France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (9 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
9.86Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 34
bureaucratic habits of prewar French governments and against the "sterile polemics" that had characterized ministerial relations since the liberation. Ministerial control of the CGP, he wrote, would mean that "instead of creating a plan, we'll be discussing procedure." He stated that no French administration, working within existing structures, could initiate the swift and coherent action that France needed: "[the] plan means transformation and perhaps even revolution of certain sectors of French production. Now, the administration can by nature and duty only administer the existing state of things." The plan must not become simply "a cog in the machinery" of this preexisting structure. Monnet's forceful argumentation, and his threat to resign, prevailed, and Gouin engineered a compromise in the cabinet. The Ministry of National Economy, under the Socialist André Philip, would direct a short-term plan for the coming four months, but Monnet would be allowed to control the promulgation of a four-year plan running through 1950. Monnet was charged with completing this plan by the end of June. The first hurdle had been cleared, and the Monnet Plan could now be drawn up in detail.
53
A final draft of the report would not be completed until November 1946, however, largely because of the preoccupation of the government with immediate credits and coal supplies, without which the French economy could not function, much less modernize. The coal problem in particular bothered Monnet, as it represented the chief obstacle to a swift resumption of economic activity. Coal production in France had regained its prewar level of about 50 million tons a year by the middle of 1946, but imports, on which France had always heavily relied, lagged woefully. Monnet calculated that France's rate of imports was running at 10 million tons a year for 1946, well below the 22 million tons of 1938. This difference could only be made up by imports from the United States and Germany. German imports in particular had to be raised from their monthly totals of 300,000 to 400,000 tons to at least 1.3 million. Only this quantity would assure that the "margin of security indispensible for the workings of industry and transport is reconstituted."
54
Monnet based his expectations for more German coal on U.S. policy. In August 1945, President Truman had called for an increase in German coal exports to 10 million tons before January 1946, and 15 million more by May 1946.
55
The French were to be disappointed, however. "As far as exports go," Monnet noted to André Philip, "the Truman directive has remained a
lettre morte
. The total of exports for the second half of 1945 has been 4 million tons instead of 10," and the rate was actually declining
 
Page 35
because of the departure of the Allied troops who staffed the distribution and transport networks. Monnet figured that at least 1.5 million tons of Ruhr coal should be available to France by the end of 1946.
56
When the first session of the CGP convened on March 16, this was the primary concern, and the CGP urged the government to seek stepped up imports of coal from Germany, preferably on a permanent basis.
57
French officials had a chance to make their case before the Americans in March, when a mission led by former premier Léon Blum went to Washington to seek American economic support. Monnet and the governor of the Bank of France, Emmanuel Monick, accompanied Blum as negotiators, and presented to William Clayton, the American undersecretary of state for economic affairs, a detailed report on the problems of the French economy. The report discussed the long-term erosion of national capital and infrastructure in France that had begun in 1930 and was exacerbated by rearmament and war. Now the government was caught in a dilemma: to begin a program of modernization, it first had to stimulate production so as to develop a margin of earnings to be earmarked for investment; but stimulating production was impossible in an outmoded economic environment, and one that lacked the crucial fuel of industrial activity: coal. Thus, everything came down to two simple problems: coal and credits. From the United States France sought help in securing "an adequate and sustained supply of coal and power," freer access to world markets, "particularly to the markets of the United States," and credits at a favorable rate of interest, similar to the $ 3.75 billion loan just secured by the British.
58
Blum did not leave America empty-handed. Despite protests from the War Department that credits not be given to France because of the latter's obstinacy with regard to the German question, the State Department concluded that a loan to France was an indispensable part of American efforts to see a productive and politically stable Europe emerge from the war. Ambassador Caffery in particular waged a strong campaign in favor of loans to France to strengthen the hand of the tripartite government, and especially Blum's Socialists, in the coming elections. His reports showed a consistent fear that should Blum's mission fail, the consequences in political terms would be severe. Clayton followed this line of reasoning as well in justifying a loan to France before the National Advisory Council, and by the beginning of May, had received the Council's assent to a $ 650 million Export-Import Bank loan to France. In addition, $ 2.8 billion of lend-lease debts were canceled, some $ 700 million worth of goods and equipment already on order were turned into
 
Page 36
loans, and another $ 500 million was recommended for the next year from the World Bank.
59
The loan was not as extensive as the French had hoped, but with this loan, Monnet knew, "the modernization of France had become a common objective between lender and borrower."
60
With American support for French modernization secured, Monnet could now make a sales pitch to the French cabinet itself. In the first report of the CGP to the government, Monnet made five points in arguing that France's greatest needs could only be met by dramatically overhauling the productive apparatus of the nation. First, he claimed that the construction of housing, a pressing need especially in warravaged
départments,
could only be accomplished through a prompt modernization of industry. Second, he argued that raising the standard of living required greater opportunities for employment and business expansion, and only modernization could provide them. Third, modernization would lead to increased productivity and would thus have a salutary demographic effect: economic expansion would provide France with the means and the motive for higher birth rates. Fourth, and most important, France's economic independence could only be maintained if its trade deficit was redressed; this made a dramatic increase in exports vital, and this in turn could be provided only by modernization. Finally, the war had shown that France's security would be greatly enhanced not by expenditure on arms but by strengthening the nation's productive apparatus. Power was a function of industrial potential, and France could thus be powerful only after an overhaul of its economy. These points were evidently persuasive, as the plan was submitted to the cabinet in January 1947 and approved without discussion. The orthodoxy of the 1930s was a distant memory.
61
Why was the Monnet Plan accepted so swiftly, and supported so widely, in a cabinet and a nation full of political contradictions, in which any consensus on postwar planning had been utterly absent until this point? Four basic reasons may be underscored. First, the plan was an effective and unspectacular way out of the deadlock between competing economic philosophies apparent in the Mendès France-Pleven debate. In promulgating the plan, Monnet had avoided jurisdictional squabbles by claiming that he was charting new territory, and thus represented no threat to established ministries. To some degree, this was disingenuous. The hopeful rhetoric of his memoirs aside, Monnet understood that politically, his chances of success would be increased by avoiding confrontation and by securing de Gaulle's backing within the cabinet. Once de Gaulle resigned, Monnet worked on successive presidents and prime
 
