Planning

for Peace: Postwar

Internationalism

and European

Reconstruction By Daniel Stinsky, Maastricht University ([email protected])

General project description My PhD project is about early attempts at constructing institutions for European economic cooperation after World War II. The working title for my project is Cooling the Cold War: The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), 1947-1960. Economic cooperation in Europe was an integral part of the Allied governments’ plans for an eventual peace settlement. These plans saw a European settlement as part of a global scheme to secure peace and security in the postwar world. The United Nations (UN) family of organizations was created to provide the necessary institutional mechanisms. As a new take on international organization, the UN combined the internationalist ideal that the unsuccessful League of Nations had embodied with elements of 19th century Great Power diplomacy and a technocratic institutionalism heavily inspired by the American New Deal. This new system for international conflict resolution was soon put under heavy pressure by rising tension between the victorious powers of World War II. During the late 1940s, rising Cold War tensions led to the emergence of separate “spheres of influence” in Europe for the opposing superpowers. Governments, intellectuals and the general public were “forced to recognize a Western Europe which they treat differently from Eastern Europe”, as one contemporary observer put it.1 Economic cooperation became largely limited to the respective blocs and sparked off exclusive institutions like the Marshall Plan organization OEEC/OECD and the European Coal and Steel Community in the West or the Soviet-led COMECON in the East.2 But the earlier plans to organize European economic cooperation within the more inclusive framework of the United Nations had not been fruitless. Founded in 1947, ECE was the first international organization dedicated specifically to economic cooperation in Europe after 1945. Its pan-European scope went against the trend toward bloc formation. As a UN regional organization, it comprised the two superpowers, their respective European allies, and neutral countries. A perspective on ECE allows observing international politics in Europe during the postwar period in the contexts of economic cooperation and the Cold War. From there, the persistence of efforts for trade, economic and technical cooperation across the descending Iron Curtain can be traced.

1

William Diebold Jr., "East-West Trade and the Marshall Plan," Foreign Affairs 26, no. 4 (1948). 709 709 2 Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), founded in 1948, since 1961 Organization for Econopmic Co-operation and Development (OECD). European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1951, forerunner for the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957 and the European Union. Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), founded in 1949. 1

Recent historiography on the Cold War tends to “relativize […] the geopolitical story” and emphasizes international cooperation that coexisted with or sometimes even superseded conflict.3 The UN had a significant role in the continuity of cooperation despite global conflict.4 In Europe, so called “loopholes in the Iron Curtain”5 show a continuity of contacts and cooperation in politics and business across the divided continent. European politics and processes conducted by European actors are often the focus in recent literature on the Cold War.6

But while the histories of the Cold War and European

economic integration have always been regarded as “separate but intertwined”, the two subjects have more often than not been studied in near total isolation.7 ECE is a case that challenges the EC/EU-centered narrative and the way in which most histories of European cooperation have been written, assuming that the international stage was rather empty when integration was young.8 ECE as an institution is very much understudied and existing literature concerned directly with it is scarce. Most accounts were written by actors who were personally involved in the ECE secretariat.9 Scholarly literature has picked up ECE only in recent years.10 This, I believe, is due to the fact that political scientists and historians adopted the view of contemporaries who regarded ECE as a failed experiment: “Among the European organizations I got to know”, wrote West-German economist Alfred Müller-Armack, “ECE was, despite the backing it enjoyed as a UN organization and despite the huge effort of delegations, weak and altogether non-effective.”11 To Müller-Armack and others, ECE was an early victim of the Cold War, with bloc politics making 3

Akira Iriye, "Historicizing the Cold War," in The Oxford Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Richard H. Immermann and Petra Goedde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 15. 4 Ilya V. Gaiduk, Divided Together. The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945-1965, ed. James G. Hershberg, Cold War International History Project (Stanford CA: Stanford Unitversity Press, 2012); Mark Mazower, Governing the World. The History of an Idea (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012). 5 Poul Villaume and Odd Arne Westad, eds., Perforating the Iron Curtain: European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965-1985 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010). 6 Sari Autio-Sarasmo, "A New Historiography of the Cold War?," European History Quarterly 4, no. 4 (2011). 7 N. Piers Ludlow, "European Integration and the Cold War," ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, Crises and Détente: Cambridge Histories Online (2010). 8 Kiran Klaus Patel, "Provincialising European Union: Co-Operation and Integration in Europe in a Historical Perspective," Contemporary European History 22, no. 04 (2013). 9 Walt W. Rostow, "The Economic Commission for Europe," International Organization 3, no. 2 (1949); Gunnar Myrdal, "Twenty Years of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe," ibid.22(1968); Václav Kostelecký, The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe: The Beginning of a History (Göteborg1989); Yves Berthelot, ed. Unity and Diversity in Development Ideas. Perspectives from the Un Regional Commissions, United Nations Intellectual History Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 10 Sandrine Kott, "Par-Delà La Guerre Froide. Les Organisations Internationales Et Les Circulations EstOuest (1947-1973)," Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire 109, no. 1 (2011); Vincent Lagendijk, Electrifying Europe. The Power of Europe in the Construction of Elecricity Networks (Amsterdam: Aksant Academic Publishers, 2008); "Divided Development: Post-War Ideas on River Utilisation and Their Influence on the Development of the Danube," The International History Review (2014); Cay Sevón, Visionen Om Europa: Svensk Neutralitet Och Europeisk Återuppbyggnad 1945-1948 (Saarijärvi: Gummerus Kirjapaino Oy, 1995). 11 Alfred Müller-Armack, Auf Dem Weg Nach Europa: Erinnerungen Und Ausblicke (Tübingen1971). 167. 2

effective cooperation impossible. Less concerned with defining success and failure, more recent statements by historians have acknowledged that ECE was “an important knot in an emerging network of experts”12 and planners. Despite the Cold War divide, hundreds of international agreements were concluded at ECE. Most of these were of a technical rather than political nature, giving ECE an important role in what historians of technology have labeled the “hidden integration” of Europe through norms and standardization.13 The scarcity of existing literature on ECE opens a large field of possibilities to explore. For my study, I have decided to focus on the formative years, the decade when the influential Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal was ECE’s Executive Secretary (1947-57).14 Some chapters go beyond this focus to provide a wider context. I use a rather open research question: Within the contexts of European economic cooperation and the Cold War, how did ECE operate and function? This open question allows me to map out different fields of activity at ECE and to explore its role in the postwar context. I apply three narrower sub-questions to guide my selection of sources and literature:

a) How did actors at ECE try to bridge the Cold War divide in the commission and in Europe, especially in regard to trade? b) How did ECE relate to other IOs – both within the UN framework and with other organizations for economic cooperation in Europe? Was it subsequently marginalized by more successful institutions of Western European cooperation or did certain tasks and policy issues stick with it? c) The ECE secretariat put much emphasis on the organization’s technical rather than political nature. How was this distinct mindset of technocratic internationalism constituted, and did it relate to a wider phenomenon of growing expert power? The sources I use are mostly documents produced within ECE itself, rather than by the member governments. In doing so, I follow Sandrine Kott’s suggestion to, when researching the history

of international organizations, “reevaluate the work of the secretariats, commissions, and technical agencies, on the basis of the documents produced by the officials and experts who

