Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Another factor was the long decline in agricultural prices relative to industrial ones, a process exacerbated since the eighteen-seventies by the importation of cheap grain and later meat from the Americas and the British Dominions. By the 1930s European peasants had lived for nearly three generations with this relentless deterioration in their circumstances. Many—from Greece, Southern Italy, the Balkans, central and eastern Europe—had emigrated: to the US, Argentina and elsewhere. Those who stayed behind had often proved easy prey for nationalist and Fascist demagogues. After the war it was thus widely believed, particularly on the Left, that Fascism appealed especially to desperate peasants and that any revival of Fascism in Europe would begin in the countryside. The agrarian problem was thus twofold: how to improve the economic prospects of the peasant and thereby wean him from authoritarian temptation.

Between 1944 and 1947 every east European country saw the creation of a large class of smallholders beholden to the new authorities for their land. A few years later those same smallholders would in their turn be dispossessed by the Communist regimes in their drive for collectivization. But in the meantime whole classes of landed gentry and large farmers, in Poland, East Prussia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia simply disappeared.

the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in West Germany, the Christian Democrats (DC) in Italy and the Popular Republican Movement (MRP) in France—now had a near-monopoly of the Catholic vote. In 1945 Europe, that still mattered a lot: the Catholic vote was still heavily conservative, especially on social questions and in regions of high Catholic practice. Traditional Catholic voters in Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and southern and western Germany would rarely vote Socialist and almost never Communist. But, and this was the peculiarity of the post-war era, even conservative Catholics in many countries often had no choice but to vote Christian Democrat, despite the reformist bent of Christian Democrat politicians and policies, because conventional right-wing parties were either under a shadow or else banned outright. Even non-Catholic conservatives turned increasingly to the Christian Democrats, as a bar to the ‘Marxist’ Left.

In contrast to the lingering insurrectionary undertone to even the most domesticated Socialist and Communist rhetoric, prominent Christian Democrats—Maurice Schumann and Georges Bidault in France, Alcide de Gasperi in Italy and Konrad Adenauer in the Federal Republic—always emphasised reconciliation and stability,.

The leaders of Christian Democratic parties, like Britain’s Winston Churchill, were men of an earlier time: Konrad Adenauer was born in 1876, Alcide de Gasperi five years later, Churchill himself in 1874. This was no mere coincidence or biographical curiosity. By 1945 many continental European countries had lost two generations of potential leaders: the first to death and injury in the Great War, the second to the temptation of Fascism or else to murder at the hands of Nazis and their friends. This shortfall manifested itself in the generally rather mediocre quality of younger politicians in these years—Palmiro Togliatti (who had spent much of the previous twenty years as a political operative in Moscow) was an exception. The special appeal of Léon Blum, who returned to public life in France after imprisonment by Vichy and incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald, was not just his heroism but also his age (he was born in 1872).

But thirdly, and perhaps most important, the old men who rebuilt Western Europe represented continuity.

The most obvious economic impact of the war was on housing stock. The damage to London, where three and a half million homes in the metropolitan area were destroyed, was greater than that wrought by the Great Fire of 1666. Ninety percent of all homes in Warsaw were destroyed. Only 27 percent of the residential buildings in Budapest in 1945 were habitable. Forty percent of German housing stock was gone, 30 percent of British, 20 percent of French. In Italy 1.2 million homes were destroyed, mostly in cities of 50,000 or more people. The problem of homelessness, as we have seen, was perhaps the most obvious consequence of war in the immediate post-war era—in West Germany and Britain the housing shortage would last well into the mid-1950s.

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 Swiss authorities, in their defence, had good reason to keep the Nazis friendly. Although the Wehrmacht high command postponed its June 1940 plans for an invasion of Switzerland, it never abandoned them; the experience of Belgium and the Netherlands was a grim reminder of the fate awaiting vulnerable neutral states that got in Hitler’s way. For similar reasons the Swedes also extended their cooperation to Berlin, on whom they were historically dependent for coal.

Before the war neither Switzerland nor Sweden had been especially prosperous—indeed they contained significant regions of rural poverty. But the lead they secured in the course of the war has proved lasting: both are now at the top of the European league and have been there steadily for four decades.

