Alan S. Milward and a Century of European Change

Fernando Guirao, Frances Lynch, Sigfrido M. Ramirez Perez

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136466076
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

The main purpose of the book is to introduce the work of Alan S. Milward and to acknowledge the full magnitude of his scientific contribution to contemporary British and European history. The book is a collection of essays which provide a better understanding of Alan Milward's extensive intellectual work for future scholars and facilitate the knowledge and transmission of his published work to present and future generations of students, scholars in the various disciplines concerned, and the general public. The series of original contributions which this book contains are related to or reflect critically upon Milward's own contributions to the fields of political, diplomatic, and socio-economic history, political science, economics, international relations, and European Studies in general. This book honors Alan Milward through a better understanding of his many pioneering contributions in the fields of contemporary European history in general, and the history of European integration in particular. Although the volume does not aim to be a substitute for Milward's work itself, it illuminates and assesses his creative process along fifty years of continued and intense work, as well as the impact of his main work, and the continuing relevance of his main theses today.

1	Nation-states, Markets, Hegemons Alan Milward’s Reconstruction of the European Economy Charles S. Maier

Sometimes after many years, even decades, of productive intellectual work, the author himself, or his readers, discern underlying questions that have driven his investigations across apparently diverse fields of inquiry. Alan Milward, to the immense sadness of all who have known him, will not be able to carry out such a work of retrospective reflection. But as a historian who shared some of his inquiries and took pleasure in the originality of his thinking I should like to attempt that task. This essay seeks to present the major studies from the 1960s until about 2005 as part of an unfolding historical reflection on the political context of recent European economic history.¹ Alan was of course an economic historian, ready to interpret and deploy the usual quantitative data the profession draws on, but it was the world of national states, large and small, that generated the numbers.

A word first about our relationship: I met Alan at a major conference in Bochum in June 1973, which was organized by Hans Mommsen, Dietmar Petzina, and Bernd Weisbrod on ‘Industrial System and Political Development in the Weimar Republic’. This meeting sought to bring together the exciting work in the political economy of Weimar then being opened up thanks to the new availability of firm archives as well as public papers and statistical material.² Among notable historians present were Tim Mason, who died in 1990, and Gerald Feldman, who passed away in 2007, both of them close to me. It was an exciting moment of research. I still possess a photo of several of us—Alan sporting a very large beard—in sooty coal-miner suits following a descent into one of the last functioning Ruhr mines. But in fact my intellectual collaboration with Alan rested more on our shared interests in post-1945 inquiries, which we took up later in the 1970s, in particular on the history and impact of the Marshall Plan. These issues involved us in several debates around the time of the fortieth anniversary of General Marshall’s famous speech of June 4, 1947, and they provided a reason for Alan to invite me a couple of times to the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence to address his seminar or serve as an external examiner. Both of us—Alan eventually in far greater detail and with a much wider range than I—sought to remove the mythology and reverence that surrounded the Marshall Plan. Not that we believed it was insignificant or ungenerous, only that we shared a commitment to studying its role soberly and without sentimentality. We collided occasionally with Charles P. Kindleberger, a tremendously productive and likeable economic historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with whom I maintained a personal friendship, but who felt, I fear, that we were attacking an episode into which as a young economist he had poured heart and soul and intellect. I admired Kindleberger tremendously, but he always thought Alan and I wanted to reduce the Marshall Plan to insignificance. In any case, these years saw a close collaboration between Alan and me, and he wrote an important chapter for a volume Günter Bischof and I edited on Germany and the Marshall Plan.³ We both continued our research into postwar political economy, but at the EUI, Alan was in a position to encourage a new generation of talented students to work in detail on related themes and to produce in 1992 an important summary of this research: The European Rescue of the Nation-State. I was diverted to different themes whereas he continued as the preeminent historian of Western Europe’s economies in the decades after the devastation of World War II.

