A constructed Peace The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963

In their talks with the Russians, western statesmen frequently argued that the NATO system worked to the advantage of the USSR: a Germany tied into that system could not pose a threat to the USSR. Their goal, or at least the American goal, was to persuade the Soviets to accept reunification without insisting that the new state leave NATO. But the more effective those arguments were, the less of an incentive the Soviets had to agree to reunification. The one thing that might get them to accept a formal settlement was a belief that the status quo was unstable. As Dulles pointed out, for the Soviets to agree to reunification, they would have to "receive the impression that by sitting on top of the German situation, there might be an explosion."⁴⁷³ But if the NATO system in its present form kept the Germans in line and thus removed that risk, what incentive did the Soviets have to negotiate a settlement that might lead to a general troop withdrawal from Germany? The current system--the limits on German sovereignty, the presence by right of western troops on German soil, and West Germany's political and military dependence on the western powers--was linked to the division of Germany and especially to the presence of Soviet troops on the Elbe. Why should the USSR agree to a peace settlement that would change all that? Reunification would probably mean full sovereignty for Germany, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and the transformation of Germany's political relationship with the western powers. Germany would be less dependent on the West, more able to relate to her allies as a full equal. If the goal was to keep German power limited, wasn't the present system much better, even from the Soviet point of view? If the NATO system kept Germany from posing a threat, what was the point of putting that system at risk? Why not just keep things as they were?

So at the 1955 Geneva summit conference, Soviet leaders made it abundantly clear that they had little interest in a settlement that would provide for the reunification of Germany. The security guarantee that the western powers were willing to make in order to entice the Soviets into an agreement was dismissed out of hand: the USSR was a great power and did not need to rely on guarantees from the West. There was also a domestic factor that had a certain bearing on Soviet policy at this point. Stalin had died in 1953 and by now the post-Stalin struggle for power had run its course in Moscow. Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Communist Party, was now the dominant figure in Moscow. His defeated rivals, especially Beria and Malenkov, had been associated with the flexible line on Germany, and this issue had played a certain role in the leadership struggle. Khrushchev had no great interest in vindicating his opponents after the fact by taking an accommodating position. Instead, the Soviets insisted that the division of Germany was a reality which both sides would have to accept, and they now recognized the Federal Republic of Germany and exchanged ambassadors with that state.⁴⁷⁴

The fact that no formal east-west settlement was worked out in 1955 meant that the 1954 arrangements would remain intact. Could a stable peace have been based on the system set up by the Paris accords? The answer turns on an analysis of Soviet, German and American policy. Was this a system which all three major players were in the final analysis willing to accept?

The Soviets, first of all, would almost certainly have gone along with it. The NATO system, although officially directed against them, in practice solved their number one security problem. Assuming it worked the way the allies said it would, and assuming above all that the United States remained in Europe and continued to dominate the NATO structure, German power would be contained, and Germany could pose no threat. Western statesmen from the start argued that Germany's integration into the western system was the only viable solution to the German problem. This was the gist of Dulles's argument to Molotov at the Berlin conference in early 1954, and at Geneva in 1955 Eden told the Russians that it was much better, even from their point of view, to "see German military power contained in NATO than loose about the world." It was in part for this reason that the Americans had supported the EDC so strongly. The Germans, Eisenhower said in 1953, "must never be in a position where they could blackmail the other powers and say 'meet my terms or else,'" and the EDC would prevent them from ever being able to do so. The goal, he said, was to "integrate them in a federation from which they could not break loose." And in 1955 he told the Russians that the NATO system would serve the same function. It would make it impossible for German forces to engage in independent military operations, and the physical presence of western forces on German soil, he pointed out, would "constitute great security for all."⁴⁷⁵

The Soviets understood that there was something to this argument, and never simply dismissed the general idea that the western system could keep Germany in line out of hand. They certainly were aware of the fact that the western powers agreed that there was a German problem, and they recognized that the West's goal was never to build up as strong a German state as possible to serve as a kind of anti-Soviet battering ram. Stalin, for example, knew that the EDC was not directed against the Soviet Union, but was rather about "power in Europe"--that is, how much power Germany would have.⁴⁷⁶ The USSR's great fear was that the system might not work as advertised. The Soviets were worried that America and the other western powers would "soon begin losing control over the Germans," and that West Germany might "become a loose cannon on the European boat." The western goal of a Germany "firmly anchored in NATO" and locked into a purely defensive policy they thought might well be beyond reach.⁴⁷⁷ Soviet reservations, in other words, were rooted in doubts about the viability of the NATO system. If it turned out, however, that the western powers were able to work out arrangements that would keep German power limited, the most basic Soviet interests would be protected and the USSR was evidently prepared to live with a system of that sort.

Indeed, the Soviets in the late 1950s sought to work out an understanding with the Americans that would stabilize and formalize the status quo in Europe. The old Soviet idea about the importance of broadening "every fissure, every dissent and contradiction in the imperialist camp," which Molotov still championed in 1957, Khrushchev and his supporters now dismissed as dogmatic and old-fashioned. The new leadership was not interested in building up Germany as a counterweight to American power, but preferred to think in terms of a system dominated by America and Russia--a system, that is, in which American power dominated western Europe and in which Germany remained dependent on the United States for protection.⁴⁷⁸

And this, in the final analysis, was a system which the Germans themselves could also accept, even though German power and German freedom of action were limited in important ways. There was a whole series of reasons why this was so. The constraints on German sovereignty were not too discriminatory, and were not too overtly directed toward keeping the Germans in line. Some of them--the provisions extending SACEUR's authority, for example--had a perfectly straightforward military rationale. The goal of reunification had, of course, been put on the back burner, but reunification through force was practically out of the question anyway, and a peaceful solution was also highly unlikely, since the Soviets would insist on terms which would compromise German security and which the Federal Republic could therefore scarcely accept. In such circumstances, most of the constraints on German sovereignty, one could reasonably calculate, were of little practical importance and might well in time rust away through non-use. Instead of making a fuss over these provisions, it made more sense to be patient and ride the great political tides which would in time bring about a full transformation of Germany's political status.

Beyond that, there were certain juridical arguments for accepting the regime established by the Paris accords. Full sovereignty for the Federal Republic would imply that the division of Germany was definitive: the reserved powers, on the other hand, underscored both the provisional status of the West German regime and the allies' continuing responsibility for creating a unified German state.⁴⁷⁹ There was also the special problem of Berlin to consider. The allies' right to be there was rooted in the occupation regime, but that regime had to be understood as a bloc. To liquidate it entirely in West Germany would to a certain degree undermine the allies' right to remain in Berlin, and to the extent (minor, but not negligible) that such juridical considerations affected both Soviet and western policy, a restoration of German sovereignty might not be a good thing for the Berliners.⁴⁸⁰

And then there was the Adenauer factor. In those early years, the chancellor did not want Germany to have complete freedom of action in any case. The German people, he thought, might not be able to resist Soviet blandishments after he left the scene, and might, it were just up to them, opt for some sort of reunification-cum-neutralization deal with Russia. But a Germany not tied to the West, in his view, would not be strong enough either morally or materially to maintain "a free and independent central position in Europe." Germany had to be anchored in the West; he could therefore accept the idea that the Federal Republic's freedom of action needed to be curtailed.⁴⁸¹

While all these factors were important, the fundamental taproot of German policy was geopolitical in nature. The geopolitical situation was very different now from what it had been after the First World War, and this meant that German foreign policy would now be cut from an entirely different cloth. In the 1920s, Germany's aim was to throw off the "shackles of Versailles" and resume her position as an independent great power. But Germany had been shielded from Soviet pressure at that time by a wall of independent east European states, tied to the West; and the Soviet Union had been much weaker in the 1920s than she was after World War II. Of the western powers, only France had tried to enforce the Versailles system; by the beginning of 1920, America had defected and Britain had half-defected. So not much had stood between Germany and her ambitions. The pro-Versailles forces were weak, so it had seemed that resistance might well be successful; and in fact the democratic governments of the Weimar Republic resisted Versailles practically from the start. Germany in the 1920s maneuvered between Russia and the western powers, increasing her leverage in international affairs and gradually recovering her power; the "shackles of Versailles" had effectively been thrown off even before Hitler came to power. In the 1950s, however, the whole geopolitical landscape was radically different. A powerful Red Army was now in the middle of Germany, not behind a hostile Poland tied to the West. And it was not just France, supported to a certain extent by Britain, that was now propping up the western system. The United States, a much stronger country, had become the principal western power. Germany was threatened, and a strong western alliance offered security; and Germany was being accepted into the western world as an almost-equal partner. The Germans this time had a much stronger incentive to cooperate with the western allies and take their place in the system those powers were constructing.

And all this was reinforced by yet another set of factors that was moral and historical in nature. In the Cold War environment, Germany had a strong incentive to embrace democratic values. The western countries could only be counted on to defend a democratic Germany, a Germany that rejected her Nazi past and had turned away from the nationalistic excesses that had poisoned her political life for so many years. This was a Germany that recognized the concerns of the rest of the world as having a certain legitimacy, and that was willing to accept certain limits on her power as the price she had to pay for what she had done in the past. World War II was very different from World War I, both in its origins and in terms of what happened while it ran its course. Since Germany really was guilty this time, the constraints on German sovereignty laid down in the 1950s could be accepted in a way that the milder constraints laid down at Versailles never could be. And Germany's integration into the western system was a form of moral rehabilitation: Germany was being accepted into the western world as a real partner, with all that that implied, in moral as well as in material terms.

All these factors pointed in the same direction. What they meant was that the Germans could accept the 1954 system. They could live with the arrangements they and their allies had worked out, even though those arrangements limited their military power and political independence in important ways--but only if the United States remained on the continent and continued to play a fundamental political role in Europe.

So the viability of the system depended ultimately on American policy. The Russians would go along with it, and so, in the final analysis, would the Germans. It was the American attitude that was problematic. The U.S. presence was what made the whole system work. Who would protect Germany if the United States was not involved? Britain and France could obviously not provide the necessary degree of assurance. If America pulled out, the Germans would therefore have to build up their own forces. The regime of constrained German sovereignty, of a non-nuclear Federal Republic, of a highly integrated western military system, could scarcely survive an American withdrawal. But with America in, the system could work. Western Europe could be defended, but at the same time, the USSR would not feel threatened by a resurgent Germany.

American power was thus the heart of the NATO system, and the American presence in Europe was what held this whole political structure together. The 1954 arrangements could serve as the basis of a stable peace if, and only if, the United States remained on the continent and continued to play a central political and military role. The problem was that Eisenhower and Dulles were determined "to get out of Europe" and make the Europeans carry the burden of their own defense.⁴⁸² Russia and Germany might be willing to go along with a system in which German power was limited and the United States was the dominant force in the West, but the American government had no interest in playing that kind of role on a permanent basis.

This basic policy choice--this determination to withdraw from Europe in the not-too-distant future--was to have enormous and far-reaching repercussions. It meant that the world would have to go through another great period of crisis before a relatively stable system would finally come into being.

CHAPTER FIVE

EISENHOWER AND NUCLEAR SHARING

In the early 1950s, the western powers had sought to construct a system that would provide for the defense of Europe without at the same time allowing Germany to become strong enough to act independently. With the signing of the Paris accords in late 1954, it seemed that they had finally achieved their goal. Soviet power would be balanced by an impressive NATO force that would include a German national army, but Germany's freedom of action would be limited in a whole series of ways. The most important constraint related to nuclear weapons. Technically, the Federal Republic had only promised not to build nuclear weapons on her own territory, but the spirit of the 1954 system was that Germany would not have a nuclear force under her own control. A non-nuclear Germany could not stand up to the USSR on her own. As long as the Federal Republic was dependent on her allies for protection, and as long as those allies were committed to an essentially defensive policy, there was no way West Germany, or the western bloc as a whole, would pose a threat to Soviet control of the east.

The Soviets could therefore live with the arrangements the western powers had worked out among themselves in 1954, and the Germans could also accept a system which provided security for the Federal Republic. But the viability of the system depended on a continuing U.S. military presence in Europe. If the Americans pulled out, a non-nuclear Germany would be vulnerable to Soviet pressure; the Federal Republic would then be secure only if she developed a strong nuclear capability of her own. But a powerful and independent Germany would no longer be locked into a purely defensive policy, and this was why, from the Soviet standpoint, anything that pointed in the direction of a resurgence of German power--above all, the building of a German nuclear force--was bound to be a source of great concern.

The problem was that Eisenhower very much wanted to withdraw American forces from Europe in the not-too-distant future. He thought the Europeans should be able to defend themselves as soon as they could. Europe should become a third great "power mass," capable of standing up to the USSR on its own. This implied that the Europeans, including the Germans, needed a nuclear capability under their own control. And by the end of the Eisenhower period, the NATO allies had in fact been given effective control of American nuclear weapons. This was not something that "just happened," because the military was out of control or because central authority was lax. It was the result of a basic policy choice that had been made at the highest political level: the U.S. government had in effect opted for what was called a policy of nuclear sharing.

To understand all this, the roots of the nuclear sharing policy need to be examined in some detail. The meaning of what was going on in the field with regard to control of the weapons only becomes clear when one understands the depth and seriousness of the thinking in Washington. And, conversely, the thinking has to be taken seriously because of what was going on in the field. The next three sections therefore examine the three great taproots of the sharing policy: Eisenhower's basic views about the future of Europe and America's role in the world; the military strategy adopted in December 1954 for the defense of the western Europe; and thinking about long-term changes in the overall strategic balance, and especially about the implications of an eventual, and inevitable, loss of American strategic superiority. A final section will then deal with the sharing policy itself and with how it was actually implemented at the time.

The Eisenhower Concept

Eisenhower's long-term goal was simple. He wanted to make western Europe into what he called "a third great power bloc." When that happened, he told the NSC in 1955, the United States would no longer have to bear the enormous burden of providing for the defense of Europe. America, he said, could then "sit back and relax somewhat."⁴⁸³

Eisenhower had been thinking along these lines well before he became president. The "great industrial complex of Western Europe," he had pointed out in February 1951, could obviously not be lost to the Communists, and America had to take the lead in organizing a defense system, since the European allies were still too weak to stand on their own. For the time being, a sizeable American army had to be physically present to make it clear that the United States "meant business." But sooner or later the Europeans would have to defend themselves. In the long run, the new NATO commander wrote from Europe, "there is no defense for Western Europe that depends exclusively or even materially upon the existence, in Europe, of strong American units. The spirit must be here and the strength must be produced here. We cannot be a modern Rome guarding the far frontiers with our legions if for no other reason than that these are not, politically, our frontiers. What we must do is to assist these people [to] regain their confidence and get on their own military feet."⁴⁸⁴

This was now his standard theme. Western Europe, with "about 350 million people, tremendous industrial capacity, and a highly skilled and educated population," he told a White House meeting in January 1951, could certainly generate the power to keep the Soviets at bay. Why was western Europe, with all its resources, so afraid of "190 million backward" Russians? The answer was that the USSR was a powerful, unified state, while Europe was weak and divided. The Europeans had to get moving, they had to take responsibility for their own military fate, they had to put their antiquated national differences aside and organize themselves into a strong and unified bloc. The western countries "could tell Russia to go to hell if they only would get together, raise enough men, and produce enough equipment."⁴⁸⁵

While this was going on--while the Europeans were coming together and developing their military power--American forces obviously needed to be present. But the U.S. umbrella was not meant to be permanent. If Eisenhower said it once, he must have said it a thousand times: a large-scale American military presence in Europe was originally supposed to be temporary. "The stationing of U.S. divisions in Europe," he pointed out in a 1953 NSC meeting, "had been at the outset an emergency measure not intended to last indefinitely."⁴⁸⁶ When it was decided to deploy those divisions, he noted later that month, no one had "for an instant" thought that they would remain there for "several decades"--that the United States could "build a sort of Roman Wall with its own troops and so protect the world."⁴⁸⁷ U.S. forces had been sent to Europe, he pointed out in 1956, just "to bridge the crisis period during which European forces were building up."⁴⁸⁸ And again in 1959: "the six U.S. divisions which we had deployed to the NATO area were originally intended to be our response to an emergency situation. These divisions were sent in order to encourage the European nations to become the first line of their own defense against the Soviet Union."⁴⁸⁹ America's ultimate goal was to pull out and turn over to the Europeans responsibility for their own defense. Eisenhower himself felt, toward the beginning of his tour of duty as SACEUR, that "if in ten years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project"--meaning the whole NATO effort--"will have failed."⁴⁹⁰ And he never really changed his mind on this basic point: his greatest frustration as president was his inability to withdraw the American forces from Europe.⁴⁹¹

But if America was ever to pull out of Europe, the Europeans would first have to come together in a real political union. The power of western Europe could not "be fully developed" as long as that area was "just a hodge-podge of sovereign political territories," he wrote in December 1951. The Europeans should put their trivial national differences aside and create a kind of United States of Europe. With a united Europe, America would have nothing to worry about. "The whole 'German' problem would be solved," Europe would quickly be able to defend herself, and America would soon be able to withdraw her troops. In fact, there was "no real answer for the European problem until there is definitely established a United States of Europe." He was fed up with talk about the need for a cautious step-by-step approach. Unification should be brought about "in a single plunge" and "the sooner the better." In December 1951, he urged French prime minister Pleven to invite the continental NATO powers to a "constitutional convention" to create a European union. American efforts, he wrote in June 1952, should be directed to "one great and ultimate purpose," the "political and economic unification of Europe."⁴⁹²

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