NEWS OF THE WEEK
AGREEMENT in the West will not fail for want of discussion. At the moment in London, France, Britain and the United States with the three Benelux countries are discussing the future of Western Germany, including its relationship to Western economic policy generally. In Brussels officials of the same group, minus the United States, have met to consider questions of economic, social, political and defence co-operation, or in other words to put teeth into Western Union. On March zsth the i6 nations which co-operated to produce the Paris reports on the Marshall Plan will meet. in the French capital again, under the leadership of Mr. Bevin and M. Bidault, to deal with a strictly practical—and technically formidable—agenda, which must include the questions of a continuing organisation to administer American aid, the allocation of that aid among competing claimants, and action to be taken on the recommendations of the specialist committees set up last autumn. Before the present month is over there will also have been international meetings of trade unions and socialist parties to consider the Marshall Plan and a further conference between the Scandinavian countries on political questions generally. This spate of discussion does not necessarily imply a dissipation of energy or lack of co-ordination. It is quite possibly an essential stage in the progress from major conferences of Foreign Ministers to the continuous routine of diplomacy, and it can hardly be a less fruitful stage than that which has been chiefly marked by the feats of obstruction performed by M. Molotov. Moreover, now that France and Belgium have seized upon Mr. Bevin's suggestion for Western Union with scarcely less alacrity than Mr. Bevin seized on Mr. Marshall's earlier suggestion for European economic co-operation a unifying thread runs through the whole complex of conferences. The thread must not be broken. The necessity to secure the co-operation of an economically reviving Germany must not be forgotten. And the need to hold the door open to Russian co-operation (which, if sincere, would be reconcilable with dose Western co-operation) must not be allowed to become a hampering distraction. If these things are remembered action cannot be long delayed, though it has been made plain by the State Depart- ment that the time for an American military guarantee is not yet.
