What purpose does NATO serve?

A question to answer prior to recommitment

Mightier than the sword? Naah.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (“NATO”) was created to implement the North Atlantic Treaty, which was signed in 1949. It grew from the Treaty of Dunkirk, a 1947 treaty between the U.K. and France that was ostensibly intended to guard against a renewal of German aggression but which had a subtext of guarding against the Soviet Union.

So that opening paragraph was written for an article entitled “Does NATO have a future?”, a complete review of NATO’s history and potential futures. However, due to a silly error on my part Wednesday morning, the entire (finished!) article was lost into the ether and is unrecoverable. As a result, I have to recreate the article from scratch. But in so doing, I’ve decided to subdivide it into at least two parts: one on the history of NATO — the events that led to its creation in the form we know it — and one on the future of NATO drawing from that history. Perhaps a third part will be needed, because this first part will only cover the 1940s and 1950s.

Wait a minute (you may well ask), is there so much history in NATO’s formation that the early years need to be covered in that much detail? Do we really need to understand the choices that were made back then? Well, the truth is that the modern era depends entirely on those choices, because none of what happened was inevitable or known as of the end of WWII. Some of the choices were just serendipitous, and yet in retrospect they may seem predestined. In fact, movies made today may show those choices as planned and perhaps a little devious — but they were not.

A giant potato patch?

As the war approached a conclusion, the Allies (the U.S., the U.K., and the U.S.S.R.) had agreed on a basic plan to partition Germany (or what was left of it after stripping out Prussia, Silesia, most of Pomerania, and Alsace and Lorraine) and Austria (as it had existed before the 1938 Anschluss), and their capitals Berlin and Vienna, into three roughly equal sectors, one occupied by each country. When the French objected to their exclusion, sectors were carved out for them — but entirely from the American and British sectors. And the most important part of the plan was to de-industrialize Germany and return it to being an agrarian economy, so that Germany could never threaten Europe again — or, as Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels put it when those plans leaked before the end of 1944, “make Germany into a giant potato patch”. As such, industrial facilities in occupied Germany were to be disassembled and shipped back to the Allies as reparations, and patents and know-how held by Germans were to be transferred to the Allies.

The KdF-Wagon

There were serious objections to this plan, including among diplomats who saw widespread starvation as a result of it, and the sudden death of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, who had been a strong supporter, created more room for American objections. But it was still the operative plan, at least until it ran into British Major Ivan Hirst. Hirst, a college-trained engineer serving at the time as the officer in charge of a tank and equipment repair center located in Belgium, was ordered to Wolfsburg, Germany, shortly after V-E Day to take over a largely-undamaged car manufacturing plant that had just been built by the Nazis in 1938 and had only produced a handful of vehicles before the beginning of the war.

The car produced there was dubbed the KdF-Wagon by the Nazis. “KdF”, or “Kraft durch Freude” (“strength through joy” in English), was the Nazi governmental organization in charge of leisure activities, which was administratively part of the German Labour Front (“DAF”), the umbrella organization that the Nazis set up to unite all workers. Principally it organized package tours (almost 2 million a year just before the war), which were intended to eliminate the “class” distinction in leisure, but one of its other objectives was to produce a “people’s car” accessible to the masses, intended to eliminate the “class” distinction in auto ownership. [When I see socialists argue that the National Socialists weren’t actually socialists, I always ask how they reconcile KdF and DAF with that belief. The standard answer is that KdF and DAF were con jobs. Right . . . the Nazis were conning people into thinking they were socialists by . . . delivering on socialist goals of eliminating class distinctions?]

The Allies had known about the Wolfsburg plant and had bombed it. And at the moment, there was a huge unexploded bomb sitting right in the middle of the key equipment in the plant. Hirst’s orders were to defuse and remove the bomb, then to strip out all of the car manufacturing molds, and to send them to whatever British car manufacturer wanted them. Except that, after taking care of the bomb, Hirst quickly learned that no British manufacturer wanted the molds, because they thought that the car was a piece of junk and building it would be a waste of time.

