NEWS OF THE WEEK
THE announcement that negotiations leading to a definite Anglo- French Alliance are to begin immediately is as welcome in London as in Paris and in Paris as in London. It is, in fact, a move that is considerably overdue. If both Britain and France could conclude alliances with Russia it is anomalous that they could not long before this have done the same with one another. But there may be advantages in the delay. The course events have taken make it impossible for Russia to entertain suspicions of the creation of anything like a western bloc. To the new understanding between her two Allies (the stupid and perverse attack by Pravda on Mr. Bevin in that connection is not worth noticing) she can take no conceivable exception. Some special relationship may develop in the future between the Low Countries and the two new Allies ; it would be perfectly reasonable if it did, but nothing of that is in immediate contemplation. As for the two Allies themselves, each of them will gain psychologically and, it may be hoped, economically. M. Blum, it is true, has not taken home with him the promise of an immediate increase in coal supplies ; that is physically impossible ; but German production is increasing, and it looks as though in three months' time an increased flow to France would begin.
One development that may reasonably be hoped for if negotia- tions proceed with the smoothness that we are entitled to assume is a much greater disposition on the part of France to co-operate with British and Americans in Germany ; if the French Zone were now unified economically with the Anglo-American a further step to the economic, and in a lesser degree the political, stability of Germany would have been taken. Meanwhile the alliance itself will strengthen the whole European fabric. It, of course, conforms in every respect to the provisions and intentions of the Charter of the United Nations, and that organisation as a whole, and the Security Council in par- ticular, will be all the better for it. To France it will give new encouragement and confidence just when she is opening a fresh chapter of her history under her new constitution. The economic understanding which will be complementary to the Treaty and Alliance is already being worked out, and those negotiations will now, no doubt, be accelerated. M. Blum on his side, and Mr. Attlee and Mr. Bevin on theirs, have done an admirable piece of work, all the more so in that they have stuck to immediate realities and raise no premature questions of any kind of federal relationship.
