GERMANY'S OPPORTUNITY
WITH the promulgation of the Occupation Statute for Western Germany a new chapter for the bulk of the German people should open. Not, unfortunately, for all Germany. Out of the country's population of 66 million some seventeen million live in the Russian Zone, and for the present are cut off inexorably from the freedoms which, in increasing measure, the Western Allies are able to extend to the Germans whose home are in the three Western Zones. The possibilities are great, and it is for Germans to decide how fully they shall grasp them. There will be inevitable complaints that close on four years after the end of war, freedom is hot unlimited. But there are some things the Germans must remember. We have no desire to remind them that Germany—Germany as a nation, whether ruled by the Kaiser or by Hitler—committed aggression on its neighbours twice in twenty-five years, and they will not be so reminded unless they show signs of forgetting it. They must remember, too, that the average German citizen today is enjoying a personal freedom and security incomparably greater than any- thing he could count on between 1933 and 1945. They must remember further, that their country has fared far better politically in the years immediately following the second war than in the years immediately following the first. There has been since 1945 no Spartacist rising, no Kapp putsch, no Communist outbreak in Thuringia, no murders of an Erzberger or a Rathenau. Economic hardship, sharply accentuated by the influx of refugees from the east, has been immense, but it has been borne with surprising stoicism, and Germany today is well prepared for the substantial political advance now within her reach. For all this, let it be acknowledged at once, great credit is due to the German people themselves. They have recognised that the new Germany must be very different from the old. They have accepted without cavil the decision that it must be made incapable of future aggression (a measure calculated in fact to give Germany a preferential position commercially), though they demur, as was inevitable, to some of the details of the dismantle- ment policy. But dismantling is almost over, and all that will soon belong to the past. They do not like the Ruhr Statute, framed by the Allies in order both to prevent that great potential arsenal from ever being used for military purposes and to ensure the equitable distribution of its products, but the Ruhr today is producing more coal than at any time since the war ended. And in the political field, men like Dr. Arnold and Dr. Adenauer, Dr. Reuter and Dr. Schumacher (there are as many doctors in Germany as there were colonels in America after the Civil War), have come forward to bear the burden of leadership in circum- stances which have often involved them in unmerited unpopularity and even obloquy. But thanks to them the structure of self- government in Germany has gradually been built up, in the Lander first, with the creation of a central Government now imminent as the next step. It will not be, and is not meant to be, the final step. The ideal of a united and completely independent Germany, subject it may be to certain limitations specified in an agreement freely negotiated, remains. Some day it will be realised. But progress will come by stages. The Germans themselves fully appreciate that.
The next stage is ushered in by the promulgation of the Occupation Statute. Till that was issued the framers of the new German Constitution at Bonn could not complete their work. That the first result of the publication of the Statute was the decision to destroy what is so far built and start again is of no great conse- quence, though the causes and results of the decision have still to be fully disclosed. The agreement finally reached on the Statute is a happy result of the presence of Mr. Bevin, Mr. Dean Acheson and M. Schuman in Washington for the signature of the Atlantic Pact. In the atmosphere of co-operation and satisfaction created by that auspicious event, demurrers which one or other party had entered were abandoned—particularly by France, to whom and to her Foreign Minister, M. Schuman, great credit is due—with the result that the Statute was completed before the European Foreign Ministers left America. Its object is stated in its first clause— to give Germany (meaning, of course, always Western Germany) " self-government to the maximum degree consistent with the occupation." That means that the three Western Zones will be completely unified, as the two largest of them have long been, and that a Central Federal Government will be created as soon as the Parliamentary Council now in session at Bonn has succeeded in constructing it. When that happens, Allied Military Govern- ment will end—no tribute was ever better deserved than that paid to General Robertson and General Clay by the three Allied Foreign Ministers, and it is fair to add that Marshal Sokolovsky could have been placed beside any of them but for the fetters with which the Kremlin bound him—and the Occupying Powers be repre- sented by Civil High Commissioners. That is a symbolic and significant advance from war to peace conditions, as the repre- sentatives of the eleven Western Lander have rightly recognised.
The limitations on German independence are not inconsiderable and Germans must be expected to criticise them ; some of the leaders would lose the confidence of their followers if they did not. But none of them is unreasonable, and if they amounted to less than they do the assent of the French to the Statute could never have been obtained. The Allied Powers are to retain control, and Germany therefore is not to obtain control, of disarmament, demilitarisation, scientific research, civil aviation, the Ruhr (provided for already by the Ruhr Statute), foreign affairs, foreign trade and exchange. That list is not complete. Even so, it is possible for Germans to represent it as a grave encroach- ment on national liberty. It can, undoubtedly, be so represented. Everything will depend on the degree of confidence which can be established between the Allied High Commissioners and the new German Government. It would be a profound mistake, for example, to remove the discussion of foreign relations completely from the purview of the German Parliament, particularly if, as is intended, Germany is in due course to take her place as a full member of the society of European Recovery States. Particular care, moreover, must be taken to ensure that no atom of excuse is given for the accusation that control of scientific research is being used not merely to forestall any military scientific develop- ment, but to check German industrial competition. There is little reason to doubt that all this will work out satisfactorily in practice —there is everything to be said for the English solvitur ambulando method—and the sooner the practice stage can be begun and the stage of argument about paper provisions ended the better.
The new move at Bonn is a little obscure. If a shorter and less complicated constitution is to be adopted, that will be all to the good. But if the old contention about centralisation and federation is to be resumed and protracted it will not be good at all. The change is the work of the Social Democrats, and it cancels all the agreement reached in weeks of discussion with the Christian Democrats. The new draft is not to be submitted to the Social Democratic Party Conference till next Wednesday and it is only after that that it will come before the Parliamentary Council at Bonn. The revised proposals which will ultimately emerge from it will need the assent of the Occupation authorities, but it is permissible to hope that even so Western Germany will have equipped herself with an agreed and approved constitution before the summer is far advanced. That it can at present be a constitu- tion for Western Germany only is no one's fault but Russia's, and the Western Allies will hail with as much satisfaction as Germans themselves the day when it can be extended to cover all four instead of the three zones into which Germany is temporarily divided. As Mr. Bevin said at Washington, Germany has been given her chance. No one regards her with hostility. Her re- habilitation is a general interest. A place among the free nations of Western Europe is ready for her. It is for her leaders now to resolve that she shall contribute to the full to the maintenance of peace and the creation of prosperity.
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