France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (3 page)

Read France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 Online

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
8.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 2
obvious political and institutional shortcomings with its considerable successes in these other areas.
France's postwar revival was due, this study shows, to the surprising tenacity with which leading French planners, technocrats, and policymakers pursued a national strategy of recovery, one that was formed in the crucible of French politics in the first three years following the war and that provided a blueprint for both domestic and foreign policy. The institutional weaknesses of the Republic as it was reconstructed after the war offered opportunities for maneuver and innovation in policymaking. Thus, the lack of an effective governing structure, the absence of coherent argumentation in much of French political life, and the apparently insurmountable divisions among ideologically charged sectors of the population led innovative planners to champion technocratic, ostensibly apolitical solutions to the host of difficult problems facing the nation. This new managerial elite was made up of youngish, cosmopolitan insiders, some of France's leading technical and financial civil servants, who in the confused atmosphere of the postwar years were uniquely situated in government to effect policy. These were men who had traveled, had studied abroad, and whose outlook on economics and national strategy had been transformed by their experiences in the war. No longer, they concluded, could France remain isolated from the world economy and the harsh realities of international competition, as their Third Republic mentors had believed. Swiftly and quietly, these new "technocrats" began to lay the groundwork for French recovery along the most pragmatic lines possible. They engineered what I have identified as a "planning consensus," a compromise among political, economic, and administrative interests that delineated a plan for national recovery and that could be defended with arguments based on efficiency, rationality, and national interest. The Monnet Plan of 1946 was the preeminent example of this kind of state problem solving. As chapter I argues, the Plan was a clever trompe l'oeil, an attempt to draw from the confusion of French politics a working consensus on reconstruction. To it may be attributed a uniquely French administrative style in which the state built consensus from the top down without resolving, or even disturbing, the political hubbub and tumult erupting in the streets of French cities and on the pages of France's postwar newspapers.
The planning consensus, however, was not limited to domestic politics, but had a distinct utility in international relations as well. In the course of this decade, French elites learned that they could frame their international objectives in the language of planning in order to build a
 
Page 3
consensus for regional stabilization, while at the same time pursuing the national interest. France deployed the planning consensus on the international level to win American support for its postwar objectives. This international presentation mattered because France had laid out a bold and aggressive economic strategy toward Germany with which the Americans were distinctly uncomfortable. The Monnet Plan aimed to reinvigorate French industry and stimulate exports, but its authors also understood that their goals depended on prompt and continuing access to German raw materials, especially coal. Further, they believed, French security could only be ensured by some continued monitoring device in the Ruhr valley, the industrial basin that had fueled Germany's rise to world power in the 1930s. The control of German coal and steel resources was considered by French leaders important not simply for France's domestic recovery, but for the nation's future security and for the creation of an enduring balance of power between these two longtime rivals.
For France, then, the key to recovery lay in devising a solution to the German problem, and this explains the emphasis placed in this book on the evolution of France's policy toward Germany. No European settlement could be conceived in Paris that did not redress Germany's century-long economic, military, and political advantage over France. From 1944 through 1947, as chapter 2 shows, first under the leadership of President Charles de Gaulle and then under Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, France tried with limited success to persuade the United States and Great Britain that France's national security depended on French  or at least international  control of Germany's industrial resources. The Anglo-Saxons (as they were characterized in French parlance) opposed what they saw as vengeful French policies, similar in nature to those developed after World War I and which had done so much to create resentment among the German people. France's hopes for a subservient, docile, and much weakened Germany ran afoul of the United States, where policymakers by 1946 had set their sights on a new foe, the Soviet Union. In this nascent struggle between East and West, Washington sought to rally all available allies, regardless of their behavior during the Second World War.
The onset of the Cold War forced French planners to rethink their German policy, as chapter 3 demonstrates. Increasingly reliant on American financial support, ever more horrified by Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe, and rocked by domestic conflict directly linked to these East-West divisions, France was obliged to defer to the American insistence
 
