ABSTRACT
This remarkable vision of the Federal Republic in the 1950s dates from the dark days of April 1945; it comes from Goebbels’s last broadcast on Hitler’s last birthday! Its idyllic word picture was intended to show the Germans what they might achieve by victory. That the dream should instead have been realized as the result of defeat was not entirely due to Soviet intransigence, for it is wrong to suppose that the liberality of the USA was exclusively inspired by the wish to save Europe from Communism. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the International Trade Organization/General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the instruments with which the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations sought to create an open world, predated the Cold War. Indeed that war was precipitated by American insistence that aid would be forthcoming only for countries which adopted liberal trade policies. And it was that insistence alone which induced German industrialists-unwillingly at first-to abandon the attitudes of a lifetime and take part in the Organization for European Economic Co-operation, the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community. These were the institutions which made possible the widening markets characterizing the post-war worlds. And without these markets it is hard to see how there could have come into existence the ‘virtuous spiral’ (see p. 115) on which West German export-led prosperity rested. No comparable openings had existed since the years before 1914 and it was equally long since Germany had made comparable efforts in foreign markets. The
West German share of the world trade in manufactures rose from 7 per cent in 1950 to nearly 19 per cent in 1959, which had been approximately its level (allowing for partition) in 1913 whereas in 1937 the figure had been only 16.5 per cent. The consequence was that the Federal Republic’s export surpluses became embarrassing. So far from needing to conduct an ‘export drive’ like the British, the Government was under pressure to get the favourable balances reduced since their accumulation inside the country could not but have an inflationary effect.
