France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (10 page)

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Authors: William I. Hitchcock

Tags: #History, #Europe, #France, #Western, #Modern, #20th Century, #Political Science, #Security (National & International), #test

BOOK: France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954
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Page 39
Finally, the plan provided an outline for a national strategy of recovery, one in which domestic needs were linked to international imperatives. It comprehended France's weaknesses and laid down basic guidelines by which they could be remedied. The implications of the Monnet Plan were lost on few observers. Here was a way to enlist American support for reconstruction objectives that envisioned France as the key economic power on the continent, forming a tripartite international regime with the United States and Britain, surrounding and carefully guiding a limited German economic recovery. Indeed, the Monnet Plan signaled the emergence of a new style of French diplomacy, one that avoided direct confrontation in favor of consensual, technocratic, and apolitical agreements, while pursuing the national interest at the expense of traditional rivals. The Monnet Plan reflected the concern in certain government circles that French interests would be difficult to defend in a new and challenging world environment in which economic power weighed more heavily than traditional great-power status. Economic security had emerged as the top priority, and this would be the nation's leading concern throughout the postwar decade.
In short, the Monnet Plan expressed the arrival in French policy circles of a "planning consensus": a flexible, subtle governing strategy that could skirt political obstacles and advance economic recovery both at home and in Europe as a whole. The general failure of the political settlement of 1946 to provide stable governing institutions for France had not inhibited the development of new ideas about economic organization and national strategy. Because it focused on increasing productivity rather than reforming "structures," the Monnet Plan provided a place on the political spectrum toward which the parties could converge, despite ongoing disagreements in the political arena.
The Monnet Plan had implications beyond the borders of France as well. In the coming years, French policymakers saw the utility of using the cooperative and consensual language of planning to frame France's own national interest in the emerging European settlement. As this study will demonstrate, France's European policy of the late 1940s and 1950s was intimately linked to the administrative style that had been worked out in the course of domestic reconstruction. In the diplomatic confrontation over the future of Germany and Europe, France from early 1948 worked to shift the terms of the debate away from the traditional language of Franco-German conflict and toward more palatable concepts of rational planning and integration of economies. Technocrats at the Quai d'Orsay, the Ministry of Finance, and the Planning
 
Page 40
Commissariat hoped this new language of politics that had given an above-party flavor to state-sponsored economic policy within France might have the same persuasive effect on foreign governments. This strategy promised a dramatic departure from de Gaulle's diplomatic style, which prided itself on its single-minded pursuit of French
grandeur
. Indeed, the transfer of the planning consensus to foreign policy proved a difficult and uneasy affair, accomplished only after years of resistance. Before the utility of such ideas could be demonstrated to foreign policy officials, the same transformation in mental attitudes that we have charted in the economic sphere would have to take hold in the Foreign Ministry as well.
 
Page 41
Chapter 2 
The Limits of Independence, 19441947
As the war in Europe drew to a close, French policymakers knew that their country, still economically and politically frail, would be as reliant on its wartime allies in the period of reconstruction as it had been during the war itself. Surprisingly, however, economic weakness in no way diminished the zeal with which French planners promoted their country's political and economic interests, especially with regard to Germany. On the contrary, they viewed domestic recovery as largely dependent upon the achievement of a favorable postwar settlement in Germany, one that allowed France a preponderant role in determining the economic and political future of that defeated nation. Across a broad spectrum, French foreign policy officials and postwar planners believed that France had a unique opportunity to ensure that German resources would be used to initiate French and western European recovery. They also anticipated that France could use its position as a victorious power to compensate for the economic inferiority from which it traditionally suffered. Under French political tutelage, German industrial power could be employed to the benefit of all of Europe, but Germany itself would remain so shackled by administrative controls as to be rendered incapable of threatening the political equilibrium of the continent.
In setting out this vision, French leaders, President Charles de Gaulle in particular, revealed that the German problem dominated their thinking about postwar recovery. This was not surprising. Germany had been the principal focus of France's attention during the war, the source of profound humiliation and therefore the only nation through which French dignity could truly be redeemed. During the military campaign of the winter of 194445, de Gaulle aimed to recapture French
grandeur
at Germany's expense, and alerted the Big Three that France intended to share as their equal in the adjudication of the new European order. From the recovery of
grandeur
would flow all things: stature among the great
 
