France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (38 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 179
the essential objective of the European policy of the government." Moreover, NATO had been incapable of providing an integrated plan for rearmament, arms production, and standardization of weapons, with the result that France's own defense budget was skyrocketing. The EDC promised to ease France's economic burden by spreading the costs of rearmament more evenly; it would also provide the coherent, Europe-wide rearmament plan NATO had failed to produce. Then there was the question of credibility: "If France modifies her policy now at this late hour," Alphand believed, "after having restated her intention of pursuing this policy, there will result a debasement of our country from which she will not recover.''
20
Beyond Alphand's powerful arguments, one final factor militated in favor of pursuing the EDC: the Indochina war. The French war effort there was eating up one-third of the defense budget and costs were projected to rise during 1953.
21
The only way to pursue rearmament and the Indochina war was through massive American aid. Yet the United States made any aid to France conditional on French good faith in pursuing the ratification of the EDC. Bidault, to fight in Asia, would have to fight for the EDC
On a visit to Paris in early 1953, the new American secretary of state John Foster Dulles drove these points home. Before his departure, Dulles had suggested that if the efforts to create an integrated alliance continued to falter, "it would be necessary to give a little rethinking to America's own foreign policy in relation to Western Europe."
22
This strong-arm approach reflected Dulles's concern that without immediate movement on the EDC, the U.S. Congress would be loath to continue appropriations of funds for France's rearmament effort and for the war in Indochina.
23
The French, it seems, were not wholly convinced that America would link continued aid to passage of the EDC: too much of America's own credibility was at stake in Europe and Asia to give such threats real weight. Thus, when meeting with Dulles in Paris in early February, Bidault laid out a lengthy list of obstacles to EDC ratification, after which Premier Mayer asked for more American aid for Indochina. Dulles tried to keep the focus on the EDC. Mayer made clear his determination to press for ratification, but pointed out that passage would require additional protocols to assure parliamentary opinion. Some of these would be simply interpretive comments on certain aspects of the treaty. Far more important to Mayer were closer British association and a final Franco-German settlement on the Saar. Even with such amendments, the prospects of the treaty looked grim. The most Bidault could manage was the anemic comment to Dulles, "I am not without hope" about ratification.
24
 
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Following Dulles's visit, the French government set out to secure agreement on the additional protocols to the treaty. Though the French hoped to present these protocols as merely interpretive and thus not requiring revision of the treaty itself, their overall impact was significant. For instance, France now objected to Article 13 of the treaty that required approval of both the EDC Council and the SACEUR before French troops could be withdrawn for use overseas. The veto of SACEUR  an American general  over French deployments was deemed unacceptable. The French also worried that their voting power, linked to the size of their contribution to the EDC, would soon weaken relative to Germany's, and sought to institute a permanent balance of voting power between France and Germany in the Council. Other protocols focused on the rotation of officers between Europe and the Empire, schooling of officers, mobilization procedures, arms production, length of service, and the cost of troops stationed in Germany during the EDC transition period. Most significant, however, were French demands that the Saar issue be settled and that Britain be linked more closely to the EDC.
25
The response from the EDC members was not encouraging. Adenauer thought the protocols would "radically change" the treaty and give a renewed boost to SPD opposition. At a meeting in Rome on February 2324, EDC ministers discussed the French suggestions. Adenauer claimed the protocols had placed the security of the West in doubt, and other nations joined in the criticism. Though the United States thought the French positions could be softened, and sought to quiet Adenauer, the whole affair of the protocols promised to delay ratification for months.
26
While the EDC Interim Committee continued to work on the text of the protocols, the French government stepped up its efforts to secure closer British association with the EDC. It will be recalled that in April and May 1952, the British extended an assurance to the EDC countries that they would agree to defend the "integrity" of the Community and treat an attack upon its members as an attack upon itself. In addition, through the framework of NATO, Britain would maintain a large military force on the continent. Yet Bidault and Mayer, who traveled to London on February 12, 1953, wanted greater British political links to the EDC, chiefly to counter Germany, and an open-ended commitment from Britain to keep its forces on the continent. A memorandum from the Quai made this clear: "the creation of the EDC must stabilize and reinforce the presence of American and British troops on the continent, not the reverse. We have consented to heavy sacrifices for the common interest of Atlantic defense. It would be paradoxical if these sacrifices had
 
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as their only consequence the removal of Anglo-Saxon forces."
27
The French thus proposed to offer Britain the opportunity to participate in the EDC Council of Ministers, the Assembly, and the Commissariat, though in a nonvoting capacity, in exchange for a British commitment to leave its forces on the continent for the duration of the EDC treaty: fifty years. The British rejected the idea, as they had little desire to join the EDC institutions anyway, and because they were unwilling to make a long-term commitment about troop deployments on the continent. The British counterproposal  to extend the NATO pact to a duration of fifty years from twenty and so make it coterminous with the EDC  was greeted coolly in Washington, which feared congressional opposition to such a plan. Nor did it offer the French enough with which to appease parliamentary opinion. After a month of fruitless efforts, René Massigli reported that France "should not expect any fundamental modification of the British position."
28
The French protocols had met with stiff resistance; the mission to London had failed. On top of this came the news that the German Bundestag ratified the EDC treaty and the contractual agreements on March 19. Though the Bundesrat and the federal president still had to pass judgment on the treaty, the Bundestag action placed the fate of the EDC squarely in French hands. In late March, Mayer, Bidault, and an entourage of French officials traveled to Washington to meet the new American president Dwight Eisenhower and review the bilateral relationship. Ambassador Douglas Dillon, who had been sent to Paris by the new administration, thought the visit an opportune moment to point out to the French the "inevitability of a German contribution" to western defense, and the "difficulty of obtaining funds from Congress for France, whether in Indochina or Europe," without real progress toward ratification. It was time, Dillon thought, to be "very blunt," and others in the State Department wanted to tie military aid explicitly to the EDC. When Eisenhower met Mayer aboard the presidential yacht
Williamsburg,
he made a strong statement that the EDC was "so important in American eyes that the American people would not support aid to France if they [the French] were to postpone ratification.'' Mayer impressed his interlocutors with his avowals of determination to get the job done, but insisted that the Saar issue had to be settled and Britain brought closer into the EDC system. Mayer and Bidault may have suspected that the American threats to cut off aid were empty, and indeed in late April, France secured from Washington a package of nearly $ 1 billion of aid for Indochina and French rearmament in Europe. The carrot, it seemed, would be relied upon more than the stick to secure ratification of the EDC.
29
 
