With the defeat of the Reich and pending the emergence of the Asiatic, the African, and perhaps the South American nationalisms, there will remain in the world only two great powers capable of confronting each other – the United States and Soviet Russia. The laws of both history and geography will compel these two powers to a trial of strength, either military or in the fields of economics and ideology. These same laws make it inevitable that both powers should become enemies of Europe. And it is equally certain that both these powers will sooner or later find it desirable to seek the support of the sole surviving great nation in Europe, the German people.
Adolf Hitler, April 1945
If there is no real European federation and if Germany is restored as a strong and independent country, we must expect another attempt at German domination. If there is no real European federation and if Germany is not restored as an independent country, we invite Russian domination . . . This being the case, it is evident that the relationship of Germany to the other countries of western Europe must be so arranged as to provide mechanical and automatic safeguards against any unscrupulous exploitation of Germany’s pre-eminence in population and in military-industrial potential.
George Kennan, 19481
Germany and Berlin overshadowed everything; Germany was, of course, the historic balance at the center of Europe, as well as our historic enemy, the cause of two world wars, and now the main battleground of the Cold War, with Berlin, literally, as the front line.
Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet ambassador to
Washington, 1962–862
Partition was the central fact of the post-1945 world. The globe was ideologically divided between a democratic west and a communist east. Key areas, such as Korea, Palestine and Vietnam were partitioned. Europe itself was divided between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. At the heart of the conflict, however, lay the partitioned Germany: a divided country in the middle of a divided continent, at the centre of a divided world. The struggle for that space dominated international politics. Both sides sought to win over the Germans, or at least to deny them to the other side. They were also determined to prevent the re-emergence of German power. The parallel projects of NATO and European integration were designed with this twin purpose in mind; so was the permanent US military presence, making Washington a guarantor of the European settlement. The German Question also drove domestic politics in France, Britain, the Soviet Union and, of course, Germany herself, which sought to regain her sovereignty and transform herself back into an independent actor.
The Third Reich died hard. Hitler’s armies fought bitterly all the way back from Normandy, from Italy and from their positions in Poland, the Baltic and the western Ukraine. After a headlong retreat across northern France in August 1944, the line was stabilized in Alsace-Lorraine and the Low Countries. In September an attempt by British, American and Polish parachutists to secure the bridges over the Meuse, Waal and Lower Rhine at Arnhem was repulsed with heavy loss of life. In the east, the Red Army advance came to a temporary halt on the Vistula. Not long after, however, the Allies surged forward again on all fronts. One by one, Germany’s eastern allies jumped ship: Romania switched sides in late August, Bulgaria in early September, and a week later even the Finns were forced into an armistice. Hungary’s attempt to follow suit was halted by energetic German action in December 1944; Admiral Horthy was replaced in Budapest by a more pliable figure. By the end of the year, though, Allied forces were on German soil: the Russians had penetrated into East Prussia and the Anglo-Americans had gained a toehold near Aachen. It would not be long before the Grand Alliance overran the rest of the Reich and put an end to Hitler’s rule.
The question of the post-war order now became acute. Despite two decades of mutual suspicion, Stalin and Churchill agreed to divide south-eastern Europe into spheres of influence. In the ‘percentages agreement’ of October 1944, Romania and Bulgaria fell to the Soviet Union. By contrast, Greece was assigned to the Anglo-Americans, while both sides would share influence in Yugoslavia and Hungary equally. The withdrawal of German troops led to mayhem in Yugoslavia – where Tito’s partisans battled it out with various right-wing and centrist forces – and Greece, where British troops promptly found themselves embroiled in fighting with the communist KKE in December 1944. Stalin, however, honoured his commitments and left the Greek party to its fate. Nor did the Allies fall out, yet, over eastern Europe. Here Stalin, on the other hand, was determined to prevent the re-creation of the interwar ‘cordon sanitaire’ on his western border. In particular, he refused point-blank to countenance any potentially hostile government in Warsaw. At the Yalta Conference of 1945, the three powers agreed that the Polish eastern border should be moved closer to Warsaw according to the old ‘Curzon Line’, which more or less reflected the linguistic boundary between Polish and Ukrainian or White Russian; in return she would gain ‘substantial accession of territory in the north and west’.3
Overshadowing everything, of course, was the question of what to do with Germany.4 Roosevelt believed Germany should be punished, partitioned and crippled with reparations. In the view of the Treasury, this was not only the most just but the cheapest way of administering the area. The ‘Morgenthau Plan’, named after the Secretary to the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and adopted by the Americans and British in late 1944, argued that Germany should be de-industrialized so as to destroy its capacity for making war. At around the same time, the American military authorities ordered that Germany was to be treated as a defeated rather than a liberated country, and its elite subjected to a thoroughgoing process of ‘denazification’. It also recommended the partition of Germany ‘as a measure for the prevention of German rearmament and renewed aggression’. This was the stated policy of the western powers as the final defeat of Germany approached.
The State Department, on the other hand, favoured the rehabilitation of Germany. The Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, drew on the experience of the Civil War – when ‘it gradually took people 75 years to get back again’ – as a model for ‘uproot[ing]’ the strain of Nazism in the German people.5 The best way of preventing another round of aggression, the argument went, was the creation of strong democratic structures. A punitive peace in the style of Versailles – or worse – would only complicate this. Moreover, like Keynes in 1919, the State Department believed that the health of the European economy as a whole was dependent on the engine of German growth. The ‘pastoralization’ suggested by Morgenthau, and the huge reparations payments demanded by almost everyone else, would not only make Germany but the entire continent dependent on long-term US economic aid. It would also reduce the potential market for American goods. The experts warned that the partition of Germany would be a ‘disaster’ which would delay economic recovery, encourage the growth of extremism, and tempt the victors to squabble among themselves over the spoils.6 Britain took a broadly similar view. It saw ‘Prussian militarism’ as the primary threat to European stability. Likewise, Churchill repeatedly warned of the danger of ‘inflicting severities upon Germany, which is ruined and prostrate . . . open[ing] to the Russians in a very short time to advance if they chose to the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic’. The best way of preventing this, of course, was to create a strong Germany.
Stalin was keeping his options open. He argued that while the Hitlers came and went, the German people would remain. ‘We are now smashing the Germans, and many people now assume that the Germans will never be able to threaten us again,’ he exploded in March 1945. ‘Well, that’s simply not true. I HATE THE GERMANS! . . . It’s impossible to destroy the Germans for good, they will still be around. But we must bear in mind that our allies will try to save the Germans and conspire with them . . . That is why we, the Slavs, must be ready in case the Germans can get back on their feet and launch another attack.’7 On the one hand, this made him fearful about the re-emergence of Weimar-style revanchism. For this reason, Stalin initially hoped for a longer-term American presence in or at least engagement with Europe. To be on the safe side, however, he concluded a series of alliances designed to contain the threat: a Soviet treaty with the Czech government-in-exile in late 1943, a Franco-Soviet treaty with the Free French Leader, General Charles de Gaulle, in December 1944, and treaties with Poland and Yugoslavia in April of the following year. On the other hand, Stalin was quick to spot the potential accretion of power which control of Germany would bring him. In 1943, he set up the Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland, made up of captured senior officers, including the commander at Stalingrad, Friedrich Paulus. This and subsequent initiatives were designed to revive traditional Prusso-Russian friendship and harness the power of German nationalism for Soviet ends. Stalin also kept the cadres of the powerful German Communist Party – or at least those who had survived Hitler and the Moscow purges – in reserve in order to effect the communist transformation of as much of Germany as required. Finally, Stalin deliberately left open the question of whether the Polish gains in the west would be confirmed or returned to Germany on terms acceptable to him.8
The Yalta Conference sought to reconcile these conflicting views on Germany.9 Germany was divided into four occupation zones: Soviet, American, British and French. She was to pay extensive reparations, mainly in kind of such items as ‘equipment, machine tools, ships, rolling stock . . . these removals to be carried out chiefly for the purpose of destroying the war potential of Germany’. The British, Americans and Russians promised to ‘take such steps, including the complete disarmament, demilitarization and dismemberment of Germany as they deem[ed] requisite for future peace and security’.10 A joint Allied Control Council of Germany would administer the country after victory had been achieved. Finally, there was to be a broader global organization, which would rally the world behind the containment of Germany. The protocol announced the convening of a ‘United Nations Conference’ to be made up of the existing coalition powers and ‘such of the Associated Nations as have declared war on the common enemy by 1 March 1945’.11 This would create a ‘General International Organization for the maintenance of international peace and security’. In short, the United Nations – even more so than the League of Nations – had its origins as a wartime alliance against Germany.
All this was to be embedded in a profound ideological transformation across the continent. This reflected the US belief that the only way to prevent the outbreak of another war was to ensure a fair distribution of economic resources and ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. The declaration laid down precisely how this was to be achieved. Once ‘internal peace’ had been established, and ‘emergency measures for the relief of distressed peoples’ had been undertaken, states were expected ‘to form interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population’ to be followed by the ‘establishment through free elections of governments responsible to the will of the people’.12 In other words, far from openly selling out eastern Europe to Stalin, the new order agreed at Yalta was supposed to inaugurate a pan-continental democratic revolution in governance.
Despite this impressive display of Allied unity, Hitler believed that he could repeat the achievement of Frederick the Great by fighting on until the encircling coalition fell apart. When President Roosevelt died suddenly in April 1945, the Führer was convinced that just as Peter III had made peace with Prussia after the death of the Empress Elizabeth in 1762, so the new president would lead the United States out of the coalition. This hope was dashed when Harry Truman pledged to carry on the struggle. The final dramatic confrontation in Berlin pitted Wehrmacht, Volkssturm, French, Flemish, Scandinavian, Russian and many other auxiliaries against the Red Army.13 Its outcome was never in doubt. On 30 April, Hitler committed suicide, bequeathing what was left to Admiral Dönitz. On 8 May, the new German government surrendered. It had taken nearly six years, and the combined effort of the United States, the Soviet Union, the British Empire and all the other members of the United Nations, to bring the Third Reich and its European allies to heel. The war had shown, as the US Under-Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, wrote in 1945, ‘that the Germans were able to fight all the rest of the world’.14 The experience was to shape European geopolitics for decades to come.
Two months after the German capitulation, the victorious Grand Alliance conferred at Potsdam to agree ‘the measures necessary to assure that Germany never again will threaten her neighbours or the peace of the world’.15 The four zones of occupation now took definite shape: a Soviet one in Mecklenburg, Thuringia, the central Prussian provinces around Brandenburg and in Saxony; an American zone in south-western Germany; a British zone in north-western Germany; and a French zone carved out of the Anglo-American share in the southern Rhineland, the Palatinate, Baden and southern Württemberg. Berlin – which lay deep in the Soviet Zone – was also split into four sectors, one for each of the powers. Austria was likewise divided into four zones of occupation: the Soviet one in Lower Austria, an American around Salzburg and Linz, a British one in the south including Carinthia and Styria, and a French one in the west centred on Innsbruck. The capital, Vienna – which lay in the middle of the Soviet Zone – was also divided into four sectors. Eupen-Malmedy was returned to Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine to France and northern Schleswig to Denmark. These decisions essentially restored the settlement of 1919, but in the east the changes were far more radical. Pomerania and Silesia were ceded to Poland – although the ‘final limitation of the western frontier of that country should await the peace settlement’ – while East Prussia was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union. All three regions had been ruled by German princes for centuries, and with the exception of Upper Silesia, where the Germans were a bare majority, they had been inhabited almost exclusively by Germans for hundreds of years. In total, Germany lost about one third of her pre-war territory.
There were substantial boundary changes elsewhere in Europe. Stalin held on to his gains of 1939–40: the formerly Finnish Karelia, the formerly Romanian Bessarabia, the Baltic states and of course eastern Poland. As Stalin explained at Yalta, the annexation of Polish territory was not just driven by concern about her neighbour. ‘The essence of the problem,’ he stressed, ‘lies much deeper. Throughout history Poland was always a corridor through which the enemy has come to attack Russia . . . the Germans have twice come through Poland in order to attack our country.’16 It was the German Question, in other words, which drove the new territorial settlement in the east. In ethnographic terms, the scale of the transformation was even more breathtaking.17 Virtually the entire Jewish population between the Don and the Bay of Biscay had been murdered. The Germans of Pomerania, Silesia and East Prussia – all 7.5 million of them – were expelled en masse westwards into the occupation zones; so were the 3 million Sudeten Germans. The Germans, the restored Czech president, Edvard Beneš, argued, had ‘ceased to be human in the war, and appeared to us as a single, great, human monster. We have decided that we have to liquidate the German problem in our republic once and for all.’18 The Polish populations of Pinsk, Lvov and Brest-Litovsk were also deported westwards, and settled in the regions vacated by Germans. There were still a few substantial pockets of national minorities – especially Hungarians and Germans in Romanian Transylvania and Hungarians in southern Slovakia – but the ethnic diversity that had characterized central and eastern Europe for hundreds of years was no more.
The geopolitical implications of these changes were seismic. The European centre had been destroyed. Germany had ceased to exist as an independent state. The resulting vacuum was filled by the French, British, American and Soviet armies of occupation. In territorial terms, Russia had moved almost as far west as Alexander had by 1815, but in practice Stalin’s reach extended much further. The Red Army was physically present in large numbers in Poland, central Germany and eastern Austria. It was more thinly spread across Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, but all three countries were now firmly in Stalin’s orbit. No less significant, in the long term, were the ethnographic shifts. Not only was the area of German settlement now largely confined to the area between the Oder–Neisse and Rhine rivers, but the uprooting of her traditional East Elbian ruling elite profoundly changed the composition of German society and politics, and thus potentially of her strategic orientation. The Holocaust also had a profound geopolitical effect. European Jewry had largely been destroyed, but European anti-semitism still flourished. Holocaust survivors were discriminated against, expelled and in extreme cases murdered, for example during the Kielce pogrom in Poland shortly after the war. All this meant only one thing to the victims: Jews had no future in Europe. They would only be secure in their own state, defended by their own weapons. A flood of Jewish refugees now began to leave for their new Zionist homeland. In the mandate itself, Zionist guerrillas in the Irgun, Haganah and the ‘Stern Gang’ stepped up their campaign to force out the British.
With Germany subdued, the international architecture designed in the last year of the war came into its own. The San Francisco Conference of May–June 1945 brought the United Nations (UN) into being. It consisted of a General Assembly and a Security Council made up of representatives of the victorious wartime coalition: Great Britain, France, the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Flanking the new world organization was an array of other international institutions designed to facilitate global economic prosperity and thus, Washington believed, to keep the international peace. ‘Nations which are enemies in the marketplace,’ a US Assistant Secretary of State remarked in 1945, ‘cannot long be friends at the council table.’ By extension, economic interdependence would prevent disputes from ever reaching the battlefield. At Stalin’s insistence, the permanent members of the Security Council were granted a veto. As the British civil servant and historian Charles Webster, who was intimately involved in drafting the Charter remarked, this made the UN ‘an alliance of the Great Powers embedded in a universal organization’.19 Most of those assembled at San Francisco, however, also had profound ideological expectations.
The original conception of the United Nations as a democratic club found expression in its treatment of Franco’s Spain, regarded with extreme distaste by both Washington and Moscow. Spain was therefore specifically barred from membership of the UN so long as it remained a dictatorship. Matters came to a head in August 1945 over the future of Tangier. The port had been seized by Franco five years earlier; now he was not only told to hand it back, but informed that Spain’s participation in a new international authority there was contingent on ‘the re-establishment of a democratic regime’ in Madrid.20 Stalin now tried to mobilize the United Nations as a whole against Franco. In particular, Franco was accused of sheltering Nazi refugees and allowing German scientists to work on an atomic bomb in Spain. A special committee reported to the Security Council that while the Spanish dictatorship was undoubtedly a ‘fascist regime’ which had helped Hitler and Mussolini, and remained a ‘source of international friction’, there was no evidence that it was ‘preparing for an act of aggression’. All the same, the commission recommended that the General Assembly present Franco with an ultimatum to give up power within fifteen months or face the breaking off of diplomatic relations by the General Assembly. Nothing came of this, but it is clear that at its creation the United Nations was a highly interventionist body. The fetishization of state sovereignty for which it later became known was a subsequent re-invention by Third-Worldist dictators and unworldly international lawyers.
The Allies were far apart on the promotion of democracy in eastern Europe and the extra-European world. His commitments at Yalta notwithstanding, Stalin made clear at Potsdam that he had no intention of allowing central and eastern Europeans to decide their own destiny. ‘A freely elected government in every one of these countries,’ he announced, ‘would be anti-Soviet and we cannot permit that.’21 For the moment, however, Stalin only interfered directly in the strategically vital areas of Poland and Germany. He allowed elections in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania to go ahead. Likewise, the European imperial powers were in no rush to organize elections in their overseas colonies, on the grounds that the populations there were ‘not ready’ to make an informed choice about whether they wished to remain part of their respective empires. There were also widespread fears that broader political participation would spark fresh rounds of traditional communal blood-letting in religiously or ethnically mixed parts of Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Indian subcontinent.
In the autumn of 1945, the centre of military and diplomatic attention switched briefly to the Far East, where the Japanese still offered determined resistance to the Americans as they ‘island-hopped’ across the Pacific. Britain sent substantial forces partly to assert her imperial interests, partly to impress the increasingly sceptical Australians and New Zealanders, but mainly to build up goodwill in Washington which could be parlayed into American engagement with European post-war security. In early August, the US dropped a devastating atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and then another on Nagasaki, killing around 200,000 Japanese instantly, nearly all of them civilians.22 The introduction of this new and devastating weapon radically changed the nature of international politics, at least in the short term. ‘Hiroshima has shaken the whole world,’ Stalin remarked shortly afterwards. ‘The balance has been broken.’23 The United States was certainly determined to maintain its nuclear monopoly: in August 1946 Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act, which prohibited the US administration from transferring nuclear technology to any other power, including close allies. There were in fact serious ethical, political and operational obstacles to the use of the atomic bomb for purposes of strategic coercion. This threat was used only once by the Americans during their four-year nuclear monopoly, in order to hasten the Soviet withdrawal from Iran. The key thing, as Stalin repeatedly said, was to keep one’s nerve. He now instructed his scientists to build a Soviet bomb without delay. It was not only the Soviet Union, but America’s allies who felt threatened by the new nuclear geopolitics. The British chiefs of staff were adamant that they needed to have ‘every club in the bag’ and began to adapt the bomber force for the delivery of the atomic bomb even before they had the technology itself. In short, the development of the atomic bomb simply led to an extreme form of the ‘Dreadnought-style’ arms races familiar in years past. As we shall see, nuclear weapons certainly interacted with the traditional concerns of European geopolitics – especially the German Question – but they did not fundamentally change them.