Hirst disagreed. He was impressed by the car. Yes, it was underpowered for British hills, but that could be fixed fairly easily. And he admired the simplicity of the car, with its air-cooled rear engine, its light weight, and its compact size. He thought that it really was a people’s car, simple to operate and repair. And he was among the group who believed surviving Germans needed direction and work, not more punishment. Plus, the Allies needed transportation, and shipping more Jeeps to Germany was expensive.

So, although Hirst could have just followed orders, pulled and junked the molds, and converted the plant as ordered, he decided to fight to save the small car. His commanding officer supported his judgment. And he convinced the British army to order 20,000 units of the KdF-Wagon. He then had to scrounge parts and equipment to repair the plant, as well as locate scarce food for the townspeople working in the facility and their families, but he managed to get just under 2,500 units built by the end of 1945.

Of course, the KdF-Wagon needed a new name. Hirst decided to use the original name for the “people’s car”, which in German was Volkswagen. Soon he developed a higher-output engine for the car, set up sales and service facilities, and even set up an export operation (although just to Belgium at first). And when his bosses complained that the British public was getting nervous about British officers rebuilding German competitiveness, Hirst learned that a former executive of the German automaker Opel lived nearby, and Hirst ended up naming him as managing director of Volkswagen in 1947 (a position he held into the 1960s).

The 1946 regional elections: The future is now!

While Major Hirst was getting things restarted in Wolfsburg, the Allies were overseeing the restart of German society. Or perhaps the dismantling, because they all were proceeding to remove equipment, factories, and even key personnel, continuing on their original path. And the Soviets were fully cooperative with the shared government. Why?

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we learned what Stalin was thinking at this time: Germany must become communist. But Stalin expected that this would be relatively easy, for three reasons that he laid out to his aides: (1) the Soviet Union would pretend to co-operate with the Allies but would actually be working to subvert their efforts; (2) because the main opposition within Germany to the Nazis had been the Communists, Stalin expected that a de-Nazified Germany — faced with a lack of productive improvements after the war — would choose communism; and (3) once the U.S. grew frustrated with Soviet obstructionism and saw the level of support for the communists, it would withdraw, probably no more than two years after the end of the war. Thus, he saw cooperation with the West as the best path to achieve his goal of Germany in the Soviet orbit. But the price of that first stage of fake cooperation was to hold an election for new local governments early in 1946 across all of the zones of occupation.

Prior to Hitler’s ascent to power, the largest political party during the Weimar Republic (especially in the east) was the Social Democratic Party, which was a socialist (but not communist) party in the model of the British Labour Party — which was now running the postwar British government. When the Great Depression arrived in 1929, both the National Socialists and the Communists splintered the Social Democratic bloc, but the socialist share of public support between the three parties grew to over 70% as the center-right collapsed. The Social Democrats were clearly the largest party in 1933 and also the largest remaining party, though.

Each of the Allies had its own view of how it wanted the election to turn out. The Soviets chose to require that, in the Soviet Zone, the Social Democrats and the Communists be merged into a so-called “Socialist Unity Party” dominated by Moscow’s choices. The eastern head of the Social Democrats supported this choice and became the leader of the Socialist Unity Party. He and the Russians all expected this party to dominate.

However, in the other three zones, the British supported the Social Democrats remaining independent from the Socialist Unity Party — and the overall Social Democratic leadership indeed rejected this merger in all of the other zones, including in Berlin (because the entire city was being administered as a whole, not by occupation zone). Meanwhile, U.S. interests supported an avowedly Catholic party with strong appeal in Bavaria, known as the Christian Social Union Party, and also supported the expansion of this party to the rest of Germany (as a united Christian party, not divided by Protestant or Catholic) under the leadership of former Cologne mayor Konrad Adenauer (discussed later in this article) as the Christian Democratic Party. And in the French Zone, the French organized the Party of the Palatinate to advocate for uniting those regions with France. So all that remained was the actual voting.

And Stalin received a rude awakening when the actual votes were cast.

