_____________________________________________________________________

H-DIPLO ROUNDTABLE REVIEW

Marc Trachtenberg, _A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European
Settlement, 1945-1963_ Princeton University Press, 1999. xi + 402 pp.
Abbreviations, bibliographical references, index. $65.00 (cloth) ISBN
0-691-00183-9; $19.95 (paper) 0-691-00273-8.

Reviewers:

Diane Shaver Clemens, Thomas Maddux, Tony Smith, Odd Arne Westad
______________________________________________________________________


Author's Response by
Marc Trachtenberg
<trachten@polisci.ucla.edu>
University of Pennsylvania

These comments raise a number of important issues, but before I deal with
them, I want to thank all four commentators for actually understanding
what the book was about. I'm sure most readers of H-Diplo would agree with
me when I say that no author can take this for granted. It means that
instead of having to spend a lot of time clearing up misconceptions, I can
pass directly to the real issues at hand.

Let me respond first of all to the most basic criticism: that the book is
too narrowly focused on the German question, that too many things are
ignored, that I push the argument too far. Now, it is certainly true that
the book is very narrowly focused. But this is not necessarily a defect.
The real issue is whether that kind of focus -- that kind of method -- is
warranted.

This is not the first time I've had to think about this sort of criticism.
A few of the people who read the manuscript prior to publication made the
same general point. And about a year ago, I gave a talk at the University
of Virginia; Stephen Schuker was one of the commentators. He pointed out
(paraphrasing a famous remark of Acheson's) that I made things "clearer
than the truth." And I think I startled the audience a bit by saying, in
effect, "yes, that's true -- but that's what I think historians have to
do." What I had in mind was the point that our goal was not simply to give
some kind of mindless photograph of the past; our aim was to make what
happened intelligible. And that meant that it was important to focus in on
the heart of things -- to get at what was driving the course of events --
and to avoid muddying the waters by trying to cover all the bases and
spending a lot of time talking about things of marginal importance.

The real issue, then, is not whether it makes sense to be narrowly
focused. That would be a flaw only if it could be demonstrated that what
is left out is of fundamental importance. The real issue is thus empirical
in nature: was ideology, for example -- and by that I mean the Wilsonian
ideology -- much more important in shaping American policy than I had made
out?  Was it wrong to argue that Soviet policy was essentially rooted in
concerns about Germany, and especially (during the Berlin crisis period
from 1958 to 1962) in concerns about German nuclear aspirations?  Am I
wrong in general to emphasize power, especially military power, and to
play down the importance of such things as democratizaton and European
integration? Let me discuss each of these questions in turn.

I.

The first issue has to do with the role Wilsonianism played in shaping
American policy, and the commentators who bring this up focus quite
naturally on U.S. policy on eastern Europe in the immediate postwar
period. Arne Westad, for example, says that for Truman and most of his
advisors, Wilsonianism -- in particular, with regard to eastern Europe --
"seems to have been a very real perspective indeed." He stresses the point
that although Truman was "highly unlikely to go to war over Eastern
Europe, he never accepted Soviet hegemony, and made its dissolution a
precondition for normal diplomatic intercourse with Moscow." And Tony
Smith says I am mistaken to argue that in May 1945 the United States "more
or less gave up on trying to save democracy in Poland."

Let me respond to this last point first. The issue here is: what exactly
did the U.S. government do, after May 1945, to try to save democracy in
Poland?  When I first started studying these things, I took it for granted
that the U.S. government, especially after Roosevelt's death, was
committed to a program of self-determination for eastern Europe. The Yalta
agreement had called for free elections in Poland. Those elections, of
course, were not held; instead, a Communist police state was imposed on
the country. I fully expected to see the Americans bring up this issue,
especially when they met with the Soviets at Potsdam in July: "you guys
promised free elections, you're not keeping your promises, why not?" But
when you go through the Potsdam documents -- which, by the way, is a
wonderful collection, my favorite volume in the whole FRUS series -- you
find nothing of the sort. You look up "Poland" in the index, you read the
pages referred to there, and you just don't see the Americans pursuing the
issue at all. This certainly was a dog that didn't bark. That fact struck
me as enormously revealing, as did the fact that diplomatic recognition of
the Warsaw government was never withdrawn -- and as did the fact that
(according to a document cited by Mastny and referred to in a footnote on
p. 32 of my book) Molotov evidently saw Potsdam as an acknowledgment by
the western powers that they had "lost eastern Europe."

