HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

The most striking post-war development was the division of Germany into two states by the "Iron Curtain", a term first used by Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945)  and later, in different circumstances, by Churchill.  By no means planned by the Allies (though the Morgenthau Plan had toyed with idea of dismembering Germany, just as Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929)  and Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), had done in 1918), the division of Germany proceeded in step with the development of the Cold War; the defeat of Germany provided the opportunity and the Cold War the rationale.

As with Europe as a whole, troops on the ground in 1945 largely dictated the character and loyalties of the two Germany's, but, even after the establishment of the two republics in 1949, a unification of Germany remained a theoretical possibility until the rejection by the new Federal Republic's first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (1876–1967) , of the "Stalin note" of March 1952, which offered the possibility of unification at the price of the Federal Republic of Germany not entering into an alliance with the western powers.

What followed was the German "economic miracle", the transformation of the bleak and battered landscape of post-war Western Germany into a thriving industrial economy that quickly became the powerhouse of Western Europe, although when the two German Republics were formed in 1949, neither appeared destined for economic success. Both owed their existence to the Second World War, but in the Anglo-American Bizone, anti-Nazism had quickly been replaced by anti-Communism, a process made seamless as it had Germany's experience of 1945 to build on, whereas in the Soviet zone which became the GDR or German Democratic Republic, anti-fascism and the idea that German anti-fascist forces had played a great role in freeing the country of the National Socialist regime became what has been described as the GDR's "congenital myth".¹⁷

The contrast between the two states, the one becoming the outstanding example of a western synthesis of capitalism and social democracy and the other the most formidable example of the Soviet Bloc's command socialism can be found in the ideologies and economic policies of Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) , on the one hand, and the hard-line Communism of Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973) , who almost out-Stalined Stalin, on the other. European economic development was on the cusp of the end of industrialisation and the beginning of the post-industrialisation era. 

This was not yet apparent to most observers, for the very name of the major step towards the European unity, the European Coal and Steel Community,  demonstrates that the economic common sense of the time prioritised coal and heavy industry. Both western and Soviet Bloc states were able to make advances within the bounds of an economic outlook that was about to become moribund.

The Soviet Union and its satellites were as good at building steel works and giant shipyards as their western competitors, but the former failed to satisfy the emerging demands of consumers, just as they failed to provide political choice. Inevitably the first stage of European recovery had to be along the old lines - coal, steel and the rebuilding of the infrastructure - and here the Eastern European economies were able to compete.

But, and here the two Germanys can be taken as representative, a gulf opened when it came to the consumer revolution in the production of automobiles,  refrigerators and other "white goods" to satisfy the aspirations of consumers, it was West Germany and Western Europe which made progress.  A famous Italian film of 1948, directed by Vittorio de Sica (1901–1974) , was Bicycle Thieves,  a title and plot that would have been puzzling in Western Europe a decade later.

The success of the Western European economies in recovering from the nadir of 1945 was infinitely superior to the much more limited progress made by the Soviet Bloc, but it is easy from an early twenty-first perspective to underestimate the limited but real achievements of the Eastern European economies in the first post-war decades. When the wave of what was virtually the looting of defeated and overrun states by the Soviet Union was over, towns and cities were rebuilt, if brutally and insensitively, while new industrial towns were established.

Central planning saw employment and basic security implemented and was effective in the production of coal, iron and steel, though poor at encouraging agricultural production. Statistics were, of course, massaged for five-year plans could not be seen to have failed, but the success of Soviet science was seen as phenomenal in the West and was symbolised by the launch of Sputnik in 1957,  while higher education was a priority in most Eastern European states, to an extent which contradicts the widely held belief that education and economic prosperity necessarily go hand in hand.

East Germany may have lagged behind its western neighbour, but itself became by far the most economically successful state amongst the People's Democracies, even though the uprising of June 1953, crushed by the Red Army and followed by the mass exodus of professionals and skilled workers to the West, demonstrated that without Russian intervention the GDR could have collapsed. The Hungarian revolt of 1956  again demonstrated the internal contradictions of the Eastern European economies and its suppression demonstrated that even post-Stalin, no significant deviations from Marxist-Leninism would be permitted.