In the western occupation zones, the Communist Party received well under 10%, with the Christian Democrats narrowly edging out the Social Democrats at the top. In fact, the Communist Party placed last in every western occupation zone. In the Soviet Zone, the Socialist Unity Party won, but narrowly and sometimes only by a plurality. The French also received a surprise when fewer than one-half of one percent of voters in the French Zone supported the Party of the Palatinate, which for all practical purposes ended the idea of further French annexations of German territory.

And in Berlin, Ernst Reuter, the Social Democrat candidate (and former First Secretary of the German Communist Party in the 1920s, who had been a favorite of Lenin’s before being pushed out of the party in a power struggle, then joining the Social Democrats and being elected to the Reichstag, and finally having to flee to Turkey to escape persecution from Hitler and the Nazis), was elected Lord Mayor with just under an absolute majority (48.7%; 63 seats out of 130). The Christian Democrats were second (22.18%, 29 seats). The Socialist Unity Party finished a weak third (19.78%, 26 seats). [The libertarian Free Democrats ran fourth, with 9.34% and 12 seats, permitting them to ally with the Social Democrats for a controlling majority.]

To the Soviets, nothing was more shocking — or more problematic — than the results in Berlin. Reuter had been a leading opponent of the Soviet plan to merge the parties on the left, and his history with the Communist Party left little doubt of his opposition to Stalin. Under the power-sharing agreement, any of the occupying powers could reject the results of the mayoral election, and so the Soviets did. However, the elected city council generally deferred to acting Lord Mayor Reuter, despite Soviet hostility. So, since the Berlin City Hall (known as the Rotes Rathaus for its red brick façade) was in the Soviet sector, the Soviets regularly raised hostile mobs to intimidate “greet” the delegates coming from the other sectors of the city.

A noncommunist future?

Because Stalin insisted on a communist Germany but was willing to accept a neutral Austria (perhaps because so much of the country was rural and mountainous), the same problems did not happen with the joint Allied administration there. Austria proved far less interesting to the Soviets — except for the opportunities it permitted for expropriation, theft, and other crimes; in 1946, the Austrian police reported that over 90% of the crimes committed in the entire country were committed by Soviet soldiers. But in Germany, the Soviet intransigence had led the Americans and British to formulate their own plan (later joined by the French, once they had given up hope of annexing any more of the country) to unify their sectors by 1949 (first known as “Bizonia” and then “Trizonia” after the French joined) and turn the country over to local government. So, although it was taking two years longer than he’d anticipated, Stalin’s projection of a quick U.S. withdrawal appeared to be coming true.

However, the western Allies still had to get a friendly or at least noncommunist Germany to 1949, especially after the U.S. adopted a more confrontational foreign policy with the Soviet Union following George Kennan’s “long telegram” in 1946. During that year, as the de-industrialization of Germany (except in Wolfsburg) continued, Germany also began to experience hyper-inflationary pressures, similar to the Weimar era. The Reichsmark was still the German currency, as it had been since Weimar, and the flashbacks to the prewar era posed a real problem for the western Allies — but the U.S.S.R. continued to print and distribute Reichsmarks, as it was fine with a currency collapse; it believed that hyperinflation would create pro-communist momentum.

Similar to the Weimar era, people who distrusted the currency began to engage mostly in barter transactions, with Western cigarettes as a common substitute medium of exchange. And the early 1947 municipal elections (held in the western occupation zones but not the Soviet Zone) supported the Soviets’ theories about hyperinflation being good for their subversion strategy, as the Communist share of the votes in the west increased to between 10-15%. Another year, and who knew where voters would be?

не кури́ть (no smoking)

U.S. President Harry Truman now had a dilemma. A sizable number of the U.S. military and many of Truman’s advisers still supported the goal of de-industrializing Germany (although maybe not taking it all the way down to a giant potato patch). But Truman’s former Secretary of State (and former Supreme Court justice) James Byrnes believed that the only people to benefit from that strategy would be the Communists. So Truman quickly sent someone he trusted to Germany to look at the situation firsthand: former U.S. President Herbert Hoover (and isn’t it a pleasant change to read about a president and an ex-president from the other party who could work together successfully because each put the country first?). After touring through the three western zones, Hoover reported back that, unless the U.S. planned to exterminate or deport about 25 million more people from Germany, it needed to abandon any de-industrialization plans and offer a lot more help to prevent mass starvation.

