Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  Indeed, in the summer of 1947, it appeared that the pendulum might be swinging away from Soviet influence. Ever since the war’s end, the Czechs had grown increasingly disenchanted with their communist-dominated government. The strong-arm tactics of the state police had alienated many citizens, and farmers were up in arms over talk of collectivization. Workers, meanwhile, opposed communist demands for increased output without higher wages in return. With national elections scheduled for May 1948, it became increasingly clear that the communists would probably fail to achieve their goal of a majority in the country’s parliament.

  Such an outcome was unacceptable to Stalin, who had had enough of this facade of democracy. He used the United States’ invitation to join the Marshall Plan as an opportunity to show the Czechs who was in charge. Summoning Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister, and Masaryk’s Polish counterpart to Moscow, the Soviet leader ordered them to reject the United States’ offer of economic aid. Both did so.

  To Masaryk, it was obvious that democracy was nearing its end in his homeland. “I left for Moscow as the minister of foreign affairs of a sovereign state,” he remarked when he returned to Prague. “I am returning as Stalin’s stooge.” When a friend asked him how Stalin had treated him, he replied, “Oh, he’s very gracious. Of course, he’d kill me if he could. But, still, very gracious.”

  It was an agonizing time for Masaryk. His friends in Britain and the United States chided him for not standing up to Stalin. If he and his noncommunist colleagues had insisted on accepting Marshall Plan aid, his critics said, they would have won the overwhelming backing of their fellow citizens, making it considerably harder for the Soviets to crack down on the country.

  But in Masaryk’s view, such resistance would have had little or no effect unless the Czechs had strong support from the United States and Britain. A few months earlier, he had traveled to Washington to urge the president and his administration to supply that support. But neither Harry Truman nor his secretary of state, Dean Acheson, would see him. The message was clear: the United States had written Czechoslovakia off. “What happened in Washington broke Jan’s heart,” said Marcia Davenport, an American novelist and close friend of his. Caught in the middle of a maelstrom, Masaryk alternated between despair and frantic gaiety. “He was straining to stay in a position that assaulted and offended everything he inherently was,” Davenport remarked.

  In Czechoslovakia, meanwhile, the conflict between the communists and their democratic opponents grew increasingly bitter. The situation came to a head in February 1948, when Václav Nosek, the communist interior minister and head of the state security police, illegally removed all noncommunist senior police officials from the force. The remaining noncommunist ministers in Edvard Beneš’s cabinet resigned in protest after Nosek refused to reinstate the men he had purged.

  The noncommunists assumed that Beneš would refuse to accept their resignations and keep them in a caretaker government, thus forcing the dissolution of parliament and the calling of an immediate national election. “Facing an implacable foe, the democratic leaders still put their trust in constitutional procedures,” Josef Korbel wrote. “It was the decent procedure of decent men in such a situation, but the tragic weakness of such a process is that the enemy is often not burdened with any such regard for decency.”

  Beneš did nothing to help the ministers’ cause, despite his insistence to Korbel a month earlier that he would never permit the communists to take over the government: “They have found out for themselves that I enjoy a certain authority in the nation….They have come to realize that they cannot go against me.” Beneš assured Korbel that “I shall not move from my place and I shall defend our democracy till my last breath. They know it, and therefore there will be no coup.” But just as at Munich, his brave words meant nothing when the time came for action. Announcing that he planned to remain above the political fray, he refused to confront the communists, who immediately took advantage of the leadership vacuum.

  On February 25, 1948, the masquerade of democracy in Czechoslovakia finally ended. The communists seized control of the government, and Beneš, once again surrendering his country to the demands of a foreign power, obediently signed the list of new ministers put before him. He remained as figurehead president and Jan Masaryk as figurehead foreign minister.

  Two weeks later, Masaryk’s body, clad in blue silk pajamas, was found at sunrise, lying spread-eagled in the courtyard of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, just below his apartment. The Czech communists insisted that he had committed suicide. Nearly half a century later, the Prague police ruled that Masaryk had been murdered. “What died with him,” wrote one historian, “was the liberty of his country.”

  The shocking twin deaths of Masaryk and Czech democracy reinforced the West’s fear of an imminent spread of communism and galvanized it into action. Vigorous measures were taken to keep communists out of power in the governments of France and Italy. In Washington, Congress, which had been dithering over legislation authorizing the Marshall Plan, approved it immediately. Less than a month after Masaryk’s murder, Truman signed the bill into law, granting an initial $5 billion in economic and technical assistance to sixteen European nations, including Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and Luxembourg. Another $8 billion was spent during the four years of the plan’s existence; when it ended in 1952, the economy of every participant country had easily surpassed its prewar level.

  The Marshall Plan marked a definitive parting of the ways between the two halves of the Continent. While western Europe embarked on several decades of unprecedented growth and prosperity, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the rest of eastern Europe sank further into poverty and repression.

