Something of the sort occurred in Europe, quite unexpectedly, in the first half of the 1950s.
From 1945 until early 1953, Europeans lived, as we have seen, in the shadow of the Second World War and in anxious anticipation of a third. The failed settlement of 1919 was still fresh in the minds of statesmen and public alike. The imposition of Communism in Eastern Europe was a pointed reminder of the revolutionary instability that had followed World War One. The Prague coup, the tensions in Berlin and the Korean War in the Far East seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of the serial international crises of the thirties. In July 1951 the Western Allies had declared their ‘state of war’ with Germany to be over, but in the circumstances of a rapidly intensifying Cold War there was still no Peace Treaty, and little prospect of one to come. Nor could anyone be confident that Fascism would not once again find fertile soil in the unresolved problem of Germany, or indeed anywhere else.
The expanding web of international alliances, agencies and accords offered little guarantee of international harmony. With the benefit of hindsight we can now see that between them the Council of Europe, the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Payments Union and above all the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were the germ of a new and stable system of inter-state relations. Documents like the Council of Europe’s 1950 Convention for the Protection of Human Rights would acquire lasting significance in the decades to come. But at the time such documents, like the agencies that published them, rather closely resembled the well-meaning but doomed pacts and leagues of the 1920s. Skeptical contemporaries could be forgiven for paying them little attention.
Nevertheless, with the death of Stalin and the end of the Korean War, Western Europe stumbled half unawares into a remarkable era of political stability. For the first time in four decades the states of the continent’s western half were neither at war nor under the threat of imminent war, at least among themselves. Domestic political strife subsided. Communist parties everywhere except Italy began their slow retreat to the political margins. And the threat of a Fascist revival no longer carried conviction, except perhaps at Communist political rallies.
Western Europeans owed their newfound well-being to the uncertainties of the Cold War. The internationalization of political confrontations, and the consequent engagement of the United States, helped draw the sting from domestic political conflicts. Political issues that in an earlier age would almost certainly have led to violence and war—the unresolved problem of Germany, territorial conflicts between Yugoslavia and Italy, the future of occupied Austria—were all contained, and would in due course be addressed, within the context of Great Power confrontations and negotiations over which Europeans had very little say.
The German Question remained unanswered. Even after the panic of 1950 had subsided, and Western leaders recognized that Stalin had no immediate plans to ‘do a Korea’ in central Europe, the two sides were no closer to agreement. The official Western position was that the two Germanies that had emerged in 1949 should be reunited in a single democratic state. But until all Germans were free to choose for themselves the political regime under which they would live, such reunification was not possible. In the meantime the Federal Republic of (West) Germany would be treated as the representative of all German citizens.
The Soviet position was ironically quite similar. In his last years Stalin continued to maintain the official Soviet stance, that Moscow sought a united Germany and would even be willing to accept that such a Germany be neutral, so long as it was unarmed. In a series of Notes in the spring of 1952 Stalin proposed that the four occupying powers draw up a Peace Treaty aimed at establishing such a united Germany, neutral and demilitarized, with all occupying forces removed and its government chosen by free, all-German elections. Historians have criticized Washington for its failure to take Stalin up on these proposals—a ‘missed opportunity’ to end the Cold War or at least to draw the sting from its most dangerous point of confrontation.
It is certainly true that Western leaders did not take Stalin’s Notes very seriously and refused to take the Soviet Union up on its offer. As it turns out, though, they were right. The Soviet leaders themselves attached little importance to their own proposals and didn’t seriously expect the Americans, British and French to withdraw their occupying troops and allow a neutral, unarmed Germany to float loose in the middle of a divided continent. If anything, Stalin and his successors were not unhappy to see a continuing American military presence on German soil; from the point of view of the Soviet leaders of this generation, the presence of US troops in West Germany was one of the more reliable guarantees against German revanchism. It was worth risking that guarantee in exchange for a demilitarized Germany in the Soviet shadow (an objective for which Moscow would happily have abandoned its East German clients and their Democratic Republic), but not for anything short of that.
What the Russians decidedly did
When the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson first initiated discussions about German rearmament with Britain and France, in September 1950, the French vehemently opposed the idea. It confirmed all their earlier suspicions that NATO, far from representing a firm American commitment to protect France on her eastern flank, was simply a stalking horse for the remilitarization of Germany. Even the Germans were reluctant, though for their own reasons. Konrad Adenauer understood perfectly well the opportunity afforded him by these altered circumstances: far from leaping at the opportunity to rearm, the Federal Republic would hold back. In return for a German contribution to Western defense Bonn would insist upon full international recognition of the FRG and an amnesty for German war criminals held in Allied custody.
Anticipating some such deal being cut behind their back, the French pre-empted further discussion of a German military contribution to NATO by making a counter-proposal of their own. In October 1950, Rene Pleven, the French Prime Minister, suggested that a European Defense Community be established, analogous to the Schuman Plan. In addition to an Assembly, a Council of Ministers and a Court of Justice, this Community would have its own European Defense Force (EDF). The Americans, like the British, were not happy with the idea but agreed to go along with it as a second-best solution to the problem of defending Europe.
The European Defense Community (EDC) Treaty was accordingly signed on May 27th 1952, along with contingent documents affirming that once all the signatory countries had ratified the Treaty, the US and Great Britain would cooperate fully with an EDF and that the military occupation of Germany would come to an end. It was
The French, however, were still unhappy. As Janet Flanner shrewdly observed in November 1953, ‘for the French as a whole the EDC problem is Germany—not Russia, as it is for the Americans.’ France’s hesitations frustrated the Americans—at a NATO Council meeting in December 1953 John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s new Secretary of State, threatened an ‘agonising reappraisal’ of American policy if the EDC were to fail. But even though the Pleven Plan was the brainchild of a French prime minister, public debate had revealed the extent of French reluctance to countenance German rearmament under any conditions. Moreover, the proposals for German rearmament and a European army could not have come at a worse time: the French army was facing defeat and humiliation in Vietnam, and the new French Prime Minister, Pierre Mendes-France, rightly calculated that it would be imprudentto stake the future of his fragile coalition government on an unpopular proposal to re-arm the national enemy.
Accordingly, when the EDC Treaty finally came to the National Assembly for ratification, Mendes-France forbore to make of it an issue of confidence, and the Treaty was rejected, on August 30th 1954, by a vote of 319- 264. The plan for a European Defense Community, and with it a re-armed Germany in a European army, was finished. In private conversation with Belgian Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak and Luxembourg Prime Minister Joseph Bech, a frustrated Adenauer attributed Mendes’s behavior to his ‘Jewishness’—for which he was, according to the German Chancellor, overcompensating by aligning himself with French nationalist sentiment. More plausibly,