Page 37
ministers in a similar fashion, insisting on the importance of keeping the Planning Commissariat attached to the executive branch and out of the grasp of the ministries. In December 1946, just as the plan was being considered by the government of Léon Blum, again premier, Monnet reemphasized that the unwillingness of ministers to submit to the authority of one of their colleagues had made the notion of a strong Ministry of National Economy "an illusion." In a tone bordering on the presumptuous, Monnet argued to Blum that only a planning agency such as he had designed, "distinct from the various-ministries, and apolitical," would succeed in developing and implementing policy, and he actually recommended doing away entirely with the Ministry of National Economy.
62
Thus, the cooperative and unassuming rhetoric that Monnet employed in justifying the plan publicly hid the very specific agenda of the new planning structure: to circumvent bureaucratic bottlenecks and to streamline decision-making on economic policy. The plan provided a means to enact policy without
overtly
threatening the authority of any particular ministry.
63
Second, the plan rallied support from many quarters of the political landscape. It was able to function within the heterogeneous ideological environment of postwar politics precisely because, in contrast to the approach of Mendès France, it was not didactic or coercive, but inclusive, democratic, and "indicative." Production and investment objectives were developed by eighteen modernization commissions that drew upon recommendations of over one thousand technical experts, managers, and union personnel, thus allowing the plan to claim that it was democratic and consensual. The participation of the major labor and business organizations allowed the government to raise the ceiling of the fortyhour workweek without provoking a crisis. Once objectives had been formulated by the commissions, the Commissariat, on the basis of these recommendations, could allocate scarce resources and materials to key sectors, as well as channel credit and give tax breaks and research and development subsidies to particularly important industries. The Commissariat acted as a source of information for the business community, a clearinghouse of ideas and objectives to which many participants were willing to subscribe. In this fashion, the normal French aversion to expansive business practices could be overcome. The result of such "indicative" planning was that the state could establish a role as an arbiter of economic conflicts, willing to set aside ideological principles in favor of pragmatic and flexible agreements on production and investment. It sought to establish a consensus on expansion, modernization, and lim-
 
Page 38
ited state intervention in a market economy, and to a large degree it succeeded.
64
Third, a younger, more receptive personnel in key administrative posts  enjoying greater stability than the ministers at the top  had emerged from the war and were favorable in general terms to the methods Monnet proposed. With Monnet at the CGP was Robert Marjolin, an economist and former Socialist who had joined de Gaulle in London during the war and who since the 1930s had been a proponent of more rational state intervention in the economy. In the Foreign Ministry, another Gaullist loyalist, Hervé Alphand, directed the Office of Economic Relations, from which he was to exercise immense influence on foreign economic policy. In the Finance Ministry, Guillaume Guindey and Olivier Wormser brought new blood and open minds to the problem of financing the plan; François Bloch-Lainé, a true
résistant,
directed the Treasury and became an adherent of Monnet's philosophy. And Monnet himself, ardent exponent of frank and open discussion, succeeded in breaking down many of the traditional barriers between ministries so that these types of men could come into contact with one another. Bloch-Lainé remembered the small dining room in the offices of the CGP that Monnet had had installed precisely for the purpose of encouraging informal contact. Here Monnet would roam, provoking conversation, yet, "rather like a fireman, falling on any spark of disagreement."
65
Over the next few years, these men were central in consolidating the planning process in the hands of the CGP and the Ministry of Finance, while stripping the Ministry of National Economy, still a symbol of
dirigiste
and corporatist economic philosophy, of any control over planning. The state, under the influence of these and other young and largely unconventional administrators, would swing increasingly in favor of a national strategy of recovery that relied on high levels of public spending and investment, accepting the risk of inflation against all the orthodoxy of Third Republic finance. As Bloch-Lainé put it, "a little bit of
fuite en avant
wasn't going to do [France] any harm. We had to profit from this exceptional moment . . .[and] to charge forward, even if we didn't know where we were headed."
66
These participants were crucial to the swift "mental conversion" of the French government in favor of productivity and expansion. René Girault has made the important point that among these figures serious differences arose, with Monnet often assailed by the Ministry of Finance for his elaborate public spending proposals. But over and against the financial dogmas of the previous Republic or Vichy, a new consensus on modernization, expansion, and international competition could be discerned.
67

Other books

Raking the Ashes by Anne Fine
The Heartbreak Cafe by Melissa Hill
TST by Deskins, Brock
Sweet Danger by Violet Blue
Bless the Beasts & Children by Glendon Swarthout
Obsession by Quinn, Ivory
The Seduction of an Earl by Linda Rae Sande