Foreign Policy (U.S., 1949-1955), West Germany in The Strategy of Integration

Between 1949 and 1955 German-U.S. re­lations were characterized by the step-by- step transition from military occupation to partial sovereignty. Within a short time span, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), founded in 1949, achieved legal sovereignty, joined the Western Alliance on almost equal terms, and completed the transition from occupied territory to ally, which marked a huge advance in Ger­many’s return to the international commu­nity of nations.

This remarkable change in Germany’s position within the international postwar system was to a large degree the result of Washington’s strategic approach toward Europe in the context of the East-West confrontation. The upgrading of the FRG from occupied to allied status was the logi­cal outcome of America’s strategy of con­taining its Soviet adversary by uniting the non-Communist world in a system of al­liances under U.S. hegemonic leadership.

In Western Europe, Washington was confronted with the simultaneous chal­lenges of preventing the extension of Soviet power into Central and Western Europe and ensuring that Germany would never again become a threat to world peace. The U.S. response to this dual challenge was to advance the integration of the Western Eu­ropean states. By increasing the economic and military strength of Western Europe, integrating it politically, and revitalizing it psychologically and ideologically, the United States hoped to prevent both the expansion of the Soviet Union and the un­controlled resurgence of Germany. This ap­proach met the desire of many European governments to form part of a European economic and security system under U.S. leadership, a process that Norwegian histo­rian Geir Lundestad has described as “em­pire by invitation” (Lundestad 1986, 263-277).

At the point of intersection between the two plans—the strategy of integration and the policy of containment—lay the German question.

The transformation of the FRG from occupied territory to ally was thus built into the conceptual framework of the U.S. containment strategy. The fact that the change took place in a relatively short pe­riod was attributable to the U.S. interests embodied in that strategy and to the in­creasing polarization of the international system from 1950 on.

The Politics and Economics of Integration

The founding of the West German state in May 1949 and the conversion of the Allied military governments to civilian high com­missions ended the occupation period and prepared the way for the step-by-step trans­formation of German-U.S. relations. Al­though Americans and Germany’s Euro­pean neighbors harbored suspicions about the extent of democratization and reform achieved in West Germany during those first years, the strategy of integration re­quired that the FRG be granted increased room for maneuver, coupled with the insis­tence on the strict political, security, eco­nomic, and cultural/ideational integration of the new German state into the Western community of nations.

The Occupation Statute underwent a first revision in the Petersberg Agreement of November 22, 1949. The dismantling of German industrial plants was restricted, and the FRG received the right to establish consular relations with foreign nations and to join international organizations. At the same time, it was to conclude a bilateral economic agreement with the United States on Marshall Plan aid and join the Council of Europe as an associate member. By October 1949 the FRG became a mem­ber of the Organization for European Eco­nomic Cooperation (OEEC), and the Marshall Plan agreement between West Germany and the United States was signed on December 15. By July 1, 1950, West Germany joined the Council of Europe. A comprehensive revision of the Occupation Statute, effective from March 6, 1951, not only brought virtually complete internal self-government but also permitted the es­tablishment of a foreign ministry. In addi­tion, the FRG was one of the six founding states of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), established in Paris on April 18, 1951.

Political integration was accompanied by the reintegration of West Germany into the world economy. The European Recov­ery Program (ERP), commonly referred to as the Marshall Plan after the project’s ini­tiator U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall, was implemented between 1949 and 1952. The United States and sixteen European nations participated in a pro­gram whose financial volume of $14 bil­lion would equate $70 to $90 billion in 2005 prices. Although West Germany re­ceived only 10 percent of the program’s for­eign aid, the ERP helped to stabilize the country’s balance of payments and enabled the import of urgently needed foodstuffs and raw materials for the reemerging in­dustry. The Marshall Plan thus made a sig­nificant contribution to West Germany’s foreign trade balance and also helped to foster a long-term recovery into the growth periods of the 1950s and 1960s. Unem­ployment figures gradually decreased and the economy achieved regular export sur­pluses.

With the intensification of the cold war, and in particular during the war in Korea (1950—1953), economic stabiliza­tion became an important tool of U.S. se­curity strategy. The Marshall Plan was con­sequently integrated into the Mutual Security Program as West German rearma­ment took on priority over reconstruction. The war in Asia accelerated the transitional relationship between West Germany and the United States as it demonstrated to the Allies the urgent need for a West German contribution to European defense.

