12 JULY 1946, Page 3

PLODDING TOWARDS PEACE

IT is rather more than a year since the war with Germany ended, rather less than a year since the war with japan ended. There are disturbances in Palestine ; guerrilla skirmishes continue in Batavia ; the eternal antagonism between Chinese Communists and the Chinese Government sporadically finds armed expression. Apart from these scattered manifestations the world is at peace —if mere desistance from open warfare spells peace. Blessed are the peace-makers—particularly four of them at this time assembled in Paris. So- the cynic might well be tempted to ex- claim. In fact, the .blessing might justly fall on three of them. Mr. Bevin, Mr. Byrnes and M. Bidault have striven ceaselessly. and tirelessly for any agreement that will enable peace to be made with five out of the seven European ex-enemy States, Italy and Finland, Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary. By themselves the three could have succeeded completely long ago. Some of the problems of peace are no doubt difficult. There is little prece- dent for the treatment to be accorded to an enemy country that has been defeated and invaded, has unconditionally capitulated and finally become a co-belligerent and worked its passage home. Allied statesmen naturally think of the stab-in-the-back to France, of the criminal and unprovoked attack on Greece, the part played by Italian troops in the invasion of Southern Russia and Northern Africa. Italians protest that all this happened under a regime they have overthrown ; that they are today good democrats ; that as such they are entitled to expect from the Allied leaders benevo- lent justice, if not actual generosity. In the face, not so much of these rival contentions as of differences between the four Foreign Ministers themselves, no more than a provisional and temporary settlement- with Italy has been reached. The fate of her African colonies has been postponed for a year, but Italy is definitely to renounce sovereignty over them ; a Free State of Trieste has been constituted, subjecj to confirmation by the coming Peace• Conference and approval of its Statute by the United Nations Assembly, but the durability of the arrangement must inspire very persistent doubts ; reparations to the value of £25,000,000 are to be paid to Russia in seven years, another arrangement about which doubts may well arise ; Italy is rightly to lose the Dodecanese, she is' wrongly to retain the Southern Tyrol. Sub- ject to those extensive reservations the road to peace with Italy is clear.

That qualified achievement is about as much as can be set to the credii of the Paris Conference. Peace treaties with Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria and Finland have indeed been drafted, but here it is frankly a question of dictation by Russia, whose domina- tion throughout Eastern Europe cannot be challenged, though theoretically the Western Allies should have as effective an influ- ence in the East as Russia claims to exercise, and is exercising, in the West. And after infinite wrangling the date for a general Peace Conference has at last been fixed. Invitations are to be sent out to twenty-one States to meet at Paris on July 29th, the General Assembly of the United Nations being postponed in consequence till September 23rd. Is peace in sight? That is the dominating question, -and no one would answer it with any confidence. At the best, of course, it will be peace within narrow limits. There is no question of a peace treaty with Germany or Japan for years. Austria may be settled sooner, but we have not really progressed there as yet beyond the stage of military occupation. And even within the limits drawn at Paris few steps towards the goal have yet been taken. If disagreement between four Foreign Ministers can create the crisis and delays the world has . experienced in the last six months, to what remote future may disagreements between the twenty-one States 'summoned for this month protract discussions? They are only six fewer than assembled at Paris in 1919, and it took five months to conclude one treaty then. It is true that there has been more pre-confer- 'ence preparation this time, but its results constitute no very solid foundation, and some of the conference States, some of the British Dominions in particular, will refuse obdurately to accept without further detailed discussion the conclusions at which the four Ministers have laboriously arrived. Nor will such insistence on further discussion be merely factious. Both Yugoslavia and Italy, for example, will claim the right to make urgent repre- sentations regarding the Trieste settlement. Greece has strong views about her frontier with Bulgaria in the north-east and with Northern Epirus in the south-west, and has both the right and the intention to express them. And those are far from being the only demands that will be advanced by one European State or another. What voice will be allowed to the defeated States is a matter about which little has been heard, and nothing appar- ently decided. The Peace discussions will not be easy ; they will still more certainly not be brief.

Meanwhile there are still more urgent and immediate questions to settle, notably the question of Palestine. Here minds are turning to old solutions. The question whether, after all that has happened, Arab and Jew will ever live together peacefully in Palestine, and whether there is any prospect of the creation of a State that shall be neither Arab nor Jewish but Palestinian, is fundamental, and it is not surprising that opinion in this country is moving more and more towards the solution which some close and impartial students of the prob- lem always favoured—partition. The objections to creating two sovereign States in an area no larger than Wales are palpable, and even within the partitioned regions there may have to be enclaves for the Holy Places, but the Royal Commission which attempted to solve the Palestine problem in 1936 would not have proposed this if any alternative seemed practicable. It is likely enough, moreover, that partition would satisfy neither Arab nor Jew, even in principle, and that over the practical application of it there would be endless altercation. But again, as in 1936, it remains to be seen whether anything better, or as good, can be proposed. Under such a scheme the Arabs, though no longer sharing all Palestine, could within their narrowed boundaries federate profitably with one or more of the larger Arab States on their borders.

Palestine is only one of many problems in the solution of which this country has its part to play in a distracted world. Britain is accused of having no clear-cut foreign policy. The charge is a little unreasonable when the condition of the world is considered. To frame a policy and endeavour to apply it would be relatively easy ; there are plenty of theorists ready to provide one on the spot free of charge. But no country can act by itself today. To advocates of the firm British policy it is only necessary to put the single question: What about M. Molotov? It is possible, of course, that some other Foreign Minister could handle M. Molotov better than Mr. Bevin does, but it is certain that no Foreign Minister could ignore M. Molotov. The States that made war together have undertaken not to make peace separately. That gives each of them a virtual veto on particular peace plans, and since the veto cannot be surmounted it must be circumvented by patient persuasion and—inevitably—some compromise. A Foreign Minister today must be content if, while keeping his gaze fixed firmly on an ultimate goal, the fortification of an inter- national authority capable of enforcing peace (when enforcement is necessary) on a largely disarmed world, he can avert immediate dangers and solve immediate problems by whatever improvisation and concession may be needed to effect agreement where agree- went is indispensable. No code of concrete rules can be formu- lated, for in regard to many of the problems arising there is no ideal course open, only a best-in-the-circumstances. There is no absolutely right decision to be taken about Trieste ; there is far too much justice in the conflicting claims of the Italians and the Yugoslays. It is a case here, as so often, of choosing the least of various evils, with the certain knowledge that what is settled will satisly no one. There will be no ideal solution for Germany. If her productive power is not drastically limited she will again become a military danger ; if it is, her capacity for self-support will be destroyed, and she will remain what she is today, an economic liability to her conquerors. For the peace- makers frustration after frustration is in store, and must be. All they can do is to hold fast to certain basic principles—justice. liberty, defence of the weak, co-operation in the preservation of peace and of the maintenance of certain standards of human rights and of nutrition for all people in all lands. The goal may be distant, but it Is worse to abandon it than to. perish in trying to attain it. For if it is abandoned we shall perish more certainly still.