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

By the end of 1946, the course of western policy seemed set. In the immediate postwar period, Britain and America had been reluctant to move too quickly or too overtly toward the "organization" of the western zones--toward allowing them to recover economically and indeed politically as well. They had held back for a variety of reasons: a general desire to avoid a split with the Soviets; a sense that a breakdown of the alliance might well lead to a resurgence of German power, with the Germans playing off east against west; a certain fear that a divided Germany would never be acceptable to the Germans, whose efforts to recover their national unity would be a source of profound instability in Europe; and, above all, a strong wish to avoid blame for the division of Germany, especially in the eyes of the Germans themselves.

But with the passage of time, many of these concerns were losing their force. The split with the Soviets was coming to be taken as a basic fact of international political life. The division of Germany was coming to be seen as a natural, perhaps even as an inevitable, consequence of the collapse of the wartime alliance. And the more unavoidable it came to seem, the less the western powers had to worry about being blamed by the Germans for the division of their country if they took action to restore their economy and set up some kind of political system in the western zones.

And with the passage of time the arguments for action became more compelling. The Germans could not be kept in a state of limbo forever. They had to be allowed to get back on their feet. It was important, of course, that the burden on the British and American treasuries be reduced; for this reason alone, the economic recovery of western Germany was essential. But political aims were even more fundamental. The Germans needed to be given some hope that a way out of their present misery could be found; things had to start moving if democracy was ever to take root in Germany; and above all the Germans needed to be shown that their interests lay in close association with the western powers.

As it became clear that action was not possible on an all-German basis, it also became obvious that the western powers would have to act by themselves in the part of Germany they controlled. So what was called the "western strategy" was gradually embraced by high American and British officials, and, more discreetly, by leading French policy makers as well: western Germany would be "organized," both economically and politically; it would be protected by the western powers and tied to the western world in a whole variety of ways--economically, politically, and, ultimately, militarily.

By the end of 1946, this was the track that U.S. and British policy seemed to be moving along. And yet it would be a full year before the western governments took the plunge and embraced this strategy outright. In January 1947, General George Marshall, the top American military officer in World War II, became Secretary of State. Truman's relations with Byrnes had been cool throughout 1946--for personal reasons, and not because of any truly fundamental difference on policy. But the president, like most Americans, had enormous confidence in Marshall. And the new secretary wanted to make a fresh start: he wanted to see if U.S.-Soviet relations could be put on a new and more satisfactory footing.

Marshall understood that the German question was the central problem in international politics, but, unlike many in high policy making circles in the West, he still thought of four-power cooperation as the key to a solution. The Germans, in his view, were "indomitable"; they would play their former enemies off against each other if the allies failed to reach agreement among themselves; they would gradually recover their power and again pose a threat to the world. The Soviets, he thought even in November 1947, needed to be brought into the system for the control of German power: "it would be difficult to conclude a definitive peace" without them.¹⁸³

Marshall certainly understood the need for action in Germany and indeed in Europe as a whole. But he was very reluctant to break with the Russians. A good part of the reason was that he thought the American people could not be counted on to support a firm stance if the western strategy led to a prolonged confrontation with the USSR. The nation might currently be in an anti-Soviet mood, but that mood could change quickly. Even at the end of 1947, when by every indication the allies had reached the end of the road, he hesitated with this consideration in mind. The American people, he said, would applaud if told the Russians "to go to the devil," but when the implications became clear, that attitude would change soon enough.¹⁸⁴

So Marshall was unwilling to move too forcefully toward the "organization" of the western zones. He very much wanted to see whether some arrangement could be worked out that would preserve German unity and avoid a sharp clash with the USSR. His tactic was to focus on finding practical and constructive solutions to concrete problems. Marshall disliked the increasingly ideological cast of American policy, and disapproved in particular of the Truman Doctrine speech: he "deplored the emotional anti-Russian attitude in the country and kept emphasizing the necessity to talk and write about Europe in terms of economics instead of ideologies."¹⁸⁵ The central political problems were to be put on the back burner. If the main goal had been simply to clarify the situation and thus provide a basis for independent action, Marshall could have focused on the fundamental political question of whether the Soviets would agree to abandon control of eastern Germany and allow the Germans to determine their own fate in truly free elections. But he did not want to bring matters to a head, and instead sought instead to focus on areas where agreement was possible--that is, on economic issues, and especially on reparation.

