2

Different Securities?
NATO and the Transformation of the State

Alan S. Milward

The conflict between military security and economic security which accom-
panied the first years of NATO has been much discussed. 1 It arose out of
the demands of voters in post-war western democracies, many of them with
a greatly extended franchise, for personal lifetime economic security. The
high unemployment rates and great uncertainties of personal income in the
inter-war period were seen by many post-war western European govern-
ments as having weakened the fabric of civil society. There was a remark-
able readiness, deriving from the desire of restoration regimes to legitimise
themselves with electorates which they had largely failed in the inter-war
years by satisfying the claims of voters for a larger measure of social secu-
rity. In some countries- Belgium, France, the United Kingdom -, this was
displayed even before the onset of the Cold War reversed the immediate
post-war fall in defence spending. The welfare state, as it came to be called,
was willingly embraced by politicians whose primary task in their own
judgement was to re-establish the nation-states which had collapsed in
1938-40 as the basis of a European order.
The most obvious cause of their collapse, however, had been their in-
ability to defend themselves and their citizens against invasion. Disruption,
displacement, deportation, death had been common experience from 1938
to April 1945 across western Europe. That the first elements of personal se-
curity, the preservation of property, family, and self, had not been securely
re-established by Germany's surrender came as a shock wave increasing in
its intensity until it culminated in the NATO rearmament programme of
1951. Did not rearmament to meet NATO's 'force goals' in that year at that
speed endanger the very economic re-foundation of the states it was de-
signed to protect against a possible Soviet attack? What was the true nature

15
G. Schmidt (ed.), A History of NATO — The First Fifty Years
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2001
16 Different Securities?

of the competition with communist Eastern Europe? Was it a race for

military superiority which must be won to preserve life and property as a
first priority at every possible cost? Or was it a long-run economic and so-
cial competition between two competing economic systems for the hearts
and minds of citizens? If it was the latter, would not defence expenditure
above a certain ceiling weaken the chances of an ultimate western victory?
This was a debate which divided officials and government agencies in
Washington DC as well as western European Governments. But with the
transposition of Marshall Aid into military aid in 1950-1 the die was cast in
the US. Western Europe's rearmament would have the first call on dollar
aid. Congress, when it passed the Battle Act in October 1951, linked mili-
tary aid to a pattern of economic warfare to which western European traders
with the USSR had henceforth to conform and it gave the achievement of
NATO's rearmament targets priority in determining the flow of that aid.
The escalation of American military demands on Europe had even be-
fore that point had a disruptive effect on the domestic and international
policies of several European governments. The speed with which the State
Department accepted in May 1950 Robert Schuman's proposal to create a
European Coal and Steel Community was a source of great support to the
French centre. The acceptance of his plans as the first step towards a true
integration of the new Federal Republic into the Western European comity
of nations was ready enough in Washington because it had seemed to State
Department officials in the preceding three months that the US itself had
failed to devise any European framework which guaranteed that outcome.
In the minds of the centrist coalition in France the chances of succeeding in
their bold step depended on the Federal Republic having no easier and more
obvious way forward to equality at the table with its western neighbours.
When only six weeks after Schuman's statement the US requested a greatly
increased Western European rearmament programme, in which the Penta-
gon evidently numbered Germany, the first clash between long-term eco-
nomic security and immediate military security was visible to all. Could a
centrist coalition afford such an increase in defence expenditure as part of a
package in which defeated Germany would be rearmed with American
help?
Over this question in 1951 one minister, Paul Antier, resigned on the
grounds that the economic effort endangered the levels of public income
support for farmers. Another, Jules Moch, was expelled from the executive
committee of the Socialist party (SFIO) for publicly demanding a cut in
social security benefits to finance the rearmament programme. In 1951 also
one prominent minister, Aneurin Bevan, resigned from the British gov-
ernment, in spite of its minuscule majority, in protest at the introduction of
additional charges within the National Health Service in order to help fi-