The Press WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 1947. Making the Marshall Plan Work

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25243, 23 July 1947, Page 6

The Press WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 1947. Making the Marshall Plan Work

The French Ambassador’s warning, expressed in Washington, that the Anglo-American design to raise the level of German industry “ will “ greatly endanger the Marshall “ plan ”, should be contrasted with Mr Alphand’s statement before the Co-operation Committee of the Paris Conference. When the Netherlands delegate, Dr. Hirschfeld, said that any general estimate of European productivity must include German resources, Mr Alphand agreed. German production should contribute to recovery; but, he went on, it was the French belief that, whatever was done to make it contribute, the “ over-riding considerations ” must be those of security. In coal and agriculture, however, German production could be “pushed to the “ maximum ”. In plain terms, what France is afraid of is the German steel and the German chemical industries; and because the United States and Great Britain now want German steel production to be rapidly and greatly lifted above the Potsdam permitted level, Mr Bonnet has let Washington know that his Government is troubled.

In this situation appears, of course, what was certain to be the first of the difficulties to be encountered before the participant countries can answer the Marshall offer with a workable and acceptable plan. The French have steadily set their faces against proposals involving, or seeming to involve, a risk of their being opposed again by aggressive German nationalism with a restored war potential at its back. Their reasons are very plain and, up to a point, as sound as they are plain. But it is not the French only who must measure this risk and secure themselves against it; and it cannot, in the long run, be the French formula of security that guarantees either France or any other country untroubled frontiers and peaceful advance within them. On the contrary, a formula which assumes that any great country can first be impoverished and then quarantined in its poverty is fallacious; and that is only one of its unsound assumptions. But the question is not whether French thinking on this point can be changed, but whether French policy, in spite of it, can be modified sufficiently to fit into a plan that does not expose a damaging German gap. The chance of a constructive agreement is favoured by the fact that France badly needs everything it promises and cannot easily avoid disaster on other terms; it is also favoured by the fact that Britain and the United States can offer France such assurances, for the long-term control of Ruhr industry and otherwise, as she cannot obtain from any other friends and cannot equal by any independent action. Against it is the instability of the* French Government, whose majority may break up if it proposes a really significant concession in foreign policy, and which, now, has an additional reason to fear Communist hostility. Its dilemma cannot easily be escaped; but the way of escape, being also the way to an effective compromise, will have to be found. If it is not, there will be no European plan that fulfils what are as much the conditions prescribed by the European situation and the interests of Europe as the conditions explicit in the Marshall offer. Europe has to help itself to be helped. It can help itself over steel. It needs all it can get, as fast as possible, to restore transport, to rebuild, to renew lost or worn-out equipment. Before the war, Europe produced 52,000,000 tons of steel; now, it is producing 29,000,000 tons. British expansion will pick up 4,000,000, but not before 1952. French plans will pick up 7,000,000 tons, but not before 1950. It is hardly worth while thinking of these faraway supplements, which depend on three to five years of steady progress, when the fabric of Europe is groaning and cracking to its fall now. If they were immediately available, they would not be enough. The Ruhr, an J only the Ruhr, can with swift, long strides catch up with the need of the immediate future; and a plan that does not count on its doing so, and enable it to do so, is no plan, or a maimed and perverted plan. Steel is not less vital than coal, power, fertiliser, and food. Dollars, as such, will not convert the Marshall offer into a programme. Supplies will do it the right kinds, enough of them, produced and delivered soon enough. Even if the United States could spare steel enough to fill the European void and were ready to accept a plan making this inordinate and defeatist demand, and if steel were given a long priority over all other cargoes, still it could not be shipped fart enough. But there must be other cargoes—food, fertiliser, oil, machines, tools—or reconstruction will falter in the first stage; and Europe’s steel production must be sped back to normal, or there can be no steady progress towards the real object. If the countries of Europe cannot, in a new interdependent independence, regain their ability to live without the dole, they will fall into a chaos from which no dole will rescue them. The worst that could happen now is that the darkening of vision in Europe or in America, or both, will substitute for the central ‘ idea of the Marshall offer—the idea of helping Europe back to strength and solvency—the disruptive idea of charitable aid, scattered on mixed principles of commercial expediency and political patronage.

! Tragedy in Burma Burma, which should within the year achieve independent nationhood, inside or outside the British i Commonwealth, can ill afford the loss of its eight murdered leaders, all members—and among the ablest members—of the Govemor’sExecutive Council, which since the beginning of the year has functioned, in effect, as the Cabinet of a self-governing Burma, more often under the chairmanship of Aung San than of the Governor (Sir Hubert Rance). Burma is not rich in experienced political leaders and most of the members of the Executive Council were new to administrative responsibility. Many were younger than Aung San, who was only 32. Lieutenant-Colonel D. R. Rees-Williams, M.P., chairman of the Burma Frontier Areas Committee of Inquiry, described them as “ idealistic, honest, and in many “ cases inexperienced ”. Members of a revolutionary party that suddenly found itself with its revolution bloodlessly achieved and with the unexpected responsibility of government, they were “ learning “ fast and jettisoning various the- “ ories which did not fit into the pat- “ tern of government ”. Strikes and armed insurrection had to be suppressed by the very people in whose hands they were to have been an instrument.

The death of Aung San will be deplored not only in Burma, where to the great majority of the people he was a national hero, but in Britain, where he was recognised as perhaps the only man capable of rallying the people as a whole to the loyal support of an all-Burmese government. Aung San had a remarkable hold on the imagination of his countrymen, although his record, in British eyes, was equivocal. Police interest in his political activities in 1940 caused him to leave the country. He tetumed with the Japanese to organise an Independence Army to fight against the British, and for his services was decorated by the Japanese Emperor. But it was not long before he and his colleagues learnt that Japanese domination was far more hateful than British rule had ever been. Aung San became the heac( of a new resistance movement, an army raised and led by Burmese officers, and it gave considerable help in the reconquest by the Allies. After the war, when this movement became the political organisation known as the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, it retained, with much of its military form, a leader who was criticised by many for his autocratic and authoritarian methods. When the elections for Burma’s first Constituent Assembly were held recently, the inconsiderable minority parties claimed that the A.F.P.F.L. bribed and bullied its way to its sweeping success at the polls. The British Government, faced at the beginning of the year with the alternatives of transferring power to Burmese hands or of undertaking extensive military operations, had no doubt that, in treating with Aung San, it was dealing with the man best qualified to give his wartorn country strong leadership, stability, and order. In the manner of his death those who accused him of seeking dictatorship seem to he answered. His assassins penetrated to the room where the Burmese Cabinet was meeting as easily as to the unprotected Cabinet room of any democratic country. In the light of this shocking tragedy the words of Dr. Ba Maw, Prime Minister of Burma during the Japanese occupation and one of Aung San’s political opponents, take on the quality of prophecy: “In modern Burma worship of the “ gun has become a fetish. The “Japanese came into Burma—with

“the gun. The British drove them “out—-with the gun”, he said in claiming that the recent elections were dominated by force: “ It is not “elections that are going to decide “Burma’s future, but the gun. The “British drove the Japanese out of “ Burma but they left Japanese “ militarism and power worship Mr Nehru, in a message expressing India’s sympathy, said: “India, “ Burma and Asia indulge in violence “at peril of their freedom”. They still have that lesson to learn.