INFLUENCE SPHERES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 28 December 1943, Page 3

INFLUENCE SPHERES

NOT FAVOURED BY POLES CRITICISM OF SUGGESTIONS BY GENERAL SMUTS Commenting on General Smut S’s last speech the “Dziennik Polski” in London wrote on December 6: —“If Great Britain’s interest's were artificially limited to those certain countries of Western Europe, it means the recognition of a dogma of influence spheres, that wry dogma, which it was one of the primary aims of this great war to completely destroy. Moreover, has not the danger of returning to that conception been officially cancelled by the Moscow conference? The specific interest in the countries of Western Europe, General Smuts explained by bonds of common forms of life which unite them. • We Poles estimate the value of those bonds perhaps even better than countries situated west of our frontiers, but we do not think the area of that common Western “Weltanschauung” is limited only to States situated on the continent’s Western peripheries. France’s role .cannot be measured by potentials of her material strength today, it must be measured by those values and positive possibilities of which there is no lack in the French nation. It is always dangerous to divide Europe into West and East, for Europe constitutes a unit of civilisation and thus there exists among its citizens a sense of responsibility for'the fate of each of its nations. This communal sense was so seriously threatened by Germany’s revolt against civilisation that we feel all the more obliged to exert every effort to restore that unity. How well Mr Churchill understood this when he spoke of those great cultural values which the old nations of Europe brought into the general treasury. We may add, nations great or small, strong or weak.”