The eclipse of war-torn Europe by the ideology and power of America and Russia largely explains the division of the continent in the decade after 1945. But the durability of that division owes much to the way that it suited Europeans and helped solve some of their problems.
NATO’s principal function was to deter possible Soviet aggression by the threat of American nuclear retaliation. By the late 1950s this encompassed battlefield as well as strategic nuclear weapons, long-range missiles as well as bombs dropped from aircraft. But NATO protected all members against attack from any quarter and, for many Europeans, Germany remained a real threat. As the contemporary joke had it, NATO’s role was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.
No western country feared German revival more than France. Its leaders had initially tried to restrict German recovery. When the Americans and British won out, in 1950 the French developed an alternative strategy, masterminded by Jean Monnet—if you can’t beat them, join them. This was most evident in the European Coal and Steel Community, which came into existence in 1952. These industries were crucial for European economic recovery; they were also vital to national war-making potential. By placing them under an international authority, ‘the Six’ (France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg) were abridging national sovereignty in the interests of prosperity and security. They were also motivated by the strong federalist sentiments of the time, after the war had exposed the ruinous cost of national rivalries. Indeed the three small members of the Six had already formed their own Benelux customs union in 1948. Nevertheless, the Coal and Steel Community was as much a diplomatic strategem as an idealistic vision, with the ‘German question’ at its heart.
This helps us understand the subsequent chequered history of European integration. The Benelux countries, particularly Belgium, were the most ardently federalist in the mid-1950s, and they helped push the Six towards the European Economic Community which came into existence on i January 1958. For Germany and Italy, Europe’s pariah nations, integration was a way of recovering international status and influence. But it was France which had most success in shaping the EEC around her national interests. Anxious to avoid a repeat of the French crisis over German rearmament, the other five allowed France preferential treatment for her colonies and a Common Agricultural Policy that suited the interests of her small and inefficient peasant farmers, a powerful political constituency. In 1963 French president Charles de Gaulle (1958-69) vetoed Britain’s belated application to join the Six, on the grounds that she was not yet truly European in her outlook. Equally important, though not stated publicly, was the fear that Britain would weaken France’s influence: a case of two cocks rather than one in the hen-house, as a chauvinistic French diplomat observed. De Gaulle also diverted the Community’s evolution away from Monnet’s federalist goals. In 1965 he blocked the development of majority voting, arguing that the EEC should be a Europe des patries and not a supranational state.
The EEC nevertheless proved a remarkable success. Its first decade saw the creation of a common market with all internal tariffs abolished and a single external tariff established against outsiders. At the heart of the new Community was a remarkable entente between France and Germany. For Konrad Adenauer, Federal Chancellor from 1949 to 1963, friendship with France was as great a priority as the containment of communism. Although his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, had advocated a less protectionist economic grouping-akin to the free trade area originally proposed by Britain-Adenauer believed that politics took priority over economics. German acceptance of the EEC on French terms was essential to reconciling the two old enemies. De Gaulle and Adenauer hit it off personally and in January 1963 they solemnized the new special relationship in a Franco-German friendship treaty.
The Community was therefore, in part, an answer to Europe’s vexed ‘German question’. And within this new framework of cooperation Germany’s economic strength, no longer a threat, could be used for the benefit of her neighbours. In the 1950s the West German economic miracle transformed the country’s place in the world economy. By 1960 it accounted for one-fifth of world trade in manufactured goods, surpassing Britain economically and acting as the powerhouse of the Six.
What also made German recovery both possible and potent, apart from the political settlement created by the EEC, was the fact that the Americans had assumed much of the burden of western Europe’s defence. Their commitment to NATO guaranteed France and her neighbours against Russia (and also Germany). In addition, it meant that full-scale German rearmament, with all the fears that this would evoke, was not necessary. Germany was only allowed conventional forces, committed to NATO, and forswore nuclear weapons. Without the American guarantee, the issue of Germany as a nuclear power could not have been avoided, given the size of the Warsaw Pact.
The American commitment to Europe offered other benefits to western European states. By freeing them from prime responsibility for the security of the West, it allowed France and Britain to mount a rearguard defence of their colonial empires. Both had suffered as a result of the war: the French lost Lebanon and Syria in 1946, the British relinquished India in 1947. But the French fought a long and bitter war to hold Indochina from 1946 to 1954. And as soon as this ended in failure, they began another struggle to keep control in Algeria against nationalist rebels and French settlers, which lasted until de Gaulle conceded independence in 1962. For a decade and a half, therefore, most of the French army was committed outside Europe in colonial wars. Although Britain’s imperial retreat was less bloody, the country’s main energies were also employed imperially throughout the 1950s, and this was one reason why she was slow to take seriously the EEC. The British position in countries such as Malaya and Egypt was regarded as so important economically that substantial defence commitments were maintained. The effort to keep control of the Suez Canal led to the disastrous Anglo-French attack on Egypt in October 1956, whose failure did much to show the world the limits of their power.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, NATO’s first Supreme Commander and then United States President (1953-61), had always hoped that the American commitment to NATO would be a temporary expedient to help the Europeans bounce back. But by the end of the 1950s the springboard seemed to have become a crutch. Moreover, it was an increasingly expensive crutch for the Americans. In 1945 the United States, as the world’s leading economy with massive financial reserves, could afford the costs of containment-paying for aid and troops in sensitive countries abroad. By 1960 the world economy was more in balance, with the recovery of Germany and Japan. America’s share of world production had shrunk from a half to a quarter, her holding of world gold reserves from 70 per cent to 50 per cent. Eisenhower and his successors, John F. Kennedy (1961-3) and Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-9), pressed Europeans, particularly Germany, to contribute to the costs of their own defence. They also came to view the EEC, originally welcomed in Washington, as a trading rival.
On the European side, feelings grew that the original Atlantic contract was now out of date. Some Germans, for instance, resented the continued American occupation. The vast and deliberately visible American presence in cities such as Heidelberg or Kaiserslautern began to seem offensive. There was also debate in the early 1960s about Germany joining the nuclear ‘club’. But France, once again, went furthest with her protests. De Gaulle believed that the Alliance had become an instrument of American domination. He also felt that incidents such as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 — when the world waited impotently, under threat of nuclear war, for the superpowers to resolve their confrontation—showed the folly of Europe relying on the volatile United States. By 1960 France, like Britain, had become a nuclear power and de Gaulle gradually extracted France from NATO’s integrated command, evicting US troops and headquarters in 1966.
This rupture was not total. France remained a signatory to the North Atlantic Treaty, prompting charges that she was enjoying the benefits of NATO a la carte rather than paying for the full menu. And fears that the French would adopt a stance of neutrality between east and west evaporated with de Gaulle’s resignation in 1969. Although the transatlantic contract was under increasing strain in both Europe and America by the end of the 1960s, it still seemed mutually beneficial.
World History
