by Tony Judt
The paradox was particularly acute in France. In 1950 the country was still a net food importer. But in the years that followed the country’s agricultural output soared. French production of butter increased by 76 percent in the years 1949-56; cheese output by 116 percent between 1949 and 1957. Beet sugar production in France rose 201 percent from 1950 to 1957. The barley and maize crops grew by an astonishing 348 percent and 815 percent respectively in the same period. France now was not merely self-sufficient; it had food surpluses. The third Modernization Plan, covering the years 1957-61, favored still more investment in meat, milk, cheese, sugar and wheat (the staple products of northern France and the Paris basin, where the influence of France’s powerful farming syndicates was greatest). Meanwhile the French government, always conscious of the symbolic significance of the land in French public life—and the very real importance of the rural vote—sought to maintain price supports and find export markets for all this food.
This issue played a vital role in the French decision to join the EEC. France’s chief economic interest in a European common market was the preferential access it would afford to foreign—especially German (or British)—markets for meat, dairy and grain products. This, together with the promise of continued price supports and a commitment by its European partners to buy up superfluous French farm output, was what convinced the National Assembly to vote for the Rome Treaty. In exchange for an undertaking to open their home market to German non-agricultural exports, the French effectively shifted their domestic system of rural guarantees onto the backs of fellow EEC members, thereby relieving Paris of an intolerably expensive (and politically explosive) long-term burden.
This is the background to the EEC’s notorious Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), inaugurated in 1962 and formalized in 1970 after a decade of negotiations. As fixed European prices rose, all of Europe’s food production became too expensive to compete on the world market. Efficient Dutch dairy combines were no better off than small and unproductive German farms, since all were now subject to a common pricing structure. In the course of the 1960s the EEC devoted its energies to forging a set of practices and regulations designed to address this problem. Target prices would be established for all food items. EEC external tariffs would then bring the cost of imported agricultural products up to these levels—which were typically keyed to the highest priced and least efficient producers in the Community.
Each year, the EEC would henceforth buy up all its members’ surplus agricultural output, at figures 5-7 percent below the ‘target’ prices. It would then clear the surplus by subsidizing its re-sale outside the Common Market at below-EU prices. This manifestly inefficient proceeding was the result of some very old-fashioned horse-trading. Germany’s small farms needed heavy subsidies to remain in business. French and Italian farmers were not especially high-priced, but no-one dared instruct them to restrict production, much less require that they take a market price for their goods. Instead each country gave its farmers what they wanted, passing the cost along in part to urban consumers but above all to taxpayers.
The CAP was not wholly unprecedented. The grain tariffs of late-nineteenth-century Europe, directed against cheap imports from North America, were partly analogous. There were various attempts at the depths of the Slump of the early 1930s to shore up farm prices by buying surpluses or paying farmers to produce less. In a never-implemented 1938 agreement between Germany and France, Germany would have promised to take French agricultural exports in return for France opening its domestic market to German chemical and engineering products (a wartime exhibition in occupied Paris devoted to ‘La France européenne’ emphasized France’s agrarian wealth, and the benefits that would accrue to it from participation in Hitler’s New Europe).
Modern agriculture has never been free of politically motivated protections of one kind or another. Even the US, whose external tariffs fell by 90 percent between 1947 and 1967, took care (and still does) to exclude agriculture from this liberalization of trade. And farm products were from an early stage excluded from the deliberations of GATT. The EEC, then, was hardly unique. But the perverse consequences of the Common Agricultural Policy were perhaps distinctive all the same. As European producers became ever more efficient (their guaranteed high incomes allowing them to invest in the best equipment and fertilizer), output vastly exceeded demand, especially in those commodities favored by the policy: the latter was markedly skewed in favor of the cereal and livestock in which big French agri-businesses tended to specialize, while doing little for the fruit, olive and vegetable farmers of southern Italy.
