ABSTRACT
Figure 23.1 The Council of Europe (1949) 364 Figure 23.2 The Interparliamentary Assembly of the Western European Union 367 Figure 23.3 The COCOM embargo list (1949) 369 Figure 23.4 The Organization of American States (OAS) (1948) 370
US policy with respect to a European problem
The institutional settlement of peace promoted by the US following the Second World War was not restricted to just the UN. In the midst of the growing antagonism between West and East, a classic recourse followed from the balance of power between the states: the alliance. In 1952 the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 became a permanent body, NATO. In 1955 the Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact, an organization more centrally led and less intergovernmental than NATO. The role of both alliances was to counter aggression against one or more member states. The bipolar world and the fact that both blocs had nuclear weapons with which they could eliminate each other (as they realized during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962) transformed these alliances into direct instruments of power for the two superpowers, which could be used to demonstrate their superiority and deter attacks that might escalate into nuclear war. The permanent nature of theWestern alliance added a further dimension. It offered a visible forum in which states could negotiate on joint policy. The alliance had a public figurehead in the person of the secretary general. The establishment of this Western alliance was politically difficult, because of the German problem. The US and Western Europe had different views on how a de facto divided Germany should be integrated into Europe. Western European states themselves were far from unanimous on how to address the problem. When the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was formed in September 1949 and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was created the following month, the partitioning of Germany took on a more permanent character. The US believed that Western Europe should contribute as much as possible to deterring the Soviet threat. After some time it
was a view to which the UK also subscribed. West Germany should also, it was argued, make a substantial contribution, by participating in the defence of Western Europe and in its economic recovery. To kick-start this economic recovery the US advocated a joint approach within the framework of the Marshall Plan and the creation of a Western European internal market, the engine of which would be West Germany. The US realized that this policy could succeed only if Western European states could be given assurances that there would be no renewal of German dominance (Lieshout 1999, 3). This resulted in a complex of security organizations in Western Europe, with ultimately a central role for NATO, and in a range of economic organizations which would subsequently be subsumed under the term ‘Western European integration’ (see Chapter 26).
