From the Kremlin’s point of view towards the end
of 1947, things were not going well. The West
was disputing Soviet dominance in Eastern and
central Europe with the Truman Doctrine and the
Marshall Plan. Was not the Soviet Union entitled
for its own security to an extension of influence
over its neighbours? Twenty-eight million had
died to achieve it. After the early and genuine
welcome for the liberating Red Army among
quite large numbers of Poles, Bulgarians and
Czechs, communist support was eroding and
nationalism was reasserting itself.
The Soviet response to US intervention in
Europe was one of uncertainty. In September
1947 the Cominform was established to try to
bring all the communist parties into ideological
conformity as prescribed by Moscow. The Soviet
Union’s principal ideologue, Andrei Zhdanov,
laid down the doctrine that the world was now
divided into imperialist, anti-democratic forces on
one side, and the democratic, anti-imperialist
camp on the other and that the US was building
up foreign bases and was expansionist in its aims.
It was a clear message to all comrades that
Moscow’s interpretation should be accepted as
correct. In Poland, Wladyslaw Gomulka stoutly
insisted on following Poland’s road to socialism;
this did not include, for example, collectivisation
of Poland’s farmers. Gomulka was allowed to
remain in power for less than a year. In
Czechoslovakia the parliamentary constitutional
framework, political parties and a coalition
National Front government had not moved
forward yet to complete communist domination.
Preparations for tighter communist control in
Eastern Europe were no doubt initiated after the
Cominform conference, but it was in Stalin’s
interests to postpone an open crisis as there still
appeared to be some possibility of blocking
Anglo-American plans for the consolidation of
the West German zones of occupation into an
eventual separate Western-orientated state.
After the failure in December 1947 of the
London Foreign Ministers’ Conference to reach
any settlement over Germany, the Russians
proved surprisingly accommodating over Austria
and on a number of other East–West questions.
The signal from Moscow was that progress could
still be made, that the West should be patient.
However, Anglo-American patience had run out
and on 23 February 1948, another London conference
was convened to discuss the future of
Germany. This time it was attended only by the
ambassadors of Germany’s Western neighbours,
the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and
France, plus Britain and the US. Agreement was
reached on ending the stalemate over Germany,
with all its harmful consequences for West
German and West European recovery. It was
accepted that the new arrangements planned for
the Western zones of Germany would lead to a
breach with the Soviet Union. Tension was
expected but not the crisis of 1948. That this
occurred was the fortuitous coming together of
the Western plans for Germany and the communist
coup in Czechoslovakia.
From Moscow’s point of view the Czech coup
could not have been worse timed. The government
crisis in Prague lasted from 20 to 27
February 1948, at the very time when the Western
foreign ministers were meeting in London.
Communism was showing its most unacceptable
face. Moscow seemed, so it was thought in the
West, bent on ruthless expansion and the suppression
of freedom. The end of Czech democracy was
bloodily marked by Jan Masaryk’s fall to his death
from his study window. Whether the popular
Czech foreign minister had been pushed, or
whether he had deliberately chosen this dramatic
suicide as a gesture to the world, will never be
known. A few months later, the other monument
of free Czechoslovakia, President Eduard Benesˇ,
also died. All he had striven for lay in ruins.
Was there really a planned communist coup or
had the opponents of the communists miscalculated?
Were they in fact responsible for what happened?
In one sense they were. The Czech
government was a broad coalition which included
some communists, not least the prime minister,
Klement Gottwald. But the February crisis was
neither ordered by Moscow nor initiated by
Gottwald. The ministers opposed to the communists
had resigned and Gottwald replaced them
with communists. With a general election due in
the summer of 1948, it appeared that the communist
opposition had committed political
suicide and that there had been no coup as was
claimed in the West at the time. But appearances
are misleading.
During the winter of 1947–8, both in the
Cabinet and in parliament tension between the
communists and their opponents had led to
increasingly bitter conflict. The communist
minister of the interior, protected by the communist
prime minister, illegally extended his
powers; the security apparatus and police were
being transformed into instruments of the
Communist Party, endangering basic civic freedoms.
