PARTISAN REVIEW
Take so elementary a handbook of politics as Lippmann's
U.S. Foreign
Policy.
Writing in 1943, he takes up the question of growing fissures
among the Allies, and notes: ". . . a Russian policy of aggrandizement
in Europe, one which threatened the national liberties of her neighbors,
would
[should]
inexorably be regarded as such a threat to Britain
and America that they would begin to encourage the nations which
resisted Russia." And again: " ... the objective test of whether there
is to be peace or war will be whether the borderland between Russia
and the Atlantic states is settled by consent or by pressure, dictation,
and diplomatic violence. This borderland begins with Finland in the
North and includes Sweden, and extends through Poland, the Danubian
nations, the Balkan nations, to Turkey, and it includes Germany." This
was not prophecy, but the simplest (and not, by far, the most incisive)
attempt to look at the real and permanent factors of contemporary
politics. Nor is it so amazing to find E. H. Carr in his
Conditions of
Peace
(
1942), writing on the basis of things all thoughtful people knew
since Keynes of 1919, outlining the principles of an ERP which the
Western nations could ignore only at their direst peril-the necessity
for the immediate organization of a European Relief Commission, a
European Transport Corporation, a European Construction and Public
Works Authority, a European Planning Authority.... The years have
fled, and we have paid a high price for our incapacities in political theory
and social analysis.
The
di~,
I am afraid, was cast when Eisenhower made his rather
ignorant decision that the taking of Berlin would be "a mere show"
and allowed the Soviets to enter the capital and to reach the Elbe.
Moscow's machine for the occupation dug in. Today, frankly, it is in–
conceivable how-short of another war-the Communist dictatorship
in Germany can ever be displaced. There has been a fundamental,
if
somewhat chaotic, revolution in the economy with the introduction of
the chief measures of economic socialism : an extensive land reform
(division of the great estates), and considerable anticapitalist expropria–
tion (sometimes as
V olksbetriebe
in the name of anti-Nazism, sometimes
as Soviet trusts in the name of the workers' fatherland). But never before
has it been so clearly apparent how little the formal character of prop–
erty relationships has to do with the establishment of a good and reason–
able society. Certainly, if one were to inquire seriously what has hap–
pened to the foundation of dictatorship and totalitarianism in this
great chunk of Germany since the Nazi fanatics were swept away, it
would call for a radical reappraisal of our old notions of the extent
to which Hitlerism and Stalinism, national socialism and national com-
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