Europe

ON THE WORLD TODAY

AT THE end of World War I the treaty-makers toiled in an exploding world. There was terror in Hungary, revolution in Russia, and bedlam in the Balkans. Incipient turmoil, which was to pave the way for Fascism, was manifesting itself in Italy. Strife rent the remnants of the Turkish Empire in the Middle East. India was edging toward revolt. Asia was a chaos of warring factions, with interventionary armies battling in Siberia against the Far Eastern Republic. A plague of war lords, student revolts, and banditry was ravaging vast areas of China.

The fundamental difficulty among the Big Three regarding Italy has little to do with Italian preferences. A long series of modifications, emendations, and diplomatic reversals of policy by Britain and the United States, stemming from the original Italian armistice, implies plainly that Italy’s wishes will be consulted only as they happen to serve the aims of her former opponents in arms. Almost all these changes in the modus vivendi set by Britain and the United States for Italy during the past two and onehalf years remain secret, even today. Why?

In strength, however, the British and French Empires were relatively unimpaired. The revolution that preoccupied Russia also kept her away from the peace table at Paris. This meant — and the point has much significance now — that Russia did not share in the distribution of spoils from World War I.

More specifically, it meant that Britain and France were not obliged to honor the secret treaty both extended to Russia in 1915, giving Constantinople and control of the Dardanelles to the Russians. It meant that the secret Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916, which gave Russia the territory along the Black Sea to a point west of Trebizond, was likewise disregarded.

Today Italy, a defeated foe, is completely crushed as a Mediterranean power. France has lost her influence in the same region to the precise degree that she has lost military strength. The British, weakened economically and in armed strength, confront a rising nationalism throughout the Arab, Moslem, and Hindu worlds from Cairo to Calcutta. At the same time the Soviet Union has emerged as the strongest land power on the entire Eurasian continent and is pressing toward the identical territorial and strategic objectives at the Dardanelles and in Turkey which were offered the Tsar by Britain and France in the secret treaties of 1915-1916.

The real obstacle which the Russians, the British, and the Americans have to overcome in working out a treaty for Italy arises from mutual suspicions. These are generated from the anxiety of the British for the security of the Empire, and from the determination of Russia to claim the fruits of victory deemed by Moscow properly Russia’s share because of her contribution to the Allied victory and her need for security.

Moscow’s view, as already indicated by her post-war maneuvers, bears striking resemblance to Russia’s views in 1915-1916 as set forth in the abortive secret treaties of those years. The problem of the Italian peace, like the problem of Iran, is to discover how the opposing objectives of Britain and Russia can be adjusted in a durable compromise.

Italy sets the tune

The Italian treaty, being first in the order of making by direct orders from London, Moscow, and Washington, will set the general design later to be applied in the framing of treaties with Axis satellites in the Balkans. Italy is clearly within the British sphere of interest: the lesser allies of Germany all lie within the Russian zone of influence. Britain’s imperial tradition and political practice stem from one concept, Russia’s from another. Accordingly each scrutinizes the other’s proposals about Italy for possible precedents which might plague its plans for the future.

From Italy, the British and Americans exacted her navy but have not demanded industrial compensation — because they do not need it and because its subtraction from Italy would intensify economic disaster in the Italian peninsula. Russia, whose richest industrial regions in the Ukraine were wrecked and looted by the Axis powers, sees things differently. From Bulgaria, Rumania, and Hungary, she has demanded reparations to the tune of about $300,000,000 apiece in the terms of the armistices. She insists upon a similar amount from Italy for herself. She has posed a claim approximating $1,000,000,000 for reparations on behalf of Yugoslavia and Greece.

The Italian treaty will demonstrate whether the major Allies possess the ability to halt the economic and social disintegration which is war’s legacy to Europe. But these processes are deeply involved in political ferments at present afflicting all nations on the Continent, Allied and Axis alike.

And nowhere are these forces more ominously at work than in Italy today, where misery and disillusionment tend to set a passionately reformist Left against an increasingly strong conservative Right. The struggle is complicated by factionalism on both sides: on the extreme left we find Communism; on the right, neo-Fascism and monarchial extremism, in the “Common Man” movement of Giannini. And between them are the exponents of social reform and the strengthened power of the Church.

The Tyrol and Trieste

The task of the treaty-makers in dealing with Austria’s claims for return of the Tyrol is difficult. This is ancient Austrian territory and basically German in culture, despite efforts of Italy under Mussolini to inundate the area with Italian settlers and crush the indigenous culture, language, and institutions. During the Italian ascendancy, many valuable industries were developed by the Italians. The Tyrol also controls the three historic passes for invasion from the north — especially the Brenner. In other words, for Italy the Tyrol has both an industrial and a strategic importance.

The Big Three, however, view the question of the Italian frontier in the Tyrol not by itself, but in its bearing upon another frontier question, far more vehemently disputed: Trieste. Russia’s ally, Yugoslavia, demands that Trieste be added to Marshal Tito’s territories. The British for strategic reasons — Trieste controls the upper Adriatic — want it to remain Italian. The Americans want the port internationalized. Behind this three-way dispute lie five hundred years of stormy history, irreconcilable differences in national sentiment, and religious feud.

To redraw the frontier between Italy and Yugoslavia is far less difficult than to reach a satisfactory compromise on the issue of the area s most important coastal city. For Trieste, which is overwhelmingly Italian in population, is the doorstep seaward for the whole traffic of its hinterland as far back as Czechoslovakia. And Czechoslovakia, like Yugoslavia, lies in the Russian sphere. The claims of population within the city lean strongly toward Italy, but the whole economic significance of the port comes from its relationship to the economy of the western and central parts of the Balkans.

