Word: strasbourg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Winston Churchill looked around the quiet, grey-carpeted chamber, with its red leather chairs and chamois-covered walls, hurriedly built for last week's meeting of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe at Strasbourg. Said he: "It is a wonder that we sit here in our new House of Europe, calmly discussing our plans for the future happiness and concord of our peoples and their moral and cultural ideals. It is a wonder, but at least it is better than getting into a panic...
Last week the Council of Europe, meeting at Strasbourg, was dandling the German problem on its knee. How far should the Council go in letting Germany back among the European nations? Should Germany be invited to send an observer-minister? The French objected. Or would the Germans accept the role of mere observers...
This frivolous dalliance with time was not confined to Strasbourg. Paris, London and Washington were all acting as if they had an indefinite period in which to make up their minds about Germany. Nobody faced this fact: if the Red army moved 200 miles from the Western end of Russia's zone of Germany to the French border, the Kremlin would have doubled its present industrial potential for supporting war. If, in terms of high-school algebra, it now takes x Western force to restrain Russia, it will take 2X Western force when the Russians have reached the Rhine...
Churchill begged Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin to press for a Germany able to defend itself. But Bevin replied that he could not urge such a policy on his French allies. Bevin, sick and cautious, left for Strasbourg in no mood for grand designs...
...turned over former Reich property to Adenauer's Bonn government; nobody else may legally lease them. On this basis, Adenauer expressed sharp disappointment with the Western powers. The Saar deal, he said, made it impossible for West German representatives to attend the proposed Council of Europe meetings in Strasbourg...