12

Matthias Schmelzer, "Planning the Economic Miracle? Industrial Policy in Europe between Boom and Crisis (1950-1975)," H-Soz-Kult, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=3897 (2011). 13 Thomas J. Misa and Johan Schot, "Inventing Europe: Technology and the Hidden Integration of Europe," History and Technology 21, no. 1 (2005). 14 On Myrdal, see Thomas Etzemüller, Die Romantik Der Rationalität. Alva & Gunnar Myrdal. Social Engineering in Schweden (Bielefeld2010); William Barber, Gunnar Myrdal: An Intellectual Biography, Great Thinkers in Economics (Basingstoke: Pelgrave Macmillan, 2008); James Angresano, The Political Economy of Gunnar Myrdal: An Institutional Basis for the Transformation Problem (Cheltenham, UK and Lyme, NH1997). 3

worked there”.15 Most of these documents are kept at the UN’s European Offices in Geneva (UNOG).16 One exception is the draft chapter I present below, on the origins of ECE. Here I applied the documentation of the British Foreign Office from the National Archives in Kew, London.17 Additionally, I have consulted the private files of Gunnar Myrdal at the Swedish Labor Movement Archives and other private files18 and tape-recorded interviews19 at the Swedish Royal Library, both in Stockholm.

Place of the draft chapter The following is a shortened excerpt from the draft chapter I am currently working on, titled Planning for Peace. It is the first chapter I write and will be the second of five chapters in the dissertation: Chapter

Working Title

Key theme(s)

Period covered

1

Optimizing the World

Social Engineering, Stockholm School of Economics

Interwar-1943

2

Planning for Peace

Postwar Internationalism, Reconstruction & International Organisations

1943-47

3

A Bridge between East and West?

East-West trade in a period of high tension

1947-53

4

European Cooperation, European Competition Emulating Europe: Reconstruction, Trade and Development

Growing landscape of European IOs (OEEC, ECSC, COMECON, EC et al.) forces ECE to adapt, institutional cooperation & competition

1950-1957

Intellectual and institutional (ECE->UNCTAD) evolution from European reconstruction and international trade to international development

Until ~1964

5

15

Sandrine Kott, "International Organizations - a Field of Research for a Global History," Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History, online edition 8, no. 3 (2011). 16 Most ECE files are registered under UNOG Archives ARR 14/1360. 17 Mostly series FO 371/62382 - FO 371/62386, „Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe“. 18 Those of Karin Kock, Swedish delegate and chairman at ECE, and Dag Hammarskjöld, UN Secretary-General. 19 Václav Kostelecký, who had worked with the ECE secretariat for most of his life, conducted interviews with several important actors in 1979-81 for a book on ECE’s history. Kostelecký died unexpectedly in 1982, before the book was finished. The material he collected is kept at the Swedish Labor Movement Archives. See Arne Högström, "Václav Kostelecký: Gunnar Myrdals Trogne Vapendragare," Arbetarhistoria 146(2013). 4

The excerpt below is very much part of a work in process, but I think the general direction becomes clear from it. In the chapter, I examine Allied plans for a postwar order of Europe and the intellectual and institutional origins of ECE. I trace ideas connected with a reconfiguration of internationalism and European reconstruction and the immediate institutional predecessors of ECE. I argue that ECE was the result of two trends in Washington and London in 1946/47: A tendency to wind up inter-Allied cooperation within the newly created UN framework, and a high confidence in planning as a means to solve the challenges of European reconstruction. ECE’s roots lay in the immediate institutional precedents of relief cooperation between the Allies, especially the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and the conviction that economic cooperation was crucial to European recovery. I argue that the plans for economic cooperation as part of a European peace settlement can be roughly divided into two stages, a more inclusive first stage and a more exclusive second stage. During and immediately after the war, Europe’s problems were considered part of a global solution to secure peace and prosperity via the UN. With rising tension between the Allies and the beginning of bloc formation, plans became more exclusive, limiting thinking about economic cooperation largely to the respective blocs. The labels “inclusive” and “exclusive” describe a tendency rather than an absolute categorization. During the generally more inclusive stage, certain governments were still excluded from participation with the UN, most notably Francoist Spain.20 The earlier, more inclusive take on economic cooperation brought practices, concepts and institutions into being that continued to exist, against the trend of geopolitical division during the Cold War. An element that I still want to include, but that is missing in the draft are the Soviet plans for a postwar order of Europe. Any comments on how the Soviet and Eastern European perspective can be strengthened would be appreciated. I will probably also include another paragraph on the larger UN system. The excerpt ends with Gunnar Myrdal being appointed Executive Secretary. I did not write a conclusion yet. I still want to expand the part on Myrdal, and then end the chapter with the first session of ECE in 1947, until the announcement of the Marshall Plan.

Excerpt from draft chapter “Planning for Peace” The ideas that fueled the creation of ECE and the UN at large were deeply rooted in a “reconfiguration of internationalism out of the war effort against Nazism”21 during the 1940s. Political leaders, especially in the United States, claimed that the Allies fought not for their own nations only, but for the good of all mankind. Intellectuals like the historian James T. Shotwell added their conviction that a lasting peace was possible, if it were constructed with dedication and rational design: “Our victory over the Axis powers can be made a victory over war itself, if we bring to the support of peace the 20

A UN General Assembly Resolution of December 12, 1946, recommended that “the Franco Government of Spain be debarred from membership in international agencies established by or brought into relationship with the United Nations, and from participation in conferences or other activities which may be arranged by the United Nations or by these agencies, until a new and acceptable government is formed in Spain.” Cit. First Session: Summary of Proceedings and Decisions submitted by the Executive Secretary. E/ECE/33, 13 May, 1947. UNOG Archives ARR 14/1360, Box 22, Folder ‘ECE First Session 1947’. 21 Mark Mazower, "Reconstruction: The Historiographical Issues," Past and Present Supplement 6(2011). 20 5