Food shortages were endemic everywhere except Sweden and Switzerland. Only UNRRA supplies built up in the spring of 1946 kept Austrians from starving in the twelve months that followed. Caloric provision in the British Zone of Germany fell from 1,500 per day per adult in mid-1946 to 1,050 in early 1947. Italians, who suffered two consecutive years of hunger in 1945 and 1946, had the lowest average food levels of all the west European populations in the spring of 1947. In French opinion polls taken in the course of 1946 ‘food’, ‘bread’, ‘meat’ consistently outpaced everything else as the public’s number one preoccupation.

German coal was a vital resource for French steel manufacturers. But until its political future was resolved Germany’s economy—for all its restored potential—remained frozen, effectively blocking the economic recovery of the rest of the continent. The second problem concerned not Germany but the USA, though the two were connected. In 1938, 44 percent of Britain’s machinery imports by value came from the USA, 25 percent from Germany. In 1947 the figures were 65 percent and 3 percent respectively. The situation was similar in other European countries. This sharply increased demand for American goods was, ironically, an indication of an upswing in European economic activity—but to buy American products or materials required American dollars. Europeans had nothing to sell to the rest of the world; but without hard currency they could not buy food to stop millions from starving, nor could they import the raw materials and machinery needed to move forward their own production. The dollar crisis was serious. In 1947 the UK, whose national debt had increased fourfold since 1939, was buying nearly half its total imports from the USA and fast running out of cash. France, the world’s largest importer of coal, was running an annual payments deficit with the US of $2,049 million.

In Germany there was no functioning currency. The black market flourished and cigarettes were the accepted medium of exchange: teachers in DP camps were paid 5 packs a week. The value of a carton of American cigarettes in Berlin ranged from $60–$165, an opportunity for soldiers in the American occupation forces to make serious money converting and re-converting their cigarette allocation: in the first four months of the Allied occupation US troops in Berlin alone sent home $11 million more than they received in wages. In Braunschweig, 600 cigarettes would buy you a bicycle—a necessity in Germany no less than in Italy, as depicted unforgettably in Vittorio de Sica’s 1948 film Bicycle Thieves.

from Paris in March 1947, ‘there has been a climate of indubitable and growing malaise in Paris, and perhaps all over Europe, as if the French people, or all European people, expected something to happen, or, worse, expected nothing to happen.’ The European continent, as she had noted a few months before, was slowly entering a new ice age. George Kennan would have agreed. In a Policy Planning Staff paper six weeks later he suggested that the real problem was not Communism, or if so then only indirectly. The true source of the European malaise was the effects of war and what Kennan diagnosed as ‘profound exhaustion of physical plant and spiritual vigour’. The hurdles the continent faced seemed too great, now that the initial burst of post-war hope and rebuilding had drained away.

Hamilton Fish, editor of Foreign Affairs, the influential house journal of the American foreign policy establishment, described his impressions of Europe in July 1947: ‘There is too little of everything—too few trains, trams, buses and automobiles to transport people to work on time, let alone to take them on holidays; too little flour to make bread without adulterants, and even so not enough bread to provide energies for hard labor; too little paper for newspapers to report more than a fraction of the world’s news; too little seed for planting and too little fertilizer to nourish it; too few houses to live in and not enough glass to supply them with window panes; too little leather for shoes, wool for sweaters, gas for cooking, cotton for diapers, sugar for jam, fats for frying, milk for babies, soap for washing.’

German residents of the American Zone expected it to be at least twenty years before their country recovered. In October 1945 Charles de Gaulle had imperiously informed the French people that it would take twenty-five years of ‘furious work’ before France would be resuscitated.

Marshall’s plan for a European Recovery Program, discussed with his advisers over the next few weeks and made public in a famous Commencement Address at Harvard University on June 5th 1947, was dramatic and unique. But it did not come out of nowhere. 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. The chief beneficiaries by far had been the UK and France, which had received $4.4 billion and $1.9 billion in loans respectively, but no country had been excluded—loans to Italy exceeded $513 million by mid-1947 and Poland ($251 million), Denmark ($272 million), Greece ($161 million) and many other countries were indebted to the US as well.

