A Franco-German Bomb?
A study by the German historian Werner Abelhauser casts new light on Franco-German efforts to provide the youthful European Economic Community with military capability.(1) The essay is notable because it adds another dimension to our grasp of how and why the EEC was formed. Most modern work follows from the thesis developed by Alan Milward and is starting to accept that the EEC developed out of the post-war reconstruction programmes of the six nations (France, Germany, Italy and Benelux) which founded it.(2) Abelhauser does not argue with this but does suggest that other, strategic factors were at work.
He argues that Euratom, created at the same time as the EEC, was seen by its founders as just as important. It was established to promote nuclear co-operation between the members – and not for just civilian uses. Behind Euratom was a determination shared by political leaders in Paris and Bonn, that both should develop nuclear weapons. There were essentially two influences behind this commitment. First there was unease about Anglo-American strategic thinking. Until the mid-1950s it had seemed as if Washington and London, the key players in working out NATO’s strategic response to any Soviet threat, had based their thinking on the use of substantial ground forces. However, financial exigency began to change this and a new doctrine was developed – the ‘New Look’– which involved the use of massive nuclear retaliation. For Paris and Bonn this was an appalling prospect. It opened up the possibility that the US and the UK would pull out of western Europe (or, at any rate, substantially scale down their military presence) and rely on nuclear diplomacy to contain the USSR. They decided that possession of their own deterrents would give them the diplomatic influence to counter the possibility that the US and the UK would be prepared to threaten the obliteration of western Europe in the event of escalating tension between the West and the Soviet bloc.
The second factor was the Suez crisis. The failure of the USA to support the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt led to different reactions in London and Paris. The British determined never again to fall out of step with Washington on strategic issues. The French however felt betrayed and decided that they could not rely on the US to defend European perceptions of self-interest in any circumstances. Would France and Germany slump to the status of the third rate or should they not salvage their international influence (which they saw also as Europe’s influence) by embracing nuclear weapons, traditionally seen as the tickets to great power status.
The defence co-operation that ensued was, however, short-lived. A Franco-German protocol was signed in January 1957 and in April 1958 a trilateral treaty between France, Germany and Italy followed, devoted to agreement that the three powers work on the production of nuclear weapons. Shortly afterwards, however, the arrangements were frozen. General de Gaulle, who came to power in June 1958, disliked their exclusivity and preferred to operate through the creation of a new directorate in NATO. When this failed he revived the old idea about special Franco-German measures, but Adenauer, the West German Chancellor, uneasy at Paris’s unpredictability, decided to work with the USA after all.
This was not the end of the story. De Gaulle continued the programme for the creation of an independent French deterrent, started some years earlier during the Prime Ministership of Pierre Mendes-France. The West German Christian Democrats, in power throughout the 1950s, were favourably inclined to the idea of a German bomb – especially the powerful nationalist wing led by the influential Franz-Josef Strauss. All this was worrying to the USA where Kennedy had taken over the Presidency in 1961 determined to prevent the fragmentation of the western alliance into separate US and European politico-economic power blocs: ‘If the French and the other Europeans acquire a nuclear capability they would be in a position to be entirely independent and we might be on the outside looking in. We must exploit our military and political position to ensure that our economic interests are protected.'(3) This ‘independence’ might consist of separate dealings with the Soviet Union and protectionist measures against US trade: it would damage the long-term US projects to contain the USSR and make the world safe for liberal capitalism.
The Americans offered West Germany the latest and best high-tech weaponry. This did not include nuclear arms but it did extend to nuclear-capable missile systems such as Pershing, Nike and Sergeant. It was a deal which was good for the US balance of payments and defence industry while rearming West Germany within the framework of the post-war western alliance. Any chance that West Germany might take an ‘independent’ road with France was finally wrecked by the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. This certainly led to a deterioration of East-West relations – yet ironically the intensification of Cold War tension was in the US strategic interest since it confirmed Bonn’s determination to stick with Washington rather than Paris when it came to international security issues. An extra 45,000 US troops were sent to West Germany while Adenauer endorsed a modernisation of the armed forces which continued to rely heavily on American technology and hardware. The prospect of a European bomb and of a European political and military capability outside US influence had receded for the foreseeable future.
George F. Kennan
One notable anniversary which passed by the British media without any comment as far as I could see was the 100th birthday of George F. Kennan on 16 February.
Kennan is one of the most influential diplomats of the contemporary era. He was responsible for the doctrine of ‘containment’, which formed the basis of the US geopolitical strategy in the Cold War. The principles were set out in a major article, ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, published in Foreign Affairs in 1946. Since Kennan was at the time a serving member of the State Department authorship was anonymous, and he was known simply as ‘Mr X’ (although it did not take long for the real identity to emerge).