same kind of realistic strategy which we devote to war."22 American elites began to accept that isolationism was not an option anymore, and advocated a new kind of internationalism, modified to avoid mistakes made after 1918. This shifting attitude was perhaps most prominently expressed by Vice President Henry A. Wallace in 1942: “We failed in our job after World War Number One. We did not know how to go about it to build an enduring world-wide peace. […] But by our very errors we learned much, and after this war we shall be in a position to utilize our knowledge in building a world which is economically, politically and, I hope, spiritually sound.”23 Wallace framed the failure to secure peace after 1918 into a learning experience, with an optimistic outlook for the near future. The rhetoric of war effort and sacrifice in the names of peace, democracy and national self-determination had long-lasting repercussions, particularly in the sphere of international politics. Although President Roosevelt’s preferred solution to the problem of enduring peace was to effectively retire Europe from the international political stage through forced decolonization and disarmament, the public message was framed much more positively. Even before the United States entered the war, collective security, free trade and rising living standards everywhere had been articulated as the three core themes for American world reform. Before the fighting was over, the projected postwar order had already found expression in the new institutions of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods system. The new internationalism and the institutions embodying it were designed to keep European nation states on more or less equal footing legally, but with an inherently strong standing of the United States as a sponsor of ideas and money. Internationalism became a short-hand term for fair American world leadership in place of isolationism or imperialism.24 It acknowledged the discredited European nation states as partners, as long as they committed to cooperation on American terms. In exchange, the United States committed to foster European reconstruction. Economic reconstruction in the 1940s meant much more than repairing production facilities and infrastructure destroyed during the war. The last time Europe had known sustained prosperity was before 1914. What was missing were stability, growth and a reasonable security of expectations for economic agents. Thirty years of conflicts and crises on an unprecedented scale had shattered Europe’s large and complex, but highly integrated continental economy.25 This was what had to be reconstructed if the Allies were to honor their war goals. In the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill had declared global economic cooperation and lowered trade barriers part of their goals for a postwar world, as well as the advancement of social welfare. By incorporating this last point, reconstruction became an agenda for progress rather than the re-erection of the economic 22

James T. Shotwell, The Great Decision (New York: Macmillan, 1944). v Henry A. Wallace, "The Price of Free World Victory " in Prefaces to Peace (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942). 24 David Ellwood, "America as a European Power: Four Dimensions of the Transatlantic Relationship: 1945 to the Late 1990s," in Three Postwar Eras in Comparison. Western Europe 1918-1945-1989, ed. Carl Levy and Mark Roseman (Basingstoke / New York: Palgrave, 2002). 70 25 Jan Tumlir and Laura La Haye, "The Two Attempts at European Economic Reconstruction after 1945," Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 137, no. 3 (1981). 23

6

status quo ante bellum. It was supposed to raise the living standards in many regions of Europe forever. The historian Paul Addison argued that reconstruction after World War II became a broad movement of progressive thought, marked by a “muscular faith in reason and progress” and fusing “‘the traditional philanthropic drive to perform good works” with “the modernizing technocratic motive”.26 On the level of rhetoric, this assessment was certainly true. Reconstruction was often coded with a remarkable feeling of optimism and doability. The key to reconstruction lay in planning. During the war, centralized state planning had unlocked the full potential of industrialized economies for destruction. In peace, planning should use that potential to build a better, more equitable and more rationally organized future. Institutions were created to implement plans for reconstruction, like the French Commissariat général du Plan in 1946. On the international level, the experience of international cooperation for relief during and immediately after the war should help to address the challenges of coordinated planning for reconstruction. In the minds of planners in Britain and the United States, the new kind of internationalism should be put to a practical test in civilian cooperation for relief and humanitarian aid. Relief for territories liberated from German or Japanese occupation was projected early on during the war. Winston Churchill committed the United Kingdom to prepare for the relief of mainland Europe already in summer 1940, after the fall of France. The promise to provide assistance after liberation was meant as an impetus for the populations of occupied territories to side with the Allies. But it was also a legitimization for the Royal Navy’s blockade of supplies to these territories. Speaking in Parliament in August 1940, Churchill was uncompromising about his refusal to allow any supplies to go through the blockade, but promised immediate relief once German occupation had ended. Churchill insisted that in relief matters, Europe had to be managed as a whole, with no differentiation between liberated countries, neutrals and former enemies.27 Since war, disease and hunger were not limited by national boundaries, relief work, too, had to be international and cooperative: “Let Hitler bear his responsibilities to the full, and let the people of Europe who groan beneath his yoke aid in every way the coming of the day when that yoke will be broken. Meanwhile we can and we will arrange in advance for the speedy entry of food into any part of the enslaved area, when this part has been wholly cleared of German forces and has genuinely regained its freedom. We shall do our utmost to encourage the building up of reserves of food all over the world, so that there will be always held up before the peoples of Europe including – I say deliberately – the German and Austrian peoples, the certainty that the shattering of the Nazi power will bring to them all immediate food, freedom and peace.”28 When America joined the war, the Roosevelt administration not only committed to the British promise of relief, but assumed the leading position in its planning. Roosevelt appointed the Governor of New York Herbert H. Lehman as Director of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations in December 1942. His task was the preparation for a future international relief agency – estimating relief requirements, 26

Paul Addison, The Road to 1945. British Politics and the Second World War (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1975). 27 Jessica Reinisch, "Relief in the Aftermath of War," Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008). 378 28 Parliamentary Debates, HC Deb 20 August 1940 vol 364 cc1161-1162. 7

program planning, and the development of procedures for allocating and handling supplies.29 Lehman argued that the projected American relief operations in Europe would be “merely enlightened selfinterest.” Providing relief to Europe would help the United States to find outlets for its surplus goods, to stabilize the world economy and to provide jobs for returning soldiers. In order to avoid the “tragic cycle” of debt and repayment that had taken place after 1918 and led to the rise of fascist regimes, it would even be in the United States’ best interest to give gifts instead of setting up loans which could not be repaid.30 Arguments on economic and political self-interest played a significant role in planning for international relief. But it was not self-interest alone that drove the debate. Declarations often featured Christian imagery of charity and philanthropy and a moral obligation to help those in need. Adding to this moralistic argument was a notion of civilizing superiority. Many Western intellectuals and politicians held the conviction that developments in the United States were the pinnacle of progress and civilization. It therefore seemed appropriate to apply America’s historical experience and the institutions and practices that had evolved from it to world problems. In this line of thought, a major purpose of the relief project was to internationalize New Deal achievements and American standards of living.31 In pushing for relief operations, the combination of arguments based on morality and self-interest made a powerful rhetoric that left a lasting impression on policy makers in both the United States and the United Kingdom. Hopes were high among internationalists on both sides of the Atlantic that cooperation on the technical, hands-on problem of relief coordination would have a spillover effect into more complex areas of international relations.32 To planners in Washington and London, relief featured heavily as a logistical problem: The main challenge was to coordinate the needs for food, drugs, clothing, building supplies, coal or industrial materials with the available supplies. Coordination was, as historian Jessica Reinisch puts it, “the magic process which could reduce waste and delay, and which would prevent any duplication of relief efforts, both nationally […] and internationally”.33 In order to achieve this necessary coordination between countries on the supplying and the receiving end of relief operations, new international organizations had to be created, outside the disgraced existing framework of the League of Nations. The first organization to put the idea of relief as the testing ground for a new kind of internationalism into practice was the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). The relief organization UNRRA was a transitional entity in many ways, marking the transition from war to peace, from military to civilian authority, from inter-Allied to international cooperation, and from the League to the UN. UNRRA was based on the assumption that mistakes made in previous relief operations could be avoided if relief was identified as a joint problem and taken on as a collaborative