The terms of the loan negotiated in Washington in May 1946 between the US and France were only slightly less restrictive. In addition to a write-off of $2.25 billion of wartime loans, the French got hundreds of millions of dollars in credits and the promise of low-interest loans to come. In return, Paris pledged to abandon protectionist import quotas, allowing freer entry to American and other foreign products. Like the British loan, 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.

By the time Marshall Aid came to an end, in 1952, the United States had spent some $13 billion, more than all previous US overseas aid combined. Of this the UK and France got by far the largest sums in absolute amounts, but the relative impact on Italy and the smaller recipients was probably greater still: in Austria, 14 percent of the country’s income in the first full year of the European Recovery Program (ERP), from July 1948 to June 1949, came from Marshall Aid. These figures were enormous for the time: in cash terms the ERP was worth about $100 billion in today’s (2004) dollars, but as an equivalent share of America’s Gross Domestic Product (it consumed about 0.5 percent of the latter in the years 1948–1951) a Marshall Plan at the beginning of the twenty-first century would cost about $201 billion.

Czechoslovakia’s exclusion from the Marshall Aid programme was an economic and political catastrophe for the country. The same is true of the ‘choice’ imposed on every other country in the region, and above all, perhaps, for the Soviet Union itself. His decision to stand aside from the European Recovery Program was one of Stalin’s greatest strategic mistakes. Whatever their private calculations, the Americans would have had no choice but to include eastern Europe in the ERP, having made the offer available to all, and the consequences for the future would have been immeasurable. Instead, the aid was confined to the West and marked a parting of the ways between the two halves of the continent.

Although the US administrators of the Plan made no secret of their expectations, they left it to Europeans to take responsibility for determining the level of aid and the manner of its distribution. European politicians—accustomed to the blunt self-interest of the US in earlier bilateral loan negotiations—were rather taken by surprise. Their confusion was understandable. Americans themselves were divided as to the goals of the Plan. Idealists in the New Deal mould—and there were many in post-war American administrations—saw an opportunity to reconstruct Europe in the American image, emphasizing modernization, infrastructural investment, industrial productivity, economic growth and labour-capital cooperation.

Using the Bank of International Settlements as their agent, European states were encouraged to secure credit lines proportional to their trading requirements. Then, instead of using up scarce dollars they could settle their obligations through an intra-European transfer of credits. All that mattered was not whom you traded with but the overall balance of credits and debits in European currencies. By the time it was wound up in 1958, the Payments Union had quietly contributed not merely to the steady expansion of intra-European trade but to an unprecedented degree of mutually advantageous collaboration—financed, it should be noted, by a substantial injection of US dollars to furnish the initial credit pool.

From a more conventional American perspective, however, free trade and its attendant benefits were themselves a sufficient objective and justification for the ERP programme. The United States had been particularly hard hit by the trading and export slump of the thirties and spared no effort to convince others of the importance to post-war recovery of liberalized tariff regimes and convertible currencies. Like English Liberals’ enthusiasm for free trade in the era before 1914, such American pleas for the unrestricted movement of goods were not altogether un-self-interested.

Free trade is (was) in America's self-interest.

CIA Director Allen Dulles observed: ‘The Plan presupposes that we desire to help restore a Europe which can and will compete with us in the world markets and for that very reason will be able to buy substantial amounts of our products.’ In a few cases there were more immediate benefits: back in the US, organized labour’s backing for the Marshall Plan was secured through the promise that all in-kind transfers from America would be despatched in US-owned ships loaded by American dockworkers unionized in the AFL-CIO. But this was a rare case of direct and immediate advantage. For the most part Dulles was right: the Marshall Plan would benefit the USA by restoring her major trading partner, rather than by reducing Europe to an imperial dependency.

the deeper question was whether Europe and Europeans had lost control of their destiny, whether thirty years of murderous intra-European conflict had not passed the fate of the continent over to the two great peripheral powers, the US and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was quite content to await such a prospect—as Kennan noted in his memoirs, the pall of fear hanging over Europe in 1947 was preparing the continent to fall, like a ripe fruit, into Stalin’s hands. But for American policymakers, Europe’s vulnerability was a problem, not an opportunity.

Europe was concerned about losing sovereignty to the US and USSR.

