| Review of: | A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe by Michael Creswell |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Jeffrey G. Giauque |
| Reviewed in: | Diplomatic History |
| Date accepted online: | 10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 32, Issue 01, Pages 139-142 |
Book Review: France's Fourth Republic and the Rearmament of Germany
Michael Creswell is assistant professor of history at Florida State University.
In focusing on this period and these issues, Creswell takes on subjects already widely covered by other historians using many of the same archival sources. [1]Rather than claiming to cover new territory or uncover new archival surprises, Creswell seeks to review the development of the Western Cold War alliance in the early 1950s and interpret it in new ways, correcting what he sees as misinterpretations in the existing historiography. His book is largely narrative and chronological in organization, interweaved with sections contrasting his interpretations with those of others. The book is generally well written, but is, unfortunately, marred by occasional typographical errors and inelegant prose in need of one more editing.
The first of Creswell's two central questions is somewhat exaggerated, as his own introductory chapter makes obvious the many reasons why the United States was never in a position to force German rearmament down French throats without any consideration for French interests or preferences. As few historians today would argue otherwise, Creswell's claim that this is still a subject in need of historical revision is questionable. To list only a few of the reasons Creswell notes for American flexibility on the means and timing of German rearmament, U.S. leaders feared the Soviet reaction to any sudden unilateral American rearmament of the country, feared that an unstable and unanchored Germany might fall into the Soviet orbit, and worried that neglect for French interests might cause that country to abandon its commitments to joint continental defense efforts as well as to Indochina and other "Western" interests outside Europe (pp. 2-4). Creswell's second question is the more interesting one, and it is that question that the remainder of this review shall address.
At a time when the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb, the victory of the Communists in the Chinese civil war, and the outbreak of the Korean War convinced U.S. planners of the need for a credible conventional defense for Western Europe, they turned inevitably to the idea of rearming Germany, the necessary linchpin of any such defense. Creswell argues that French military leaders and the centrist politicians of the Fourth Republic understood and accepted this U.S. rationale but feared admitting as much to the French public and the powerful French Communist party (PCF). Although there was thus much public talk of keeping Germany down and forming alliances against it, Creswell states that most French leaders sought to manage German rearmament rather than prevent it, and used anti-German rhetoric to disguise the fact that their military and foreign-policy efforts were really intended to counter the Soviet Union (p. 16).
The ever-changing leaders of the unstable governments of the Fourth Republic, with an average shelf life of six months, were faced with more than this dilemma. Fighting a losing colonial war in Indochina, the Fourth Republic was never able to find either the troops or the money to field a conventional military force in Europe that would match or exceed even the smallest German contributions that the United States insisted were necessary. And yet, for Germany to eclipse France militarily and politically in Europe such a short time after the war was entirely unacceptable to any French leader, military or civilian. It was German military parity or superiority in Europe, not German rearmament per se, argues Creswell, that the French sought to prevent (p. 44). The solution to all of these linked dilemmas that French policymakers ultimately developed was the Pleven Plan for an integrated European army, which ultimately formed the basis of the EDC. This plan would prevent the existence of German military units larger than battalions of, at most, a few thousand soldiers, and integrate those units into a supranational structure analogous to the European Coal and Steel Community that Jean Monnet, one of the thinkers behind the plan, had already set into motion.
Ironically, it was the very supranational nature of the EDC that made it anathema to both the French Gaullists on the right and the Communists on the left. The latter, of course, also disliked the implications of France's and Germany's deeper linkages to a Western alliance clearly aimed at countering Soviet influence, regardless of what centrist policymakers might claim. Creswell also notes that the French military leadership found the EDC to be cumbersome and unworkable from the start, and preferred some form of German rearmament within NATO. Because of the objections of these powerful groups, ratification of the EDC treaty, signed by the government of Antoine Pinay in May 1952, was never going to be easy, but successive governments made ratification even less likely by delaying the process in the hope of extracting concessions from their allies, mistakenly thinking that time worked in their favor, rather than against them (p. 93). Aside from seeking amendments or protocols to the treaty to make it more favorable to French interests and acceptable to domestic critics, successive French governments insisted on reaching an agreement with Bonn on the disposition of the Saar region, and with London and Washington on greater military commitments to the continent, before they would ratify the treaty.
Although the EDC was a European invention, the Truman administration rallied around it as a means of providing a solid conventional defense of Western Europe without tying down large numbers of American soldiers on the continent indefinitely. When the Eisenhower administration took office in 1953, it thus inherited the EDC treaty, signed but not ratified by any of the participating states. In the context of the New Look policy favoring nuclear deterrence as a means of reducing the U.S. Cold War burden, the new administration pushed even harder for EDC ratification, most famously in December 1953 when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pressed the Europeans to ratify in order to avoid an "agonizing reappraisal" of U.S. security policy in Europe, suggesting the United States might fall back to a "peripheral" strategy of abandoning the continent to a Soviet onslaught if the treaty were not ratified (pp. 127-35). However, whereas Germany and the Benelux countries proceeded to ratify the treaty in early 1954, French leaders continued to refuse to submit it to the National Assembly.
With opinion in the National Assembly turning ever more solidly against the EDC by 1954 for a variety of reasons, including fears that it would provoke the Soviet Union, place French military forces under supranational control, and compel France to withdraw forces from Indochina to defend Europe (p. 137), the situation came to a head with the fall of the fortress of Dien Bien Phu in northern Indochina in May, which brought Pierre Mendès-France to power with a commitment to end the war. Mendès-France was also determined to resolve the EDC issue, and, after failing to obtain approval from the other signatories for a series of protocols he proposed for modifying the treaty, he finally submitted it to the assembly, knowing in advance that it would be rejected, which it was, on a procedural motion, on August 30 (p. 158).
Creswell describes how not only the British and Americans but also the French themselves had prepared for such an eventuality, studying alternatives so that some other arrangement could fill the breach in short order. With American support, British and French policymakers agreed on German membership in the Western European Union (WEU) and NATO. At the same time, London and Washington agreed to open-ended troop commitments on the continent and the Germans negotiated a settlement on the Saar that the French could accept. As a result, in December 1954, the same assembly that had rejected the EDC only four months earlier approved the new WEU and NATO arrangements.
Aside from these specific British, American, and German accommodations of French concerns, Creswell accounts for the August-December 1954 French reversal by highlighting the U.S. decision not to pressure or punish France after its rejection of the EDC, as well as the decision of the Mendès-France government to launch a military atomic program. Although he does not analyze the latter dimension in detail, Creswell argues that this program, combined with Germany's commitment to foreswear unconventional weapons, gave the French leadership confidence that their country's military superiority over Germany would be maintained (pp. 163-64).
[1]To list only a few of the most notable works predating Creswell's book: Pascaline Winand,