29

Grace Fox, "The Origins of Unrra," Political Science Quarterly 65, no. 4 (1950). Quoted from Jessica Reinisch, "Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of Unrra," Past and Present Supplement 6 (2011). 271 31 Ibid. 272-73 32 Ibid. 264. 33 "Relief in the Aftermath of War." 376

30

8

effort across national borders.34 Unlike the League of Nations, UNRRA included both the United States and the Soviet Union on its Council. Unlike most of its successor bodies in the UN, UNRRA operated extensively in Eastern Europe. This transition also allowed for continuity, not least on the level of personnel. One particularly striking example is the Polish bacteriologist Ludwik Rajchman. Rajchman was the Medical Director of the League’s Health Section, and spent several years as a League envoy to China. During the war, he became the Polish representative at UNRRA in Washington. Rajchman explicitly described UNRRA as a stepping-stone toward a new international health organization. After the war, Rajchman continued his international career within the UN system as one of the founders and the first chairman of UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund.35 Contemporaries, both UNRRA enthusiasts and critics, seemed to agree that the scale and character of this organization were unprecedented and that it would set a crucial example for other international organizations to be founded after the armistice.36 It was clear that UNRRA was a prototype for IOs of a new kind. Hence, its institutional design was contested from the beginning. European exile governments criticized the Great Powers for the dominant position they assigned for themselves in UNRRA. The first draft terms of reference for UNRRA, issued by the State Department in June 1943, allotted a decisive role to the “Four Policemen” China, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. The draft envisioned a Council comprising all 44 member states, but exercising supervisory powers only. Policy decisions and appointments of staff were supposed to be carried out in between Council sessions by a Central Committee, consisting of representatives of only the Big Four.37 This design fostered protest, particularly among those European governments-in-exile expecting their countries to change from the receiving to the supplying end of relief operations rather soon after an armistice. They objected to any arrangements not based on equal representation of member states. The Dutch Foreign Minister in-exile Eelco van Kleffens told Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson that UNRRA would set a precedent for future international collaboration that his government “would find […] extremely difficult to accept”.38 Also the Canadian government, as a major supplier to the projected relief organization, voiced concerns about the example which UNRRA would provide for the future. With other, more far-reaching international bodies likely to be set up under the aegis of the UN, the Canadians saw an UNRRA directed by the Big Four as an unpleasant precedent.39 While Whitehall was sympathetic of the Canadian and European concerns, the governments of both the United States and the Soviet Union insisted on a Four Powers-led Central Committee. Efficiency and the urgency of “getting UNRRA started” were the central arguments for this set-up. In order to somewhat dilute the influence of the Great Powers, an extensive committee system was integrated 34

On relief and reconstruction before World War II, see Carl Levy and Mark Roseman, eds., Three Postwar Eras in Comparison: Western Europe, 1918-1945, 1989 (London: Palgrave, 2002); Andrew J Williams, "'Reconstruction' before the Marshall Plan," Review of International Studies 31, no. 3 (2005). 35 Marta Aleksandra Balinska, Une Vie Pour L'humanitaire. Ludwik Rajchman 1881-1965, ed. Christophe Prochasson, L'espace De L'histoire (Paris: La Découverte, 1995). 36 Reinisch, "Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of Unrra." 37 Fox, "The Origins of Unrra." 571 38 Reinisch, "Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of Unrra." 282 39 Fox, "The Origins of Unrra." 577 9

into the structure of UNRRA. Standing committees were set up for Europe, the Far East, and Supplies, which included all countries concerned with that area or subject. These committees would give recommendations to the Council and the Central Committee. The mixed structure of a supervising Council based on equal representation, an executive Central Committee consisting of the Great Powers,

and

specialized

standing

committees giving

recommendations

bears

a

remarkable

resemblance to the larger institutional structure of the UN System and its Principal Organs, which was formed later.40 It did not, however, convince UNRRA’s critics in 1943. With the very last amendments to the UNRRA agreement, the European Allies and Canada succeeded in establishing supremacy of the Council’s policy-making power, allowing the Central Committee to take decisions of an emergency nature only.41 Relief policy was thus to be managed by the United Nations as a whole; the powers of the “Four Policemen” were truncated at the last minute. The discussion surrounding the establishment of UNRRA thus provides an early example of what historian Mark Mazower has described as the “European tail” wagging the “American or Soviet dog”.42 Nevertheless, UNRRA was still an essentially American project. With Herbert H. Lehman, a fierce New Dealer became the Director General in its Washington headquarters. While the organization was often celebrated as the first large-scale operation of the UN, an example for the great potential of international teamwork, it is debatable how strong UNRRA’s internationalism was in practice. The vast majority of available supplies were controlled by the United States, with smaller contributions by Britain and Canada. Other potential contributing countries like Sweden and Switzerland did not participate in UNRRA. The Swedish government saw UNRRA as an Allied club where the contribution of a neutral country was not welcomed. Swedish humanitarian aid was deliberately not organized in collaboration with the Allies. The Swedish Foreign Office feared that the Great Powers would use the aid provided through UNRRA as a “first rank political weapon” to ascertain their dominance in Europe.43 In spring 1944, Gunnar Myrdal voiced his suspicion that UNRRA was first of all a political necessity for Britain and the United States, to make up for their boycott and blockade of territories occupied by Germany.44 Criticism of UNRRA soon grew also in the Allied countries, due to the extended bureaucracy in its Washington headquarters and the apparent failure of its staff of 25,000 worldwide to deliver on its ambitious promises.45 Despite the advance planning, the organization was not ready in 1943 to supply the territories liberated during the North African Campaign and the invasion of Sicily. Instead, the military was tasked with providing basic relief. UNRRA’s initial civilian relief programs were thus conceived as only supplementary to that of the Allied military forces.46 By

40

On the discussions shaping the organizational structure of the UN, see Gaiduk, Divided Together. The United States and the Soviet Union in the United Nations, 1945-1965. 41 Fox, "The Origins of Unrra." 578-579 42 Mazower, "Reconstruction: The Historiographical Issues." 43 Sevón, Visionen Om Europa: Svensk Neutralitet Och Europeisk Återuppbyggnad 1945-1948. 53-69. 44 Gunnar Myrdal, Varning För Fredsoptimismen (Stockholm1944). 227-229 45 "Archival Finding Aid of the Unrra Records," https://archives.un.org/sites/archives.un.org/files/files/Finding%20Aids/Predecessors/AG018_IRO.pdf. 46 Fox, "The Origins of Unrra." 570 10