As world food prices fell in the late 1960s, EEC prices were thus stranded at absurdly high levels. Within a few years of the inauguration of the Common Agricultural Policy, European maize and beef would be selling at 200 percent of world prices, European butter at 400 percent. By 1970 the CAP employed four out of five of the Common Market’s administrators, and agriculture was costing 70 percent of the budget, a bizarre situation for some of the world’s most industrialized states. No single country could have sustained so absurd a set of policies, but by transferring the burden to the Community at large, and tying it to the broader objectives of the Common Market, each national government stood to gain, at least in the short run. Only the urban poor (and non-EEC farmers) lost out from the CAP, and the former at least were typically compensated in other ways.
At this stage most West European countries were of course not members of the EEC. A year after the Common Market was inaugurated, the British—still trying to head off the emergence of a super-national European bloc—suggested that the EEC be expanded into an industrial free-trade zone including the EEC member-states, other European countries and the British Commonwealth. De Gaulle, predictably, rejected the idea. In response, and at the initiative of the UK, a number of countries then met in Stockholm in November 1959 and formed themselves into the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). The member states—Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Portugal and the UK, later joined by Ireland, Iceland and Finland—were mostly prosperous, peripheral, and enthusiastic proponents of free trade. Their agriculture, with the exception of Portugal, was small-scale but highly efficient and oriented to the world market.
For these reasons, and because of their close links to London (especially in the case of the Scandinavian countries), they had little use for the EEC. But EFTA was (and remains) a minimalist organization, a reaction to the defects of Brussels rather than a genuine alternative. It was only ever a free-trade zone for manufactured goods; farm products were left to find their own price level. Some of the smaller member-states, like Austria, Switzerland or Sweden, could thrive in a niche market for their high-value-added industrial goods and their attraction for tourists. Others, like Denmark, depended heavily on Britain as a market for their meat and dairy products.
But Britain itself needed a vastly larger industrial export market than its tiny Scandinavian and Alpine allies could provide. Recognizing the inevitable—though still hoping to influence the shape of EEC policy—Harold Macmillan’s government formally applied to join the European Economic Community in July 1961, six years after London’s disdainful disengagement from the Messina talks. Ireland and Denmark, their economies umbilically linked to that of the UK, applied alongside it. Whether the British application would have been successful is uncertain—most of the EEC member states still wanted Britain in, but they were also justifiably skeptical of London’s commitment to the core goals of the Rome Treaty. But the issue was moot—De Gaulle, as we have seen, publicly vetoed Britain’s entry in January 1963. It is an indication of the speed with which events had unfolded since the Suez crisis that Britain’s rejection from the hitherto disparaged European community prompted the following despairing entry in Macmillan’s private diary: ‘It is the end . . . to everything for which I have worked for many years. All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins.’
The British had little recourse but to try again, which they did in May 196
7—only to be vetoed once more, six months later, by a calmly vengeful French President. Finally, in 1970, following De Gaulle’s resignation and subsequent death, negotiations between Britain and Europe were opened for a third time, culminating this time in a successful application (in part because British trade with the Commonwealth had fallen so far that London was no longer pressing a reluctant Brussels to guarantee third-party trading preferences to non-EEC nations). But by the time Britain, Denmark and Ireland finally joined, in 1973, the European Economic Community had taken shape and they were in no position to influence it as British leaders had once fondly hoped.
The EEC was a Franco-German condominium, in which Bonn underwrote the Community’s finances and Paris dictated its policies. The West German desire to be part of the European Community was thus bought at a high price, but for many decades Adenauer and his successors would pay that price without complaining, cleaving closely to the French alliance—rather to British surprise. The French, meanwhile, ‘Europeanized’ their farm subsidies and transfers, without paying the price of a loss of sovereignty. The latter concern had always been uppermost in French diplomatic strategy—back at Messina in 1955 the French foreign minister Antoine Pinay had made France’s objectives perfectly clear: supra-national administrative institutions were fine, but only if subordinated to decisions taken unanimously at the inter-government level.
