Rebuilding Europe

Western Europe, America and Postwar Reconstruction

David W. Ellwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317901242
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

With the end of the Cold War and the prospect of a federal Europe ever closer, this book is a timely reassessment of the processes by which western Europe was reborn out of the devastation and despair of 1945. Concentrating on the first postwar decade and making rich use of the latest research findings, David Ellwood gives a detailed account of the practicalities of reconstruction - how it was done, what it cost, who paid for it, and what those involved hoped for, expected and actually received.

CHAPTER ONE

The Lessons of Last Time

LOOKING THE DISASTER IN THE FACE

‘If men will not learn until their lessons are written in blood, why, blood they must have, their own for preference’, wrote Bernard Shaw in 1918 introducing Heartbreak House, his great play on the decadent Europe from which had sprung the Great War. In contrast to those who learned from the First World War simply how much better to prepare for a Second, there stood in Western Europe and America in 1945 a new class of politicians, high civil servants and experts determined not just that this time ‘never again’ would mean what it said, but that the survival of liberal civilisation itself demanded a positive, constructive response equal in scale to the disasters of the previous three decades.

‘During the catastrophe, beneath the burden of defeat, a great change had occurred in men's minds. To many, the disaster of 1940 seemed like the failure of the ruling class and system in every realm’:¹ General de Gaulle, the towering leader of the Free French, was only one of those, conservative and leftist alike, who understood the revolutionary character of the challenge and who feared a repeat of the Europe-wide chaos of 1918–26 should it not be met. A sense of shame and guilt pervaded those in Britain and America who had seen war coming as the outcome of the great depression of the 1930s, but had felt powerless to prevent it.²

But in the defeated and occupied countries nothing less than a top-to-bottom change of regime could be contemplated by the new men. ‘The issue of progress versus reaction has characterised every example of genuine resistance in Europe’, a Manchester Guardian writer proclaimed in August 1945; ‘Europe is in a revolutionary mood, a mood that forces comparison with 1848. Nothing is finally decided, and loyalties remain open in a way they have not been for a hundred years.’³

The distinguished historian and Times editorialist E.H. Carr had declared as early as 1942: ‘The most encouraging feature of the present situation is the prevalence, especially among the younger generation, of a deep-seated conviction that the world of the past decade has been a bad and mad world, and that almost everything in it needs to be uprooted and replanted.’ The radical impulses of the First World War towards self-determination, international justice and ‘a world made safe for democracy’ — Woodrow Wilson's great call of 1917 — had produced the League of Nations. But, insisted Carr, these impulses and the League itself had been swamped within months by the craving of the traditional ruling classes in France, Britain and America for a return to the stability, security and prosperity presumed by all of them to have been the supreme characteristics of the world before 1914. Now, from the wreckage of this mentality and all the disasters it had produced, from the very successes of the warmongering, ‘dissatisfied’ powers of the post—1919 era, had come a new agenda: social equality, economic democracy, supranational cooperation, the politics of participation, planning and welfare at every level, within nations and beyond them.⁴

Wherever involvement in the Second World War required something like total mobilisation of a nation's people and resources, there was intense debate on the postwar world — the more complete the mobilisation, the wider this debate ranged, the more numerous those involved in it. In times such as these it was conceivable in America for a former Republican Presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, to publish in ‘One World’ (1943) a grand international peace plan and to see it enjoy the most phenomenal sale of any book ever published in the United States.⁵ In Britain the confrontation on the shape of the country after the war had started almost immediately upon its outbreak: ‘The pros and cons of social change, the high hopes of some for a more just world, and the scepticism of others, were perpetual talking points’, (writes the historian Paul Addison). ‘The issues were debated in air-raid wardens' posts, in factory canteens, at mothers' meetings, on trains and buses when strangers fell into conversation.’⁶

In occupied Europe Resistance itself was inconceivable without designs which went far beyond the expulsion of the invader and the liquidation of his accomplices, towards conceptions of renewal which could inspire the appearance of new leaders and new social groups. Political exiles and those incarcerated in relatively tolerable conditions such as the St. Michielsgestel hostage camp in Holland or Mussolini's island prisons, carried on ‘interminable discussions on politics and liberty’, according to the pioneer federalist, Altiero Spinelli, who spent sixteen years in this situation. Governments in exile, such as the Belgian and the Dutch in London, spent their time partly in drawing up detailed plans for the work of renewal and reform to be started on their return home.

E.H. Carr identified the nature of the Europe-wide search for renewal as a revolt against ‘the three predominant ideas of the nineteenth century: liberal democracy, national self-determination and laissez-faire economics’, and he proceeded, in a book widely read not just in Britain but also in countries such as Holland and Denmark, to illustrate the nature of the crisis in each of these conceptions brought on by the rise of totalitarianism and the outbreak of a second world war only 20 years after the end of the first. Almost fifty years afterwards, it is easy to perceive the limits of this view, its inability to foresee the Cold War and the division of Europe, the impact of decolonisation, the role of America in Western Europe's future, or even the many continuities of institutions, ideas and methods from the discredited prewar era. But it did succeed in highlighting the supreme importance economic priorities would play in settling the fate of the other two areas of crisis. In spelling out these three key lessons written in blood, Carr provided a key to the plans being so intensely prepared in Europe and America for when the war was over.