I am not in a position to review systematically the fields Alan researched with his ferocious archive-based specificity, lucid intelligence, and remorseless questioning of accepted pieties. It has been over two decades since we explored the same area although there were conferences and meetings together into the 1990s, and I followed the work of the students I had come to know at the EUI. This essay, though, attempts to think about the underlying themes Alan found important throughout his publishing career. His early scholarly publications concerned the performance and sacrifices of national economies in the Second World War—Germany’s and two countries under the German yoke from 1940 to 1944—following which he wrote one of the surveys of the economic history of World War II in the celebrated series produced by the University of California Press. From there he went on to examine the topic where our work intersected: the recovery of postwar Western Europe and Germany during the cold war, at a time when the United States played a significant if not hegemonic role. That period coincided with his repeated service in Florence. Finally, as official historian of the United Kingdom’s entry into and participation in the European Economic Community, he published an authoritative opening volume which appeared in 2002. His final published statement was a distillation of several of the major historical issues he had been addressing in this long-term project, which he compressed in masterly fashion just five years ago into the Schumpeter lecture series at the University of Graz.

A Recurring Argumentation

Each of these chronological segments—the economics of World War II, the sources and nature of the European economic recovery after that war, and the United Kingdom’s relationship to the Franco–German initiatives that went from the Coal and Steel Community to the Common Market—drew Alan into detailed studies on a diversity of subjects any of which alone might occupy a scholar for life. Surveying the forty-year achievement as a whole, we can discern several recurring themes, some argued very openly, but one largely implicit and to be interrogated in retrospect. All these themes are embedded in Alan Milward’s continuing engagement with the argumentation already in print: the explicit weighing of explanations and models, and efforts to find more adequate explanation remained characteristic of his approach throughout.

The overtly explicit theme, which Alan himself identified as his continuing leitmotif at the outset of his final major study, The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy, was the continuing concern with the ongoing vitality of national politics and national communities. Nation-states play an irreducible historical role vis-à-vis both nonpolitical market forces and against supranational or potentially imperial political visions. From the first work on the wartime economies to the final reflections on the political input into the enlargement of the European Union (EU), Alan Milward always insisted on the power and persistence of national political motivations. For roughly half of Alan’s career, he lived and worked in an academic milieu, which, one can safely generalize, tends to downplay the value and contribution of ‘pure’ market forces. Alan’s work shared some of that overall stance but on historical and not ideological grounds. He did not indict market principles for their unequal outcomes or their alleged entailing of authoritarian enforcement, as, say, Karl Polanyi had done at a moment when Milward would have been a schoolboy.⁴ But perhaps as a serious student of German economic development, Alan always understood the power of state institutions to shape market forces. What contributed particular force to these postulates was that they persisted during the second half of his career, that is, during the decades when social scientists and political leaders alike emphasized anew the power and indeed the beneficence of market forces.

Alan’s work retained instead the conviction that the political framework and political motivations remained the formative, and at least after World War II, decisive influences upon economic outcomes. The individual studies contributed to a continuous demonstration that politics and economics could not really be disentangled. Economic outcomes depended not primarily on structural conditions (or perhaps he took them for granted as background givens) but on economic policies—a finding that sounds trite but is not really so. Economic policies in turn—both under fascist and democratic regimes—were the outcome of politics.

But the politics remained the politics of the nation-state. Even as Alan insisted on the role of national political choices vis-à-vis market logic, so too he argued for the persistence of national calculation and interest in the face of any supranational commitment. He structured one of his books on the postwar era, The European Rescue of the Nation-State, as an extended explanation of how national policy-makers had managed to shape supranational institutions precisely to render postwar nation-states viable in the turbulent postwar conditions. He maintained, convincingly I believe, that the emerging European Economic Community could be crafted precisely because it advanced the national interests of each of its members. The argument in itself does not seem remarkable, but it had to be asserted in the face of a vast sentimentalizing of the European construction, which was and remains generally celebrated as the path that prevented a resumption of war in Western Europe. Europeanist sentiment may have played a more important role than Milward wanted to admit, especially in the emerging Christian Democratic parties, but he was certainly correct in that the European Communities were hardly needed to preclude a renewal of the French-German warfare. With the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe on one hand and a powerful United States on the other—a United States moreover committed to a long-term military alliance and to West European ‘integration’ no matter how fuzzy the British found the concept—and the deep division of Germany, there could have been no resumption of the constellation that had led to the two wars of 1914–45.