The result of Hoover’s visit was indeed a complete change in U.S. strategy. No longer would the western occupation zones be staring at the smoking ruins of German industry (unlike the Soviet Zone). Instead, new Secretary of State George Marshall launched the “Marshall Plan” (officially called the “European Recovery Program”) to rebuild Germany and the rest of Europe, and because of Hoover’s report, the plan had bipartisan support in the U.S. Secretary Marshall also contacted the Soviets about participating, despite the breakdown among the Allies in Germany, and offered aid to all of Europe, including countries occupied by the Soviets. At first, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Poland accepted their invitations to discuss the plan, but the latter two then rescinded their acceptance under pressure from Stalin, and the Soviets blocked Czechoslovakia from attending.

As the program developed, one of the “role models” was the British effort in Wolfsburg led by Major Ivan Hirst, which stood in opposition to almost everything else the Anglo-American allies had been doing since the occupation. It isn’t an overstatement to say that one of the most important factors in postwar West Germany developing in the fashion it did was the certainty of Major Hirst with regard to Volkswagen’s prospects and the steps that he took to put that certainty into action. However, the insecurity created by the Marshall Plan with regard to both Germany and the U.S.S.R. led to the Treaty of Dunkirk (discussed all the way back in the first paragraph).

Western Union (dah-dit-dah-dit-dah)

There were other consequences to the dramatic shift represented by the Marshall Plan as well. In early 1948, a Soviet-supported revolution in Czechoslovakia overthrew its post-war democratic government and put the communists in full non-democratic control of the country, in what was viewed as a direct reaction to the Czech government’s desire to participate in the Marshall Plan instead of following Stalin’s directions to refuse. Now the prospect of direct Soviet involvement in western Germany seemed far less remote, and the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg, all of which border Germany) decided to join the British-French pact to form a five-member organization known as the “Western Union” (with a military command known as the Brussels Treaty Organization), and the pretense that this larger pact was primarily intended as protection against Germany was largely abandoned.

The Western Union realized that its only real security from the Soviet Union would require the involvement of the U.S., which was the only country not reeling under rebuilding pressures as well as the only country with the atomic bomb. But the U.S. was still debating taking French leave from Europe as soon as it could get the new domestic government running in the western occupation zones. One more step that had to be taken was to break the hyper-inflationary cycle, since all of the new money being brought in by the Marshall Plan would be throwing more fuel on the inflationary fire. Western advisors decided that the only way to control inflation in the new region would be to remove any role for the Soviets in printing and distributing currency, which could only be done through the introduction of a new currency, which was to be named the “Deutsche Mark” (or “DM”). This was a decision that the Soviets were anticipating, and they already had a counter-strategy planned for it.

The Berlin Blockade

The western Allies’ intent was to introduce the DM both in the Western occupation zones and in Berlin. Although the Soviets had partly cut off the government of the Soviet Zone of the city from the recognized city government, there was still generally free travel within the city. But the Soviets were unwilling to permit the introduction of the DM and told acting Lord Mayor Reuter that the DM would not be legal tender in the Soviet Zone; only Soviet-issued currency could be used there. Reuter, along with the western occupying forces, nevertheless said that the currency transition to the DM would take place in Berlin. That announcement was made on 18 June 1948, with an effective transition date of 21 June.

Now Berlin was located about 100 miles (160 km) inside East Germany. The German partitioning agreement had not contemplated that the zone divisions would remain for very long — they were only supposed to last until there was a German government “acceptable to all parties” — and there were only three air routes from the western Zones to Berlin specifically identified in the agreements and no land routes. Despite that, the Soviets had informally permitted auto traffic along four designated autobahn routes and a limited amount of passenger and commercial rail traffic to come into Berlin from the western Allied areas. However, starting back in April, the Soviets had begun intermittently denying train access from the western occupation zones to Berlin, just to establish that they had that right if they chose to use it.

