Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (32 page)

It was the British who initiated a new approach to Washington. In a speech to Parliament on January 22nd 1948, Bevin had committed Britain to engagement with her continental neighbours in a common defense strategy, a ‘Western European Union’, on the grounds that British security needs were no longer separable from those of the continent—a significant break with past British thinking. This western European Union was officially inaugurated with the Brussels Pact, but as Bevin explained to Marshall in a message of March 11th, such an arrangement would be incomplete unless extended to the concept of North Atlantic security as a whole—a point to which Marshall was all the more sympathetic because Stalin was just then applying considerable pressure on Norway to get it to sign a ‘nonaggression’ pact with the Soviet Union.

At Bevin’s urging, then, secret discussions took place in Washington between British, US and Canadian representatives to draft a treaty for Atlantic defense. On July 6th 1948, ten days after the start of the Berlin airlift and immediately following Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Cominform, these talks were opened to other members of the Brussels Pact, among whom the French were not well pleased to discover that once again the ‘Anglo-Americans’ had been arranging the world behind their back. By April of the following year the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) had been agreed and signed by the US, Canada, and ten European states.

NATO was a remarkable development. As late as 1947 few would have predicted that the United States would commit itself to a European military alliance. Indeed, there were many in the US Congress who were notably reluctant to approve Article V of the Treaty (which bound NATO members to come to one another’s aid if attacked), and the Treaty only secured Congressional approval, after three months of discussion, because it was represented as an
Atlantic
defense pact, rather than a Euro-American alliance. Indeed, when Dean Acheson presented the Administration’s case before the Senate, he took care to insist that America would
not
be deploying substantial ground forces in Europe.

And this was indeed the American intention. If the United States was committing itself to an entangling European alliance for the first time, it was because many people in Washington saw NATO much as they saw the Marshall Plan: as a device to help Europeans feel better about themselves and manage their own affairs—in this case, their own defense. In itself, NATO changed nothing in the European military balance: of the fourteen divisions stationed in Western Europe, only two were American. The Western allies were still outnumbered on the ground 12:1. The US Chiefs of Staff in 1949 calculated that it would be 1957 at the earliest before an effective defense on the Rhine could be mounted. It was by no means inappropriate that at the NATO Treaty-signing ceremony in Constitutional Hall, Washington, on April 9th 1949, the band played ‘I’ve Got Plenty of Nothing . . . ’.

Nevertheless, things looked rather different from the European side. The Americans did not ascribe much significance to military alliances; but Europeans, as Walter Bedell Smith advised his colleagues on the State Department Policy Planning Staff, ‘do attach far more importance to the scrap of paper pledging support than we ever have.’ This was not perhaps altogether surprising—they had nothing else. The British, at least, were still an island. But the French, like everyone else, were as vulnerable as ever: to the Germans
and
now to the Russians as well.

NATO thus had a double attraction for Paris especially: it would place the line of defense against Soviet forces further east than hitherto—as Charles Bohlen had observed, some months before the Treaty was signed, ‘the one faint element of confidence which [the French] cling to is the fact that American troops, however strong in number, stand between them and the Red Army.’ And perhaps more important, it would serve as a reinsurance policy against German revanchism. Indeed it was only because of the promise of NATO protection that the French government, with the outcome of World War One still firmly in mind, conceded its approval for a West German state.

The French thus welcomed NATO as the guarantee against a revived Germany that they had been unable to obtain by diplomatic means in the previous three years. The Dutch and Belgians also saw in NATO an impediment to future German revanchism. The Italians were included to help shore up Alcide De Gasperi’s domestic support against Communist critics. The British regarded the NATO Treaty as a signal achievement in their struggle to keep the US engaged in Europe’s defense. And the Truman Administration sold the agreement to Congress and the American people as a barrier to Soviet aggression in the North Atlantic. Hence the famous
bon mot
of Lord Ismay, who took up his post as NATO’s first Secretary General in 1952: the purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was ‘to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.’

NATO was a bluff. As Denis Healey, a future British defense minister, observed in his memoirs, ‘for most of the Europeans, NATO was worthless unless it could prevent another war; they were not interested in fighting one’. The originality of the Treaty lay not so much in what it could achieve but in what it represented: like the Marshall Plan—and the Brussels Treaty from which it sprang—NATO illustrated the most significant change that had come over Europe (and the US) as a result of the war—a willingness to share information and cooperate in defense, security, trade, currency regulations and much else. An integrated Allied command in peacetime, after all, was an unheard of departure from practice.

But NATO did not leap fully formed from the agreements of 1949. In the spring of 1950 Washington was still worrying about how to explain to the French and other Europeans that the only realistic hope for West European defense was to rearm Germany, a subject that made everyone uneasy and was thought likely to provoke an unpredictable response from Stalin. In any case, no-one wanted to spend precious resources on rearmament. The appeal of neutrality—as an alternative to defenseless confrontation—was growing, in Germany and France alike. If the Korean War had not broken out just at this moment (a reasonable counter-factual, since it nearly didn’t) the contours of recent European history might look very different indeed.

Stalin’s support for Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea on June 25th 1950 was his most serious miscalculation of all. The Americans and West Europeans immediately drew the (erroneous) conclusion that Korea was a diversion or prelude, and that Germany would be next—an inference encouraged by Walter Ulbricht’s imprudent boast that the Federal Republic would be next to fall. The Soviet Union had successfully tested an atomic bomb just eight months earlier, leading American military experts to exaggerate Soviet preparedness for war; but even so, the budget increases requested in National Security Council paper #68 (presented on April 7th 1950) would almost certainly not have been approved but for the Korean attack.

