Word: rearmaments
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Change of Plan. Opposition to EDC in the French Assembly falls roughly into two groups: 1) opponents of West German rearmament in any form (this includes the Communists); 2) Frenchmen who accept the need for German arms but dislike the treaty's constraints on French sovereignty (in order to put similar supranational restraints on Germany). Mendès hoped to win enough Assembly votes from this second group by adding these key revisions or "protocols...
...debate until the summer recess ends in October or November-and during this additional period, Mendès reassured the left wing of his majority, Russia would have time to come forward with genuine concessions in Western Europe if it wanted badly enough to halt German rearmament. So Russia too was being offered an alternative. All in all, Mendès' plan was devious, perhaps too devious. Le Figaro, bellwether of French conservative opinion, called it "full of intellectual seduction" but "fragile...
...there much evidence that Mendès intended to exert his dynamism to press really hard for EDC; he remained vulnerable, in the deathly climate of Geneva, to Communist pressure against the No. 1 objective of U.S. cold war strategy: the rearmament of Germany. "In Mendès-France's office in the Quai d'Orsay," cabled TIME correspondent André Laguerre, "I could hear the worn old cry: 'We must do nothing brutal to provoke the Communists...
...decided to go it without France, at least part of the way. Unless France acts on EDC before its Parliament quits for the summer (around Aug. 15), Washington and London would give West Germany the self-government it deserves and demands, without waiting for a decision on German rearmament under...
Ultimatum. The idea of tying Bonn's sovereignty to the EDC treaty had been France's in the first place, designed to bring about German rearmament without a revival of German militarism. Bonn would get self-government only by simultaneously agreeing to put its armed forces under supranational command. But while Bonn gave its assent, France fiddled with its approval, and left Chancellor Konrad Adenauer exposed to increasingly dangerous attacks at home for failing to win sovereignty for his people...