Yugoslavia therefore has a formidable case, which Russian support does not tend to moderate. The mustering of Yugoslav armed forces in the immediate rear of Trieste and recent protests of Moscow against General Anders’s Polish Army of 110,000 men, which the British have posted along their control area in this region, are not calculated to make the path of the framers of the Italian treaty easier.

Russia in the Mediterranean?

The dispute between Turkey and Moscow over Russian demands at the Dardanelles and in Turkish Armenia is directly related to the Russian demands for trusteeship over Italy’s vast desert colony of Tripolitania on the Central Mediterranean shores of Africa. These issues are likewise tied into the stiff argument about the Dodecanese islands, which Britain has promised will be returned to Greece.

The questions of the Straits, of Eastern Turkey, of the Dodecanese, and of Tripolitania all come to focus at the same time. The issue is whether Russia is to become a major Mediterranean power. It is being joined at an embarrassing moment for the British, whose troubles in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt, not to mention dangers farther east, weaken their bargaining position.

Tripolitania, in Russian hands, would straddle Britain’s Mediterranean communications line at the middle. That is the crux of the problem. Shall this colony be given to the Arabs, who seek through the Arab League to assume trusteeship and speed creation of another independent Arab state? To the Italians, in whose custody it would represent a victory for British policy? Or shall it be committed to a joint trusteeship by all four European Allies, including Russia, for a period of a decade — thereafter to obtain independence as an Arab state — as the United States suggests?

The real solution for the Mediterranean question dividing Moscow and London will have to take into consideration both Russian strength and British strategic imperatives. Already, there are some signs that admission of Russia to the area as a partner, jointly with France, the United States, and Britain, may be agreed upon. This procedure obtains at Tangier, at the western gateway to the Mediterranean.

Recent pointed suggestions from Washington and London to the Turks, to yield bases in the Dardanelles to Russia, indicate that a compromise reminiscent of the Sykes-Picot treaty regarding the Dardanelles and the Bosporus may be in the making. In an age of developing air power, the fact that the Dodecanese lie across the Aegean gateway to the Mediterranean should likewise permit of compromise. The islands belong rightly to Greece. Demilitarized, they can hold no threat to either the British or the Russians.

Armies without countries

The tiff between London and Moscow over General Anders’s Polish Army in Italy, and the 400,000 German troops retained in formation by the British in their zone of occupation in Germany, and the Polish brigades posted in this same zone under British command, like the complaints lodged against Polish and Yugoslav royalist units in the American zone, points up a problem which is needlessly complicating matters for all the Allies in Germany. Unless there is a speedy clarification of purposes, plenty of trouble lies ahead.

In the American zone, steps were taken recently to break up and disperse American-armed Polish and Yugoslav military units — but only after criticism made their existence public. Yet these organizations were under the command of the Allied Military Government, which did not hesitate to fetch the now dethroned King Peter of Yugoslavia to the area to visit the Serbian royalists last autumn. Since they, and the vast majority of the Polish forces in western Germany, are bitterly hostile to Belgrade and Warsaw, their establishment in military formations amounted to an American sponsorship of armed opponents of governments accorded diplomatic recognition by Washington,

In the British zones in Italy and Germany, the situation is slightly different. There the elements of the Polish Army in exile, though equally opposed in the main to the present regime at Warsaw, are continuing units of the British Army, which they joined early in the war.

Europe’s stepchildren

What are the Western Allies going to do with these troops? Equally important: what are they going to do with the thousands of displaced persons of various nationalities who still find refuge in the British and American zones in Germany?

It is clearly undesirable and unjust to compel these refugees to return to their native lands if they fear to or do not wish to. It is equally necessary that London and Washington adopt some consistent policy for resettling them. With the United States planning a shift from military rule to civilian control in its German zone in June, and with General Lucius Clay, Deputy Military Governor at Frankfort, announcing that the Americans may pull out in 1948, save for a control commission and a small military police force, it is time this matter received official attention.

The whole question of the displaced persons attracted attention at the recent sessions of the United Nations Assembly, where some steps were taken to study the riddle. Obviously these expatriates cannot remain indefinitely in western Germany, whether they have civilian status or are members of the armed forces of the Allies.

Winston Churchill, months ago, offered the Polish refugees, whether in uniform or out, permanent homes in the British Empire as settlers. Australia, which is eager to encourage white settlers to augment her population, might welcome these exiles, many of whom would be valuable citizens. The increase of lawlessness in western Germany, because of desperate forays by gangs of displaced persons, shows that the danger inherent in a policy of drift is not limited to the explosive possibilities on the higher political level of Allied relations.

The last thing to be encouraged or permitted in Europe is continuing nuclei of potential civil war. What is needed urgently is a joint policy by the United States, Britain, and possibly France, which will provide these refugees with hope and opportunity for a future, and set up secure guarantees for those who may still be persuaded to go home.

KEEP IN MIND

1. That Russia’s claims to a controlling position on the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, like her indicated aims in Eastern Turkey, are in fact a continuation of Russian policy from tsarist times.

2. That Britain and France recognized the geographical reasons for Russian policy and, in secret treaties made during 1915 and 1916, conceded Russian demands almost identical with those being made today.

3. That these treaties were never carried out, first, because the Russian Revolution upset relations among the three powers; second, because Russia was absent from the peace table; third, because Lenin repudiated all tsarist secret treaties.

4. And the query: Do Russian demands at many points in the Mediterranean represent merely her “asking price” in bargaining for free access to the Mediterranean?