The non-communist ministers protested
and insisted on bringing to book the offending
communists in the government. But the communist
ministers countered by threatening to use
force and, in order to avoid defeat in parliament,
mobilised groups of their supporters in the
country. The communist-dominated workers’
factory councils met in Prague on 22 February
1948. It was intended that their well-orchestrated
demands should provide the pretext for forcing
out the non-communist government supporters.
But twelve non-communist ministers chose to
anticipate Gottwald’s manoeuvre. When, on 20
February, the communist interior minister refused
to reinstate eight non-communist senior police
officers despite a majority vote of the Cabinet in
favour of doing so, they resigned. The normal
constitutional procedure would have been for
them to continue in a caretaker government.
President Benesˇ was expected to, and at first did,
insist that no new government could be formed
which did not include ministers representing the
parties that were not communist. If Benesˇ had
held to this line, Gottwald’s communist ministers
would not then have been able to form a government;
the only non-violent way out of the
deadlock for them would have been either to give
way to the non-communists or to risk defeat in a
general election which would have had to have
been brought forward. That would not have
given the communists enough time to rig the
elections. The opponents of the communists calculated
that early elections were the best guarantee
of preserving democracy in Czechoslovakia;
the longer they waited, the less possible it would
be for the non-communist parties to campaign
freely, since the interior minister was subverting
the impartiality of the police and placing communists
in key positions. Thus it was in the interests
of the supporters of democracy to bring the
crisis to a head quickly. Admittedly it was a desperate
throw and the democrats lost.
Gottwald proved to be tough and utterly ruthless.
He resorted to a show of violence in Prague.
Armed militia and the police took over Prague;
communist demonstrations were mounted; an
anti-communist student demonstration was broken
up. ‘Action committees’ were organised
throughout the country to carry through a purge
of opponents of communism. The ministries of
the non-communist ministers were occupied, civil
servants dismissed and the ministers prevented
from entering their own ministries. The army was
confined to barracks and did not interfere. The
show of force proved sufficient. Some dissidents
in the democratic parties agreed, unfortunately,
to work with the communists, giving Gottwald’s
list of new ministers a spurious National Front
appearance. Benesˇ was old and weak; he held out
no longer. He believed that the country might be
plunged into civil war and he thought that even
Soviet intervention was possible if he did not give
in to Gottwald’s demands. He therefore agreed
to a new communist-dominated Cabinet without
holding immediate elections. On 27 February
1948, the new government was sworn in.
Democracy was finished.
A party that in the last free elections had
secured just over a third of the electorate’s votes,
and probably did not command even that support
in 1948, could not have gained control of the
government and of the country without threatening
violence and undermining the democratic
institutions and the loyalty of the police beforehand.
It is true that the non-communists had
chosen the time for the inevitable showdown, but
it was bound to happen anyway. They may have
been ill advised in their tactics, but it made no
real difference. The communists were determined
to gain control and they knew they could not do
so in free elections only a few months away. A
minority usurped the wishes of the majority.
Gottwald had covered his coup with no more
than a thin façade of constitutionality which did
not fool the Czechoslovak people or the West at
the time, though it fooled a few historians later.
The impact on Western governments and public
opinion was enormous, strengthening their
resolve. The majority of the US Congress was
persuaded that America’s own security required
close cooperation with Western Europe against
Soviet-led communism. The Prague coup finally
discredited Soviet moves to prevent the formation
of a West German state and accelerated the conclusion
of a West European alliance, the Brussels
Treaty, in March 1948. It was self-evident in the
West that it had been fear of Soviet intervention
that had enabled the Czech communists to blackmail
the whole nation. The Soviet threat would
have to be met by measures of mutual security.
The formation of the Western alliance and the
plans for ending the occupation of Germany were
intimately linked. The French continued to fear a
resurgence of Germany and fought a rearguard
action to retain Allied control over the Ruhr.
Bevin tried to calm their fears, stressing that
France could rely on the Anglo-French Treaty of
Dunkirk, concluded in March 1947, which
promised immediate British military assistance if
Germany attacked. By January 1948, Bevin had
become more alarmed about Soviet intentions
than about what the Germans might do at some
future date. He called for a West European
Union. What he was aiming for, however, was not
a united Europe; the West European states were
to preserve their sovereignty but should conclude
treaties between them for their mutual defence.
