Agreement on Germany

History was the honored guest at the London conference. In stately Lancaster House, where Chopin once played mazurkas for Queen Victoria, the accolade of sovereignty was restored, in all but name, to defeated West Germany. Britain dramatically abandoned a centuries-old tradition of "splendid isolation" from the Continent. The U.S. firmly offered to keep an American army in Europe so long as Europe is threatened. Both offers were made to reassure France, finicky with ancient fears which history was rendering obsolete. France responded by agreeing to Germany's rearmament and admission into the North Atlantic alliance.

All the commitments hung on promises rather than on comfortable certainties. But they were promises solemnly made by men who, in their own words, hoped "to liquidate the past and to prepare for the future."

First Day. An awareness that failure could shatter the Atlantic alliance lent a grave and urgent air to the chandeliered conference room where the nine foreign ministers assembled at the invitation of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. They sat about a huge, hollow, rectangular table covered with deep blue felt—Chairman Anthony Eden, lounging debonairly; John Foster Dulles, doodling; Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak, looking more than ever like a plumper and younger Winston Churchill; Canada's L. B. Pearson; Konrad Adenauer, gaunt and silent; Gaetano Martino, at his first international appearance as Italy's Foreign Minister; Joseph Bech from Luxembourg; Johan W. Beyen of The Netherlands; dark-jowled Premier Pierre Mendès-France, reading a magazine. The pressing task before them was to fill the void left by the French rejection of EDC—in short, to bring an armed Germany into the alliance without losing the French,

"This is a conference which must succeed," Anthony Eden began. Mendès-France, whose views were known the least and counted the most, hastened to explain his government's "philosophy" toward German rearmament. Diplomatic brows furrowed as Mendés reeled off the list of familiar French objections: controls, limits, agreements on the Saar. Then Mendès made a big concession. In principle, he said, France would no longer oppose West German sovereignty or its admission to NATO. "The French government," explained the man who had stood in five-to-one isolation at the Brussels Conference only five weeks before, "does not feel like opposing an objective shared by a large number of others."

Konrad Adenauer replied, matching concession with concession: West Germany would 1) pledge itself not to exceed the twelve-division strength laid down for it in EDC, 2) submit to controls, so long as they were not discriminatory. It was a good beginning.