Perhaps this was all Khrushchev (or Tito) had in mind at this point, knowing the offer would be rejected. But more intriguing was what the proposal indicated about the Tito-Khrushchev relationship. Since the Hungarian revolt, Moscow seems so unsure of how to handle the ferment in its Eastern European empire that it has publicly conceded ex-Foe Tito a hand in the Balkans. But how much of a hand? Proposing a grouping in which Tito would obviously be the biggest frog was calculated to make Tito swell up. But proposing one that did not stand much chance was to gratify his ego without running the intolerable risk of having him, in fact, set up a rival power center to Moscow.