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  IN 1949, THE CZECHOSLOVAKIA coup and worries about further Soviet aggression gave rise to another historic event—the groundbreaking decision of the United States, Britain, and Canada to join the countries of western Europe in creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which promised a collective defense by all member nations in the event of an armed attack on any one member.

  The impetus for NATO came the previous year, just days after Masaryk’s death, when Britain, for the first time in its history, committed itself to a peacetime European defense confederation. Its partners were France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. On the day the European treaty was announced, President Truman expressed strong support in a speech to Congress, remarking that the “determination of the free countries of Europe to protect themselves will be matched by an equal determination on our part to help them do so.”

  Truman’s declaration marked an extraordinary about-face for the United States, whose policy since its founding had been a determination to stay away from European military commitments. Indeed, at Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt had announced that all U.S. troops would be pulled out of Europe, including occupied Germany, within two years. But the Cold War had put an end to such aloofness; with the stroke of a pen in Brussels, the United States became a permanent and leading force in keeping peace in Europe.

  Just as dramatic was the change of heart of the European nations, most of which had zealously guarded their neutrality before the outbreak of World War II. Norway was the most striking example. Arguably the least prepared of all the nations invaded by the Germans, it had spent almost nothing on its defenses in the interwar years in the hope of remaining distant from any future conflict. The shock of defeat and calamity of war, however, swept away its ostrichlike attitude.

  The trauma of 1940 “really made us grow up as a nation,” noted one Norwegian who had fought in the war. “Until then we had been part of nothing. We learned the lesson that we had to be prepared ourselves; we couldn’t just leave it to others to fight our wars. We became determined not to be taken with our pants down anymore.” Since the creation of NATO, Norway has remained one of its most stalwart members.

  On a rainy spring morning in 1942, representatives of the exile governments of Belgium, the Netherlands,
and Luxembourg gathered for a meeting in central London. At that point, the outlook for the Allies seemed as dreary as London’s weather: the Soviets appeared to be close to defeat, while the United States and Britain were still reeling from Japanese drubbings in the Pacific. But the Belgians, Dutch, and Luxembourgians had not met to bemoan the present. Trusting that the Allies would triumph in the end, they were there to plan their postwar future.

  The three small nations had much in common. Clustered together on the rim of western Europe, they were precariously situated between two major European powers, France and Germany. Like Norway, they had put their faith in neutrality before the war. Like Norway, too, the German invasion of their countries had disabused them of the belief in every country for itself.

  Only by banding together politically and economically, they believed, could their nations regain control of their destinies. And if all of western Europe formed such close ties, perhaps it could once again establish a measure of influence and sorely needed security. In pursuing these goals, the three governments in exile decided they would lead the way.

  In September 1944, after more negotiations, they signed what came to be known as the Benelux Treaty, which called for the elimination of all tariff duties on the exchange of imported goods between their countries and the establishment of common tariffs on imports from other nations. The treaty also laid the foundation for eventual free movement of workers, capital, and services. As a result of this groundbreaking pact, which took effect in 1948, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg helped change the face and future of Europe. The first stirring of the movement toward European unification, the Benelux Treaty became a catalyst for the more revolutionary steps soon to follow.

  Paul-Henri Spaak

  Among the leaders of the effort was Paul-Henri Spaak, the foreign minister of Belgium. Known as “Mr. Europe” after the war, Spaak became one of the founding fathers of the European union movement, together with such pioneers as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman of France. Thanks in no small part to Spaak’s close involvement, his hometown of Brussels emerged as the movement’s base—home to NATO and various other supranational organizations, including the current European Union.

  It was a remarkable turnaround for a man who had started the war in disgrace. Spaak’s list of sins then were many: he had falsely accused King Leopold of treason, urged Belgium to capitulate to Germany in late 1940, and initially refused to go to England to continue his country’s war effort. Once the war ended, Spaak again became a lightning rod in his homeland when he launched his successful drive to keep Leopold from returning to the throne. In 1950, after the king had won a national plebiscite to resume his reign, Spaak and other leftist leaders orchestrated a new campaign to keep him out, which prompted a full-blown political crisis. A general strike was called, which quickly turned violent. Riots broke out in Brussels and other cities, and several people were killed. With Belgium on the brink of civil war, Leopold finally gave in and abdicated in favor of his son, Prince Baudouin.

  Throughout his checkered political career, Spaak resembled a modern-day Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Confrontational and divisive in his own nation, he worked tirelessly after the war to heal the divisions among the countries of Europe and to bring them together. His transformation from rabble-rouser to international statesman was due largely to his three years in London. Thanks to the many new contacts he made there, his previously parochial outlook on the world became much more cosmopolitan. He even tried to learn to speak English, which, prior to his arrival in Britain, he had adamantly refused to do. He never quite mastered it; his biographer wrote that he was “rather like one of the Marx brothers pretending to talk in a foreign language.” Spaak himself once said, “I’m often told that I look like Winston Churchill and speak English like Charles Boyer, but I wish it were the other way around.”

