“HAVES” AND “HAVE NOTS”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLI, Issue 20340, 12 February 1936, Page 8

“HAVES” AND “HAVE NOTS”

“Austria to day is content, with her present borders, and her people ask only security against aggression.” In these words, Prince Starhemberg, Vice-Chan-cellor of Austria, discussed the future of Central Europe, in an exclusive interview with a representative of an English journal. In part, at least, the ViceChancellor’s views will be endorsed by the peoples of Europe, particularly in relation to the desire for security. But if the cause of world unrest to-day is that several powerful nations are by no means content with their present borders, because they have deeply-grounded expansionist ideas, investigators need not go very far to discover the fundamental causes of the dangerous situation confronting Europe to-day. The other day Madame Tabouis, a. well-informed French journalist, writing in L’Oeuvre, declared that it is believed Germany lias three plans for expansion under consideration : First, the Goering plan providing for an attack on the Ukraine; secondly, one contemplating expansion in

Central Europe through Austria and Czecho-Slovakia; and thirdly, one envisaging the invasion of France, via not only Belgium but also Holland. It cannot be denied that to-day Europe is suffering from a new and violent attack of fear. Germany fears Russia and the proFrench bloc that has been consolidated on her eastern frontiers. Russia, on her part, is reaching out her diplomatic arms to embrace France and Britain, because the Soviet is afraid of being caught in the pincers between Germany and Japan; France fears a re-armed Germany, while Austria, noting Italy's grave predicament in Abyssinia, fears the expansionist plans of Germany; while the new States that had their birth in the Versailles Treaty, fear that they may not be able to keep their 1919 frontiers. Manifestly, the genesis of Europe's new attack of fear is the unstable conditions that remain in Europe as the heritage of the impositions of the Versailles Treaty. The world is divided into two groups, the revisionists, who demand substantial modifications of the Peace Treaty, and the group of nations inspired by France who visualise the Treaty and the League of Nations, as a one way-gun exclusively designed to protect French security and to preserve the Versailles Settlement. This means that Europe and the Far East is divided into two camps, the “Haves” and the “Have Nots.” Can it be denied, then, that the expansionist aims of Germany, Italy and Japan substantially accelerated the coming of the crisis that now threatens the peace of the world? As one noted authority puts it:

The “Haves,” who control the outlets and the supplies of raw materials, have shut their frontiers to emigrants and goods; this has complicated the currency situation; and the “HaveNots” have been left without outlets for their population or their produce, and without means of purchasing supplies for their industries. Unemployment and privation followed; it is not to be wondered at that Germany and Italy have taken to desperate measures and that every State is drawing itself into itself and determining to become self-sufficient for very fear. Clear deductions can be drawn from the plain evidence before the world to-day. Germany, Italy, and Japan and in a lesser degree Hungary, must expand. Dr. Follick, in his new book on world affairs, “Facing Facts,” which is a vigorous and somewhat alarmist piece of journalism, thus diagnoses the chief cause of the crisis in Europe to-day: “At the Conference of Versailles and ever since that Conference, the whole preoccupation of France has been to see how she can make up the difference of her thirty-eight millions of population against Germany’s sixty millions, and it is this preoccupation which has kept France in continual unrest since 1919."

This diagnosis may be wholly true or it may not, but the fact remains that under the enactments of the Treaty of Versailles, France has seen several millions of Germans handed over to Czecho-Slovakia and Poland; she has watched with satisfaction, the creation of the Polish Corridor which divided Eastern Prussia; and she has resorted to pre-war methods and built a wall of powerfully-armed allies along Germany’s eastern boundary consisting of Poland and Czechoslovakia, buttressed first by Jugoslavia and Rumania and now under an Eastern Pact powerfully reinforced by Russia’s offer of mutual assistance. Dr. Follick calls the last chapter of his book, “The European Mess,” and what a tangle confronts the world? The safety valves have been sealed up and the “Have-Nots” have reached exasperation point. Obviously, the danger of an explosion is very real unless some drastic modification of existing treaties (which no one seems to have the courage to propose) is undertaken without delay.