Paris: Still Deadlocked

If Poet T. S. Eliot were a foreign correspondent covering the Paris conference, he might sum up the week's work in one of his own famous phrases: "The intolerable wrestle with words and meanings." All week, the Foreign Ministers' deputies wrestled with such words as "demilitarization," such vague meanings as "examination of the causes of the present international tensions in Europe."

Gromyko had started out by demanding that the agenda for a future Big Four conference include the "demilitarization" of Germany and steps against "remilitarization" (TIME, March 19). Last week Gromyko agreed to drop the word remilitarization, but insisted on keeping "demilitarization." The West was willing, if the reference was linked to the larger consideration of all causes of European tension (which would later permit the Western Foreign Ministers to bring up Russian and satellite armaments).

In the long, futile debate, there were two flashes of clarity, both contributed by Andrei Gromyko in moments of almost absent-minded frankness. At one point he burst out with the remark that the Foreign Ministers, when & if they met, would talk about what ever they chose, anyway, regardless of the agenda drafted for them. Another time, he declared angrily that the West ought to suspend its plans for defense of Western Germany while the Paris conference was going on.

Both remarks supported the suspicion that Russia's only aim in Paris was to make anti-Western propaganda and to delay or destroy Western defense plans. This simple fact was getting all but lost in the verbiage. The Western nations stood fast against Gromyko at the conference table, but they were not doing enough to take their case from the conference table at Paris to the world.

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