Search

The responses to Andrew Moravcsik's article discuss the main substantive and methodological points raised in it. Although most of the respondents agree that Moravcsik has properly highlighted the importance of commercial concerns for de Gaulle's policy on European integration, they question the validity of his sharp separation between de Gaulle's political and economic goals for France. Several commentators argue that political and commercial concerns (including agricultural concerns) were closely intertwined in de Gaulle's vision of French grandeur. John Keeler brings up another crucial question: Was French agriculture really an obstacle to France's position in Europe? He argues that de Gaulle successfully supported and modernized French agriculture because he was convinced that this would contribute to France's geopolitical position in Europe and the Western world. In two longer commentaries, Jeffrey Vanke and Marc Trachtenberg raise questions about Moravcsik's methodology and use of sources. Both agree that Moravcsik draws on an impressive array of available materials concerning de Gaulle. But they both wonder whether a definitive account of de Gaulle's policies can be written when the documentary record is still incomplete, a point raised by the

Since Gunnar Adler-Karlsson in 1968 published the first attempt at a comprehensive study of the West's “economic warfare†against the Soviet Bloc (Western Economic Warfare, 1947–1967: A Case Study in Foreign Economic Policy. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell), there has been a thin but persistent stream of studies covering the same subject. Adler-Karlsson's title was exaggerated. His theme was one instrument of Western commercial policy, namely the embargo on exportation of so-called “strategic goods†to the Soviet Bloc and China. Because almost all documentation on this subject was still secret when he wrote, his approach was quantitative, relying on the measurement of differences in trend over twenty years between Western exports to the Eastern bloc and to other destinations. Unrefined though this approach was, it remains the one book on the subject which proceeds from trade statistics to policy. The opening of documentary sources has reversed that process. Diplomatic historians have used government records to show how wide were the differences, and sometimes the practices, among Western countries in implementing the embargoes. Their most salient theme has been the demonstration from written records that the decisions about which goods to embargo were genuinely collective and that, in particular, the influence of Britain as an intermediary was surprisingly important in shaping the form and overall impact of these policies. However unilateralist the American hegemon may now be, in the 1950s it was not so. The sustained growth of Europe's economic strength was vital to America's own security; trade embargoes which threatened that growth were not enforced. On the basis of this documentation political scientists have been able to formulate theories of commercial “warfare,†of which Michael Mastanduno's Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) has received the most acclaim.

The conflict between military security and economic security which accompanied the first years of NATO has been much discussed.1 It arose out of the demands of voters in post-war western democracies, many of them with a greatly extended franchise, for personal lifetime economic security. The high unemployment rates and great uncertainties of personal income in the inter-war period were seen by many post-war western European governments as having weakened the fabric of civil society. There was a remarkable readiness, deriving from the desire of restoration regimes to legitimise themselves with electorates which they had largely failed in the inter-war years by satisfying the claims of voters for a larger measure of social security. In some countries-Belgium, France, the United Kingdom —, this was displayed even before the onset of the Cold War reversed the immediate post-war fall in defence spending. The welfare state, as it came to be called, was willingly embraced by politicians whose primary task in their own judgement was to re-establish the nation-states which had collapsed in 1938–40 as the basis of a European order.

Review in this Article Michael J. Hogan. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. xiv + 482 pp. Notes, bibliography, index.

In a recent article in the Scandinavian Economic History Review, R. Karlbom raised an important issue, and one which had not up to that point received the attention it merited.1 This issue is the degree to which Germany was dependent on Swedish exports of iron ore between her invasion of Poland and her defeat of France. Could Germany have conquered Norway, Denmark, France, Holland and Belgium without a regular supply of iron ore from Sweden? Could Sweden, as Mr. Karlbom implies, have stopped the war?

G ermany, unlike the United Kingdom, has no official history of the Second World War. On the 'civil' side the original material for such a study, although scattered and fragmentary, is more generally open to inspection than that of the United Kingdom. On the economic history of the war the published material relating to Germany is still sketchy and incomplete when compared with that relating to Britain. The information in print is piecemeal; areas of Germany's war effort are covered comprehensively, others ignored just as comprehensively. The patchwork nature of this material is perhaps due to two great causes, first the diffusion and destruction in I945 of the evidence available for such a study; secondly the fact that historians approaching the problem have required certain particular information to answer specific questions. What were Hitler's intentions in starting the war? Did he even intend to start a war? How far had his economic preparation gone by I940? What effect did Allied intervention in the German economy have? How far was Allied bombing responsible for Germany's collapse? The answers to all these questions have been searched for and in part found. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, 1 the fullest and best published source of material on the German war economy, was, for instance, undertaken to answer the last of these questions, and to decide on the relative merits of 'strategic bombing' and 'area bombing', a serious matter of dispute between the American and British Air Staffs during the war. It was the work of a team of economists flown out at the German collapse and given special privileges and facilities. It was the publication of some of their work which first corrected the erroneous impression held in wartime about the development of the German economy, and set out the argument that Germany's failure properly to develop her economy at the outset of the war was her undoing. In demonstrating the inefficiency of the organization before Albert Speer became Minister of Armaments and Munitions in February I942, the Bombing Survey weighed the balance down on the other side rather than corrected it. The Blitzkrieg was good strategy and highly successful. The Bombing Survey paid too little attention to the period immediately before Speer became Minister of Armaments and Munitions and thus presented a distorted picture of German economic development. This picture has not been altered either by Klein 2 or by Webster and Frank

German international economic policy in the 1930s has almost invariably been interpreted as an integral aspect of an aggressive foreign policy designed to satisfy the major international political ambitions of the National Socialist government. The changes which occurred after 1933 in Germany’s economic relationships with other countries are always presented as deliberate, positive, choices of policy. There has been considerably more doubt expressed about the precise purpose of these policies but the overwhelming majority of opinion has ascribed to them a nefarious purpose. Historical and economic discussion has focused mainly on the pattern of bilateral trading agreements with central and south-eastern European countries and the creation of a central clearing system in Berlin to support the ever-increasing trade which these agreements produced. In effect six European countries forming a contiguous block of territory in central and south-eastern Europe, all of them relatively low per capita income economies and primary exporters, saw their trade with Germany under these conditions grow steadily as a proportion of their total foreign trade after 1933. They were Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Romania, Turkey and Yugoslavia.