A Special Ad Hoc group of the State, War and Navy Departments’ coordinating committee spelled the point out more fully in a report dated April 21st 1947: ‘It is important to maintain in friendly hands areas which contain or protect sources of metals, oil and other natural resources, which contain strategic objectives or areas strategically located, which contain substantial industrial potential, which possess manpower and organized military forces in substantial quantities, or which for political or psychological reasons enable the US to exert a greater influence for world stability, security and peace.’

Western Europe indubitably recovered, and precisely over the period (1948–1951) of the Marshall Plan. By 1949 French industrial and agricultural production both exceeded 1938 levels for the first time. By the same criterion sustained recovery was achieved in 1948 by the Netherlands, in 1949 by Austria and Italy, in 1950 by Greece and West Germany. Of those countries occupied during the war, only Belgium, Denmark and Norway recovered sooner (in 1947). Between 1947 and 1951 the combined GNP of western Europe rose by 30 percent.

Britain and France had declared war on Hitler in September 1939 over his violation of Poland. But for the Western Allies the case for leaving Stalin a free hand in the east was self evident. The point of the war was to defeat Germany.

on May 2nd 1945 the Yugoslav Army of National Liberation and the British Eighth Army came face to face in Trieste drawing through that most cosmopolitan of central European cities a line that would become the first true frontier of the Cold War. Of course the ‘official’ Cold War still lay in the future. But in certain respects it had begun long before May 1945. So long as Germany remained the enemy it was easy to forget the deeper disputes and antagonisms separating the Soviet Union from its wartime allies. But they were there. Four years of wary cooperation in a life or death struggle with a common foe had done little to obliterate nearly thirty years of mutual suspicion. 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 was Germany that brought Russia and the West together in 1941, much as it had succeeded in doing before 1914. But the alliance was foredoomed. From 1918–34 the Soviet strategy in central and western Europe—splitting the Left and encouraging subversion and violent protest—helped shape an image of ‘Bolshevism’ as fundamentally alien and hostile.

As for the Soviets, they never lost their distrust of the West—a distrust whose roots go back far beyond 1917, of course, but which were well irrigated by Western military intervention during the civil war of 1917–21, by the Soviet Union’s absence from international agencies and affairs for the next fifteen years, by the well-founded suspicion that most Western leaders preferred Fascists to Communists if forced to choose, and by the intuition that Britain and France especially would not be sorry to see the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany engage in mutually destructive conflict to others’ advantage.

Even after the wartime alliance was forged and the common interest in defeating Germany was clear, the degree of mutual mistrust is striking: there was, revealingly, very little wartime exchange of sensitive intelligence between West and East.

Thanks to German aggression the United States was now, for the first time, a power in Europe. That the US had overwhelming strength was self-evident, even to those mesmerized by the achievements of the Red Army. US GNP had doubled in the course of the war, and by the spring of 1945 America accounted for half the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses and virtually all international financial reserves. The United States had put 12 million men under arms to fight Germany and its allies, and by the time Japan surrendered the American fleet was larger than all other fleets in the world combined.

Reflecting the views of, among others, Henry Morgenthau, the US Secretary of the Treasury, it recommended that: ‘It should be brought home to the Germans that Germany’s ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance has destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves. Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation’. Or, as Morgenthau himself put it, ‘It is of the utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation.’ The point, in short, was to avoid one of the major mistakes of the Versailles Treaty, as it seemed in retrospect to the policy makers of 1945: the failure to bring home to Germans the extent of their sins and the nemesis visited upon them.

the Wehrmacht was formally dissolved (on August 20th 1946); denazification programs were set in place in the US-occupied zone especially, as we saw in Chapter Two; and strict limits were placed upon German industrial capacity and output, with steel-making particularly severely restricted under the March 1946 ‘Plan for the Level of the Post-War (German) Economy’. But from the outset the ‘Morgenthau strategy’ was vigorously criticized within the US Administration itself.

American critics of the initial US ‘hard’ line added a further consideration. It was all very well forcibly bringing Germans to a consciousness of their own defeat, but unless they were given some prospect of a better future the outcome might be the same as before: a resentful, humiliated nation vulnerable to demagogy from Right or Left. As former President Herbert Hoover expressed it to Truman himself, in 1946, ‘You can have vengeance, or peace, but you can’t have both.’