The terrible experience of war and the uncertainty of its immediate aftermath served to promote the idea that Europe should collectively assert its separate cultural, spiritual, economic and political identity. During the conflict two Italian anti-fascists, Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, had drawn up their manifesto ‘For a free and united Europe’. They condemned the tendency of ‘capitalist imperialism’ and ‘totalitarian states’ to unleash destructive wars. The only way of breaking this vicious cycle, Spinelli and Rossi argued, was to break with the classic balance of power and to create a completely new system of coexistence in Europe through ‘the definitive abolition of the division of Europe into national, sovereign states’, and the creation of a ‘European Federation’. This ‘United States of Europe’ was to be ‘based on the republican constitution of federated countries’. The authors knew that the best moment to realize their scheme would be in the turbulent aftermath of the German defeat, ‘when the States will lie broken, when the masses will be anxiously waiting for a new message, like molten matter, burning, and easily shaped into new moulds capable of accommodating the guidance of serious internationalist minded men’.24 The continent would be a tabula rasa, and could thus be shaped into a new system designed not to deal with an external enemy but to prevent Europe from tearing itself apart.
The near-universal experiences of war and occupation fundamentally shaped domestic politics after the end of hostilities. They did not, however, lead to a groundswell movement for political union or integration. Instead, the first post-war elections were dominated by an inquest into the causes and conduct of the war, the containment of Germany, the pressing question of reconstruction, and the economics of demobilization. In Britain, Churchill suffered a surprise defeat in the July 1945 election, a reflection not so much on him personally, or of any irresistible tide of popular radicalism, as a withering judgement on the Conservative policy of appeasement and the fall of France. ‘It was not Churchill who lost the 1945 election,’ Harold Macmillan later remarked, ‘it was the ghost of Neville Chamberlain.’25 Likewise, the French Assembly elections of October 1945 were dominated by a settling of accounts with the defeat of 1940, the Vichy regime and concern about a possible German revival. These issues were far more important than fear of Stalin, or the unification of Europe. The results were a conclusive rejection of the interwar right and its subsequent association with Marshal Pétain and national humiliation. The communists secured just over a quarter of the vote, and became the largest party; the socialists and the Christian democratic Popular Republican Movement of Maurice Schumann polled almost as many votes. Charles de Gaulle was re-elected president on an independent ticket, his immense personal standing as leader of the Resistance outweighing suspicion of his domestic conservatism. In Britain, the peace led to the immediate termination of the American Lend-Lease programme, precipitating a financial crisis. The costs of reconstruction and the continuing defence of the empire would have to be borne alone.26 It was far from clear where the new Labour government would find the resources to fund not only the domestic ‘New Jerusalem’ it had promised but Britain’s enormous strategic ambitions and obligations.27
The experience of the war, their continued international ambitions, and the post-war financial squeeze had profound implications for the European colonial empires.28 To the British and French, the retention of overseas possessions and the reassertion of imperial control over territories occupied by the Axis were essential, not only to make up for resources missing back home, but also in order to increase their weight on the European and world stage. It was vital, de Gaulle announced a day after the German capitulation, that ‘our Indochina’ be regained and France’s grandeur thereby ‘increased’. ‘It is in union with the overseas territories,’ de Gaulle declared, ‘that France is a great power. Without these territories she would no longer be one.’29 Likewise, the Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, spoke of the need to ‘mobilize the resources of Africa in support of a western European Union . . . [to] form a bloc which, both in populations and productive capacity, could stand on an equality with the western hemisphere and the Soviet blocs’, a task all the more important after the end of Lend-Lease.30
The United States initially regarded the attempt of the European powers to re-establish their colonial empires with disdain. Not least thanks to their own revolutionary origins, most American politicians and statesmen were initially sympathetic to the aspirations of Vietnamese, Indonesian and other nationalists. With British help – and to the fury of de Gaulle – they eased the French out of Syria and Lebanon in 1945. They also put pressure on London to withdraw from Palestine after mediating a compromise between Jews and Arabs. Washington also discouraged the Dutch from trying to recover Indonesia from Sukarno, who had repudiated colonial rule. The Americans warned that they were not prepared to support western European powers economically so long as they squandered scarce resources on pursuing their imperial pretensions. More generally, the United States was anxious not to appear to be supporting colonialism partly to appease domestic public opinion, which was strongly anti-imperialist, and partly in order to remain on the right side of sentiment in the United Nations.
Meanwhile, relations between Stalin and the west deteriorated sharply in Europe and its Middle Eastern periphery. He ruthlessly crushed all independent political expression in Poland – thus violating the letter of the Yalta Agreement – and in his zone of occupation in Germany.31 In Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, the Soviet dictator was inclined, for the moment, to allow some room for democratic politics, so long as those states remained strategically firmly within his orbit.32 Finland was permitted to choose her own domestic orientation so long as she maintained a strict neutrality in foreign policy, thus serving as a buffer in the north-west. Stalin was also well pleased with the new territorial dispensation, which gave him the Slavic solidarity he needed to guard against a revival of German power. Looking at the Caucasus, however, Stalin announced: ‘I don’t like our border here.’33 For this reason, encouraged by local Azeri and Kurdish nationalists, the Soviet Union welched on her wartime agreement to evacuate Iran after the end of hostilities, and put pressure on Turkey to grant her joint administration in the Straits. Meanwhile, by early 1946 Greece was wracked by a full-scale civil war between communists and the British-backed royalist government. London and Washington were convinced – wrongly – that Stalin was the driving force behind the communist advance there. In fact, the Greek guerrillas drew most of their logistical support from Tito, who hoped to draw the Slavophone Macedonians into the Yugoslav orbit.
The breakdown in trust between Soviet Union and the western allies was increasingly reflected in public statements and secret memoranda. In late February 1946, a young US diplomat at the embassy in Moscow, George Kennan, responded to a State Department request for an analysis of Soviet policy with a brutal confidential memorandum, which later became famous as the ‘Long Telegram’. Reviewing Stalin’s recent moves and communist ideology, Kennan warned that ‘We have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the United States there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.’ The Soviet Union, in other words, was not just a strategic threat but an ideological threat; indeed, it was a strategic menace because it was an ideological challenge.34 At the beginning of the following month, Winston Churchill, now out of office, summed up the new mood in a famous speech entitled ‘Sinews of Peace’ at Fulton, Missouri. He began by announcing that the right to ‘free and unfettered elections’ and all the other liberties enjoyed by Britons and Americans had universal applicability and ‘should lie in every cottage home’. The reality, however, was that ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent’. The defence of European liberty was synonymous in Churchill’s mind with the prevention of another European war.
The sense of a growing strategic and ideological confrontation was shared in Moscow. In September 1946, the Soviet diplomat Nikolai Novikov was asked for a memorandum on US policy by the foreign minister, V. Molotov. His memorandum warned that ‘The foreign policy of the United States, which reflects the imperialist tendencies of American monopolistic capital, is characterized in the postwar period by a striving for world supremacy.’ Against the background of ‘broad plans for expansion’, the establishment of a ‘system of naval and air bases stretching far beyond the boundaries of the United States’, not to mention ‘the creation of ever newer types of weapons’, looked decidedly sinister. The aim of the United States, in short, was to ‘limit’ and ‘dislodg[e] the influence of the Soviet Union from neighbouring countries’ and more generally to ‘impose’ her will on Moscow.
All this both reflected and was reflected in the breakdown of the Allied consensus over central Europe. Ideally, both sides would have preferred to win over Gemany in its entirety, but failing that both the Soviet Union and the western allies were determined to secure as much of its huge economic and military potential as possible, or at the very least to deny it to their rivals. Here Stalin had a head start. Right at the end of the war he signalled his willingness to cut a deal with German nationalism by delaying the handover of Stettin to the Poles as long as possible. He stalled on western demands for the formal abolition of Prussia. Stalin also authorized the German communists to take a strong stand against French ambitions. In late April 1946, he merged the old German Communist and Social Democratic parties in his zone with the intent of using the new Socialist Unity Party to extend Soviet influence throughout the western areas of occupation as well.35 Three months later, Molotov appealed directly to the German people in a speech offering them a united and independent Germany. Stalin made less headway than he hoped, however, partly because the behaviour of Soviet forces – which was characterized by killings, mass rape and the systematic dismantling of German industry – antagonized the local population, and partly because communism was itself inherently antipathetic to most of the population, even the working class.36 It was not just that Stalin’s right hand in Germany did not know what his left hand was doing: the Soviet dictator himself does not seem to have made up his mind whether he was aiming for a single Soviet-dominated country, a militarily defanged neutral state or some combination of the two possibilities.37
The western allies, for their part, fundamentally reassessed their German policy in the light of perceived Soviet actions. Washington wanted to co-opt German nationalism. In May 1946, the Americans abolished reparations in their zone unilaterally. In a widely discussed speech in Stuttgart that autumn the Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, announced not only that the US would remain committed to Europe, but that it favoured German self-determination and even the revision of the Oder–Neisse line. Washington was determined, however, that the new Germany, or at least the parts under western control, should be democratic. Under the direction of General Lucius D. Clay, the US military governor, a fundamental transformation of the American zone of occupation, and increasingly of the two other western zones, was got underway. Working closely with the West German elites Clay oversaw the restoration of participatory political structures, bringing the British along with him. In June 1946, the Anglo-American occupation authorities held elections for regional assemblies; the former mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, performed particularly well. They also laid particular emphasis on the ‘re-education’ of Germans away from Nazism towards western values.38 Later that year, the British and Americans announced that they intended to merge their areas of occupation to create ‘Bizonia’. Clay believed that although a permanently divided Germany would be ‘catastrophic’, a Soviet-dominated united Germany represented ‘an even greater threat to the security of western civilization and to world peace’.39
Britain and France, by contrast, were sceptical of the prospects for German democracy and deeply hostile to German unity. ‘A reunited Germany will join one side or the other,’ Bevin cautioned, ‘and will almost inevitably start serious trouble.’40 So London was happy to go along with American plans to democratize Germany, and combine the western zones, but as a means towards entrenching the division of Germany, not of overcoming it. France, of course, was strongly opposed to anything which restored German unity and sought to keep her neighbour down by controlling and exploiting her resources.41 On the other hand, the French feared that Germany might be sucked into an eastern orientation. So, in March 1946, the French reluctantly dropped their demand that the Rhineland and the Ruhr be separated from Germany. They began to think, however, of new ways of containing German power through some form of European integration. General de Gaulle, then on one of his periodic ‘retirements’, even wrote that France was ‘destined by her geography to promote a European Union’, primarily as a solution to the German problem.
Against this background, British commitments in the eastern Mediterranean became an expensive luxury. In February 1947, London suddenly announced that it wished to transfer the costly task of defending Greece to the Americans. The baton being passed from London to Washington was not just responsibility for the eastern Mediterranean but the defence of the European balance as a whole. George Kennan glossed the new policy in a famous article in Foreign Affairs in June 1947. This reprised the arguments from his confidential ‘Long Telegram’, and stressed once again the importance of communism to Soviet foreign policy. ‘Ideology,’ Kennan argued, taught the men in the Kremlin ‘that the outside world was hostile and that it was their duty eventually to overthrow the political forces beyond their borders’. ‘A permanent and peaceful coexistence’ was thus not possible. At the same time, however, Kennan pointed out that ideology was also a restraining force, because since the victory of communism over capitalism was inevitable, it could be awaited rather than brought about. The Kremlin would therefore avoid ‘adventurism’, and would have ‘no compunction about retreating in the face of superior force’. The correct approach, therefore, was not reflexive ‘toughness’ but ‘a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies’.42
The main front in the ‘containment’ of Stalin was Europe. A paper of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of April 1947 listed US allies and theatres of activity in order of importance: Great Britain, France and Germany came first. Japan, China, Korea and the Philippines came last, behind Belgium. The danger was that the Soviet Union, which already dominated a large chunk of Europe, would bring the all-important areas of central and western Europe under her control as well.43 Washington therefore needed to rally the continent – or at least its western half – against Stalin, militarily, politically, economically, culturally and spiritually. This was a tall order, because European economies recovered far more slowly than had been expected, and by the beginning of 1947 the situation was still dire across the continent;44 unemployment was rife and rationing was still in place. Faith in capitalism, and even in democracy, was low. The Americans feared that this socio-economic vacuum would be filled by communism, especially in France and Italy, where the national parties were strong, and in Germany, where the misery was greatest.
So, in June 1947, the US Secretary of State, George Marshall, announced a plan for the economic regeneration of Europe. The United States offered a massive transfusion of funds to bridge the ‘dollar gap’ not only to France, Britain and Germany (the principal beneficiaries), Italy and other countries to the west of the ‘iron curtain’, but also to the eastern European countries as well, including the Soviet Union itself. Germany, however, was the key. ‘The restoration of Europe,’ Marshall told Congress, ‘involves the restoration of Germany. Without a revival of German production there can be no revival of Europe’s economy.’ The principal motivation here was not commercial – scarcely 5 per cent of US GDP came from exports – but strategic. The United States was vitally concerned both to neutralize the threat of German revanchism and to secure central Europe against Soviet penetration. Even the commitment to open markets was primarily driven by the belief that free trade reduced the risk of war.45
The onset of open confrontation with the Soviet Union inspired moves towards greater western European unity.46 In March 1948, the Brussels Pact brought together Britain, France, Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg in a Western European Union partly to hedge against the revival of German power, but primarily to contain the Soviet Union. The signatories committed themselves to mutual defence in the event of external aggression, and in September 1948 military planning on how to repel the Red Army began: air defences were integrated and a joint high command was established. To many Europeans, a new system of alliances was not enough, however. They had come out of the war convinced that some form of federalism or shared sovereignty would be essential to prevent a relapse into barbarism, and the threat from Stalin only reinforced this view. Washington, wanting to contain Germany and mobilize the continent against the Soviet Union, was strongly supportive: Truman indicated that he ‘favoured a United States of Europe’.47 In early May 1948, hundreds of European politicians, trade unionists, intellectuals and other representatives of civil society met at The Hague under the chairmanship of Churchill and at the invitation of the International Committee of the Movements for European Unity. It was attended by the Conservative grandee Harold Macmillan, François Mitterrand (then a minister in the French government), the former French prime minister Édouard Daladier, the future West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the Italian statesman Altiero Spinelli and many others. The Hague Congress therefore had the potential to develop into the European equivalent to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, when the United States gave herself a central government and a constitution in order to forestall internal division and to deter external attack.
Unlike the founding fathers, however, the men and women assembled at The Hague failed to achieve a European political, economic and currency union. They could not agree whether the unity of Europe should be generated on supra-national or intergovernmental lines. At this point the French, and many other western European governments, were sympathetic to the idea of a European federation. Britain, too, was sympathetic to much closer European cooperation, which it hoped would give it the weight to act on the world stage on terms of equality with the United States and the Soviet Union.48 London resisted, however, any attempt to merge its sovereignty into a larger whole, partly because of its Commonwealth links but mainly because, not having experienced defeat and occupation, British opinion regarded European political unification as an attempt to repair something that was not broken in the first place. The Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, therefore signalled: cooperation and even ‘spiritual confederation’ – yes; complete political union – no.49 Washington’s hope that the administration and distribution of Marshall Aid would lead to the establishment of federal European structures was disappointed.
The shift to a policy of ‘containment’ had profound implications for the link between US strategic interests and democracy promotion. On the one hand, there was now much less pressure on right-wing dictatorships in southern Europe and Latin America to reform, and within a few years the United States would negotiate a deal with Franco on the use of naval and air bases in Spain.50 On the other hand, the decision to confront the Soviet Union had profound implications for the future of the western zones of occupation in Germany. ‘It is not overstating the matter,’ the Deputy Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Sir Orme Sargent, argued, ‘to say that if Germany is won this may well decide the fate of liberalism throughout the world.’51 It was therefore vital to establish a political order capable of resisting Soviet infiltration, strong enough to contribute to the defence of the west as a whole and yet incapable of or uninterested in dominating the rest of Europe. In effect, this meant the introduction of some form of federal democracy. The first step here was the formal abolition of the state of Prussia in 1947, which, the occupying powers claimed, had ‘always represented the elements of militarism and reaction in Germany’. At the London accords in April–June 1948, the French reluctantly agreed to the creation of an independent albeit federal Germany.
Democracy and self-determination were useful weapons against Stalin in Europe, but they could be turned on the western powers overseas. In India, Mahatma Gandhi’s policy of non-violent resistance ground down the authorities, leading to partition and independence in 1947. The Muslim-majority areas in the west and in Bengal became Pakistan; the land in between became India. The strategic consequences of Indian independence were huge: Britain forfeited the military hub from which the defence of empire east of Suez had been funded and manned for generations. London hoped to make good this loss by developing, as Bevin put it in early 1948, ‘the material resources in the [remaining] Colonial Empire’, and by intensifying cooperation with the white settler dominions. Australia, for example, agreed to support the British position in the Middle East. Canada, for her part, remained committed to the defence of the European balance. Increasingly, however, the dominions were going their own way in grand strategy. This was reflected in the creation of ANZUS, an alliance between the Antipodes and the United States which bypassed the British Empire.
