EUROPE IN SHADE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 302, 21 December 1935, Page 22

EUROPE IN SHADE.

FRENCH PESSIMISM.

LAVAL ON THE TIGHT ROPE.

HIS SECRET COMMITMENTS

(By WALTER DURANTY.)

No. 11. PARIS, November 16. France to-day is doubly in the shadow. France shares the fear of war with the rest of Europe, but in addition to that there is another, perhaps, deeper, fear of civil strife within her borders and a third fear besides these two, which ie particularly atrocious to the canny French whose "bae de laine," the money saved in the sock or hidden in the peasant mattress, has become proverbial—the fear of a further devaluation of currency, which will mutilate the national savinge. It is reckoned that more than a third of the French currency issued, which approximates 83,000,000,000 francs, is held tight by the population in the form of savings, tied up in the sock or hidden in the mattress. This, too, is threatened today, with the result that France is a prey to nerve-straining uncertainty and to pessimism. A prey also to fantasy. The wildest rumours run rampant down the boulevards, and although few believe them, no one knows, because it is felt that anything may happen. In attempting to analyse the French situation, it is necessary to make a distinction between foreign and home affairs. Of course, the former, as everywhere, depend largely upon the latter, but I propose to put the cart before the horse and discuss in this message the French foreign policy, reserving internal considerations for a subsequent article. The Quai d'Orsay—French foreign Office—will tell you exactly what Laval has been saying in his speeches at Geneva and elsewhere, that France is ! loyal to the League and has the highest regard and respect for England's rigid determination to keep the League afloat, without, however, forgetting a tender affection for her Latin sister, Italy. Furthermore, M. Laval, as the Quai d'Orsay will echo, hopes, and is doing his utmost, to smooth away the unhappy friction which has arisen recently between Italy and England. Such soft soap cannot disguise the naked and unpleasant truth that Anglo-French interests are antagonistic, and that in tryin" to reconcile the two Laval has a harder task than Blondin performed when he carried a man on his back along the tight rope over Niagara. Laval is a shrewd tight-rope dancer—no one donbts that—but Egypt or the route to India are far more than pawns in the Britisli o-ame and the colossal British assembly Zi naval force in the Mediterranean is not merely pre-election bluff.

' Dancing Hia Tight-Rope

Whether Laval likes it or not, the time is coming when ho may have to choose between England and Italy, lo avoid that choice ho naturally tries to bring the two together. If he can do it, well and good, but the odds nre cruelly against him. For the moment, however feval is France, and there is Mtledoubt tht he is so heavily committed to the Italians by his agreement of January 7— irrespective of secret clauses, if any, and what may or may not have been subsequent dealings between the French and Italian General Staffs-that he has no choice save to dance I^-™?*-There are two ways of covering news in Europe. One is to go to the Foreign Offices and to obtain interviews with high-placed personages like, for instance, M Laval himself, and to write what they care to tell you. Another method is to talk to people who are less directly interested—to business men and bankers, to one's fellow reporters, to diplomats below the rank of ambassadors (because ambassadors must observe caution), and finally to the man or woman in the street. I prefer this method and in the light of such talks I am now attempting to explain the foreign policy of France, as follows: Laval is playing a personal policy at present. He is committed—who knows how deeply?—to Mussolini. He is committed to the League of Nations and to England. He has a commitment which he "himself undertook last summer—not perhaps unwillingly — towards the U.S.S.R. There are also the alliances with Poland and the Little Entente. That is the foreground of the picture, and over it in the background looms ■Germany like a thunder cloud, not yet ready for its storm to burst, but rolling on and growing darker. Thinks England Double-crossed Him. The key and pivot and fundamental basis of French policy to-day is the certainty in French minds that Germany intends to demand a revision of the Treaty of Versailles. What form that demand may take is relatively unimportant, but tfie knowledge that the demand -will be made is the dominating factor in the foreign policy of France. Against Germany, France has five potential allies —Britain, U.S.S.R., Italy, the Little Entente and Poland. Consider these potential allies through the eyes of M. Laval, who, as I said, is for the moment the director of France's foreign policy. England, he thinks, double-crossed him with the Anglo-German Naval Agreement last summer. Poland, he sees, has made a deal with Germany, which the newlysigned German-Polish Commercial Treaty only serves to reinforce and emphasise. The Little Entente since the murder of Alexander of Yugoslavia is a bruised and doubtful reed. The U.S.S.R. might stiffen that reed to become an iron, bar, but M. Laval, rightly or wrongly, has little confidence in the U.S.S.R., and is even inclined' to "view with alarm" its growing rapprochement with Rumania and Czecho-Slovakia and the possibility of its making a deal with Yugoslavia. It is freely said in Paris that Iff. Laval would like to block the ratification of the Franco-Soviet agreement. Whether he can do it or not is another matter,