Now, what is to be made of the Westad argument that Wilsonian ideas played
a key role in shaping U.S. policy toward eastern Europe in 1945-46?  I
have three problems with what he says on this issue.

First, I think he is simply mistaken when he says Truman "never accepted
Soviet hegemony" in eastern Europe. Perhaps the most striking piece of
evidence here is the extract from the Forrestal diaries which showed
Truman at Potsdam saying that the world was going to have a "Slav Europe
for a long time to come," but that he didn't think this was "so bad." (I
quoted the document on p. 28, and included a facsimile of it in the
website,
http://www.history.upenn.edu/trachtenberg/documents/forrestal.html).
Truman's goal, as he said here, was to try to deal with the Russians in a
"very realistic" -- i.e., unideological -- way. That document,
incidentally, was of particular interest to me because the key passage had
been deleted from the published version of the Forrestal diaries. It thus
provided a very good example of the way our understanding of the period
had been distorted by the fact that declassification is a highly
politicized process; in other words, this sort of thing helped me
understand why it was that people had gotten the impression that American
leaders had refused to accept eastern Europe as a Soviet sphere of
influence.

The second point relates to the relative importance of Truman and Byrnes.
My claim is that Byrnes was the real maker of American policy in the
second half of 1945; I think Truman gave him a very free hand in this
area. I think this comes through quite clearly from the Potsdam documents;
the Messer book is also very good on this subject. I also think Byrnes
knew what he was doing, and in 1945 that was to try to engineer a kind of
"amicable divorce" with Russia. It is true that the policy changed in
early 1946, but this to my mind was not rooted in Byrnes's
"inconsistency"; it was not as though the policy shifted simply because
the political winds at home had started to blow in a new and more
anti-Soviet direction. When I was working this part of the story out, I
explored this issue in some detail, and, if people like, I could explain
some of the thinking on which this conclusion is based. But for the time
being let me just say that I think the shift was a quite intelligible
response to the situation created by Soviet policy toward Turkey and Iran.

Truman's views, Byrnes's role -- these are empirical issues. I think the
preponderance of the evidence supports my interpretation on these issues
(obviously, because otherwise I would not have argued along those lines),
but there is room for disagreement here, in large part because Byrnes was
very much a lone cowboy and it is hard to document exactly what he was
thinking.

But there is a third problem with Westad's argument that is more than just
an empirical issue. For Westad points out -- and he is quite correct to do
this -- that neither Truman nor any other American president was willing
to go to war over eastern Europe. And presumably he would admit that the
Soviets, for their part, were also willing to live with a divided Europe
rather than go to war with America. But if so, where was the problem?
What was all the fuss about?  Was the Cold War simply a war of words?  To
be sure, people at the time might have thought that a third world war was
a real possibility. But looking back, are we entitled to say that this was
an illusion-that American power and Soviet power balanced each other so
completely that neither of those two countries, and certainly no third
country, had any room to maneuver for fundamental change in the system?
Were the two sides thus locked into the status quo, and did what seemed to
be a relatively stable system come into being when both sides finally
recognized that simple fact?

This is what I used to believe, and in fact I argued along those lines in
the piece on the Berlin crisis I published in the "History and Strategy"
book. I now think that whole line of argument is simply wrong, and that
the risk of war was real. If so, then the question has to be: what was
generating it?  If the fate of Poland, and indeed the fate of eastern
Europe as a whole, was not a major factor here since the Americans were
just not willing to go to war over this question, then what was the real
issue?  Where exactly did the two sides' vital interests collide?  It is
this question that justifies, to my mind, the great emphasis I place on
the German question.