In early 1947, it seemed that some kind of deal with the Russians might actually be within reach. The key was a new approach to the reparation problem. The original Soviet policy of stripping the eastern zone--of dismantling factories and shipping them back to Russia for reassembly--was widely recognized as a failure. Railway sidings in eastern Germany were full of industrial equipment just rusting away. The Russians therefore wanted to change the system, and have the German economy, especially the west German economy, make reparation deliveries out of current production. Soviet officials suggested that if this arrangement were accepted, the USSR for its part would allow Germany to be run as an economic unit.

Clay and a number of his advisors thought that if the western powers were flexible, it was just possible that something could be worked out. Reparation deliveries out of current production might be bartered for Soviet acceptance of a Germany unified not just economically, but under a liberal democratic political system. Other high officials doubted whether the USSR would ever sacrifice political control over their own zone, but Soviet rhetoric in early 1947 suggested that there was some chance that they might actually agree to a unified and (in the western sense) democratic Germany. At the Moscow Conference of foreign ministers in March, the USSR called for the creation of a German republic with a popularly-elected parliament, full "civil and religious guarantees," and a constitutional structure very much like the one that Germany had in the 1920s.¹⁸⁶ On the surface, it seemed that the two sides might be able to work something out. Differences on the constitutional issue were not insurmountable. The Americans and the British wanted a somewhat more decentralized structure for the German state than the Soviets preferred. But Stalin was not intransigent. He was willing, he said, to accept the structure Marshall and Bevin had in mind if the Germans themselves agreed to go along with it.¹⁸⁷

The reparation problem was ostensibly the sticking point. Marshall may have wanted to reach an understanding with the USSR, but there was not much flexibility in the official U.S. position in this area. Reparation out of current production might be permitted "within narrow limits" if the Soviets would in return agree to treat Germany as an economic unit.¹⁸⁸ But the key thing even for Marshall was that an arrangement of this sort not increase the cost to America of financing essential imports into Germany.¹⁸⁹ Marshall's position was that the Potsdam agreement had ruled out reparations from current production--a point which was in fact not true¹⁹⁰--and that the only way such reparations could ever be considered was as a substitute for the deliveries of plant and equipment which Potsdam had called for but which the western allies no longer wished to make.¹⁹¹

Neither the State Department nor Bevin wanted to go even this far. Before any production could be sent to Russia as reparation, the German economy, in their view, had to be made to pay its own way. As long as Germany was in deficit, and as long as the western powers had to bear the lion's share of covering that deficit, any increased production had to be sold abroad, the proceeds being used to pay for imports, cut the deficit, and thus relieve the burden on American and British taxpayers. Any arrangement which allowed goods to be sent east before that point was reached therefore meant that the economic burden on the western powers would be greater than it had to be, and thus that America and Britain would in effect be paying Germany's reparations for her. It was not good enough, therefore, to take Marshall's line and say simply that the burden would not increase; it was essential that it be decreased and indeed brought down to zero as quickly as possible. In fact, the previous advances that had been used to finance the German deficit needed to be repaid before any reparation from current production could be contemplated.¹⁹²

Marshall did not end up taking quite so intransigent a line, but even his plan did not offer the Soviets very much. And it is clear that in 1947 the western powers in the final analysis took a fairly rigid line on the reparation issue. But it would be a mistake to assume that that attitude was the real cause of the failure of the four powers to work out an all-German settlement in 1947, and that if only the western governments had been more flexible, Germany could have been unified on a democratic basis in 1947. For behind their relatively inflexible stance lay judgments about what was really possible in the way of an all-German solution, judgments that reflected the way most key officials in Washington and London had by now come to see the problem.

For what was the point, most officials were coming to think, of trying so hard to reach agreement on this issue? An agreement would simply reiterate the terms of Potsdam. One draft discussed at Moscow in fact called on the Control Council to set up central administrative agencies for the fields defined in the Potsdam Protocol.¹⁹³ But if the attempt at running Germany as a unit had failed in late 1945 and 1946, what basis was there for thinking that the same kind of policy would succeed now? East-west relations were certainly no better now than they had been right after Potsdam; in fact, they were a good deal worse. So how would it do any good, in effect, to simply reissue a slightly updated version of the Potsdam agreement? Robert Murphy, Clay's Political Advisor and thus the top State Department official in Germany, made the obvious point. The Allied Control authority was "a moribund organism incapable of withstanding the virus of Allied dissension."¹⁹⁴ What reason was there to think that this virus could be cured by a new agreement that simply repeated the terms of the old one?

