Europe: A History (219 page)

In 1945, however, the immediate problem lay with the intentions of the British and American Governments. London and Washington were politically supreme in Western Europe. They could easily have taken the lead in the formation of new European institutions, or indeed in opposing them. They did neither. In the field of international co-operation they looked principally to the United Nations;
politically, they were preoccupied by the growing confrontation with Stalin. They had no special vision for Europe.

The lack of intent, however, was not immediately evident. Churchill’s personal involvement in the early post-war years boded well for official British support. Only later did it become apparent that the ruling British Labour Party did not share his views. The most that it did was to encourage the discussions which was to lead to the Council of Europe (see below). A Labour Party pamphlet entitled
European Unity
(1950) stressed that ‘no iota of British sovereignty’ was negotiable. The Americans, too, exuded goodwill. The OECD, which acted as the conduit for Marshall Aid, seemed to be a first step in the direction of European integration. Only in 1949–50, when Marshall Aid was running down, did the limits of American as well as of British interest become clear.

The first person of stature to identify the direction in which Europe was moving was Winston Churchill. Rejected by the British electorate in July 1945, Europe’s most admired war leader had leisure to reflect. ‘What is Europe?’ he wrote. ‘A rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding-ground for pestilence and hate.’ In 1946, in two landmark speeches that were to prove prophetic, he expressed views that were not very popular at the time. On 5 March, at Westminster College in Fulton (Missouri), with President Truman at his side, he spoke of ‘the Iron Curtain’:

From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line, lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe—Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia… This is certainly not the liberated Europe which we fought to build up.
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Churchill rejected the likelihood of an early Soviet attack on the West, but he believed that Moscow was intent on ‘indefinite expansion’. He called for ‘timely action’ of the sort that had been lacking ten years earlier against Nazi Germany. US opinion was ‘almost universally hostile’.
¹⁰
In London,
The Times
bristled with disapproval, announcing that ‘Western Democracy and Communism have much to learn from each other’.
¹¹

On 19 September, in Zurich, Churchill appealed for ‘a kind of United States of Europe’. Time, he said, might be short; the spread of atomic weapons might soon reinforce existing divisions. The first step had to be a partnership between France and Germany. ‘If we are to form a United States of Europe …’, he declared, ‘we must begin now.’
¹²
The future of the ‘European family’ depended on ‘the resolve of millions to do right instead of wrong’. So the appeal was not economic or political, but moral.
The Times
sniffed at this ‘outrageous proposition’. ‘Even in Western Europe,’ it commented, ‘there is little to suggest that the unity so much spoken of… is on the way.’ The founder of the pre-war European movement, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, was one of the few to congratulate Churchill. ‘Now that
you
have raised the European question,’ he wrote, ‘the governments can no longer ignore it.’
¹³

In this period, Churchill’s strategic vision postulated a ‘fraternal association’ of
three interlocking circles made up of the British Commonwealth, the ‘European Union’, and the United States. Britain was to act as ‘the vital link between them all’. He correctly identified the competing interests which were to cause tremendous strains in the ensuing decades by pulling British foreign policy in three different directions at once.

Churchill’s views made him the natural choice for chairing the Congress of Europe which was privately organized in The Hague on 7–10 May 1948. Some 800 eminent invitees were asked to ponder the problems of European disunity. A strong German delegation attended, with Konrad Adenauer at their head. The cultural commission was chaired by the exiled Spanish minister and writer Salvador de Madariaga. In their debates, they recognized the principle of ‘supra-nationality’: the need for states to surrender part of their sovereignty in the interests of common institutions. Churchill’s statement enshrined the loftiest ideals:

We must proclaim the mission and the design of a United Europe whose moral conception will win the respect and gratitude of mankind, and whose physical strength will be such that none will dare molest her tranquil sway … I hope to see a Europe where men and women of every country will think of being European as of belonging to their native land, and wherever they go in this wide domain will truly feel ‘Here I am at home’.