On 17 March 1948, Bevin, Bidault and their
Belgian counterpart, Paul Henri Spaak, concluded
the Brussels Treaty. This bound Britain,
France and the Benelux countries (Belgium, the
Netherlands and Luxembourg) to take whatever
steps were necessary ‘in the event of a renewal by
Germany of a policy of aggression’; the signatories
also promised to come to each others’ defence
if attacked by any aggressor in Europe. This
article (IV) applied to the Soviet Union without
specifically naming it. There was provision for
other states to join. Although the Brussels Treaty
was an essential preliminary to strengthening the
link between Western Europe and the US, and
was intended by Bevin as such, another year
was to pass before the North Atlantic alliance
(NATO) was concluded. The Brussels Treaty was
in no way supranational. Neither Britain nor
France intended to relinquish its sovereignty to
any European council or parliament.
With the conclusion of the Brussels Treaty
more rapid progress was made on the question of
the future of West Germany. The Soviet response
to all this was to protest and to withdraw from
the Allied Control Council on 20 March 1948.
As it turned out, that ended all formal four-power
control of Germany. The Russians also put pressure
on the Western Allies in the hope of deterring
them from creating a separate West German
state; they increasingly interfered with Allied land
communications to Berlin, which ran, of course,
through the Soviet zone.
Berlin, divided into four occupation zones,
had, at the end of the Second World War, been
placed under separate four-power control. Access
to Berlin was an obvious problem for the Western
powers; this was not overlooked in 1945, as has
often been asserted. The French, British and
American commanders in Berlin had reached an
agreement (29 June 1945) with the Soviet
command guaranteeing to them the use of one
main rail line, one main highway and two air corridors.
Later, a second rail line and a third air
corridor were added. In January 1948, Soviet
inspectors began to board American and British
military trains demanding to check the papers of
the German passengers. That was just the beginning;
worse followed. Alleging technical difficulties
and the need for repairs, two rail links were
closed on 1 April and canal and road traffic was
also interrupted. But the escalation of pressure
did not deflect the Western states from their
course of action in Germany. A joint conference
held in London ended on 1 June with an agreement
to set up a West German state. There was,
therefore, no longer any reason to delay a separate
currency reform in the West, thus ignoring the
Russian objections. Without sound currency there
could be no economic revival. By the end of June
the currency reforms for Western Germany were
carried out and, after further unsuccessful negotiations
with the Russians, introduced in the
Western sectors of Berlin too. The Russians now,
on 24 June, cut off all remaining land communications
from the West by rail or road and three
weeks later all barge traffic as well. The blockade
of Berlin by land and canal was now complete.
The Soviet authorities justified the blockade by
claiming that the three Western Allies had broken
the four-power agreements on Germany; they
cited the Western currency reforms in particular
as being in breach of the agreement to treat
Germany as an economic whole. The Western
Allies protested and insisted on their rights of
access. The one route left to the beleaguered city
was by air – and the Russians had left the air corridors
open, no doubt reluctant to launch an allout
challenge. One can surmise their calculations.
The air corridors sufficed to supply the Allied garrisons
and their dependants in the Western sectors
of Berlin. It must have seemed inconceivable that
2.25 million blockaded West Berliners could
receive supplies by air as well.
The blockade was intended as a ‘tails you lose,
heads we win’ gambit: the Allies would have to
give up either Berlin or their German policy. After
withdrawing they would be likely to pay more
attention to Soviet interests. All this would be
accomplished without real risk of war. The Allied
position in Berlin was militarily hopeless. Was
Western public opinion likely to start a third
world war over a German city and over the fate
of a people they had so recently done their best
to destroy? Western military experts did, in fact,
advise their governments that it was better to
negotiate and to withdraw with honour than to
be forced out a few weeks later. Even if the West
were ready for war over Berlin, from a military
point of view to fight a way through to the beleaguered
city was not sensible strategy. General
Lucius Clay’s proposal of sending an armed
convoy to Berlin was unrealistic.