In September 1947, under pressure from Zionist terrorists and Arab nationalists, the British announced their intention to relinquish the mandate in Palestine, hand the problem over to the United Nations and withdraw. When the UN proclaimed the division of the territory into an Arab state and the state of Israel in late November 1947, the Jewish settlers agreed to abide by the resolution. It was furiously rejected, however, both by the Arab population and by neighbouring Arab states. In 1948, a full-scale war between the Zionists and the Arabs resulted in the total defeat of the latter within a few months. This led to an attack on Israel in May 1948 by Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan. Once again, Israel prevailed, despite an international arms embargo in which the US and all western powers participated. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs either fled or were expelled by the Zionists, an experience which became known as the ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe; the West Bank of the Jordan was annexed by the Kingdom of Jordan. The new state was a European transplant in the heart of the Middle East. Its leadership was mostly German or eastern European in origin. Although vastly outnumbered, the Jewish settlers adopted European forms of organization, recruitment and extraction with the result that they were able to field a slightly larger army than the Palestinians with about half the population. Israel was militarized without being militaristic.52 ‘It is no secret,’ the minister of labour, Mordechai Bentov, remarked shortly after the end of hostilities, ‘that success in war hinges not only on success at the front, but also success at the home front; and mobilization under modern wartime conditions must approach total mobilization.’53
Faced with a concerted western attempt to contain him in Europe, Stalin reacted by consolidating his hold on central and eastern Europe.54 When eastern European governments showed a keen interest in Marshall Aid in the summer of 1947, however, Stalin feared that they would be drawn into the western orbit and forced them to decline the American offer. In September 1947, Stalin founded the Cominform – a successor organization to the old Comintern – to keep the eastern European parties in line and to ensure that the activities of international communism conformed with the interests of Moscow. Its headquarters were located in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade. Single-party communist rule was imposed on all of eastern and central Europe by the end of 1948. Stalin did not, however, attempt to promote communist revolution in France or Italy,55 on the grounds that this would be premature and give the capitalists a pretext to crush the parties there. The Soviet dictator particularly wished to avoid unnecessary provocations in what he regarded as peripheral areas. He made clear his intention to honour the ‘percentages agreement’ with Churchill and to refrain from supporting the Greek communists. This led to a confrontation with the independent Yugoslav leader, Marshal Tito. In June 1948, Stalin’s patience snapped, not least because he did not want to be dragged into a Balkan quagmire while he was engaged over Berlin. Tito was denounced, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform and the two dictators henceforth became sworn enemies. As Tito moved closer to the west in order to contain Stalin, he cut off support to the Greek communists, whose resistance soon collapsed.
The really crucial arena, of course, was Germany. In March–April 1947, a meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers in Moscow failed to reach a consensus. The Americans, in particular, were no longer willing to countenance Russian demands for reparations from the western zones, which would – as the senior Republican John Foster Dulles argued – ‘in effect make the Soviets master of all Germany – including the Ruhr – and with that all Europe will go under’.56 Stalin regarded the creation of Bizonia, the currency reform and the Marshall Plan, rightly, as steps preparatory to the creation of a West German state and ultimately to the reunification of Germany under the Allied aegis. Determined to forestall such a mortal threat to his European position, Stalin withdrew his representative on the Four Power Allied control council in late March 1948. Towards the end of June, immediately after the currency reform, he imposed a blockade – cutting off water, electricity and all land routes into the city – on the Allied sectors of Berlin. This was designed not so much to drive the Allies out of the former German capital, as to force them to desist from moves to draw Germany into their camp. The struggle for mastery in central Europe was entering a new and more intense phase.
The west responded by stepping up ‘containment’, particularly in central Europe. Allied transport planes supplied Berlin by air throughout the winter of 1948–9, forcing Stalin to lift the blockade.57 In early April 1949, the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Portugal and Italy came together to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The signatories agreed that ‘an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’ and would trigger a ‘collective self-defence’ by all members of the treaty. This amounted to nothing less than a peacetime geopolitical revolution in Europe: not only was the United States (and Canada) now a guarantor of the post-1945 territorial order, but the long-existing community of fate between Europe and North America had been given international legal expression. The treaty was primarily directed against the Soviet Union, but for many of the signatories it also helped to guard against the revival of German power. As the British General ‘Pug’ Ismay, the first Secretary General, famously quipped, NATO was designed to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down.
Shortly afterwards, the western allies decided to risk democracy in Germany as the best strategy of denying the area to Stalin and integrating it into the common front against communism. In late May 1949, the American, British and French zones of occupation were merged to form the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, as it soon became known. The resulting German constitution was drawn up, as one American liaison officer remarked, ‘primarily for international purposes’.58 It established a federation of regions with considerable autonomy, much closer to the old German Confederation and Second Empire than the more centralized Weimar Republic and Third Reich. This reflected partly the survival of strong federal traditions in Germany and partly the desire of the occupying powers, especially the French, to prevent the development of a strong state. For the same reason, the new Federal Republic remained disarmed for the time being. In order to ensure that the Soviet Union would not dominate the new state by stealth, the Basic Law enshrined the right to private property, which effectively excluded any move towards a planned economy, and included a strong defence of basic individual rights. Likewise, the invitation to join the new General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) ensured that West Germany would not succumb to economic protectionism, but remain integrated into the global economic system. As always, the domestic structure of Germany and the European balance were intimately connected.
In the face of widespread scepticism, democracy flourished in West Germany.59 Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, presided over an economic boom, the party system stabilized, and under the ‘social market economy’ labour relations and wealth redistribution functioned so well that the kind socio-economic unrest which had bedevilled the Weimar Republic, and which threatened to return after the war, became a thing of the past. Left and right were united in an anti-totalitarian consensus against communism and, retrospectively at least, Nazism.60 The really critical issue facing the new democracy, however, was the Soviet threat and reconciliation with her European neighbours. For this reason, Adenauer urgently sought a rapprochement between France and the Federal Republic, a diplomatic revolution which endured to become a principal pillar of European geopolitics.61
The confrontation between Stalin and the west, and to a much lesser degree persisting fears of German revanchism, was the dominant factor in European and American domestic politics. The US presidential elections of 1948 were shaped by debates over America’s place in the world, and their implications for society and economy. For Harry Truman, the contest was essentially a referendum on his management of containment. By contrast, the principal concern of the leader of the new Progressive Party, Henry Wallace, was a more conciliatory policy towards the Soviet Union. The Republicans were deeply divided between isolationists such as Robert Taft, who opposed the Marshall Plan as an expensive folly, and their eventual candidate, Thomas Dewey, an internationalist supporter of containment. During the campaign they failed either to land any significant blows on Truman or to pin on him what Dewey called ‘policies which resulted in surrendering 200,000,000 people in middle Europe into the clutches of Soviet Russia’.62 To everyone’s surprise, Truman won re-election, a victory at least partly due to his perceived firmness on foreign policy especially during the Berlin crisis.
In France, on the other hand, the principal preoccupation was the revival of German power. In July 1948, a popular outcry over Georges Bidault’s agreement to the creation of a (west) German state led to the fall of his administration, and his replacement by Robert Schuman. The Italian elections of 1948 went badly for the communists, partly because of their association with Stalin and partly because of direct US support for the rival Christian Democrats. In Britain, both the Labour government and the Conservative opposition were preoccupied with the preservation of British power; one prominent Labour tract claimed that ‘the maintenance of Britain as a world power is . . . the precondition of a socialist foreign policy’.63 Grand strategy was furiously contested not only between the parties, but within them. The ruling Labour Party, in particular, was divided between those who wanted rapprochement with Moscow and supporters of containment. Opinion was shifting against Moscow, however. In 1947, the party’s International Secretary, Denis Healey, published Cards on the table, an impassioned plea to come off the fence and to oppose Soviet advances in eastern and central Europe. Likewise Bevin argued that communism should not just be ‘disparag[ed] on material grounds’ but by comparison with ‘a positive ideology . . . of civil liberty and human rights’.64 British socialists might maintain an ideological equidistance between capitalism and communism, but they could not remain neutral between freedom and dictatorship.
The emerging Cold War also shaped European governmental structures. In 1945, the British set up the Joint Intelligence Committee to coordinate the flow of strategically important information to the prime minister. This was the first step in the creation of a ‘secret state’ geared to counter Soviet subversion and prepare Britain for the worst.65 Similar structures were either established or restored in France. In both countries, conscription was retained even after the end of the war. All these developments paled, however, by comparison with those taking place on the far side of the Atlantic. The policy of containment was underpinned by a programme of domestic mobilization designed to maximize American power for the struggles which lay ahead. The National Security Act of 1947 established the National Security Council, to advise the president on foreign affairs and international security, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many other features now loosely, and often pejoratively, described as the ‘National Security State’. The draft by which young male Americans served was maintained. For the first time in its history the United States was undergoing a peacetime militarization. Big government, which had begun during the New Deal and expanded massively during the war, was there to stay. The United States had effectively become a European state not only in terms of its geopolitical orientation, but also with regard to domestic structure and mindset.
Many despaired of the ability of western polities to withstand the centralized structures of the Soviet Union. Denis Healey, for example, warned of the ‘inestimable advantage’ which Moscow had of dispensing with public opinion. This gave the Soviet Union the ‘freedom to fit policy closely to the scientific calculation of a fluctuating national interest’.66 The National Security Act and the Joint Intelligence Committee were attempts to address this deficiency in Washington and London, but they did not mean that either the United States or Britain came to resemble the enemy they were fighting. In America, especially, popular and parliamentary hostility to the state remained strong. Congressional committees maintained strict oversight over expenditure, which may have cramped the style of the executive and the national security apparatus in the short term, but made the United States a more efficient and vibrant defender of its values and interests over the long haul.67
In previous eras, substantial external challenges had driven programmes of profound social change to increase national resilience. This did not happen in the early Cold War. Most western European states were too concerned with the problems of reconstruction to think of preparing society for the next war. In the United States, however, there were some who argued that the challenge of the Soviet Union required a fresh look at the position of African-Americans, especially in the South, where they were still heavily discriminated against. This was partly driven by fear that the Communist Party would exploit their grievances to undermine the home front, and partly by the desire to rally all sectors of society for the struggle ahead. As the black American Roy Wilkins, the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, argued, ‘the survival of the American democratic system in the present global conflict of ideologies depends upon the strength it can muster from the minds, hearts and spiritual convictions of all its people’. ‘The Negro,’ he explained, ‘wants change . . . not only to preserve and strengthen the standard [of rights] here at home, but to guarantee its potency in the world struggle against dictatorship.’68 The Soviets routinely used racial discrimination to attack the United States, and it was particularly embarrassing in Germany, where black servicemen made up more than 10 per cent of the garrison, and where they were supposed to serve as ambassadors for democracy against communism and Nazi racial hatred.69 A segregated military, Jacob Javits, a senator on the European Study Mission of the Foreign Affairs Committee, seriously hampered US efforts in Germany, ‘the main front of the cold war’.70 The emancipation of the American blacks and the struggle for mastery in central Europe were thus closely linked.
Globally, the rights of men and women were now very firmly in contention. In early December 1948, scarcely a month after the US election, the United Nations issued its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The preamble asserted that recognition of the ‘equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family’ was ‘the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’. This was because ‘contempt for human rights’ had ‘resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’ – a clear reference to defeated Nazism – and because ‘rebellion against tyranny and oppression’ would otherwise result. Either way, the promotion of human rights was seen not only as a good in itself, but as a strategy for the avoidance of international and civil war. Right at the top of the list was the right to freedom from discrimination on the basis of ‘race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, property, birth or other status’. Slavery, the slave trade, arbitrary arrest, detention and exile were to be abolished. The international implications of this move were complex. On the one hand, the Declaration strengthened the hand of the west against Stalin in Europe. The European Convention on Human Rights, which was agreed two years later, was certainly driven by such Cold War imperatives.71 Moreover, as Roosevelt’s widow, Eleanor, pointed out, the Soviet Union – which effectively imprisoned its own and subject populations – was particularly vulnerable to the idea that emigration was a fundamental human right.72 On the other hand, the Universal Declaration, particularly its commitment to ‘self-determination’, could be used by colonial peoples to challenge the European imperial powers.
The international developments of 1947–8 had a profound impact on Soviet domestic politics. Many of the freedoms permitted during the war were curtailed by a regime which felt itself under attack from without by the west, and subverted by internal dissidence. Tito’s apostasy sparked off a fresh round of party purges, as Stalin sought to root out potential deviationists. By the end of the decade, his Gulag contained more prisoners than ever before. The most striking domestic political shift, however, came in response to the triumph of Zionism in Palestine in 1948. Stalin had supported the creation of Israel in order to embarrass the British, but the enthusiastic welcome Soviet Jews afforded Golda Meir, the first Israeli ambassador to Moscow, and his own paranoia caused him to fear a Zionist-American plot against his person. ‘Every Jew is a nationalist and agent of American intelligence,’ Stalin claimed.73 Over the next four years or so, the Soviet Union was gripped by a wave of anti-semitism: Jewish doctors were accused, without a shred of evidence, of trying to poison Stalin; Jewish communists were murdered or imprisoned.74 Similar events took place in eastern Europe, especially in Czechoslovakia, where Jewish party-leader Rudolf Slansky was charged with ‘Trotskyite Zionism’ and other crimes more or less explicitly linked to his racial background.75 International anti-semitism was firmly back on the agenda. This was the Jewish security dilemma: the establishment of Israel had fuelled the very anti-semitism which it was designed to guard against.
Stalin responded to the creation of West Germany with the establishment of the German Democratic Republic later in 1949. In keeping with his existing policy, the Soviet dictator was not trying to set the partition of Germany in stone, quite the opposite. The creation of the GDR was meant to signal an alternative for the whole of the country. ‘This is not the creation of an East German state or an East German government,’ its founding proclamation announced, ‘but of a government for all of Germany.’ For the moment, however, the GDR was to remain disarmed, at least ostensibly. Its chief value to Stalin lay in its capacity to disrupt the re-militarization of the Federal Republic. ‘West’ and ‘East’ Germany thus became two experiments as to which model of society and government could best satisfy the material, spiritual and national needs of the German people. Stalin also pressed ahead with his nuclear programme. In August 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, and although her arsenal was to remain markedly inferior to that of the United States for many years, the spectre of being blackmailed by the American nuclear monopoly had been banished.
At the same time, the Russians – who had until recently regarded the rest of the world largely as an unwelcome distraction from European matters – sought to put the pressure on the United States globally in order to force the Americans to relax their grip in Europe, and especially Germany. In March 1949, with defeat over Berlin looming, Stalin finally agreed to supply North Korea’s communist leader, Kim Il Sung, with large quantities of modern armaments.76 That same year, Mao finally triumphed in the longstanding Chinese Civil War and drove his rival, Chiang, to seek refuge on the island of Formosa (Taiwan). The desire to restore China’s global position – and thus to avenge a century of ‘humiliation’ at the hands of outside powers – was a crucial motivating force for the communists. Equally important, however, was a mission to implement and export the tenets of Marxism. Mao aimed at the revolutionary transformation of Chinese society, and to spread the word into neighbouring countries, partly for its own sake and partly because he believed that there was no other way of keeping the revolution at home safe. For this reason Mao, who yielded to none in his resentment of foreigners, nevertheless deferred to Stalin as the ideological leader of world communism.77 He inherited all the European communist conceptions of ‘encirclement’ and external threats.78 A Sino-Soviet Treaty duly followed in 1950, and Mao announced that he would ‘lean to one side’ in the struggle between the Soviet Union and the west. The new People’s Republic of China, in other words, was driven by a combination of local concerns and a revolutionary agenda first set out in Germany nearly a hundred years before. Central Europe had come to the Far East with a vengeance.
Taken together, Stalin’s bomb, his German policy and the emergence of militant communism in east Asia led to a much broader programme of western military re-mobilization. In January 1950, Truman authorized the construction of a still more deadly nuclear weapon – the hydrogen bomb. A few months later, the United States government issued National Security Directive 68 (NSC 68), which called – in often apocalyptic terms – for much greater investment in armaments in order to meet the global communist challenge. Implicitly invoking the experience of ‘appeasement’, the memorandum warned of ‘gradual withdrawals under pressure’ until the Soviet Union had achieved ‘domination of the Eurasian landmass’.79 The echoes of Mackinder were unmistakable.
The main battlefield remained Europe. The ‘coordinated’ Kremlin offensive feared for Asia was refracted through European lenses. In northern and east Asia, this anxiety dictated a policy of support for governments such as Chiang’s Kuomintang in Taiwan and Syngman Rhee’s dictatorship in South Korea, to help them resist communist subversion from within and aggression from without. Washington would very much have preferred to have backed similar local forces in the European colonies of Indochina, Indonesia and Malaya, believing that they enjoyed a legitimacy which the imperial authorities lacked. In spite of this, the United States supported the British, French and Dutch attempts to hold on to their colonial empires, because they needed European cooperation on the central front against Stalin. ‘The Netherlands,’ the State Department explained, ‘is a strong proponent of US policy in Europe . . . the stability of the present Dutch government would be seriously undermined if the Netherlands fails to retain a very considerable stake [in Indonesia] and the political consequences of failure of the present Dutch government would in all likelihood be prejudicial to the US position in Western Europe’.80 Europe, and especially Germany, trumped everything else.
Matters came to a head in late June 1950, when Kim Il Sung launched a surprise attack on South Korea, with Stalin’s foreknowledge and approval though not at his instigation. What shook Washington, and especially the western European capitals, was the belief that the attack on South Korea heralded a much broader assault on the west, particularly in Europe. The new West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was fervently of this opinion. It was for this reason that the United States immediately sent troops to shore up the collapsing South Korean defences. The French foreign minister and avid European integrationist Robert Schuman responded to news of the American intervention with visible emotion, saying, ‘Thank God, this will not be a repetition of the past’,81 that is of the 1930s. Shortly afterwards, the United States persuaded the United Nations to support the war against Kim’s Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the first operation of the new international organization. Britain and Australia sent substantial forces; France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece and Turkey also sent troops. West Germany had, as yet, none to send. They were all there not to protect the South Korean dictator, Syngman Rhee, but to fight a global battle against world communism which would soon engulf Europe if not stopped in the Far East.
With the majority of US forces now engaged in Asia, more troops were required to deter the Soviet Union along the Rhine and Elbe. Some form of permanent European defence integration, which would harness the resources of Britain, France, the Low Countries and Italy, or the rearmament of West Germany, or some combination of the two approaches, was required. For the next five years or so, European geopolitics and domestic politics were dominated by these interrelated issues. Should there be a strong Germany to deter the Soviet Union, with all the potential dangers to her neighbours, or should German strength be diluted through some form of supra-national European political integration in which the Germans gave up their sovereignty along with everyone else? As the German economy boomed in the early 1950s in the famous Wirtschaftswunder – by late 1951 onwards, growth outstripped that of Great Britain – the issue of how soon this financial muscle would be converted into political and military power, and whether those capabilities could be harnessed to the wider western cause, became increasingly pressing.
Washington’s preference was clear.82 Only a politically and militarily united Europe – or at least a concerted western European effort – could mobilize the economic, moral and military energies to stop Stalin, and relieve the burden on the Americans. Central to this programme on the military side was German rearmament, either unilaterally or as part of a broader process of political integration. ‘You cannot have any sort of security in western Europe,’ the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, argued, ‘without using German power.’ The only question was whether it would ‘be integrated into western European power or grow up to be a power of its own’.83 In September 1950, therefore, the US made the dispatch of more troops to Europe contingent on British and French acceptance of the creation of a large West German force within NATO. At the same time, Washington saw the European project as crucial to the management of German power. In April 1950, John McCloy, former US high commissioner to Germany, warned that ‘no permanent solution of the German problem seems possible without an effective European Union’.84 European unification, in short, was intended to serve the ‘double containment’ of Germany and the Soviet Union.
