France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (32 page)

Read France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 Online

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
10.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 145
numbers of German troops would never exceed 20 percent of the total Allied forces in Europe; and the AHC and MSB would continue to monitor these officers, troops, and their military equipment.
24
With the crucial exception of the size of the units, the American proposals did not differ markedly from ideas that Seydoux and others in the Quai had been considering. But French defense minister Jules Moch  as hostile to German rearmament as any French citizen could be  did the French cause great harm by insisting that the Pleven Plan was the most the French public could accept, and that if the package were not accepted in toto it would be withdrawn. Instead of negotiating between the American proposals and the French ideas, Moch rejected the American plan out of hand. The strong contrast between Moch and Schuman, who in the past had so diligently and quietly defended difficult French positions, struck the other NATO ministers, and Moch quickly found himself isolated. By the end of the meetings, Moch had been so unpersuasive that Acheson now believed the Pleven Plan militarily unsound, politically unacceptable, and an offense to the Germans. Unless Paris showed some flexibility, perhaps circumventing Moch, the United States might "be oblige[d] to review our entire policy toward [the] def[ense] of Western Europe."
25
The British shared Acheson's feelings. The U.K. deputy to the NAC thought that French inflexibility might "wreck the whole NATO organization." Ernest Bevin railed against the French efforts to create "a continental bloc under French leadership," which he thought would have disastrous results for NATO, and which he claimed were motivated by a "covert antipathy" toward the Western Alliance.
26
In the wake of this acrimonious meeting, the French position received tactical support from an unexpected quarter. On November 3, the Soviet Union extended an invitation to Britain, France, and the United States to convene a quadripartite meeting of the CFM to discuss the implementation of German unity and demilitarization: the long-forgotten objective of the Potsdam agreement. No doubt the initiative was designed to divide the allies at a most vulnerable time and slow the talks on German rearmament, and, briefly, the proposal had the intended effect. Neither the French nor the British could publicly reject, at a time of grave international tension, any serious offer for discussions with the Soviets, and although both governments saw the Soviet invitation as simply a diplomatic ploy, they nonetheless had to produce a suitable public response. The French in particular saw obvious political advantages in taking up the Soviet offer: the debate on German rearmament might indeed be postponed. On the other hand, the Quai knew if a
 
Page 146
settlement on the German issue were delayed interminably, the Truman administration's case before Congress for sending American troops to Europe would be dealt a severe blow, and NATO would suffer the consequences. To allow the talks in the NAC to break down would play right into Soviet hands.
27
Ultimately, therefore, the Soviet proposal had the effect of forcing the Allies to compromise on the German question, for each power realized that before a four-power meeting convened, the position of the Allies would have to be firmly in place to avoid the inevitable Soviet efforts to secure an agreement on a neutral and unified Germany. Toward the end of November, the American deputy to the NAC, Charles Spofford, offered a compromise plan to the French: German "combat teams" of 5,000 to 6,000 men  much smaller than the infantry divisions the United States had earlier proposed  would be raised and placed into the integrated force under a supreme commander
before
the political institutions that the French desired had been erected. However, no German general staff would be formed, the German troops would carry no heavy weapons, and the units would be directly controlled by the supreme commander's staff. Moreover, the French effort to build a European army could go forward in future negotiations, and the United States would support this initiative.
28
Pleven, considering whether or not to accept the compromise, sought out Georges Bidault's views. The former prime minister and foreign minister, not then in the cabinet, told him "to take the bull by the horns" and accept the plan. "What we don't want is the
Wehrmacht,"
he said, "but what we do want is to be defended."
29
In the first week of December, the French, so keen to have American troops in Europe and pleased that the German contribution had been limited to small units, agreed to the plan.
Ironically, just as the Allies came to terms on the contribution of the Germans to European defense, Chancellor Adenauer stated publicly that he could not agree to the Spofford plan because it did not assure political equality for Germany or guarantee a reevaluation of the Occupation Statute. Adenauer attempted to frame the discussion of rearmament around the question of political evolution and thus make it appear that the Allies were demanding one in exchange for another. To avoid the appearance of begging the Germans to accept the Allied plan, the three occupation powers agreed to begin negotiations with the Germans on the subject so that a public rebuff could be avoided. This could only mean more delay in raising the German troops, an outcome quite satisfactory from the French point of view. As Roland de Margerie noted
 
Page 147
in a letter to Parodi, "the resistance which German rearmament has raised within Germany suggests that the United States cannot impose a solution on Bonn which does not have the support of the Germans themselves; we have therefore a real chance of seeing a European solution to the question prevail."
30
During the Brussels meetings of the NAC on December 1820, the participants agreed that the AHC would begin discussions in Bonn with the Germans on the nature of their contribution  and on the price the Allies had to pay to gain it. In Paris, meanwhile, another set of discussions on establishing a European army was also set underway.
The French government could look upon the Brussels meetings, and the entire period since September when the question of German rearmament had been raised, with some satisfaction. In September, French leaders had stood firmly against a swift and aggressive rearmament of Germany by the United States. In October, they maintained this position, despite private accusations that they endangered the NATO alliance by doing so, and they countered the American plan with one of their own, based on the lofty principles of European unity but clearly designed to limit German sovereignty over military affairs. In December, the French secured a very productive compromise between their ideas and the American position. The Americans would go forward with their plans to boost their troop presence in Europe, and in return France would accept a modest and temporary establishment of German combat teams to participate in an integrated force under American command. Because Adenauer himself did not accept the plan as it stood at the end of 1950, the French could take all the more pleasure in the fact that it was not they but the Germans who were holding up rearmament after Brussels. Yet if France had weathered the political storm of German rearmament, the economic implications remained to be tackled.
31
Economics, Dfense, and European Cooperation
The Korean War faced the Alliance not just with the unpleasant task of rearming Germany; it also required the rest of Europe to rearm as well. For France, this burden came at a particularly inopportune time. Economic stability, so elusive during the preceding five years, had begun to take root by the middle of 1950. The productive apparatus of the nation had been reinvigorated so much by the massive capital investments of the Monnet Plan that exports nearly equaled imports, while the Schuman Plan appeared to offer France and Germany a way to resolve
 
