In a divided world and one in which there is no peace, a nation's military power fixes the extent to which it can hope to influence its own destiny. Only a few years ago, Europe west of the Stettin-Trieste line encompassed four out of seven Great Powers. Today it is militarily and economically prostrate and sapped by political dissent and moral incertitude. The unexampled accumulation of power across the Atlantic and beyond the Iron Curtain turns this weakness into relative impotence. No wonder that many western Europeans have reacted against this striking change in their fortunes by demanding that their several countries recapture jointly what as individual nations they have irretrievably lost.

The problem before us is a formidable one but its elements are simple. Many years ago Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the day when each of the European nations, caught between the mass of Americans and the mass of Russians, would feel itself tragically weak, indeed powerless.

The following pages are based on the last six months of 1948 which the writer spent in England, France and Italy. During this period Marshall aid had begun to bear certain fruit. On the other hand the international situation, already bad at the opening of the period, had deteriorated cumulatively as time passed. The Berlin deadlock, a symbol of the will of East and West, continued as before; and not even the beginning of a solution was reached at the United Nations assembly in Paris in die autumn. All over Europe people were preoccupied widi the economic crisis; but also by the direat of a new war. A military committee composed of Great Britain, France and Benelux was formed in the autumn under the chairmanship of Marshal Montgomery. There remained problems about this committee's effectiveness as well as about the extent to which other proposals for Western union were practicable at present. While in each country in Western Europe common people and politicians are talking more about union than ever before, in practice separatist tendencies in each shrunken western nation are still at work and travel to, or independent contact with, neighboring countries is a far more difficult business today than it was in 1939.

The debate over the nature of American federalism did not end, as is so frequently maintained, with the victory of die North in the Civil War. Indeed, it is inconceivable that a conflict of such proportions could ever; be reconciled as readily in the intellectual sphere as in the military. For at least three decades following the termination of that struggle, scholars, jurists and publicists continued, with a fervor and prolixity rivalling that of the pre-war debates, to explore the issues and constitutional questions associated with nullification, secession and the locus of sovereignty in the American Union. The great bulk of this post-war writing on federalism was the work of the victors and tended, therefore, to express “nationalist” or “dual federalist” interpretations. Despite an atmosphere hostile to the dissemination of theories that continued to view the states as sovereign bodies, defenses of particularism continued to appear. Among these was the treatise on constitutional history produced by Alexander H. Stephens.

Is there a clear-cut Soviet concept of satellite states? Apparently not, for, from the official Soviet point of view a satellite state east of the Iron Curtain is an anomaly: ca n'existe pas. The very idea, the Soviets would have us believe, is an aberration, a falsification concocted, to use the Communist jargon, by the “ideological armbearers of the American monopolists and imperialists.” Unfortunately, this stand is not corroborated by facts. It is for us in the Western world as well as for the millions of private, honest citizens in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe that the existence of satellite states behind the Iron Curtain means a most disquieting and indeed a sinister reality.

The term “satellite state” is first of all a question of political semantics. If one consults the records of the United Nations Commission which has just completed its work on the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he can readily appreciate the polarity between our approach and that of the Soviet camp to a whole register of political definitions.

The constitutional development of the governments of eastern Europe in modern times has varied with the particular circumstances and personalities of each national group. Yet in its broader aspects this development has revealed a remarkably uniform pattern. The minority peoples of the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires met the challenge of alien laws and discriminatory economic conditions in the nineteenth century by adopting as their program the political principles popularized by the French revolution. By the outbreak of World War I, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania had achieved an independent status, and with the exception of the last-named had established a tradition of parliamentary government and the beginnings of a liberal democracy. A new era of opportunities and problems, inaugurated by the victory of the Allies in 1918, saw the creation of the enlarged Yugoslavia and Rumania, and of the new Czecho-slovakia. Two years later, with the stabilization of Russia's western frontier, Finland, the three Baltic states, and Poland were established as independent states. Albania and Bulgaria continued with modest changes of frontier and political outlook, and took their place beside a recalcitrant Hungary and a chastened Greece.

The arrest, trial and sentence for life of Joseph Cardnial Mindszenty, Primate of Hungary, has profoundly shaken the conscience of the Western world and provoked a wave of protests on a scale unheard of before. The incident occurred at the climax of the tension between West and East. The figure of the Cardinal became the personification of a world-wide struggle between two fundamentally different conceptions of life. His broken resistance—both physical and psychological—symbolizes the fate of the millions oppressed and silenced by a ruthless Communist minority in East Europe. The recntations and self-contradictory confessions in the course of the trial had all the characteristics of the usual travesties of justice in Communistdominated countries. Pope Pius XII rightly stated in his allocution of February 14, 1949, that the behavior of Cardinal Mindszenty “appeared an accusation not against himself but against his very accusers and condemners.”

The term “satellite” clearly indicates a relationship of inequality and dependence between master and “follower” states. It stands to reason, therefore, that dealings with the present satellite states in Eastern Europe cannot be viewed in the same light as relations with completely independent nations, but must be considered special problems within the general field of American-Soviet relations.

It is one of the ironies of history that of all the belligerent nations of World War II the civilian-minded United States alone fought the war in almost exclusively military terms, concentrating her efforts on victory in the field of batde and giving scant attention to the post-war constellations. In line with this short-range attitude, the United States supported two principal political concepts with regard to Eastern and South Eastern Europe. She clearly recognized that the Soviet Union had a right to have friendly governments along her frontier, that is, governments which would not permit their countries to become avenues of aggression against the Soviet Union.