After the fall of 1949, the Soviet Union possessed a nuclear capability and its superiority in conventional weapons in Europe was now seen as an even greater threat. The founding of NATO in the same year had brought no immediate improve­ment in the situation as far as the West was concerned, and the military now con­cluded that the imbalance could be re­dressed only with the aid of German divi­sions. Another factor in favor of rearmament was that it would ease the fi­nancial burden on the West European al­lies. The most compelling political argu­ment, however, was that the complete integration of the FRG into the Western Alliance would prevent, once and for all, any return to a German policy of walking the tightrope between East and West.

From the summer of 1950, the ques­tion was no longer whether West Germany would be rearmed, but what form rearma­ment would take. The analogy between the Korean and German situations—a dis­torted analogy, yet suggestive—helped to reduce gradually the reluctance of the Western powers, and of public opinion within them, to accept a German defense contribution.

The French prime minister, Rene Pleven, put forward a plan in October 1950 in which a supranational organiza­tion, the European Defense Community (EDC), would cushion the threat West German rearmament posed to the West. The aim of the Pleven Plan was to enable West German troops to be raised without creating a West German national army. The resulting negotiations were tough and protracted and the French, in particular, took a hostile position toward the idea of West German troops that was overcome only by considerable pressure from Wash­ington. Not until May 9, 1952, was a draft treaty finalized. While this treaty was being negotiated, the occupying powers and the FRG, whose policy naturally linked a de­fense contribution to the issue of sover­eignty, drew up what later came to be known as the Paris Treaties, which pro-

vided for the end of the occupation and promised the West German state its sover­eignty, apart from some residual Allied rights.

However, the failure of the EDC also delayed the coming of West German sover­eignty. The treaty establishing the Euro­pean Defense Community was signed by the foreign ministers of the participating states in Paris on May 27, 1952, but on August 30, 1954, the French National As­sembly refused to ratify it. Two years of hard work, by Europeans and Americans alike, to create a European military force had come to nothing. But just three months later, in October 1954, the NATO foreign ministers agreed to accept the FRG as a member of NATO. On May 5, 1955, the Paris Treaties, which included slight modifications to the 1952 agreements, came into force. West Germany was now a sovereign state and a member of NATO.

Personalities played an important role in bringing about this quick turn of events and the rapid integration of a former enemy into the Western community of na­tions.

The Cultural and Ideational Foundations of Integration

From the outset, the functional integration of the FRG into the political, economic, and military structures of the Western world went hand in hand with a program designed at ideational and cultural integra­tion. The main instrument of this intellec­tual reorientation was a comprehensive program of democratization beginning in 1946 and 1947. Yesterday’s enemy was now to be transformed into an allied democracy on the Western model. Thus, the objective of social reform was another integral part of the strategy of dual con­tainment. From the U.S. point of view, it was important for the sake of a stable in­ternational system—and hence for the sake of America’s own national security—that West Germany should be welcomed back into the fold of the Western democracies.

The foundations of this German-U.S. success story had been laid earlier with the end of the war and the events of the early postwar years. The United States was seen to be magnanimous in victory, an image far removed from that portrayed in National Socialist propaganda. The Germans, hun­gry and defeated, soon came to trust the GIs, whose behavior was far different from the excesses of the Red Army. These early impressions, encouraging for the most part, were then further strengthened by the massive economic aid provided under the Marshall Plan.

The United States therefore addressed the West German people directly, through the largest cultural relations programs worldwide designed to encourage Germans to commit themselves to the West without reservation. The programs were designed to bring about profound changes in West Germany through a wide range of cultural diplomacy and propaganda, including edu­cational exchange, information centers, media programs, exhibits, and concerts.

Between 1947/1948 and 1955 almost 12,000 Germans visited the United States (Schumacher 2000, 160). High school and university students, scholars, and profes­sionals toured America to study the work­ings of a democratic society in action and return with a largely positive attitude vis-a­vis the United States and a desire to trans­fer insights derived from the stay overseas. The various programs were complemented by more than 1,600 U.S. experts who toured Germany during the same time pe­riod and contributed to fields ranging from municipal administration to prison reform to educational reform.