Page 148
their political differences through economic means. The outbreak of war in Asia, however, led to a precipitous rise in the prices of raw materials, undermined the fragile recovery in France, and imperiled European economic cooperation. Inflation once again gripped France as prices rose by 40 percent between 1950 and 1952. Fearing that the Korean War might soon be followed by similar hostilities in central Europe, the government undertook a huge rearmament effort that the nation could not afford: France nearly
tripled
its military expenditures between 1950 and 1952, from 463 billion francs to 1.27 trillion. Despite cutbacks in civil expenditures, the deficit doubled over these two years to 844 billion francs. By the end of 1951, France had to suspend many of the commitments it had made on trade liberalization and currency convertibility in Europe. Rearmament, it seemed, would weaken the transnational economic and political mechanisms that France believed crucial to European stability.
32
The French raised their concerns about the economic implications of rearmament at the London meeting of the North Atlantic Council in late July 1950. French officials were dissatisfied with the slow pace of American military aid that had been promised in the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of October 1949 and in the subsequent bilateral military aid agreement of January 1950.
33
The first American arms shipment arrived in France only in April 1950. Believing that American aid alone would not nearly meet French needs and searching for a long-term economic strategy that could underpin European rearmament, the French administration urged the NATO allies to consider developing a common pool for defense expenditures through which a coordinated defense program for all of western Europe could be directed. Struggling with a fragile economy and already unable to balance its budget, France could hardly be expected to undertake a massive rearmament plan alone. Rather, France insisted on spreading the cost of rearmament, and its attendant inflationary impact, equally among the members of NATO. The plan had other obvious advantages. As a paper from the Comité Interministériel pour les Questions de Coopération Economique Européenne (CIQCEE) noted, a common budget scheme would allow France to continue to insist on "the limitation of the physical and material participation of West Germany in the war effort, without limiting as a result the [financial] burden which West Germany will have to carry in the establishment of a common defense." This memo articulated a persistent French fear that rearmament would damage France's competitive advantage in Europe by forcing the country to step up imports and
 
Page 149
expend its dollar reserves, while Germany, disarmed, might profit by taking over French markets, increasing its dollar holdings, and augmenting its economic leverage.
34
As if to emphasize, however, that the plan for a common budget was not a ploy to avoid paying its share, the French government informed the NAC on August 5 that it would undertake a massive rearmament program, quadrupling the number of combatready divisions in France from five to twenty by 1954, and spending 2 trillion francs  about $ 6 billion  over the next three years to do so.
35
The French remained frustrated in their efforts to secure a common program of defense spending across the Alliance. Although during the September 1950 foreign ministers' talks in New York, the director of the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, Paul Nitze, had suggested a scheme for common planning of military budgets, the Nitze plan said nothing about how much American aid the Europeans could count on when drawing up their military budgets, nor about coordination of national financial policies to adjust for the negative impact of arms spending. Moreover, Nitze had especially emphasized that bilateral discussions would predominate in planning for American aid, and the United States would not rely on the kind of distribution exercises for which the OEEC had been designed.
36
Without an executive body coordinating the "equalization of costs" of rearmament  perhaps even fixing European exchange rates to ensure balance between those nations with large (and inflationary) military programs and those without them  French officials feared that financial planning would revert back to the kind of bilateral haggling that had characterized American-European relations before the Marshall Plan.
37
Still, because the French ideas on common financing of rearmament had been rejected, the government could feel somewhat at liberty to seek large American military credits to defray some of the costs of its national military program. In October 1950, the French proposed a budget of 850 billion francs for 1951 (compared to a budget of 420 billion francs for 1950), and asked Washington to provide 270 billion francs  $ 800 million  of this sum.
38
The Americans summarily rejected the French request. Instead, they offered $ 200 million of assistance for funding "procurement, production, and military construction" in France, on the condition that France stick with the plan "of at least the general size and scope it has presented." If France did so, the U.S. Congress might see fit to deliver another $ 200 million later in the year.
39
The French, in turn, trimmed their military budget by nearly $ 400 million (the shortfall in the expected U.S. contribution) to 740 billion francs  angering American

Other books

High Five by Janet Evanovich
Hamish Macbeth 12 (1996) - Death of a Macho Man by M.C. Beaton, Prefers to remain anonymous
The Emerald Comb by Kathleen McGurl
Richard The Chird by Paul Murray Kendall
Death Takes Priority by Jean Flowers
Valiant by Holly Black