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Three ministers and the world they made
Acheson, Bevin and Schuman, and the North Atlantic Treaty, March–April 1949
Anne Deighton
Introduction
The North Atlantic Treaty (NAT) defined and then cemented the institutional shape of the bipolar system and the ideological contours of the Cold War world. The alliance became the key vehicle for both East–West and West–West communication during the Cold War, and it also shaped the politics of West European states. It has continued to survive and to expand its membership and its functions for over 20 years since the end of the Cold War.
This would have surprised the three leading foreign ministers, Dean Acheson (USA), Ernest Bevin (UK) and Robert Schuman (France), who signed the NAT with nine other foreign ministers on 4 April 1949. It would have amazed them that they had devised such enduring institutional and military structures, and that, over the next 60 years, NATO would both survive and continue to enlarge. For in 1949, all three were far more conscious of the history of the previous 50 years. Etched on their minds – but in different ways – were the disasters of European and global wars; the consequences of the USA’s refusal to sign the Versailles Treaty; the failure of appeasement in the 1930s to deal with nazism and fascism; and the frailty of the wartime alliance that had been forged to fight the war after 1939. All three were more concerned with how Germany’s future might look in the short term; with the nature and strength of the Soviet threat in Europe and the kind of political deal that was now required to meet it; and with resource and reconstruction issues.
This chapter will examine what Acheson, Bevin and Schuman thought they were creating in April 1949, and the high-level personal diplomacy that took place in Washington from 31 March to 7 April 1949. It will show that there were substantive areas of disagreement, and that compromises had to be made to secure a general treaty, as there was no agreed view about the form it should take or of its membership. Yet, it was clear by the end of 1949 that the NAT had triggered a profound strategic and psychological revolution among the Western allies, despite the fact that the militarization of the NAT took several years more. By the mid-1950s, the NAT had facilitated a more activist US policy over West Germany which involved empowering France as the lead nation on the European continent, but which also left the UK as a global strategic partner to the USA, yet also outside the integrative efforts on the continent.
The chapter will conclude by reflecting on the footprint of the 1949 settlement that remains today, at least in two important respects. The first is that the idea of an existential external threat remains the necessary driver for the institutional success of NATO. That is to say, NATO remains at heart primarily a defence alliance, driven primarily by Article 5 of the NAT. This helps us to understanding the continuing perceptions of both Russia and now also of terrorism as existential ‘others’, as this serves to legitimize the continuing presence of NATO. The dominance of the USA over European politics from 1949 has also shaped the direction and depth of subsequent European integrative efforts, and has contributed to a European-wide cultural and political internalization of Atlanticism that has become a part of the politics of European security and integration over and beyond the end of the Cold War. This reveals the ‘stickiness’ of NATO’s institutional presence in the Euro-Atlantic sphere to this day, although the extent to which this continues to depend upon the ‘defence’ dimension of the Alliance remains unknown.
Secret and public diplomacy: 1948
The year of ‘la grande peur’ was 1948. Between 1945 and 1947 diplomacy had failed to secure a post-war settlement, and the risks of an ideological and power political conflict seemed high. Germany, Austria and Japan were still under military occupation. In February, the Soviets masterminded a coup in Prague. In June they blockaded Berlin. Economic crisis loomed in Western Europe and the sterling area, despite the promise of dollars through Marshall Aid. Intelligence reports about the attraction of communist propaganda were mounting. Politicians and planners on both sides of the Atlantic were divided on how to assess the future: they were mindful of the baleful memory of appeasement, yet aware that popular pressures were for domestic reconstruction and peace. The nature of Soviet policy was hard to assess beyond observation of policy on the ground, and analysis of the ideological and geostrategic tenets of the Soviet Union/Russia.
It was against this background of real fear and insecurity that the Brussels Treaty (BT) was drawn up by the UK, France and the Benelux countries. It was Bevin who made the early running for the treaty, particularly with his famous House of Commons ‘Western Union’ speech of 22 January 1948.1 The BT, which was then agreed less than two months later, was multilateral, secured within the UN Article 51, with defence automaticity in Article IV. It received public endorsement from Truman, as well as his private promise of support.2 Before the ink was barely dry the signatories began talks on how to bind the USA to a European project to deliver military security to the western part of Europe.
