Documents on International Affairs, ed. Frankland Noble

[p021] Documents on International Affairs, 1957. Selected and edited by Noble Frankland. Oxford University Press, 70s. These substantial volumes might be called ‘Studies in competitive window-dressing ’. The Survey covers the public diplomatic activity of the powers from the Bandung Conference, through the Summit Conference at Geneva and the Baghdad and Warsaw Pacts to the opening moves in the Anglo-Franco-Israeli aggression in Egypt. The Documents deal especially with the intrigues in the Middle East after Suez. There is a running record of more or less peaceful co-existence. The wiseacres intone; ‘While they are talking, they are not fighting’. More important it is to establish what else they are doing. Here they are: the Cold War diplomats who yearn for peace by agreement, who can never reach a stable formula. They make agreements on the basis of a momen- tary balance of forces. When either side wants to break an agreement, it represents its aims and interests (and its bad faith) as necessary for main- taining peace, ‘unmasking’ its adversaries as warmongers. This display of literary ingenuity takes places in the early Lonsdale and middle Blake periods, with who knows what CIA and MI5 agents across the curtain? None of these documents points a way to removing the underlying causes of world tension, the necessity of US imperialism to move against the smaller imperialists and to check the rising power of the colonial peoples and the Soviet bloc. They all accept an uneasy peace as the setting in which new wars are prepared and unrest within each sphere of influence is dealt with. This is the reality in which anyone who relies on peaceful co-existence by negotiations is placing his faith—wishful thoughts apart. J.A. 59 Hushed Up