BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
153
the final argument in favor of risking a showdown with Russia and
China before Japan, too, is swallowed up. These are not altogether
idle thoughts: the crumbling of Congress rule in India within the
next ten years is now regarded as probable by some experts, and as
possible by most. In a decade, therefore, we may have a situation
where European neutralism will feed upon the most powerful of all
arguments: self-preservation, added to the belief that no vital Euro–
pean interests are at stake and that America and Russia can (and
should)
be
left to fight what most Europeans would regard as a
purely imperialist war for the control of the Asian mainland.
It
takes
no great prescience to realize that such a situation would, to put it
mildly, place a severe strain on the cohesion of the Atlantic com–
munity, and needless to say this strain would be enhanced if by that
time the Soviet Union should be fortunate enough to have a non–
Stalinist government (although one committed to expanding the area
under Soviet control by all means judged suitable).
It is here that one begins to touch upon one of the raw and
exposed nerves of European sentiment which responded so powerfully
during the brief springtime of optimism after Stalin's death last
March. In retrospect this period can now be viewed as an ill-fated
precursor of what most European governments hope will gradually
become a genuine move away from Stalinism on the part of Russia's
rulers. In this context it is useful to bear in mind that when people
in London, Paris, Rome or Bonn speculate on the chances of such
a development they are seldom led astray by the wistful, or wishful,
thought that a military dictatorship in Russia (clearly the optimal
solution in the short run) would be addicted to permanent peace.
They assume, on the contrary, that
it
would probably not shrink
from war. ""hat makes them treat even this hypothesis with a certain
stoicism is the belief that Europe might conceivably survive such a
war, whereas it could hardly survive a Russian occupation, if t.hat
occupation were of the "total" kind of which the Germans in 1940-
44 gave other countries a brief foretaste. A Soviet advance into v"est–
ern Europe which went hand in hand with a policy of imposing the
Stalinist pattern would simply be the end of civilization, even if it
did not immediately translate itself (as it probably would ) into mass
deportations behind the Iron Curtain. The only possible response to
