THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1936 GERMANY AND RUSSIA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22351, 24 February 1936, Page 8

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1936 GERMANY AND RUSSIA

The shadow of Russia darkens the Nazi outlook from Berlin. The understanding between Paris and Moscow, likely to be completed by the formal conclusion of a Franco-Soviet pact, is read as a threat to German aims. For this reading there is reason, but whether it accurately presents causes and effects is open to question. The tendency of the times is to draw Germany and Russia apart into irreconcilable opposition. These neighbours are each bent upon ambitious national programmes, and absorption in these is equally made the more intense because of a realised necessity to overcome domestic obstacles to success. Each is endeavouring to bring a particular order out of chaos, one by the swift imposition of the fiats of a party newly arisen to power, the other by a systematic plan made patient through reverses. This striving, in the economic sphere, i's an occasion of increasing rivalry. But it is in political diplomacy that their mutual hostility is most definitely creating trouble in Nazi minds. Germany's steep ascent has precarious foothold. Herr Hitler and his associates are painfully aware of this. They have so boastfully set out upon it, however, that they cannot easily turn back. They have preferred to make Germany's rights a case against the world. What they apparently did not see was that the only practicable answer to it was the very thing now happening. If they took it into account, as a probable reply inspired by France, they had a fallacious idea that it could assume no serious gravity. Least of all, apparently, did they anticipate a working arrangement between France and Russia.

This unexpected development has come with rapidity. When Hitler embarked on his course of national assertiveness, Russia was not in the League and only on the edge of Europe considered as a diplomatic unit. A Soviet pact with a nation so wholly of the West as France, if regarded by him as a possibility at all, must have been deemed most unlikely. Then the currents were all setting the other way: Russia, whatever might be projected in the way of covert propaganda, was openly seeking no diplomatic alliance anywhere, and France was at the focus of Western international activity. To deal with Germany's frontier needs on the east it seemed to him sufficient to establish better relations with Poland, and in this he succeeded despite the long-standing rapprochement between that country and France. An agreement with Poland could, he thought, serve almost as well as an "Eastern Locarno," which was then forecast as excluding Russia. How dangerously he miscalculated was soon seen. Germany, in accordance with the Hitler determination, left the League: Russia immediately entered it. Side by side with this came Soviet disavowals of secret intrigue to embarrass other nations and also advances in Western co-operation. The political 'scene was entirely changed, and sundry revolting excesses of Nazi barbarity made Germany, instead of Russia, the object of foreign popular reprobation. Russia was relatively in favour, and the Soviet leaders were shrewdly able to tako full advantage of the change. Watching their steps, they walked triumphantly through the opening created by Nazi fanatical blundering. Perhaps Hitler, never an apt pupil of history, misread the events of the Great War •and the Russian Revolution, remembering only the direct and indirect service of these to Germany; certainly he reckoned without a Soviet Russia on friendly terms with a large part of Europe. From the outset Nazi principles were violently anti-Communist. Arising thus, they easily moved to political antipathy to Russia, and in spite of occasional economic reciprocity this antipathy has hardened. To-day it is a fundamental fact in the European situation. France, taking her cue from it, has steadily fostered amity with Russia, and in the new circumstances produced by German aggressiveness has carried this to the point of a formal agreement. The German reaction, to be consistent with earlier national decisions, cannot be very well other than it is, for Hitler's policy has closed the door against any multilateral understanding to which Germany, let alone Russia, can be a party without recantation of every swollen word of defiance. With Britain, with Italy, even with France, there can be bilateral parley, but none at a round table. The German protest against a FrancoSoviet pact takes consequently the well-trodden ground of purely national need of security, this time on the eastern frontier. The protest can avail nothing by its argument that the pact is a "flagrant violation" of Locarno; the Italian denial of this charge is supported by every truthful consideration. And Russia is now too well buttressed in Western diplomacy for German ridicule to be more than an assault in_ vain words. Alone they cannot hinder the pact. They are calculated to play on French fears, but France would be foolish to throw away this substantial chance for the sake of a doubtful gain by any bargain with Germany.