The United States, containment and Western Europe

There is no question that the enhanced American role in Western Europe was both a contributory source and an outcome of the tensions and divisions that characterized the origins of the Cold War in Europe.

isolationism

The policy or doctrine of isolating one’s country by avoiding foreign entanglements and responsibilities. Popular in the United States during the inter­war years.

That the United States would eventually engage so deeply in Western Europe was, however, by no means inevitable in 1945—46. In fact, strong domestic constituencies urged the Truman administration to disengage the United States from the old continent. For example, in the November 1946 Congressional elections the Republicans, under the influential leadership of Senator Robert Taft, defeated the Democrats for the first time in decades, and it was no secret that Taft and a large portion of the Republicans favoured a return to some form of American isolationism (although their more appealing message was probably the promise to cut down government expenditure by 20 per cent). President Truman, who lacked the unchallenged authority of his deceased predecessor, thus faced an uphill battle, as he became more convinced of the need forcefully to oppose the USSR.

Inexperienced in foreign affairs, Truman relied on a number of advisers who rarely agreed on the gravity of, and the correct response to, what was viewed as increasingly aggressive Soviet behaviour.

logically insecure, they believed that the USSR’s future security was directly dependent on minimizing their neighbours’ security, and were convinced that only the destruction of American power would ultimately guarantee their survival. What Kennan thus implied was that the Soviets would not be satisfied even with the total domination of Eastern Europe but would use both overt and covert means to spread their influence to Western Europe. While Kennan would later complain he had been misunderstood and that his statements about the concurrent weaknesses of the USSR had been overlooked, he essentially restated this message in public in an anonymous July 1947 article in the influential Foreign Affairs magazine. In this essay he also used the term ‘containment’ to describe how the United States should use its military, political and economic power to prevent further Soviet expansion.

containment

The term coined by George Kennan for the American, and broadly Western, policy towards the Soviet Union (and communism in general). The overall idea was to contain the USSR (that is, keep it within its current borders) with the hope that internal division, failure or political evolution might end the perceived threat from what was considered a chronically expansionist force.

By July 1947, though, containment was already being applied. In fact, Kennan’s ‘Long Telegram’ was only one of many private and public statements that indicated a hardening attitude in the United States and elsewhere towards Soviet behaviour.

These two crises seemed to confirm one of the major principles of the policy of containment: if you are tough, the Soviets will eventually step back. Indeed, a year and a half after Germany’s surrender the American administration was becoming increasingly convinced that only a firm policy of containment could stop further Soviet moves to expand their power beyond Eastern Europe. On another level, however, the events in Iran and Turkey in 1946 reflected not only Truman’s growing resolve to confront the Soviets, but the obvious weakness of Britain’s power and the American willingness to take over the commitments and positions previously held by the British.

After the evacuation of German forces from Greece in late 1944, the country had experienced a brief period of civil war. However, the British forces that subsequently entered the country managed to forge a truce between the two Greek factions: the Greek communists and the royalists. In March 1946 Greece held elections, but the communists decided to boycott them, resulting in a royalist government being formed that enjoyed Britain’s support. A few months later the Greek Civil War erupted and became immediately internationalized: the Greek communists received support from Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria; the royalists continued to receive British assistance.

Truman Doctrine

The policy of American President Harry S. Truman, as advocated in his address to Congress on 12 March 1947, to provide military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey. Subsequently used to justify aid to any country perceived to be threatened by communism.

The Soviets and the Americans were not directly involved in this initial outburst of violence, but by early 1947 this began to change owing to the dire economic situation in Britain. Facing a steady drain of gold and foreign exchange reserves, and with an internal fuel and food crisis on its hands, Clement Attlee’s Labour government had few resources to put into expensive foreign initiatives. Therefore in February 1947 the British informed the United States of their inability to continue aiding the Greek royalists. Simultaneously, the Greek government pleaded for American assistance. The Truman administration now sprang into action and on 12 March 1947 the president unveiled the so-called Truman Doctrine to Congress. This amounted to a programme to provide American assistance to the non-communist side in the ongoing Greek Civil War and further aid to neighbouring Turkey. As such, the Truman Doctrine called for the United States to step into Britain’s shoes.

see Table 9.1

While the Truman Doctrine was a response to a specific conflict clothed in universalistic terms, American involvement in Western Europe soon reached new heights with the announcement of the Marshall Plan. In June 1947 Secretary of State George Marshall unveiled what was to become probably the most important and popular American policy initiative in the post-war years. The European Recovery Program (ERP), as the Marshall Plan was formally known, eventually offered American financial aid to nearly all of the Western European countries. From 1948 to mid-1952, more than $13 billion was distributed to fourteen countries in the form of direct aid, loan guarantees, grants and necessities from medicine to mules. With such aid the transatlantic link between the United States and Western Europe was confirmed.

To be sure, the Marshall Plan, for all its lofty rhetoric (‘against hunger and poverty’), was not an unselfish act born out of some sense of guilt and responsibility for the fate of Europe. Rather, the pumping of money into Western Europe was to counter the distressing rise of European left-wing political parties: in two key countries, France and Italy, the communists were already extremely popular. The assumption was that further economic dislocation

Table 9.1 Aid allocated under the European Recovery Programme

could only boost their popularity and that, in turn, would strengthen the likelihood that the Soviet Union could play a role beyond the Iron Curtain.

