France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (8 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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his colleagues that Mendès France wanted to maintain the same kind of control that Vichy had exercised, but now through the means of a powerful Ministry of National Economy. This was perhaps his greatest sin. He wanted to use the political channels of an outmoded and inefficient administration to institute economic change. But precisely because of the failure of postwar elites to develop political institutions that could cope with the new aspirations of the liberation, a reform movement led from within the government was doomed to failure. Instead of producing the coordinated recovery program that wartime planners had called for, the period following Mendès France's resignation in March 1945, in which the Ministries of National Economy and Finance were both placed under Pleven's direction, saw very little coordinated action with respect to reconstruction. Instead, plans were worked out by various ministries, with Raoul Dautry at Reconstruction, Robert Lacoste at Industrial Production, and Paul Giaccobi at the Ministry of Supply (
Ravitaillement
). By November 1945, in the assessment of historian Philippe Mioche, "the idea of creating a plan was so toned down as to have all but disappeared." Pressure for change had to come from outside the hidebound institutions of government.
44
The Origins of the Planning Consensus
Not all advocates of a new planning mechanism suffered Mendès France's fate. On the margins of the established ministries, the irrepressible Jean Monnet was beginning an immense lobbying effort in favor of a planning agency that could direct an overall economic modernization and renovation of the country in the wake of the war. Monnet, raised in Cognac by parents in the brandy business, had trained as a lawyer in Paris and served during the 1920s in the Secretariat of the League of Nations. Unlike many of his compatriots, Monnet had a "good war." He worked diligently on behalf of the French and British armies to secure American military and economic aid before the United States formally joined the war against Germany. After 1941, he continued to work as a liaison between Roosevelt, Churchill, and de Gaulle, more trusted, it seems, by Roosevelt than by de Gaulle, for Monnet initially supported General Henri Giraud, de Gaulle's rival in Algiers, for control of the Free French movement. Monnet developed close links with American wartime officials, first during the Torch landings in North Africa, and later as the director of the French Supply Mission to Washington. In the latter half of 1944, in his capacity as chief of the Supply Mission, Monnet
 
Page 30
worked with American officials to hammer out the French lend-lease package of February 1945, on terms similar to those offered to the British. These negotiations underscored the importance of developing an overall economic strategy for the postwar period, especially as the Americans were reluctant to offer France a deal as long as specific objectives and means to reach them had not been articulated. It was largely in response to these concerns that in August 1944 Monnet drew up and submitted to the CEI two recovery plans, one designed to cover the coming six months, the other a longer period. These plans, although ''in no way definitive," had a specific purpose: "to give a somewhat precise framework to the negotiations with the American authorities  in particular, to get them to agree to furnish metropolitan France with various materials under a Lend-Lease agreement."
45
Monnet felt that the liberation might create a dangerous hiatus in which American supplies would not get through to the French people because of the disruption of distribution and supply networks. To avoid this outcome, he sought to develop specific lists of priority goods that would be necessary to keep France alive during the liberation. France especially needed coal imports, not just to keep homes heated but to fuel France's war effort. Monnet sought enough imports to keep industrial activity at least at 70 percent of the 1938 level.
Monnet's early efforts to urge coordination among governments established a pattern of activity. He insisted that the effort to prioritize French needs work in parallel with an overall coordination of French supply missions abroad, in particular in Washington, in London, and to the Allied armies. To this end, he asked the CEI to create an Import Commission, wherein decisions about supply could be made "without each decision being subject to ratification by the entire government." Monnet sought a free hand to establish with the Americans an overall import program, and was given such authority in mid-August 1944.
46
When the lend-lease package was agreed to in February 1945, it was largely due to the effort Monnet had made in persuading the Americans that the resources would be well and efficiently used, not just for reconstruction but, more important at the time, for pursuing the war effort.
The United States, however, terminated the lend-lease deal in August 1945; it was bound to do so by the terms of the agreement. The French international economic position was far too weak for the government to carry out a recovery program without external aid. The prospect of this aid ending galvanized support around those officials  especially Monnet  who could develop some kind of new aid program with the United
 
