France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (20 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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Page 80
not lost on key French officials, who were themselves beginning to understand the implications of the American effort to sponsor an integrated European recovery program. The problem for France was to turn this insistence on a swift German recovery to its advantage. Jean Monnet reiterated his views on the subject in a memo to Bidault that he also delivered to President Vincent Auriol. He laid out the problem facing France. The United States wanted recovery, cooperation, and a German settlement in Europe, and needed a coherent plan to present to Congress for approval. France had to accept the political consequences of participating in the American scheme: the country would no longer be able to lay claim to the role of arbiter between East and West that de Gaulle, and to a large degree Bidault, had done. The loss of national prestige that such a commitment implied would, Monnet believed, be offset by a strengthened French bargaining position vis-à-vis the United States. The Americans and British, Monnet pointed out, could not allow the enterprise of European recovery to fail, "and it cannot succeed without France." Washington would have to provide France with concessions in return for support of German recovery. France could not simply conform to American demands in Germany, for that would constitute "a new abdication," as nefarious as Munich and the armistice of 1940. But Monnet believed that if France could achieve a fair economic and political settlement in Germany, including Ruhr controls, a policy of compromise "will be seen as one of
relèvement,
of national independence, and European security."
22
Other influential voices in the foreign policymaking establishment supported these views. From London, Ambassador Renè Massigli wrote a long and personal letter to Bidault, urging him to abandon the obstructionist attitude that dominated French policy in Germany and to consider the level-of-industry question in light of the entire European situation. Europe was now split in two, he wrote, and from his perspective, "the break is a good thing for us," for it ensured France access to the western portion of Germany. This access would be wasted if France did not cooperate effectively with the Anglo-Americans. In the level-of-industry conflict, Massigli believed that they would not retreat from their positions: "The question is therefore whether we ought to hold our negative position, issuing solemn protests, or to envision a compromise. We should not delude ourselves. We will not stop the Anglo-Saxons from pushing the industrial restoration of the Ruhr. We will simply be unable to intervene effectively in these plans for its revival." This was precisely the point Monnet had made as well: compromise, if it provided
 
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influence in return, was better than inflexibility and isolation. President Auriol meanwhile feared that Bidault, in his insistence on strict limits of German industrial production, was making a viable settlement impossible by raising American objections.
23
Above all, as Monnet again insisted when lunching with Auriol on August 4, these sorts of public confrontations with the Americans over Germany must be avoided, for they only reinforced the impression that the United States was dictating policy to France and made negotiation even more difficult. Bidault must be brought around to the view that Monnet, Auriol, Léon Blum, André Philip, and others supported, namely, that German production was not dangerous to France provided agreements could be wrought to control the uses to which that production, particularly steel, was put. These controls must provide France with the power to observe and direct German industrial activity and ensure France's influence over German recovery. Monnet put the issue bluntly: "If we obtain these guarantees and these solutions, we will be equal with America and Britain; if not, we will become their vassals."
24
The choice appeared obvious. On August 7, Auriol wrote to Bidault that a comprehensive solution had to be found for the Ruhr. Following Blum and Monnet, Auriol argued against lengthy negotiations over levels of industry and in favor of a regional control mechanism, somewhat akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority, to pool resources and provide oversight. With these guarantees, German production "will lose its noxiousness," and European production as a whole could be maximized.
25
Under increasing pressure from within the government, Bidault adopted a conciliatory position when he and his top Quai d'Orsay officials met with Undersecretary Clayton and Ambassadors Caffery and Douglas in Paris in early August. In these conversations, Bidault made significant concessions to the Americans, stating that if the United States supported some kind of international agency in the Ruhr, with the power to allocate Ruhr output of coal, coke, and steel between German internal consumption and exports, the French would abandon their long-held position that the Ruhr be politically detached from Germany. Given sufficient controls, the French would agree to leaving ownership and administration of Ruhr industries in German hands and begin discussions about merging the French zone of occupation with the bizone.
26
Accepting Monnet and Massigli's logic, Bidault sought tripartite discussions on the issue to show that France was part of the decision-making establishment in Germany, and that the future of Germany depended as much on French will as on Anglo-American.
27
 
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Marshall was willing to allow three-way talks on the subject to go forward in London, but he had no intention of asking Clay to alter the level-of-industry plan. He issued instructions to Douglas in London that proscribed any American flexibility on the plan, except in the case of "a genuine threat to the success of the European economic plan or if democracy in France will be threatened unless changes are made."
28
The U.S. representatives in Paris, and some State Department officials, feared the impact of such a negative stance and urged a more conciliatory and facesaving agreement by which France could be assured of some form of international control over Ruhr resources before the bizonal plan went forward. But Marshall would not be deterred from announcing the level-of-industry plan.
29
Despite repeated entreaties from Caffery, Douglas, and Clayton, as well as officials within the State Department, Marshall and Lovett wanted to put the French on notice that by remaining out of the bizone, they had given up their right to participate in decision making within that area, and that though the United States was sympathetic to the French proposals, the level-of-industry talks were neither the time nor the place to work out a broad agreement on the future of the Ruhr.
30
The formal three-way talks in London, from August 22 to 27, produced a final communiqué that left open the possibility that some future control of the Ruhr could be worked out, but the French hopes of cutting a deal on the Ruhr before the revised plan went into effect had been rebuffed.
31
The days when the French could block all progress in Germany with a veto in the ACC were over.
The Domestic Crises of 1947
Despite the obvious need for swift action on German policy following the CEEC and the level-of-industry debate, French officials were preoccupied from September through December with economic and social crises that presented a far greater threat to the nation than German recovery. Yet the two issues were closely linked, for in the absence of a solid, relatively stable, and pro-American governing coalition in France, the Marshall Plan itself could never be fully realized. For this reason, Americans looked with great apprehension on developments within France.
Any optimism about a long-term recovery plan fostered by the CEEC was tempered by the realization in September of just how serious France's short-term problems were: France's gold and dollar reserves stood at just $ 445 million and would be completely exhausted by the end of October.
 
