Recovery
W
estern Europe’s recovery after 1945 was robust. Economic recovery, which required the restoration of severely damaged but essentially sound and skilled economies, was powerfully engendered through American financial aid, which was itself impelled both by generosity and by fears of the collapse of coun-tries of vital concern to the United States in the Cold War. The Marshall Plan (1947) was, with the North Atlantic Treaty (1949), a crucial factor in the tempo of western Europe’s material repair and spiritual reassurance.When the war ended the countries of western Europe were in a state of physical and economic collapse, to which was added the fear of Russian dominance by frontal attack or subversion. During the war plans had been made for the relief of immediate needs in Europe. The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) was created in 1943 and functioned until 1947: a European Central Inland Transport Organization, a European Coal Organization and an Emergency Committee for Europe were estab-lished and merged in 1947 in the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe (ECE).
These organizations assumed that Europe’s ills could be treated on a continental basis, but the Cold War destroyed this assumption and, although the ECE continued to exist and issued valuable Economic Surveys from 1948 onwards, Europe became bisected for economic as well as political purposes.
The immediate precursors of American economic aid were the failure of the con-ference of foreign ministers in Moscow in March and April 1947 and the Truman Doctrine whereby, in March, the United States took over Britain’s role of supporting Greece and Turkey and rationalized it in anti-communist terms. In June General Marshall, then secretary of state, propounded at Harvard the plan which bears his name and which offered to all Europe (including the USSR) economic aid up to 1951 on the basis that the European governments would accept responsibility for adminis-tering the programme and would themselves contribute to European recovery by some degree of united effort. The Marshall Plan was a bridge back to normality, to be financed with $17 billion of American money to resuscitate industry, modernize agriculture and ensure financial stability. It required the creation of a European organization; the
Russian refusal of the offer, for the USSR and its dependants, turned the organization into a western European one. Sixteen countries established a Committee for European Economic Co-operation which assessed their requirements in goods and foreign exchange for the years 1948–52 and was converted in April 1948 into the more perman-ent Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). Western Germany was represented through the three western commanders-in-chief of occupation forces until October 1949 when German representatives were admitted. The United States and Canada became observer members of the organization in 1950 and subsequently co-operation was developed with Yugoslavia and Spain. At the American end the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948 created the Economic Co-operation Administration (ECA) to supervise the European Recovery Programme (ERP). In the following years the OEEC became the principal instrument in western Europe’s transition from war to peace. It revived European production and trade by reducing quotas, creating credit and providing a mechanism for the settlement of accounts between countries. While it was a government-to-government and not a supranational organization, it neverthe-less inculcated international attitudes and fostered habits of economic co-operation which survived the ending of the ERP. It was replaced in 1960 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in which the United States, Canada and Japan were full members and which extended the work of the OEEC into the developing areas of the world.
The establishment of the OEEC coincided with the signing in March 1948 of the Treaty of Brussels by Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg (the last three compendiously referred to as Benelux from the time when they formed a customs union in 1947). This treaty, like the Anglo-French Treaty of Dunkirk of 1947, was directed against a revival of the German threat but contained in addition provi-sions for political, economic and cultural co-operation through standing committees and a central organization and was seen by at least some of its promoters as a step towards a broader military alliance with the United States. Truman, speaking of the need for universal military training and selective military service in the United States, so interpreted it and the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, Arthur H.
Vandenberg, proposed and carried a motion in favour of American aid to regional mil-itary organizations which served the purposes of American policy: the senator was in essence advocating a military pact between the United States and western Europe, a military counterpart to Marshall’s economic plan. The North Atlantic Treaty, signed in April 1949 by the United States, Canada and ten European countries, gave the latter for at least 20 years a guarantee of their continuing independence and integrity against Russian attack by formalizing and institutionalizing the American intention to remain in Europe and play the role of a European power. At this date the Russians, like the Chinese 15 years later, had large and frightening land forces which weighed heavily on all those within their reach but lacked a diversified, modern armament capable of engaging the United States. The North Atlantic Treaty brought American air power
and nuclear weapons to bear in order to inhibit the use of Russian land forces in the area designated by the treaty.
The European members of this new alliance were comparatively passive benefici-aries who, in spite of providing 80 per cent of its forces in Europe, were dependent on the far more significant American contribution, without which their own contribution was irrelevant to their main needs and fears. Although in terms the treaty was a col-lective security arrangement, it was more like the protectorate treaties of an earlier age whereby a major power had taken weaker territories under its wing. The treaty created a permanent organization (NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) for polit-ical discussion and military planning and some of its makers envisaged the growth of something more than a military alliance – a community or union. But nothing of the kind emerged for a variety of reasons: the enormous disparity between the power of the United States and any other member, the failure of the European members to coalesce into a political unit commensurate with the United States, the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean, the unquestioning addiction of Americans to the sovereignty which seemed to them old-fashioned in others, the revival of European power and confidence, and the waning of the Russian threat halfway through the life span of the treaty.
