European Integration. Mark Gilbert

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СКАЧАТЬ the Americans?), or should it engage with Bonn, acknowledge West Germany as a peer, and set the conditions by which Bonn was brought back into polite society? The French government chose the second option—though the choice was unpopular with large sections of French public opinion—and its gamble paid off handsomely. The Schuman Plan achieved a “political and economic balance of power” with Germany that was tilted, politically at least, to France’s advantage.² It was a diplomatic masterstroke. Even France’s subsequent collective nervous breakdown over German rearmament and its failure, in August 1954, to ratify the treaty establishing the European Defense Community (EDC), did not diminish France’s place as primus inter pares in the new configuration of power in 1950s Western Europe.

THE QUESTION OF GERMANY

      No issue troubled postwar statesmen more than how Germany should be governed. After Hitler’s defeat in 1945, Germany was divided into four zones by the Allied powers. Britain occupied the northwest part of the country, a zone that included the large cities of Cologne and Hamburg and the Ruhr industrial belt. The United States administered the center-south, including Frankfurt-am-Main and Munich. The French occupied the Black Forest region and the Rhineland, as well as the Saarland, while the Russians occupied Prussia and Saxony. Austria was similarly divided between the powers until the 1955 State Treaty. From the point of view of administration, Berlin (and Vienna) was a miniature replica of the country as a whole.

      At the Potsdam conference (July–August 1945), the “big three” powers reached broad agreement on how to treat defeated Germany pending a final treaty of peace. They decided that Germany should be subjected to “denazification, demilitarization, democratization, decentralization and decartelization.”³ Germany was to be regarded as a single economic entity, governed by the Allied Control Commission, in which each of the three powers, plus France, would possess a veto. The Allies would establish democratically elected governments in the zones they controlled. The thorny issue of reparations—the Russians had already looted eastern Germany of much of its industrial plant by August 1945—was resolved by allowing each power to take industrial equipment from the zone it occupied. The Soviet Union would receive additional reparations from the heavily industrialized British zone and from the zone controlled by the Americans. In return, the USSR promised to divert foodstuffs from its zone to feed the large cities in the West.

This broad deal never resulted in a final peace treaty. None of the Allies was able to keep its word. The Soviet Union obstructed democratic competition in its zone and also reneged on its promised shipments of agricultural produce to the West. Britain and the United States responded by suspending shipments of industrial plant to the USSR in the spring of 1946. So long as the shipments continued, the western zones of Germany, particularly the densely populated industrial area controlled by the British, could not resume production at a high enough level to buy food to feed themselves and had to rely on the charity of the occupying authorities. This was costly enough for the United States, but for war-enfeebled Britain, it was an impossible burden. In the winter of 1946 to 1947, British rations were cut to feed the people of Germany: hardly a popular move so soon after the end of the war. In January 1947, Britain and the United States merged their zones to create “Bizonia,” which was organized as a self-governing federal state under the supervision of the occupying authorities. To the Soviet Union, it must have looked as if the “capitalist” powers were rebuilding Germany against the USSR.

      These fears provided the background to the acrimonious London Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) in November–December 1947. After the breakdown of the London talks, the Cold War began in earnest. The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, the signature of the Brussels Pact in March 1948, and the ideologically charged April 1948 elections in Italy followed in swift succession. In this context, consolidating the West’s hold on western Germany became a strategic imperative. The United States extended Marshall Plan aid to Germany and called for the formation of a West German government (an idea that was greeted with great caution by the Germans themselves, who feared—rightly—that it would lead to the dismemberment of their nation). In June 1948, currency unification of the three western zones took place, and the Deutsche Mark (DM) was introduced. The USSR responded by cutting off road, rail, and river transport to Berlin. Only the miraculous Anglo-American airlift kept two million Berliners alive over the following winter. By the time the Soviet blockade was called off in May 1949, some 277,000 flights had been made and some 2.4 million tons of cargo delivered.⁴

      The French government headed by Georges Bidault grudgingly acquiesced in Anglo-American policy toward Germany from June 1948 onward. It was a drastic U-turn in its foreign policy: successive French governments had hitherto argued for a weak Germany. France had annexed the coal-rich Saarland after the war, had advocated the independence of the Rhineland from the rest of Germany, and had supported the internationalization of the Ruhr. Politically, France had wanted a decentralized Germany without a strong central government.

The events of the spring of 1948 underlined that the main military danger to France was presented by the USSR, not Germany. France, moreover, needed US aid, and that was not guaranteed unless France cooperated with the nascent West German political authorities. As Bidault, with a copious spoonful of rhetoric to help the medicine go down, told a disgruntled French National Assembly on June 11, 1948:

      We must build up Europe, and we must find some place in it for Germany. We will do all we can to create a united Europe, for this is the only way we can reconcile the countries of Europe. I wish to say that France would be wise to reconcile itself eventually with the presence of Germany in Europe and the free world, for no other reconciliation would be possible.⁵

      The French foreign ministry, which was headed by Schuman from July 1948, nevertheless insisted upon having a decisive say in the direction of the Ruhr coalfield. Before 1939, a cartel of German producers had prevented France from buying the coal it needed to fuel its steel industry. Throughout 1948, France battled hard to ensure that “access to the coal, coke and steel of the Ruhr, which was previously subject to the exclusive control of Germany, [should] be in the future guaranteed without discrimination to the countries of Europe cooperating in the common good.”⁶ To this end, France urged the establishment of an “International Authority” for the Ruhr.

The Authority eventually came into being on April 28, 1949, in the wake of the signature of the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, DC, on April 4. In Washington, Foreign Minister Bevin, Secretary of State Marshall, and Schuman decided to present Stalin with a fait accompli by incorporating the French occupation zone into Bizonia, authorizing the Germans to press ahead with the creation of a federal West German state subject to the control of the Allied High Commission and establishing the International Authority over the Ruhr (IAR). The Basic Law (Constitution) was adopted by West Germany in May 1949. At the final postwar meeting of the CFM in May–June 1949, the three Western allies collectively told Stalin that they would make a deal over Germany only if the USSR agreed to incorporate its zone into the institutional framework decided in Washington and allowed free elections throughout Germany. Stalin rejected these terms, and Germany was partitioned. The first West German elections took place in August of that year, resulting in a narrow victory for the Christian Democrats (CDU-CSU) who took 139 seats in the Bundestag to the 131 of the Social Democrats (SPD). The CDU formed a coalition government with the Liberals (FDP) and the nationalist “German Party.”

      The division of Germany into two states delighted Paris, but French leaders were uncomfortably aware that West Germany alone surpassed France in industrial power. West German steel production, which had been restricted to less than three million metric tons in 1947 (France produced nearly six million), surged to over nine million tons in 1949 (the same as France). In 1950, Germany produced twelve million tons; France, less than nine million.⁷ The Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) that would return Germany to its position as the economic powerhouse of Europe had begun: French diplomacy had to cope with this fact. Improving relations with Germany became an “obsession” for Schuman, who, as a native of Lorraine, an area of France occupied by Germany after the Franco-Prussian СКАЧАТЬ