  Wartime London, as it happened, was a perfect breeding ground for European cooperation. Spaak and officials from all over the Continent worked and socialized together in a way that would never have been possible without the war. Their long stay in the British capital gave them a certain distance from narrow national concerns and allowed them to form close personal and official bonds that bore extraordinary fruit once the conflict was over. “If the European Community is compared to a house, those years of cooperative exile in wartime London are part of the foundation,” wrote the historian Robert W. Allen.

  For Spaak, the integration of Europe became an obsession. In 1944, he took note of a final message that a member of the Belgian resistance had scrawled on the wall of her jail cell shortly before her execution by the Gestapo: “I have opened a door to you which none shall close.” Spaak declared, “When we have won this war, we must unite Europe. We cannot afford any more civil wars among our nations or we will destroy our civilization.”

  Yet even as they worked for European union, Spaak and other movement leaders were eager to retain their close ties with the British. For all their wartime difficulties with Britain, the exile governments were keenly aware of how much they owed the country that had given them refuge when they most needed it. Indeed, many Europeans hoped, as one Dutch official put it, that “Britain, our closest wartime ally and friend, will not only participate in European cooperation but take the initiative.” That could happen, however, only if Britain agreed to abandon its historical insularity and, in Spaak’s words, “consent to think of itself as belonging to Europe.”

  The Europeans looked to Winston Churchill, the man responsible for welcoming them to England in 1940, to lead the charge in aligning his country with the Continent. Initially, there seemed grounds for optimism. A longtime advocate of what he called “a United States of Europe,” Churchill had discussed various permutations of the idea with members of his government throughout the war. To Anthony Eden, he had envisioned a new Europe, guarded by an international police force, “in which the barriers between nations will be greatly minimized and unrestricted travel will be possible.”

  After he lost the 1945 general election, Churchill devoted much of his time and energy to just such a unification campaign. In a speech that “fired multitudes of Europeans with hope and excitement,” he declared, “When the Nazi power was broken, I asked myself what was the best advice I could give my fellow citizens in our ravaged and exhausted continent. My counsel to Europe can be given in a single word: Unite!”

  In 1949, Churchill’s efforts helped lead to the creation of a multilateral organization called the Council of Europe, based in the French city of Strasbourg. Among its ten members were Britain and five of the countries it had sheltered during the war: France, the Benelux nations, and Norway. From the start, however, the council’s raison d’être was unclear; with no power and no authority to act, it functioned, for the most part, as a debating society.

  Spaak, who became the first president of the council’s assembly, grew tired of presiding over “solemn charades” of votes that approved “grandiose schemes [of European integration] which had no chance of being implemented.” In early 1950, he snapped, “I admire those who can remain calm in the face of the present state of a Europe…that for five years has been living in fear of the Russians and on the charity of the Americans. In the face of all this we remain impassive, as if history was standing still and as if we had decades at our disposal…to abandon selfish nationalistic viewpoints.”

  It soon became evident to Spaak and other movement activists that Churchill, for all his eloquence, was unwilling to do anything concrete to make European union a reality and, further, that he and the British had no interest in becoming an integral part of Europe themselves. Indeed, Churchill had made his feelings clear in a Saturday Evening Post article written before the war: “We are with Europe but not of it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated, but not absorbed.”

  As Churchill saw it, Britain’s postwar destiny lay in its empire and a close alliance with the United States. He had underscored that view in his vehement declaration to de G
aulle in 1944: “Every time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea. Every time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.”

  His aloofness from European affairs had its roots, of course, in Britain’s centuries-old discomfort with continental entanglements. But it also had much to do with his and his country’s refusal to accept the fact that its days as a world power were over. It had been bankrupted by the war, and its empire was on the verge of slipping away. But, clinging to the memory of its days as one of the Allies’ Big Three, it couldn’t abide the idea of surrendering any part of its national sovereignty. In the words of the future German chancellor Willy Brandt, Britain was unable to meet European demands to “renounce the insularity of her past greatness” and join the Continent in an alliance.

  Also explaining Britain’s standoffishness was its attitude toward the war. To the Europeans, World War II was a cataclysm that must never happen again. To the British, who had suffered neither invasion nor occupation, it was one of the proudest periods of their country’s history—a “moment of national reconciliation and rallying together, rather than a corrosive rent in the fabric of state and nation.” As Max Hastings remarked, the British came to regard the war “as the last hurrah of their greatness, a historic achievement to set against many postwar failures and disappointments.”

  Whatever the reasons for Britain’s reserve, the European leaders had had enough. Realizing that it would never take the lead in the unification movement, they assumed the initiative themselves in 1950. In the forefront was Jean Monnet, an innovative, far-seeing French political economist who had spent most of the war in Washington, D.C., where he had served as an economic adviser to FDR and been a key figure in the United States’ enormously successful wartime industrial mobilization program.