How seriously was all the talk about unifying Germany on a democratic basis to be taken? For the time being, the focus might be on economic issues, but economic unification was not an end in itself. The real goal, at least in principle, was German political unity. But was it reasonable to think, given their record in eastern Europe and in eastern Germany itself, that, no matter what texts were signed, the Soviets would agree to genuinely free elections in the eastern zone? Given what had happened in Poland two years earlier, Soviet promises about free elections were obviously to be taken with a grain of salt.

It just did not seem very likely that either the Soviets or the western powers would be willing to surrender control over their zones and risk seeing all of Germany end up on the opposite side.¹⁹⁵ This implied that a partition of Germany was inevitable. And this meant that there was little point to holding off too long on the "organization" of the western zones. The Russians were certainly moving ahead unilaterally in "organizing" their own zone with the Communists in the driver's seat. And if the USSR was moving ahead unilaterally, why shouldn't the western powers be able to take action in their own area without first having to clear their policy with the Soviets?¹⁹⁶

But even if, for the sake of argument, one assumed that a unified German state could be set up on the basis of truly free elections, one had to wonder whether this was the ideal outcome from the point of view of the western powers. The British, and to a certain extent the Americans as well, were reluctant to take their chances a second time with full democracy and self-determination in Germany--to see Germany resurrected as a strong and independent power, not aligned with either side and free once again to play them off against each other.¹⁹⁷ But if this was the western attitude, how could anyone expect the Soviets, whose ideology had a good deal less appeal in Germany, to cooperate in setting up a unified German state over which they had little control? On the other hand, Germany might be unified but still kept weak--that is, subject to quadripartite controls, especially in the military area. From the standpoint of the western powers, there were two great arguments against this sort of solution. First of all, this had been tried after World War I, but the Versailles settlement had been a disaster; and it was commonly assumed that the post-Versailles period showed that this sort of arrangement was simply not viable. The second argument was that the Soviets could not be given the right to intervene in German affairs because they would not use that power in a way that America and Britain would find acceptable. The bottom line was that in neither case was a unified German state a particularly attractive outcome. If such a state were weak, it would be vulnerable to pressure from the east; if strong, it could play off east against west, develop its power, and thus once again pose a threat to the peace.¹⁹⁸

All these considerations, although weighted differently by different people, pointed to one conclusion: the western powers should not pay much of a price to reach agreement with the USSR on the German question. The western governments did not set out to sabotage the Moscow conference. They had not decided on principle to turn down whatever offer the Soviets came up with, no matter how reasonable it was, out of a belief that a divided Germany was the best solution. This was certainly not Marshall's view; the conference for him was by no means a mere charade. But given the sort of thinking that had by this time taken hold in both Washington and London, neither America nor Britain was willing to go very far in these talks.

The British in particular had reached certain major conclusions by early 1947. In 1946 Bevin had been uncertain. On the one hand, he could not understand "why we could not proceed with our own policy in our own zone in the same way as the Russians were proceeding with their policy in their zone." But then, at that same April 1946 meeting, he went on to comment that setting up a government in western Germany and then partitioning the country "meant a policy of a Western Bloc and that meant war."¹⁹⁹ On May 3, he laid out for the Cabinet the pros and cons of a policy of moving toward the creation of a west German state. He recognized that feeling had evolved, that in recent months the Soviet threat had come to be seen as "as great as, and possibly even greater than" the threat of a resurgent Germany. But on balance he, and with him the Cabinet as a whole, were unwilling to take the plunge: the "general dangers of splitting Germany" were too great.²⁰⁰

By early 1947, however, British policy had hardened. Foreign Office officials were now arguing explicitly that the West should be intransigent--that unless the Soviets accepted all the conditions the West wanted to impose, Britain and America should begin building up western Germany.²⁰¹ Bevin was not quite willing to go that far, but in February 1947 he opted for a policy of insisting on conditions for a German settlement which the Russians were highly unlikely to accept--in particular, the ruling out of reparation from current production, at least for the time being, and the "establishment of genuine freedom of assembly and expression" throughout Germany. And he recognized that in the event no arrangement could be worked out, the western powers would continue their policy of "organizing" the part of Germany they controlled.²⁰² Indeed at the Moscow conference in the spring, and even more at the London conference in December, Bevin placed a certain emphasis on these political conditions--that is, on the core political differences between the Soviet Union and the West.²⁰³

But this was precisely the sort of strategy that Marshall, in his search for an understanding, wanted to avoid.²⁰⁴ He was of course very interested in finding out whether real cooperation with Russia was still possible. But instead of focusing on the core problems--especially the issue of the Soviets' willingness to accept a really free electoral process in Germany--Marshall preferred a more indirect and less confrontational approach. He wanted to take his own measure of Soviet policy, to deal with the Soviet leaders on a personal basis and decide for himself whether some form of cooperation was still possible.

