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What most people longed for in 1945 was social progress and renewal, to be sure, but combined with the reassurance of stable and familiar political forms. Where the First World War had a politicizing, radicalizing effect, its successor produced the opposite outcome: a deep
longing for normality.
This personal distance from the over-confident dogmas of inter-war politics faithfully reflected the mood of their constituents. A post-‘ideological’ age was beginning.
The prospects for political stability and social reform in post-World War Two Europe all depended, in the first place, on the recovery of the continent’s economy.
almost every European country involved in the Second World War the national economy stagnated or shrunk when compared even with the mediocre performance of the inter-war years.
most of the European neutrals were intimately engaged, albeit indirectly, in the Nazi war effort.
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.
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.
Two structural dilemmas underlay the European crisis of 1947. One was the effective disappearance of Germany from the European economy.
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.
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.
continent.
In the short-term the chief contribution of the Program to this recovery was surely the provision of dollar credits.
The Marshall Plan was an economic program but the crisis it averted was political.
The real benefits were psychological. Indeed, one might almost say that the Marshall Plan helped Europeans feel better about themselves. It helped them break decisively with a legacy of chauvinism, depression and authoritarian solutions. It made co-ordinated economic policy-making seem normal rather than unusual. It made the beggar-your-neighbour trade and monetary practices of the thirties seem first imprudent, then unnecessary and finally absurd.
post-war Europeans were so aware of their humiliating dependence upon American aid and protection that any insensitive pressure from that quarter would certainly have been politically counter-productive.
There was one European problem, however, that the European Recovery Plan could neither solve nor avoid, yet everything else depended upon its resolution. This was the German Question. Without German recovery French planning would come to nought:
it was
clear to the Americans and their friends that the Marshall Plan would only work as part of a broader political settlement in which French and Germans alike could see real and lasting advantage.
The Allies’chief wartime concern had been to keep one another in the war. The Americans and British worried incessantly that Stalin might make a separate peace with Hitler, especially once the Soviet Union had recovered territory lost after June 1941. Stalin, for his part, saw the delay in establishing a Second (Western) Front as a ploy by the Western Allies to bleed Russia dry before coming forward to benefit from her sacrifices. Both parties could look to pre-war appeasement and pacts as evidence of the other’s unreliability; they were bound together only by a common enemy.
At Casablanca, in January 1943, it was agreed that the war in Europe could only end with an unconditional German surrender. At Teheran, eleven months later, the ‘Big Three’ (Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill) agreed in
principle upon a post-war dismantling of Germany, a return to the so-called ‘Curzon Line’1 between Poland and the USSR, recognition of Tito’s authority in Yugoslavia and Soviet access to the Baltic at the former East Prussian port of Königsberg.
The obvious beneficiary of these agreements was Stalin, but then since the Red Army played by far the most important role in the s...
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Three points are worth making about this secret ‘deal’. The first is that the percentages for Hungary and Romania were purely formulaic: the real issue was the Balkans. Secondly, the deal was largely upheld on both sides, as we shall see. But thirdly, and however heartless this must seem from the point of view of the countries concerned, it really wasn’t significant.
But nothing was decided at Yalta that had not already been agreed at Teheran or elsewhere. The most that can be said of the Yalta Conference was that it offers a striking study in misunderstanding, with Roosevelt in particular a victim of his own illusions. For by then Stalin hardly needed Western permission to do whatever he wished in eastern Europe,
Yalta left the truly important issue—arrangements for post-war Germany—off the table precisely because it was so important and intractable.
The Soviet Union had to be kept in the war against Germany (and later, as it was then supposed, Japan); the problem of central Europe could wait upon the peace.
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.
the shape of post-war Europe was dictated in the first instance not by wartime deals and accords but rather by the whereabouts of occupying armies when the Germans surrendered.
For the fact is that in Europe the Cold War began not after the Second World War but following the end of the First.
The years 1941–45 were just an interlude in an international struggle between Western democracies and Soviet totalitarianism, a struggle whose shape was obscured but not fundamentally altered by the threat posed to both sides by the rise of Fascism and Nazism at the heart of the continent. 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
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gains of the Popular Front years. Only the heroism of the Red Army and Soviet citizens in the years 1941–45, and the unprecedented crimes of the Nazis, helped dispel these earlier memories.
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. The unraveling of the wartime alliance and the subsequent division of Europe were thus not due to a mistake, to naked self-interest or malevolence; they were rooted in history. Before the Second World War relations between the US and the UK on the one hand, and the USSR on the other, had always been tense. The difference was that none of them had had
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The renewed Cold War in Europe was always likely, but it was not inevitable. It was brought about by the ultimately incompatible goals and needs of the various interested parties.
The logic of this initial American approach to the German question was thus demilitarization, denazification, deindustrialization—to strip Germany of her military and economic resources and re-educate the population.
Restrictions on urban or industrial output might keep Germany prostrate but they wouldn’t feed it or rebuild it. That burden, a very considerable one, would fall on the victorious occupiers. Sooner or later they would need to offload this responsibility onto Germans themselves, at which point the latter would have to be allowed to rebuild their economy.
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.
it was obvious from the outset that the incompatibility of Soviet and Western interests would lead to conflict and that clearly delimited zones of power might be a prudent solution to post-war problems.
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,
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 open commerce.
both Britain and France resisted convertibility, the British because of their protected ‘sterling area’3 and the weakness of their post-war economy, the French through a longstanding obsession with a ‘strong franc’ and their wish to preserve multiple exchange rates for different sectors and products, the neo-Colbertian heritage of a bygone era.
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.
it played havoc with America’s European allies, who began seriously to fear a reprise of inter-war isolationism.
If it is possible to speak of a coherent 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. The British perspective was quite different. A Cabinet sub-committee in 1944 listed four areas of primary concern to be borne in mind when dealing with the Soviet Union: i) Middle-Eastern oil; ii) the Mediterranean basin; iii) ‘vital sea
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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’.
The real British fear in Europe was not that the USSR might control eastern Europe—by late 1944 that was a fait accompli—but that it might draw a prostrate, resentful Germany into its orbit as well and thus establish mastery over the whole continent. To prevent this, as the British Chiefs of Staff concluded in the autumn of 1944, it would probably be necessary to divide Germany and then occupy the western part.
Of all the Allied powers it was Britain which came closest to anticipating and even seeking the settlement that finally emerged.
In the circumstances of the initial post-war years Britain’s best hope lay in encouraging continued American engagement in Europe (which meant publicly espousing the American faith in a negotiated settlement) while collaborating with the Soviets in so far as this was still realistic.
But what was painfully clear was that the limbo in Germany, where the country’s economy was held hostage to unresolved political discussions and the British were footing enormous bills in their zone of occupation, could not long continue. The German economy needed to be revived, with or without Soviet agreement. It was the British—who had fought two long wars against Germany from beginning to end and had been brought low by their hard-won victories—who were thus most keen to close that chapter, establish some modus vivendi in continental affairs and move on.
