The Year of the Wall
By ANTHONY HARTLEY liArEVER anyone watching foreign affairs VV may feel about the year 1961—and it very often seemed a little like being taken for a ride down the Cresta Run or on the Great Dipper— it can certainly not be called boring. Crisis suc- ceeded crisis in a way that finally dulled the nerves so that something like the Kuwait affair which would have had us all leaping in our chairs a couple of years ago passed as mere light relief and quite failed to attract to the British Foreign _Office the credit it deserved for a skilful and suc- cessful policy. Even the American attempt to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba was a nine days' wonder in London, whatever it ri►ay have been in Brasilia or Buenos Aires.
1961, indeed, may come to be looked upon as something of a watershed separating the familiar groupings of the immediate post-war years from the new patterns lying ahead. The most obvious symbol of this change is the inhumane one of the Berlin wall. The final division of the Western sectors from Herr Ulbricht's 'democratic republic' means, not only the end of illusions about Ger- man reunification following on the collapse of the Eastern regime, but also the liquidation of the last remnant of the provisional arrangements arrived at between the USSR and the Western powers during the war. Germany will not now be reunified by either one side or the other: Russian support for the building of the wall im- plies the abandonment of any hope that Germans will ever become loyal allies of the USSR, while their power to carry the measure through signi- fies the failure of the West German policy of bringing the maximum pressure to bear on the East German regime. What had been thought to be temporary will now be permanent, and there is likely to be a frontier along the Elbe and through the Harz Mountains for some time to come. Of course, it had always been obvious that the division of Germany could not easily be ended, but 1961 drew a line beneath a period of history in which it seemed that the prize at stake between the Rhine and the Oder was the attach- ment of the whole of Germany to one or other of the world power blocs.
But the past year has not left those blocs them- selves unaltered. In the East there are signs of a considerable political crisis, of which observers can only see the peaks appearing from clouds of official verbiage, and giving a vague impression of the mountain range beneath. One feature, however, is fairly clear. Instead of being faced by a monolithic bloc well under control from Moscow, the West now has to do with a series of Communist States, more or less hostile to itself, but by no means united. The Communist world is now a political spectrum stretching from Poland to Albania and China, and international Communism has become a complicating and shackling factor in Russian foreign policy rather than a handy instrument available to Soviet dip- lomacy whenever wanted.
Something of this development may be reflec- ted in the curious mixture of conciliation and bravado with which Mr. Khrushchev approaches his Western opponents. It is difficult to assess precisely what the influence of internal politics is on Russia's foreign policy, but 1961 has made it increasingly evident that the idea of a Soviet master-plan to be carried through at the expense of the capitalist world is wildly exag- gerated, not to say mythical. So far from the Communist world gradually absorbing country after country, the unity of world Communism itself has hardly been maintained for ten years after the Communist success in China. So far from the USSR having settled all Balkan feuds, Russian policy itself is now influenced by the traditional hostility between Albania and Yugo- slavia. As Russia overreaches itself in the direc- tion of Africa (the Guinea episode proves how foolish the West would be to react with too great alarm to Soviet intrigues in that continent), the Asian Communist parties look like escaping from Moscow's control, and in 1961 we have seen a Russian and a British chairman of the Laos con- ference co-operating to arrive at a settlement in an area where American and Chinese diplomacy showed themselves to be more intransigent.
For the West, too, looks less united than it did a year ago. The emergence of a European view- point, which was eclipsed by the chaos in which Western Europe found itself immediately after the war, has meant that America has begun to find more resistance to its views among its NATO allies. Not all President Kennedy's powers of persuasion have been able to shift President de Gaulle on the issue of negotiations over Berlin. Ten years ago not all President de Gaulle's stub- bornness would have been able to overcome the fact of American preponderance within the alli- ance. Since then the advent of the Common Market has changed the balance of power be- tween America and Western Europe or, rather, has created a balance of power where none exis- ted before. Britain has also been affected by this process, and those who have protested over the last year that our diplomatic action is being influ- enced for the worse from Paris or Bonn hardly realise how much at the mercy of the Six our failure to join the Common Market from the beginning has left us. What Western Europe will do with its new strength remains to be seen. For the moment Paris and Bonn outdo Washington in toughness towards the Soviet Union, but this will not always be so. 1961 may come to be con- sidered as the year in which the post-war identity of interests between Western Europe and America began to dissolve, the year in which a new strategic situation made American reluctance to fight a war for European interests seem pos- sible for the first time.
For Great Britain 1961 was a year of choice —of the right choice. The demand to enter the Common Market was the one positive step which has been taken since the war to adapt this country to its reduced position in the world. And, while it would be dishonest to pretend that this new direction may not mean some loosen- ing of what are called 'Commonwealth ties,' it would be even more dishonest to claim that these ties have much significance at the present time. If we have taken to wooing President de Gaulle instead of Mr. Nehru, it is because he has more to offer us in the way of positive advantage. 1961 has revealed the nakedness of the Emperor's new Commonwealth, not so much by a failure to maintain reasonable rela- tions with its members as by the impossibility of using those relations as the basis of a policy suited to any of Britain's problems. • The tenuous nature of the Commonwealth has been revealed by the disagreements over such matters as the Congo and Goa—international crises which profoundly affected' and daniaged the UN during 1961. As to the Congo, whatever one may think of the actions of the British Government, the final result of the past year's crises is likely to be an increased unwillingness on the part of those powers who can afford it either to create UN forces or to demand their dispatch (Dr. Cruise O'Brien's articles in the Observer were a good deal more damaging to the UN than to Mr. Macmillan). And Goa has probably destroyed the Hanitnarskjold concep- tion of a UN moral leadership supported on the Afro-Asian bloc in the General Assembly.
The theory behind that conception was that relatively small powers would see that it was to their interests to keep marginal international disputes within the bounds of UN behaviour. That illusion has now been disproved, and the world is that much more unstable at a time when instability has become endemic.
Mr. Nehru's invasion may have started something bigger than he anticipated. In Rene Clair's film A Nous la Liberte there is a scene where a number of top-hatted businessmen at an official ceremony find themselves confronted with banknotes floating on the wind. One of them by his example holds the others back from an undignified grab, but at last he, too, suc- cumbs, and there is a mad rush after the money.
Mr. Nehru's rush into Goa is likely to produce something of the same effect, 'since India has in the past set standards of international behaviour for the other new States. Already President Soekarno is after Dutch New Guinea, and Senegal has its eye on a Portuguese enclave in West Africa. And it is not much comfort that these are demands affecting ex-colonial powers.
As the African and Asian States behave now towards European countries, so they will be- have later towards each other when it comes to the countless minority problems and claims for territory which exist between them.
Before the First World War any treatment was deemed good enough for Turkey by the new Balkan States which had been freed from Turkish rule. But later on those States used the same disregard of international law in their dis- putes among themselves. Goa has removed one of the barriers to Balkanisation in Africa and Asia. The Indian demand for Goa was a per- fectly reasonable one, which ought to have been conceded by Portugal, or, at any rate, sub- mitted to UN arbitration. As it was, the last notable event of 1961 was an invitation to inter- national anarchy—ironically, for at the end of 1961 the relations between the great powers appeared, if anything, a little more hopeful. By the New Year the international chess board had not been overturned, though the play had be- come terribly complicated and some of the players abominably careless.
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