Grand Designs and Visions of Unity: The Atlantic Powers and the Reorganization of Western Europe, 1955-1963
344
Grand Designs and Visions of Unity: The Atlantic Powers and the Reorganization of Western Europe, 1955-1963
344Paperback(1)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807853443 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 03/25/2002 |
| Series: | New Cold War History |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 344 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Lexile: | 1470L (what's this?) |
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Grand Designs and Visions of Unity
The Atlantic Powers and the Reorganization of Western Europe, 1955-1963By Jeffrey Glen Giauque
The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2002 University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-5344-3
Introduction
France, Germany and Italy were devastated, but these three countries are regaining the elements of their power and there is no reason to abandon the direction of Europe to the Anglo-Saxons, especially the Americans. It is a bad idea, because our peoples will lose interest in the actions of their governments. A state cannot survive unless its people are convinced that their government is responsible for their fate and not some organization with an acronym name or some foreign country, however friendly it may be. -Charles de Gaulle, 24 June 1959
Between 1955 and 1963, Western European and transatlantic relations witnessed a period of political and economic ferment as a wide variety of proposals for unity and cooperation appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the accomplishments of the period were the creation of the European Common Market, the antecedent of today's European Union, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the main transatlantic organization for economic cooperation to this day, as well as the cementing of the postwar rapprochement between France and Germany in treaty form in 1963. Other proposed institutions and arrangements did not come into being. These included a political union to provide Western Europe greater cohesion in foreign policy and a voice in global affairs, a structured Atlantic political and economic community to strengthen the connections between the United States and its European partners, and the admission of Britain to the Common Market to increase the political and economic weight of the European community.
In retrospect, it is not surprising that the late 1950s and early 1960s was a time to explore new forms of cooperation in Western Europe. Throughout much of the world, both inside and outside the Cold War blocs, this was an era of adaptation to a bilateral international system that placed overwhelming power in the hands of the United States and Soviet Union. Nineteen fifty-five marked the formal construction of the Warsaw Pact, which represented the Soviet response to the Atlantic alliance, the creation of NATO, and the rearming of West Germany. The same year also witnessed the beginning of the nonaligned movement at the Bandung conference, reflecting the increasing assertiveness of Europe's former colonies at a time when decolonization was at its peak. The United States was actively intervening around the world to support friendly governments and remove hostile ones. In a world dominated by two superpowers and moving toward regional and political blocs, Western Europe had to move quickly or be left behind and reduced to insignificance.
European countries struggled to find new, post-imperial roles in the world, both to reassert their status and importance and to reaffirm their own national identities. At a time when Europe's decline seemed manifest in myriad ways and when painful adjustments to a reduced status were still being made, cooperation and unity offered both immediate symbols of recovery and potential concrete gains, particularly over the long term. The European task would be to alter the structures of the western Cold War international system. At the moment these were based primarily on NATO and other American-dominated alliances, American economic support of the continent and of international trade structures such as GATT and Bretton Woods, and the presence of U.S. troops in Europe and elsewhere. All these contributed to European recovery and security, but they also enshrined American dominance. Because the East-West conflict largely paralyzed the United Nations, these structures predominated not only in Europe, but also in most of the noncommunist world. If Europe were to regain an independent voice, it would have to build up its own structures for unity in order to speak as one and deal with the United States on more equal terms.
Efforts at Western European and Atlantic integration predated 1955, but during that year an important shift occurred. Between 1947 and 1954, the Western European countries and their American allies had focused on building a bulwark against the USSR, based largely on reconciling themselves to the political, economic, and military recovery of West Germany. The threat of a military attack from the East seemed very real, particularly after the outbreak of the Korean War, and German support was needed to counter it. During this period, all cooperative efforts, including the Marshall Plan and the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), the predecessor of the OECD, were intended primarily to increase Western Europe's capacity to resist the USSR militarily and its ability to halt the spread of communist influence within its borders, as well as to reduce America's burden on the continent. In this first phase of European and Atlantic cooperation and integration, the successes were either clearly military, from the creation of NATO to the 1954 arrangements that enabled Germany to join the alliance, or were fairly limited in scope, from the use of the OEEC to coordinate the distribution of Marshall Plan aid to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) to consolidate elements of Western European heavy industry and facilitate acceptance of German economic recovery. More ambitious and less well-defined efforts, such as those to build a supranational European military organization (the European Defense Community [EDC]) or a political or customs union in Western Europe, failed as a result of the absence of consensus on anything more than sectoral measures.