And so, in an effort to force the western Allies to give up Berlin, on 24 June 1948, the Soviets announced that they intended to make sure that the only currency circulating inside Berlin was Soviet-issued. The key element to this strategy was a land blockade of Berlin, prohibiting all land transportation between the western occupation zones and the western sectors of Berlin until the DM was withdrawn from use there. After all, the land transportation agreements were informal, unlike the air routes. Before doing this, the Soviets had concluded that the west would be unable to adequately supply Berlin, especially with the coal used for heating German homes during the winter, which was always brought in by train. At the time of the blockade, the western sectors of Berlin only had 45 days of coal on hand, and that was during the summer.

But once again, the Soviets were wrong.

The Berlin Airlift

Although the U.S. actually did consider abandoning Berlin at first, the American military personnel in charge of the occupation, including Secretary of State Marshall, a five-star general who therefore remained on active duty (although not in active service) during his time in the executive branch, strongly believed that this might be the determining action of the entire postwar period and organized a massive airlift to supply Berlin.

One of the strongest backers of the airlift was acting Lord Mayor Reuter of Berlin. The ramp-up of the airlift brought serious privations within the western sectors of the city. But Reuter organized a rally in support of the airlift that attracted 500,000 Berliners from the western sectors to demonstrate at the Brandenburg Gate (the entrance to the Soviet Zone), which showed skeptical Americans that there was indeed popular support within Berlin for this strategy.

Before long, the Soviet-organized harassment at the Berlin City Hall building in the Soviet Zone forced the city council to move to new meeting grounds at the Rathaus Schöneberg in the Western sector. The Soviets tried to turn this into a propaganda triumph, moving an alternate city government into the old building — while the Soviet authorities set up zone checkpoints and sought to isolate their zone from the rest of the city, including by refusing to recognize all-zone passes from the Berlin governing council.

When new elections were held (only in the western zones) in late 1948, Reuter, the leader of the Social Democrats, was the clear overall winner — and he then formed a new city government with members from each of the Berlin parties (except for the Socialist Unity Party, which had been designated by the Soviets to take over the Soviet Zone of the city). Because of the de facto split, the new city council changed Reuter’s official title from Lord Mayor to Governing Mayor.

As months passed, the Americans hired a number of ex-Luftwaffe soldiers as ground crews and maintenance personnel, to provide the manpower needed to support a changeover in the primary emphasis of U.S. supplies to coal. The Soviets never believed that the U.S. and the U.K. could pull this off for an entire winter, and some bad weather at one point reduced Berlin to just a week’s worth of coal reserves. but by spring of 1949, the Soviets finally admitted that their strategy had failed. About two-thirds of the total tonnage shipped by the western occupying forces during the Berlin Airlift was comprised of coal.

At the same time as the Berlin Blockade, the Allies had imposed a counter-blockade on shipments from the western occupation zones to the Soviet Zone, and the Soviets finally concluded, after almost an entire year, that the possibility of the West failing in the airlift was smaller than the probability that the counter-blockade would lead to starvation in the Soviet Zone. Accordingly, the Soviets ended the Berlin Blockade on and formally ended the blockade on 11 May 1949 — but the level of trust between the former Allies was now so minimal that the Americans and British didn’t suspend the airlift until 30 September 1949, in an effort to build surpluses within the western zones.

The Formation of NATO

Germany was no longer being turned into a potato patch. Indeed, Germany was no longer being de-industrialized to any significant extent, at least in the western occupation zones. In fact, the Marshall Plan was focused on rebuilding Germany. And the Americans and British had prevailed upon the former mayor of Cologne from 1917-33, Konrad Adenauer, one of the few prominent prewar German politicians who had remained in Germany without being murdered by the Nazis (although he had spent most of the Third Reich years hiding in rural Germany, moving frequently so the Nazis rarely could catch up to him) and then (as alluded to above), as a Catholic himself, had helped the Americans form the Christian Democratic Party out of the ruins of the old German Centre Party, to serve as chancellor. Adenauer was already 73 years old, but he continued to serve as chancellor until he was 87, earning the nickname “der Alte” (the old man).