Indeed, the announcement of the Marshall Plan put the Soviets on the defensive and effectively served to push the onus for the commencement of the Cold War onto the Kremlin’s shoulders. This came about because the United States cannily offered aid to all European countries. Accordingly, in late June and early July 1947 the Soviets attended a meeting in Paris with the British and the French to discuss the particulars of the American offer. However, the Soviets, headed by Foreign Minister Molotov, soon walked out of the meeting, claiming that the whole thing was a capitalist plot, and stating that they rejected any external intrusion into the East European, let alone Soviet, national economies. In particular, the Soviets rejected the idea that East European raw materials would be shipped to boost Western recovery. The Kremlin, as previously noted, then pressed East Europeans to remain outside the ERP, thus effectively sealing the economic division of Europe.

How successful was the Marshall Plan in stimulating European recovery and meeting its political objectives? This question has yielded considerable debate, as some revisionist historians, by pointing to statistics showing that Western European recovery was well under way by 1947—48, have challenged the assumed ‘boost’ that the Marshall Plan provided and have claimed that the influx of dollars caused inflation and did not solve the serious balance-of-payments problem.

European Economic Community (EEC) Established by the Treaty of Rome 1957, the EEC became effective on 1 January 1958. Its initial members were Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany (now Germany); it was known informally as the Common Market. The EEC’s aim was the eventual economic union of its member nations, ultimately leading to political union. It changed its name to the European Union in 1992.

European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) Established by the Treaty of Paris (1952) and also known as the Schuman Plan, after the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, who proposed it in 1950. The member nations of the ECSC — Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany — pledged to pool their coal and steel resources by providing a unified market, lifting restrictions on imports and exports, and creating a unified labour market.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Established by the North Atlantic Treaty (4 April 1949) signed by Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States. Greece and Turkey entered the alliance in 1952 and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. Spain became a full member in 1982. In 1999 the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined in the first post­Cold War expansion, increasing the membership to nineteen countries.

However, whether this is the case or not, it is undeniable that the ERP had a huge psychological impact on West Europe, creating greater admiration for the United States and building a sense that the reconstruction of Europe was well under way. Moreover, it forced West Europeans to co-operate seriously for the first time, brought West Germans to the same table as others and hence provided a stimulus, if not a perfect one, for the European integration process that would reshape the continent in subsequent decades.

Indeed, the Marshall Plan coincided with and encouraged a number of the economic arrangements that paved the way towards the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. On 9 May 1950 the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, made an announcement proposing the pooling together of Western Europe’s coal and steel resources. After extended negotiations, the Schuman Plan resulted in the signing of a treaty in Paris the following March that established the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The ECSC created a common market for coal, steel, coke, iron ore and scrap between six countries: France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

The culmination of the early containment policy in Europe came approxi­mately a year after the Marshall Plan became operational. On 4 April 1949 the United States, Canada and ten West European countries formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). ‘An alliance for peace’, as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tom Connally, termed it, NATO in many ways symbolized the key role that the United States had come to play in Europe. While there had been some initial reluctance to commit the United States in this manner — a strain of latent isolationism ran deep in American politics — the pressure from Britain and a number of other European countries, as well as the need to create an institutional structure linking the United States permanently with Western Europe, eventually forced the issue. Still, in the spring of 1949 it was clear that NATO was in large part created to send yet another message to the Soviet Union, a message that conveyed US determination to object to any further expansion of Soviet influence in Europe. To a large extent NATO was at the time of its creation a political rather than a military alliance. Together with the Marshall Plan, it solidified the political and economic division of Europe by emphasizing the similarities between the participating countries’ domestic systems and values. Remarkably, it would remain an important part of transatlantic co-operation even after the Cold War (see chapter 20).

NATO’s success was, however, in large part linked to the numerous hiccups that slowed down European integration in the 1950s. While economic integration was remarkably successful, political integration suffered from continued national preferences and prejudices. This, in part, explains the inability of West Europeans to agree on a common defence policy; indeed, one of the early failures of European integration was the 1954 demise of the European Defence Community (EDC). In the realm of security, particularly military security, most West Europeans preferred NATO and the continued presence of the United States to an independent European defence policy. This would become evident in the mid- 1960s when the departure of France — a key country in all the various integration

schemes — from NATO did not encourage others to follow suit. By then, however, the nature of the Cold War confrontation had dramatically changed, for while many in the Truman administration and Western Europe viewed the Cold War initially as a political and economic contest focused on Europe, developments in late 1949 and throughout the early 1950s served both to militarize and to globalize the Cold War.

see Chapter 11

Debating the origins of the Cold War

While no one questions that the Soviets expanded their influence massively in the early post-war years, historians have debated for decades the motives behind Moscow's policies. Were the Soviets acting simply to guarantee their security in the future - that is, did East and Central Europe simply represent a first line of defence against the future rise of Germany or other Powers trying to invade the USSR? Or were the Soviets deliberately attempting to expand communism, initially to Eastern Europe, but later to Western Europe and beyond? Did Stalin have a master plan? Was he simply an opportunist, or do the take-overs in, and subsequent hegemony over, Eastern Europe provide evidence of the impact of communist ideology in Soviet foreign policy?

A closely linked debate concerns the motivations behind American involvement in Europe. Initially, most observers and a large number of historians have stressed the essentially defensive nature of American policy: that the Truman administration merely responded to the aggressive policies of the Soviet Union. In the 1960s the so-called revisionist school - led by scholars like William A. Williams - challenged this interpretation by arguing that American foreign policy was driven by a need to secure overseas markets and incorporate Western Europe firmly into an American- dominated international system. Subsequent scholarship has often taken these opposing views as the starting point of analysis, although gradually the picture of the origins of the Cold War has become increasingly complex. In particular, numerous authors have explored the role of other players (notably, the various European countries) and taken advantage of new methodological approaches to explore the cultural and social aspects of the origins of the Cold War in Europe. In general, the scholarship of the onset of the Cold War is both rich in scope and large in volume, offering no easy path for generalization.