Obviously the Soviet and American roles in Europe meant that the influence of supranational economic commitments emanated not just from the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and then the post-1957 Communities. It was inherent in post-1945 bipolarity. As a historian of the wartime economies, Milward was familiar with a far more oppressive effort to impose a supranational hegemony, namely the German New Order. This meant that his historical investigations covered two sources and indeed two eras of hegemonic design, albeit very different in intent and structure. The first sprang from the ambition of Fascism, in particular as represented by the case of the National Socialist regime with its aspirations for a New Order in Europe which really meant a German economic empire. The second emanated from a source that Alan certainly beheld as far more benevolent—the American effort to preserve a primacy through European multilateral institutions. The United States spoke for the virtues of extended markets and had contested Nazi policies. But by its size, its immunity in the war, its technological virtues and agricultural bounty, it too represented a hegemonic force that the Europeans needed to contest even as they drew upon it. At the end, Milward’s argumentation was one that confirmed the cunning of history. The nation-state prevailed in the face of the universalizing market and the power of economic hegemons. It did so because as a hegemon the United States had an interest in expanding international market regimes and ended up helping to advance the market and sustain the nation-states. The remainder of this essay will try to fill out this argumentation.

The underlying condition of international economic life, Alan suggested from the outset, was the search for nation-state viability. And domestic economic systems had to be studied in light of their political constitution and administration. Milward’s early analysis of The German Economy at War emphasized this throughout. This study, now forty-five years old, would have to be modified today in some respects, in particular its emphasis on Hitler’s preparation for a short war but his insufficiencies for a long struggle. Richard J. Overy and Adam Tooze have demonstrated the seriousness of Hitler’s rearmament effort for a long or short struggle; however, there was no way Germany could maintain its effort against both the United States and the Soviet Union.⁵ In fact, Milward hardly thought differently. ‘No nation had ever previously spent so vast a sum in peace time on preparations for war’ (27). Still, the economic agencies of the Reich were a tangle of conflicts and priorities and often totally unfeasible quotas. In spite of them, ‘Germany overran half of Europe with an economic system which [General Georg] Thomas, quite justifiably, called “a war of all against all”’ (27).⁶ He went on to argue in this early book that ‘there was a complete absence of systematic planning in the German “New Order”^‘(30). The Reich was to serve as the center of heavy industrial production; consumer goods and foodstuffs would be supplied from the occupied territories. Milward’s brief book shows how this calculation had to be set aside in early 1942, but with the survival of the Soviet Union and the entry of the United States, no German economic strategy could have worked. Albert Speer’s organizational talents were remarkable—a view that Tooze harshly contests—but he could not work miracles and understood by early 1945 if not earlier that the war was lost with the overrunning of the Ruhr and Upper Silesia (188–189). German economic strategy—whether the original concept of provision for a successful Blitzkrieg or the later reorganizations effected by 1942–43—still presupposed that conquests had to be retained to supply the armed forces needed to retain them.

Milward largely retained these views a dozen years later in his general economic history of the Second World War, War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945.⁷ After careful calculation of payments, exports, and redirected labor, the 1977 account likewise reaffirmed the earlier findings that Germans had massively exploited French economic resources. But Milward also went on to estimate military output and efforts in the other belligerent powers as well as to devote attention to technological change, labor and population, and the comparative regulation of wartime economies. In the three decades since the work appeared other economists have provided more systematic comparative estimates and have relied less on the early U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.⁸ Still valuable, though, is Milward’s concept of a strategic synthesis, which demonstrated how military planning and the economic calculus of conquest were fatefully interdependent at each stage of the long struggle. Happily Hitler got it wrong.

