Word: rhine
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Only three months ago, Ludwig Erhard was firmly maintaining that if Charles de Gaulle insisted on pulling his troops out of the unified NATO command, he could hardly keep 72,000 of them on German soil, no matter how much he wanted to keep a watch on the Rhine. "There can be no throwback to an occupation status," Erhard declared. Then, as De Gaulle's July 1 deadline for France's NATO withdrawal began to creep nearer, Erhard allowed technical experts in Paris to negotiate a "temporary" agreement under which the French troops might stay in Germany...
From the moment De Gaulle arrived, everything pointed to success for the visitor from Paris. What with his defeat at the North Rhine-Westphalia polls fortnight ago and the constant badgering of the "Gaullist" wing of his party, Erhard presumably felt it was no time to give his enemies grounds for charging him with gumming up relations with France. In any case, he gave De Gaulle a reception that was far beyond what protocol requires for an ordinary working visit. Honor guards and anthems were in profusion, and Erhard's luncheon toast was especially cordial...
...locale was North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state in West Germany and, with its vast Rhine-Ruhr coal-and-steel complex, the industrial heartland of the nation. The state's 17 million inhabitants represent fully a third of the West German electorate, and exercise a political power that in U.S. terms would equal California's and New York's combined. Heavily Catholic, the region has traditionally given wide majorities to Erhard's Christian Democratic Union. Hence the surprise last week when, in the state's first election since 1962, Willy Brandt's Social...
...handle angry workers, and it was probably no coincidence that Gelsenkirchen voters turned more powerfully against the C.D.U. on election night than did any other town. At week's end, Erhard and his lieutenants were undecided whether to continue with a bare-majority coalition government in North Rhine-Westphalia, or to let the Socialists rule as a minority government. Erhard himself is firmly set against a grand coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists, for fear that if it is established on the state level, it may become necessary on the federal level. That could spell derailment for the Wahllokomotive...
That act of friendly persuasion is quite in keeping with the French role in Europe. De Gaulle shares the traditional French fear of Germany, and has been reluctant to see his trans-Rhine neighbor reunite. In that, De Gaulle is clearly a Frenchman first-but with a pan-European difference. As he said during his election campaign last year: "This country, this France which has bandaged her wounds, and God knows they were serious; this France which is regaining her power; ah, yes, she is devoting herself to establishing an equilibrium in the world. In brief, we are playing...