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By 1945 many continental European countries had lost two generations of potential leaders:
Where the First World War had a politicizing, radicalizing effect, its successor produced the opposite outcome: a deep longing for normality.
war is not always an economic disaster—on the contrary, it can be a powerful stimulus to rapid growth in certain sectors. Thanks to World War Two the US surged into an unassailable commercial and technological lead, much as Britain had done during the Napoleonic wars.
the German Reichsbank deposited the gold equivalent of 1,638,000,000 Swiss francs in Switzerland during the Second World War.
it was Swiss authorities before the outbreak of the conflict who asked that German passports indicate whether their holders were Jewish, the better to restrict unwanted arrivals.
Although the Wehrmacht high command postponed its June 1940 plans for an invasion of Switzerland, it never abandoned them;
Only UNRRA supplies built up in the spring of 1946 kept Austrians from starving in the twelve months that followed.
western Europe could no longer turn to the granaries of eastern Europe on which it had traditionally depended.
World War Two and its uncertain aftermath might well have precipitated Europe’s terminal decline.
Between the end of the war and the announcement of the Marshall Plan, the United States had already spent many billions of dollars in grants and loans to Europe.
this agreement was designed in part to advance the US agenda of freer international trade, open and stable currency exchanges and closer international cooperation. In practice, however, the money was gone within a year and the only medium-term legacy was increased popular resentment (much played upon by the Left) at America’s exploitation of its economic muscle.
Analogus to US in Asia today
left to the Europeans to decide whether to take American aid and how to use it, though American advisers and specialists would play a prominent role in the administration of the funds. Secondly, the assistance was to be spread across a period of years and was thus from the start a strategic programme of recovery and growth rather than a disaster fund.
Czechoslovak participation would be construed as an act directed against friendship with the Soviet Union and the rest of our allies.
Similar to China in Asia and Pacific today
it almost certainly paved the way for the Communists’ successful coup in Prague seven months later.
His decision to stand aside from the European Recovery Program was one of Stalin’s greatest strategic mistakes.
the provision of goods, free of charge, delivered to European countries on the basis of annual requests formulated as part of a four-year plan by each recipient state.
The programme obliged European governments to plan ahead and calculate future investment
This is the broader context of the Marshall Plan, a lowering political and security landscape in which American interests were inextricably interwoven with those of a fragile and sickly European sub-continent.
Western Europe was able to benefit from American help because it was a long-established region of private property, market economics and, except in recent years, stable polities.
As the British diplomat Oliver Franks put it: ‘The Marshall Plan was about putting American dollars in the hands of Europeans to buy the tools of recovery.’
Eisenhower certainly could have reached Berlin before the Russians but was discouraged by Washington from doing so.
generals’ concern for loss of life
Stalin’s interest in the German capital.
For the fact is that in Europe the Cold War began not after the Second World War but following the end of the First.
‘It is of the utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation.’
demilitarization, denazification, deindustrialization
‘You can have vengeance, or peace, but you can’t have both.’
As early as 1943 he had taken the full measure of Roosevelt’s desire to see the liquidation of the British Empire—indeed, there were times when Roosevelt seemed at least as concerned with reducing post-war Britain as with containing Soviet Russia.
pressure Britain to abandon its overseas empire and embrace open trade and sterling convertibility;
The British continued to see European affairs in terms of a balance of power:
In that sense the Cold War in Europe was an unavoidable outcome of the Soviet dictator’s personality and the system over which he ruled.
It is easy, in retrospect, to see that hopes for a democratic Eastern Europe after 1945 were always forlorn. Central and Eastern Europe had few indigenous democratic or liberal traditions. The inter-war regimes in this part of Europe had been corrupt, authoritarian and in some cases murderous.
Prague coup was of enormous significance, precisely because it came in a more or less democratic country that had seemed so friendly to Moscow.
But for contemporaries what mattered was that the Yugoslav Communist partisans had fought the only successful resistance war against the German and Italian occupiers.
Tito’s Communists had no truck with coalitions of the kind being set up elsewhere in liberated eastern Europe and set about immediately destroying all their opponents.
Communism had lost its revolutionary edge and become, deliberately, part of a broad anti-Fascist coalition.
Henceforth Moscow expected Communists to pay closer attention and subordinate local considerations to Soviet interests.
Like most of Stalin’s diplomatic adventures the Berlin blockade was an improvisation, not part of any calculated aggressive design
The Berlin crisis had three significant outcomes.
In the first place, it led directly to the creation of two German states,
the Berlin crisis committed the United States for the first time to a significant military presence in Europe for the indefinite future.
the Berlin crisis led directly to a reappraisal of Western military calculations.
that British security needs were no longer separable from those of the continent—a significant break with past British thinking.
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
‘to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down.’
Stalin’s support for Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea on June 25th 1950 was his most serious miscalculation of all.
Thus Pierre Pucheu, a senior Vichy administrator later to be executed by the Free French, envisaged a post-war European order where customs barriers would be eliminated and a single European economy would encompass the whole continent, with a single currency. Pucheu’s vision—which was shared by Albert Speer and many others—represented a sort of updating of Napoleon’s Continental System under Hitlerian auspices, and it appealed to a younger generation of continental bureaucrats and technicians who had experienced the frustrations of economic policy making in the 1930s.
The fact that the Nazis themselves had apparently unified much of Europe in a technical sense—removing frontiers, expropriating property, integrating transportation networks and so forth—made the idea even more plausible.
Or, as he put it more bluntly to his aides: ‘Das ist unser Durchbruch’—this is our breakthrough. For the first time the Federal Republic of Germany was entering an international organization on equal terms with other independent states—and would now be bound to the Western alliance, as Adenauer wished.
All six foreign ministers who signed the Treaty in 1951 were members of their respective Christian Democratic parties. The three dominant statesmen in the main member states—Alcide De Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman—were all from the margins of their countries:
