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

But if the Berlin Crisis was not really about the status of East Germany, if the real Soviet concern related to West Germany, then this sort of flexibility did not go to the heart of the problem. And on that core issue, the Eisenhower administration was not willing to go very far. The president himself did not believe that West German power needed to be kept limited, or in particular that the Federal Republic had to be prevented from getting a nuclear force under her own control. If the burden of defense in Europe was to be shifted to the Europeans, if the Europeans were to be weaned from excessive dependence on the United States, if nuclear weapons were the ultimate basis of the defense of the NATO area, then obviously the Europeans needed to be armed with nuclear weapons and to have much greater say over their use. He understood why the Europeans would want a nuclear capability of their own and felt America should treat her allies generously in this area. And when he spoke along these lines, he was referring not just to Britain and France; he put Germany in the same category.⁹²⁸ Indeed, from the start, he was relatively relaxed about the prospect of a buildup of German power. In the past, he thought, this might have been a problem, but that was only because Russia had been weak. But now with Russia so strong, he would "take a strong Germany." The implication was that a German nuclear capability was no cause for alarm.⁹²⁹

Dulles's views were in theory somewhat different. He and his top lieutenants in the State Department did think that there was a real problem of German power. Dulles in fact thought that the United States and the Soviet Union had a common interest in keeping Germany under "some measure of external control." But his mind was focused on the risk that a strong and reunified Germany would pose if she were not tied to the western bloc. The Germans, he said, could not be allowed to do "a third time what they had done in 1914 and 1939." A reunified Germany could not be "turned loose" and allowed to "exercise its tremendous potentialities in Central Europe."⁹³⁰ Soviet fears about Germany, he and his main advisors felt, were legitimate, and, if Germany were reunified, certain "military restraints on Germany" were appropriate. The USSR was "entitled to a sense of security," and the Soviet Union had the right, as part of a general settlement, to guarantees against a "rebirth of German militarism."⁹³¹ And indeed this was the price they felt the West would have to pay if the Soviets were ever to agree to German reunification.⁹³²

If, however, Germany were to remain divided, none of these considerations really applied. Dulles may not have fully agreed with Eisenhower's basic thinking on issues relating to the defense of Europe. He certainly wanted more in the way of "flexibility," and hoped to rely less on strategic nuclear forces. He also disagreed with Eisenhower on the related question of the size and permanence of the American military presence in Europe. And he was a good deal less inclined than the president to think that the Europeans had to take over primary responsibility for their own defense.⁹³³ He was therefore somewhat less inclined to think that the Europeans needed nuclear forces under their own control. But he agreed with the basic philosophy behind the sharing policy, and if he did have any misgivings about a German nuclear capability, he took care not to express them: he did not directly oppose the idea of a West German nuclear force.

So neither Eisenhower nor Dulles was prepared to give the Russians what they wanted. If Germany were to remain divided, they would not agree that West Germany should be kept non-nuclear. American policy during the Eisenhower period was thus not open to the idea of a settlement with Russia based on maintaining the status quo--on accepting the division of Germany and keeping the Federal Republic dependent on her allies.

British leaders were fundamentally opposed to the basic thrust of American policy during the Berlin Crisis. The United States was ultimately willing to use force rather than to capitulate to Soviet demands, but for Britain Berlin was not worth a war. Could the United States, Macmillan asked, really expect Britain to go to war for the sake of the Germans in West Berlin, "for two million of the people we twice fought wars against and who almost destroyed us?"⁹³⁴ The western powers, the British further believed, could not bluff their way through the crisis. They simply did not accept the idea that Berlin could be saved by nuclear threats. As their foreign secretary put it in July 1961: "our position was very weak on the ground and only tenable on the assumption, which he did not believe for a moment was realistic, that nuclear weapons would be used to defend our position."⁹³⁵ A tough line might well lead to the incineration of the British Isles, or more probably to a humiliating capitulation at the last moment. Macmillan and other top British officials wanted to do what they could to make sure that the crisis did not reach the point where either outcome was likely. They felt that a military confrontation of any sort had to be ruled out. Nuclear escalation was out of the question; it therefore made little sense to contemplate more limited forms of military action, which could always be easily countered by the Communist side. To send in a battalion in the event Berlin was cut off would be "militarily unsound." To send in a division with orders to fight would lead to a major military disaster. To send in an army corps would be even worse.⁹³⁶ The British defense minister in fact characterized such measures in late 1961 as "conventional aggression by the West," and told his American counterpart that under no circumstances would Britain agree that the western powers should put themselves "in the position of being the aggressors."⁹³⁷ Macmillan himself considered the contingency plans "absurd."⁹³⁸

But the British were reluctant to lock horns directly with the Americans over this issue, and therefore from the start sought to evade the fundamental question of whether, in the final analysis, force would be used to maintain allied access rights. They agreed to allow Norstad to direct a planning effort code-named "Live Oak," and in December 1959 even agreed to allow him to plan for "any likely contingency." But they were always careful to stress that the plans his group came up with had no official government sanction, that the British government was in no sense committed to the Live Oak plans, and that the plans could not be implemented until the governments gave their consent. In 1961, for example, when the new Kennedy administration sought to develop a posture that would allow the West to draw out and intensify the phase of limited military operations before a full-scale nuclear attack was launched, Macmillan was willing to allow planning to proceed on the basis of the new American thinking, even though the British were even more out of sympathy with that strategy than they had been with the Eisenhower approach. For Macmillan, military planning was simply an "academic exercise," and he again emphasized that "specific political approval" had to be given before even the most limited military operation could begin.⁹³⁹

If the military option was effectively ruled out, it was obvious to the British that the western powers had no choice but to negotiate. The best strategy was to settle the crisis quickly, before the bankruptcy of a policy of maintaining the status quo through force if necessary became too obvious. "The premises of our position in Berlin," Macmillan told Eisenhower and Dulles, "and particularly the premise of our presence by right of conquest, are fast fading away." The Soviets, "with their control of the GDR," had the "upper hand." Hence, he said, "we should try to salvage something by negotiation."⁹⁴⁰ As one of his principal advisors pointed out in August 1959: "We must negotiate some sort of settlement with the Russians and so recognise the realities of the situation because otherwise our position in Berlin will be destroyed anyway."⁹⁴¹ This meant movement toward the de facto recognition of the East German regime, acceptance of the Oder-Neisse line, and also a special military status for an area in central Europe that would include both parts of Germany.⁹⁴²

None of this was at all to the liking of the three other main allied governments. The German reaction was particularly strong. For Adenauer, the British were simply "traitors."⁹⁴³ Macmillan, of course, deeply resented being "howled at" for taking what he thought was the only realistic line, especially by governments like Adenauer's who themselves were unwilling to face the terrible prospect of general nuclear war.⁹⁴⁴

But while he was ready to part company with Germany over these issues, his attitude toward America was rather different. The Americans were more serious about risking general war, and the hostile U.S. reaction could not be taken in stride, given especially the fact that cooperation with the United States was a cardinal principle of British policy. And it was clear from the start that the Americans were disturbed by the obvious thrust of British policy. The British were "wobbly," U.S. leaders complained.⁹⁴⁵ The British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, sent Dulles a short essay on the Berlin question in January 1959. There was a tendency in Europe, Lloyd argued, to think that the Americans wanted a showdown with Russia, and indeed wanted to provoke a war from which they themselves "would be relatively immune"; Lloyd added that he was "not criticizing such a view if it has been expressed." The essay was "very disturbing," Dulles told Eisenhower. If that sort of thinking prevailed, he said, the West was "in a bad fix. It indicates a Chamberlain attitude."⁹⁴⁶

Macmillan, in fact, was soon flying off to Russia to meet with Khrushchev. Dulles did not like the idea. He thought the Soviets would interpret what he referred to sarcastically as "Harold's solitary pilgrimage to Moscow" as a sign of weakness.⁹⁴⁷ These British efforts at peacemaking were generally interpreted in terms of British domestic politics. Macmillan, Dulles said, was "running pretty hard for election."⁹⁴⁸ And Adenauer, when he was told of the planned visit, asked the British ambassador point blank: "Was this an election manoeuvre?"⁹⁴⁹ Such suspicions were not off the mark. As Lloyd himself wrote, "no Prime Minister could face an election without having made a personal effort to ease tensions, i.e., by a meeting with Khrushchev."⁹⁵⁰ In substantive terms, Britain's allies did not have much respect for the line of policy Macmillan was following.

The issue came to a head when Macmillan returned from Russia and then flew off again for America. In his meetings with U.S. leaders, he called for compromise and defended Soviet policy as not aggressive. Eisenhower said the United States "would absolutely refuse 'to throw the West Berliners to the wolves.'" Macmillan became emotional. The smell of war was in the air. There had to be a summit meeting, he said, to head off a war. But Eisenhower would not be "dragooned to a Summit meeting." Macmillan claimed that the First World War could have been averted if a summit conference had been held. Eisenhower "countered by saying that prior to World War II Neville Chamberlain went to such a meeting and it is not the kind of meeting with which he intends to be associated." He would not surrender to blackmail. One could not avoid war, he said, "by surrendering on the installment plan."⁹⁵¹

Dulles also clashed sharply with Macmillan. What was the use, he asked, of maintaining a powerful deterrent force "if whenever the Soviets threaten us and want to take something from our present positions we feel that we have to buy peace by compromise"?⁹⁵² From Dulles's point of view, Britain was weak, not just militarily but morally as well. Relations with Britain, he now thought, were going to be difficult. The British had apparently decided to chart their own course. The period of close Anglo-American collaboration seemed to be over.⁹⁵³

The following year, with Dulles dead and buried, Macmillan returned to the charge. He now told Eisenhower explicitly that Britain did not intend to use force in a Berlin crisis, and he assumed the U.S. government "felt likewise." That was not the case at all, Eisenhower replied. If the Soviets tried to put "an end to our rights, then we do intend to go through to Berlin with armed forces."⁹⁵⁴ The United States and Britain were deeply divided on this fundamental issue. The two countries, more generally, seemed to be drifting apart.

Macmillan was aware of the problem; in early 1960 one of his advisors ticked off for him a whole list of examples of the new coolness in America's attitude toward Britain.⁹⁵⁵ This was a disturbing trend, which the British felt they needed to counteract. They therefore now began to trim their sails. They would not press so overtly for a radical shift in western policy on fundamental political issues, but rather would follow the American lead in this area.⁹⁵⁶ And they would play down their opposition to the Berlin contingency plans: their goal now was to avoid provoking renewed criticism of their "infirmity of purpose."⁹⁵⁷ A modicum of cooperation, they felt, was necessary to avoid losing whatever influence the British government had left.⁹⁵⁸

In reality, Britain had little control over the situation. For American leaders, British softness was regrettable, but was in itself by no means catastrophic. The Americans could pursue their policy even without British support. As Dulles explained to Adenauer in February 1959, "final decision" would rest "with the nation which holds the greatest power." If the British wanted to make "dangerous" concessions, the U.S. government "would express its views very clearly, and he was certain they would prevail."⁹⁵⁹ And he made the point even more bluntly in a short piece on Anglo-American relations written in the hospital at the very end of his tenure as Secretary of State. Macmillan and his government had "not been candid" with the Americans that year, but ultimately Britain would play only a minor role: "Ours is the 'king-pin' of power; therefore our views are in the last analysis compelling on the UK and our other allies."⁹⁶⁰

Neither Eisenhower nor Dulles, however, really felt that the United States should simply call the tune, and that the European allies would just have to follow the American lead. British misgivings could perhaps be swept aside; the Germans could in theory be virtually forced to toe the American line. But the American government was not comfortable with a policy of simply dictating to the allies. There was a vague sense that the whole western system might collapse if the Europeans came to feel that the United States was blind to their concerns and was arrogantly dragging them to the brink of war, or, alternatively, was unilaterally forcing distasteful concessions down their throats. The enormous responsibilities relating to the great issues of war and peace had to be shared. It was therefore important, especially given the British attitude, to find some real political support in Europe.

This was why French policy mattered as much as it did. If the French were also ultimately willing to risk war over Berlin, that would give a certain legitimacy to the American position that would otherwise be missing. And if the French took a tough line on that issue, but also supported the general idea of a negotiated settlement with Russia, then a policy that aimed at some kind of settlement would be much easier to implement. In German eyes, the British might be dismissed as appeasers, and even the Americans, especially after Dulles left the scene, could be tarred with the same brush. But if France sought a negotiated settlement, it would be harder to condemn such a policy as the product of Anglo-Saxon weakness, and there would be greater pressure on Germany to go along. On the other hand, if the French opposed a policy of negotiation, the German government would find it easier to resist what the Americans wanted to do in this area.

It was thus of considerable importance that French and American policy ran along parallel lines from the beginning of the crisis until late 1961. Both countries felt that the status quo of a divided Germany was something they could live with and sought mainly to safeguard the status quo where it was threatened--that is, in Berlin. And indeed in spite of all their complaints about American "immobilism"--Gaullist mythology held that the Americans were intent on maintaining the division of Europe which they and the Soviets had supposedly agreed upon at Yalta--the French were even stronger defenders of the status quo of a divided Germany and thus of a divided Europe than the Americans were.⁹⁶¹

Dulles and Eisenhower took the ultimate goal of German reunification seriously. The Germans, in Eisenhower's view, were a single people who wanted to come together in a single state, and he took it for granted that "we should do everything we can to let nature take its course."⁹⁶² But de Gaulle made it quite clear to his allies, and even to the Soviets, that he was perfectly happy to live with the status quo in central Europe indefinitely. "France," he said, "was not in a hurry for the reunification of Germany."⁹⁶³ A few months later he reiterated the point. "For understandable reasons," he noted, France was "not unduly anxious for German reunification or to see Germany grow larger."⁹⁶⁴ As far as Berlin was concerned, the present situation was perfectly acceptable: "All that the West really wanted from Mr. Khrushchev was that he should not start a war and would agree to work out some sort of a modus vivendi."⁹⁶⁵ De Gaulle did not even agree with Eisenhower in principle that western policy should be based on the theme of "self-determination of peoples." When Eisenhower said the West "should stress that we believe in this" and that this belief should be the basis for western policy in Berlin and East Germany, de Gaulle replied with characteristic bluntness that the Americans "did believe in this but he did not."⁹⁶⁶ In keeping with a long-standing French tradition, de Gaulle did not view German unity as wholly natural in any case. The East Germans, whom he often referred to as "the Prussians and the Saxons," were not quite the same people as the West Germans, and part of the reason he liked Adenauer so much was that the German chancellor saw things much the same way. "Adenauer," he said, "does not believe in German reunification, in the return of Prussia to Germany. Il se moque de Berlin -- he doesn't care about Berlin at all."⁹⁶⁷ Adenauer was the best of all the Germans, a Rhenish Catholic, a bourgeois democrat but a strong leader, pro-western and pro-French--and a skillful politician who knew to how steer his fundamentally unstable nation along the proper course.⁹⁶⁸

It followed that the western powers in general, and France especially, had to conduct their policy with great care. On the one hand, as Prime Minister Debré put it, France wanted coexistence with the east and "could accept the existence of two Germanies." The goal therefore was a modus vivendi on that basis. The problem was that for the Germans this policy was anathema. If the West pursued those goals too openly, there was no telling how the Germans would react. If they felt betrayed and turned away from the western alliance, the results could be disastrous. The West therefore had to go on pretending that it favored reunification. This was a theme the western governments were stuck with, but the "practical problem was how in practice to accept the division of Germany."⁹⁶⁹

So French policy during the crisis was shaped with an eye to these two conflicting goals. In principle, the French government took a tough line. If the allies were cut off from Berlin, the western powers would not capitulate. Force, in the final analysis, would have to be used. "If that means war," de Gaulle told Macmillan, "well then, there will be a war."⁹⁷⁰ But if the allies stood firm, the Soviets would not block access to the city. Thus the overriding need was to demonstrate resolve, so as to minimize the risk of a Soviet miscalculation. The allies should avoid initiatives which would be taken as signs of weakness. And it is often said that for this reason de Gaulle from the start opposed the very idea of negotiations with the USSR.

In reality French policy was not nearly so unambiguous. On the vital issue of whether force, in the final analysis, would be used, French officials were surprisingly cautious. The Soviets in November 1958 had given their former allies a six-month grace period before their rights were to be liquidated, and the U.S. government wanted to take advantage of the delay to work out military contingency plans with the other two powers with responsibilities in West Berlin. The Americans therefore proposed in December 1958 that this planning be based on principle that force would be used if access were cut off. But the French, in spite of all of de Gaulle's talk about the importance of tripartite cooperation in the working out of common military plans, sought to evade this vital question. They were "weaseling," the U.S. representative in these talks told top American military leaders. Like the British, they finally agreed that military planning would take place under Norstad's supervision. But Norstad would not be allowed to implement these plans on his own authority.⁹⁷¹ De Gaulle took an ostensibly tough line because he thought the Soviets were bluffing, but if his own bluff were called, it was by no means clear that he was ready to face nuclear war over Berlin.

Indeed, French officials sometimes even suggested that West Berlin might have to be sacrificed in the end. De Gaulle himself told Eisenhower in April 1960 that he "felt we should not allow ourselves to be pushed out of Berlin, but that we should not use the word never, never, never."⁹⁷² Prime Minister Debré was even more explicit. In May he told Macmillan that there should be no war over access to Berlin--at least if West Berlin itself was not overrun--and that if the Soviets cut off the city there could be no military action. The most the West could do was to set up a "sort of economic counter-blockade."⁹⁷³ The foreign minister, Couve de Murville, suggested much the same thing, even in late 1961 when the French were taking what to the world seemed a very tough line on the Berlin question. Khrushchev, he told his British and American counterparts in August, thought the West would not fight and would ultimately accept his terms. Perhaps in the final analysis, Couve thought, Khrushchev was right about that; what was wrong was to "give him the immediate impression that he is right."⁹⁷⁴ The implication was that the West might have to capitulate in the end, but should not do so prematurely. It was for this reason that he thought the Americans were committing themselves too strongly to the defense of Berlin. De Gaulle himself made a similar point to Adenauer in December. The French, it seemed, had resigned themselves to the eventual loss of the city, and were now worried mainly about the effect this would have on the Federal Republic. "The main problem now," Couve noted, "was to safeguard Western Germany. The fate and freedom of 2,000,000 splendid West Berliners was of course important, 'but after all,' he said, with a shrug of the shoulders. He felt that in staking so much prestige on Berlin the Americans were taking Western Germany far too much for granted. We could all see the state the West Germans were in now. That was where the real problem lay."⁹⁷⁵