By 1955 most of the issues that had led to this first phase of European integration had been resolved in one way or another. Marshall Plan aid had been successfully distributed and employed, and Western Europe was well on its way to economic recovery and growth. The Soviet military threat to Western Europe had been countered via NATO and the likelihood of a direct military attack from the East gradually decreased after Stalin's death in early 1953. Détente remained a long way off, but the Cold War was entering a phase of greater stability in Europe that would require adjustments from Western countries. Germany had been tentatively accepted as an integral part of Western Europe, and the United States had taken up a political and military partnership with the continent.
Throughout most of the Cold War, the Soviet Union opposed the unification efforts of Western Europe since the Kremlin realized that unity would make Europe much more resistant to both Soviet lures and threats. Soviet leaders used both the carrot and the stick to attempt to derail the unity process, from the Marshall Plan to the Common Market to the Franco-German treaty of 1963. These efforts were uniformly unsuccessful, and the USSR was generally powerless to stop the unity effort. If anything, Soviet bluster helped the Europeans to overcome their differences and move toward unity. Soviet pressures helped bring about the Franco-German rapprochement and convinced the United States to accept European trade discrimination for the sake of greater political and economic unity on the continent. Whenever the Europeans had a falling out, the Soviets were always there to remind them why unity was necessary, whether blockading Berlin in 1948-49 and menacing it in 1958-62, invading Hungary in 1956, or threatening Britain and France with nuclear attack during the Suez crisis. However, the Soviet threat was most important in motivating European unity in the earliest days of the Cold War. Thereafter its significance receded and other causes came to the forefront, but throughout the Cold War, and even after its end, uncertainty regarding the USSR or Russia was often in the back of European minds and helped them to overcome differences that might otherwise have been more difficult to resolve.
With the most immediate concerns settled by the mid-1950s, Western European leaders reexamined their basic ideas on cooperation and unity. The second phase of the debate over European and Atlantic relations was in some ways more dynamic than the first, since economic recovery and the relative receding of the Soviet threat allowed Europeans and Americans to contemplate the relations and institutions they wanted to build rather than those that had to be constructed out of necessity. At the same time the second phase was more realistic than the first, since the Europeans and Americans had learned the limits of supranational integration during the earlier period, particularly as a result of the rejection of the EDC by the French National Assembly in August 1954. No longer under pressure for immediate, sweeping measures, they could explore less radical options. This shift led to a wide variety of new proposals for cooperation, but also produced considerable disunity, as each major member of the Western camp developed its own vision of the future shape of Europe that would best promote its own national interests. The combination of competition and cooperation produced progress but also a great deal of rancor among the Atlantic powers, which now allowed their disputes to overshadow their underlying areas of agreement. Facing a less direct Soviet threat, they resumed the traditional European contest for power and influence, but with new rules, new language, and a new forcefulness. Indeed, by the late 1950s and early 1960s the Atlantic powers spent at least as much energy competing with one another as they did cooperating to face the Soviets.
This book is the story of how the four largest Atlantic powers, Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, sought to reshape their partnership to adapt it to a changing world in which European empires were fading rapidly, the Soviet-communist challenge was moving from Europe to the developing world, and the United States could no longer carry the entire political and economic burden of the West on its own, yet hesitated to share leadership with Europe. The book takes a thematic approach to European and Atlantic relations in the 1950s and 1960s. It examines the "grand designs" that each country developed to advance its own European and Atlantic interests, which often defined these national priorities as synonymous with "common" Western interests, the specific proposals for cooperation and unity, and the reactions of the others. It considers both the plans that were achieved, such as those leading to the Common Market, and those that failed, such as the early efforts to create a European political union. The case studies in this book demonstrate the swings between cooperation and competition among the four Atlantic powers as well as the constant shift in alignments between them. Up to now, many historians have overlooked the volatility of this period and reduced it to a contest for influence between France and the United States. While there were major disagreements between Paris and Washington, there were numerous examples of Franco-American cooperation as well. Moreover, there were many instances when the United States and its nominal "special" partner, Britain, disagreed and worked against one another. The case study approach enables us to investigate not only the connections between various issues, but also larger themes such as the reasons for the long-term failure of European political union.