The military ‘realities’ were, nevertheless,
ignored. President Truman and Bevin rejected
‘appeasement’. Despite Berlin, Allied plans for
transforming Bizonia (created by the fusion of the
British and American zones of occupation) into a
West German state went ahead. A German
Parliamentary Council convened in Bonn on 1
September 1948. Delegates from the eleven
separate Länder parliaments and from West Berlin
came to this historic assembly. The wily Konrad
Adenauer was elected president of the Council. In
May 1949 a Basic Law, a substitute constitution
for the Federal Republic of Germany, was agreed,
many differences and difficulties having been
overcome. To all appearances it was a constitution
for an independent sovereign state. But
Britain, the US and France still reserved to themselves
ultimate authority. West Germany was not
allowed to rearm, and the economy of the industrial
Ruhr, though not separated from West
Germany, was placed under inter-Allied control.
Germans were not yet trusted; the new democratic
institutions remained in probationary tutelage
to the three Western military governors,
renamed high commissioners. The new West
German state and constitution laid claim to rep-
resent the wishes of the whole German people,
whether living in the East or the West. The
Russians could do little but respond in kind by
turning their zone into a communist captive
German Democratic Republic. It was ostracised
by the West.
The changes in West Germany, with her temporary
capital, Bonn, marked a giant step forward
in the recovery of sovereignty. The Basic Law,
West Germany’s constitution, came into force on
24 May 1949. In August a general election was
held and Adenauer and the CDU unexpectedly
emerged the winners. In September, Theodor
Heuss was chosen by parliament to become
the first president and Adenauer was elected chancellor;
so began his long years in office, which
came to be known as the Adenauer era. On 21
September Western military occupation ceased.
The Berlin blockade was the first great drama of
the post-war years. It ended with a stunning
diplomatic victory, a triumph for power and good
sense. The air corridors between the West and the
beleaguered city were crowded with a continuous
stream of US and British transport planes carrying
everything to the city to keep it alive, including
coal. It was the Germans in Frankfurt,
Hanover, Hamburg and Berlin-Tempelhof,
loading and unloading the planes landing every
few minutes, who were the unsung heroes of the
day. Freddie Laker joined the fun and was later
able, on the profits earned, to found an airline.
The Soviets were careful too to avoid an ultimate
showdown. Soviet air-control towers provided
essential guidance along the twenty-mile-wide
corridors and some services located in the Eastern
sectors of Berlin were kept functioning for the
Western sectors. Before it was all over, 2.3 million
tons of food and supplies had been flown to the
city at a cost of $224 million. At the same time
the hated Germans began to be transformed in
Western eyes into steadfast, courageous, freedomloving
Berliners. In fact, whether in the East or
West, the German people had little choice; but
credit should not be denied to a number of
sincere democratic leaders such as the charismatic
socialist mayor of Berlin, Ernst Reuter, whose
moral authority symbolised the resistance of the
democratic Western ideals against the brutal challenges
of totalitarianism.
The Berlin crisis painfully demonstrated to
Stalin the West’s determination to contain the
Soviet Union and to resist pressure. The Soviets
had miscalculated. It was also the first crisis that
could have turned the Cold War into a hot conflict.
That it did not do so was due not to luck but
to careful calculation and restraint on both sides.
Berlin was the first example of an East–West confrontation
taken to the new limits of post-war
diplomacy, dangerously close to an armed clash
but stopping just short of it. The defence of
Quemoi and Matsu off the coast of China and the
Cuban missile crisis were others. The Soviets may
have miscalculated in 1948, the West may have
misinterpreted, but in Moscow, London and
Washington care was taken from the first that a situation
should not be created that was bound to
lead to war. The American administration and the
British Cabinet regarded the airlift as a way out,
avoiding humiliation with minimum risk. It
allowed the West to maintain its position in Berlin
without use of force. The Russians also refrained
from using force and let the airlift function without
interruption. In January 1949, Stalin talked to
an American journalist, and so gave the first hint
that he was ready to negotiate and to lift the
blockade. He tried hard to salvage something and
to gain concessions from the US and Britain on
the German question, but without success. After
secret negotiations in May 1949, the Russians
lifted their blockade and the Western nations
raised their counter-blockade of the Soviet Union
and the Eastern German zone, which had stopped
valuable goods from going east.