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Without immediate foreign assistance, imports would have to be cut off  and the entire recovery program halted. The ambitious plans for the future economic organization of Europe suddenly appeared utopian in the face of France's financial collapse. Clayton and Douglas cabled Washington as the CEEC closed that the United States must provide interim aid "so that by spring we shall still have a democratic area upon which to build a complete recovery program."
32
Keeping France out of the hands of the Communists proved the chief justification for interim aid. Caffery had been sending telegrams to Washington for months analyzing the PCF and its efforts to disrupt the Marshall Plan; in the early fall, he adopted a truly alarmist tone. Without a promise of interim aid, the Ramadier government would collapse, he believed. Meanwhile, the Communists, sensing an opportunity, were planning to adopt more openly revolutionary tactics to achieve power. Caffery painted a picture of France in entropy, verging on not just economic but social collapse. Interim aid provided the only hope.
33
Certainly the French Embassy in Washington did what it could to encourage this view. An October 17 memorandum to the State Department asked for American assistance of at least $ 120 million per month until Marshall aid had been enacted. The memo spelled out the consequences of a shutdown of imports: industry would deplete its stocks and slowly grind to a halt, leading to large-scale unemployment; agricultural production would slow due to depletion of fertilizers; and there would follow "a general lowering of the standard of living, that would be particularly dangerous in view of the present social climate." Bidault, in New York for the opening of the General Assembly of the United Nations, met with congressional members and made similar points. He described the situation in Europe as "a huge wager between the Communist and anti-Communist forces" that he was sure France, with American support, would win. Interim aid, in Bidault's mind, had become crucial to stopping a Communist seizure of power.
34
The Truman administration shared this sense of impending crisis. State Department officials informed President Truman that in France and Italy, "totalitarian forces" were seeking to capitalize on economic weakness to undermine the governments and defeat the American aid program. Officials estimated that at least $ 350 million would be required simply to keep essential imports flowing into France between October 1947 and March 1948.
35
On November 10, the administration asked Congress for $ 328 million for France, to cover a shorter period: December 1947 to March 1948. The administration was bolstered in its ap-
 
Page 84
proach to Congress by a CIA report stating that "France is of greater strategic importance than any other continental European country except the USSR. . . . If France is lost, Europe is lost."
36
By mid-December, $ 284 million of interim aid had been approved for France.
This economic crisis in the second half of 1947 did not come as a surprise to American observers; after all, the CEEC's chief purpose had been to examine thoroughly each nation's financial and industrial position. Moreover, in September the State Department had asked overseas embassies to comment on the reports that each nation made in the CEEC about the state of its own economy. In early October, Caffery sent to Washington his analysis of the French report, and it helped place in perspective the economic crisis of SeptemberDecember 1947. He pointed to three basic reasons why French industrial production had been so slow to move beyond the 1938 level, which it had reached by 1946. Capital equipment and manpower depletion were foremost among causes of slow industrial activity. But two bad harvests out of three since the war compounded an agricultural crisis due, again, to a shortage of capital machinery, fertilizer, and farm labor. Financial and monetary disequilibrium  inflation, a hopelessly complex and inefficient tax system, budget deficits  contributed to a weak trade position and to social unrest. Indeed, the Monnet Plan itself, which focused government resources on capital equipment often at the expense of housing and agriculture, had been both inflationary and unsuccessful in providing consumer goods. Based on the huge task ahead of France in rebuilding its infrastructure, Caffery thought France's projection in the CEEC report of export-import equilibrium by 1951 was overly optimistic.
37
From the American perspective, then, French economic problems were not limited to just the industrial collapse in the wake of the war. For American aid to be effective in rebuilding France, reforms both in the internal financial life of the nation and in its trade relations with other European countries would have to be introduced. But in France, such reform threatened the stability of the fragile centrist coalitions that the United States very much wanted to protect. This contradiction between American objectives and French political limitations proved the most enduring characteristic of the Franco-American relationship in the era of the Marshall Plan.
The belief that the Marshall Plan implied the transformation of European life on every front took hold not just in the French government but in opposition parties as well. The PCF initially floundered in searching for an appropriate response to Marshall aid, but by the early fall,

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