The United States gave not only strong diplomatic backing, but also extensive covert financial assistance to the European project. The new Central Intelligence Agency, and to a lesser degree the British Secret Intelligence Service, funded a broad range of political and cultural activities in support of European unification – or at least greater European unity.85 These included the anti-Moscow trade unions, anti-communist liberals and leftists, the Congress of Cultural Freedom (1950) for intellectuals, Radio Free Europe in Munich (founded 1951),86 the secretive ‘Bilderberg’ group (founded 1952) and publications such as Melvin Lasky’s Der Monat (founded in 1948), which was edited in the iconic frontline city of Berlin, and the very widely read Encounter magazine (founded 1953). More modestly, the Information Research Department in the British Foreign Office clandestinely subsidized Animal Farm, George Orwell’s devastating critique of Soviet communism.87 Conservatives, leftists and liberals came together to defend not so much capitalism – many still clung to the idea of a ‘third way’ between the American and Soviet economic extremes – as ‘European values’ such as democracy, freedom of speech and civil rights. The European Convention on Human Rights, which was championed by European conservatives as much as by liberals and the non-communist left, was signed in 1950 specifically to strengthen the west morally in the Cold War.88 The fight for the soul of Europe, and especially of Germany, was on.
In May 1950, the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, proposed a joint administration of French and German coal and steel resources. Ostensibly a form of economic rationalization, the scheme was really a device to bring the war-making potential of Germany under multilateral control. ‘A United Europe was not achieved [before 1939],’ Schuman argued in his declaration, ‘and we had war.’ In effect, Paris wanted to Europeanize Germany, before it Germanized Europe. Britain, predictably, was highly sceptical, partly because she refused to pool the necessary sovereignty, and partly because the British economy was still largely geared towards the Commonwealth and Empire, which took more than half of British exports in 1951, with the balance being shared between western Europe and the United States.89 The West German government under Konrad Adenauer supported the Schuman Plan, partly as a vehicle for the return of their country to the diplomatic top table, but also out of genuine belief in a common European destiny. Washington had some initial reservations about what was effectively a European cartel in competition with US industry, but the political and strategic advantages of greater European cooperation were so compelling that it endorsed the plan; indeed, US negotiators worked closely with Schuman in drawing up the scheme.90 In 1951, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) came into being, the first major step towards political unification.
The core of the project, however, was always common defence. Economic self-interest and a common European ‘civilization’ were not enough. Only fear of Soviet domination and – to a lesser but still substantial extent – of German revanchism would drive well-established states such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and perhaps even Britain to give up or at least share their sovereignty. In late October 1950, the French prime minister, René Pleven, responded to US pressure for German rearmament with a proposal for a European Defence Community (EDC). This was to be ‘the complete merger of men and equipment under a single European political and military authority’, integrating Germans in smaller formations to operate on the crucial central front. In late May 1952, with strong US encouragement, France, Italy, West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg signed the European Defence Community Treaty.91 At first, only Britain stood aloof, rejecting the project as an unacceptable dilution of her sovereignty. In March 1953, the signatories to the EDC concluded a draft treaty for a matching European supra-national authority – the European Political Community (EPC) – to govern the defence community and the ECSC. This was to include not only an Executive Council of national prime ministers, a Court of Justice and an Economic and Social Council, but also a two-chamber European parliament, one made up of deputies directly elected from the peoples of the community and another of senators representing the ‘peoples’ of all the participating states. The EDC, and the political integration it spawned, was effectively a European government-in-waiting.92 Within a very short period of time, parliaments in Bonn and the Benelux countries had ratified the treaty, and that of Italy, though delayed, was expected to follow. Continental western Europeans appeared to be on the verge of creating a mighty union to banish discord between them and to present a common front against Soviet communism.
Moscow watched these developments with mounting alarm. Ever since Napoleon and Hitler’s ‘crusades’ against Russia, it had regarded the political and military union of the continent as a potential threat, and the prospect of German rearmament under its umbrella as a mortal danger.93 ‘The Americans will draw West Germany into the Atlantic Pact,’ Stalin warned the East German communists in early April 1952. ‘They will create West German troops. Adenauer is in the pocket of the Americans. All ex-fascists and generals also are there. In reality there is an independent state being formed in West Germany.’94 The Soviets now strained every nerve to disrupt western European defence integration. They played on British and French fears of German rearmament. They instructed European communists, especially the French and Italian parties, to stop the necessary legislation from passing parliament. On the diplomatic front, Moscow opened a peace offensive, designed to show that the waning threat of war rendered the EDC redundant. Finally, as the French military effort in Indochina foundered, the Soviets explicitly linked their support for a face-saving withdrawal formula at the Geneva peace talks to the rejection of the defence community.
The main target, however, was the Federal Republic. If it could be prised loose from the west, the EDC would be dealt a severe blow. There was some urgency to this, because the Soviet Union had begun to despair of using the GDR as a magnet to rally nationalist opinion to her side. On the contrary, the regime of Walter Ulbricht in East Berlin conspicuously failed to satisfy the materialist appetites of Germans bewitched by the ‘economic miracle’ in the west. Nor was he able to slake their spiritual thirst as the dictatorial nature of communist rule, backed up by Soviet tanks, became increasingly clear. Millions of Germans fled westwards; only a trickle made the journey in the other direction. What had once been thought of as a porous border to infiltrate the western zones of occupation had become an open wound through which the GDR was being demographically bled dry. In order to deprive Adenauer and the Americans of a pretext for West German rearmament, Ulbricht was permitted only a small number of clandestine paramilitary police formations. These were fully engaged in internal repression and were too weak to be of much use to the Red Army. Ulbricht, in short, had become a liability, the more so as he was more and more open about his preference for a smaller GDR under his control, rather than merging into a united neutral and democratic state.95 The basis on which Stalin’s German policy had rested since the closing stages of the Second World War was being rapidly undermined.
So in early March 1952, the Soviet dictator made one last attempt to break the deadlock. In a series of communiqués – which have gone down in history as the ‘Stalin Notes’ – he offered the west a deal. In return for the demilitarization and neutralization of Germany, the Soviet Union would withdraw its own forces of occupation and permit reunification. This was very much less than the optimal solution he had canvassed after 1945, but it had the merit of shedding a liability – Ulbricht’s regime – while forcing the Allies to sacrifice the burgeoning West Germany. Ostensibly, the notes were directed at the three occupying powers, but the real addressee was the government in Bonn, and the wider West German public; he was still trying to trade on their nationalistic instincts. Adenauer, however, refused to be drawn.96 Instead, he forced the pace on German rearmament and the Federal Republic’s alignment with the west – the Westbindung as it came to be known. This involved persuading the Allies that German militarism had died with Hitler and the Junker class, but that German military traditions could be placed in the service of the western cause.97 In April 1951, for example, he asserted that the Wehrmacht had come through the war with its ‘honour’ unbesmirched, and he played up the importance of the German resistance at every turn. This might have been bad history, but it was good politics from Adenauer’s point of view. At the same time, he tried to repair Germany’s image as far as possible with world and especially Jewish opinion. The German chancellor thus made a point of trying to establish good relations with Israel, and in 1952 he came to an agreement about restitution payments for Nazi crimes against the Jews.98 Against this background, Adenauer rejected the Soviet offer, thus signalling his rejection of a policy of oscillation between the two camps, in favour of a wholehearted commitment to the integration with the west.
Frustrated, Stalin now moved to the other extreme. He had held the GDR back from the crash programme of industrialization, state ownership, and one-party rule which he had imposed on the other European satellites in order to appease West German nationalist opinion, but now he ordered Ulbricht to proceed with the ‘Construction of Socialism’ in July 1952. Announced with much fanfare by his Socialist Unity Party, this involved the building of more factories, further expropriations of ‘bourgeois’ enterprises, suppression of the churches, and the creation of formal East German military formations, though not yet a separate army. The effect of all this was the exact opposite of what Stalin had hoped. Rather than strengthening Ulbricht’s grip, the exodus of refugees actually doubled, as East Germans fled westwards for economic and political reasons. Desertion from the security forces was rife. As for using Ulbricht’s republic as a showcase, that was now quite out of the question. Soviet intelligence candidly reported that the GDR no longer held ‘even the slightest attraction for citizens of West Germany’.99
The sharp increase in international tension due to the Korean War, the process of European military integration and developments in Germany had a profound impact on domestic politics in Europe and the United States.100 It dominated the 1952 American presidential campaign. The decision of the former wartime Allied Supreme Commander and NATO Supreme Commander Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, to run was strongly driven by his belief that the Republican frontrunner, Robert Taft, a prominent ‘Asia-Firster’, was unsound on collective security and rearmament, that only he could save NATO, and that Germany – ‘the prize for which the international game is being played’, as he put it in March 1952 – was being neglected.101 Eisenhower promised to ‘go to Korea’ and end the conflict, increasingly seen as ‘the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong enemy’, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, had described it.102 Instead, Eisenhower undertook to ‘roll back’ Soviet power in Europe. He won the election comfortably. In the Soviet Union, the question of how to deal with the deteriorating situation in Germany was right at the top of the high political agenda after the death of Stalin in early March 1953.103 The troika which succeeded him – made up of Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria and Nikita Khrushchev – sharply changed course on the GDR and forced Ulbricht to relax his policies of repression. They ordered an immediate halt to the ‘Socialist Construction Programme’, including a reversal of collectivization in the countryside. This about-face, which was initiated by the police chief Beria, was designed to reduce the flow of refugees to the west. It backfired spectacularly within a few months. The new line from Moscow divided the German party between those such as Rudolf Herrnstadt, who supported unification with the west, and Ulbricht, who feared that he was about to be sacrificed for Soviet strategic gain. On 17 June 1953, East German workers took advantage of the new freedoms to demonstrate in favour of better working conditions, and even German unification. In the end, Ulbricht was forced to beg the Soviets to intervene, which they did with heavy loss of life, and further loss of reputation. Moscow’s German policy was once again in tatters. At the end of that month, Beria was arrested on trumped-up charges and executed. There were many reasons for his fall, especially fear that he was planning to murder his comrades, but it was the failure of Beria’s German strategy which made it so easy for his enemies to assemble a conspiracy against him. Two years later, Khrushchev crushed his principal (post-Beria) rival, Malenkov, who was forced to resign as prime minister. The chief charge against him at the Central Committee was his past support for Beria’s more liberal policy in the GDR. Khrushchev’s rise to power in the Soviet Union, in other words, was on the strength of his status as vindicator of Russia’s vital national interests, especially in Germany.
In West Germany, foreign policy was also at the heart of domestic political polarization. The governing coalition parties – the moderately conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Free Democrats (FDP) – supported German rearmament and the western orientation. There were some dissidents, however, such as Adenauer’s interior minister, Gustav Heinemann, who resigned in 1950 over the prospect of German rearmament, partly because he feared another war but also because it would damage the prospects for German unification. The other large party, the still notionally Marxist Social Democrats (SPD), were strongly opposed to Adenauer’s foreign policies, which they blamed for entrenching the partition of Germany. Their leader, the fiery First World War veteran Kurt Schumacher, roundly condemned Adenauer as the ‘chancellor of the Allies’. The German public respected Schumacher, and there was also a groundswell of opinion that Stalin’s offers on reunification should at least have been considered. Many were sceptical about rearmament, which often provoked the response, ‘count me out’ (ohne mich). In the end, however, most backed the chancellor on foreign policy, and accepted that Germany would have to contribute militarily to its own security. In early September 1953, Adenauer romped to victory in the federal elections with a greatly increased majority. This was, of course, primarily a tribute to his economic stewardship, but it was also an endorsement of his unswerving commitment to the west.
British politics were also profoundly shaped by the new sense of international crisis after 1950. The spiralling costs of defence (about 12 per cent of GNP) associated with the maintenance of an overseas empire, the prosecution of war in Korea, the development of the atom bomb (achieved by 1950) and defensive measures against a possible Soviet invasion of Europe forced the government into painful cuts to domestic spending. When in the spring of the following year, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell, proposed to introduce charges on dental and eye treatment in order to pay for increased armaments, the minister for labour, Aneurin Bevan, resigned in protest. He was supported by left-wingers such as Michael Foot and Harold Wilson. The Labour Party was now deeply split. Gaitskell’s cuts were to no avail, in any case, because in September 1951 Britain suffered a balance-of-payments crisis largely caused by massive defence expenditure, not least the huge currency cost of the British Army of the Rhine.104 At around the same time, Britain officially fell behind West Germany in terms of economic performance.105 In October 1951, the Labour Party went down to a narrow defeat in a general election in which foreign policy – the unpopular Korean War, the cost of rearmament, and the shaky British position in the Middle East – were central issues. Labour portrayed itself as the ‘peace’ party which would rescue the nation from Tory warmongers; the Conservatives condemned the slide in Britain’s international standing, and the ‘appeasement’ of her enemies. ‘Whose finger on the [nuclear] trigger?’ the press asked. From late 1951, it would once again be that of the Conservative prime minister, Winston Churchill.
The polarization of British domestic politics around foreign and defence policy gathered pace in the early 1950s. A full-scale battle erupted within Labour over Germany.106 The dominant anti-communists, such as Healey and Gaitskell, strongly supported NATO and were prepared to tolerate German rearmament within a system of multilateral constraints. They pointed out that the EDC corresponded to the old socialist principle of transcending narrow national boundaries and preoccupations. Thus Gaitskell warned a group of trade unionists in 1952 that if the democracies were ‘divided’ in the face of Stalin, they would ‘fall one by one as Hitler’s victims did’.107 The ‘Gaitskellites’ went along with the Americans, not because they had been bought by the CIA, but because they were persuaded that Washington was still the best defence of ‘free institutions’. A significant minority in the Labour Party, however, was highly suspicious of what they saw as American warmongering and materialism. They were also deeply opposed to the creation of a new German army under the auspices of the EDC or any other umbrella. And whereas opinion on the United States tended to divide on ideological lines, the question of what to do about Germany transcended the left–right split: two of the most strident opponents of German rearmament were the left-winger Bevan and Hugh Dalton, who was firmly on the right of the party.108 In 1954, the Labour Party Conference narrowly endorsed German rearmament, but only by using the trade union ‘block vote’ to overrule the rank-and-file sceptics.
Eisenhower’s election victory led to the announcement of a new American foreign and defence policy. In a dramatic televised address shortly after taking office in 1953, his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, pointed to a map demonstrating the ‘vast area’ from Germany to east Asia, including the Soviet bloc and China, which the ‘Russian communists completely dominate[d]’.109 He warned that not only was Moscow pursuing a policy of ‘encirclement’ against the west, but that the population of the communist world had quadrupled from 200 million to 800 million since the Second World War. Most of the resources of Eurasia were in hostile hands. This was effectively Mackinder’s ‘heartland’ theory in a new guise. Containment, therefore, was not enough: an active policy to ‘roll back’ Soviet power was necessary to prevent the slow strangulation of the free world. The ideological and strategic here were closely linked: the National Security Council argued that a permanent Soviet domination of eastern Europe ‘would represent a serious threat to the security of western Europe and the United States’. For this reason, Washington reiterated her ‘traditional policy to recognize the right of all people to independence and to governments of their own choosing. The elimination of Soviet domination of the satellites is, therefore, in the fundamental interest of the United States.’110 A barrage of speeches, radio broadcasts and psychological warfare directed against the eastern bloc followed. This approach even extended to Islamism, which Washington regarded as a lever against the Soviet Union in central Asia and the Caucasus. The CIA began to cultivate activists such as Said Ramadan, effectively the Muslim Brotherhood’s foreign minister, and sponsored the construction of a mosque in Munich which would serve as a focal point for stateless Muslims opposed to Godless communism.111
In the ‘Third World’, on the other hand, the Eisenhower administration and the western European powers were potentially confronted by a sharp contradiction between ideology and Realpolitik. There, the weapons of self-determination and human rights, which could be used so effectively to rally opinion at home and to prise open the Soviet position in eastern Europe, tended to boomerang. In Africa and Asia, local nationalists now used these arguments against European imperialists. Moreover, as the US administration began a systematic alignment with authoritarian regimes in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia against popular movements which were believed to tilt towards Soviet or Chinese communism, it became vulnerable to similar charges. The empires, once European assets, had become liabilities in Europe, while Washington’s global commitments weakened not only her military commitment to but also her moral standing in Europe.
The other plank of Eisenhower’s grand strategy was the need to reduce the budget deficit in order to safeguard the long-term economic health on which US security depended. Like many Republicans and libertarians, he was also fearful that the machinery of the military-industrial complex – as he later christened it – would slowly swallow the freedoms it was supposed to defend. To this end, the new president moved quickly to end the costly war in Korea, which was finally achieved in late July 1953. Eisenhower also reduced spending on conventional forces, seeking to make up the missing firepower through reliance on massive nuclear force. This strategy – the ‘New Look’ announced in NSC 162/2 – was enshrined in NATO’s MC 48, which threatened to respond to a Soviet attack with ‘massive retaliation’. His various disarmament proposals were public relations gambits, designed to wrong-foot the Soviet Union. Central to this policy of nuclear reliance and fiscal retrenchment, however, was Europe, and especially Germany. It would only be possible if NATO or the EDC picked up the resulting slack, in terms both of conventional and, if possible, of nuclear capability. For this reason, the Eisenhower administration was a staunch supporter of European integration, and especially military cooperation; his Secretary of State, Dulles, had been a sponsor of Jean Monnet, the president of the High Authority of the ECSC and one of the continent’s leading integrationists since the Second World War. The European Defence Community seemed the solution both to the Soviet threat and to the president’s enduring ‘grave anxieties about German rearmament involving the recreation of a German national army and a German general staff’. Eisenhower therefore told the British and French in December 1953 that the EDC was ‘not only the best, but also the only hope of a solution to the problem of a German contribution, without which NATO would fall down’.112
The course of French domestic politics, however, ultimately frustrated Eisenhower’s efforts. In June 1954, the forces of Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese nationalist and communist leader, vanquished the French at Dien Bien Phu. Eisenhower rejected French appeals to save their cause through direct military intervention. The government of Pierre Mendès France came to power shortly afterwards with a mandate to end the war, and in late July the Geneva accords ended this phase of the conflict. France abandoned her empire in Indochina. Laos and Cambodia became independent states. Vietnam was divided into a communist north, backed by the Soviet Union and Red China, and a US-supported right-wing regime in the south, the Republic of Vietnam.
