France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (12 page)

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Authors: William I. Hitchcock

Tags: #History, #Europe, #France, #Western, #Modern, #20th Century, #Political Science, #Security (National & International), #test

BOOK: France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954
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issues were placed last on the agenda, overshadowed by the Italian and East European peace treaties. The Big Three had just had an opportunity to discuss Germany at Potsdam and wanted now to turn their attention to these other issues. To have his views on Germany heard, Bidault directed a memorandum to the Council three days into the conference. In it, he noted that the principles outlined at Potsdam for the administration of Germany were, from France's perspective, quite contradictory. Indeed, paragraph nine of the agreement on "Political and Economic Principles" envisioned political and economic decentralization in Germany alongside the creation of certain centralized institutions for transport, communication, finance, and foreign trade. Bidault also questioned the fairness of the settlement wherein a substantial piece of Germany, east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, had been removed and placed under Polish control, while any similar arrangement of territory in the west had as yet been rejected. Bidault therefore insisted that, if German central administrations were to be established, the Rhineland must not be included in their jurisdiction, in deference to French security interests. The memorandum concluded that, given the ambiguity surrounding these issues, the foreign ministers ought to consider them immediately. Until that time, the French representative in the ACC would not be authorized to discuss these issues. In short, the French threatened to block the work of the ACC until they could air their views on Germany, as they had as yet been unable to do in a full session of the CFM.
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This was not an idle threat. Beginning in September, while the London CFM meeting was still underway, France's representative on the ACC, General Pierre Koenig, vetoed the attempts of the other three powers to initiate the creation of central administrative agencies to deal with transportation and national labor unions, leading to a great deal of hostility toward the French in the ACC. The American deputy military governor in Germany, General Lucius Clay, snarled in late September that "if the Control Commission cannot establish central machinery, it cannot govern Germany," and General Eisenhower, after a further month of French vetoes, concurred: "it is the job of the Council to run Germany as a unit. . . . The members are wasting their time until this is settled." Although Clay was given approval by the War Department to make arrangements with the other two zones, the French refusal to cooperate placed the entire structure of Potsdam in jeopardy. The French believed, as de Gaulle stated to Ambassador Caffery, that the issue of centralization, and the future of the Rhineland and Ruhr, "was a matter of whether or not France is to continue to exist as an independent
 
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nation." France had established itself as the chief obstacle to progress in Germany.
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As a concession to French demands for discussion on the RuhrRhineland, the conferees at London agreed to receive French representatives in their respective capitals for bilateral talks on the subject. From October 12 to 16, Maurice Couvé de Murville and Herve Alphand, directors respectively of the political and economic departments of the Foreign Ministry, held talks with their British counterparts in London; from November 13 to 20, Couve de Murville worked with American officials in Washington, and in December, Alphand traveled to Moscow to explain French views to the Russians. If there had been any misunderstanding of the French position on the Ruhr and the Rhineland after Potsdam, there could be none now. The French representatives told their colleagues that in the interest of French and western European security, Germany must be denied free access to the industry and resources of the Rheno-Westphalian area that in the past had provided Germany with its formidable war-making power. Territorial annexation, the French admitted, may be unacceptable, but above all this area must not come under the control of any central German administrative agency. Therefore, France sought both the separation of these territories from Germany and their removal from the control of the ACC (whose centralizing tendencies the French decried). Once this region was separated from Germany, it should be further broken down into distinct political regions. The Rhineland would be placed under permanent military occupation but would not be considered either French or German territory. The Saar, by contrast, would be joined economically (by customs and currency integration) to France, while the Ruhr should be occupied permanently and subjected to international political and economic control.
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The French representatives frequently stressed that the justification for these proposals lay in the need for military security from German invasion, and stated their interest in taking the full and lasting steps toward German disarmament that the Allies had failed to implement after the First World War. They did not argue, that is, from the point of view of economic security, and indeed, by the admission of the secretarygeneral of the Quai d'Orsay, Jean Chauvel, the French had not given enough consideration to the economic impact such a plan would have on the rest of Germany or on the separated regions themselves.
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There is no evidence to suggest that the French were dissembling their motives in these talks, but it did not escape them that their proposals would sub-
 