De Madariaga waxed equally eloquent:

This Europe must be born. And she will, when Spaniards say ‘our Chartres’, Englishmen ‘our Cracow’, Italians ‘our Copenhagen’, and Germans ‘our Bruges’… Then Europe will live. For then it will be that the Spirit which leads Europe will have uttered the creative words: FIAT EUROPA.
¹⁴

The Congress was undoubtedly carried away by the force of its own enthusiasms. But the final communiqué called for practical steps such as the creation of a European Assembly and a European Court of Human Rights; and a liaison committee was formed to keep the Congress aims alive. This latter body was destined to adopt the name of ‘European Movement’, of which it was indeed the progenítor. Apart from Churchill, its honorary presidents were Schuman (France), De Gasperi (Italy), and Spaak (Belgium). They had now to see whether any of the ruling governments might adopt their ideas. Given the truculence of the USSR, it was obvious that they could only hope for support from the governments of the West (see below).

By the end of 1947, therefore, Churchill’s Iron Curtain was becoming a reality. Three events removed all lingering doubts: the creation of Cominform; the February coup in Prague; and the Berlin Blockade.

Meeting in the Polish mountain resort of Szklarska Poręba in October 1947, communist delegates from the USSR, Eastern Europe, France, and Italy founded the Communist Information Bureau. Its purpose was to co-ordinate the strategies of fraternal parties. To the outside world, it looked suspiciously like a revival of Comintern, an instrument of subversion, the harbinger of a new ideological offensive.

The Communist coup in Prague took place on 25 February 1948. The Czech communists had been sharing power with the socialists for two years; but their fears of a rising socialist vote meant that their own influence might soon decline. Their involvement in a genuine democratic system equally meant that they could not gain supremacy by manipulation, as in neighbouring Poland; so they resorted to force. Armed workers and militiamen appeared on the streets. Red Army garrisons were rumoured to be preparing for action. Non-communist politicians were arrested, and their parties dissolved. Jan Masaryk was thrown to his death from his ministry window. Klement Gottwald, the communist boss, said ‘it was like cutting butter with a sharp knife’. President BeneŠ, pliant as ever, did not resist. For the second time in ten years, Eastern Europe’s most promising democracy had been subverted without a shot fired in its defence. Western opinion took fright. Fearing a Soviet attack, five West European countries formed a 50-year alliance providing for economic and military co-operation. The Brussels Treaty of 17 March 1948, signed by Britain, France, and the Benelux group, was the precursor of the new security alignments now congealing.

The final blow fell in Germany. The German Economic Council was preparing its new plan. The key proposals envisaged a radical currency reform, involving the exchange of ten old Reichsmarks for one new Deutschmark, and a new central bank—the Bank Deutscher Länder (the ancestor of the Bundesbank). The Soviet commissioner, Marshal Sokolovsky, would have none of it. On 20 March 1948 he and his aides marched out of the Allied Control Commission, never to return. The Grand Alliance was finished.

Stalin had reached the point where restraint was no longer paying dividends. Soviet diplomacy had failed both to persuade the Americans to leave Europe and to prevent the growing integration of Germany’s Western zones. With active American assistance, Western Europe could only grow in strength. So the time had come for the Russian bear to growl. The Soviet Army could not risk a direct assault; but it could demonstrate its hold on the vulnerable, and highly symbolic, city of Berlin. On 1 April 1948 Soviet patrols began interfering with traffic in the corridor between Berlin and the Western zones, but to no effect. On 18 June the D-Mark and the BDL Bank were introduced. This, from the communist viewpoint, was an act of aggression; on the 24th Soviet troops sealed off Berlin completely, to save their zone from invasion by the Deutschmark. The German capital was under blockade, and would remain so for 15 months. The Cold War had begun.

Western Europe, 1945–1985

Post-war Western Europe is easily defined: it consisted of the countries which were not occupied by the Soviet Army, and which did not fall under communist control. These countries belonged, however, to two distinct groups. One was made up of neutrals, who stayed outside the various military and economic associations of the era; the other, larger group was made up of those who became
members either of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or of the European Economic Community (EEC), or both (see Appendix III, p. 1335).