For almost half a century NATO was a principal instrument in the Cold War. Western Europe, with the Atlantic and Mediterranean seas, was its theatre of operations. The European members of the alliance provided the bulk of its forces, the Americans the bulk of the equipment and money. The Europeans were careful to avoid any form of military association among themselves which might seem to weaken the Euro-American link. They were more reluctant than the Euro-Americans to acknowledge that an anti-Soviet alliance entailed an early end to hostility with Germans and the integration of West Germany into the alliance but this step was precipitated by events thousands of miles away in Asia: the Korean War. Within little more than a year after the sign-ing of the North Atlantic Treaty the outbreak of this war created substantial calls on the United States’ resources and Washington became anxious to convert its allies from passive protégés into junior partners and to build up in Europe itself a counter-force to the Russian armies, distinct from the long-range American air power which, although based in Europe, was under exclusive American command and remained so even when joint NATO commands were created. Britain and France, with much of their forces committed outside Europe, could give little help immediately and were therefore the more easily constrained to accept an American decision to rearm the Germans. In 1950 General Eisenhower returned to Europe as supreme commander of the kind of anti-Russian alliance feared by Moscow between the wars. In the same year Greece and Turkey were invited to co-operate with the allies in the defence of the Mediterranean, although they did not become full allies until 1952: their co-operation helped to estab-lish an eastern flank to protect the allied central sector and to threaten the USSR from the south. In 1952 at Lisbon, the NATO council approved a plan to create by 1954 a force of 96 active and reserve divisions and 9,000 aircraft. Although these targets were
never attained, the Lisbon decisions gave the alliance the shape which it ever after-wards retained.
With one exception: the German problem – that is to say, the status of West Germany as a political entity and its role in NATO’s planning and operations. With the Korean War, American pressure to accelerate West Germany’s sovereignty – and there-with West German rearmament – became irresistible, but France in particular was anxi-ous to find a way to prevent the resurgence of autonomanxi-ous German military power.
René Pleven, the French minister of defence, proposed that German units be raised and incorporated in multinational divisions but that western Germany be allowed no separate army, general staff or defence ministry. Adopting the pattern of the European Coal and Steel Community, which had been launched on French initiative and was about to come into existence (see p. 187), Pleven devised a European Defence Com-munity (EDC) with a council of ministers, an assembly and a European minister of defence. The French aim was to minimize the German military unit and at the same time to integrate the German military contribution, both operationally and politically, in an international organization. British participation was all but essential since with-out it the proposed international organization would consist only of France and Germany with lesser makeweights. For France a British commitment was the only way adequately to offset the risks inherent in the rearmament of Germany and the re-appearance of a sovereign German state, but no British commitment satisfactory to France was forthcoming during the four years in which the EDC was under debate.
In 1952 agreements signed in Bonn and Paris created a complex new structure: six continental European states signed a treaty creating the EDC, the three western occu-piers of Germany agreed to end the occupation upon ratification of the EDC treaty, and the NATO powers, including Britain, entered into separate ancillary treaties pro-mising military aid in the event of an attack upon any of the EDC partners. But the French remained uneasy. They wanted British membership of the EDC and not a pledge to help it, and they disliked the provision in the EDC treaty permitting the rais-ing of whole German divisions in place of the smaller units proposed by Pleven’s plan.
The United States and Britain brought pressure to bear on France, the former by threatening an ‘agonizing reappraisal’ of American policies if the EDC treaty were not ratified (which was taken to mean the cutting off of American aid to France) and the latter by giving in 1954 a further pledge of military and political co-operation with the EDC. But in that year the French parliament finally came to a vote and refused by 319 votes to 264 to debate the ratification of the treaty.
With this vote the EDC and all the Bonn and Paris agreements of 1952 collapsed.
There was anger in Bonn, where Adenauer insisted that western Germany must have sovereignty none the less, and in Washington, where Dulles decided ostentatiously to cut Paris out of a tour of European capitals. In London, more constructively if belatedly, Eden set to work to put the pieces together again by diplomatic labours and a more specific pledge than Britain had so far been willing to vouchsafe. By the end of
1954 the Brussels treaty of 1948 had been expanded to take in the German and Italian ex-enemies and was renamed Western European Union (WEU); this WEU took over the non-military functions of the Brussels treaty organization and became militarily an ingredient in NATO; Britain declared that it would maintain on the continent forces equivalent to those already committed to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), that is, four divisions and a tactical air force; the occupation of western Germany was ended; Adenauer undertook not to produce atomic, bacteriological or chemical weapons, long-range or guided missiles, bomber aircraft or warships, except upon the recommendation of SACEUR and with the assent of two-thirds of the council of WEU. West Germany became a full member of NATO the following year. One other loose end was clutched. France and western Germany agreed that the Saar, which France had hoped ever since 1945 to annex in one form or another, should constitute a special autonomous territory embedded in WEU, but the Saarlanders rejected this arrangement by plebiscite and the Saar became a part of western Germany at the beginning of 1957. Thus the first postwar decade closed with NATO in existence to extend American protection over western Europe, Britain as the firmest and most effective of the European members of the alliance, and a nascent German state back in the comity of western Europe.