Marshall went to the Moscow foreign ministers' meeting looking for answers. By the end of the conference, he had reached certain basic conclusions. On matters large and small, the Soviets were not friendly and not constructive. In an important meeting with Stalin on April 15, Marshall brought up the great problem of deteriorating U.S.-Soviet relations. His first complaint was that the Soviets often did not answer the communications the Americans had sent them. The American people, he said, "simply could not understand such behavior." He complained about Soviet charges that the bizonal agreement was a violation of Potsdam, and that the United States wished to dismember Germany. He was particularly upset that the Soviets were not very interested in the American offer of a four-power treaty to guarantee the demilitarization of Germany. Even in the West, and in France especially, many people were skeptical about the value of such paper guarantees--a very understandable attitude, given the history of such promises in the interwar period.²⁰⁵ But Marshall simply could not comprehend this sort of skepticism. If America gave her word, that was a fact of enormous political importance. To question the value of such a promise, or to act as though a four-power treaty were not of central importance, was practically to accuse the United States of dishonesty. If the Soviets spurned even this American offer, then there was really very little hope that they would cooperate with the West on the German question as a whole.²⁰⁶

It is not hard to imagine how the Soviet dictator must have reacted to Marshall's litany of complaints. Here the U.S. government, in the Truman doctrine speech, had just portrayed the conflict with Russia as a struggle of world-historical importance--as a titanic conflict between the forces of freedom and an aggressive totalitarian movement. And now Marshall's number one complaint was that the Soviets often did not answer their mail? The United States was of course a very strong country, but the people now running American foreign policy seemed a bit out of their depth. In any event, Stalin chose to humor Marshall and sought to smooth his ruffled feathers. The situation at the conference was not "so tragic," he said. Differences had occcurred before, but after people had "exhausted themselves in dispute," they were generally able to reach compromises. Marshall should be patient and not become depressed.²⁰⁷

To Marshall, however, this was proof of Stalin's lack of seriousness. The Soviet leader acted as though the allies were engaged in some kind of game, and did not understand, or want to understand, that immediate action was essential. At Moscow, Marshall had told Stalin very directly that the Americans were "frankly determined to do what we can to assist those countries which are suffering from economic deterioration which, if unchecked, might lead to economic collapse and the consequent elimination of any chance of democratic survival."²⁰⁸ And on his return to America, he gave a report to the nation, expressing his disappointment and stressing that matters could not be permitted to drift much longer: "the patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate."²⁰⁹

So Marshall was finally ready to move ahead without Russia. Europe, or at least western Europe, was going to be put back on its feet whether the Soviets were willing to cooperate or not. The failure of the Moscow conference thus led directly to the Marshall Plan, the great American program for the economic recovery of western Europe.²¹⁰

In top American policy making circles, a new and quite important idea was now taking hold: western Europe could be encouraged to pull together and develop a political personality of its own. Western Germany could be integrated into that western European community, which might in time develop into a "third force" capable of withstanding Soviet pressure without direct American involvement. Such a system would also help solve the German problem by limiting Germany's freedom of action and thus preventing her from once again posing a threat to international stability. If the west Germans were led to think of themselves as "west Europeans," their nationalist impulses might be tamed or deflected, and the division of their country might be made more tolerable for them. As Charles Bohlen, one of Marshall's chief advisors, put it at a high-level meeting in late August: "the three Western zones should be regarded not as part of Germany but as part of Western Europe." What an extraordinary comment! The fact that a top official would say that western Germany should not be regarded as part of Germany shows just how far U.S. policy makers had moved from traditional conceptions of how Europe was to be organized. And the assumption was taking hold that western Europe could come together politically only in a Cold War context. The Soviet threat on the Elbe would force the west Europeans to put aside their petty differences and unite behind a common policy of defending western civilization; the American presence in western Europe would reassure the west Europeans and allow them more easily to accept the west Germans as real partners.²¹¹

The Americans were now committing themselves to a policy of "building Europe"--meaning, of course, western Europe--as a political entity. Economic considerations merged easily into the new thinking. Western Europe could revive economically only if western Germany regained her economic health; and western Germany, for its part, could not recover in isolation from western Europe as a whole. The old national barriers had to be broken down. The region had to be thought of as a whole.