THE ISSUE AND GROUND OF A POWER COLLISION

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25135, 17 March 1947, Page 6

THE ISSUE AND GROUND OF A POWER COLLISION

EUROPE AND THE EAST

(Specially Written for “The Press.”) [By ROY SHERWOOD]

London, February 22.—Preoccupied with the setbacks and difficulties of endless conferences between the Big Three, the Big Four, and, very occasionally, the Big Five on a multiplicity of subjects, Europe’s most common mistake to-day is to forget—as Asia is never likely to do —that for the Americans the war started and ended in the Far East, with Europe as a side issue of admitted importance, yet a side issue. In the Pacific Britain, France, and Holland face a situation changed enormously to their disadvantage. American power and influence are so vastly strengthened and extended there that all contact with reality is lost if Soviet fears and suspicions of the United States are judged by what takes place in or near Germany. In this situation the three losers in power and influence are acting so differently from each other that understanding of the reasons for these differences becomes important. Of the three, only Great Britain has been victorious in the war. TThe other two, through no fault of their "own, have been mere passengers on the victory waggon. Post-war Contrasts Along the lines of orthodox political and militaristic reasoning, that would give Britain the greater right to assert a position in the world in which the national will and national advantage can be imposed, while the other two might be expected to be more compliant. Actual developments contradict this, though endless quibbles could be started about the British case. France and Holland would probably say that Britain’s manpower shortage, in combination with her fierce need to produce exports in something like sufficient quantity to pay for indispensable food imports, reduces her military power to their own level. To which Britain would reply that she can, in any case, produce war material, whereas the other two are dependent on outside help. for practically everything in that direction. The issue is not worth arguing to the end, because it does not matter who would be right and who wrong, in view of a far more important factor. It is certain beyond all possibility of doubt that in Britain’s case the national will itself has undergone a change. Outwardly expressed in the election to office of a Labour Government, the change finds additional expression in the Conservative Opposition’s lessened resistance to that Labour Government’s policy regarding India, Burma, Malaya, and all other Empire questions. With the exception of a few old men, there are no die-hard imperialists left in Great Britain. It is this that makes the contrast with Holland and France, faced with similar problems, sharp enough to cause an occasional sharp exchange between the three countries’ public speakers and writers; but people who feel tempted to lo'se patience sometimes with either France or Holland because they seem unwilling to adapt themselves to the new conditions m the Pacific should remember two facts. The first is that, because both countries were shut off from world thought for five years, things which have come gradually, almost without conscious perception, to the minds of people in places never under German occupation, present themselves to French and Dutch minds vrith all the harshness of the whole difference between pre-war and post-war ideas, while they are also unaware of the changes which have come over themselves as well as over the people in the Far East with whom they are most concerned.

In Indo-China as well as in Indonesia not only national consciousness but also national ability have been strengthened by the knowledge that the Japanese—another Oriental peqple —could wage war successfully against the western nations; and it is because of this, incidentally, that the use of the atomic bomb m this particular theatre of war was a gigantic mistake in psychological strategy, quite apart from all considerations of morality. Effects of Defeat and Humiliation Even so progressive and “Indonesianminded” a man as Dr. van Mook, the Acting-Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, had to admit that the ideas with which he re-entered Java after the Japanese surrender were completely out of date, and that nothing in the facts as he found them to be could justify the somewhat contemptuous attitude he had at first taken towards the Republic of Indonesia. That, however, is only the minor part of the case. A wrong line of thought is net a driving force. Man's springs of action lie in feeling and impulse; and it is from these that the difference between the British attitude on one side and that of France and Holland on the other originates. It comes from urges deep enough to make the usually progressive French more conservative than the British and to bring them into the same camp with the Dutch who, normally, are the most conservative of the thfee. The mould which has shaped French and Dutch impulses into a common pattern is their common experience of military defeat and of five years of Nazi rule. The last 25 years of Europe’s history were shaped in 1919 at Versailles. There, as Mr Harold Nicolson said (not for the first time) in a recent broadcast, he saw the Germans being humiliated as no great nation had ever been humiliated before; and the urge to humiliate somebody eke became the driving force for Hitler’s long series of successes, which began with the easy whipping-up of hatred against the Jews. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that an analogous psychological process to that inflicted on the Germans by the Versailles humiliation set in wherever people had to live under the hated German occupation. All militarist impulses in them were strengthened; tolerance and sympathy were choked. Life had no space to spare for anything but harshness, no colouring except white and black. The outside world which, by means of propaganda, did all it could to cultivate that spirit of fierce single-mindedness can hardly complain now if it refuses to die to order. In the end it will have to give way, though, not perhaps so much to reasonableness coming from within as to pressure exerted from without Neither the French nor the Dutch art likely to be allowed to become instrumental in starting the beginnings of the next world war unless the two protagonists of the gigantic struggle to come should, contrary to expectation, be ready for it before the post-occupa-tion effects of the German regime have spent themselves. In the last resort it is not Europe, despite the importance of German coal and factories, but the Far East, with its teeming millions and infinite possibilities of further development,- that constitutes the terraiw on which the American economic urge for expansion and the Soviet urge for ideological expansion are most likely to clash. China’s present civil war epitomises that; and it is only because Europe is as yet too busy with her own unimaginative gropings for peace that she pays so little attention to that highly significant danger. .