July 1944, The Economist was reporting a “general impression that UNRRA is in some way missing its opportunities and turning out not to be a vigorous experiment in the new internationalism, but another pale Genevan ghost”.47 Disappointment grew by the end of 1944, as UNRRA failed to deliver much needed supplies to the newly liberated countries of Western Europe. Undoubtedly, UNRRA did much good work, for example in Poland.48 But along with the growing disappointment over UNRRA’s practical achievements in France and Belgium, American commitment began to diminish. American policymakers were dissatisfied with the high monetary costs of UNRRA and the lack of direct control that the United States as the largest contributor of money and supplies could exercise. Fearing another American withdrawal from Europe after the war, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin urged Congress in October 1945 to keep up its commitment to UNRRA: “[…] if Congress did not vote another £450 million, it [UNRRA] would be broken and the situation would soon be disastrous. Britain readily agreed to pay her 1 per cent of the national income if America did the same.”49 UNRRA continued to operate until 1947. The decision to terminate UNRRA was taken in August 1946, after the United States announced the intention to withdraw. Remaining assets and personnel were distributed among the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and UNICEF.50 In the State Department, UNRRA became a cautionary tale. Despite the huge American financial investment, the Washington headquarters and an American Director General, the Department felt a lack of direct control in UNRRA. When the Marshall Plan was in the making, Undersecretary of State William Clayton noted that, this time, “we must avoid getting into another UNRRA. The United States must run this show.”51 But while the success of UNRRA in the field remains debatable, the rhetoric surrounding its pioneering exercise in renewed practical internationalism after the demise of the League had long lasting repercussions. In the few years between the first UNRRA operations and the announcement of the Marshall Plan, several organizations were set up that largely followed in UNRRA’s spirit. UNRRA was designed to be more than a “glorified soup kitchen”, to not only grant relief, but also provide means for economic reconstruction. ECE and its immediate predecessors, the three so called e-organizations, were founded to provide for the coordination of national reconstruction plans. They embodied a technical take on international cooperation and were very much a continuation of the spirit which had shaped UNRRA. These organizations were the European Coal Organization (ECO), the European Central Inland Transport Organization (ECITO), and the Emergency Economic Committee for Europe (EECE). All three of them were founded outside the UN as instruments of inter-Allied

47

The Economist, 15 July 1944, quoted in Ben Shephard, "'Becoming Planning Minded': The Theory and Practice of Relief 1940-45," Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008). 413 48 European Regional Office, "Unrra in Poland," UNRRA at Work 5, no. February 1946 (1946); Jessica Reinisch, "'We Shall Rebuild Anew a Powerful Nation': Unrra, Internationalism and National Reconstruction in Poland," Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008). 49 Royal Institute of International Affairs (Publ.), "Mr. Bevin's Speech on Conditions in Europe," Chronology of International Events and Documents 1, no. 9 (1945). 205. 50 Reinisch, "Internationalism in Relief: The Birth (and Death) of Unrra." 285. 51 Clayton memo, 27 May 1947, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947 (Washington, D.C. 1972), vol. 3, 230-232 (original emphasis) 11

cooperation, but for practical considerations opened to neutrals and, in a non-voting capacity, even some of the former enemies soon after the end of hostilities. The three e-organizations were tasked with tackling so called “bottleneck problems”, shortages of supply that were obstacles to an economic recovery in various sectors. These bottlenecks included among others transport, coal, food, and housing. The e-organizations were created with haste, and unlike UNRRA, their institutional design was not discussed broadly due to the pressing emergency situation. The deficit of coal, for example, in the winter of 1945-46 was estimated at 3 million tons per month in the formerly occupied territories of Western Europe alone.52 This huge deficit called for institutionalized international cooperation, given that the number of possible coal suppliers was very limited. If UNRRA was an essentially American project, the e-organizations were an essentially British one. Both EECE and ECO were based in London, with ECITO in Paris, and the British exercised a strong influence in all of them. A member of the French delegation later recalled that “the EECE in London looked like an appendix of the Foreign Office to some delegates”: Its offices were located in Whitehall, the chairman was British, and even the stationery was the same that the Foreign Office used.53 UNRRA’s and the e-organizations’ success lay less in the achievements of their field work, but in the rhetoric that had shaped them and that they shaped in return, promoting the necessity of intergovernmental cooperation and coordinated planning for the purposes of reconstruction. When the decision to terminate UNRRA was taken and the mandates of the e-organizations were running out, governments still sought to continue on the path these organizations had laid out. Picking up the threads of revived internationalism in an economic key, the Polish delegation at the first session of the UN General Assembly in February 1946 brought forth a draft resolution on the “Reconstruction of countries members of the United Nations devastated by the war”. The resolution argued that the problems of war devastation were beyond the capabilities of individual countries, and that international cooperation for European reconstruction should continue. What had begun with humanitarian aid provided through UNRRA should become a more permanent form of economic cooperation under UN auspices. The resolution was supported by the delegations of the United Kingdom and the United States and adopted unanimously in the General Assembly. But relief cooperation had been expensive, and American financiers especially were dissatisfied with the way UNRRA and the e-organizations had developed. So while Americans and Europeans agreed that it was necessary to continue European economic cooperation in a more permanent and more efficient way, a continuation of the already existing institutions was never seriously discussed as an option.54

52

A.S.A., "The European Coal Organization: International Cooperation in Practice," The World Today 2, no. 3 (1946). 99 53 Jean Wintier to Václav Kostelecký. 54 The Belgian, Dutch, Greek and French representatives at ECITO briefly supported the idea that ECITO should remain independent from ECE, but their proposal was overruled by ECE’s terms of reference which terminated all three e-organizations. See Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Economic and Social Council on an Economic Commission for Europe. The National Archives, FO 371/62382: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 12

The first detailed suggestion for a permanent, all-European economic institution under UN auspices was drafted in the State Department by Walt Whitman Rostow.55 A young Yale and Oxford-trained economist, Rostow’s job during the war was to identify targets for bombing raids in Germany for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). With the armistice, his task transformed from destruction to reconstruction of the former enemy countries in the Office of Economic Security Policy’s GermanAustrian Affairs Unit. Rostow’s draft, written in spring 1946, envisions a “European UNO Machinery” as an “extension of the central organization”, with an Assembly- and a Security Council level as well as a European Economic and Social Council.56 Remarkably, the draft already mentions bloc formation as a looming danger: “The United States Government has noted with concern […] the assumption that Europe must one day divide into exclusive eastern and western ‘blocs’. The United States Government considers that the security of Europe and therewith of the United States would be endangered by such a division of Europe and seeks to prevent such a division.” Counteracting the division of Europe was thus listed as a major purpose for ECE from the very beginning. In a later publication, Rostow summarized the other reasons for ECE’s creation as threefold.57 First, by the summer of 1946, governments realized that the problems the e-organizations were dealing with were likely to persist for years. Their fields of operation overlapped, yet membership was varied. It thus seemed logical to merge the emergency organizations into one permanent, allEuropean organization with consistent membership. Second, the prospective gap in external aid after the termination of UNRRA made the idea of a European economic commission attractive to eastern European countries. While it was not clear how exactly the proposed ECE would help the recovery of its members, “the existence of such a body would, at the least, keep alive the concept of international responsibility for aid to war-devastated areas”.58 Third, ECE offered the possibility of a long-term settlement of common economic interests: “[…] ECE might, it was thought, constitute an instrument whereby Europe could ultimately unite on certain key issues, to set the long-run terms of its economic relations with Germany.” According to Rostow, it was no coincidence that the first ideas for what would become ECE nurtured in the section of the State Department concerned with the German economy: “A Germany economically united can only be dealt with securely within the framework of a Europe which is united in dealing with certain economic essentials. […] The ECE appeared as a possible realistic first step along the slow path towards a democratically negotiated, economic unity in Europe.”59 The British Foreign Office’s records on the creation of ECE confirm the reasons listed in Rostow’s summary, but provide some additional insights into the constitutive politics behind the scenes. Although UK officials were more reluctant toward the proposed ECE than their American counterparts, 55