The welter of negotiations that took place over the rest of the year has been covered in a number of accounts.3 There were private trilateral talks between the USA, UK and Canada from March (about which the other BT powers were not informed); sessions of the BT Consultative Council; and many sets of bilateral negotiations. At the public level, the Vandenberg resolution of June 1948 was a significant indication that public opinion in the USA might now move to a new defence policy, and the BT powers, the USA and Canada then opened negotiations. Negotiators on both sides of the Atlantic moved from the hope that the USA would give military support to the BT or an expanded model of the BT, to exploration of the USA joining the BT, or even creating a new treaty. Military discussion also got under way.4 By September 1948, the planners had come up with the skeleton of what was to become the NAT: while not naming the Soviets or the Germans as the future threat, the draft mentioned mutual defence against an armed attack. It also touched upon economic and social cooperation, self-help and mutual aid. The form, membership, duration and geographical scope of the treaty were not mentioned.5 Hard negotiating then lapsed because of the American presidential elections in which Truman was wrongly but widely expected to lose.6
January–April 1949
As the new year opened, ministers once again began their negotiations. What were the expectations of the ministers as the preparatory talks reached their climax, and preparations were made for the three foreign ministers to meet in Washington at the end of March 1949?
Dean Acheson, appointed as Secretary of State by Truman after his own successful election campaign, was to be the host of this three-way meeting. It was to be the first time he had met his fellow foreign ministers.7 Acheson was a lawyer–politician and had already served under Truman, taking a leading role in the Marshall Plan before leaving office to make money as a lawyer. Acheson’s views hardened over time, but he was still by temperament a classic east-coast American liberal with a natural sympathy for the UK. Urbane, quick-witted, yet with a sharp tongue, he sought to activate a ‘preponderance’ of power in the furtherance of American interests in Europe.8 Acheson saw the treaty instrumentally, as part of a wider European project to deal with the major strategic question of Germany’s future in the face of the Soviet menace. He was irritated by the complexity of the two-, three- and four-power negotiations about Germany, reconstruction and defence, thought that the path towards the creation of West Germany was irreversible, and that the USA had to use the NAT as a ‘carrot to elicit France’s cooperation’ to bring a West Germany into a West European community.9 Truman later reflected that there would have been no NATO without Acheson, who drove through both the decisions on Germany and the treaty’s own institutional arrangements.10
Robert Schuman’s career and approach to life were totally different. A borderland man from Lorraine, Schuman was unmarried, gaunt, aesthetic and almost clerical in demeanour. Yet he was a tough political survivor. He came to the post of foreign minister in 1948 from being prime minister, and was an emblem of stability in the tumultuous politics of the Fourth Republic. He knew both the depth of insecurity about German power that existed in France, and also the importance to the national psyche of the idea of France as a major continental and imperial power. He knew that French leadership in Europe would never be easy, not least because of France’s large communist party, and he was also not a natural Atlanticist. Yet it was clear to him that the USA had now to be an ally of France in peace as it had been in war: how this was to be operationalized in a way that enhanced France’s role in the international system drove Schuman’s strategy.11 So Schuman went to Washington with the intention of seeking progress on Germany, but also with a clear agenda about the ways in which the treaty could benefit France’s own European, geostrategic and economic interests.12 He would have to be flexible on currency reform, a possible new constitution for western Germany and the Ruhr, while playing a hard, two-level game between French domestic opinion and international ambitions and pressures.
Ernest Bevin was one of the most senior trade unionists in Britain, and had held senior government office longer than his other two colleagues. Minister of Labour between 1940 and 1945 in Winston Churchill’s coalition wartime government, he then took office in the 1945 Labour Government of Clement Attlee at the age of 64. He was already tired and in poor health. Bevin’s view of Britain’s role in the world was largely formulated before 1945. In his union career he had seen the malign influence of communist doctrine upon the working man and upon social democratic trade unionism. Yet he appreciated that communism was a force that could be neither ignored nor easily stamped out, and that the Soviet Union – like the interwar employer bosses – was a power with which Britain would have to live. He favoured an intergovernmental, Commonwealth-like approach to the management of Britain’s role as a world power. He also favoured a close collaboration with France, but there is little evidence of a natural affinity with the USA. He had opposed the 1946 US loan, and was on the secret cabinet committee for Britain’s own independent nuclear bomb project. However, Bevin, always a subtle observer of the workings of power, was well aware of the unbalanced power distribution among the USA, Europe and the Soviet Union that the Second World War had exacerbated.
In 1948, Bevin’s sights were set high. He sought actively to promote the role of the UK as a third world force; to...