but he would like to. There remains Italy, and filially the League of Nations.

The precise nature of the bond between M. Laval and Mussolini is a matter of mystery and conjecture in Paris. He made the agreement of January 7 as Foreign Minister of the Flandin Government, and, it is said here, did it so thoroughly "on his own" that neither M. Flandin nor the Ambassador of France in Koine at the time were aware of the exact terms. Hence the boulevard stories about M. Laval's per- ] sonal commitment. It is more reasonable to suppose that Laval', who is no less shrewd than cautious, did not "give himself away" to Mussolini but that he feels that he is the man who healed the long-time breach between the Latin Sisters, or in other words that the Franco-Italian rapproachemcnt is his work, of which he is proud. This, too, comes back to something personal. Laval, one might say, stands for FrancoItalian rapproachement and is thus com-

mitted more by his own action and attitude than by any secret clauses or possible strings to the January 7 agreement.

An. Instrument of French Interests. No dispassionate observer of European affairs can doubt for a moment that from a French angle,the League has never been anything b'ut an instrument to maintain the Treaty of Versailles, that is to say, the French hegemony over Continental Europe. For this purpose Stresseman was lured into the League, and when Hitler left it it was: not eo much the League as France which suffered a heavy blow, whose effects were increased by Hitler's eubeequent defiance of the League and the Versailles Treaty together. But the League is opposed to war, is perhaps the most valid obstacle to war in Europe nowadays, save German unreadiness. The British do not want war, nor do tho Russians. Therefore, under their ioint impulsion the League has imposed sanctions against Italy as a war-maker. Laval was forced to acquiesce, not because he liked sanctions or wished to "punish" Italy, but because he knew there was always Germany in the background and that the very mechanism of Sanctions and collective action winch En-land and the U.S.S.R. have put in motion against Italy might perhaps later, and even more effectively, be applied to Germany. All of which makes Laval's tightrope yet more tenuous and difficult.

Over-played the Game. The greatest weakness of French foreign policy is that it is predicated upon a series of "combinations," pacts, agreements and alliances which are so diversified and various as to have become in certain cases self-negating and mutually contradictory. For instance, the small case of Poland and Czechoslovakia, France's allies, which are spittin" at each other like a pair of angry cats'; or a larger case, England and Italy. France clearly has over-played the pact-agrtsenient game, which has reached a stage of insoluble confusion. •The simplest answer of alj would be a Franco-German agreement, with which, it is whispered here, Laval is now connoting, as many of his predecessors have done before him. This is the most Utopian of all the Utopian schemes and ideas in present Europe. Briand nearly put it over—at Locarno—with the blessing and support of Sir Austen Chamberlain, but Hitler and Nazi Germany are very different from Stresemann and his Social-Democratic regime. There can be no lasting or genuine deal between France and Germany that would not involve the tearing up of the Versailles Treaty, which no French statesman would dare, or care, to attempt. This "combination," however desirable in theory, is less possible in practice than the earlier ones, which themselves, as I have said, have no longer rhyme nor reason. That is the foreign situation which M. Laval —and France —now faces.—(N.A.N.A.)