Kostelecký, The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe: The Beginning of a History. Rostow, Walt W.: Draft of Proposed U.S. Plan for a European Settlement: Spring 1946 UNOG Archives ARR 14/1360, Box 69, Folder ‘W.W. Rostow”. 57 Rostow, "The Economic Commission for Europe." 254-256 58 Ibid. 256 59 Ibid. 256 56

13

they still supported the idea: “Whatever we may think of the practical aspects of some of these proposals,” a Foreign Office briefing noted, “it is crystal clear that we must do nothing to discourage a state of mind which tends to commit the United States to an active rôle in European economic affairs.”60 Securing America’s commitment in Congress meant a significant reduction of the costs of operation in comparison to UNRRA and the e-organizations, a factor not mentioned by Rostow, but certainly crucial to the State Department. For the first five months of ECE’s operation, staff salaries were budgeted at less than half the costs of the three emergency organizations combined.61 For 1948, the first year of full operation, budget estimates were still below the combined costs of the eorganizations, not even counting the much more expensive UNRRA. Rostow and the other American planners proposed ECE as a cost-efficient, centralized solution to problems arising from the limited mandates of the existing organizations. The Foreign Office records also emphasize that the nature of the task had changed much since the immediate aftermath of war: “In the eighteen months since liberation, Europe has passed out of the immediate posthostilities emergency period and now faces a somewhat changed and considerably more complex set of urgent economic problems requiring immediate international solution. These new problems are far beyond the scope of the existing emergency organizations. The proposal to establish an Economic Commission for Europe was motivated by a desire on the part of the European countries and of the United States to establish new machinery adequate for the new problems. The Commission is expected also to provide machinery for beginning the longer-run task of economic integration of Europe and the adjustment of the European economy to wartime changes both in Europe and in the rest of the world.” 62 With state planning on the rise throughout Europe, the coordination of national reconstruction plans was projected as a central activity for ECE. The more different national plans were being discussed, the more obvious it became that they were at conflict with each other: “[…] most of them contemplate a substantial increase in exports, increase which in aggregate and if uncoordinated could clearly not be achieved”, as EECE’s secretary Eric Wyndham White summarized the problem. Competition between national reconstruction plans over the limited available supplies and outlets would lead to waste and delay: “Skill, labour and capital so urgently needed for the economic recovery of Europe would have been misapplied and this at the most critical time.” At the same time, Wyndham White was optimistic that such hindrances could be overcome, echoing the firm believe in the power of international cooperation that sparked off UNRRA a few years earlier: “On the other hand, there is no reason why with a proper degree of consultation and co-ordination means should not be found for meeting the desiderata of the European countries with the minimum of conflict between them and consistently with a reasonably balanced European economy”.63

60

Draft brief on E.C.E. and E.C.A.F.E. The National Archives, FO 371/62382: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 61 James Keen: The Economic Commission for Europe, dated 28th March 1947. UNOG Archives ARR 14/1360, Box 67, Folder “History”. 62 Problems for the proposed Economic Commission for Europe, 11 December 1946. The National Archives, FO 371/62382: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 63 Eric Wyndham White: Draft Note for the Secretariat of the United Nations on the Economic Commission for Europe, 9th January 1947. FO 371/62382: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 14

As Rostow had stated, a long-term settlement with Germany and an integration of the German economy into a European framework was a key prospect for the establishment of ECE from the beginning. Among the delegates involved, this prospect sparked enthusiasm for the project. John Troutbeck, the UK representative at the UN, reported about a lunch with Paul Porter of the American embassy on New Year’s Eve 1946 that Porter was passionate about the idea of an ECE: “[…] he seemed to hope that the Economic Commission might one day develop into some kind of economic federation for Europe.”64 Porter’s enthusiasm was shared by the governments of continental European countries, who thought of ECE as a means to get a say in the management of occupied Germany: “The smaller Western European Powers, and to a lesser extent the French, are enthusiastic supporters of the proposed Commission. They see in it a forum for the discussion of both short term and long term economic problems relating to Germany […] and they look to it as a means for stabilizing and ‘integrating’ their respective economies. […] The limitrophe powers will see in the formation of E.C.E. an opportunity for securing three objectives: (a) A larger voice in the nature and direction of German trade, (b) Some degree of influence over longer term plans for the future pattern of German industry and trade, (c) Better information concerning current developments within Germany and the industrial and commercial plans of the occupying powers, especially from the point of view of their effects on the economies of the non-occupying power.”65 While the French “tried very hard to include in the terms of reference some mention of the importance of the economy of Germany to that of Europe as a whole”66, the other occupying powers were not keen on enabling such involvement in German affairs. They insisted that all enquiries should be directed to the Allied Control Authority directly, and not via ECE. After corresponding inquiries from the Dutch representative in the General Assembly, the UK government also pushed for a limitation of ECE’s competences

for sending observers to non-member countries, fearing “embarrassing

investigations in Germany.”67 The occupying powers interpreted ECE’s terms of reference in a way that would permit any such investigation only with the consent of the Control Authority. Their interpretation remained authoritative, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the four powers also formed the drafting committee for these terms. This was not the case in the UN General Assembly’s prepatory committee for ECE. Besides the four powers occupying Germany, this committee included representatives of China, Chile, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and Lebanon.68 The discussion in the General Assembly showed that Europe’s

