Time of Decision

"History has flung down a challenge to us—perhaps she will do so only once." So spoke Konrad Adenauer, himself a maker of history, as one day last week he challenged the German Bundestag to ratify the Paris accords. The grim-faced old German titan was opening the last and fateful round in the three-year-old battle to rearm West Germany within the Atlantic alliance. On both sides of the Rhine, and of the Iron Curtain, too, all men knew that this time history required that the fight be fought to a finish.

The Soviet Union unloosed all the resources of its diplomacy and propaganda. For the benefit of the Bundestag, East German Puppet Premier Otto Grotewohl ordered "spontaneous" protest marches "to topple the Paris treaties." The Kremlin followed through with a flurry of diplomatic notes which fell like poisoned confetti on the capitals of Western Europe. Russia's Molotov warned the French government that ratification would "cross out and annul" the 1945 Franco-Soviet treaty of alliance. Britain was sternly advised that the presence of U.S. air bases in East Anglia is "incompatible" with the Anglo-Soviet treaty; six other NATO nations—Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Greece and Turkey—were accused of giving support to "the dangerous remilitarization of Germany."

Scarcely a year ago, such Soviet threats might have been enough to throw many Europeans into a tizzy of alarm. Last week's Communist blustering seemed to misread the mood of Western Europe, and to be almost irrelevant. The fact seemed to be that in a slow, subsurface fashion, the people of Western Europe had finally made up their minds that German rearmament is inevitable. There was plenty of agitation in last week's parliamentary debating in Bonn and Paris, but local passions, not the Kremlin threats, were what caused it.

Britain's House of Commons has already ratified. Iceland followed last week. In Italy, seeing that an overwhelming majority is for ratification, Communist Boss Palmiro Togliatti agreed to limit debate in the Chamber of Deputies, thereby presumably assuring ratification before Christmas. That left Germany and France as the crucial tests.

"Calm & Polite." Looking haggard and erect, Chancellor Adenauer faced not only his Bundestag but a television audience. "Into our hands," said der Alte, "is placed the decision by which to end the epoch of European confusion and wars . . . Let us respond in a way we can justify in the eyes of Germany and the world."