Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (63 page)

For these reasons, and because of their close links to London (especially in the case of the Scandinavian countries), they had little use for the EEC. But EFTA was (and remains) a minimalist organization, a reaction to the defects of Brussels rather than a genuine alternative. It was only ever a free-trade zone for
manufactured
goods; farm products were left to find their own price level. Some of the smaller member-states, like Austria, Switzerland or Sweden, could thrive in a niche market for their high-value-added industrial goods and their attraction for tourists. Others, like Denmark, depended heavily on Britain as a market for their meat and dairy products.

But Britain itself needed a vastly larger industrial export market than its tiny Scandinavian and Alpine allies could provide. Recognizing the inevitable—though still hoping to influence the shape of EEC policy—Harold Macmillan’s government formally applied to join the European Economic Community in July 1961, six years after London’s disdainful disengagement from the Messina talks. Ireland and Denmark, their economies umbilically linked to that of the UK, applied alongside it. Whether the British application would have been successful is uncertain—most of the EEC member states still wanted Britain in, but they were also justifiably skeptical of London’s commitment to the core goals of the Rome Treaty. But the issue was moot—De Gaulle, as we have seen, publicly vetoed Britain’s entry in January 1963. It is an indication of the speed with which events had unfolded since the Suez crisis that Britain’s rejection from the hitherto disparaged European community prompted the following despairing entry in Macmillan’s private diary: ‘It is the end . . . to everything for which I have worked for many years. All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins.’

The British had little recourse but to try again, which they did in May 1967—only to be vetoed once more, six months later, by a calmly vengeful French President. Finally, in 1970, following De Gaulle’s resignation and subsequent death, negotiations between Britain and Europe were opened for a third time, culminating this time in a successful application (in part because British trade with the Commonwealth had fallen so far that London was no longer pressing a reluctant Brussels to guarantee third-party trading preferences to non-EEC nations). But by the time Britain, Denmark and Ireland finally joined, in 1973, the European Economic Community had taken shape and they were in no position to influence it as British leaders had once fondly hoped.

The EEC was a Franco-German condominium, in which Bonn underwrote the Community’s finances and Paris dictated its policies. The West German desire to be part of the European Community was thus bought at a high price, but for many decades Adenauer and his successors would pay that price without complaining, cleaving closely to the French alliance—rather to British surprise. The French, meanwhile, ‘Europeanized’ their farm subsidies and transfers, without paying the price of a loss of sovereignty. The latter concern had always been uppermost in French diplomatic strategy—back at Messina in 1955 the French foreign minister Antoine Pinay had made France’s objectives perfectly clear: supra-national administrative institutions were fine, but only if subordinated to decisions taken unanimously at the inter-government level.

It was with this goal in mind that De Gaulle browbeat the other member-states of the European Economic Community in the course of its first decade. Under the original Rome Treaty all major decisions (except for the admission of new members) were to be taken by majority vote in the inter-governmental Council of Ministers. But by withdrawing from inter-governmental talks in June 1965 until his fellow leaders agreed to adapt its agricultural funding to French demands, the French President hobbled the workings of the Community. After holding out for six months the other countries gave in; in January 1966 they reluctantly conceded that in future the Council of Ministers would no longer be able to pass measures by a majority vote. It was the first breach of the original Treaty and a remarkable demonstration of raw French power.

The early achievements of the EEC were nonetheless impressive. Intra-Community tariffs were removed by 1968, well ahead of schedule. Trade between the six member-states quadrupled in the same period. The farming workforce fell steadily, by some 4 percent each year, while agricultural production per worker rose in the Sixties at an annual rate of 8.1 percent. By the end of its first decade, and notwithstanding the shadow of De Gaulle, the European Economic Community had acquired an aura of inevitability, which is why other European states began lining up to join it.

But there were problems, too. A high-priced, self-serving customs union, directed from Brussels by a centralized administration and an unelected executive, was not an unalloyed gain for Europe or the rest of the world. Indeed, the network of protective agreements and indirect subsidies put into place at France’s bidding was altogether out of keeping with the spirit and institutions of the international trading system that had emerged in the decades following Bretton Woods. To the (considerable) extent that the EEC’s system of governance was modeled on that of France, its Napoleonic heritage was not a good omen.

