5 - American Policy toward Germany and the Integration of Europe, 1945-1955

Summary

Autonomy and integration are the conflicting elements that, in varying combinations, determine the foreign policy of modern industrialized nations. The imperialism of the late nineteenth century indicated that none of the major European nations was prepared to accept the interdependence that integration into a world trade community and international division of labor entail. Germany in particular revolted against the supposed disadvantages of its geopolitical situation in the middle of Europe and its history as a “belated nation,” and tried radically to evade these consequences of progressing industrialization. This nonacceptance ranged from the rejection of Chancellor Caprivi's trade agreements to the “debate on the agrarian or industrial state” around 1900 and to the fight against Bethmann Hollweg's plans for a German hegemony in Mitteleuropa. If there was any “continuity from Bismarck to Hitler,” it was this increasing insistence, intensified by the experience of World War I, on a broadly defined national autonomy and autarchy, which asked for a direct, territorial control of food, raw materials, and labor in Eastern Europe. Stresemann's efforts toward an industrial integration into Western Europe, which took these changed circumstances into account, fell victim to this antimodernistic nostalgia, which found its most radical and perverted expression in Hitler's Lebensraum ideas and war aims.