Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
nomic aid to Europe in 1948, for example, Secretary of State George Marshall told a con-
gressional committee that American assistance was necessary to prevent “economic distress
so intense, social discontents so violent, political confusion so widespread, and hopes for the
future so shattered that the historic base of Western civilization, of which we are by belief
and inheritance an integral part, will take on a new form in the image of the tyranny that we
fought to destroy in Germany.” 51
Europeans also invoked this notion of Western civilization in arguing for postwar Atlantic
security cooperation. The British Foreign Minister, Ernst Bevin, argued for a European se-
curity alliance with the United States as part of a “spiritual union” that would link the At-
lantic world: “While, no doubt, there must be treaties or, at least, understandings, the union
must primarily be a fusion derived from the basic freedom and ethical principles for which
we all stand. It must be on terms of equality and it must contain all the elements of freedom
for which we all stand.” 52 These officials were giving voice to an evocative political senti-
ment—that Europe and the United States form a single political community shaped by com-
mon history and values. The failure of peacemaking after World War I and the search by the
United States for a stable group of like-minded countries with whom to build institutionalized
relations made officials on both sides of the Atlantic receptive to these appeals to Western
democratic solidarity. 53
American support for some sort of Atlantic community or association came from officials
pursuing various—and, to some degree, competing—visions and agendas. “Europeanists” at
the State Department focused on the unification of Europe as an end in itself, championed the
Marshall Plan, and anticipated an independent Europe with loose links to the United States.
“Atlanticists” urged the building of a more ambitious functional and political association that
would unite the United States and Europe. 54 Differences existed, for example, over whether
the United States should be pushing for European “unification” or “integration.” Both groups
were reaching for an organizational formula that would embody a new trans-Atlantic solidar-
ity. The challenge, as one American diplomat put it, was to figure out “how to develop a form
of unity which will avoid either a US-satellite relationship or a flimsy bilateral partnership
between two sovereign 'equals.'” 55 The two positions were ultimately more or less comple-
mentary. Indeed, by the 1950s they were largely subsumed by a wider consensus about At-
lantic political and security cooperation, embodied in the NATO alliance.
Implicit in this emerging American vision was the view that the West itself could serve
as the foundation and starting point for a larger postwar order. The West was not just a geo-
graphical region with fixed borders. Rather it was an idea—a universal organizational form
that could expand outward, driven by the spread of liberal democratic government and prin-
ciples of conduct. In this sense, the postwar West was seen as a sort of molecular complex
that could multiply and expand outward. The most explicit and radical version of this view
was perhaps that of Clarence Streit, who proposed a union of the North Atlantic democra-
 
 
 
 
 
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