The war had brought the USA, as well as the USSR, into the heart of Europe, though it was essentially the disintegration of the wartime Grand Alliance that made it stay there, and American aid via the Marshall Plan  undoubtedly played a major role in assisting the recovery of Western Europe and determining its political complexion; the results of the Italian election of 1948 were important here in that they resulted in a resounding victory for the Christian Democrats as was Adenauer's narrow victory in the first elections to the Bundestag in August 1949.

Parallel, however, to the close association in defence and politics with the United States was a movement towards European unity. A Congress of Europe met in The Hague  in May 1948 to discuss various plans for closer integration and this led to the formation of the Council of Europe the following year, which in turn set up a parliamentary assembly and then, in succession, to the Schuman Plan, the subsequent formation of the Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community (EEC).  Whether these twin developments were complementary or whether the latter involved a degree of anti-Americanism is arguable, especially in the case of France. Although Ludwig Erhard, often seen as the pioneer of West German recovery, claimed that the recovery owed nothing to American economic support, the FDR was in general more sympathetic towards US policies.

As with so many aspects of post-war Europe, it is difficult to see the moves towards what was to become the European Union as a direct result of the Second World War, if only because of the pre-war antecedents, such as Aristide Briand's (1862–1932)  "Memorandum on a European Federal Union" (1930) and Jean Monnet's (1888–1979)  collection of essays, entitled The United States of Europe (1931); indeed most of the best known proponents of European unity in the post war period had been promulgating it before the war.

Nevertheless, the war and its immediate aftermath, undoubtedly, gave a great fillip to the movement in that two of the motivations behind it, that a divided Europe inevitably seemed to lead to war and that individual national states could not compete in economic and political power with the USA, seemed clearly evident. Yet, paradoxically, it was the threat from one super power and the protection of the other that provided the context for the post-war success of European supra-nationalism and the most important reason for it, the rapprochement of France and Germany.

Ever since 1870 and even more earnestly from 1918, France's main diplomatic aim had been the containment of what was, if only potentially, the major continental power. Although the defeat and division of Germany reduced that potential, France was, at least as determined as in 1918 to exact a territorial and economic price in order to contain the country it still regarded with hostility. France's initial refusal to join its zone of occupation with those of Britain and the USA when the latter set up the Bizone was largely because it objected to a process intended to assist German recovery and was still intent upon exacting reparations.

After Versailles, Britain and the USA had failed to support France's need for security and the memory of the way the Anglo-Saxon powers had reneged on the Treaty of Guarantee by which they had agreed to defend France against a future German attack and had been lukewarm in the enforcement of the Versailles settlement still rankled. From 1948 the Cold War resulted in commitments that gave France and Western Europe as a whole the necessary security, for the cooperation that had proved impossible previously.

Added inducements for rapprochement were a realisation of the precariousness of France's great power status especially as its colonial problems mounted and above all, the perception of the advantages of economic cooperation. Thus, the shield of the NATO alliance, though France's attitude to the Soviet Union was more ambivalent, her membership of NATO less solid, and her acceptance of West German re-armament more reluctant, than those of other members of the Alliance, provided the basis for closer German-French relations. The Elysée Treaty of 1963, signed by Adenauer and French president Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970)  codified this rapprochement.

The parallel growth of intra-European economic cooperation, which was to result in the EEC, led to mutually convenient closer ties in a variety of fields. It is striking, however, that defence has been the field in which Franco-German cooperation was least evident. The failure of Robert Schuman's (1886–1963)  proposal for a European Defence Community in 1950 and France's virtual withdrawal from NATO in 1956 revealed basic divisions in the European approach to defence. Subsequent attempts at combined European defence arrangements have come to little and, although the European Union may have become an economic super-power, it remains a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War dependent upon NATO for its defence.