The Cold War crisis of 1947 and 1948 hastened
a fundamental reappraisal of American policies.
The US commitment to assist in the defence
of Western Europe dramatically increased, but it
still fell short of stationing large armed forces in
Europe. American demobilisation after the war
meant that there were still none to send anyway.
Not until the outbreak of the Korean War in the
summer of 1950 did the US actually start to
rearm on the scale necessary to back militarily its
promise of global assistance. A year earlier, on 4
April 1949, the US had taken a decisive step
forward in forging an Atlantic–West European
military partnership. The North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation (NATO), although strictly speaking
not an alliance like the Brussels Treaty, with provision
for automatic military assistance, in practice,
despite its careful wording, bound the US to
join with the West European allies in defence
against the threat of Soviet aggression.
The conclusion of NATO and its ratification
by the US Senate marked a revolution in American
attitudes to world problems. The defence of
the US was no longer seen in American hemispheric
terms; the American defence frontier
was now clearly delineated in Europe. It ran along
the Elbe and through the Balkans. American
security became global in scope; already deeply
involved in eastern Asia, it would eventually
spread to every part of the world. The US Policy
Planning Staff, renamed the National Security
Council, created in 1947, was given the brief
of formulating ‘the long-term programs for
the achievement of US foreign policy objectives’.
It sought to advise on priorities and the
means to achieve them. George Kennan became
its first chief. The National Security Council laid
down the doctrine that the biggest threat was
a Soviet advance and that priority should be
given to the defence of Western Europe. Successive
presidents accepted this advice. For Western
Europe, the nightmare of abandonment by the
US was lifted. Bevin and Bidault, with Dean
Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state after the
retirement of the ailing Marshall in January
1949, were the principal architects of the
North Atlantic Treaty. The Brussels Treaty had
been the first essential step; now the new link
was formed between the Brussels Treaty powers
– Britain, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the
Netherlands – and the US and Canada. On
French insistence, Italy also became a founding
member of NATO, and Iceland, Norway,
Denmark and Portugal soon joined. ‘North
Atlantic’ was thus something of a misnomer. The
territory covered by NATO included French
Algeria and, more importantly, provided for the
alliance to be activated if ‘the occupation forces
of any party in Europe’ were attacked. In this way
West Germany and the Western sectors of Berlin,
the Western zones of Austria and Vienna were
also included.
The heart of the alliance commitment was
contained in Article 5, which stated that an attack
on one member country would be regarded as
an attack on all. Each member of the alliance
would then assist the country under attack ‘by
taking forthwith, individually and in concert with
other parties, such action as it deems necessary,
including the use of armed force. . .’.
The measures would then be reported to the
UN Security Council and would cease when
the Security Council had taken the necessary step
to restore peace and security. The European partners
would have preferred an automatic military
commitment, but this was more than Dean
Acheson could deliver. The great majority of US
senators, both Republicans and Democrats, had
abandoned American isolation but not the constitutional
powers of the Senate. That had been
shown by the passage the previous year in June
1948 of Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s Senate resolution
by an overwhelming majority; this had
advised that the US should develop ‘self-defense’,
‘regional and other collective arrangements’
within the UN Charter, with other nations in case
of an ‘armed attack’ threatening the security of
the US. The tortuous wording deliberately
avoided the word ‘alliance’. A significant addition
was that such associations should be governed by
‘constitutional process’, which in plain words
meant that the Senate would not abandon its
rights to decide by majority vote on issues of war
and peace. The resolution had paved the way for
the North Atlantic Treaty, which was duly ratified
by the Senate on 21 July 1949.
Not only the US but Canada also came to the aid
of Western Europe. During Britain’s dollar crisis
following the Second World War, Canada had
provided $1,250 million, a quarter of the total
loan to Britain, with the US supplying $3,750
million in 1945. Under the premiership of the
longest-serving prime minister in the Western
world (1921–5, 1926–30 and 1935–48), the
Liberal William L. Mackenzie King, Canada had
made a remarkable economic recovery from the
depression years of the 1930s and by the end of
the war had become a major world commercial
power. Its population sharply increased and immigration
from Europe helped to fill gaps created
by the sustained boom of the early 1950s and
1960s. American capital poured in and US–
Canadian economic cooperation was most strikingly
symbolised by the joint enterprise of the
transportation–electric-power development of the
deep-water route of the St Lawrence to the Great
Lakes.
