EDC THE EUROPEAN ARMY
IN a prefab tacked on to the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, a dozen staff officers are huddled in talk. They are the advance guard of the European Defense Community (EDC)—the curious alphabetic device that is supposed to fuse the armies of France, Germany, Italy and the Low Countries into a single European Army. Among them is the first German general ever to participate in Western strategic planning: Hans Speidel, better known as Rommel's chief of staff.
The officers' common language is French, and one bitter phrase dominates their conversation. "En principe [in principle]," they say, there is a European Army uniform. No one knows what color it will be, but en principe it exists. Nor has anyone laid eyes on the European Army boot, though en principe, footwear will be worn by every one of the 2,000,000 soldiers who, en principe, will serve.
EDC is like that: it exists only in principle. All its members, except West Germany, have long since committed their armies to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose Supreme Commander is an American: General Alfred M. Gruenther. West Germany has no army, and as a defeated enemy, may not legally rearm until a peace treaty has been signed and sealed. To make German arms palatable to Europeans who still bore the teethmarks of Nazi aggression, a Frenchman (ex-Premier René Pleven) suggested EDC, which would add German strength to NATO, but still enable the West to keep an eye on German militarism.
All of a year's hopes have gone into pleading EDC's case before the Parliaments of Europe, yet in mid-1953, nearly three years after Pleven's proposal, West German rearmament is still a chimera. On both sides of the Atlantic, suspicion is hardening into the conviction that EDC 1) will not be ratified this year, and 2) may never be ratified at all.
The Girl Was a Boy. Only in the Low Countries have parliamentarians shown any real enthusiasm for EDC. The Netherlands' lower chamber ratified EDC by 75 votes to 11 (TIME, Aug. 3). A special committee of the Belgian Parliament has also approved the text, but Belgian lawyers insist that a constitutional amendment is needed.
Bigger obstacles block EDC in the three big nations that are its centerpiece:
ITALY'S Alcide de Gasperi is the most singleminded advocate of European "integration." Last week his cabinet fell.
WEST GERMANYs Parliament, goaded by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, is the only European legislature that has passed EDC through both houses. But is German rearmament constitutional? The German Federal Court will not decide until after the German elections on Sept. 6, and if it obeys Mister Dooley's law, the judges will follow the election returns. Adenauer's Socialist opponents are pledged to ditch EDC in favor of "German unity"—although they have not explained how they will achieve unity.