II.

This brings me directly to the second big issue, the one relating to my
interpretation of Soviet policy. Westad says that I'm "almost certainly
wrong" in my belief "that the fear of an independent and rearmed German
state drove Soviet policy" during this period. And Thomas Maddux thinks
that my view that the German nuclear weapons question lay at the heart of
Soviet policy during the Berlin crisis is too extreme. Yes, this was a
factor, he says, but there were other factors as well, and it would be
better to take a multi-causal view and include all of these factors in the
explanation.

Let me admit at the start that I view this business of Soviet motivation
as by far the weakest point in my argument. And there are two reasons why
I say this. The first has to do with the problem of evidence. I feel quite
comfortable making claims about American policy, or even British or French
or West German policy, because the evidence is so good. But with Soviet
policy, the story is quite different. To be sure, some very interesting
things from former Communist sources have been published (especially under
the auspices of the Cold War International History Project). But in the
final analysis, what we have are just bits and pieces, nothing at all like
what we have from the western side. Maybe I'm wrong about this, and I know
that people who have worked in eastern sources have a rather different
impression, but I just have not seen the kind of evidence that even comes
close to answering some of the most fundamental questions I have about
Soviet policy.

The second reason is that there is a basic and obvious problem with my
whole theory of Soviet policy: if the German nuclear weapons question was
as important as I say, the Berlin crisis should have ended when the
Americans made it clear, beginning in late 1961, that they were willing,
as part of a settlement, to guarantee that Germany would remain
non-nuclear. This problem, as I say in the book, is not fatal to the
argument, since it only shows that other factors came into play at that
point. But there is no denying the fact that it is a weakness, and that
Soviet policy, especially in 1962, remains a puzzle to me.

Given these problems, how is the historian to proceed? You can take the
line that you shouldn't write anything until you know the whole story --
that is, until you have enough evidence to allow you to deal in a pretty
conclusive way with all the big issues. But most of us feel you can hope
to produce something of value on a subject like the Cold War even when the
evidence for one of the major actors remains fairly limited. How then
should you proceed?  Soviet policy can't just be ignored. But how, given
the limited evidence, is the Soviet side to be dealt with?

The answer is that you have to rely on presumption -- that is, on your
sense for what Soviet policy "had to be," what the USSR's most basic
concerns "had to have been" -- as well as on whatever evidence you have
access to, including especially evidence from western sources (records of
meetings between Soviet and western officials, and so on). And of course a
basic presumption is that given what the Russians had suffered at German
hands, a certain sensitivity to the German question on their part was very
natural; given that the USSR was in effective occupation of half of
pre-war Germany, and that the Germans were bound to want to change that,
one can take it for granted that the Russians would be very much concerned
with the question of German power. One assumes that the Soviet leaders
knew, both from experience and from what western leaders told them, that
the three western powers were quite willing to live with the status quo in
Europe, and were certainly not willing to come close to war in order to
change it; one assumes they recognized that as long as Germany was weak,
she would be dependent on her allies for protection, and thus could not
contemplate anything other than a purely defensive policy, but that things
might be very different if, as was quite possible, Germany became a strong
and fully independent power. One assumes finally that they recognized that
a strong Germany was a nuclearized Germany-that the only way the status
quo could be threatened was for Germany to recover her strength, and,
given the military realities of the day, that meant to develop a full
nuclear capability-but that that was simply the final stage on a long
road, and that any movement along that road, anything that pointed toward
the recovery of German power and independence, was also bound to be a
source of concern.