Lastly, France’s influence in the European Community’s early years helped forge a new ‘Europe’ that was vulnerable to the charge that it had reproduced all the worst features of the nation-state on a sub-continental scale: there was always more than a little risk that the price to be paid for the recovery of Western Europe would be a certain Euro-centric provincialism. For all its growing wealth the world of the EEC was quite petty. In certain respects it was actually a lot smaller than the world that the French, or Dutch, had known when their nation-states opened on to people and places flung far across the seas. In the circumstances of the time this hardly mattered to most West Europeans, who in any case had little option. But it would lead in time to a distinctly parochial vision of ‘Europe’, with troubling implications for the future.

Josef Stalin’s death in March 1953 had precipitated a power struggle among his nervous heirs. At first the head of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, appeared likely to emerge as the dictator’s sole heir. But for just that reason, his colleagues conspired to assassinate him in July of that same year and after a brief detour via Georgy Malenkov it was Nikita Khrushchev—by no means the best-known of Stalin’s inner circle—who was confirmed two months later as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This was somewhat ironic: for all his psychotic disposition, Beria was an advocate of reforms and even of what was not yet called ‘de-Stalinization’. In the brief period of time separating Stalin’s death from his own arrest, he repudiated the Doctors’ Plot, released some prisoners from the Gulag and even proposed reforms in the satellite states, to the confusion of the local Party leaders there.

The new leadership, collective in name but with Khrushchev increasingly
primus inter pares
, had little choice but to follow the path that Beria had advocated. Stalin’s death, following many years of repression and impoverishment, had precipitated widespread protests and demand for change. In the course of 1953 and 1954 there were revolts in Siberian labor camps at Norilsk, Vorkuta and Kengir; it took tanks, planes and a considerable deployment of troops for the Kremlin to bring these under control. But once ‘order’ had been restored, Khrushchev reverted to Beria’s strategy. In the course of the years 1953-56 some five million prisoners were released from the Gulag.

In the people’s democracies the post-Stalin era was marked not just by the 1953 Berlin revolt (see Chapter Six) but by opposition even in such obscure and typically cowed imperial outposts as provincial Bulgaria, where workers in tobacco factories rioted in May and June of that same year. Nowhere was Soviet rule seriously threatened, but the authorities in Moscow took very seriously the scale of public discontent. The task now facing Khrushchev and his colleagues was to bury Stalin and his excesses without putting at risk the system that Stalinist terror had built and the advantages that accrued to the Party from its monopoly of power.

Khrushchev’s strategy, as it emerged in the following years, was fourfold. First, as we have seen, he needed to stabilize relations with the West, following the rearmament of West Germany, its incorporation into NATO and the establishment of the Warsaw Pact. At the same time Moscow began building bridges to the ‘non-Aligned’ world—starting with Yugoslavia, which Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin visited in May 1955 (just one month after the signing of the Austrian State Treaty) in order to rekindle Soviet-Yugoslav relations after seven years of very cold storage. Thirdly, Moscow started to encourage Party reformers in the satellite states, allowing circumspect criticism of the ‘mistakes’ of the Stalinist old guard and rehabilitation of some of their victims, and bringing to an end the cycle of show trials and mass arrests and Party purges.

It was in this context that Khrushchev gingerly advanced to the fourth (and in his understanding, final) stage of controlled reform: the break with Stalin himself. The setting for this was the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU, in February 1956, at which Khrushchev delivered his now-famous ‘secret speech’, denouncing the crimes, errors and ‘cult’ of the General Secretary. In retrospect this speech has taken on a mythical aura, but its epochal significance should not be overstated. Nikita Khrushchev was a Communist, a Leninist and at least as much a true believer as his contemporaries in the Party leadership. He had set himself the tricky objective of acknowledging and detailing Stalin’s deeds, while confining responsibility for them to the man himself. His task, as he saw it, was to confirm the legitimacy of the Communist project by heaping obloquy and responsibility upon the corpse of Uncle Joe.

