Foreign News: THE SAAR

THE Saar, the troublesome little territory that almost wrecked all the European agreements last week, is well worth a quarrel. A place of rolling green hills laced with gritty factories, it is the most heavily populated area in Europe, with nearly 1,000,000 inhabitants in its 900 square miles. The vast majority are Germans; they drink beer, not wine, and French is seldom heard. But France has an appeal to Saarlanders too: an appeal to the pocketbook.

Ruled for early centuries by obscure princes, the Saar has been fought over by Germany and France for the past two centuries. German since 1915, it was handed over to French control under League of Nations auspices after World War I. In 1935 the Saar enthusiastically voted itself into Hitler's Germany in a plebiscite, and survived to regret it. After World War II, the Saar was linked in economic union with the French; in return, France agreed to scale down reparations from Germany.

With its coal mines (17 million tons annually) and its steel furnaces (3,000,000 tons), the Saar is the counterweight France wants to offset the industrial might of West Germany. With the Saar, France's steel production is near West Germany's (13 million tons v. 16 million); without the Saar and with the Saar added to West Germany, France would have little more than half of West Germany's output (11 million tons v. 18 million).

By political logic, all arguments point to union with Germany. But both sides recognize that the Saar is the smelter for the iron mines of Lorraine in France, and cannot thrive in the German market cut off from Lorraine. Even the Saar's Germans recognize this: in the 1952 elections, they gave a surprisingly heavy majority to parties supporting continued economic linkage with France. Ideally, most look hopefully for the day when a real European community would allow them to get their iron from Lorraine while allied with Germany politically.