Thus the question of German power, and especially the German nuclear
question, were necessarily of fundamental importance. If Germany did not
go nuclear, the Soviets could be relatively relaxed about the situation in
Europe. In such circumstances, their position in central Europe would be
relatively solid. Whatever problems there were could be dealt with in ways
that would not involve any real risk of war. The East German regime could
be propped up through police methods; the Red Army would be the ultimate
guarantor of the status quo there. The refugee problem could be dealt with
by sealing the border, something which, it was quite clear, would not
involve the risk of war with the West. But the development of a German
nuclear capability was the one problem that could not be dealt with in
that way, the one issue where a really vital Soviet interest was engaged,
and thus the one area where sharp diplomatic action-that is, the laying on
of a crisis-was actually warranted. And the assumption here is that
countries do not start crises just to make themselves disagreable-that
they do such things only when really important interests are at stake,
interests that cannot be protected in less risky ways.

Now, all this is just presumption. You try to figure out how the Soviet
leadership "must have" seen the situation, assuming a degree of
rationality on their part. But this kind of analysis is just the
beginning. The reason is that you cannot simply take it for granted that
someone like Khrushchev thought in such terms; to the extent possible, you
therefore need to test this kind of interpretation against the evidence
(meaning whatever evidence we happen to have) -- that is, to see whether
it holds up in the light of what the Soviets were saying and what they
were doing. And I think this basic line of argument holds up rather well
-- at least until you get to mid-1962.

With all this in mind, let me now turn to the arguments Westad and Maddux
make in this general area. Westad says, for example, that the admittedly
limited evidence we have from eastern sources indicates that "Stalin's
main post-war preoccupation (in the short term) was not with German
resurgence, but with the United States harnessing German production
capabilities and military prowess for its coming confrontation with the
Soviet Union." But I find it hard to believe that Stalin was really
worried in the late 1940s about America getting ready for war with Russia,
and that his concern with Germany was limited to worries about how America
might use German resources in a coming military confrontation with the
USSR. For one thing, America was not seriously preparing for war with
Russia in the late 1940s, and Stalin knew, for example, about the very low
rate at which America was producing atomic bombs at this time. For another
thing, America, in the late 1940s, had still not opted for a policy of
rearming Germany. I assume Westad is referring to specific documents where
Stalin or other Soviet officials pointed to America and not Germany as the
real threat, but, given the realities of the situation, I wonder how
seriously such statements (assuming they were made) are to be taken; I
wonder whether Stalin, even if he made a very explicit argument along
these lines, was simply speaking for effect.

Perhaps the most important point to make bearing on this issue has to do
with Stalin's decision in 1948 to blockade Berlin. It was quite obvious,
even at the time, that this move was directed against the western policy
of setting up a West German state. Stalin himself made it clear in a
meeting with the western ambassadors in August 1948 (summarized on p. 80
of the book) that he did not object to the economic recovery of western
Germany, and that the "real issue" was the establishment of a west German
government. The implication was that he would have been quite happy if the
three western powers had remained in charge in western Germany, and that
his real concern was that the Germans were beginning to get too much
power. It is very hard to understand why Stalin would provoke a crisis
over this issue if he had not been fundamentally concerned about the
recovery of German independence and power as such.

What about the Maddux argument about Soviet policy during the 1958-62
Berlin crisis?  He quite correctly points out that I am puzzled by
Khrushchev's failure to close the deal with the Americans in 1962 (when a
U.S. guarantee of Germany's non-nuclear status was in effect included in
the package). But he thinks that I would have found Soviet policy less
difficult to understand if I had not been so preoccupied with the nuclear
issue and had taken a more wide-ranging "multi-causal" perspective, and he
cites some evidence published by Douglas Selvage and Hope Harrison in a
recent issue of the CWIHP Bulletin to support this point of view.