Page 4
that Germany be resuscitated and mobilized as part of the campaign to promote security and stability in western Europe. Yet the Cold War necessitated only a shift in tactics and not in overall strategy. France continued to insist on a postwar European settlement that constrained German independence and enhanced French influence.
The task of developing a new approach to the German problem fell to the unassuming Christian Democratic foreign minister, Robert Schuman. Schuman, born in German-occupied Metz before the First World War, actually served in the German army in 1914. When Alsace-Lorraine reverted back to France after the Treaty of Versailles, Schuman became a French citizen  but always spoke French with a heavy German accent. He was a natural ambassador between the two countries. Moreover, he was shrewd. Schuman saw that France could attain many of the economic controls over Germany that were deemed vital to French security, but they had to be couched in the language of planning and productivity that had become the currency of U.S.-European relations. The strategy of using nonideological, pragmatic problem solving had worked to reconcile divergent interests at home; Schuman and his colleagues in the Foreign Ministry sought to internationalize this approach to cultivate a Franco-German rapprochement.
Schuman realized his objectives in the proposal he made in 1950 for a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the origins of which are discussed in detail in chapter 4. In this scheme, a High Authority, under the control of no single nation, arbitrated the use of mineral resources among six regional nations: France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Italy. Though France had to give up some control over its own steel-making capacities, Germany too was obliged to surrender national control over the industries in the Ruhr valley. At last, France could be sure that Germany would not be able to draw upon its vast energy resources to outproduce France and therefore outweigh it in the emerging international system. By 1950, therefore, and through France's initiative, an economic balance of power had been struck in Europe between these two ancient foes. Schuman had successfully transferred the planning consensus to international politics.
The Schuman Plan did not entirely resolve the German problem. Upon the outbreak of the Korean War, the Western Alliance embarked on a massive program of rearmament in Europe, and Anglo-American planners called with increasing firmness for a German contribution to this military expansion. The prospect of German rearmament threatened France's entire postwar strategy of recovery and endangered the fragile
 
Page 5
fabric of controls woven together by the Schuman Plan. Initially, French planners sought to apply the same principles of integration to the military arena as they had done successfully to the economic. The Pleven Plan, a hastily conceived scheme for a European army made up of troop contributions from the ECSC countries, successfully countered the Anglo-American demands for the resuscitation of some German military capacity. The resulting European Defense Community (EDC) sought to provide an institutional framework so that Europeans could rearm without upsetting the balance of economic power that the ECSC offered. Yet as chapters 5 and 6 show, the EDC debate revealed a fissure within the French government and demonstrated the limits of the planning consensus as a mechanism for manufacturing domestic consent. In the eyes of many French legislators and policymakers, the EDC gave away sovereignty in military affairs without providing satisfactory recompense. French planners, over the course of four long years, concluded that they could secure continued controls over Germany's military capacities by bringing Germany into the existing NATO alliance structure, and need not sacrifice national control over the symbol of French independence, the army. The EDC debate showed that for French planners, European integration was never an end in itself. Rather, the value of integration had to be measured by the degree to which it advanced France's long-standing objective of containing Germany and bolstering French influence. Furthermore, the ultimate resolution of the rearmament problem  German entry into NATO  reflected a growing sense of maturity on the part of postwar France, and signaled a break with the now outdated conflicts of the World War II era. That Germany could be accepted as an ally, even grudgingly, pointed to the extraordinary mental transformation through which the nation had passed in this decade.
This book thus presents an interpretation of French diplomacy toward Europe generally and Germany in particular during the first decade of the Cold War. In doing so, it enters into three broad debates concerning the legacy of the Fourth Republic, the role of the United States in postwar European political and economic life, and the origins of the movement toward European integration.
First, the book argues that France in this period crafted a far more coherent and successful national strategy for recovery than many historians have recognized. During its brief existence, the Fourth Republic won little respect and far more derision. Gaullists spent the entire decade of the 1950s heaping scorn upon the constitutional settlement of 1946. The British considered France the new "sick man" of Europe,
 
