A WAY FOR EUROPE
By MAURICE EDELMAN, M.P.
DRIVEN by the force of things during the war, the Allies found themselves, almost without noticing it, creating joint agencies for the common purpose of victory. S.H.A.E.F., the Combined Food Board, the Combined Raw Materials Board and the Middle East Supply Centre fused British and American authority. Whether executive, as in the case of S.H.A.E.F., or advisory, as in the case of the Combined Food Board, the authority of these organs, having the sanction of Britain and the U.S.A., was accepted unhesitatingly by -both countries. No one complained that the Middle East Supply Centre diminished either British or American sovereignty. As long as it did its war-time job, no one even complained of its " supra- commercial " character. In Russia's case, Britain and the U.S.A. tried energetically to draw her into working organisations of joint concern. Her reluctance didn't prevent Britain from building, with U.S. help, a road through Persia to the Caucasus in order to hasten Lend-Lease supplies, Lend-Lease and U.N.R.R.A., which Russia couldn't afford to ignore, were agencies designed to fit resources to needs in a planned form. They were an ark in which a menagerie of States, many of them normally hostile to each other, lived com- patibly.
As soon as the flood of war subsided the rush to normality began. The victors broke up all the functional agencies which had linked them together for their general advantage—all, that is to say, except those like the European Coal Organisation, formed towards the end of the war—while in London, Paris and Moscow the Foreign Secre- taries fumbled their way towards a political settlement which would, somehow or other, fit a reconstituted 1938 Europe (with suitable adjustments according to taste by the Western and Eastern Powers) into the more generous conceptions of U.N.O. and even of the half- forgotten Atlantic Charter. The repeated failures of the Great Powers to find agreement in political treaties have inclined the Western States of Europe and the U.S.A. to look for pragmatic solutions of their difficulties. The Economic Commission for Europe and the Marshall speech have their origin in the belief that if we can deal with economic difficulties first, political problems will solve themselves.
The political federation of Europe and a universal Parliament may not be attained in our life-time. It is certainly not practical politics to believe that we may reach these elusive constitutional forms in time to use them for the settlement of our immediate troubles. We need new instruments to cope with problems which have no relation or regard to political frontiers—problems of raw materials, energy and food, which co-exist with regions of supply and need. These instru- ments must partake of some of the sovereign authority now residing only in States. But they must not require these States to surrender their full sovereignty—something which no State, in view of the war's exacerbation of nationalism, would yield. The functional agency like the Middle East Supply Centre, or the European Coal Organisa- tion, enlarged to cover all States concerned in the problem, and acting under the supervision of the Economic and Social Council of U.N.O., is the form of organisation which can be established now to serve Europe in her crisis. If military power is U.N.O.'s teeth, then the joint working agency will be its hands.
The European Coal Organisation will soon be merged into the Economic Commission for Europe. It deserves a brief obituary, because its distinguished career will be an example for other bodies as yet unborn. By an agreement of January 1st, 1944, E.C.O., which had already been informally at work for six months, undertook " to promote the supply and equitable distribution of coal and scarce items of coal-mining supplies and equipment, and to safeguard, as far as possible, the interests of both producers and consumers." Every three months E.C.O. received a report from the producer countries setting out what each could make available for the following three months. All the delegates to E.C.O.—from Belgium, Czecho- slovakia, Denmark, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Turkey, Britain and the U.S.A.—then sat in com- mittee, and recommended to the suppliers what allocation should be made to the consumers. The basis of this allocation was need, and,
to ensure that need was properly assessed, the Emergency Economic Committee for Europe gave E.C.O. the appropriate advice. To ensure that the coal moved freely, E.C.O. worked closely with the European Central Inland Transport Organisation, another functional agency of U.N.O., which, like E.C.O., will shortly be assimilated into the Economic Commission for Europe. Of E.C.O. as it existed its biographer may say, " It was poor ; its budget was only L90,000 a year. Its premises were small and dingy ; its rent was £1,200 a year. It had no executive power ; its use depended entirely on the accept- ance of its recommendations by the Governments of its member and associate countries. But it worked."
If, without executive power, E.C.O. could act so effectively, what a prospect opens up of joint agencies sanctioned by the Economic Council of U.N.O. and acting as plenipotentiaries for member States. A Ruhr Coal and Steel Board could work out, with French and Russian participation, a plan to de-congest Ruhr industry and stimu- late the steel industry of Lorraine, while at the same time revitalising the Ruhr industrial system for the benefit of the whole of Europe. And as an economic balance--or perhaps as a political chiasmus—a Silesian Coal and Steel Board, with Anglo-American participation, would re-integrate the industry of Eastern Europe with the South- East, South and West. The distribution of Europe's physical re- sources makes it desirable that East should not be separated from West. E.C.O., without Russia, was effective because Eastern and Western Europe are, more or less, self-contained in the matter of coal supplies. But can we conceive of an effective European Timber Organisation without Russia, when Russia controls so great a pro- portion of Europe's timber? The European Central Inland Trans- port Organisation was never as successful.as E.C.O., because Russia, although a member, was passive, and traffic on the great inland waterways of Eastern and South-East Europe was never unfrozen in a genuine international movement. Today Russia, recognising, as we must, the fact of our interdependence, is more likely to be an active partner in joint agencies, though her planners still cling to the idea of a master Soviet Plan, with centripetal plans for her surrounding satellites. But could not a Danube Valley Authority bring better result;, both for the riparian states and for Russia, than the chain of bilateral trading companies set up by Russia and the countries of the region? With Britain and America taking part, a Danube Valley Authority under U.N.O. could stimulate the whole area into a composite, healthy activity, ending the contentions of the past. A Balkan Trading Corporation, buying the peasants' crops and selling them consumers' goods, lending them money provided by the World Bank for Recon- struction and Development, and helping them through the hard winter, would do more for peace between Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece than a thousand U.N.O. Commissions with exclusively political terms of reference. And would not an Adriatic Corporation, based on Trieste, serve to link together, in a joint economic interest under the supervision of U.N.O., the business of Italy, Yugoslavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland, which finds a focus in the port? Trieste might then become a knot, uniting Central and Southern Europe, instead of a likely casus belli.
The rivers of the world, which ignore frontiers, can serve the common purposes of States. The Foreign Secretary has already spoken of a project to harness the waters of the Alpine watershed to provide hydro-electric power for Austria, Italy, Switzerland and perhaps Hungary. In Cairo the pashas incite the fellahin against Britain with the charge that we want to stay in the Sudan and control the waters of the Upper Nile, and so threaten Egyptian sovereignty. Might there not be a Nile Valley Authority (with Egyptian, British, Sudanese and Belgian representation) as part of a great Middle East Water Authority, to control the Nile's waters, under U.N.O., in the interest of all the peoples of the Valley? That is the way both to peace and to prosperity for the hungry, diseased and over-populous Egyptian fellahin. Perhaps the Middle East Water Authority could bring Jews and Arabs together in a scheme for the Negev. The Iraq irrigation project might move rapidly forward with its help. The oil of the Middle East and the trade of Northern China are, at one and the same time, essential for the world's economic well- being, and are of international concern ; yet, treated as prizes, are a threat to peace. Where the nations of the world clash in the search for raw materials and commerce, there is an opportunity of establish- ing a functional agency to promote their common interest. A Middle East Oil Corporation? A North China Trading Corporation? Business-men and politicians may not like the idea. But there is a force of things in peace as in war which may drive us, despite our- selves, to our salvation.
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