Page 31
States. At a time when the French government had no direction or leadership with regard to reconstruction or postwar planning, the imminent crisis of losing American aid worked to concentrate the mind.
Monnet was in a better position than anyone in the French cabinet to deal with the Americans about securing aid. He had established a reputation in both the American and French administrations as a valuable gobetween, one who, when necessary, could circumvent bureaucratic bottlenecks and pull the appropriate strings. Above all, Monnet knew that for France to transform the wartime supply program into a peacetime one, specific plans would have to be drawn up and presented to the Americans. The principle of planning, as Monnet envisaged this term, was therefore developed during international negotiations on aid to France. Only by developing clear and coherent economic objectives could France secure the international aid necessary for recovery.
47
The link that Monnet made between French recovery and the economic activity of the larger world reflected the guiding principle of his economic philosophy. Unlike Pierre Mendès France, whose monetary policy alienated many cabinet colleagues, Monnet focused less on monetary issues and tried to frame his ideas in an international context. The "reforms of structure" that Mendès France sought and that occupied a central place in the resistance's "revolutionary" ideology were less important in Monnet's conception than the reform of economic behavior. Monnet believed that France's objectives should be simply to increase production and stimulate exports in order to pay for the flood of imports that reconstruction would require. He was largely uninterested in the political implications of economic policy, and in this lay the key to his success. By framing his ideas in the language of productivity rather than of social justice, his ideas escaped the political backlash that previous plans had encountered. Indeed, he was able to avoid the stigma attached to exponents of
planisme
such as André Philip and Mendès France by offering his plan as a strategy for recovery and renewed economic health. Thus, Pierre Mendès France could say that "Monnet, a liberal by temperament, was certainly
anti-planiste
."
48
In building political support for an integrated recovery plan, Monnet went first to the top. In November of 1945, as discussions were ongoing in Washington over a loan from the Export-Import Bank to allow France to pay for goods ordered through the now defunct lend-lease agreement, Monnet sent to Gaston Palewski, de Gaulle's private secretary, a memorandum he knew would cross the general's desk. France's international position, he wrote, was gravely threatened. The
grandeur
 
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that de Gaulle invoked would be impossible to achieve without a massive modernization of the French economy. This could only be achieved through swift and effective action by the executive organs of the state, for the ministries had shown themselves to be utterly inept. "At a time when we need initiatives," Monnet wrote, "they are blocked by a monstrous bureaucracy which no longer knows the object for which it was created, and which if not completely reformed will bury the French people under a mass of paper and incompetence." Monnet's solution, one that characterized all his subsequent efforts, was to circumvent this ministerial tangle and "to give all necessary powers to one person, surrounded by a small group of energetic men from outside the administration, who will have the responsibility" to initiate the needed reforms.
49
Ostensibly, politics was left behind in this scheme, though Monnet knew that, on political grounds, it could not fail to appeal to de Gaulle, who for over a year had been decrying the obstinance and inefficiency of the political parties in the Assembly.
He was also advancing a view that was no doubt drawn from his experiences during the war. Power and influence accrued to those nations with the greatest productive resources and the ability to develop them. Status as a traditional great power would matter very little in the postwar world. Thus, he wrote, "the influence of France in the world will depend on the degree to which we are able to raise our production and our national economic activity" to the level of other leading nations. "It is only on this condition that the actions of France will be effective in the world." Furthermore, in Monnet's analysis, a strong economy ensured not only international influence but also domestic stability through higher wages and standards of living. Only a coherent plan that took into account the linkages among these diverse factors would provide France the direction it needed during the recovery period.
50
Monnet's arguments in favor of modernization were reinforced by pressure from the United States with regard to trade liberalization. Throughout the summer and fall of 1945, American officials had been making known to the French their opposition to trade barriers and import controls and indeed were fairly explicit that trade liberalization would be expected in return for loans. French protectionism, American officials knew, had a long history, but since the Atlantic Charter of 1941, Free French spokesmen had generally subscribed to the principle of free and expansive trade relations. Yet without protection, the French economy would have to work that much harder to compete internationally  a strong argument in favor of the economic and industrial strategy that
 
Page 33
Monnet was urging. Moreover, a public commitment to multilateral trade had been made in an official exchange of notes in November 1945 between the two governments, which led to an Export-Import Bank loan to France of $ 550 million in December. France was now bound by the letter of these agreements to effect a liberalization of its economy. An overall modernization and production plan now seemed the sine qua non of French survival.
51
Monnet reiterated these themes in his formal proposal to de Gaulle of December 4, 1945, for the creation of a Plan de Modernisation et d'Equipement (PME) that would not only focus on reconstruction of war-damaged areas but outline a total overhaul of the nation's productive forces. This meant more than issuing directives. The plan Monnet envisaged was to be above all a public undertaking, one involving all sectors of society, from labor groups to managers, employers, and technical experts. Only in this way could special interests and pressure groups that had traditionally looked to the state for protection be denied influence over the nation's economic activity. Instead, modernization commissions would be brought together to draw up plans for different sectors of the economy that then would be integrated into a coordinated whole by a planning commissariat. Planning was to become a public undertaking devised from the bottom up, with coordination and direction provided from above. "All of the vital forces of the nation," Monnet hoped, would have a stake in the success of the program if they were included from the start in its development. This plan was accepted by de Gaulle, and on January 3, 1946, the Commissariat Général du Plan (CGP), with Monnet as its director, was officially created and charged with the development of a coherent plan for the reconstruction and modernization of the French economy.
52
Monnet still had a number of battles to win before the campaign for his modernization plan was over. No sooner had the CGP been created than Monnet found himself fighting to protect the fledgling agency from the eager grasp of the various ministries under whose aegis economic affairs had heretofore been placed. One of the most important principles inherent in Monnet's planning structure was that the agency be free to operate outside normal bureaucratic channels, responsible to the executive alone. But with de Gaulle's resignation on January 20, 1946, Monnet lost his most important sponsor. Following discussions within the CEI regarding the competence of the Ministry of National Economy to direct the planning agency, Monnet shot off a series of desperate letters to the new president, Félix Gouin, railing against the

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