The documents Maddux cites (easily available online, by the way, at
http://cwihp.si.edu/publications.htm) are indeed very interesting, but
they by no means solve the puzzle, for me at any rate. Maddux, for
example, seems to endorse Selvage's view that the most important Soviet
goal in the crisis was "to gain international recognition of the GDR."
But the first document Maddux alludes to, the record of a meeting between
the Soviet and the East German leadership held on June 9, 1959, shows
Khrushchev saying that the West has already recognized East Germany de
facto (pp. 207, 209), that for prestige reasons the western powers do not
want to recognize that state formally, and that to press the issue now
"would hinder the relaxation of tensions."  Therefore, Khrushchev said,
"we don't think it's worth it now to push the West to the wall, so that we
will not give the impression that we are seeking the recognition of the
GDR" (p. 208). And Maddux himself points out at the end of the paragraph
in question that Khrushchev in the meetings recorded in these documents
boasted about his success in achieving "de facto western recognition of
the GDR."  But if Khrushchev really felt he had achieved that goal, how
could his desire to "gain international recognition of the GDR" explain
his policy in this area in 1961 and 1962-that is, his policy of rejecting
a settlement and keeping the crisis alive?

The basic point here is that Khrushchev at the June 1959 meeting was
justifying his decision to put the crisis on ice. The rationale he laid
out can therefore scarcely explain his decision to revive the crisis in
1961, or his refusal to end it in 1962. And the same point can be made
about the sentence in his comment where Maddux ticks off a whole series of
factors which he (and Selvage and Harrison) think played a key role in
shaping Soviet policy: the "growing disparity" between the East and West
German economies, the flight of East Germans to the west, the economic
vulnerability of East German to a counter-blockade if the Berlin issue
came to a head. But these were all reasons given for allowing the crisis
to cool down-for building the wall, for avoiding a "peace treaty" that
would liquidate the rights of the western powers, and so on. They can
scarcely explain the truly puzzling thing, the refusal of the Soviet
leadership to accept a very reasonable deal when the Americans offered it
and the decision to keep the crisis alive in 1962.

Nor can this problem be solved by alluding to Soviet-East German
relations. I simply do not buy the idea that Khrushchev's concerns about
Ulbricht had any bearing on the Soviet leader's reluctance to accept the
American plan for a settlement. Maddux says that my focus on strategic
issues "precludes looking very much at the inner dynamics" of the
Soviet-East German relationship and other intra-Eastern bloc
relationships. But I can assure him that I wasn't blindsided by
preconception and that I did look into the issue (indeed, I had to, since
I was on Hope Harrison's dissertation committee), and I just don't think
the evidence supports the "tail wagging the dog" argument. The East
Germans were totally dependent on Russia, and the Soviets were perfectly
capable of exerting as much control over East Germany as they wanted. They
were certainly calling the shots on the Communist side during the Berlin
crisis. In any event, the bottom line here, I think, is that we are asked
to imagine Khrushchev in 1962 thinking along these lines: "well, I'd love
to accept what the Americans are proposing-it really does give us
everything we can reasonably hope for-but I have to worry about preventing
Ulbricht from getting out of control, so I guess I'll just have to say no
and allow the crisis to develop."  But it's very hard, for me at any rate,
to imagine him thinking along these lines at all.

So the puzzle about Soviet policy in 1962 remains intact. I hope someone
will eventually get full access to the Soviet sources and clear it up.
Until then, we simply have to do the best we can, and when we fail to come
up with adequate explanations, I think we just have to accept that
situation philosophically.

III.

Finally, let me talk a bit about Tony Smith's point that I ignore such
things as the "American decision to democratize Germany and to liberalize
it economically," and that I fail to give European unification the
attention it deserves.

The democratization of Germany is, of course, a very important part of the
system that developed during the Cold War period. Germany today is a very
different country from the Germany the world saw before 1945, and I have
no doubt the transformation of German political culture is a big part of
the reason why the Cold War political system, in the form it took from
1963 on, was as stable as it was. But I view the democratization of
Germany as, in large part, an artifact of the Cold War itself-that is, as
something that came into being to a very considerable extent for
geopolitical reasons. Germany was weak and vulnerable; Germany needed the
protection of the western powers; in that context, it made sense to adopt
their values so as to firm up their commitment. This is just a theory, of
course, and those claims should be explored more in the light of the
empirical evidence. But I am suspicious of the notion that the
democratization of Germany is to be explained primarily in terms of the
American decision to democratize that country-that is, in terms of what
the U.S. authorities did there during the period of the military
government (1945-49). Reforms of that sort, artificially imposed by an
occupying army, cannot in themselves be expected to transform the essence
of a country; when the occupation ends, the reforms can be thrown off. But
geopolitical realities, I think, had a more permanent, more far-reaching
effect; even in this context, they almost certainly, in my view, deserve
to be seen as the fundamental factor; and this warrants the emphasis on
geopolitics.