It was in Europe, however, where the impact of French politics was most keenly felt. The withdrawal from Indochina greatly lessened interest in following the American lead in Europe, especially German rearmament and military integration. Moreover, Stalin’s death had reduced the sense of a Soviet threat. During a passionate debate in the French National Assembly, critics lined up to attack the EDC for failing to provide sufficient guarantees against the revival of German militarism,113 not least because the British refused to participate. In a subsequent vote right at the end of August 1954, the treaty was rejected by a clear, though not massive, majority. This was the decisive ‘non’. The European Defence Community, and with it the military integration of Europe, was dead. Whatever else it would be, ‘Europe’ would not be a mighty union on the lines agreed by the thirteen American states in the late 1780s.
The defeat of the EDC shaped European geopolitics for the rest of the decade. Britain moved into the resulting political vacuum and seized control of the European project.114 In late October 1954, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain came together under the leadership of the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, to agree to ‘promote the unity and to encourage the progressive integration of Europe’; in May of the following year, this pact was formally christened the Western European Union (WEU). Unlike the supra-national EDC and EPC, however, this was an intergovernmental organization acceptable to London. Germany was once again an actor on the European scene, and thus consoled for the failure of the EDC. Her sovereignty was still highly conditional, however, in deference to French demands. Adenauer was obliged to make a unilateral declaration abjuring any interest in atomic and chemical weapons, or in the construction of guided missiles, and large naval and aerial capabilities, without the permission of the WEU. The German troop commitment was to be capped, and Allied forces were to remain in Germany on a permanent basis not only to deter the Soviet Union, but also to prevent German aggression in the future. They reserved the right to intervene in defence of the democracy in West Germany, to stop the independent development of nuclear or chemical armaments, or in the event of an attempt by Bonn to achieve unification by force. The future of political freedom in West Germany, in other words, was integral to the security of western Europe.
Jean Monnet was so scarred by the French parliamentary rejection of the EDC that he came to believe that unity could only be achieved through stealthy cooperation between the major European governments, beginning with the economy. In 1955, he founded the Action Committee for a United States of Europe – which was made up of leading Christian Democrat, socialist, liberal and labour leaders. That same year, the ECSC countries met in the Sicilian city of Messina in early June 1955 to deepen their supra-national economic ties. The foreign ministers of France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries agreed to form a customs union – known as a ‘common market’ – and to integrate the transport and civil atomic energy sectors. Britain, which was not a member of the Coal and Steel Community, tried in vain to push a much looser free trade association. It argued that further economic union would divide western Europe and, far from containing Bonn, would actually, in the words of one official, provide ‘a means of re-establishing the hegemony of Germany’.115 This signalled the beginning of a separation of what all previous successful unions – from England and Scotland, through the American Constitution to the creation of the second German Empire – had combined: of economic union on the one hand, and defence integration on the other.
Washington now pressed ahead with the rearmament of West Germany within NATO. In early May 1955, the German Basic Law was abandoned to allow the creation of armed forces. Not long after, Dulles made a substantial concession to German nationalist opinion, and dealt the French a stinging rebuke, when he reiterated American support for the unification of Germany ‘under conditions which will neither “neutralize” nor “de-militarize” a united Germany, nor subtract it from NATO’.116 A complex system of financial transfers and ‘offsets’ was established to share the burden of the US military presence between Bonn and Washington. At around the same time, EURATOM was set up to manage the European acquisition of nuclear expertise, and thus prevent Bonn from developing atomic weapons independently. One way or the other, the principal provider of military security was now NATO, rather than any European organization. It had relieved western Europeans of the need for further political-military integration.117 The EDC controversy subsided, but the unresolved underlying tensions erupted in a European double crisis in the middle of the decade. Overlapping and interlocking developments in Moscow, London, Paris, Cairo and Tel Aviv led the continent to the edge of a general conflagration. The trail began in Moscow, where West German rearmament had shocked Soviet policy makers to the core. In mid-May 1955, only a week after the final announcement from Bonn, Khrushchev responded with the creation of the Warsaw Pact, which rallied the entire eastern bloc, including the GDR, in a formal military alliance with the Soviet Union. The day after, the Russian leader approved the Austrian state treaty. This agreement to end the four-power presence in the country in return for its neutralization was not about Austria. It was a clear signal to all Germans that a similar arrangement was on offer for them. Once again, Adenauer did not take the bait; West Germany would rearm. She immediately became more assertive: in December 1955, Walter Hallstein, the State Secretary, announced that West Germany would no longer recognize any state that recognized the GDR, apart from the Soviet Union (the ‘Hallstein Doctrine’).118
Moscow was deeply alarmed by all this. ‘The West Germans are the only ones who might bring about a new war in Europe,’ Khrushchev remarked to his son.119 This fact drove domestic politics in the Warsaw Pact: all member states were characterized by one-party systems, state ownership of the principal means of production, militarization of all levels of society and the emergence of a nomenklatura, a new party aristocracy who were rewarded for their service to communism and Moscow with economic privileges. Like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization its strategic operational horizon was Germany and the Rhine. Unlike NATO, which was led by the United States but was also a genuine alliance, the Warsaw Pact was completely dominated by Moscow. Right at the end of May 1955, Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin visited Belgrade to patch up relations with Tito. Two months later, Khrushchev sought an understanding with Eisenhower at a summit in Geneva where the future of Germany was the main issue. The United States, however, was not prepared for any solution which did not involve free elections, which would lead to the immediate collapse of the GDR, and it was not prepared to allow Germany to cut loose as a neutral, either. Eisenhower warned that ‘There was no possibility of having 80 million hard-working people in the center of Europe as neutrals.’120
This precipitate decline of Russian influence in Germany drove Khrushchev to abandon the traditional Soviet reticence about intervening in the Third World. In a famous speech in early 1956 the Soviet leader hailed the arrival of the ‘new period in world history predicted by Lenin when the peoples of the East will play an active part in deciding the destinies of the world and become a new and mighty factor in international relations’.121 This required an ideological recalibration: ‘anti-imperialist’ cooperation with diverse anti-western regimes rather than pan-Marxist solidarity was now the watchword. In particular, Moscow pursued a relationship with the Egyptian leader, Colonel Gamal Nasser, in order to embarrass Paris and London, and to frustrate Washington’s attempts to complete the encirclement of the Soviet Union from the south. The local communists were left to the tender mercies of the Egyptian secret police.
At the same time, Khrushchev sought to strengthen the Soviet system by making the European satellites more viable, and releasing the domestic energies sapped by years of Stalinist terror. In his remarkable ‘secret’ speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow in late February 1956, Khrushchev announced a new policy of de-Stalinization. Millions of prisoners were released from the Gulag; attempts were made to wrestle control from the bureaucracy back to the party. Stalin’s body was removed from his mausoleum on Red Square. A few months later, the Soviet leader authorized the removal of the hardline Hungarian party leader Mátyás Rákosi and his replacement by a more moderate figure. Not long after that, Khrushchev permitted the return of the independentminded Polish communist leader, Wladylsaw Gomulka, from internal exile. As was so often the case, however, these reforms merely whetted the appetite for more freedoms. By late October 1956, a full-scale crisis had erupted in both countries. In Poland, the riots were largely directed against shortages, albeit with a strongly Russophobic undertone. In Hungary, on the other hand, matters quickly escalated beyond the control of the local party and the Russian garrison. It soon became clear that the reformist leader, Imre Nagy, encouraged by the Austrian precedent, was planning to take his country out of Moscow’s immediate control, and perhaps out of the Warsaw Pact altogether. Hungarian workers and students – pumped up not least by US ‘rollback’ propaganda – prepared for a showdown with the Red Army. A year after the announcement of German rearmament, the Soviet position in central and eastern Europe was locked in a perilous downward spiral.
Meanwhile, the British and French were grappling with Egypt’s Colonel Nasser, who not only took delivery of a Czechoslovak – effectively a Soviet – arms shipment, but also nationalized the Suez Canal. London and Paris believed not just Egypt and the wider Middle East were at stake, but ‘Europe’ itself. Paris was rocked by the start of a nationalist revolt in Algeria in 1954, which among other things threatened the testing grounds for the French nuclear programme. Britain, for her part, was alarmed by the outbreak of a Greek Cypriot rebellion, which threatened the crucial base areas in the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, dealing with the Egyptian challenge was seen as vital to the success of the ‘Eurafrican’ project of collectively mobilizing the continent in support of European power.122 For this reason, the West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, strongly supported military intervention on the grounds of ‘European raison d’état’.123 In early September the French prime minister, Guy Mollet, secretly proposed a Franco-British union of states – a revival of the Churchill scheme of 1940 – in order to present a united front to the world. London rejected these overtures as a dilution of national sovereignty, but it did agree to approach Tel Aviv to concert joint action against Nasser. The Israelis – having failed to secure an American arms deal to deter the Arabs – welcomed these approaches with open arms. French weapons now flowed instead. In late October, the British, French and Israelis agreed a secret protocol in the Paris suburb of Sèvres by which the Israelis agreed to attack Egypt, after which the two European powers would step in to ‘separate’ the combatants and restore international control over the Canal.
Everything now happened very quickly, as the eastern European and Middle Eastern crises climaxed simultaneously.124 Right at the end of October the Israelis attacked Egypt. A day later, fearful that the new Hungarian government was about to leave the Warsaw Pact – which it did shortly afterwards – Khrushchev sent Soviet tanks into Budapest. By contrast, the Poles – who were prepared to stay within the direct Soviet sphere of influence – were appeased with vague assurances of domestic autonomy. That very same day, the British and the French began ‘Operation Musketeer’, the military intervention promised at Sèvres.125 The WEU powers – the Belgians, Dutch, Germans and Italians (with fingers firmly crossed behind their backs) offered unequivocal support. Egyptian resistance collapsed quickly; the Hungarians put up a desperate fight in their capital. In the UN and at the bar of world opinion, London and Paris were mercilessly pilloried for their ‘colonialist’ adventure. The Hungarians were largely forgotten. The (cold) war of European unification, which Washington had expected to take place against the Soviet Union, was now taking place in Egypt.
Eisenhower was furious, partly because the crisis cut across his desire to cooperate with Arab nationalism wherever possible, partly because he shared the global distaste at Anglo-French ‘imperialism’, partly because he was standing for re-election in the following month, but mainly because the crisis in Egypt shifted the spotlight from Hungary and allowed Khrushchev to restore Soviet control in eastern Europe. The Hungarians were crushed; the United States stood aside. Eisenhower straight away sponsored a UN resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Egypt. When that failed due to an Anglo-French veto in the Security Council, Eisenhower turned to tougher measures. Using massive economic pressure – through the International Monetary Fund and the crash sale of sterling bonds – the United States sought to compel the two European powers to withdraw. The French, who had prepared themselves for the intervention much better financially, were relatively untroubled, but London – confronted by a run on the pound – soon buckled.126 Britain and France backed down, and they had completely withdrawn from the Canal Area by the end of the year. It was a devastating blow to the Anglo-French position in the Middle East, and thus to their condominium in Europe.
In France, the US intervention in support of Nasser was taken to show that Washington could never be trusted. The French redoubled their efforts to secure a nuclear weapon and clung on grimly to their installations and testing grounds in Algeria. The British, on the other hand, took away from Suez a powerful sense that they must never find themselves on the wrong side of an argument with the Americans again. Moreover, there was now a widespread realization in London that the empire, once a major bulwark of the British position in Europe, was now a liability which complicated attempts to rally the world against communism.127 Britain could no longer stand for both the defence of democracy in Europe and imperialism overseas, even if the former plausibly required the latter. In 1957, Britain wound down its war in Cyprus, and released the Greek Cypriot leader, Archbishop Makarios. Three years later, after securing the continued use of the base areas, London released the island into independence, albeit with the national tensions between Turks and the majority Greeks still unresolved. Britain also abandoned most of her African and Asian empire, which had become a distraction from her European destiny, and a cause of suspicion to friendly capitals on both sides of the Atlantic. She had built up her colonial empire largely for strategic purposes, and it was for the same reason that she relinquished it: in deference to US wishes, to strengthen the argument against Soviet human rights abuses, and to ease Britain’s path back into ‘Europe’.
Suez shifted the balance between the western European powers. As the British Chancellor of the Exchequer remarked in early January 1957, the Achilles heel of Britain at Suez had been the ‘weakness of [its] post-war economy’.128 That summer, London was rocked by another sterling crisis: wages were high, inflation was on the increase, and speculation against the pound resumed. Public expenditure was too high. Something would have to give: it would have to be either guns or butter. Britain chose butter. The population was appeased with throwaway budgets: Macmillan told them in 1957 that ‘You have never had it so good.’ The price was paid in terms of Britain’s European standing. In the late 1950s, financial pressures became so great that the government was forced to cut the RAF and the Army of the Rhine. National service was abolished for cost reasons; ever greater reliance was placed on the independent nuclear deterrent. As Britain fell, Germany rose with her booming economy and began to demand more military equality, especially with regard to nuclear weapons.
Most importantly of all, the events of 1956 gave a decisive new impulse to the European project. ‘Europe will be your revenge,’ Adenauer told the French prime minister, Guy Mollet, just after news of the US ultimatum over Suez came through. London – especially the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd – shared the view that Europe would have to be economically united in order to balance both Russia and the Americans. For now, however, the British still refused to compromise their sovereignty and antagonize the Commonwealth by participating in an economic union. Moreover, the British feared that Germany would use the resulting agreement as a vehicle for the return to great-power status. Macmillan warned that it would lead to ‘western Europe dominated in fact by Germany and used as an instrument for the revival of power through economic means. It is really giving them on a plate what we fought two wars to prevent.’129 Paris shared these concerns, but now believed that political and economic – but not military – integration with Bonn was the best way to guard against them.
In late March 1957, with strong American backing, the Messina countries concluded the ‘Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union’, better known as the Treaty of Rome. France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries – the ‘Six’ – agreed to create a common economic market, as of the beginning of the following year. At the Stresa Conference of July 1958, the Six also agreed a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) designed to manage surpluses and prevent the flight from the land. This European Economic Community (EEC) was a customs and economic union explicitly designed, like the more modest nineteenth-century Zollverein, to achieve ‘ever closer’ European political union. Britain remained aloof; London would liaise with the EEC via the Western European Union. The European project inaugurated by the Treaty of Rome differed from the original EDC and EPC in two crucial respects, however. There was no military dimension – that now rested entirely with NATO – and there was very little direct democratic accountability. Unlike the Anglo-Scottish and American unions, moreover, European integration would not be a single act, but a process. ‘Europe will not be made in one fell swoop, nor in one joint construction,’ Robert Schuman remarked, ‘it will be made by concrete steps creating first a solidarity of fact.’
The Hungarian and Suez crises also fundamentally recast Moscow’s relationship with the independent communist world. The treatment of Hungary, and the subsequent execution of Imre Nagy, who had taken refuge in the Yugoslav embassy, wrecked the Soviet rapprochement with Tito. Relations with Mao were also deteriorating badly. This was partly due to local factors: Chinese resentment about Russia’s unjust treaties, refusal to share nuclear technology, and other real or imagined slights. The real problem, however, was ideological: how best to promote world revolution and under whose leadership? Mao had been content to follow Stalin – whose revolutionary credentials stretched back beyond 1917 – but he regarded himself as Khrushchev’s senior in the world of international communism. After the ‘secret’ break with Stalinism, Bejing lambasted the Soviet Union for ‘revisionism’, that is deviating from the common party line. Central to this argument was the fate of communist regimes in central and eastern Europe. Mao now began to intervene in European affairs, sometimes criticizing the Soviet Union for its heavy-handedness, more often attacking its weakness, always seeking to maximize the embarrassment for Moscow. He laid the unrest in Poland and the fiasco in Hungary – both direct results of de-Stalinization – at Khrushchev’s door. First Mao claimed that Soviet measures against the Poles reflected their ‘big-power chauvinism’, then he demanded that the Hungarian revolutionaries be crushed without further ado. He made thinly veiled accusations of cowardice against the Soviet leader, promising to pick up the torch of global revolutionary communism dropped by Moscow. East European leaders were quick to appeal to Peking in order to carve out some independence from Moscow. In November 1955, for example, the GDR party ostentatiously adopted the Chinese rather than the Soviet method of taking over the remaining large private enterprises.130 More spectacularly the senior Chinese party leader, Chou En-lai, famously announced that he was not afraid of nuclear war, and that month Mao was the dominant presence at an international communist summit in Moscow. The overall effect of all this Red Chinese activism was to limit Khrushchev’s room for manoeuvre in central and eastern Europe.
As the decade drew to a close, a fresh trail was laid which would lead to another round of multiple European and global detonations. President Charles de Gaulle aimed to restore French ‘grandeur’ by reducing costly colonial commitments, pressing ahead with the development of a nuclear capability, and striking an independent pose in Europe. In 1958, de Gaulle demanded the creation of a Franco-British-US ‘Tripartite Directorate’ in NATO, partly with a view to controlling Germany and partly in order to stake a claim to complete equality in military matters. When this was rejected by Washington, the general showed his displeasure by taking France out of NATO’s Mediterranean Command in 1959. That same year, the Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro took power in Havana, ousting a pro-American dictator. A year later, the French exploded their first atomic bomb, greatly increasing their strategic confidence. In 1961 – against the backdrop of Algerian riots in Paris itself and furious resistance from generals and pied noir colonists – de Gaulle pulled out of Algeria. This enabled him to reorient French policy more fully towards Europe.131
Khrushchev, for his part, was grappling with the continued rise of West Germany. In the spring of 1957, the Bonn government officially notified Moscow that it was about to embark on a military nuclear programme. Soviet analysts expected that within a few years the Bundeswehr would not only number around half a million men but would also be armed with atomic bombs. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that diplomats and journalists in Moscow reported Khrushchev’s increasing sense of paranoia, his repeated references to the German surprise attack of 1941, to the revival of German ‘revanchism’ and to Konrad Adenauer, whom he regarded as a Hindenburg-style figure likely to facilitate a Nazi revival.132 What drove Khrushchev to utter despair, however, was the progressive collapse of East Germany. Since 1949, more than 2 million refugees had fled the country and the flood was showing no signs of abating. Yet Khrushchev dared not remove Ulbricht, or even remonstrate with him too strongly, because Mao was in the background demanding the defence of socialism against imperialist aggression. The East German leader was now effectively the tail wagging the Russian dog, and in 1959–60 – egged on by Red China – Ulbricht pushed through the collectivization of agriculture. This had the predictable effect of reducing the food supply further, though Mao – in order to underline his support for the ‘frontline’ German communists – sent Ulbricht food which his own peasantry so desperately needed. In short, by the end of the decade, the Soviet leader was faced with the unbearable prospect of a demographic and economic collapse of the GDR, followed by German reunification on Bonn’s terms, leading to the accession of the whole country armed with nuclear weapons into NATO.