For those who could not participate in the overseas exchange programs, informa­tion centers, the so-called Amerika-Hauser (America Houses), developed into a highly popular window into the New World. By 1951 and 1952 there were 48 of these cen­ters and more than 110 reading rooms in West Germany. The libraries played an im­portant role, as they provided Germans with the literature that had been banned during the years of Nazi dictatorship. But the centers also offered exhibits, films, con­certs, lectures, seminars, English-language instruction, and special interest programs for women, teachers, and other groups. They became cherished institutions that not only spread knowledge about the United States but also provided a frame­work within which Germans and Ameri­cans could reconstruct the ideational di­mension of mutual friendship.

Despite the enormous success of those cultural programs, Americans were often unsure about the West German people’s basic attitude to foreign policy. The major West German controversies of the 1950s— rearmament, neutrality, integration with the West, and reunification—confronted the United States with the dilemma that the newborn spirit of democracy might se­riously jeopardize the strategy of dual con­tainment. The gradual relaxing of the Western Allies’ control over the FRG be­tween 1949 and 1955 and the subversive and propagandistic activities of the Soviet Union in West Germany deepened the concerns of U.S. leaders. They reacted to this challenge with a massive propaganda offensive designed to boost the political, economic, and military integration of West Germany. This public-relations effort by the United States thus helped bring about the controlled transformation of West Ger­many from occupied territory to ally.

In its promotion of European integra­tion, U.S. propaganda focused on estab­lishing a causal relationship between Ger­man unity and European unification. Intensive individual campaigns stressing the economic, security, and cultural aspects of integration were intended to defuse the reunification dilemma as a potential dis­ruptive force in German-U.S. relations. Enthusiasm for Europe, it was hoped, would provide the public with a psycho­logical substitute for the deep-seated desire for national unity. As was logical, then, the Americans also supported Adenauer, who like them rejected any notions of neutrality and was committed to the wholehearted al­legiance of Germany to the Western pow­ers. The Eisenhower administration inter­vened in various ways in the 1953 Bun­destag election campaign to improve the chancellor’s prospects. At the same time, an extensive advertising campaign to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy was de­signed to establish the United States in the public mind as a force for peace, relieve the widespread fears of war, and neutralize crit­icism of Washington’s security policy. A similar purpose was served by the deliber­ate contrasting of the U.S. and Soviet models of society, which stressed the fun­damental community of interests of the “free world” and left no doubt as to the su­periority of its moral values and concept of civilization over those of communism.

In one way or the other, most West German citizens experienced American propaganda during the 1950s—through ex­hibitions, books, radio broadcasts, posters, or leaflets. Regular surveys designed to mon­itor the effect on public opinion kept the U.S. government informed of the progress of its program for Germany. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations both be­lieved that U.S. political propaganda in West Germany played a substantial part in bringing the West German public onto the side of the West and keeping it there. The active public-relations campaign pursued by the Americans, the broad concurrence of in­terests between Bonn and Washington, the polarization of the international system, the activities of outstanding figures on both sides, and the United States’ strategic inter­est in raising the status of the FRG trans­formed the country, within a very few years, from occupied territory to ally and so laid the foundation for more than half a century of German-U.S. cooperation.

Frank Schumacher

See also Fulbright Program; Reconstruction of West Germany (1945-1949); Stalin Note

References and Further Reading

Berghahn, Volker R. America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2001.

Buchheim, Werner. Die Wiedereingliederung Westdeutschlands in die Weltwirtschaft, 1945—1958. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990.

Diefendorf, Jeffrey M., et al., eds. American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945—1955. New York: Cambridge University, 1993.

Ermarth, Michael, ed. America and the Shaping of German Society, 1945—1955. Providence, RI: Berg, 1993.

Hanrieder, Wolfram F. “The FRG and NATO: Between Security Dependence and Security Partnership.” In Emil Kirchner and James Sperling (eds.), The Federal Republic of Germany and NATO. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. 194-220.

Junker, Detlef, ed. The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War. A Handbook, Vol. 1, 1945—1968. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2004.

Large, David Clay. Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Lundestad, Geir. “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945-1952.” Journal of Peace Research 23 (1986): 263-277.

Rupieper, Hermann-Josef. Der besetzte Verbundete. Die amerikanische Deutschlandpolitik, 1949—1955. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1992.

------. Die Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie: der amerikanische Beitrag, 1945-1952. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993.

Schumacher, Frank. Kalter Krieg und Propaganda. Die USA, der Kampf um die Weltmeinung und die ideelle Westbindung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1945-1955. Trier: WVT-Verlag, 2000.

Schwartz, Thomas. America's Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1991.