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Neither American pressure nor aid would be enough to overcome all the obstacles that lay in the path of the EDC treaty. From the summer of 1953 until the end of the year, a series of developments arose that granted the divided and confused French leadership ample opportunities to avoid facing the now widely reviled EDC. On May 21, France's last pro-EDC prime minister fell from office. René Mayer's government was a victim of its own internal contradictions, for it had rested on the support of Gaullists who openly condemned the treaty. Taking advantage of a motion of confidence on the government's financial policy, the Gaullists deserted Mayer, though his real sin had been to press onward with the EDC. For thirty-six days following Mayer's fall  the longest such hiatus since the war  France had no government. Following the failures of the Socialist Guy Mollet, the Gaullist, André Diethelm, the Radicals Paul Reynaud, Pierre Mendès France, and André Marie, and finally Bidault to gain parliamentary approval, President Vincent Auriol called all the party leaders to the Elysée Palace and berated them for their partisan behavior. He then threatened to resign if they didn't agree on a premier quickly. Auriol's intervention worked. On June 26, the Assembly voted powers to Joseph Laniel, a colorless, second-tier Independent with limited cabinet experience and, most crucial, no clear views on the EDC issue.
30
The government Laniel formed was notable for one reason: it contained three Gaullist ministers. This marked a significant development, for heretofore de Gaulle had prohibited his deputies from participating in the parliamentary game he so derided. But his political foot soldiers had not been terribly obedient, and so on May 6 de Gaulle disowned them all and renounced his affiliation with the deputies of the RPF. The 113 Gaullists, already divided among themselves, then formed two parties, the Union des Républicains d'Action Sociale (URAS) and the Action Républicaine Sociale (ARS). Still the largest voting bloc in the Assembly, their entry into the government would make the ratification of the EDC a near impossibility.
31
Developments on the international stage also slowed progress on the EDC. In March 1953, Joseph Stalin died, plunging the West into a great deal of wishful thinking about a possible improvement in East-West relations. British prime minister Winston Churchill, nostalgic for the good old days of the Big Three and contemptuous of the bickering Europeans, wrote to Eisenhower that "the three victorious powers, who had separated at Potsdam in 1945, should come together again," presumably to regulate the affairs of the world in one swift blow. "It would
 
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be a pity," he thought, "if a sudden frost nipped spring in the bud."
32
Eden, who would have been chilly indeed toward Churchill's ideas, was ill and en route to America for gallbladder surgery. Thus, on May 11 in the House of Commons, Churchill called for a "conference at the highest level" to deal with the German problem. The meeting would be ''confined to the smallest number of powers and persons possible." The suggestion threw the Western Alliance into chaos, for it raised the great fear of many in Europe, especially in Germany, that Britain and the United States might cut a deal with the post-Stalin Soviet Union over Germany without German participation. From the perspective of the French and the Americans, it was probably fortunate that two weeks later Churchill suffered a mild stroke, leaving him incapable of pushing these ideas too hard. Yet the damage had been done. The public now began to clamor for the convening of an international conference on the subject of German reunification.
33
To develop a concerted western position on how best to approach a four-power conference, Bidault, Dulles, and Eden's stand-in Lord Salisbury met in Washington from July 10 to 14. Adenauer, though not present, made his views known through the new U.S. high commissioner, James B. Conant. For Adenauer, then preparing for the German elections upcoming on September 6, it was absolutely vital that the West appear willing to negotiate on German unification, but that any talks not take place until after the elections. Moreover, they should be premised on previous agreement to very specific conditions, namely, the holding of free elections, the formation of an all-German government, the negotiation of a peace treaty with this government, the settlement of all boundary questions, and the freedom of the united country in all matters of internal and external policy, including entry into alliances. Such a proposal, Adenauer thought, would be very useful in neutralizing SPD criticism of his foreign policy.
34
Bidault too favored four-power talks. He did not think them at all likely to lead to German reunification, and indeed, it was now established French policy to oppose German unity at all costs. Rather, the parliamentary developments within France had been so averse to the EDC that, in his view, the only way of reviving it was to lay bare the Soviet "peace offensive" as a sham, and then to propose the EDC as the best solution for European security.
35
Dulles, though worried about the delay this would mean for the EDC, agreed, and on July 15 the three ministers issued an invitation to Moscow for a four-power conference. This triggered a new exchange of notes between Moscow and the western capitals, for the Russians first rejected the offer,

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