The risk of a European war was greatly exaggerated, but not completely absent. Stalin
was
contemplating a possible assault—on Yugoslavia, not West Germany—but abandoned the idea in the face of Western rearmament. And just as the West misread the Soviet purpose in Korea, so Stalin—accurately advised by his intelligence services of the rapid US military build-up that followed—mistakenly assumed that the Americans had aggressive designs of their own on his sphere of control in eastern Europe. But none of these assumptions and miscalculations was clear at the time, and politicians and generals proceeded as best they could on the basis of limited information and past precedent.

The scale of Western rearmament was dramatic indeed. The US defense budget rose from $15.5 billion in August 1950 to $70 billion by December of the following year, following President Truman’s declaration of a National Emergency. By 1952-53 defense expenditure consumed 17.8 percent of the US GNP, compared with just 4.7 percent in 1949. In response to Washington’s request, America’s allies in NATO also increased their defense spending: after falling steadily since 1946, British defense costs rose to nearly 10 percent of GNP in 1951-52, growing even faster than in the hectic rearmament of the immediate pre-war years. France, too, increased defense spending to comparable levels. In every NATO member state, defense spending increased to a post-war peak in the years 1951-53.

The economic impact of this sudden leap in military investment was equally unprecedented. Germany especially was flooded with orders for machinery, tools, vehicles and other products that the Federal Republic was uniquely well-placed to supply, all the more so because the West Germans were forbidden to manufacture arms and could thus concentrate on everything else. West German steel output alone, 2.5 million tonnes in 1946 and 9 million tonnes in 1949, grew to nearly 15 million tonnes by 1953. The dollar deficit with Europe and the rest of the world fell by 65 percent in the course of a single year, as the United States spent huge sums overseas on arms, equipment stockpiles, military emplacements and troops. FIAT in Turin got its first American contracts, for ground-support jet aircraft (a contract urged upon Washington for political reasons by its Rome embassy).

But the economic news was not all good. The British government was forced to divert public expenditure away from welfare services to meet its defense commitments, a choice that split the governing Labour Party and helped bring about its defeat at the elections of 1951. The cost of living in West Europe went up as government spending fuelled inflation—in France consumer prices rose 40 percent in the two years following the outbreak of war in Korea. The West Europeans, who had only just begun to reap the benefits of Marshall Aid, were clearly in no condition to sustain for very long what amounted to a war economy and the 1951 US Mutual Security Act recognized this, effectively closing out the Marshall Plan and transforming it into a programme of military assistance. By the end of 1951 the US was transferring nearly $5 billion of military support to Western Europe.

From a psychological boost to European confidence, NATO thus became a major military commitment, drawing on the seemingly limitless resources of the US economy and committing the Americans and their allies to an unprecedented peacetime build up of men and matériel. General Eisenhower returned to Europe as Supreme Allied Commander and Allied military headquarters and administrative facilities were established in Belgium and France. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was now, unambiguously, an
alliance
. Its primary task was what military planners called the ‘forward defense’ of Europe: i.e. confrontation with the Red Army in the middle of Germany. To perform this role, it was agreed at the NATO Council meeting in Lisbon in February 1952 that the alliance would need to raise at least ninety-six new divisions within two years.

But even with a significant and ever-growing American military presence there was only one way in which NATO could meet its targets: by rearming the West Germans. Thanks to Korea the Americans had felt obliged to bring up this sensitive matter (Dean Acheson first raised it formally at a Foreign Ministers’ meeting in September 1950), even though President Truman himself was initially reluctant. On the one hand no-one wanted to put weapons in the hands of Germans just five years after the liberation of Europe; on the other hand, and on the analogy of the economic difficulties of the Bizone just three years previous, there was something perverse about spending billions of dollars to defend the West Germans from Russian attack without asking them to make a contribution of their own. And if Germany was to become, as some anticipated, a sort of buffer zone and future battlefield, then the risk of alienating German sympathies and encouraging neutralist sentiments could not be ignored.

Moscow, of course, would not take kindly to West German rearmament. But after June 1950 Soviet sensibilities were no longer a prime consideration. The British, however reluctantly, saw no option but to find some device for arming Germany while keeping it firmly under Allied control. It was the
French
who had always been most firmly opposed to putting weapons in German hands, and France had certainly not joined NATO just to see it become an umbrella for German remilitarisation. France managed to block and postpone the rearmament of Germany until 1954. But long before then French policy had been undergoing a signal transformation, allowing Paris to accept with some equanimity a limited restoration of Germany. Unhappy and frustrated at being reduced to the least of the great powers, France had embarked upon a novel vocation as the initiator of a new Europe.

The idea of European union, in one form or another, was not new. The nineteenth century had seen a variety of more or less unsuccessful customs unions in central and western Europe and even before World War One there had been occasional idealistic talk, drawing on the idea that Europe’s future lay in a coming together of its disparate parts. World War One itself, far from dissipating such optimistic visions, seems to have given them greater force: as Aristide Briand—the French statesman and himself an enthusiastic author of European pacts and proposals—insisted, the time had come to overcome past rivalries and think European, speak European, feel European. In 1924 the French economist Charles Gide joined other signatories across Europe in launching an International Committee for a European Customs Union. Three years later a junior minister in the British Foreign Office would profess himself ‘astonished’ at the extent of continental interest in the ‘pan-European’ idea.

More prosaically, the Great War had brought French and Germans, in a curious way, to a better appreciation of their mutual dependence. Once the post-war disruption had subsided and Paris had abandoned its fruitless efforts to extract German reparations by force, an international Steel Pact was signed, in September 1926, by France, Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the (then autonomous) region of the Saar, to regulate steel production and prevent excess capacity. Although the Pact was joined the following year by Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary, it was only ever a cartel of the traditional kind; but the German Prime Minister Gustav Stresemann certainly saw in it the embryonic shape of future trans-national accords. He was not alone.