THE NATIONS: A New Tide

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Out of a welter of confusion, inertia, committee meetings and high-minded oratory, three propositions last week seemed to be taking shape:

¶That while the U.S. and Europe increasingly enjoy the good life, many nations outside the Communist bloc are getting more populous and relatively poorer. ¶That the U.S. should do no less about it, but that Europe should do more. ¶That someone ought to provide focus, plans, and machinery for all the scattered remedies that so far have not been extensive enough, or inspiringly imaginative, or outstandingly successful.

Latest attempts to articulate this changed mood:

¶U.S. Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon, on a flying trip to Europe, preached the need to end European discrimination against the dollar and for prosperous Europe to do its bit elsewhere. The U.S., having donated or lent $75.8 billion to foreign countries since 1945, could not bear the burden alone, nor could any single nation. ¶ Britain's Sir Oliver Franks, onetime ambassador to Washington, and now chairman of Lloyds Bank, coined a vivid, if not quite precise, name for the new need. Instead of a familiar East-West crisis, he talked of a North-South axis, proposed that the world's industrial "north" form a committee, with the U.S. as full partner, to coordinate and share the burden of assistance to the nonindustrialized "southern" regions. "If twelve years ago the balance of the world turned on the recovery of Western Europe, now it turns on a right relationship of the industrial north of the globe to the developing south," he said.

¶ The U.S.'s Paul Hoffman, pioneer administrator of the Marshall Plan and now managing director of the United Nations Special Fund, saw a need for a coordinated global effort to replace sporadic philanthropy. Said Hoffman: "All countries, whether their incomes are high, medium or low, must in their own self-interest accept proportionate responsibility for a rapidly expanding world economy."

Mission to India. In past days, proposals to pool foreign aid have met with congressional insistence that there should be Made-in-U.S.A. labels on all gifts sent abroad in order to win cold-war advantage. And until lately, European nations have talked poor mouth (Italy, for example, likes to bring up its own impoverished south, the Mezzogiorno, as one of the world's underdeveloped regions). Or they have insisted that British spending in the Commonwealth, French aid to its Community, and Belgian assistance to the Congo must be reckoned as each country's contribution to taking care of the rest of the world.