It was with this goal in mind that De Gaulle browbeat the other member-states of the European Economic Community in the course of its first decade. Under the original Rome Treaty all major decisions (except for the admission of new members) were to be taken by majority vote in the inter-governmental Council of Ministers. But by withdrawing from inter-governmental talks in June 1965 until his fellow leaders agreed to adapt its agricultural funding to French demands, the French President hobbled the workings of the Community. After holding out for six months the other countries gave in; in January 1966 they reluctantly conceded that in future the Council of Ministers would no longer be able to pass measures by a majority vote. It was the first breach of the original Treaty and a remarkable demonstration of raw French power.
The early achievements of the EEC were nonetheless impressive. Intra-Community tariffs were removed by 1968, well ahead of schedule. Trade between the six member-states quadrupled in the same period. The farming workforce fell steadily, by some 4 percent each year, while agricultural production per worker rose in the Sixties at an annual rate of 8.1 percent. By the end of its first decade, and notwithstanding the shadow of De Gaulle, the European Economic Community had acquired an aura of inevitability, which is why other European states began lining up to join it.
But there were problems, too. A high-priced, self-serving customs union, directed from Brussels by a centralized administration and an unelected executive, was not an unalloyed gain for Europe or the rest of the world. Indeed, the network of protective agreements and indirect subsidies put into place at France’s bidding was altogether out of keeping with the spirit and institutions of the international trading system that had emerged in the decades following Bretton Woods. To the (considerable) extent that the EEC’s system of governance was modeled on that of France, its Napoleonic heritage was not a good omen.
Lastly, France’s influence in the European Community’s early years helped forge a new ‘Europe’ that was vulnerable to the charge that it had reproduced all the worst features of the nation-state on a sub-continental scale: there was always more than a little risk that the price to be paid for the recovery of Western Europe would be a certain Euro-centric provincialism. For all its growing wealth the world of the EEC was quite petty. In certain respects it was actually a lot smaller than the world that the French, or Dutch, had known when their nation-states opened on to people and places flung far across the seas. In the circumstances of the time this hardly mattered to most West Europeans, who in any case had little option. But it would lead in time to a distinctly parochial vision of ‘Europe’, with troubling implications for the future.
Josef Stalin’s death in March 1953 had precipitated a power struggle among his nervous heirs. At first the head of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, appeared likely to emerge as the dictator’s sole heir. But for just that reason, his colleagues conspired to assassinate him in July of that same year and after a brief detour via Georgy Malenkov it was Nikita Khrushchev—by no means the best-known of Stalin’s inner circle—who was confirmed two months later as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This was somewhat ironic: for all his psychotic disposition, Beria was an advocate of reforms and even of what was not yet called ‘de-Stalinization’. In the brief period of time separating Stalin’s death from his own arrest, he repudiated the Doctors’ Plot, released some prisoners from the Gulag and even proposed reforms in the satellite states, to the confusion of the local Party leaders there.
The new leadership, collective in name but with Khrushchev increasingly primus inter pares, had little choice but to follow the path that Beria had advocated. Stalin’s death, following many years of repression and impoverishment, had precipitated widespread protests and demand for change. In the course of 1953 and 1954 there were revolts in Siberian labor camps at Norilsk, Vorkuta and Kengir; it took tanks, planes and a considerable deployment of troops for the Kremlin to bring these under control. But once ‘order’ had been restored, Khrushchev reverted to Beria’s strategy. In the course of the years 1953-56 some five million prisoners were released from the Gulag.
In the people’s democracies the post-Stalin era was marked not just by the 1953 Berlin revolt (see Chapter Six) but by opposition even in such obscure and typically cowed imperial outposts as provincial Bulgaria, where workers in tobacco factories rioted in May and June of that same year. Nowhere was Soviet rule seriously threatened, but the authorities in Moscow took very seriously the scale of public discontent. The task now facing Khrushchev and his colleagues was to bury Stalin and his excesses without putting at risk the system that Stalinist terror had built and the advantages that accrued to the Party from its monopoly of power.