With a combination of political skill and ruthlessness,
Mackenzie King mastered the formidable
problems that faced any government in Canada:
the multi-party system, which often resulted in
government based on a minority of popular votes;
the problems inherent in managing Dominion
and provincial relationships; and the difficulty of
handling the anglophone and francophone relationship
with Liberal Party strength solidly based
in Quebec. Mackenzie King’s cautious policies
fostered a Canadian sense of nationhood, emphasised
the essential unity of the federal Dominion
and strengthened the supremacy of parliament
and central federal government as far as provincial
resistance would allow. The Liberals promoted
progressive legislation in social security and housing,
though Mackenzie King’s own inclinations
were conservative.
That politics was the art of the possible was
Mackenzie King’s abiding principle. In external
affairs he reflected the isolationist attitude of the
majority of the Canadians in the 1930s. Although
Canada joined Britain in the war against Germany
on 10 September 1939, his government promised
that no conscription would be introduced. Nevertheless,
Canadian volunteer forces distinguished
themselves during the war and suffered heavy
casualties on the Dieppe raid in 1942. They also
participated in the Italian campaign and the
Normandy landings. The conscription issue
deeply divided French- and English-speaking
Canada and cut across King’s natural political
base in Quebec. A plebiscite held in 1942 on the
question whether conscription might be allowed
when the government thought it essential had
resulted in a 72 per cent ‘no’ vote in Quebec and
an 80 per cent ‘yes’ vote in English-speaking
Canada. Not until November 1944 were conscripts
sent to fight overseas. In the elections of
1945 King nevertheless survived, beating both
main opposition parties, the Co-operative Commonwealth
Federation to the left and the
Progressive Conservatives to the right. In 1948,
suffering from ill health, he handed over the premiership
to a French-Canadian Liberal Louis
Stephen St Laurent, as firm a believer in maintaining
Dominion power as Mackenzie King. The
economic boom that continued and the success
of the federal government held Quebec French
provincial nationalism in check until after St
Laurent’s retirement in 1957 following the
victory of the Progressive Conservative Party in
the June elections, after which John Diefenbaker
became prime minister.
Like the US, Canada turned its back on
pre-war isolationism. Canadian perceptions of
national defences had totally changed in the half
century since 1900. At the turn of the century the
main threat was believed to be the possibility of
an invasion from the US, whose ‘manifest destiny’
might include plans to absorb its northern neighbour.
There were even war plans drawn up by the
British War Office which included British landings
in New York and Boston in defence of the
Dominion! In reality the US–Canadian frontier
became the first undefended frontier between two
great nations in the modern world, an example
followed in Western Europe only since 1945.
Canada and the US have been indissolubly linked
in the defence of the North American continent
since the agreement reached at Ogdensburg in
1940. The relationship with the US indicates
both close cooperation on the one hand and the
assertion of Canadian independence on the other.
In Lester B. Pearson, external affairs secretary
from 1948 to 1957, Canada contributed a diplomat
of world stature to international affairs.
Lester Pearson played a prominent role in the UN
and contributed to its peacekeeping activities.
The award of the Nobel Peace Prize was fitting
recognition for his skill in finding a diplomatic
solution to the Suez Crisis in 1956. He also took
his country into the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation, Canada being one of the founding
members. Thus the New World came to the
rescue of the Old, completely reversing the imperial
relationship.
NATO formed the cornerstone of the West’s
defence in Europe. Greece and Turkey became
members in 1952; but the role of West Germany
remained a sensitive subject, since it could not yet
be envisaged as a full ally of the West. Was it
intended to rearm West Germany and make it a
partner in NATO? No, said the French foreign
minister, Robert Schumann, to the French
Assembly in July 1949:
[Germany] has no arms and will have none.
. . . It is inconceivable to France and her allies
that Germany should be permitted to join the
Atlantic Alliance as a nation capable of defending
herself or of contributing to the defence of
other nations.
But history was moving fast. The inconceivable
became fact just five years later in 1954.
World History