The weak point was France. Whereas Britain had made an energetic recovery from the war and West Germany was on the verge of its economic miracle, France was relapsing into the political instability which had characterized it between the wars, accompanied by economic ineptitude and colonial overstrain. But France too was on the verge of economic revival which was to reanimate agriculture, manufacturing industry and retail trade until the mid-1970s; was about to shed its imperial burdens and (most of) its imperial illusions and, with a radical political somersault, was restating its German problem in terms of partnership instead of hostility.
France had been a major European land power and a major imperial power but had failed in the contest with England for sea power. In the nineteenth century the decline of France’s position in Europe had been matched by the acquisition of a second over-seas empire to replace the territories lost to Britain in the wars of the eighteenth cen-tury, but by the beginning of the twentieth century France, slipping back in the demographic and the industrial race and spiritually still divided between the heirs of the Enlightenment and the Revolution and those who accepted neither, was becoming discouraged and unnerved and unresponsive to central government. The awful sacrifices of the First World War and the no less awful humiliation of the Second, separated by incapacity to face up to the problems of the economic crisis or to Hitler’s challenge to basic values, brought France low in its own eyes until the exploits of the Resistance and the leadership of de Gaulle revived and personified the French spirit: de Gaulle’s identification of himself with France and his constant use of the first person singular were precisely what was needed after the physical and spiritual lesions of a century.
When the war ended the French tried to strike out into a new world with some of the trappings of the old until they found that this would not work. They adopted a constitution and political methods unhappily reminiscent of the defunct Third Republic, made great efforts to retain or recover their empire in Asia and Africa, tried the old game of weakening Germany permanently, and made treaties with their tradi-tional British and Russian allies. But they also revolutionized their foreign policies by joining the anti-Russian western alliance even though it entailed the rearming of Germany, took the lead in devising new political structures suitable to Europe’s altered place in the world, accepted the end of empire and – most important – adopted under the lead of Jean Monnet a successful form of central economic planning for the modernization of industry and agriculture. Monnet’s economic philosophy steered between the crudities of a communist command economy and those of free market-eers – or, to put it another way, sought the best of two worlds by a dirigiste allocation of resources and entrepreneurial freedom. During the war national production had fallen by 65 per cent but within two years of liberation in 1944 and before the incep-tion of the Marshall Plan, 90 per cent of this loss had been recovered. From 1947 the series of Monnet Plans, elaborated and applied by a modest central government department and using Marshall funds mainly for the reconditioning or transforming of industries, allocated resources, determined priorities and masterminded the restora-tion of the economy sector by sector in associarestora-tion with state-owned enterprises and private businesses. From the date of the second plan (1952–57) socio-economic sectors such as education, research and training were included and led at the next stage to central direction of social policies and a welfare state financed by employers and employed.
The renunciation of empire brought France, over Algeria, to the brink of civil war, from which it was saved in 1958 by the return to power of de Gaulle and the thwart-ing thereby of a right-wthwart-ing military plan to seize control of the capital and the state.
De Gaulle tamed the generals and colonels, disposed of the politicians and the remain-ing colonies and, profitremain-ing from a rapidly improvremain-ing economic situation, rescued France from a position of scorn.
De Gaulle inherited two recent decisions of his predecessors – the decision to become a nuclear power and the decision to join an economic community with avowed political implications. The first of these decisions was congenial to him. He believed that France could be a major power and he believed that power must be modern. Just as he had been an expert in tank warfare when many of his colleagues were still in favour of the horse, so now a generation later he held that there was a choice between nuclear power and no power, and he held too that beyond a certain point there was lit-tle difference between one nuclear power and another: a nuclear power which reached that point became a member of the first league even if it possessed fewer or less sophist-icated weapons than other members of the league. The second decision may have been less congenial to him, not so much because he eschewed all unions or harboured anti-quated notions about the ability of a country like France to go it alone, but rather
because his ideas on the nature of useful unions were different from those of the authors of the Treaty of Rome. While aware that the independent states of Europe were no longer what they had been, he did not believe that the minds of Europeans had become supranational. In his view the vast majority of Europeans still responded to
because his ideas on the nature of useful unions were different from those of the authors of the Treaty of Rome. While aware that the independent states of Europe were no longer what they had been, he did not believe that the minds of Europeans had become supranational. In his view the vast majority of Europeans still responded to