Khrushchev’s strategy, as it emerged in the following years, was fourfold. First, as we have seen, he needed to stabilize relations with the West, following the rearmament of West Germany, its incorporation into NATO and the establishment of the Warsaw Pact. At the same time Moscow began building bridges to the ‘non-Aligned’ world—starting with Yugoslavia, which Khrushchev and Marshal Bulganin visited in May 1955 (just one month after the signing of the Austrian State Treaty) in order to rekindle Soviet-Yugoslav relations after seven years of very cold storage. Thirdly, Moscow started to encourage Party reformers in the satellite states, allowing circumspect criticism of the ‘mistakes’ of the Stalinist old guard and rehabilitation of some of their victims, and bringing to an end the cycle of show trials and mass arrests and Party purges.
It was in this context that Khrushchev gingerly advanced to the fourth (and in his understanding, final) stage of controlled reform: the break with Stalin himself. The setting for this was the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU, in February 1956, at which Khrushchev delivered his now-famous ‘secret speech’, denouncing the crimes, errors and ‘cult’ of the General Secretary. In retrospect this speech has taken on a mythical aura, but its epochal significance should not be overstated. Nikita Khrushchev was a Communist, a Leninist and at least as much a true believer as his contemporaries in the Party leadership. He had set himself the tricky objective of acknowledging and detailing Stalin’s deeds, while confining responsibility for them to the man himself. His task, as he saw it, was to confirm the legitimacy of the Communist project by heaping obloquy and responsibility upon the corpse of Uncle Joe.
The speech, delivered on February 25th, was entirely conventional in length and language. It was addressed to the Party élite and confined itself to describing the ‘perversions’ of Communist doctrine of which Stalin was guilty. The dictator was accused of ‘ignoring the norms of Party life and trampling upon the Leni
nist principles of collective Party leadership’: which is to say that he made his own decisions. His junior colleagues (of whom Khrushchev had been one since the early 1930s) were thus absolved of responsibility both for his criminal excesses and, more importantly, for the failure of his policies. Khrushchev took the calculated risk of detailing the scale of Stalin’s personal failings (and thus shocking and offending the sensibilities of the obedient cadres in his audience), in order to preserve and even enhance the unsullied standing of Lenin, the Leninist system of government and Stalin’s own successors.
The secret speech achieved its purpose, at least within the CPSU. It drew a firm line under the Stalinist era, acknowledging its monstrosities and disasters while preserving the fiction that the present Communist leadership bore no responsibility. Khrushchev was thus secure in power and had won a relatively free hand to reform the Soviet economy and liberalize the apparatus of terror. Old Stalinists were now marginalized—Molotov was removed from the post of foreign minister on the eve of Tito’s return visit to Moscow in June. As for Khrushchev’s contemporaries, and younger apparatchiks like Leonid Brezhnev, these men were just as guilty as Khrushchev of collaborating in Stalin’s crimes and they were thus in no position either to deny his assertions or attack his credibility. Controlled de-Stalinization suited nearly everyone.
But Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin could not be kept a secret, and therein lay the seeds of its failure. The speech would not be officially published in the Soviet Union until 1988, but Western intelligence agencies had wind of it within days. So did Western Communist parties, even though they had not been made privy to Khrushchev’s intentions. As a consequence, within a few weeks rumours of Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin were everywhere. The effect was intoxicating. For Communists, the denunciation of Stalin and his works was confusing and troubling; but it was also a relief. Henceforth, as it seemed to many, Communists would no longer have to excuse or deny the more outrageous charges of their critics. Some Western Party members and sympathizers dropped away, but others remained, their faith renewed.