Page 6
while foreign analysts wrote of the country's impending collapse. President Eisenhower in 1954 thought the French had been reduced since the end of the Second World War to a "helpless, hopeless mass of protoplasm." France's troubles were indeed legion, and this account has made no effort to downplay them. What remains striking is the success of France's postwar governments in forging a national strategy despite such difficulties. The analysis offered here seeks to restore some of the luster to a dejected and underrated period in French political history.
2
In making this case, I have drawn upon the work of many scholars who have explored various aspects of France's role in the early Cold War and European recovery. Three excellent books by Pierre Gerbet, John Young, and Cyril Buffet have examined French diplomacy in the first four years after the war, during the shift from a policy of obstruction to one of cooperation with Germany. Gérard Bossuat's massive volumes have provided important new material on the economic aspects of the U.S.-French relationship in the era of the Marshall Plan, while Irwin Wall has shed light on the multiplicitous ways in which America exerted influence on France in this decade. John Gillingham's work on the ECSC is a superb and lively account of a subject too long neglected. Biographies of the two men most directly responsible for France's European policy in this decade, Robert Schuman and Georges Bidault, provide important evidence about the motivating ideas and principles of these two men. Richard Kuisel's thought-provoking and innovative work has kept me alive to the linkages between domestic economic planning and foreign policy. I have identified differences of interpretation with each of these works in the notes; my debt to them is equally obvious.
3
Despite this exciting new work in the field, I believe that French diplomatic history has been hampered by historians' unwillingness to do for France what so many of our colleagues who study American and British foreign relations have done for their fields: to offer a sustained analysis of the formation and execution of national strategy. Instead, students of French diplomacy in this period have emphasized France's dependence on American economic and military aid, while overlooking the efforts, sometimes successful and sometimes not, to overcome this dependence or at least compensate for it in various ways. Thus, John Young and Cyril Buffet saw France as being drawn somewhat unwillingly into the western orbit by the realities of power politics and the weakness of France's international position. Yet because their studies conclude in 1948, they did not observe the degree to which entry into the Western
 
Page 7
Alliance improved French leverage and opened new avenues in the negotiations over the future of Germany. Similarly, Irwin Wall sought to elucidate the ways in which the United States exercised influence on France but did little to explore the French influence on American postwar policy. Instead, Wall's work claimed that "there was little the French could do to emancipate themselves from American tutelage during the period of the Marshall Plan, from 1948 to 1950."
4
The study that follows offers a contrary interpretation, not just for the Marshall Plan period but for the entire postwar decade. It focuses on the emergence in the late 1940s of an overall French national strategy that identified and pursued a particular vision of postwar Europe. This vision took some time to take root, required tactical flexibility, and proved hard to defend in the face of challenges from critics both at home and abroad. Nonetheless, by 1955, France stood not simply reconciled but committed to the postwar settlement that it had done much to fashion. The "new Europe" rested on institutions that bound Germany into the western community of nations, encouraged productivity, and enhanced security while balancing political power. All of these aims had been explicit French goals since the end of the war. Of course, France had not achieved them alone. But over the course of a ten-year debate on Germany's future, France helped frame the regional institutions that made the pursuit of these objectives possible.
Second, the book addresses the debate about the role of American policy in the recovery of Europe after World War II. Alan Milward's work, which argued that the U.S.-led European Recovery Program (ERP) did not "save" Europe but rather allowed Europeans to continue along a path to recovery upon which they had already embarked well before 1948, stirred up a lively controversy among historians of American foreign relations. Milward questioned the role of the Marshall Plan in triggering the extraordinary growth rates visible in Europe for the three decades after the war. More broadly, he challenged the notion that American diplomacy set the pace and agenda for postwar European recovery, suggesting instead that Europeans frequently diverged from Washington's priorities. Michael Hogan offered an opposing interpretation, one that saw the Marshall Plan not only as vital in priming the pump of the European economies after the war but, more important, in providing the intellectual underpinnings for European economic recovery. The Marshall Plan, Hogan contended, acted as a transmission belt of ideas and information between the New World and the Old, delivering to Europe the "managed capitalism" that characterized America's own economic transformation in the interwar years. For Hogan, the

Other books

One Young Fool in Dorset by Victoria Twead
Russian Spring by Norman Spinrad
Heart Earth by Ivan Doig
Berlin Burning by Damien Seaman
Lawless by Jessie Keane
A Separate Country by Hicks, Robert
THE DEEP END by Mulhern, Julie
Ash by Malinda Lo