Page 42
powers, influence in Germany, and diplomatic leverage with the Americans in the distribution of reconstruction aid.
American officials, however, drew rather different conclusions from the war than did their French counterparts, and the agenda they put forward for postwar European reconstruction revealed a basic divergence with France, particularly over the future of Germany. Planners in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations saw in the history of the interwar years a very specific lesson: that economic conflict surely led to military conflict, and that to create stability in Europe, economic rivalries first had to be defused. From the earliest days of the war, the United States laid down as a major war aim the establishment of a multilateral system of world trade, based on the free convertibility of currencies in which trade barriers were reduced and made nondiscriminatory. With fewer obstacles to the movement of goods and capital, age-old rivalries might be superseded and replaced by world prosperity  in which the United States, as the world's greatest exporter, had a vested interest. But American exports needed expanding markets, and so the rapid economic recovery of Europe had become a mantra in policymaking circles in the United States. With these objectives in mind, American planners came to oppose the Carthaginian peace that de Gaulle seemed to favor (and that had briefly been incorporated in the Roosevelt administration's planning on postwar Germany).
1
By the time of de Gaulle's resignation in January 1946, France's German policy was being challenged on various fronts. As U.S.-Soviet relations deteriorated in 1946, the Americans placed ever greater pressure on their French counterparts to adopt a more lenient position on German recovery. Within France, too, a growing number of voices began to question the value of the country's obstinate attitude toward the Anglo-Americans, and urged a more cooperative policy in Germany that, by stimulating some degree of recovery, might permit France to achieve its own domestic economic goals more quickly. Instead of seeking territorial dismemberment of Germany as de Gaulle had done, these critics, particularly the Socialist Party leaders, spoke of economic control and integration as a means to monitor Germany while advancing French economic priorities.
These ideas would not come to fruition for some time, as Georges Bidault, the Christian Democratic foreign minister, did not diverge fundamentally from de Gaulle's positions. He kept up a steady drumbeat: without satisfaction on an array of issues concerning the future of Germany, the French government would not cooperate on a broad recovery
 
Page 43
plan for Europe as a whole. However appealing from the point of view of national pride, this strategy could not be maintained in the face of France's desperate economic problems that, by the end of 1946, had reached a full-blown crisis. By the time of the four-power meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) in Moscow in March 1947, French leaders had begun to comprehend the limits of French independence, and this realization would contribute to a gradual reassessment of France's overall European policy.
Gaullist Imperatives
In the year and a half of Charles de Gaulle's first presidency, French foreign policy had one overriding aim: to press French claims in Germany as far as possible, and so prejudice the eventual postwar settlement in France's favor. De Gaulle therefore placed a great deal of importance on frequent demonstrations of French independence. In December 1944, he concluded a mutual security pact with a rather uninterested Joseph Stalin in Moscow, sowing the seeds of suspicion among the Anglo-Americans that a deal had been struck on the dismemberment of Germany. Simultaneously, he clashed openly with the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, over the American's decision to evacuate Strasbourg, which the French then held, in order to even the line against the German Ardennes counteroffensive. He instructed the commander of the First French Army, General de Lattre de Tassigny, to disobey his American superiors and remain in the city, just as he would order de Lattre to contest the American occupation of Stuttgart in April 1945. The French leader took the exclusion of France from the Yalta Conference in February 1945 as a sign that the Allies, and Roosevelt in particular, wanted to block the return of France to great-power status, and so de Gaulle refused to meet the American president in Algiers following the conference, a decision most unpopular in the country.
2
And in the spring of 1945, two highly publicized clashes, the first in Italy over the Val d'Aosta, which de Gaulle claimed for France, and then in the Middle East with Britain over influence in Syria, demonstrated France's willingness to take on the Allies wherever a shred of French pride was at stake, even if in the meantime France's international image, and Allied relations, suffered. This was the price of a return to
grandeur
.
3
Yet much of the French bluff and bravado in these early months of 1945 may be seen as part of a general attempt to set out the French vision of a postwar order, at a time of great international fluidity, when the
 
Page 44
policies of the Allies regarding the future of Europe, and Germany in particular, were neither clear nor consistent. The general outlines of French thinking on the issue were made clear enough in the public utterances of de Gaulle and his foreign minister, Georges Bidault, and in private contacts with American officials early in 1945.
4
France would seek the detachment of the Rhineland from Germany, the political future of which would be determined by the four occupying powers. These powers would retain control of the Ruhr basin as a means of eliminating German war industry and using German resources for the reconstruction of Western Europe. France would also seek permanent limits on the level of industrial activity within Germany, and annex the coal-rich Saarland for good measure. Most notable in these proposals was the large role France envisioned for itself in occupying and administering southwestern Germany, a point on which de Gaulle frequently insisted. ''France does not intend to finish this war without assurances that French forces will be installed permanently from one end of the Rhine to the other," he declared during a press conference in January 1945, and indeed, it was control of the Rhineland that he had in mind when he insisted to Eisenhower that de Lattre be allowed to hold Strasbourg and push on to take Karlsruhe, Baden-Baden, and Stuttgart.
5
De Gaulle sought to force this issue on the battlefield because he was denied the chance to do so at the conference table with the Big Three. While they gathered at Yalta in January 1945, de Gaulle could only call from the sidelines, as he did on February 5, expressing pique at the "other" great powers for discussing the German problem without France, and reminding them that the separation from Germany of the Ruhr and the left bank of the Rhine was the "essential" precondition for French agreement to any document that the conference might produce.
6
In the end, despite the low view Roosevelt and Stalin took of France, Churchill and Eden managed to persuade the conferees to give France a zone of occupation and membership (with veto power) in the Allied Control Council (ACC), which would control the governing machinery in Germany. De Gaulle grudgingly recognized that France, despite the absence of representation at the conference, had achieved some notable gains.
7
The Yalta agreements allowed French foreign policymakers to believe that from now on France would have a large role to play in the administration of Germany, and that French views would be given a fair hearing. Yalta, after all, had conformed nicely with many of France's objectives. Not only would France receive a zone of occupation, but the Big Three had agreed that Germany as a military power would be com-

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