64

John Troutbeck: untitled minutes, dated 31st December 1946. The National Archives, FO 371/62382: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 65 Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Economic and Social Council on an Economic Commission for Europe. The National Archives, FO 371/62382: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 66 Circular no. 057, Ernest Bevin to His Majesty’s Representatives, 26th March 1947. The National Archives, CAB 134/415: Steering Committee on International Organisations: Working Party on the Economic Commission for Europe. 67 Telegram No. 921 from Permanent UK Representative to the United Nations, to Foreign Office, 20 March 1947. The National Archives, FO 371/62384: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 68 Drafting Sub-Committee of the Committee on the Economic Commission for Europe, Draft Terms of Reference for the Economic Commission for Europe, UN Economic and Social Council E/AC.12/2, 19 15

reconstruction problems and the plans to set up an ECE did not exist in a vacuum, but had to face global concerns. Delegates of Peru, Venezuela and Chile demanded for consideration of the problems of South American raw material producers in connection with the establishment of the Commission. The Lebanese delegate pointed out that the Middle East and Northern Africa were still dependent on Europe economically, and proposed that the Commission should be renamed Economic Commission for Europe and the Mediterranean. This suggestion, however, drew no applause and was directly opposed by the USSR.69 The non-European countries in the General Assembly expressed their concerns that setting up ECE would bring Europe a general commercial advantage and tend to create monopoly conditions. They thus called for the establishment of similar institutions in other parts of the world. As a side effect of bringing the idea of a European economic commission before the global forum of the UN General Assembly, other regional commissions came to be projected. The Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) was proposed to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) together with ECE, and was established at the same time.70 Regional commissions for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Africa (ECA) and Western Asia (UNESCWA) followed eventually. While the prospective member governments very much agreed on the reasons for establishing a European economic commission, negotiators disagreed on the way its functions should be carried out. Fault lines ran between Great Powers and small powers, and even between European and nonEuropean UN members. The emerging bloc politics and the division between the former Allies were also already virulent enough to leave their imprint on ECE. Getting the Soviet Union on board was crucial if anything of the wartime alliance should be preserved, but Moscow’s cooperation was reluctant. While the Soviet delegation accepted the General Assembly resolution drafted by Poland, Britain and the United States that proposed the establishment of ECE to ECOSOC, they remained uncommitted in the subsequent ECOSOC meeting. Back in the General Assembly, “Poles and Czechs gave the proposal enthusiastic support […] and the Soviet delegation voted for the resolution that the Economic and Social Council should give the proposal prompt and favourable consideration.”71 The continued support of Poland and Czechoslovakia was decisive in securing Soviet participation in ECE. In a confidential note, EECE chairman Hector McNeill reported about a conversation with the Polish representative: March 1947. The National Archives, FO 371/62385: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 69 Telegram from Permanent UK Representative to the United Nations, to Foreign Office, 3 March 1947. The National Archives, FO 371/62383: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 70 The founding members of ECAFE were Australia, China, France, India, the Netherlands, the Phillippines, Siam, USSR, UK and USA. The Commission’s name was changed to Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in 1974. At only $260.000, the budget estimated for ECAFE for 1947 was considerably lower than that for ECE; the number of professional staff for ECAFE was budgeted at only 26. Economic and Social Council, Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, Provisional estimate presented by the Secretary-General in accordance with financial regulation no. 25 of the General Assembly, E/366/Add.1, 23 March 1947. The National Archives, FO 371/62384: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 71 Brief for the United Kingdom Delegation to the Economic and Social Council on an Economic Commission for Europe. The National Archives, FO 371/62382: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 16

“I took the opportunity to question him about the Soviet attitude towards the proposed Economic Council [sic] for Europe. He told me confidentially, and, I think, truthfully, that it had taken Dr. Lange and himself three extended meetings with Molotov and Vyshinsky to secure Soviet agreement that the Soviet should be neutral on the subject of the Council and that Poland and Czechoslovakia should be permitted to support it. I tried to extract from him what was the basis of the Soviet objection to the Council, and he told me that Molotov had harboured substantial fears that the Council would mean that the Soviet would be forced to provide economic statistical information, and that, even further, the Commission might be empowered to send observers inside the Soviet on economic subjects. Poland and Czechoslovakia were, of course, anxious to have the Council because both assume that the Soviet will not be able to meet their increasing economic needs.”72 Again, the European tail seemed to be wagging the Soviet dog. It was again the Polish delegation that was able to secure Soviet support with the argument that a voting block of Slavic countries would be stronger in ECE than in any other UN organization. According to Foreign Offices notes, the Poles “hoped that a Slav-block majority would be able to push through resolutions endorsing the Slav countries’ economic plans and supporting claims for financial assistance, e.g. from the International bank. They had originally persuaded the Russians to favour the Commission for these reasons.”73 The struggle to secure voting majorities foreshadowed bloc formation, and it touched directly upon the question of scope for the new organization. The scope of membership in ECE was all but clear. Discussion in the General Assembly touched upon the question whether Turkey could be considered a European country, but the matter was deterred. Similar questions were raised in the Foreign Office with regard to Iceland and the USSR, but also to Britain itself. A handwritten note in the margins of a report sent from the American embassy asked: “Does the U.K. rank as European?”74 Curiously, diplomats avoided the important questions how “Europe” would be defined in ECE and which countries other than the European UN-members and the United States were to join it. The government representatives in neither ECOSOC nor the prepatory committee concerned with setting up ECE took a final decision on the territorial scope. Instead, it was left to the UN Secretariat to send out invitations to prospective member countries.75 While no invitation was sent to Francoist Spain, Turkey, Iceland, the USSR and the Soviet Republics Ukraine and Belarus became members. Among the founding members of ECE, the Western countries had a stable majority. But it was foreseeable that other European countries not yet members of the United Nations would join at some point, raising the number of neutrals as well as countries in what was to become the Eastern bloc.76

72

Hector McNeil, December 30th 1946. The National Archives, FO 371/62382: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 73 Cabinet, Working Party on Regional Economic Commissions. Minutes of a meeting held in the Ambassador’s Waiting Room, Foreign Office, on 20th March 1947. The National Archives, CAB 134/415: Steering Committee on International Organisations: Working Party on the Economic Commission for Europe. 74 Problems for the proposed Economic Commission for Europe, 11 December 1946. The National Archives, FO 371/62382: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 75 Circular no. 057, Ernest Bevin to His Majesty’s Representatives, 26th March 1947. The National Archives, CAB 134/415: Steering Committee on International Organisations: Working Party on the Economic Commission for Europe. 76 Keen, James: The Economic Commission for Europe, dated 28th March 1947. UNOG Archives ARR 14/1360, Box 67, Folder “History”. 17

