Denis McShane
Clarendon Press, Oxford, £37.50
The origins of the Cold War in Europe has been a major battle ground now for nearly 40 years. The first version of the story, written while the Cold War was still going on and produced as part of the ideological struggle, was a simple folk tale of evil Joe Stalin stopped by the forces of American (sorry: NATO) Democracy and Freedom. This was being unpicked almost as soon as it was circulated, and was seriously challenged in the late sixties and early seventies by left-leaning historians who had begun to re-examine the Cold War (and U.S. imperialism) through the lense of Vietnam. This revision was followed by two further shifts in the English-language literature. The first was a straightforward post-revisionist synthesis; the second was a re-examination of the period from the point of view of the non-U.S. participants, especially Britain. (This process seems to be connected to the waning of American power and influence in 1970s.)
With the break-up of the Soviet empire and the ludicrous capitalist triumphalism accompanying it there was bound to be a further re-working of the period. McShane’s expanded doctoral thesis is the first such I have come across.
The left revisionist received wisdom on this period is something like this (the Doonesbury version). To avoid a return to a slump in the U.S. and the political dangers that implied, its ruling elite had to maintain war-time levels of production. To do this meant massive expansion of the U.S. sphere of economic influence (or: their informal empire). Cue, notably, the Marshall Plan: Europe rebuilds with American money, buying American goods, employing the American urban masses. But the loans have American strings. Cue the ‘regulators’ — good old Irving Brown et al — a regiment of CIA agents and Labour Attachés to fund and steer the anti socialist wing of the European labour movement in the name of ‘the communist threat’. This left revisionist thesis, specifically the wide-spread belief on the European Left that the shape of post-war unionism in Europe was largely down to the machinations of American agents like Irving Brown, is McShane’s target. But he intends his narrow focus on the struggle within the international trade union movement to stand for the wider events.
Against the revisionist thesis MacShane argues that the ‘Cold War was not external to the trade union movement but grew from existing political divisions that resurfaced as soon as the fighting stopped in 1945…. the evolution of French and German trade unionism after 1945 is based mainly on national traditions and politics…. The anticommunism of labour leaders in 1945 did not emerge from malignant, right-wing personalities but was based on a quarter of a century of disappointed observation of the Soviet experiment…..(and) deep suspicions of Russian splitting tactics the 1920s and 1930s.’ (pp. 179, 281, 285/6)
‘Malignant right-wing personalities?’ No matter: the thesis is undoubtedly plausible. It is almost certain that the Soviet concept of trade unions as arms of the Soviet state, and the capitalist unions of the ‘west’ would have shattered the international trade union movement’s fragile post-war accord eventually. But not quite certain, unfortunately. It remains the case that the World Federation of Trade Unions was wrecked by Anglo-American machinations rather than Stalinist obduracy.
MacShane’s thesis is based on extremely wide research. In his preface the author lists 7 trade union archives and 4 university libraries — in four countries — that he has consulted; his secondary sources are in English, French and German. Though this is undeniably impressive, here and there are I had odd flickers of doubt in the generally convincing picture. In the first place, he facilitates his thesis by concentrating on the pre-1948 period. Had he extended it even a year it would have been much less convincing, for by then the spread of U.S. personnel and money around the European labour scene was better organised and funded.
Then there is the way he handles the break-up of the biggest French union, the CGT. The conventional version — on both Right and Left — is that Irving Brown and American dollars persuaded part of the anti-communist faction of the union to quit and start a break-away: standard union-splitting tactics, no doubt well known to U.S. labor veterans like Brown. But while acknowledging that ‘The American embassy was an open house for elements of every political hue in the [big French union] CGT’, MacShane then tries to qualify this by informing us that ‘the American embassy was fulfiling its professional role of trawling for information with no very clear idea of the exact balance of forces, or orientation inside the CGT.’ (p. 272) In other words, it can’t have been the U.S. which split the CGT because the paper record shows that the embassy staff were never sure of ‘the exact balance of forces’. Depends, I guess, on what you mean by ‘exact’.
Interesting, isn’t it, that MacShane describes the American Embassy’s meddling in the politics of French labor as merely ‘fulfilling its professional responsibility’. Would he say that of the Soviet embassy of the period? Would he say that of the U.S. embassy in London of the period? How about in 1974? Further down the same road, he questions the actual influence of Irving Brown and the U.S. claiming that only $25,000 has been identified by researchers in the period as going from the USA into the CGT dispute. Yes, but $25,000 in one union in the war-ravaged 1940s would be at least 20 times that now; and there may be other monies better laundered.
Coming at the thing from the other end, he attempts to minimise the scale of the opposition in Europe to the Marshall Plan. He argues (pp. 267/8), for example, that the strikes called in France by the Communist Party in 1947 which are generally interpreted as being against the Marshall Plan, were actually basically about other, bread and butter issues, with the PCF piggy-backing its opposition to the Plan on these other parochial issues.
So, there wasn’t really that much communist opposition to the Marshall Plan, the U.S. did much less by way of directing events in France than is generally believed, and while the World Federation of Trade Unions split, it was bound to split and the blame lies at the Soviet door.
It is an attractive thesis, a nice, new revisionist synthesis — and it might even be true. It’s just that MacShane hasn’t really adequately described the theses he is attacking: we get a line drawing rather than the painting. There is much more to the left-revisionist case than he acknowledges. But even though I can’t quite shake the sense of being shown some sleight of hand here, this is an extremely interesting book.