The economic meltdown of the inter-war years seemed to Americans especially to be the root source of the European (and world) crisis. Unless currencies were convertible and nations stood to benefit mutually from increased trade, there was nothing to prevent a return to the bad days of September 1931, when the post-World War One monetary system fell apart.

Led by Maynard Keynes—the moving spirit behind the July 1944 meeting at the Bretton Woods conference center in New Hampshire—economists and statesmen sought an alternative to the international financial system of pre-war days: something less rigid and deflationary than the gold standard, but more reliable and mutually sustaining than a floating-rate currency regime. Whatever this new regime was to be, it would need, Keynes argued, something resembling an international bank, functioning rather like the central bank of a domestic economy, to administer it: to maintain the fixed exchange rate while at the same time encouraging and facilitating foreign exchange transactions. That, in essence, is what was agreed at Bretton Woods. An International Monetary Fund was set up (with US cash) ‘to facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade’ (Article I). The initial Executive Board, modeled on the UN Security Council, had representatives from the US, UK, France, China and the USSR. An International Trading Organisation was proposed, which would eventually take shape in 1947 as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (later the World Trade Organisation). Members agreed to tariff and other concessions for contracting partners, as well as codes for trade practices and procedures for handling breaches and disputes. All of this was in itself a dramatic break from earlier ‘mercantilist’ approaches to trade and was intended, in due course, to inaugurate a new age of...

Nevertheless, they sincerely expected that the mutual benefits to be had from an increase in international commerce and financial stability would eventually overcome national traditions and political mistrust. So when the Soviet Union abruptly announced, at the beginning of 1946, that it would not be joining the Bretton Woods institutions, the United States Treasury Department was genuinely bewildered; and it was to explain the thinking that lay behind Stalin’s move that George Kennan sent from Moscow, on the night of February 22nd 1946, his famous Long Telegram, the first significant move in America’s acknowledgement of the coming confrontation.

The United States in 1945 and for some time to come seriously expected to extricate itself from Europe as soon as possible, and was thus understandably keen to put in place a workable settlement that would not require American presence or supervision. This aspect of American post-war thinking is not well remembered or understood today, but it was uppermost in American calculations at the time—as Roosevelt had explained at Yalta, the US did not expect to remain in occupation of Germany (and thus in Europe) more than two years at most. There was strong pressure on Truman to fulfill this undertaking. The abrupt ending of Lend-Lease was part of a general cutting back of economic and military commitments to Europe. The American defense budget was reduced by five-sixths between 1945 and 1947. At the end of the war in Europe the US had 97 combat-ready ground divisions in place; by mid-1947 there were just twelve divisions, most of them under strength and engaged in administrative tasks. The rest had gone home and been demobilized. This met the expectations of American voters, only 7 percent of whom in October 1945 placed foreign problems ahead of domestic concerns; but it played havoc with America’s European allies, who began seriously to fear a reprise of inter-war isolationism. They were only half-mistaken; as the British knew, in the event of a Soviet invasion of western Europe after 1945 American strategy consisted of an immediate retreat to peripheral bases in Britain, Spain...

Britain was not universally loved in Washington. In a speech on April 12th 1946, Vice-President Henry Wallace reminded his audience that ‘aside from our common language and common literary tradition, we have no more in common with Imperialistic England than with Communist Russia’. Wallace, of course, was notoriously ‘soft’ on Communism, but his distaste for American involvement with Britain and Europe was widely shared across the political spectrum.

US strategy spanning the years 1944–47 it would be this: reach a continental European settlement with Stalin; pressure Britain to abandon its overseas empire and embrace open trade and sterling convertibility; and withdraw from Europe with all due speed. Of these, only the second objective was achieved—the third falling victim to the impossibility of the first.

From London’s point of view, the war had been fought to defeat Germany, and if the price for this was a Soviet imperium in eastern Europe, then that was how things would be. The British continued to see European affairs in terms of a balance of power: in the words of Sir William Strang, of the Foreign Office, ‘[i]t is better that Russia should dominate eastern Europe than that Germany should dominate western Europe’.