Major Hirst went back to England in 1949, and Britain turned the Volkswagen plant over to the local state government. But with all of the effort that the U.S. had already invested in Germany’s rebuild, including the selection of Adenauer, dropping out of German politics was no longer considered to be in the U.S.’s interest. Instead, partnering with the Western Union (and absorbing the Brussels Treaty Organization) was.

But the U.S. had a condition to participating; it wanted to bring in Italy, to bolster the Italian government against the communist party there, and it also wanted to include other willing countries so that the focus of NATO appeared to be more about the entire North Atlantic region instead of just a narrow anti-Soviet threat. The final agreement included the Western Union countries, the U.S., Canada, Italy, Iceland, Portugal, Norway, and Denmark — albeit with some opposition in Iceland, which was really included as more of a staging point between Europe and North America and less because it faced any immediate threats. Although no one was fooled about the true agenda of NATO, the British lord who served as NATO’s original head (until 1957) said at the time that the purpose of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.

Pan-European efforts

After America, Britain, and France turned their occupation zones over to the new “Federal Republic of Germany” (quickly dubbed “West Germany”) under Adenauer, Germany quickly achieved a remarkable economic turnaround that was dubbed the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”). This infuriated Stalin, but it also scared the French, who were still fearful that Germany might once again become powerful enough to once again engage in conquering its neighbors. So the French put forward two proposals to bind the the Central European countries together: one economic and one military.

The first was the Schuman Plan, which proposed placing French and West German coal and steel production under a single authority, to be named the “European Coal and Steel Community”, to which other countries could also belong. The second was the Plevin Plan, establishing a “European Defense Community” with a pan-European defense force. Both of these French plans included the Benelux countries and Italy but deliberately excluded the U.K.

Despite their apparent similarity, the two plans had vastly different objectives. Because Germany was a net exporter of coal and France was a net importer, the French wanted free trade in coal so that French steel producers wouldn’t be at a disadvantage to German producers due to having to pay import duties on coal, which was one of the major costs in steelmaking. The Schuman Plan was intended to create a free trade area for the named goods, thus permitting these goods to be traded in a single market. In addition, four institutions would be set up to administer this single market, to be sure that national laws were the same for all and did not serve to create preferences among countries: a common assembly of national parliamentarians, a high authority of independent appointees, a special counsel of national ministers, and a court to adjudicate cases that might arise under the plan.

By contrast, the Plevin Plan was intended as a plan for a unified European defense without allowing Germany to have an army under domestic control. Every other participant’s army would have been under the primary command of its government, but Germany’s army would have been solely under command of the European Defense Community, not the German government.

In one sense, the Plevin Plan would undermine NATO, by creating a subordinate but separate command structure for troops from the six countries involved, reporting to a Supreme Commander of the European Defense Community, who would then have to coordinate efforts with the Supreme NATO Commander. Since the Supreme NATO Commander at the time was British, and the main driver behind NATO was the United States, this might be seen as a bid by France to get as much power as the Americans and British already had within NATO. And perhaps it was, as Charles de Gaulle later made a similar pitch for French interests within NATO to be as powerful as the Americans and British. As Mark Twain once wrote when denouncing some other plan: “It is un-American. It is un-English. It is French.”

But the pan-European movement also had a goal hidden within the Plevin Plan, because an additional element that was discussed in connection with the plan appeared to require that the European Defense Community act in concert with the European Coal and Steel Community to create a unified European Political Community, a longstanding goal of many Central Europeans. Could the “unification” of Europe be accomplished through the combination of a free-trade zone and a military alliance?

