The nature and role of Germany

The shared horror of World War II and the decline of Europe from the seat of world power into an arena of U.S.–Soviet competition revived the ancient dream of European unity. In modern times, Roman Catholics, liberals, and Socialists had all conceived of one means or another to transcend nationalism, and after 1945 a combination of factors made the dream plausible. First, the Soviet threat gave western Europeans an incentive to unite for defense and economic recovery. Second, the very scale of the superpowers suggested that Europeans must pool their resources if they hoped to play a major role in world affairs. Third, two world wars and the Fascist interlude had discredited nationalism and propelled moderate Christian Democrats and Social Democrats to prominence in postwar Europe. Fourth, integration was a means by which German economic and military power might be safely revived. Fifth, centralized planning, which had evolved naturally with the war economies, made economic integration seem possible and attractive. Finally, the United States used its leverage through the Marshall Plan to encourage multinational institutions, cooperation, and free trade.

In early disputes over the occupation of Germany, France often sided with the U.S.S.R. in order to keep Germany weak and obtain reparations. The Berlin crisis of 1948, however, convinced the French that a way must be found to reconcile German recovery with their own security. The architects of an integrationist solution were the French technocrat Jean Monnet and Foreign Minister Robert Schuman. The Schuman Plan of May 1950 called for a merger of the western European coal and steel industries to hasten recovery, forestall competition, and make future wars between France and Germany impossible. The patriarchal chancellor of the new West German republic, Konrad Adenauer, embraced the offer at once, for the primary foreign policy goal of his new state was economic and political rehabilitation. The founding of the West German state was his first success; the drafting of a sturdy democratic constitution was the second; his adoption, with Ludwig Erhard, of a dynamic free-market economic policy was the third. Once Marshall Plan aid arrived, West Germany was well on its way to Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle of the 1950s, but it remained for Adenauer to achieve security and full sovereign rights for West Germany. The Cold War permitted him to do both at once. By moving West Germany into the democratic free-market camp he earned protection and trust from the West. Of course, Adenauer could not ignore the emotional issue of German reunification, and thus he refused to recognize the East German regime or Polish control of the lands east of the Oder-Neisse rivers. The Hallstein Doctrine extended this nonrecognition to all countries that recognized East Germany. Adenauer knew, however, that to base policy on the prospect of reunification was unrealistic. The Soviets’ Prague Proposals of October 1950 had envisioned a united, demilitarized German state—Kennan now endorsed such a neutral zone in central Europe to separate the Cold War rivals—but the Soviets insisted on a Constituent Council with equal representation for East and West Germany, even though the West had twice the population. At best, the East German delegation could block progress indefinitely while preventing West Germany from joining the Western bloc. At worst, the Soviets might subvert or coerce a disarmed Germany into alignment with Moscow. In the atmosphere of the Korean War, the Prague Proposals could not be taken up with confidence.

Instead, Adenauer endorsed the Schuman Plan and helped to found the European Coal and Steel Community among “the Six”: France, West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries. The Korean War sparked the next initiative toward integration when the United States, bogged down in Asia, requested a sizable increase in the European contribution to NATO. In 1951 the French and British cabinets both fell over the costly issue of rearmament before a committee managed to work out an acceptable distribution of burdens in October. The obvious solution was German rearmament, something the nervous French refused to countenance unless the German army were merged into an international force, a European Defense Community (EDC). The implications were profound, for a common western European army would require a common defense ministry, coordinated foreign policy, a joint defense budget, even a common parliament to approve spending and policy. In sum, the EDC would go far toward creating a United States of Europe. The West German parliament was first to ratify the EDC, in March 1953, but Britain, still clinging to the vestiges of empire and its “special relationship” with the United States, opted out. As Anthony Eden put it, joining a European federation “is something which we know, in our bones, we cannot do.” The French, in turn, debated the issue until Stalin’s death and the Korean armistice eroded the sense of emergency. French Communists, of course, opposed the EDC, while Gaullists blanched at merging France’s proud services into a European potpourri. Despite Dulles’ threat of an “agonizing reappraisal” of U.S. policy should the EDC fail, the French parliament voted it down on August 30, 1954. An alternate solution quickly followed: West Germany was simply admitted to NATO and its Bundeswehr (armed forces) placed under Allied command. The Soviets responded in 1955 by creating the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance of the U.S.S.R. and its eastern European satellites.

Postwar European recovery

The first postwar decade was one of anxiety and crisis for Europe but one also of astounding economic recovery. Thanks to rational planning, labour–management cooperation, emphasis on production, the Marshall Plan, and the very destructiveness of the war, which made new plant construction necessary and thorough, the members of the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation all exceeded their prewar production levels by 1950 and achieved an annual average growth rate of 5 to 6 percent through 1955. The political stability wrought by the Cold War and the Western alliance and by the American military umbrella, which permitted western Europeans to devote more resources to building the welfare state, made for unprecedented prosperity. Eastern Europe also recovered from the war, but more slowly and not always to its own benefit. In the late 1940s the U.S.S.R. forced one-sided trade treaties on its satellites so that Polish and Romanian foodstuffs and Czechoslovakian and East German technology flowed to the U.S.S.R. rather than to world markets. Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, sparked hopes for a thaw in the eastern bloc and in the Cold War. The ephemeral collective leadership that succeeded him executed the hated secret-police chief, Lavrenty Beria, and released thousands from prison camps. Riots in East Germany and Poland also induced Moscow to scale back its exploitation of the satellites and to reduce reparations from East Germany. A Soviet delegation even visited Belgrade in 1955 to attempt a reconciliation with Tito. That same year the Austrian State Treaty provided for the first Soviet military withdrawal since the war and brought into being a neutral Austrian state.

In 1956 Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the new Soviet premier and shocked the 20th Party Congress with his midnight speech denouncing Stalin’s “cult of personality” and manifold crimes against the party. De-Stalinization, however, even though carefully undertaken, created a crisis of legitimacy for the Soviet empire. In the summer of 1956 Władisław Gomułka rose to leadership of the Polish Communist Party on a wave of strikes and riots. When Moscow received his reassurances and allowed him to stay in power, other eastern Europeans were tempted to test the limits of de-Stalinization. The Hungarians reached them in October 1956 after the reformist premier Imre Nagy was deposed and protests spread that Soviet troops already on the scene were unable to quell. Nagy returned to power to announce the end of the one-party state and to release the Roman Catholic primate József Cardinal Mindszenty from his long imprisonment. Nagy also promised freedom of speech and the withdrawal of Hungary from the Warsaw Pact. While Hungary’s fate hung in the balance, the Western powers had their attention diverted by a second Middle Eastern war.