London

ON THE WORLD TODAY

IN HIS public speeches, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin has proclaimed a new policy rooted in the economic needs of the little men of all countries. But if one looks at British policy in Greece, Spain, and in the Middle East, one cannot see that the spirit of Britain’s Labor regime is permeating its international relations.

Critics are pointing to the Foreign Office and to British representation abroad as being out of tune with these times. A basic change occurred last July when the people gave a strong parliamentary majority to the Labor Government. This new temper was promptly expressed in industry, education, health, and housing. The little fellow at home is getting a new deal. Has there been a corresponding change in foreign policy or in its instruments?

Labor versus the Foreign Office

British diplomats for generations have been drawn from the landowning families, the sons of officers, the loftier strata of commerce and industry, and the nobler professions. In any list of schools through which Britain’s ambassadors and senior Foreign Office officials have passed, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and a few other exclusive institutions recur monotonously. Diplomacy as a career has been the private preserve of the social group that was decisively beaten at the last general election.

Even today one of the tests which candidates for the Foreign Service must undergo is a three-day attendance at a house party. A special country mansion is reserved for this gentlemanly inquisition. The aspirant is questioned by a panel of examiners: “What could be Russia’s motives in Bulgaria?” Or, “Do you think Russia should get out of Persia?”

The scattering of progressive young men who survive the regular Foreign Service examinations and the “week-end party” appear to be soon corrected in the Foreign Office. The net result is the good fellowship atmosphere of a very uppity club. Bevin was aware of this screening process before he became Foreign Secretary, and in the early stage of the war he demanded radical reform of the Foreign Service. “A few weeks after assuming charge of the Foreign Office,” wrote the weekly Economist, “he was swimming in a seductive sea of Christian names.” Sir Alexander Cadogan became just Alex and other titled diplomats became Archie, Reggie, or plain George.

Any British Foreign Secretary trying to carry out a socialist foreign policy would be shackled by the character of his staff. An official who is today one of Bevin’s senior assistants greeted the Labor triumph at the national election by sighing, “This is a disaster.” This Foreign Office member was perhaps merely more indiscreet than his colleagues.

There is a stock answer to these doubts: policy is made not by ambassadors or other professional diplomats, but by Bevin himself and by his associates in the Cabinet. That is true. But this policy must be derived from information gathered, sifted, and interpreted by career diplomats who, with few exceptions, are out of sympathy with the aims of Britain’s socialist government and who view with distaste the leftist regimes to which they may be accredited.

Moreover, once policy has been decided by the Cabinet, it is executed by men who understand the faded diplomacy of Kipling’s age better than the modern aspirations of a working-class government. They have been trained in languages, trained to be charming, to dress appropriately, and to cultivate the “right people” — who usually happen to be people of the Right. But are they equipped to report on countries where Socialists or Communists have overthrown the former ruling classes, as in most of Europe and much of Asia? For the average British diplomat, assignment to a mission in one of these countries is at worst a turn of duty in “enemy” territory and at best a slumming party.

Time for new blood

For many years, whenever the Foreign Office was accused of being an asylum for snobs, the critic was reminded that the father of Mr. Robert Howe, the present Assistant Under-Secretary of State in charge of Middle Eastern affairs, was an engine driver. In parliamentary debate the other day Anthony Eden once more dragged Mr. Howe’s poor father from the locomotive to present him as the democratic window exhibit of the British Foreign Office.

Labor critics of the Foreign Office are demanding nothing so impractical as discarding the six hundred seasoned career diplomats. They are suggesting nothing so violent as the proposal Thomas Carlyle made in 1850, when he wrote: “There is but one reform for the Foreign Office — to set a live coal under it.” They are not asking that Foreign Service men shall be socialists or that the Civil Service shall be polluted by spoils politics.

W. N. Warbey, a Labor member, told Parliament lately what sort of men British diplomacy needs: “men capable at least of understanding what is happening in the world today and of appreciating the movement of the common people in this and other countries. I merely ask the Foreign Secretary to infuse into the Foreign Service some new blood. I would not say red blood, but fresh and virile blood.”

During the war hundreds of progressive young men and women were enlisted in political warfare and in the intelligence and information services. Some brought to those jobs a knowledge of world affairs; others acquired it in the war. Almost all these fine recruits, so valuable a supply source for a new generation of diplomats, have been allowed to disperse into private employment.

What is Labor’s foreign policy?

A few months ago Bevin’s stand against Russia would have been extremely unpopular among the Labor Party’s followers. Today his policy has the approval of the overwhelming majority of Britons of all parties. It is being said here that the Kremlin is performing the double miracle of making the British anti-Russian and the Americans pro-British.

Some are saying that Winston Churchill, by his speech in Fulton, Missouri, accomplished the further miracle of making Bevin’s policy toward Russia appear amiable and conciliatory. By provoking the United States to be firm and by producing Churchill’s anti-Soviet outburst, Russia granted the British Labor Government the luxury of a back seat.

The difference between the Churchill policy and the Bevin policy toward the Soviet Union seems to be one of emphasis and tempo rather than of principle. Long before the recent fireworks, Soviet distrust of Britain was vigorously reciprocated by distrust of Russia on the part of British Labor leaders.

Bevin believes, probably with reason, that in Greece, the Middle East, and Spain the overthrow of the reactionaries would start upheavals to Russia’s advantage. The effect of British action in Greece has been to assist the monarchists.

After British troops crushed the uprising of the leftist EAM and ELAS, a government of the Center was set up in April, 1945. This regime was bound to be weak because the Greek masses continued to flock to the Right and Left extremes. Rather than create a Center-Left coalition in which Greek Communists would hold a few posts, Britain practiced tolerance toward the Greek monarchists.