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stantially alter the economic organization of the future German state, whether or not that government ever had warlike intentions. In a remarkable aide-mémoire written just after he had completed the session of talks with the British, Alphand sketched out the possibilities that control of the Ruhr and Rhineland offered France. He envisaged a control system in which German coal and coke were exported from the Ruhr to forges in Lorraine, from which steel would be exported to Germany. This arrangement would invert the traditional relationship of these two countries, whereby France had exported iron ore from Lorraine to be used in German forges for the production of steel that then was exported by Germany. France could thereby direct the Ruhr's industries away from the production of steel and pig iron and toward the production of finished goods, using French steel. This strategy could be justified strictly from the point of view of military security, but it was also a patent attempt to deny Germany the reconstruction of its powerful steel industry that France hoped to control.
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In keeping with this line of thinking, in late October de Gaulle instructed Koenig to place the railways and mines of the French zone and the Saar under French government control and to ensure that any administrative structures put in place were kept strictly local. "We must not, at any price," he believed, "under a pretext of short-term advantages, allow the framework of the former Prussian and Bavarian administrations to remain." De Gaulle's intense suspicion of his allies, reflected in his belief that coal shipments into France were being deliberately delayed and that the British were stockpiling arms with which to rearm German forces, led him to initiate a unilateral policy with regard to Germany that flagrantly challenged the principle of a unified occupation policy there.
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The Americans rightly feared that French policy might render the Potsdam accords on reparations meaningless, requiring the immediate influx of foreign capital to rebuild the much weakened and territorially reduced Germany, an area that had already suffered from heavy Russian removals. The State Department thought the French had grossly underestimated the effect of their proposals on the economic health of the rest of Germany: a subject about which, as Byrnes earlier explained to Bidault, the United States was especially sensitive in light of the lessons learned after 1919.
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The deadlock that this conflict of economic visions produced in the ACC so soured relations there that Eisenhower reported to the press that the French were responsible for the failure to achieve a unified administration in Germany. President Truman even spoke publicly of modifying the Potsdam agreement to prevent any one
 
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power from obstructing the work of the Council. Byrnes confirmed through Caffery that the United States intended to go forward with centralized administrations, and would do so on a three-way basis if necessary.
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The period from Yalta to the end of 1945, taken as a whole, shows a glaring lack of subtlety, not to say intelligence, on the part of French leadership in pressing on the Allies its aims in Germany. To some extent, any coherent strategy had been sacrificed to the Gaullist imperative of confronting the Allies with as many demonstrations of French independence as possible, regardless of the consequences. But perhaps to a greater degree, France's inability to advance its goals grew out of a failure as yet to adapt to the dramatically new political circumstances of 1945. Despite its inclusion in the ACC, France was not on a level playing field, and was in no position, politically or economically, to force a favorable decision on the ACC without American backing. On the contrary, continued belligerence toward the other occupying powers in Germany only led to further isolation, evident in the exclusion of France from yet another Big Three conference, this one in Moscow in December 1945. De Gaulle's confrontational strategy revealed an unwillingness to cast French objectives in the constructive language favored by the United States as a means of gaining American support. This would simply have been good public diplomacy. Instead, at a time of enormous economic chaos in Europe, when the Americans and British had agreed specifically to work toward the rapid return of stable economic conditions, precisely because they feared that continued disruption in Europe augured ill for their own economies, France set out hastily conceived schemes that could only lead to the persistence of Germany's state of prostration and penury, encourage political unrest, and leave Europe in a state of flux inimical to reconstruction. Clearly, if France were to have any kind of success in establishing itself as a political arbiter and economic power in Europe, the government would have to craft a strategy that could appeal to the Anglo-Americans on economic grounds, while still providing the degree of security against Germany the French believed necessary.
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The Persistence of the Gaullist Design
De Gaulle's resignation in January 1946 provided an opportunity for critics of the general's leadership, particularly the Socialists, to propose alternative strategies to achieve French aims in Germany. As early as December 1945, Leon Blum criticized the Quai d'Orsay's handling of
 