The same lesson is derived from Milward’s studies of the French and Norwegian wartime economies, The New Order and the French Economy and The Fascist Economy in Norway. These books appeared in close succession in 1970 and 1972. They showed that Alan was wrestling with several overarching ideological issues as well as the more narrowly economic questions that he also set out to answer. Was the National Socialist concept of a European New Order anything more than a pretense for German economic exploitation of its conquests? Was the meaning of a European-wide Nazi rule anything more than just German economic administration? The French economic situation was the easier to understand. Through the conscription of French labor and the forced sale of French coal and iron at quasi-confiscatory prices, the French economy was pressed into service for wartime Germany. The lesson of the French study was that conquest might pay, and Alan began his book in fact with a review of German ideas of how conquest might be made to pay. With some subtlety he showed that although the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 protected individuals in occupied lands from depredation, they did not allow for the protection of national and collective resources. For Milward, this omission indicated the ‘illusions of liberal thought’ (14), as did the pre-1914 notion identified with Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, that modern war must cost more than it was worth.⁹ After all, if the expense of modern war proved far greater than anticipated, the costs must just make the conqueror more anxious to extract resources from this victory. The Nazi experiment flew in the face of all liberal thinking since the eighteenth century; but that was the point. State needs, not those of welfare maximization, were the determinants of economic life. Fascism in particular ruthlessly subordinated any concerns with individual welfare to that of the collectivity. And in the case of Nazi policies, state needs were to be met through war and occupation.

In fact, Alan argued, the idea of an integrated New Order had to wait until after 1942, because French assets were to be integrated not systematically but in terms of their utility for the invasion of Russia. The demands of Blitzkrieg, rather than the optimal architecture of an integrated but subjugated Europe, meant French resources were to be tapped sector by sector. Of these iron ore was the most important. By the time of the Speer-Bichelonne agreements of October 1943, the concept was changing: France would not be encouraged to produce military goods for Germany but consumer goods so that Germany might increase military production inside the Reich.¹⁰ This implied, though, that Speer must acquiesce in Fritz Sauckel’s demand for conscripting more foreign workers to labor in German factories.¹¹ As Milward no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• List of Archives
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• A Lifetime’s Search for a Theory of Historical Change—An Introduction to the Work of Alan S. Milward
• 1. Nation-states, Markets, Hegemons: Alan Milward’s Reconstruction of the European Economy
• 2. The Early Milward: An Appreciation
• 3. Alan S. Milward and the European Economies at War
• 4. Nazi Planning and the Aluminum Industry
• 5. Economic History and the Political Economy Approach
• 6. The Impossible Dream: Transferring the Danish Agricultural Model to Iceland
• 7. The Burden of Backwardness: The Limits to Economic Growth in the European Periphery, 1830–1930
• 8. Was the Marshall Plan Necessary?
• 9. Integrating Paradigms: Walter Lipgens and Alan Milward as Pioneers of European Integration History
• 10. Competing Utopias? The Partito Comunista Italiano between National, European, and Global Identities (1960s–1970s)
• 11. Economy and Society in Interwar Europe: The European Failure of the Nation-State
• 12. Unlocking Integration: Political and Economic Factors behind the Schuman Plan and the European Coal and Steel Community in the Work of Alan Milward
• 13. The Evolution of a ‘Protoplasmic Organisation’? Origins and Fate of Europe’s First Law on Merger Control
• 14. The 1966 European Steel Cartel and the Collapse of the ECSC High Authority
• 15. Was It Important? The United States in Alan Milward’s Postwar Reconstruction
• 16. When History Meets Theory: Alan Milward’s Contribution to Explaining European Integration
• 17. The Significance of the Milwardian Analysis for the Dutch Marshall Plan Debate, and Vice Versa
• 18. History, Political Science, and the Study of European Integration
• 19. Interests and Ideas: Alan Milward, The Europeanization of Agricultural Protection, and the Cultural Dimensions of European Integration
• 20. The Scandinavian Rescue of the Nation-State? Scandinavia and Early European Integration, 1945–1955
• 21. The European Rescue of Britain
• 22. The Establishment of the EEC as an International Actor: The Development of the Common Commercial Policy in the GATT Negotiations of the Kennedy Round, 1962–1967
• 23. Allegiance and the European Union
• Conclusions and Perspectives for Future Research
• Appendix 1: Career History of Alan S. Milward
• Appendix 2: Published Work of Professor Alan S. Milward, 1964–2007
• Appendix 3: List of Completed Ph.D. Theses for Which Alan S. Milward was the Main Supervisor
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index