Greece, after all, affords Britain her last lingering foothold in Southeastern Europe. The British Labor Government is unwilling to risk Soviet infiltration into this strategic flank of the Eastern Mediterranean. Crypto-Communists (to use Bevin’s favorite cussword) would find no place in the Greek administration if Britain could prevent it. Loss of her influence in Greece would further endanger Britain’s ability to resist an advance of Soviet power toward the Dardanelles and the Eastern Mediterranean.

British withdrawal from the Middle East is a course which the Labor Government rejects. It would involve strategic and economic sacrifices and would create a vacuum into which Russian influence might seep. Impelled by these understandable considerations, Britain under a Labor Cabinet has been befriending the backward feudal regimes prevailing throughout the Levant.

The velvet glove for Franco

Almost everywhere anxiety over the Soviet challenge puts a conservative stamp on Bevin’s policy. In Spain as well as in Greece, British Labor is forswearing a socialist policy. Bevin has been unfairly accused of backing Don Juan’s pretensions to the throne. The British Foreign Secretary has in fact ordered his ambassadors in Madrid and Lisbon to refrain from supporting this Bourbon prince. But he has not actively opposed the restoration of the Spanish monarchy. instead of puncturing this spare tire of the Axis, British Labor has been championing the discredited policy of non-intervention in Spain.

Economic motives account for Britain’s greater caution toward Spain than toward Greece. Britain wants Spanish iron ore and other products. Britain’s reliance on Argentine meat and wheat explains what seems to many the velvet glove without the mailed fist, which British Labor has shown both Spain and Argentina. Fear that revolution might yield Communists a part in ruling Spain and thus bring Soviet influence near Gibraltar has caused British Labor to lag behind the enemies of Spanish fascism.

America’s junior partner

In another important field the Anglo-Soviet estrangement has deflected the Labor Party from its earlier intentions. Since taking office last July, Labor has wanted to avoid taking sides between East and West and, by maintaining good relations with both, to be the mediator between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Instead, Britain has gravitated more and more into the American camp. This drift is going too far to suit a number of British politicians and progressive journals. Their uneasiness accounts for much of the British opposition to the American loan.

Churchill’s speech accentuated the fear that AngloSoviet antagonism is tending to make Britain too reliant upon the United States. Will Britain become the junior member in an Anglo-American partnership? Would such a partnership impede Britain’s evolution toward socialism? If the world is moving toward ultimate collision between the Soviet Union and Western capitalism, would the British Isles be more than an advance bomber base swiftly blasted out of action by a few atomic bombs? These are among questions prompted by Churchill’s speech and Stalin’s reply.

British diplomacy has had a taste of being America’s poor relation. Time after time in recent months, — for example, in arranging the Moscow Conference of last December, and in matters relating to the Balkans, Japan, and Iran — when the British Foreign Office anticipated joint Anglo-American diplomacy, the State Department first acted and then let London read about it in the newspapers. British officials have been smarting under these humiliations but have muttered only in private.

Full freedom for India

Contrasting with Labor’s comparatively standpat foreign policy is the British government’s new bold approach to the Commonwealth’s greatest problem — India. For the first time in history a British Prime Minister has dared to offer India independence. Freedom for India has for years been an important Labor Party pledge.

Events in India this year imparted an explosive urgency to the fulfillment of this promise. The mutiny in the Indian Navy swiftly followed “strikes" in the Royal Air Force. At least one Indian unit refused to fire on rioters; and once the Indian Army puts nationalist allegiance first, it ceases to be a reliable instrument of the British Crown. Attlee has had the authority to go much farther than the Cripps proposals of four years ago. The word “independence was shunned in the Cripps offer. That offer was for Dominion status, and during a transition period the Viceroy was to keep his right to veto decisions of the Provisional Government.

There are no such strings tied to the message which the three-man Cabinet mission has now brought to India. Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India, Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade, and A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, have been vested with sweeping powers of decision and are obliged to refer back to London only a limited area of the agreement which they are negotiating on the spot.

There has never been less cause for Indian nationalists to suspect that Dominion status and the Moslem League are being used by Britain as a means to restrict India’s advance to full freedom. Nor have the omens ever been so favorable for an understanding between Britain and the Indian National Congress.

The key words in Attlee’s historic pronouncement to Parliament were: “I hope that India may elect to remain within the British Commonwealth. If, on the other hand, she elects for independence, in our viewr she has a right to do so.”It is symptomatic of the indifference of the British people towards this great problem that, of 640 members of Parliament, only 30 attended the Commons session at which Attlee made this momentous declaration.

The Cabinet mission now in India hopes to negotiate a British-Indian military alliance and to conclude political and economic agreements. British imperial rule there is on the way out, and what is likely to remain is a voluntary association that will benefit both Britain and an independent India. This is Britain’s last chance to quit India peacefully and with heightened prestige. Britain’s exit will leave India to cope with appalling social problems. When one remembers that one out of every five inhabitants of our planet dwells in India, the depth of misery and poverty there appears in its true dimensions.

The manifesto of the Indian National Congress at this year’s elections of provincial legislatures points the road which India may follow, though only after a struggle between Left and Right: what India fights for at home is described in this proclamation as state control of mineral resources, transport, the principal means of production and distribution in land and industry “so that free India may develop into a coöperative commonwealth.”With the removal of British rule, India will require years and probably decades to accomplish her share of the social revolution which is on the march through Asia as well as Europe.