Robert Gerald Livingston

Seventeen months of intricate negotiation involving the four powers responsible for Germany, the two German states and the North Atlantic and Warsaw Treaty alliances have finally yielded a Berlin agreement. It is the first major East-West accord in Europe since the Austrian State Treaty in 1955 and suggests that old-fashioned diplomacy still has its virtues. The agreement's provisions, which are far better than Western foreign offices dared hope when the negotiations began, regulate the thorniest aspects of the Berlin problem, notably the access issue. But they do not solve the problem in the sense of establishing a new status for the city. Indeed, whether the agreement holds up at all depends on whether the present détente in Europe continues. Experience with Soviet policy has taught that this is not predictable. One result is, however, certain: the agreement compels the West to come fully to terms soon with the second German state. The German Democratic Republic is becoming, as Alice might put it, permanenter and permanenter.