Although this book includes economic and military subjects, its focus is political and diplomatic. The principal actors are government leaders, their advisers, and their representatives in foreign relations, since it was they who conceived, implemented, and contested each other's plans to reshape European and Atlantic relations. Other elements, both inside and outside government, that affected the formation of policy are included in each chapter. In instances where external forces played a decisive role, such as the challenges mounted by the ministry of economics in Bonn for control over Germany's European policy or the threats to British Common Market entry posed by domestic opposition in the early 1960s, their impact is analyzed in greater detail. With this approach in mind, we can now sketch the basic plans of the four countries for European and Atlantic relations.
The United States, despite the shift from a Republican to a Democratic administration in 1961, followed a consistent policy between 1955 and 1963. Washington had favored the creation of an integrated, supranational Western Europe since the late 1940s. President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that unity beyond the national level would create a stronger, more self-sufficient Cold War ally, able to bear more of the economic and military burden of matching the USSR in Europe, thus allowing the United States to focus on containing Soviet and communist expansion elsewhere in the world. Permanent linkage of Germany to the United States and Western Europe was also a top priority for Washington. Eisenhower hoped that European integration would include as many countries as possible, especially Great Britain. After their failed efforts to promote the EDC against the will of many Europeans, Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, now wanted the latter to initiate all future integration efforts. After the EDC, the United States played an increasingly peripheral role in European unity, a development Eisenhower hoped would encourage the Europeans to take more responsibility for their affairs. From 1955 onward, Washington took a pragmatic, short-term approach, supporting almost any proposal to advance European unity. Nevertheless, America's long-term goal remained some form of supranational union. Absent an impairment to Europe's political and economic relations with the United States or to the Atlantic alliance or NATO, Eisenhower and Dulles would have supported almost any plan of European integration.
West Germany's European and Atlantic blueprint, as consistent in principle as that of the Americans, underwent greater variation in practice. This was the result of internal debates and struggles for power between both individuals and government ministries as the country came of age in the international community. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was a staunch supporter of European integration and Atlantic cooperation as the best means to restore German sovereignty, allow Germany to take its place as an equal partner in Europe and NATO, and promote all its interests. After 1955, he and his subordinates disagreed over the precise mix of cooperation and integration to follow and on the relative priority of relations with each of their major partners. Nevertheless, the German leadership all agreed that close political and economic relations with Western Europe and the United States were the keys to security, stability, economic development, political influence, and, over the long term, dealing with the USSR from a position of strength to achieve reunification.
The British Conservative governments of Anthony Eden (1955-57) and Harold Macmillan (1957-63) had an uneasy relationship with Western Europe. Although, as we will see, the outer trappings of their European policy changed considerably, the overwhelming impression is nevertheless one of continuity. British governments since the end of World War II had focused on maintaining their country's global status by exerting influence in each of three "circles," the United States, the Commonwealth, and Europe, in that order. Whereas continental leaders pursued unity to enhance Europe's global influence, for Britain integration into a unified European system meant renouncing its traditional role in world affairs. Unlike the continental countries, all of which had been defeated and occupied by one side or the other during the war, Britain and its system of government had survived seemingly intact and its leaders and people thus saw no reason to abandon their sovereignty. Thus, London restricted itself to promoting purely cooperative European arrangements and viewed more ambitious plans, whether the United Kingdom participated or not, as a threat. However, by remaining aloof, Britain risked losing its political importance in Europe and suffering the consequences of economic isolation from the continent as well. It was for this reason that Eden and Macmillan repeatedly tried to divert European unity from a supranational to a cooperative basis and to submerge it in a wider Atlantic forum that maintained America's ties to the continent and linked Britain's three circles.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Grand Designs and Visions of Unity by Jeffrey Glen Giauque Copyright © 2002 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
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What People are Saying About This
This [is a] strong addition to the stimulating new series The New Cold War History. Giauque deserves special praise. . . . [His] work should be read by all students of and specialists on history of European integration and European-American relations, and it should encourage deeper explorations of the difficult and ongoing challenge of building an Atlantic community.—Journal of Modern History
This clear, well-written analysis. . . . is the first on the subject to be based on the full range of US, UK, French, and German archives.—Choice
Jeffrey Giauque's impressive book is the first comprehensive study of the alliance politics and European integration during an important transition period in the Cold War. Based on extensive multiarchival and multinational research, it is a model work of international history, demonstrating a keen sense of historical judgment and understanding. It should be a required text in any course dealing with post-1945 Europe, the history of European integration, or the American relationship with Europe since World War II.—Thomas Schwartz, Vanderbilt University