Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

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 ‘non-aggression’ pact with the Soviet Union.