Khrushchev still had one ace to play: Berlin. That city, he famously said, was ‘the testicles of the west. Every time I want to make the west scream, I squeeze on Berlin.’133 In November 1958, the Soviet leader issued an ultimatum. Either Washington, London and Paris agreed a mutually acceptable final settlement for Germany, or the Soviet Union would conclude a separate peace treaty with the GDR and return its territory to Ulbricht’s full control. The clear implication was that the GDR would close the access routes to Berlin and thus precipitate another blockade. Against this background, the Soviet leader approached the western powers in turn over the next two years. In January 1959, he made overtures to Washington, bypassing Bonn, but when that did not bring instant results, Khrushchev tried Adenauer. The German chancellor, however, rejected all offers of a confederation of the two German states – and the option of a conference possibly leading to unification – in return for a recognition of the GDR and the Oder–Neisse border with Poland. Khrushchev now turned back to de Gaulle, but by the time the two met in Paris in March–April 1960 it was clear that the Frenchman wanted to maintain the partition of Germany, rather than explore Soviet schemes for a neutralist confederation. At the same time, Khrushchev was determined to increase the Soviet nuclear arsenal, to achieve parity with the United States as soon as possible. He was convinced that only this would induce Washington to deal with him on a basis of equality. If there were to be another showdown over Berlin, the Soviet Union would this time be better prepared than Stalin in 1948, when the US had enjoyed an atomic monopoly. Resources were diverted from the army, navy and air force towards the Strategic Missile Forces, which were constituted as a separate service in 1959.
London took a ringside seat throughout the early stages of the second Berlin crisis, and showed no appetite for a confrontation with Moscow. While Dulles was prepared to go to the ‘brink’, Macmillan warned Eisenhower in November 1958 that Britain was ‘not prepared to face obliteration for the sake of 2 million Berlin Germans, their former enemies’.134 Britain was also in the throes of a fundamental strategic rethink. Throughout the late 1950s, the extent to which Britain was falling behind financially and technologically became painfully clear. A bilateral agreement on nuclear weapons cooperation with the United States reached at Bermuda in 1957 underlined this inferiority. It surfaced again in 1960, when technical problems forced the cancellation of the much-vaunted independent British missile system, ‘Blue Streak’. Moreover, the costs of maintaining an ‘imperial’ presence now threatened Britain’s ability to fulfil her obligations in Europe, the main battleground. Only by joining the European Economic Community, Macmillan felt, could the nation hope to regain the weight she had lost on the international stage. In July 1961, Britain made a formal application to be admitted to the EEC. All the same, Britain’s stated view of the primacy of Europe led to a deepening estrangement with Australia and New Zealand.135
The international turbulence around the turn of the decade also left its mark on domestic politics. In the United States the perceived Soviet advances in space – they sent the first Sputnik satellite into orbit in October 1957 – and the nuclear field caused a widespread crisis of confidence in her own capacity to innovate. The creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in late July 1958 and the passing of the National Defense Education Act that same year were attempts to address this problem. There was also a widespread elite feeling that the administration was not doing enough to prop up the friendly government in Saigon against communist aggression from within and without. All these factors – the Sputnik crisis, Vietnam and especially the ‘missile gap’ – were issues which John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, mercilessly exploited in the election campaign. In November 1960, Kennedy was narrowly elected – with some help from his late father’s friends in Chicago – on a hawkish platform in foreign policy.
It soon turned out that the ‘missile gap’ he had laid at the door of the Republican candidate – Richard Nixon – did not in fact exist. That said, national security was at the heart of the vision for a ‘new frontier’ which the Kennedy administration unfolded. It believed that the key to the defence of the United States lay in the socio-economic modernization of the world along western lines. The new National Security Advisor, Walt Rostow, was an academic economist who believed passionately that US aid, especially judicious state infrastructural investment, could stimulate capitalist ‘take-off’ across the developing world, and by reducing poverty bring it gradually into the western fold. Kennedy had much less interest in Germany – which his predecessor regarded as ‘the central bastion in Europe’ – and sought to bypass Bonn in the search for an early thaw in the Cold War. The New Frontiersmen initially saw Germany – as the influential Under-Secretary of State, George Ball, recalled – as ‘an irritating footnote’ to the broader confrontation.136 They were about to be rudely awakened.
If socio-economic ‘modernization’ was one plank of Kennedy’s new grand strategy, a departure from Eisenhower’s emphasis on the immediate use of nuclear weapons in the event of a major crisis was the other. The new administration rejected ‘massive retaliation’ as too constraining, forcing Washington to use an atomic sledgehammer to crush a conventional nut, and increasingly unrealistic as Soviet nuclear forces approached parity with those of the United States. Instead, the United States now pursued a policy of ‘flexible response’, which according to Kennedy’s chief military adviser, General Maxwell Taylor, involved ‘a capability to react across the entire spectrum of possible challenge, for coping with anything from general atomic war to infiltrations and aggressions’. In Europe, this meant an increase in NATO conventional forces in order to hold the Soviet Union before a nuclear showdown became unavoidable. In the rest of the world, ‘flexible response’ involved not only a greater willingness to deploy regular ground forces, but also the development of more substantial capabilities in intelligence and ‘counter-insurgency’. The testing ground for the new doctrine was increasingly Indochina, where more and more US civil and military advisers, and eventually combat troops, were deployed. Washington feared that a communist victory in Saigon would unleash a ‘domino effect’, as Soviet-inspired revolutions rippled down through Thailand and Malaysia to link up with Sukarno’s radical regime in Indonesia.
The Kennedy administration was soon in difficulty. Large-scale economic programmes failed to reconcile the South Vietnamese population or reduce widespread support for the Viet Cong. Moreover, the general perception was that despite the best efforts of the military mission, the South Vietnamese army would never be able to defeat the insurgency. There were now growing calls in Washington for the removal of the unpopular Ngo Dinh Diem regime, and the dispatch of large US forces to finish the job.137 For the moment, however, the president resisted further escalation in Vietnam, and rejected demands for intervention in Laos.138 This was primarily because unlike George Ball he regarded Indochina as a distraction from the main battlefront in Germany.139
Meanwhile, the Berlin crisis had reached boiling point; the city, as the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King told its citizens, had become ‘the hub around which turns the wheel of history’.140 The Soviet leader now expected an immediate collapse of the GDR and its swift absorption by West Germany. Then, Khrushchev feared, ‘The Bundeswehr would advance to the borders of Poland and Czechoslovakia and therefore nearer to our borders.’141 In June 1961, Khrushchev told the Politburo that Germany was ‘the key issue’.142 His demand that the United States recognize the boundaries of the satellite states, especially those of the GDR, was rejected. Worse still, Kennedy vowed to defend Berlin, even at the cost of war. Mao was still on Khrushchev’s back, demanding tougher action. Drastic measures were required. In mid-August 1961, therefore, Moscow finally permitted Ulbricht to build a large barrier along the zonal border in Berlin to prevent further emigration. Those attempting to escape were mown down without warning. As one historian has put it, the East German leader drove the Soviets ‘up the wall’.143 The main function of the NVA, the East German army, was no longer to defend against capitalist aggression, but to incarcerate its own population. The last gap in the ‘iron curtain’ had been plugged, but at the price of admitting the inferiority of the communist system in the central theatre of the strategic and ideological conflict.
Humiliated over Berlin, Khrushchev began to look around for ways, as he put it to his defence minister in April 1962, of ‘throw[ing] a hedgehog down Uncle Sam’s pants’.144 He therefore authorized the dispatch of medium- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles to Castro’s Cuba a month later. Khrushchev wanted to put pressure on Washington’s southern flank and thus weaken her in Germany; at the very least, he hoped that he could force the withdrawal of American missiles deployed along his own southern border with Turkey. In mid-October 1962, however, US reconnaissance spotted the deployment before it was complete. President Kennedy demanded the immediate withdrawal of the missiles, which could reach American cities with almost no warning and represented a flagrant breach of the Monroe Doctrine, and imposed a naval blockade on Cuba. He saw the connection to Germany at once. ‘I need not point out to you,’ he told the British prime minister at the height of the crisis, ‘the possible relation of this secret and dangerous move on the part of Khrushchev to Berlin.’145 The world now moved rapidly towards a nuclear confrontation. Moreover, unbeknown to Washington, Soviet ‘advisers’ in Cuba were authorized to use the tactical missiles already on the island at their discretion. An American attack – even a purely conventional one – might have provoked an instant atomic exchange. Castro and Che Guevara, the charismatic Latin American revolutionary, pressed for war, which would expose the Americans as paper tigers and precipitate a broader struggle for the liberation of Latin America. Khrushchev, however, rejected their demands for a pre-emptive strike. He informed Castro that if Moscow had been ‘the first to launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy [this] would have been the start of a thermonuclear world war’. ‘[W]e are not struggling against imperialism in order to die,’ he reminded the Cuban leader.146 Within a few days, Khrushchev had backed down, the missiles were withdrawn in return for a promise to remove the Jupiter missiles in Turkey quietly, and war was averted.
The Berlin and Cuban crises shaped world geopolitics over the next three years. Mao finally lost patience with Khrushchev. He accused the Soviets of ‘bluffing’ over Germany, where they had backed away from their ‘deadline’,147 and especially in the Caribbean. Fortunately for Moscow, the consequences of this in Europe were containable. The defection of Albania to the Red Chinese camp in late 1961 remained an isolated incident in an isolated country, though it cost Moscow some valuable port facilities on the Adriatic. In the Far East, however, Mao’s hostility was a more serious matter. All Soviet advisers were withdrawn, Moscow continued to refuse all nuclear cooperation, and Mao accused the Russians of failing to support Ho Chi Minh adequately. In October–November 1962, taking advantage of Khrushchev’s preoccupation with Cuba, Mao launched a surprise attack on India, which the Soviet Union was backing in its border disputes with China. And when Khrushchev folded over Cuba, Mao’s derision knew no bounds. The Sino-Soviet split – which US policymakers had dreamed of since 1949 – burst into the open. Mao would not ‘lean to one side’ much longer. Two years later, Red China tested its first atomic device at Lop Nor in the Gobi desert. The Soviet Union was now encircled west and east by hostile nuclear powers. The bi-polar system which had dominated geopolitics since the late 1940s had become tri-polar.
In western Europe, and especially in Germany, the Berlin and Cuban crises also had a lasting impact. On the one hand, Kennedy’s firm stance over the missiles gave heart to western publics and statesmen, particularly the inhabitants of Berlin, who perceived Khrushchev’s move as an attempt to renew the pressure on their city; ‘it’s about us,’148 they said, even though the events were taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. On the other hand, many Germans, including Chancellor Adenauer, had been deeply disappointed that the American president had not taken a harder line over the construction of the wall. They suspected him – and the British – of wishing to perpetuate the partition of their country. The Germans were also unsettled by the military implications of ‘flexible response’, which deprived them of automatic American nuclear protection while exposing their country to the ravages of a conventional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. To make matters worse, Washington had not bothered to consult with her allies over Cuba: not just Bonn, but London and especially Paris were outraged at how close they had come to nuclear obliteration over a remote island in the Caribbean.
The stage was set for an intense round of European diplomacy, as the Germans searched to escape their military inferiority, while the western powers sought to draw Germany over to their own side, or at least to keep Bonn from becoming more deeply committed to the rival camp.149 In late 1961 and early 1962, the senior French diplomat Christian Fouchet launched plans for a European Political Union (EPU). This was designed to compensate for the loss of Algeria and to make up for the waning effectiveness of the US nuclear deterrent in Europe, through greater diplomatic cooperation between western European states under French leadership. The Fouchet plan finally collapsed in April 1962 because some states, such as Italy and the Netherlands, rejected French intergovernmentalism in favour of a supra-national union, while most other members of the EEC were wary of de Gaulle’s hostility to the US and his determination to keep out the British. All this aroused intense anxiety in Washington about the state of the western alliance in general, and the future of Germany in particular. President Kennedy responded with a ‘Grand Atlantic Design’ to renew NATO, bind Germany even more closely to the west, meet their demands for consultation halfway, and mobilize more European energies for the common struggle against the Soviet Union.150 He also took up a scheme for a Multi-Lateral (nuclear) Force (MLF), which Eisenhower had conceived in the final months of his presidency. This involved a shared shipborne atomic deterrent, which would be under NATO rather than national US command. Full West German participation was envisaged. Kennedy hoped that all this would be accompanied by a new wave of political integration, preferably supra-national rather than intergovernmental. Britain was expected to play an important role in driving this process forward, for which reason Washington strongly supported London’s second bid for EEC membership in late 1962. Kennedy, in turn, promised Macmillan at the Nassau Summit at the very end of that year to supply Britain with Polaris nuclear missiles on the understanding that these would eventually be deployed under the MLF umbrella. In mid-January 1963, however, de Gaulle unilaterally vetoed Britain’s admission to the EEC. ‘If Britain were admitted,’ he announced, ‘Europe would eventually be absorbed into a colossal Atlantic community dependent on America and under American control, and this France could not permit.’
The MLF plan and the associated programme of political integration dominated European geopolitics over the next two years. To France, the prospect of nuclear weapons under any sort of German control was deeply alarming.151 De Gaulle therefore used the same press conference at which he rejected Britain’s EEC application to rule out any French participation in the scheme. In late January 1963, a week after the rejection of Britain’s EEC application, his overtures culminated in the Franco-German Élysée Treaty. This was designed to drive a wedge between Bonn and Washington, derail US-sponsored European defence and political integration, and inaugurate a European alliance under French leadership. De Gaulle seems to have planned to expand this agreement into a much deeper dual union with common institutions, foreign policy and possibly even joint citizenship. Within a very short time, however, US pressure and a revolt within Adenauer’s own administration led the Bundestag to add a qualifying preamble. This reaffirmed Germany’s support for the transatlantic link and the MLF, the commitment to admit Britain to the EEC, and the vision of supra-national European integration, and generally emptied the Élysée Treaty of any content beyond the symbolic expression of Franco-German friendship. The United States now began to regard European integration – which could potentially be directed against them as much as against Moscow – with ambivalence,152 but de Gaulle was back where he started.
Kennedy remained preoccupied by the German Question generally and Berlin in particular; it was the need for large-scale conventional forces to defend the city which underlay the whole concept of ‘flexible response’.153 In late June 1963, Kennedy famously announced in the former German capital that he was a ‘Berliner’ – literally: a doughnut – and called upon its citizens to look beyond the city to ‘the advance of freedom everywhere’. He also invited anybody in the outside world who was uncertain of what was at stake to ‘come to Berlin’ and observe the two systems at first hand: freedom and prosperity in the west, and backwardness and oppression in the east. Like Eisenhower, he made every effort to spur the west Europeans and especially the West Germans to greater military efforts on the central front. Like his predecessor, however, the president was also profoundly wary of the revival of German power. In the summer of 1963, the administration forced Bonn to sign the Nuclear Partial Test Ban Treaty (NPT), which effectively scotched the prospect of an independent German deterrent. Bonn feared that the treaty would lock her into a permanent position of atomic inferiority; Franz Josef Strauss, a senior conservative politician and former defence minister, famously spoke of a ‘nuclear Versailles’. It was for this reason that the PTBT was accompanied by a US–West German agreement that ‘As long as the German government and people are convinced that the United States will defend Germany, Germany does not need nuclear weapons.’154 In short, the NPT – like many other forms of international organization and governance – had its origins in the containment of Germany.
All this made progress on the MLF even more urgent. President Lyndon Johnson – who had succeeded Kennedy after his assassination in November 1963 – was keen to proceed partly because the rising costs of the war in Vietnam made him eager to spread the burden of defence more evenly in Europe. His main concern, however, was Germany: ‘The object,’ the president remarked, ‘was to keep the Germans with us and keep their hand off the trigger.’155 Moreover, the European and especially the German issues and the war in Vietnam were closely linked in the administration’s mind. If the United States failed to hold Saigon, they reasoned, the West Germans might doubt their ability to defend Berlin and seek a rapprochement with Moscow. In this sense, the Under-Secretary for Political Affairs, Eugene Rostow, claimed, the bombing of North Vietnam ‘should greatly fortify our system of alliances’. The German government itself accepted this argument. The new chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, explained in June 1965 that he was asking the Americans to remain in Vietnam because otherwise ‘the Germans would say to themselves, that just as the Americans were not able to hold South Vietnam, they would not be able to hold onto . . . Berlin if it were seriously threatened’.156
In 1963–4, US efforts merged with those of Jean Monnet to revive the process of European integration. In early November 1964, the German government finally invited its European partners to explore the outlines of what Monnet was proposing: a deeper political union, centred on common defence through the MLF, in cooperation with Washington; Bonn hoped that Paris might be reconciled through concessions on agriculture. Later that month, the European parliament called upon the states of the EEC to convene a conference to agree a common foreign and defence policy, to create a federation and to establish an equal partnership of equals with the United States. The continent was on the move again: a democratic European superstate was back on the agenda.
De Gaulle now pulled out all the stops to rein in Bonn, pre-empt German nuclear armaments, reduce the American security dominance on the continent, and sabotage any European political cooperation which was not strictly intergovernmental or at least under French leadership. He berated the Bonn government during a disastrous state visit in early July 1964: they were bluntly told to choose between Paris and Washington. If the West Germans failed to work together with him on security matters on the intergovernmental basis envisaged in the Élysée Treaty, de Gaulle added, then he would withdraw from all economic cooperation. Thus, far from being persuaded to shelve his security objections for concessions on agriculture, de Gaulle used economic cooperation for strategic ends. In order to show that he was in earnest, de Gaulle now also made overtures to Moscow from mid-1964. This French Ostpolitik was driven primarily by the need to intimidate Germany rather than any yearning for an east–west détente. Some German observers – including Adenauer – began to speak of a return of ‘encirclement’.