The speech, delivered on February 25th, was entirely conventional in length and language. It was addressed to the Party élite and confined itself to describing the ‘perversions’ of Communist doctrine of which Stalin was guilty. The dictator was accused of ‘ignoring the norms of Party life and trampling upon the Leninist principles of collective Party leadership’: which is to say that he made his own decisions. His junior colleagues (of whom Khrushchev had been one since the early 1930s) were thus absolved of responsibility both for his criminal excesses and, more importantly, for the failure of his policies. Khrushchev took the calculated risk of detailing the scale of Stalin’s personal failings (and thus shocking and offending the sensibilities of the obedient cadres in his audience), in order to preserve and even enhance the unsullied standing of Lenin, the Leninist system of government and Stalin’s own successors.

The secret speech achieved its purpose, at least within the CPSU. It drew a firm line under the Stalinist era, acknowledging its monstrosities and disasters while preserving the fiction that the present Communist leadership bore no responsibility. Khrushchev was thus secure in power and had won a relatively free hand to reform the Soviet economy and liberalize the apparatus of terror. Old Stalinists were now marginalized—Molotov was removed from the post of foreign minister on the eve of Tito’s return visit to Moscow in June. As for Khrushchev’s contemporaries, and younger apparatchiks like Leonid Brezhnev, these men were just as guilty as Khrushchev of collaborating in Stalin’s crimes and they were thus in no position either to deny his assertions or attack his credibility. Controlled de-Stalinization suited nearly everyone.

But Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin could not be kept a secret, and therein lay the seeds of its failure. The speech would not be officially published in the Soviet Union until 1988, but Western intelligence agencies had wind of it within days. So did Western Communist parties, even though they had not been made privy to Khrushchev’s intentions. As a consequence, within a few weeks rumours of Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin were everywhere. The effect was intoxicating. For Communists, the denunciation of Stalin and his works was confusing and troubling; but it was also a relief. Henceforth, as it seemed to many, Communists would no longer have to excuse or deny the more outrageous charges of their critics. Some Western Party members and sympathizers dropped away, but others remained, their faith renewed.

In Eastern Europe, the impact of Khrushchev’s reported abjuration of Stalin was even more dramatic. Read in the context of the Soviet leader’s recent reconciliation with Tito, and his dissolution of the moribund Cominform on April 18th, Khrushchev’s repudiation of Stalin seemed to suggest that Moscow would now look favorably upon different ‘roads to socialism’, and had rejected terror and repression as a tool of Communist control. Now, or so it was believed, it would be possible to speak openly for the first time. As the Czech author Jaroslav Seifert explained to a Writers’ Congress in Prague in April 1956, ‘Again and again, we hear it said at this Congress that it is necessary for writers to tell the truth. This means that in recent years they did not write the truth . . . All that is now over. The nightmare has been exorcised.’

In Czechoslovakia—whose Communist leaders maintained a tight-lipped silence about their own Stalinist past—the memory of terror was still too fresh for rumours from Moscow to translate into political action.
¹¹¹
The impact of the shock wave of de-Stalinization in neighboring Poland was very different. In June the Polish army was called out to put down demonstrations in the western city of Poznan, sparked (like those of East Berlin three years before) by disputes over wages and work-rates. But this only fanned widespread discontent throughout the autumn, in a country where Sovietization had never been carried through as thoroughly as elsewhere and whose Party leaders had survived the post-war purges largely unscathed.

In October 1956, worried at the prospect of losing control over the popular mood, the Polish United Workers Party decided to remove Soviet Marshal Konstanty Rokossowski from his post as Poland’s defense minister and expel him from the Politburo. At the same time the Party elected Władisław Gomułka to the position of First Secretary, replacing the Stalinist Boleslaw Bierut. This was a dramatic symbolic move: Gomułka had been in prison just a few years before and narrowly escaped trial. He represented, for the Polish public, the ‘national’ face of Polish Communism and his promotion was widely understood as an act of implicit defiance by a Party forced to choose between its national constituency and the higher authority in Moscow.