Western Europe was also distinguished by the fact that in 1945 it was still the home base of the world’s colonial empires. Indeed, with the exception of the USA and the Soviet Union, whose imperialisms did not conform to the traditional type, there were no imperial powers that were not West European. Germany had been stripped of its overseas colonies in 1919. Italy suffered the same fate in 1946. But the British, the Dutch, the French, the Belgian, and the Portuguese Empires were largely intact. The dissolution of these empires in the early post-war decades constituted a fundamental element in the changing European scene. Decolonization was a necessary precondition for the emergence of a new European Community of equal, democratic partners.

During and immediately after the Second World War, many European imperialists had hoped that they would be able to keep, or to reconstitute, their empires. ‘I have not become His Majesty’s First Minister’, said Churchill, ‘in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ But he did.

There were many reasons why, by 1945, the maintenance of Europe’s empires had become virtually impossible. First and foremost, the élites of the colonial peoples, many of them educated in Europe, had learned the nationalism and democracy of their masters and were now vociferously demanding independence. The links between the colonies and the home countries had weakened during the war. There were no longer the resources available to restore them by force; nor was there the will to perpetuate the rule of one race over another. The USA, on whom Western Europe now depended, was resolutely opposed to old-style colonialism; and so was the United Nations. Imperialism was no longer either viable or respectable. The main question was whether the imperialists would bend to the wind of change or try to stand against it. Nothing better reveals the gulf between Eastern and Western Europe at this stage. At the very time that the Soviet Union was extending and consolidating its empire over the peoples of Eastern Europe, the imperial governments of Western Europe were desperately seeking means to dismantle theirs. For some reason, these twin aspects of European imperialism are rarely discussed under the same heading.

The process of decolonization was immensely complex, and many of the complications derived from conditions beyond Europe. But each empire possessed its own ethos; each possessed a variety of territories ranging from self-governing dominions to colonies and trusteeships; and each wielded very different degrees of military force. Except for Britain and Portugal, all the imperial powers had been defeated and occupied during the war, and started from a position of weakness.

The British Empire, which occupied an area roughly 125 times larger than Great Britain, was already in an advanced state of transformation. All of the ‘white dominions’ had been fully independent since 1931; and many other crown possessions were being prepared for self-rule or native administration. Of 250,000
employees of the British Colonial Office in 1945, only 66,000 were from Britain. The test case was India, a subcontinent of 400 million people where Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent resistance had attracted world-wide attention. The postwar British Labour Government decided to grant India unconditional independence. On 15 August 1947 the last Viceroy took the salute in Delhi as the Raj saw the British flag lowered for the last time. India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon all arose as independent states. There was an orgy of intercommunal massacres between Muslims and Hindus, but nothing aimed directly at the British.

Several of the smaller dependencies caused much greater trouble. In May 1948 Britain returned the mandate of Palestine to the UN after years of violence both from Zionist terrorists and from Arab rebels. In Malaya, the communist insurgency lasted from 1948 to 1957; in Cyprus, the war against Eoka from 1950 to 1960; in Kenya, the Mau-Mau campaign from 1952 to 1957; in Egypt, the struggle culminating in the Suez Crisis from 1952 to 1956; in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), the emergency over white UDI from 1959 to 1980. Elsewhere in Africa, a procession of peaceful acts of independence started with that of Ghana in 1957 and Nigeria in 1960. At the end of the process, almost all of Britain’s former colonies had joined the British Commonwealth, a voluntary association originally founded for the self-governing dominions. South Africa left in 1961, Pakistan in 1973. The residual administrative functions of the Commonwealth Office had been transferred in stages to the Foreign Office (FCO) by 1968. Preferential Commonwealth tariffs were terminated in 1973. The dissolution of the world’s largest empire was essentially complete within a quarter of a century.