In Moscow, the MLF revived the nightmares which had led to the second Berlin crisis at the end of the previous decade. In the summer of 1964, Khrushchev sent his son-in-law on a special mission to the West Germans to dissuade them from going ahead.157 At the same time, he authorized the supply of tactical nuclear weapons to the East German army, which he planned to withdraw in the event of an agreement with Bonn. In late April 1965, the French and Soviet governments issued a joint communiqué stating that Germany must permanently renounce nuclear weapons. Shortly afterwards, de Gaulle made good his threats against the EEC: from July 1965, he paralysed the community through his policy of the ‘empty chair’, when the French representatives boycotted meetings of the Council of Ministers. This was ostensibly a protest against its policies on finance and agriculture, but his real aim was to bring Bonn to heel and to block the introduction of majority voting in the Council on economic matters as a dilution of French sovereignty. The British were also deeply concerned that the MLF would give the Germans nuclear parity with them.158 In the end, President Johnson, worn out by French objections, anxious to avoid provoking the Soviet Union more than necessary, and increasingly distracted by Vietnam, allowed the MLF initiative to peter out. And as east–west tensions declined from their peak in 1961–2 so did the pressure for greater security cooperation. Bonn abolished its ministry for atomic affairs. With the MLF died not only German nuclear ambitions but also all hopes for supra-national European defence integration and thus of full political union.
Domestic politics in Europe and across the Atlantic were profoundly influenced by all this international turbulence. Defence issues dominated West German internal affairs, from the controversies about the Starfighter – an expensive and apparently unreliable jet, whose initial deployment was plagued by crashes which caused heavy loss of life among German pilots – to the ‘Spiegel Affair’ of 1962, when the defence minister, Franz Josef Strauss, ordered the arrest of investigative journalists who had questioned the military readiness of the Bundeswehr. The first to pay the price for foreign policy failure was the veteran German chancellor, Adenauer. Mainstream ‘Atlanticist’ opinion in his governing coalition, especially the foreign minister, Gerhard Schröder, his economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, and the defence minister, von Hassel, was outraged that he had put Bonn’s relationship with Washington and London through the Élysée accord. Adenauer’s position was so weakened that he was forced to resign soon after and was succeeded by Ludwig Erhard, a firm Atlanticist.
In the Soviet Union, the foreign policy failures of the early 1960s destroyed Khrushchev. The charge sheet against him at the party’s plenary meeting in mid-October 1964 was long and included his ridiculously inflated targets in agriculture, his confused bureaucratic ‘reforms’ and his generally boorish, undignified behaviour. At the heart of the critique, however, was national security. Khrushchev’s obsession with atomic weapons had not saved the Soviet Union from humiliation over Berlin and Cuba. Many felt that Cuba had not been worth fighting for in any case. The Soviet leader was also accused of mismanaging the relationship with Mao, who had not only worsted Moscow’s Indian friends, but had just brought a nuclear programme to fruition on the Soviet Union’s eastern border. What really did for Khrushchev, however, was Germany. When Alexei Adzhubei went to Bonn, his father-in-law’s apparent willingness to sacrifice Ulbricht in a deal over MLF alarmed both Peking and a Soviet establishment which now regarded the GDR as the best guarantee against German revanchism. They were particularly outraged by German press reports that Adzhubei had offered to ‘talk to papa about . . . tear[ing] down [the Berlin] wall’. Buckling under an avalanche of criticism, Khrushchev was forced to resign. ‘Why was Khrushchev removed,’ the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, remarked, ‘because he sent Adschubei to Bonn, of course.’159 Soviet German policy, the very issue which had propelled him to the top in Moscow, was the subject which had brought him down.
Foreign policy also played a crucial role in the 1964 US presidential election. The Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, alienated many, including many moderate conservatives, with his support for the right of states to resist the imposition of civil rights legislation. What really wrecked his candidature, though, was his perceived volatility on foreign policy. Goldwater had already supported the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam, and joked about ‘lob[bing]’ a nuclear bomb ‘into the men’s room of the Kremlin’. Democratic television commercials repeatedly suggested that his trigger-happiness might lead to a nuclear conflagration; the media routinely questioned his sanity. By contrast, the Democratic candidate, the sitting president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, came across as robust but measured in foreign policy.160 When they elected Johnson by a landslide in November 1964, the American people believed they were getting the best of both worlds: more butter for those who needed it, and enough guns to protect their values and prosperity.
The international strains of the mid-1960s also shaped social and economic developments on both sides of the Cold War divide. In the United States, President Johnson aimed to create a ‘Great Society’ at home to match, and ultimately to support, US great-power ambitions abroad. He not only enacted sweeping bills for health, welfare and education provision, but also tackled the cancer at the heart of American society: race. The treatment of Southern blacks had long been a matter of moral outrage to liberal opinion. With the advent of the Cold War, however, racial discrimination also proved a liability on the world stage: it embarrassed America’s friends, and gave her Soviet enemies a stick to beat her with.161 The demands of the international system now required that the United States heal the racial divide, bring her domestic record into line with her external rhetoric, mobilize all sections of the population for the global contest with communism, and reward those who were already serving in the front line. To this end, the president pushed through the Civil Rights Act of July 1964, which enshrined the civil equality of all races, made segregation illegal and abolished registration practices designed to disenfranchise blacks. The Johnson administration, in short, embarked on a thoroughgoing domestic transformation designed not only to enable Americans to live in peace with each other, but also to vindicate their destiny abroad.
In Moscow, the new General Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, reversed Khrushchev’s cuts in military expenditure. Instead, he embarked on a fresh round of armaments production designed to achieve the much-desired parity with the United States. Soviet domestic structures appeared uniquely configured to sustain this effort: according to conventional wisdom the command economy allowed Moscow to allocate vast resources to the goal of national security without, as in the west, permitting the market to introduce distorting elements of competition and demands for consumer goods. A huge proportion of the economy was thus devoted to military purposes.162 The Soviet Union, in short, did not have a military-industrial complex like the United States, it was a military-industrial complex.163 It was true that the French, British, Germans and some other European peoples remained willing to make great sacrifices to defend themselves against aggression; peacetime conscription remained the order of the day in most countries. But they had for the most part lost their appetite for national greatness and thus the imperative to order society accordingly. The long uncoupling of western European state and society from the project of making war had begun.164 Just as the interminable wars of past centuries had left their mark on European society, so now would the long peace shape domestic structures. The tradition of the primacy of foreign policy passed to the remaining European great powers, the Soviet Union and the United States.
No sooner had the controversy over the MLF subsided than the international scene was roiled by three separate but interlocking developments. The crisis began in Europe where de Gaulle took advantage of two major shifts in the international climate to articulate an even more independent ‘European’ foreign policy under French leadership. Not only had West German nuclear ambitions finally been shelved, but the immediate Russian threat was receding also. In March 1966, de Gaulle took France out of the NATO command structure: its headquarters were moved from Fontainebleau outside Paris to Mons, near Brussels. Three months later, he embarked on an ostentatious state visit to Moscow, and in subsequent years he also undertook trips to Poland and Romania. Even though France remained part of NATO itself, and was expected to stand alongside the alliance in the event of a Russian attack, de Gaulle’s initiative was a terrible shock to the political and strategic cohesion of the organization. There was uncertainty about how the French troops deployed in Baden-Württemberg and the Palatinate would behave. A hole had been blown in the defences of the west on its most central front: Germany.165
Normally, these events would have provoked a massive US response, but they came at a time when the escalating war in Vietnam meant that President Johnson was unable to give Europe his full attention. The new regime in Saigon proved even less able than Diem to stop the communist advance, which was massively supported by Hanoi and its Sino-Soviet backers. President Johnson now decided to escalate the US commitment.166
As south-east Asia burned, the Middle East exploded once more. From the mid-1960s onwards, the Israelis began to feel ever more pressure on their borders, north, east and south. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 under the leadership of the charismatic Yassir Arafat, after which guerrilla operations intensified. Jordan and especially Egypt were busy importing arms in preparation for the final showdown with Israel. In May 1967, Nasser ordered the UN buffer force in the Sinai to leave, and closed the straits of Tiran once more. A month later, Israel launched a surprise pre-emptive strike on Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The Arab armies were crushed in a Blitzkrieg lasting less than a week. The German-Jewish financier Siegmund Warburg approvingly compared Israel, with its capacity to punch above its weight and pre-empt threats, to eighteenth-century Prussia. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the Sinai peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan, and the formerly Syrian Golan Heights. The war transformed not only the Middle East, but also the region’s position in world geopolitics. On the one hand, Israel had become the regional hegemon, largely through her own efforts, and thus became a valuable partner for the United States in containing Soviet influence. On the other hand, Israel was now an occupying power and as such came under increasing international scrutiny not just at the United Nations, but also in Europe.
The French withdrawal from NATO’s command structure, the Vietnam War and – to a lesser but still important extent – the Six Day War in the Middle East dominated global geopolitics and domestic politics until the beginning of the next decade. The United States now sought to enlist the military backing of her allies in Vietnam, especially – as the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, put it – ‘to get some Germans into the field’.167 This ‘more flags’ campaign secured Australian, South Korean and Taiwanese support, but Johnson drew a complete blank in Europe, where he completely failed to persuade, or bully, the British prime minister, Harold Wilson. In 1965, the German chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, had refused to send a battalion of Bundeswehr troops. Instead, Washington now began look for ways to reduce its commitments in Europe.168 In March 1966, 30,000 men were withdrawn from Germany without consulting Bonn. Some Congressional voices, such as the Democratic Senate Majority leader, Mike Mansfield, even called for US troops to be pulled out of Germany altogether.
As the United States sank deeper and deeper into the south-east Asian morass, Britain turned back towards her European destiny, and more specifically Germany and the British Army of the Rhine.169 The 1966 sterling crisis and the defence cuts showed just how precarious her position in the world had become. In May 1967, Britain made a renewed attempt to join the EEC, primarily for strategic reasons. London was hopeful that this time US support, West German favour and de Gaulle’s isolation within Europe over NATO and the ‘empty chair’ crisis would count in London’s favour. The urgency of putting the British economy on an even keel was underlined six months later, when a sustained speculative attack led to another sterling crisis. Only a week after that, however, the second application was vetoed by de Gaulle. Once again, the French president argued that British membership would simply serve as a Trojan horse for US domination of the Community.170 Britain simply redoubled her efforts. In January 1968, she announced her decision to withdraw from ‘east of Suez’, and signalled to the white dominions that the preferential tariffs they enjoyed would be wound down. The Commonwealth now ceased to have much strategic or economic meaning; the defence relationship with Canada ran through NATO headquarters in Brussels, not London.
West Germany also regarded the shifting international situation with concern. Bonn felt left out of de Gaulle’s Franco-Russian flirtation, which made her more conscious of her historic Mittellage. She also felt discriminated against by the NPT process – which she condemned as ‘atomic complicity’ in her permanent inferiority – and the collapse of the MLF. At the same time, though, Bonn was anxious about the reduction in the British Army of the Rhine, the steady transfer of American troops from Germany to Vietnam, and the increased cost of those remaining. It was disagreements about how the American garrison should be paid for – through tax increases or cuts in government spending – which brought down the Erhard government in early November 1966. The new Christian Democrat ‘Grand Coalition’ under Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger came in committed to exploring whether the east–west divide, and thus the partition of Germany, could be overcome. ‘Germany, a reunited Germany,’ the new chancellor remarked in June 1967, ‘is too big to play no role in the balance of forces, and too small to keep the forces around it in balance by itself’, and because if united it could not simply join one side or the other, ‘one can only see the growing together of the separated parts of Germany bedded into the process of overcoming the East–West conflict in Europe’.171 A first step in this direction was the abandonment of the Hallstein Doctrine by which the FRG refused to maintain diplomatic relations with any country – except the Soviet Union – which recognized the GDR.
In short, all the major powers, with the exception of Red China, were for one reason or another desirous of reducing tensions, at least in Europe. Towards the end of June 1967, President Johnson and the Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, met at Glassboro, New Jersey. The general atmosphere of mutual goodwill was widely commented upon. Six months later, the NATO powers adopted the ‘Harmel report’. There would be no reduction in military security, but every effort should be made to explore a policy of détente with the Soviet Union to make war less likely.172 The failure of the MLF added new urgency to the negotiations on nuclear proliferation. Here the established atomic powers, east and west, were determined to prevent the dilution of their monopoly. In particular, they were concerned to stop the Germans from developing an independent capability. The principal non-nuclear states, on the other hand – Germany foremost among them – were anxious to avoid an international regime which cast their inferiority in stone for all time. The Non-Proliferation Treaty agreed in 1968 was a compromise between these two positions. Signatories committed themselves to the principle that there should be no new nuclear powers. Peaceful use of atomic energy, however, was expressly permitted.
The Vietnam War, the Sino-Soviet split and the Six Day War caused an earthquake in domestic politics in Europe and around the world. In the course of 1968–9, the cities of western Europe and the United States erupted as students hurled themselves against the police, the political and educational establishment, and increasingly against society as a whole. The ‘Sixty-Eighters’, as they came to be known, were a diverse coalition of feminists, civil rights workers, student activists and Maoists, motivated by a broad antipathy to western modernity, which appropriated and transcended existing class and racial divides. They constructed a ‘counter-culture’ of communal living, sexual experimentation, rock music and recreational narcotics to counter the prevailing ‘patriarchal’ and ‘exploitative’ societal norms of western capitalist democracies. At the heart of this global critique, however, was a rage against US ‘imperialism’ – and its supporters – in Indochina and across the world. Its demonology embraced not only the American military-industrial complex, and its western European, Latin American and Asian lackeys, but increasingly Israel and her occupation of Arab lands. All these themes had come together in 1967 with the escalation in Vietnam, and the resulting nightly carnage on the television screens, the CIA-sponsored killing of the iconic revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia, and what was regarded as Israeli swaggering after its crushing victory over Egypt, Jordan and Syria.173
The shock troops of this revolution would not be the proletariat of North America and western Europe. According to the radicals, western workers had not only gone soft but slipped into various forms of false consciousness, lulled by the ‘repressive tolerance’ of the system – to use a phrase coined by the ‘Frankfurt School’ professor Herbert Marcuse in 1965 – into believing that they enjoyed real democracy. Instead, the charge would be led by a vanguard of educated and aware student activists, who would provoke governments into counter-measures which would radicalize the population. At the same time, the revolution would cooperate with ‘national liberation movements’ in the Third World, partly to divert the resources of the imperialists but also to allow the re-importation of revolution from Che Guevara and what the writer Frantz Fanon called ‘the wretched of the earth’. Reversing Marx, they expected that the great transformation would begin in the shanty towns of the new global south, before spreading to the industrialized west. This was the reason why the avowedly ‘international’ ‘Sixty-Eighters’ supported nationalist struggles in Palestine, Ireland and, of course, Vietnam.
Throughout 1968–9, waves of popular and often insurrectionary violence beat against western governments. In the United States, rioters and policemen turned the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago into a battlefield. Along the Hudson River in New York, patriotic longshoremen, often of east European descent, attacked student protesters whom they suspected of selling the country out to communism. The nation – which had just weathered the civil rights turbulence – was now back at war with itself. In Paris, the évènements of 1968 were so dramatic that President de Gaulle either was forced to flee to the French garrison in Baden-Baden or made a flying visit there in order to discuss military intervention with the local commander, just as the royalist émigrés had once sought sanctuary in Koblenz. In Northern Ireland, large sections of the Catholic population – appropriating the language of US civil rights and student protest – rose in protest and barricaded themselves into their communities. The separatist Irish Republican Army seized the opportunity to renew its ‘armed struggle’ against the British state in pursuit of a United Ireland. All this had momentous strategic implications for the west: the United States was tearing itself apart at home while fighting in the paddy fields of Vietnam, France seemed on the verge of another revolutionary takeover, while Britain was in danger of being bundled out of the strategically important Ulster naval bases.
The key, however, was Germany. Many of the most prominent revolutionaries, as de Gaulle observed with asperity, were German, especially the French student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit (‘Danny the Red’) and the German student leader Rudi Dutschke, a refugee from the GDR who had never come to terms with partition. ‘It was in Berlin,’ one of the French protesters later remarked, ‘that we learned how to demonstrate in the streets.’174 Dutschke saw the struggle in Germany both as a ‘second front’ against the imperialist war in Vietnam, and a cause in its own right; some German protestors even saw themselves as a colonized people.175 In the summer of 1967, he speculated in a pseudonymous article whether the creation of a ‘Free City of Berlin’ – like so many others east and west, he regarded the former capital as an Archimedean point at the centre of the world – might serve as ‘a strategic transmission belt for a future re-unification of Germany’. This would generate the kind of ‘focus’ – following the French revolutionary theorist Régis Debray – through which ‘an armed vanguard of the people, can create the objective conditions for the revolution through subjective activity’. Indeed, if the movement could bring down the Bonn government and force the withdrawal of NATO forces perpetuating the division of their country – ‘an instrument for suppressing revolutions in Europe’,176 as Dutschke described them – then the whole capitalist system in Europe might give way, and some sort of deal with the Soviet Union on unification and withdrawal from the system of armed alliances might be possible. Foreign policy was thus at the heart of the revolutionary project in Germany, even more than elsewhere. From 1966, exhibitions, articles and demonstrations convinced students that Washington was waging a ‘colonialist war’ in Indochina, or, as the Socialist Student League put it, a ‘genocide emanating from imperialist political and economic interest’. American bases – which were already in the public eye after the offset crisis – were the next targets of the demonstrators, who often made common cause with Black Power conscript activists. ‘USA-SA-SS,’ they chanted, neatly aligning Washington with their ‘perpetrator’ parents.177 A year later, as the war in Indochina reached its climax, the Middle Eastern conflict served to further inflame German students. On their reckoning, Zionism was simply a bridgehead for western imperialism in the Middle East.