What about European integration? How important a role did it play in the
central political process, the process that led to a relatively stable
peace during the Cold War period?  I don't think I ignore the issue, but I
do treat it as of more or less secondary importance. It played a certain
role in reconciling the Germans to the division of their country; as was
pointed out at the time, it provided an alternative focus for German
political energies. Beyond that, it is hard to see how it played a
fundamental role in limiting German power or in resolving any of the core
political conflicts that, to my mind, lay at the heart of the Cold War.

The Americans were of course keen on European integration under Truman,
and, even more, under Eisenhower. Smith takes me to task for thinking that
the idea "accidentally emerged in 1947." I had quoted Bohlen talking at
that point about how the three western zones should not be regarded as
part of Germany, but rather as part of western Europe. Smith seems to
think this was an old idea. I would be very interested if he could give an
example of an American official saying something of this sort -- that is,
to the effect that western Germany should not be considered part of
Germany-prior to 1947.

I do think the policy of encouraging European unification was relatively
new. Smith says that Woodrow Wilson had championed this kind of policy
during his presidency, that he understood that "U.S. security interests in
Europe would best be guaranteed by a united Europe that absorbed German
power into a greater unity." But where exactly did Wilson call for such a
policy?  Smith himself says in his book "America's Mission" (p. 87) that
the "foundation of Wilson's order was the democratic nation-state," and
yet the essence of European unification was the idea that one had to have
a pooling of sovereignty -- that is, that one had to move beyond the
nation-state.

But perhaps this sort of approach is a little too legalistic. The more
important issue has to do with the way the main European nations felt
about each other, and I think it is quite clear that Wilson did very
little to promote the cause of Franco-German reconciliation, which is
something he would have had to do if he took the policy of "building
Europe" seriously. A generous America could have done a lot to achieve
that goal, but Wilson was too much of a moralist to contemplate anything
like a generous policy toward Europe from 1919 on.

But I am drifting away from the main issue here, so let me make one last
point about European integration. If the goal was to create a stable
international system, what the story I tell shows, I think, is that it was
possible to overdo it with regard to European unification. A united
Europe, a strong Europe, a Europe able to stand on its own two feet-well,
this was Eisenhower's goal, and he understood that such a Europe would
have to have a nuclear capability of its own. Given that a true pooling of
sovereignties -- that is, a genuine United States of Europe -- was not
within reach (in the near future at any rate), this sort of policy implied
that those European nuclear forces would ultimately be under national
control. Since Germany could not be discriminated against in a system of
this sort, this meant that Germany too would have nuclear forces under her
own control. Thus the policy of "building Europe" was linked to the policy
of accepting-indeed, of encouraging-national nuclear forces. But given
Soviet sensibilities, this policy was a source of tension and instability.
The solution came only when the Americans radically changed their position
and turned away from the policy of "building Europe," Eisenhower-style,
and opted instead for a system based essentially on American power.

Well, there are other things that can be said, but I've probably gone on
for too long already. Let me just close by saying how grateful I was for
these comments. In this reply, I naturally focused on the points of
disagreement, but I hope no one infers from that that I did not appreciate
the many generous things the commentators said about the book. I was
particularly gratified (and a little amazed) by Professor Westad's remark
about the student reaction, and I was also very happy to see that the
website was well-received.

Marc Trachtenberg
Department of History
University of Pennsylvania



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