Page:Foreign Relations of the United States 1948 Volume 1 Part 2.djvu/26

516 time has been unfortunate from the standpoint of the psychology of the German people. They are emerging from this phase of the post-hostilities period in a state of mind which can only be described as sullen, bitter, unregenerate, and pathologically attached to the old chimera of German unity. Our moral and political influence over them has not made headway since the surrender. They have been impressed neither by our precepts nor by our example. They are not going to look to us for leadership. Their political life is probably going to proceed along the lines of a polarization into extreme right and extreme left, both of which elements will be, from our standpoint, unfriendly, ugly to deal with, and contemptuous of the things we value.

We cannot rely on any such Germany to fit constructively into a pattern of European union of its own volition. Yet without the Germans, no real European federation is thinkable. And without federation, the other countries of Europe can have no protection against a new attempt at foreign domination.

If we did not have the Russians and the German communists prepared to take advantage politically of any movement on our part toward partition we could proceed to partition Germany regardless of the will of the inhabitants, and to force the respective segments to take their place in a federated Europe. But in the circumstances prevailing today, we cannot do this without throwing the German people politically into the arms of the communists. And if that happens, the fruits of our victory in Europe will have been substantially destroyed.

Our possibilities are therefore reduced, by the process of exclusion, to a policy which, without pressing the question of partition in Germany, would attempt to bring Germany, or western Germany, into a European federation, but do it in such a way as not to permit her to dominate that federation or jeopardize the security interests of the other western European countries. And this would have to be accomplished in the face of the fact that we cannot rely on the German people to exercise any self-restraint of their own volition, to feel any adequate sense of responsibility vis-à-vis the other western nations, or to concern themselves for the preservation of western values in their own country and elsewhere in Europe.

I have no confidence in any of the old-fashioned concepts of collective security as a means of meeting this problem. European history has shown only too clearly the weakness of multilateral defensive alliances between complete sovereign nations as a means of opposing desperate and determined bids for domination of the European scene. Some mutual defense arrangements will no doubt be necessary as a concession to the prejudices of the other Western European peoples, whose thinking is still old fashioned and unrealistic on this subject.