The international situation also provoked turbulence inside the Soviet bloc. Just as Stalin had been taken aback by the enthusiasm of Russian Jews for the creation of Israel in 1948, the euphoria with which they greeted the victory of the Jewish state over the Kremlin’s Arab allies in 1967 gave renewed offence. A new wave of anti-semitic propaganda against ‘Zionist elements’, at home and abroad, was unleashed. There were no new ‘doctors’ plots’, but Soviet Jews were now increasingly subjected to systematic discrimination. At the same time, Moscow looked anxiously on developments in Czechoslovakia, where liberal elements in the party took advantage of the new spirit of détente to challenge hardliners. In January 1968, the reliable Antonín Novotný was replaced as First Secretary of the party by the reformist Alexander Dubček. Over the next months, he introduced a series of liberalizing measures, such as the abolition of censorship and confirmation of the right to criticize the government, which became known as the ‘Prague Spring’. Throughout the summer Dubček – mindful of the Hungarian experience – repeatedly assured the Soviet Union that he had no intention of leaving the Warsaw Pact, but Moscow remained deeply worried that – as in the west – the spark of subversion would leap across national boundaries and create a conflagration it could not control.
In the end, none of the protest movements succeeded in toppling a government. The Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring by force in August 1968; after intensive ‘fraternal consultations’, the Czech party withdrew its reform programme. Three months later, the Soviet Union issued what has become known as the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’, announcing that it would never allow any ‘socialist’ state to abandon socialism. The inspiration here was largely strategic, of course, but the claim also reflected a deeply ideological belief that the onward march of socialism was inevitable, and ought therefore to be irreversible. The protesters did not get anywhere in the west, either. French workers were stirred by the évènements, but the much-hoped-for collaboration with the students did not take place. De Gaulle won the subsequent election comfortably. The West German system was also shaken, but it survived. Northern Ireland was convulsed, but British troops managed to keep the situation under some kind of control. In the west, the protestors were stopped with ballot boxes; in the east, by bullets, or the threat of them. A small minority of the protestors – in particular the Italian ‘Red Brigades’ and the German ‘Rote Armee Fraktion’ – now launched a campaign of armed resistance against ‘the system’.
That said, the international situation did lead to immediate domestic changes in the west, which in turn led to important geopolitical shifts. These were effected through elections rather than revolutionary violence. In November 1968, the Republicans won the US presidential elections, not least because the Indochina War had caused the public to lose confidence in the ability of the Democratic administration to manage foreign policy. The new administration of Richard Nixon, and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, came to power with clear views on how the United States should rebuild her global position. In late April 1969, de Gaulle resigned after a referendum defeat, an event which may not have been inspired by foreign policy, but which had considerable strategic consequences as France began to retreat from the general’s policy of ‘grandeur’. Six months later, the West Germans elected the SPD leader, Willy Brandt, partly because he promised ‘to risk more democracy’, but also because he seemed to have the most coherent programme for reducing Cold War tensions and if not overcoming the partition of Germany, then at least making it more bearable.
The tasks the incoming Nixon government set itself in 1969 were formidable: to withdraw from Vietnam ‘with honour’, leaving behind a regime in Saigon capable of surviving the renewed communist onslaught; to rebuild the frayed alliances with her European partners; and to find a new equilibrium with Moscow and Peking, however unstable, in a world in which the United States could no longer count on retaining an indefinite primacy. Military sticks – or the threat of them – were central to this strategy, if only to maintain ‘credibility’. The core of the project, however, was diplomacy. By establishing cooperative relationships with the Russians across a range of subjects, some of them more important to them than to Washington, Nixon and Kissinger sought to create a ‘linkage’ which could be used to advance their interests, especially extrication from Indochina. Moreover, by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split, Kissinger hoped to ‘triangulate’ between Moscow and Peking. When the tensions on the Sino-Soviet border exploded in the spring and summer of 1969, and Chinese fears of a Russian ‘pre-emptive’ nuclear strike mounted, Washington made clear that it regarded any attack on Mao as an unacceptable threat to the global balance of power.178
Kissinger’s model was Otto von Bismarck, whom he lauded as a ‘white revolutionary’. There was certainly something Bismarckian about the way in which he ensured that the United States would always be one of two in a world of three superpowers: America, the Soviet Union and Red China. Like the German chancellor, the new National Security Advisor had a difficult relationship with representative institutions, and his domestic policy was driven by the need to enable the United States to act with ‘authoritarian purposefulness’ in the world.179 In truth, though, the closer analogy was with Metternich, because what Kissinger was trying to do was to delay what he believed to be US decline, rather than create a new dynamic power. One way or the other, by liberating ‘geopolitics’ – here Kissinger essentially meant Realpolitik – from ideological distractions, such as global commitment to democracy and human rights, Washington was free to establish more fruitful relationships with potentially friendly regional hegemons. In late July 1969, the president announced this new doctrine in a famous speech at Guam. The central thesis of what became known as the ‘Nixon Doctrine’, he reminded Congress a year later, was that ‘the United States will participate in the defence and development of allies and friends, but that America cannot and will not conceive all the plans, all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the defence of the free nations of the world’.180
To the new chancellor in Bonn, Willy Brandt, the American retrenchment was both a threat and an opportunity. With the United States bogged down in Vietnam, strained transatlantic relations and low troop morale within NATO it was clear that the alliance was incapable of guaranteeing the security of West Germany. Reaching an accommodation with Moscow was therefore imperative. On the other hand, Brandt hoped to exploit the American preoccupation with Vietnam to pursue an independent policy designed to bring the two German states, and east and west generally, closer together. The long-term goal of this Ostpolitik was certainly reunification, but for the moment the chancellor was content to make the lives of ordinary Germans easier through the lifting of travel restrictions and other ‘small steps’.181 West German diplomats spoke of ‘overcoming partition by accepting it’. In the process, Brandt expected that the two systems – capitalism and communism – would become increasingly alike. The core of Ostpolitik, however, was a new geopolitics. Overtures were to be made to all eastern European leaders, especially those in Moscow. At the same time, Bonn needed to keep its NATO allies, especially France and the United States, onside. To this end, West Germany made considerable concessions on EEC agricultural policy, which benefited French farmers. At first, the Americans feared that Germany would leave the NATO alliance and attempt to strike a unilateral ‘Rapallo’-style deal with Moscow.182 As time passed, however, Nixon and Kissinger were persuaded that Ostpolitik actually complemented their efforts to reach an accommodation with Moscow.183
In Moscow, the American and German détente projects were received in an atmosphere of acute strategic alarm. As Russian and Chinese forces faced each across the Ussuri River, and Mao forged ahead with nuclear and conventional arms construction, the encirclement of the Soviet Union by NATO in the west and Red China in the east became ever more painfully clear. This made it important to reach rapprochement with the Americans and the Germans, and absolutely essential to prevent Nixon and Mao from coming together at their expense. Moscow was also becoming anxious that Brandt’s Ostpolitik would soften up the defences so painfully erected in the GDR and lead sooner or later to German unification. In these circumstances, the best course of action was to try to capitalize on Moscow’s current position of strength to secure recognition by Bonn of the territorial settlement in Europe, or at least to manage the absorption of the GDR in such a way as to ensure – as the KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, put it – that the rampant West Germany would ‘understand’ Soviet needs.184
Meanwhile, Brandt pressed ahead with Ostpolitik. In mid-August 1970, he concluded the Treaty of Moscow with the Soviet Union, in which he effectively recognized the GDR and the disputed Oder–Neisse border with Poland; Germany explicitly renounced any attempt to seek revision through the use of force. A similar agreement with Poland was signed in early December, and a few days later Brandt fell to his knees at the memorial for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a gesture of German national contrition for the crimes of Nazism. In early September of the following year, the four powers finally settled the status of Berlin. Then, right at the end of 1972, once the geopolitical groundwork had been laid, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany signed a Basic Treaty to regulate relations between the two halves of a single people. Despite intense Soviet and East German pressure, however, Bonn refused to recognize the GDR and send a fully fledged ambassador. Instead, it agreed to establish a ‘permanent representation’ only and set up a ministry devoted solely to ‘Inter-German’ affairs. In return, the GDR regime undertook to permit some carefully controlled travel between the two states, especially between West and East Berlin and within a defined border zone. A year after that, Bonn signed a treaty with Czechoslovakia in which it agreed to drop its support for the Sudeten Germans. The two Germanies were admitted to the United Nations. Without challenging a single boundary, indeed by confirming the territorial status quo, Brandt had changed the east–west dynamic and thus wrought a fundamental geopolitical shift at the heart of Europe.
The Soviet Union was, for now, well satisfied with these events. ‘For the first time since the war,’ Gromyko told the Supreme Soviet in June 1972, ‘a large capitalist state – the legal successor of Hitler-Germany to boot, has recognized by treaty the western border of the People’s Republic of Poland and the order between the GDR and the FRG.’ This meant, he continued, ‘the strengthening of the western borders of the socialist community of states’.185 Moscow could face Peking in the east with much greater confidence. At the same time, Russia would benefit from western investment and the purchase of surplus grain at bargain rates, ‘sweeteners’ which Nixon threw in to appease them (and the agricultural lobby back home). Yet it was not Mao or economic actors but Germany which was the primary Soviet concern. ‘Kissinger thinks it was China that played the decisive role in getting us to feel the need to preserve our relationship with the USA,’ the Soviet expert on American affairs, Georgy Arbatov, recalls, ‘but Berlin actually played a much bigger role, almost a decisive one. Having the East German situation settled was most important to us, and we did not want to jeopardise that’.186 The Russians, in short, supported détente because they believed that it solved the German Question for them.
If international rivalries had fundamentally shaped domestic politics since the war, the relaxation of those tensions after 1969–70 created a new and complex internal dynamic. In the GDR, détente led to a high-political shift when Walter Ulbricht was forced to make way for Erich Honecker, not so much because of differences over détente but because the latter had shown himself to be more subservient to Moscow.187 Similarly, Ostpolitik dominated party politics in the Federal Republic.188 The renunciation of German territorial claims to Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia, and of the right of return for the Sudeten Germans, proved extremely controversial, among nationalists generally and especially the millions of refugees from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The conservative parties, led by Franz Josef Strauss, battered the ‘eastern’ treaties relentlessly. There were several high-level defections from the SPD, and its coalition partner, the FDP, throughout 1970–71. Eventually, though, the treaties made it through parliament and, in November 1972, Brandt cruised to victory at the general election in a popular endorsement not only of his domestic policies but also of Ostpolitik, which had been a major issue in the campaign. By late July of the following year, Brandt had weathered a serious legal challenge to the treaties in the Federal Constitutional Court.
Among Palestinians, the defeat of 1967 and the subsequent failure of Arab states to lay a glove on Israel drove the PLO not only to rely more on its own efforts, but to ‘globalize’ the Middle Eastern conflict through terrorism. This tendency merged with the steady drift of European – and particularly German – radicals towards armed action. Palestine began increasingly to replace Vietnam as the main concern of European leftists, especially in Germany. In the summer of 1969, a German student delegation visited Palestinian training camps in Jordan. On 9 November of that year, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, German radicals attempted to bomb a Jewish community centre in West Berlin; Jewish cemeteries were desecrated. The subsequent statement of responsibility explained that such actions were not ‘far right excesses, but rather . . . a crucial part of international socialist solidarity’. The authors stressed the ‘historical illegitimacy of the Israeli state’, and proclaimed their ‘clear and simple solidarity with the fighting fedayeen’.189 International anti-semitism, in other words, was coming home to Europe.
In the United States, the battle increasingly shifted from the streets and student campuses to a restive Congress, weary of the expense and the human cost of stopping – or failing to stop – the spread of communism in south-east Asia. In September 1970, Nixon saw off an attempt by senators George McGovern and Mark Hatfield to force the withdrawal of all US troops from Indochina before the end of the year. In January 1971, however, Congress repealed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which had originally authorized Johnson to become more engaged in Vietnam. Six months after that, the former marine, defence analyst and sometime Vietnam War supporter Daniel Ellsberg finally succeeded in persuading the New York Times to publish the ‘Pentagon Papers’, a brutally frank documentary record of how the war in Indochina was being lost. Nixon’s need to maintain credibility abroad now drove his administration to increasingly extreme, and often illegal, measures against opponents at home, including burglary, wire-tapping and other ‘dirty tricks’. The focal point here was not so much party politics as national security. In order to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, and to prevent him from embarrassing the government during a critical moment in the negotiations with China, the White House had ordered the theft of his psychiatric record in 1971. When the same gang was arrested a year later breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s offices in Washington’s Watergate Complex, Nixon was forced to launch a desperate, and initially successful, cover-up. This was designed not to obscure the partisan burglary, of which he had no prior knowledge, but to prevent the trail from leading back to the original crime carried out for reasons of foreign policy.
In January 1972, several years of careful ‘back channel’ diplomacy by Henry Kissinger resulted in a breakthrough when Nixon met Mao in Peking. The Chinese leader, concerned that détente in Europe would lead to an increase of Soviet pressure on his western border, was anxious to begin normalizing relations with Washington. Four months later, the president held a resoundingly successful summit with Brezhnev in Moscow. The first Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement (SALT I) was signed. An ‘anti-ballistic missile agreement’ limited the use of defensive weapons, thus ensuring that ‘mutual assured destruction’ remained guaranteed. It was on the strength of this brilliant record abroad, as much as the left-wing programme of his opponent, George McGovern, that Nixon swept to an overwhelming victory in the November 1972 presidential election.
The success of détente caused France, which had taken something of a back seat after the resignation of de Gaulle in 1969, to fear a US–Soviet ‘condominium’ globally, but especially in Europe. In response, Paris moved to mobilize other European states, especially the Federal Republic, to coordinate their policies more closely and thus balance both Moscow and Washington. Contrary to French hopes, ‘Europe’ did not fill the vacuum left by declining American power. It seemed there was no longer a German threat to contain, or a Soviet threat to mobilize against. Moreover, US policy had now changed. The recession had destroyed her economic confidence and she feared European economic competition. Psychologically, Nixon was wary of his allies ‘ganging up’ on him, and Kissinger was intellectually sympathetic to a European ‘concert’, or even an ‘Executive Committee’ of the larger powers, but not a union on American lines.190 Instead, Washington now placed a new emphasis on bilateral relations with individual capitals. Détente, in short, stalled European integration.
The only major advance during this period was the accession of Great Britain.191 With de Gaulle out of the way, London launched a third campaign to join the EEC in 1969. This was partly driven by concern over Britain’s low economic growth rates. The main purpose of the bid, however, was political and strategic: to regain the nation’s historic pivotal role in Europe. A furious argument erupted across the country. At the start of the debate, opinion polls suggested that about 70 per cent of the population were opposed to membership, with fewer than a fifth actively in favour. All the same, there was widespread resentment at Labour for Britain’s botched 1967 application, and in the closely fought 1970 election – in which Europe played an important though not decisive part – Britain elected a strongly pro-EEC Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath.192 Moreover, thanks to the efforts of the European Movement, the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, various MPs, elements of the BBC and the force of the argument itself, most Britons were persuaded over the next two years to change their minds.193 On the very first day of 1973, Britain was duly admitted to the EEC without a referendum; Ireland joined at the same time. Given London’s strong ‘intergovernmental’ instincts, however, this represented a ‘widening’ rather than a ‘deepening’ of the Community. One way or the other, the question of ‘finding a role’ continued to dominate British domestic politics and foreign policy.
As 1973 dawned, it seemed as if Nixon and Kissinger would be able to extricate the United States from Vietnam, and devote more energies to shoring up her shaky position in Europe. At the end of January, Kissinger and the North Vietnamese finally agreed the Paris Accord. The United States agreed to withdraw her forces and work towards a peaceful reunification of Vietnam.
Nixon and Kissinger now turned to the much neglected European stage, where the United States had taken more and more of a supporting role from 1966. Kissinger’s ‘Year of Europe’ in 1973 was designed to reform NATO, and move through a series of ritual affirmations of common purpose towards a new Atlantic Charter.194 At the beginning of the following year, there were NATO–Soviet talks at Vienna to achieve ‘Mutual Balanced Force Reductions’ (MBFR) in order to curb the arms race in central Europe. The hoped for renewal of ties between Washington and the European capitals did not come to pass, however. There were many reasons for this failure, not least western European resentment at what they regarded as Kissinger’s Machiavellianism and patronizing undertone, but the principal bone of contention was a fresh Middle Eastern conflict launched by the new Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat. This was the more disconcerting as Kissinger had made determined attempts to lure Cairo into the western fold in early 1970; by 1971 he had opened another ‘back channel’ of communication. For the moment, however, Sadat was having none of it. In October 1973, taking advantage of the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur, the Egyptians launched a surprise attack across the Suez Canal, while the Syrians took the offensive against Israel’s northern flank.
Sadat and Hafez al-Assad’s coup caught the Jewish state completely off guard. Within a few days, however, not least thanks to a swift transfusion of US weaponry, the Israelis were able to turn the tables militarily by smashing the Syrians in the Golan Heights and pinning large Egyptian forces against the Suez Canal. This turned a regional crisis into a global and a European one. The Soviet Union, desperate to avoid the complete destruction of her allies, began to make nuclear threats.195 In response, Washington went on atomic alert. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) retaliated against US arms supplies to Israel by announcing a reduction in overall oil production and an embargo on the United States and all European states collaborating in the deliveries. Prices quadrupled; queues formed at the pumps. European governments panicked, and sought to dissociate themselves from Israel and the United States. The Belgians refused their airfields for the resupply effort, Britain was rumoured to have temporarily banned the use of Cyprus, and even the usually helpful West Germans complained about the use of their ports to ship war material to Israel. US–European relations plummeted. ‘I do not care what happens to NATO,’ Kissinger was widely quoted as saying, ‘I am so disgusted.’196 One way or the other, the geopolitics of the Middle East, Europe and the United States had intersected with consequences which were to become clear over the next thirty years.
The three decades since 1945 were dominated by the Cold War between east and west. In some parts of the world this conflict led to direct military confrontation. The United States twice went to war in east Asia, for example, fighting Soviet allies in Korea and Vietnam, and was almost embroiled in a nuclear conflict over Cuba. The real prize, however, was always Germany. It was there, especially in Berlin, that nuclear Armageddon was closest and it was there that a conventional war would first be fought. Control of that space and its resources would decide the conflict; all other fronts were therefore interpreted within an essentially Germano-centric framework. The winners and losers in this struggle were not yet clear. Britain and France had lost most of their overseas empires and much of their European weight, but they were still nuclear powers, held permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council, and kept their role as guarantors of the German settlement. West Germany had made great strides since the end of the war, and the eastern treaties marked its return to the international system, but the country remained in a state of ‘semi-sovereignty’ and was no nearer achieving reunification with the east. The United States and the Soviet Union, of course, dominated their respective camps, albeit in very different ways, but the question of which of the two systems they represented would prevail in Europe was still very much open.