Before that could happen, the treaties for each of the two elements, each of which was designated as the Treaty of Paris, would be required to be ratified by all participants. The first Treaty of Paris, establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, was indeed ratified in 1951. But the second Treaty of Paris, to establish the European Defense Community, had a much more difficult path, because the potential members understood that the treaty would significantly curtail their national sovereignty. Germany agreed, as did the Benelux countries. But both France and Italy kept delaying a vote on ratification, and France finally rejected it outright in 1954, after which Italy didn’t even vote on it.

Of course, NATO may have been seen by the French and Italians as providing enough muscle for European defense. But keep an eye on the Schuman Plan, because the backers of the European Political Community didn’t give up when the Plevin Plan was defeated. The European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 eventually became the European Economic Community in 1957, the European Community in 1993, and the European Union in 2009 (when the Treaty of Lisbon came into effect). And the four organizations set up under the Schuman Plan have become, respectively, the European Parliament, the European Commission, the Council of the European Union, and the European Court of Justice. [Did you ever wonder about the connection between the EU and NATO? As Paul Harvey would have said, now you know the rest of the story.]

The 1953 Sovietization crisis in the east

Stalin had lost, and he knew it. But he still held out hope that he could regain Germany, first by neutralizing it and then by subverting it back into the Soviet orbit. Apparently to that end (although this is still debated among historians), in 1952 he sent the “Stalin Note” (which was actually a series of four slightly different proposals) to the U.S., the U.K., and France, offering to permit a reunited Germany under conditions of strict neutrality. However, nothing in the offer guaranteed free elections throughout Germany, and Adenauer believed that the Soviet Zone, now technically called the “German Democratic Republic” but generally referred to as “East Germany”, would never agree to hold free elections again for fear of a repeat of 1946. As a result, little serious consideration was given to the Stalin Note by the west.

Following this, the pace of Sovietization in East Germany increased markedly, with a resulting decline in workers’ standards of living (indicating, in the impression of many historians, that the Soviets artificially had kept those higher when they were still hoping to take over all of Germany). In addition, the East German government increased the work quotas by 10% with no corresponding increase in pay. This was widely resented in the east, and the decline of East Germany indicated by this led to large-scale defections across the still-porous border between the former Soviet Zone and the western zones. And then Stalin died in March 1953.

The new Soviet government was worried by the growing departures from East Germany, but they felt that they needed to retain the work-quota increase. But by June 1953, the unhappy workers, beginning with construction workers, rioted with demands to improve conditions. Instead, the Soviets sent in tanks and troops. The violent suppression led to few changes in East Germany, but it made West Germany very worried about its continuing safety.

NATO already had become solely focused on the Soviet threat by adding Greece and Turkey as members in 1952, due solely to their location near the U.S.S.R. (because neither was anywhere close to the North Atlantic). But this, combined with the rejection of the European Defense Community, led to West Germany also becoming a member of NATO in 1955.

By contrast, Austria continued under joint administration until 1955, when the Soviets permitted it to reunify and become a neutral country.

France gets huffy

The consequences of West Germany’s economic revival, with a lot of help from the U.S. and the U.K., and then its admission to NATO were not lost on Charles de Gaulle, the war hero who had become leader of France. De Gaulle now realized that the Americans and British saw France as no better than Germany, a marked change from 1945. This was unacceptable to his national pride.

He soon proposed a two-tier NATO, with the controlling tier being composed of the Anglo-American alliance and France. This proposal was met with a cold shoulder in both Washington and London. Although de Gaulle’s attention was quickly distracted by uprisings in French colonies in Africa, the loss of Algeria and the other French colonies was complete in the early 1960s, and de Gaulle then withdrew France from the joint military command in NATO, while retaining membership for other purposes.

Afterword

All of that neatly sets up the reasons for NATO’s existence, as well as the related role of the EU. Germany isn’t a giant potato patch and will not become one in the near future. Basically, although there were a number of petty jealousies influencing its creation, NATO was designed to stop Soviet expansionism throughout Europe. But the failure of the European nations to adopt the European Defense Community also left NATO as the de facto military arm of European integration — despite the prominent membership roles of the U.S. and Canada, which makes each of them into participants in that project, whether they want to be or not.

And we’ll pick up from there in the next part. Be seeing you.