While the Soviet Union could be persuaded to commit to ECE, its opinion diverged from that of the other Great Powers on ECE’s place within the UN hierarchy. During informal meetings between the UN representatives of the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, the Soviet delegate insisted that ECE should not be responsible to ECOSOC. The Foreign Office enquired the reason for this persistence in a telegram to Troutbeck: “Do you think it is due to a desire to make E.C.E. as autonomous as possible in all spheres with a view to building it up to some extent in opposition to the U.N. Headquarters in the United States?”77 Troutbeck did not pick up on the speculation that the Soviet intention might have been to turn the European Office into a competitor for UN Headquarters, but confirmed that in his view, “it is significant of apparent Russian desire to emphasise the regional against the international idea.” The establishment of regional commissions already went against a basic principle of the UN decided at San Francisco, namely that economic problems should be dealt with on a world-wide and not a regional basis. ECE was established hierarchically under ECOSOC and under its supervision to keep this principle formally untouched, but the Soviets succeeded in securing a comparatively large degree of independence for ECE from its superior body. The choice for Gunnar Myrdal as ECE’s Executive Secretary was a crucial decision, as it set the organization on a trajectory emphasizing research and planning and developing practices with a longterm effect.78 But when ECE was in the making, Myrdal was by no means a likely candidate for the position. The first candidate discussed for the post of Executive Secretary at ECE was Eric Wyndham White, a British diplomat who had headed the secretariat at EECE. Wyndham White was a liberal economist trained at the London School of Economics and was affiliated with the Conservative party. He had held a variety of positions, at the British Embassies in Washington and Paris, at UNRRA, and at EECE. Wyndham White also acted as Executive Secretary for the London and Geneva prepatory meetings for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Employment in 1946 and 1947, where the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) originated.79 Given his experience in international politics and his expertise as an administrator in the predecessor organizations, Wyndham White was a very likely candidate for the post at ECE. However, the Foreign Office decided not to push his candidature, as they wanted to keep Wyndham White available for an International Trade Organization (ITO), which was being discussed at the same time. Instead, they agreed with the Americans that a candidate from either France or one of the smaller European countries should be found who would also have to be acceptable to the Soviets.80 Since the ITO did not come to be, Wyndham White ended up as Director General at GATT, an engagement he held until 1968 and that earned him the nickname

77

Draft telegram from Foreign Office to UK Representative to the United Nations, March 1947. The National Archives, FO 371/62384: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 78 The importance of working principles established during Myrdal’s tenure in 1947-57 is emphasized repeatedly by Yves Berthelot, who was himself Executive Secretary in the 1990s.Berthelot, Unity and Diversity in Development Ideas. Perspectives from the Un Regional Commissions. 79 Rogério de Souza Farias, "Mr Gatt: Eric Wyndham White and the Quest for Trade Liberalization," World Trade Review 12, no. 03 (2013). 80 Telegram from Permanent UK Representative to the United Nations, to Foreign Office, 1st March 1947. The National Archives, FO 371/62383: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 18

“Mr GATT”.81 Although Wyndham White and Myrdal had almost opposite intellectual and political affiliations, they shared an enthusiasm for free trade and a belief in multilateralism. Myrdal was a Social Democrat and a leading member of the proto-Keynesian Stockholm School of Economics. He entered the contest as a potential candidate for ECE very late, only two months before the first Commission session should take place. His name was brought forth to the representatives of the Great Powers by David Owen, Assistant Secretary General for Economic Affairs at UN Headquarters: “In private conversation yesterday Owen suggested name of Myrdal Swedish Minister of Commerce as Director General (or Executive Secretary) of E.C.E. He thought he should be acceptable to Western Powers and also to the Russians in view of the part he played in recent Russo-Swedish Agreement. Owen has reason to believe that Myrdal would accept the post if offered to him. […] Only doubts I feel are whether Myrdal is not too big a shot in view of our wish to enhance position of national delegates. Owen sees force of this point but thinks Myrdal would do the job admirably.”82 The bilateral trade agreement between Sweden and the USSR had been a core project for Myrdal during his tenure as Swedish minister of commerce, and it was probably the main reason that he got involved with the UN at all. Myrdal, although an outspoken internationalist, was initially skeptical of the UN system. When ECOSOC and other bodies in its orbit were first projected, Myrdal doubted that “the lively thinking about organizational planning in the international economic and social area” would lead to any practical results.83 Myrdal was highly critical toward the UN System as proposed at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in October 1944, which subordinated economic and social organizations to a Security Council dominated by the Great Powers: “Organizational independence from the security organization is a primary condition if the specialized agencies in the economic and social field shall be able to successfully fill in their important tasks.”84 This insistence on organizational independence later became characteristic of Myrdal’s leadership style at ECE. When Myrdal became minister of commerce in Sweden’s Social Democratic postwar government, he expected the United States and Great Britain to enter an economic depression soon, which rendered them unreliable as trading partners. One year earlier, in 1944, Myrdal published a book in Swedish titled A Warning of Peace Optimism.85 In this book, Myrdal predicted a prolonged economic crisis after the armistice, comparable to or worse than the Great Depression. Sweden’s economy was traditionally export-heavy and the elimination of the crucial German market brought it into a dangerous position. Adding to this was a feeling of mistrust toward Sweden in the Allied countries.86 Sweden preserved its neutrality during the war with several concessions to Hitler, and profited heavily from German rearmament as an exporter of iron ore. 87

81

de Souza Farias, "Mr Gatt: Eric Wyndham White and the Quest for Trade Liberalization." Telegram from Permanent UK Representative to the United Nations, to Foreign Office, 1st March 1947. The National Archives, FO 371/62383: Establishment of an Economic Commission for Europe. 83 Gunnar Myrdal, "Speciella Organ På Det Ekonomiska Och Sociala Området," in Fred Och Säkerhet Efter Andra Världskriegt. Ett Svenskt Diskussionsinlägg, ed. Utrikespolitiska Institutet (Uppsala: Almquist & Wicksells, 1945). 170 84 Ibid. 176-77 85 Varning För Fredsoptimismen. 86 E.J.L., "Some Trends in Post-War Sweden," The World Today 2, no. 7 (1946). 87 Karl Molin, "The Central Issues of Swedish Neutrality Policy," in Die Neutralen Und Die Europäische Integration 1945-1995, ed. Michael Gehler and Rolf Steininger (Vienna / Cologne / Weimar: 2000). 82

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Some observers saw European neutrals as free riders of Allied victory, and some even wanted to prevent Sweden and Switzerland from joining the UN.88 Myrdal’s policy in this situation was one of rapprochement toward the USSR. As minister of commerce, he pursued a Soviet-Swedish trade agreement which became highly unpopular in Swedish public opinion. Russia was still perceived as a hereditary enemy, and the invasion of Finland had stirred up anti-Russian feelings quite recently. A brooding personal feud escalated between Myrdal and Herbert Tingsten, the editor-in-chief of Sweden’s biggest newspaper Dagens Nyheter.89 Tingsten publicly accused Myrdal of having accepted unlawful personal benefits for signing a trade agreement with Stalin. When David Owen contacted Myrdal in this situation about the job opening in Geneva, Myrdal was ready to resign from his position in government almost instantly.

88 89

Wilfried Loth, "Neutralität Im Kalten Krieg," ibid. Sevón, Visionen Om Europa: Svensk Neutralitet Och Europeisk Återuppbyggnad 1945-1948. 20

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