RENEWING DEMOCRACY

The expectations of the liberators

By 1945 the question of political renovation had quite changed in complexion when compared to the assumptions reigning in the central years of the conflict. The reason why was explained by Stalin in a famous speech to a visiting delegation of Yugoslav Communists early in 1945: ‘This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army has power to do so. It cannot be otherwise.’⁷ So no longer were the Allies responible for simply ‘liberating’ the territories that fell to their military advance: liberation and occupation would henceforth not be so easily distinguishable.

Against Nazism and Fascism, the Allies guaranteed the right of every nation to choose democratically its own future. But by the end of the war it had become clear that the conceptions of democracy brought by the armies were reduced to two, and that liberated peoples would be obliged to adopt the version sponsored by the great power or powers to whom they owed their deliverance. In the West the classic formulations of parliamentary liberalism and popular sovereignty would clearly bring back a model, however deeply modified in its methods and aims, of traditional class collaboration, based on consensus and the rule of law. In the areas taken over by the Red Army democracy would be that embodied in the anti-Fascist forces who had led the fight against the enemy.

Earlier in the war, when principles had to be settled for the treatment of the first of the liberated territories, Italy, it had been possible for the Allied Foreign Ministers to agree at a special conference in Moscow in October, 1943 that the democratisation of government meant the elimination of Fascist institutions and the introduction of recognised anti-Fascist elements — generally gathered in broad-ranging ‘committees of liberation’ — into the political life of that country.

But by the time Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met in Yalta (February 1945), London and Washington had become convinced that the forces dominating anti-Fascist fronts everywhere were Communist parties loyal to Moscow, and that social revolution in the name of the working classes would be the consequence of their efforts at democratisation, inevitable where accompanied by the Red Army, imaginable even where the armies were Anglo-American. One result was the Declaration on Liberated Territories produced by the Yalta summit, a lame compromise formula which committed the Big Three powers to promote free elections throughout the nations they controlled as soon as possible.⁸ Within a matter of weeks the Declaration was a dead letter, and the conference began to acquire the baleful reputation it has kept to this day. Among those who followed its proceedings, diplomats, journalists and anti-Fascist leaders who were not invited — such as General de Gaulle — there spread the conviction that a new division of Europe had begun.

Expectations on the ground

The forces of democratic renewal were everywhere surprised by this outcome to their struggles. From the majesty of de Gaulle's position at the head of the French Provisional Government to the outposts of the Greek mountains, a common illusion had taken root that freedom to choose what came next would — within national boundaries — be limitless. Had not the lavish propaganda of the fighting United Nations guaranteed self-determination and the right of each people to choose its own destiny at the war's end? But when the end finally arrived, it quickly became clear that democracy could only be renewed on the basis of certainty concerning the essential elements of civil life: food, work, law, order. Whoever could guarantee these possessed the keys to the future. But such was the chaos and disruption prevailing in most liberated territories that only the liberating armies and the victorious great powers who had sent them were in a position to provide these means to restart normal life. And their help, it soon emerged, would not be unconditional or automatic.

The plans prepared by the Resistance and its allies all reflected other priorities. In Italy, Germany and France a change of regime came at the head of the list. The collapse of democracy in these countries — Italian liberalism in 1922, the Weimar Republic in 1933, the Third Republic in France in 1940 — all ignominious and often violent events, demanded the invention of new systems of representation with much stronger bases of legitimacy. But how? What political method would build the new relationship between the state and civil society, between the institutions and the electorate?

The rebirth of politics

This was the question the reborn political parties of Continental Europe all hastened to answer. Although radically changed in appearance and tone, almost none of them were new: even a substantial part of their leaderships had survived in most cases. They proved to be a stronger force for continuity with the past than almost any other in the postwar years. On the question of democratic renewal the major blocs or areas presented their case as follows (moving from left to right across the political spectrum).

The Communist parties which existed in every European country stood for popular participation. The Italian party told its swelling ranks in July 1944:

Only the participation of all the people in the insurrection will guarantee victory and it is this participation which is the essential prerequisite for the democratic renewal of the country. The reeducation of the Italian people, the radical elimination of Fascism and its economic roots, these will only be possible if all kinds of employees, not only workers, actively intervene in political life, in first person, as conscious creators of the new democracy. The first act of intervention of the Italian people in the forging of its destiny is the war of liberation.⁹

Officially such an approach excluded any action aimed at armed revolution, and events in Greece, where an insurrectionary mov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Postwar World
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Editorial Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One. The Lessons of Last Time
• Chapter Two. The Realities of Survival 1945–47
• Chapter Three. Managing the Shift to Peace
• Chapter Four. The Reinvention of American Power
• Chapter Five. The Road to the Marshall Plan
• Chapter Six. Interdependence and Defence: the Start of the Cold War
• Chapter Seven. The Road to Containment
• Chapter Eight. Interdependence and Economics: the Limits of Reform
• Chapter Nine. Filling the Dollar Gap: the Evolution of the Marshall Plan
• Chapter Ten. From Korea to Recovery
• Chapter Eleven. Hoping for Prosperity 1953–54
• Chapter Twelve. Expecting Growth 1955–61
• Tables
• Bibliography
• Guide to Further Reading
• Index