In the autumn of 1947 the country was even forced to cancel naval manoeuvres in order to save fuel oil. In the words of the American Ambassador William Clayton, a far from unsympathetic observer, ‘the British are hanging in by their eyelashes to the hope that somehow or other with our help they will be able to preserve the British Empire and their leadership of it.’

Europe in May and June 1940, when the great French army collapsed and fell apart before the Panzer onslaught across the Meuse and through Picardy, was thus all the greater for being so unexpected. In six traumatic weeks, the cardinal reference points of European inter-state relations changed forever. France ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a power, and despite De Gaulle’s best efforts in later decades it has never been one since.

one internal French policy paper put it, a week after the Liberation of Paris in 1944: ‘If France should have to submit to a third assault during the next generation, it is to be feared that . . . it will succumb forever.’ That was in private. In public, post-war French statesmen and politicians insisted upon their country’s claim to recognition as a member of the victorious Allied coalition, a world power to be accorded equal standing with her peers. This illusion could be sustained, in some degree, because it suited the other powers to pretend it was so. The Soviet Union wanted a tactical ally in the West who shared its suspicion of the ‘Anglo-Americans’; the British wanted a revived France to take its place in the counsels of Europe and relieve Great Britain of continental obligations; even the Americans saw some advantage, though not much, in granting Paris a seat at the top table.

in Europe, Paris had grounds for concern. French influence in eastern Europe, an arena where French diplomacy had been most active between the wars, was finished: in October 1938 a shell-shocked Edouard Benes famously confided that his ‘great mistake before History . . . will have been my fidelity to France’, and his disillusion was widespread in the region.

in 1938 France had been the world’s biggest importer of coal, buying from abroad some 40 percent of its requirements in coal and coke. By 1944 French domestic coal output had fallen to less than half that of 1938. The country was even more dependent upon foreign coal. But in 1946, when domestic coal production regained 1938 levels, French coal imports—at 10 million tons—were still desperately short of the required amounts. Without German coal and coke, the post-war French recovery would be stillborn.

France’s relationship with the Soviet Union was a little different. France and Russia had been in and out of alliances together for the past half century and Russia still held a special place in French public affection: opinion polls in post-war France consistently revealed a substantial reserve of sympathy for the Soviet Union.5 French diplomats in the aftermath of German defeat could thus hope that a natural concordance of interests—shared fear of Germany and suspicion of the ‘Anglo-Americans’—might translate into sustained Soviet support for French diplomatic goals. Like Churchill, De Gaulle thought and spoke of the USSR as ‘Russia’ and reasoned in grand historical analogies: on his way to Moscow in December 1944, to negotiate a rather meaningless Franco-Russian Treaty against any revival of German aggression, the French leader observed to his entourage that he was dealing with Stalin as François Ie had with Suleiman the Magnificent four centuries earlier: with the difference ‘that in sixteenth-century France there wasn’t a Muslim party’. Stalin, however, did not share French illusions. He had no interest in serving as a counterweight to assist the French in offsetting the foreign policy heft of London and Washington, though this was only finally made clear to the French in April 1947, at the Moscow gathering of Allied foreign ministers, when Molotov refused to back Georges Bidault’s proposals for a separate Rhineland and foreign control of the Ruhr industrial belt. Yet...

If France finally abandoned these fantasies and came round to the position of her Western partners in 1947, it was for three reasons. In the first place, French strategies for Germany had failed: there was to be no dismantling of Germany and there would be no reparations. France was in no position to impose a German solution of her own, and no-one else wanted the one she was proposing. The second reason for France’s retreat from her initial positions was the desperate economic situation of mid-1947: like the rest of Europe, France (as we have seen) urgently needed not just American aid but German recovery. The former was indirectly but unambiguously dependent upon French agreement on a strategy for the latter. But thirdly, and decisively, French politicians and the French national mood shifted definitively in the second half of 1947. Soviet rejection of Marshall Aid and the advent of the Cominform (to be discussed in the next chapter) transformed the powerful French Communist Party from an awkward coalition partner in government to the unrestrained critic of all French policies at home and abroad: so much so that through the latter part of 1947 and most of 1948 France seemed to many to be heading into civil war. At the same time there was something of a war scare in Paris, coupling the country’s continued worries about German revanchism with new talk of an impending Soviet invasion.