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German policy, arguing that the ACC was the only corrective to the disastrous zonal division of Germany, and that France ought to work with, not against, its wartime allies.
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Now, with de Gaulle gone, the Socialist leadership pressed the point. André Philip, the Socialist minister of national economy, an old associate of Mendès France and an advocate of domestic economic planning, developed a critique of French policy that focused on the failure of France's confrontational and inflexible position in the ACC.
Since January, the ACC had been deadlocked in discussions on the level of industrial activity that the occupying powers would allow Germany during the period of reconstruction, and how much of this production would be slated for reparations payments. The Potsdam agreements were very ambiguous on reparations, and the ACC was now charged with drawing up a plan to show how the equipment remaining after reparations were paid could support a modest standard of living in Germany and allow for a level of exports sufficient to pay for imports into Germany. The plan would have to reconcile the views of the British, who sought the speedy recovery of German industry so as to avoid incurring any occupation expenses, with those of the Russians, who placed a priority on dismantling and reparations.
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The French, because they did not accept the principle established at Potsdam that Germany must be treated as a unit, were able to float freely from one position to another, repeating their insistence on reparations in coal and a settlement for the Ruhr. As the occupation powers bickered, German production remained stalled, delaying European recovery. It was on this point that Philip based his critique of the French position.
In the middle of February 1946, Philip informed the CEI that though French coal production had just barely achieved the level of 1938 (4 million tons a month), further increases would be difficult to achieve due to the labor shortage and poor productivity in the mines. Imports would have to be relied upon to bolster French coal resources, but they were not forthcoming in the quantities expected. To some degree, he attributed this shortfall to the poor management of the Ruhr, but also to the French persistence in arguing that levels of German industrial production be kept to a minimum. This thesis, Philip argued, must undergo "a certain revision . . . in harmony with the new German and French economic necessities." Philip believed that low levels of production in Germany only furthered political and social instability, an outcome "perhaps as dangerous from the point of view of French security as a situation wherein Germany still possessed some coal- and steel-making
 
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capacity and some mechanical industry.'' He therefore advocated the regeneration of some German industries, both to shore up stability in Germany and to resuscitate Franco-German trade. "The complete economic disarmament of Germany," Philip wrote, "risks leading to unfavorable consequences for the French economy." Instead, Philip set out an economic strategy in which Germany's productive capacity was harnessed by France. "Rather than leave Germany the ability to export only in areas without military significance  but which might nevertheless be dangerously competitive with France . . . [i.e., in areas such as textiles, optics, clocks, chemicals, etc.], we should rather authorize the Germans to conserve some part of their export markets of finished goods . . . while rigorously controlling the commercial organization of these markets." France would control not only the kinds of industries that were reconstructed, but how these industries were supplied. If France could prohibit the import into Germany of high-grade iron ore, Philip continued, Germany's industries would be limited in the kinds of materials they could produce, leaving France to use these ores to produce high-grade steel and thus take over German export markets. Such control also meant that France could constrict German steel production at any time  a very desirable military asset  while profiting from the demand of German markets for French steel. By controlling German economic recovery rather than prohibiting it altogether, France would enhance both its economic and its military security. Here Philip was making a bold and novel point: France could advance its own interests by allowing German industrial recovery in those sectors over which, as an occupying power, it could exert continuing control. Philip challenged Bidault's policy of territorial dismemberment with a more subtle strategy of economic control and integration.
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This line of thinking emerged at precisely the same time the CEI was considering the need for a long-term plan for the recovery of the French economy. As we have seen, the decree of January 3, 1946, which established the CGP, initiated a tense debate between Monnet and Philip about the competence of the Ministry of National Economy to control the new agency. Despite this jurisdictional debate, however, both agreed that a long-term plan, one that incorporated domestic and foreign policy imperatives, was the precondition of French recovery. Their thinking was supported by de Gaulle's successor as president of the GPRF, the Socialist Félix Gouin, who in a memorandum to the CEI quickly went to the heart of the matter: "the problem of planning is not only economic. It also concerns the security of the country. A liaison must be established

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