Word: mende
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...before the Bundestag reconvened to lay German disappointment at Konrad Adenauer's door, before the Bevanite "No Guns for Huns" campaign seduced Britain's Labor Party into opposition to any German rearmament, before the U.S. got too involved in its fall election campaign, before France's Mendès-France could upset the applecart with another of his drastic alternatives...
...State Department, with no plan of its own to offer, acted as if this were a problem for Europeans only. Talk of an EDC without France died almost as soon as it began. Konrad Adenauer contended that EDC might still be revived, but he sounded neither convinced nor convincing. Mendès-France proposed a looser European coalition that would include Britain, but Sir Winston Churchill (for all his high-minded talk of European citizenship in 1947) had said before, and last week said again, that Britain was unwilling to get too involved on the Continent...
...left and to right, EDC's enemies thundered. Former President Vincent Auriol, a respected voice, cried that EDC "would sunder France from the French Union." Charles de Gaulle, who dislikes both EDC and Mendès with equal intensity, announced that "a surge comes from the depths that will protect France's independence." But as the week wore on, the answering fire grew louder. "If France fails to ratify EDC," editorialized the conservative Figaro, "she will find herself on the road to Prague. All else is sophistry, self-deceit and imposture...
...Opposite me," said Mendès, "were men who were exasperated-and they said so-by the policy adopted by France during the past few years. In diplomatic language, they told me: 'The rearmament of Germany was proposed to you, you proposed the European Army. The European Army was proposed to you, you asked for changes. They were given to you, and then you asked for prior conditions . . . You got those too, and today you ask something new, pending a new Prime Minister, who in six months will ask for something else again...
...Mendès insisted that he wanted no more shilly-shallying. "Once the vote has been taken," he said, "we shall have to accept the consequences and either put the treaty into effect or else adopt a new solution in agreement with our allies...