The X article advocated ‘long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies’. Its publication reinforced the trend to confrontation between the USA and the USSR and was followed in early 1947 by the Truman Doctrine, in which the President told Congress: ‘I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures’. The speech was used to draw financial backing from Congress to Truman’s determination to support anti-Communist regimes in Greece and Turkey. These governments had been propped up by the British but the expense of the operation was by late 1946 too much for London. Washington was informed that the British were going to pull out and, following the policy recommended by Kennan, stepped into the breach. In the State department there was anxiety that failure to act would lead to Soviet influence spreading from the eastern Mediterranean into Italy and France, both of which had large Communist parties. Given Soviet control over east Germany and the strength at the time of left-wing parties in the allied-occupied zones of Germany, this could lead to the extension of Moscow’s hegemony over western Europe and the economic and political isolation of the USA. The Truman Doctrine was followed by the Marshall Plan and NATO while the Soviets responded with the Molotov Plan, designed to bring economic unity between the USSR and its east European satellite states (known as COMECON), and the Warsaw Pact. By 1949, with Europe divided into two camps and both the USA and the USSR embarked on a nuclear arms race, the Cold War was under way.
It might therefore be supposed that Kennan was a supporter of the Vietnam War, of the neo-Conservative revolution in foreign policy which began with Reagan, and maybe even of the recent war against Iraq. In fact since 1950 his has been one of the leading dissident voices in US foreign policy.
For over 50 years Kennan has argued that his policy was distorted and transformed into a monster. It was indeed his intention to focus on the long-term strategic danger presented to the USA by the USSR. But his aims were limited and specific. He argued that the primary response of the USA to Soviet expansionism should be economic aid to countries where social and political conditions were favourable to pro-Communist coups. He was an advocate of covert operations, under political control. He maintained that the key to success in holding back the USSR was retention by the West of influence over the world’s advanced industrial states which, should they fall under Soviet hegemony, would have the capacity to transform themselves into military powers strong enough to threaten the USA. In the post-war era this meant, as far as Kennan was concerned, western Europe and Japan. He became increasingly dismayed however at the globalisation of the Cold War in the 1950s and the increasing tendency of US administrations to lose their focus on the parts of the world which were of genuine importance to American national security, replacing this with a crusading determination to confront Communism everywhere.
Vietnam was the logical consequence of this misapplication of Kennan’s ideas, and he campaigned long and hard against the conflict. Later, in the Reagan years, he was a staunch opponent of the neo-conservative strategy of confronting the USSR. He became worried at the escalation of the arms race and the increasing militarisation of US foreign policy. More recently he has attacked the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq: it stemmed from the same fusion of universalist and militaristic impulses which he had identified back in the 1950s. In February 2002 he warned that launching an attack on Iraq would amount to waging a second war that ‘bears no relation to the first war against terrorism’; that Iraq presented no threat to American interest; that it did not collaborate with Al-Qaeda; that it probably had no weapons of mass destruction and if it did the Israelis would strike it.(4)
This is a long history of dissent. Kennan has shown guts, independence, determination as well as enormous resilience over the years. His criticisms of US foreign policy stemmed not from a lurking commitment to radical ideas but from a profound concern for the quality of life on this planet. The nuclear arms race ran in tandem with increasing environmental degradation stemming from over-reliance on the internal combustion engine, itself a function of excessive individualism and materialism. Both threatened the future of life on earth. Kennan’s politics became an unorthodox brand of reformism and conservatism. Of course they can themselves be attacked on the grounds that the America won the Cold War thanks to Reagan’s determination to confront the USSR and outperform it in military modernisation during the 1980s. But Kennan has argued against this, maintaining that the conflict lasted years longer than it needed to have done. Writing in the New York Times in October 1992 he claimed that from the death of Stalin the USSR was in the process of a gradual shift towards a more liberal and pluralist regime which aimed first at coexistence then at collaboration with the West.(5) But the increasing militarisation of US foreign policy actually strengthened the hard-liners in the Kremlin and delayed the liberalisation of the Soviet regime. When this came it did so amid increasing economic and political difficulties whose legacy remains with us still. These could have been avoided. Kennan’s view is that nobody won the Cold War and that the West’s triumphalism was premature and misplaced. Could this be why not one British newspaper or television station commemorated his 100th birthday?
Notes
1 ‘Military Aspects of International Financial Relations’ in M. Flandreau, C-L Holtferich and Harold James, International Financial History in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2003)
2 See for example A. S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London, 2000) and Scott Newton, The Global Economy, 1944-2000 (London, 2004), chs. 2 and 3.
3 Kennedy addressing the National Security Council, 22 January 1963: quoted by Abelhauser, ‘Military Aspects of International Financial Relations’, p. 209. See note 1.
4 Albert Eisele, ‘George Kennan Speaks Out About Iraq,’ News Abroad, 26 0ctober 2002.
5 ‘The GOP won the Cold War? Ridiculous’, New York Times, 28 October 1992.