A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe (review)

Sharply refuting contemporary historiographic claims that France’s role in shaping early Cold War Europe was minimal, Michael Creswell’s work, A Question of Balance: How France and the United States Created Cold War Europe, concisely argues that the French role in European Cold War policy endeavors was paramount. France’s unique position as a European continental power and its special historic role as the three-time victim of German military aggression ensured that all U.S. policy roads towards West Germany’s rearmament for use as a buffer against Soviet communist expansion went through France. Playing on the phrase “balance of power” in his title, Creswell definitively argues that in order for postwar security to come to Europe, the U.S. had to balance its desires to protect Europe cheaply with France’s desire to protect itself from the threat of German and Soviet aggression.

Striking the balance between the United States and France would not be easy, as both nations had powerful domestic factions that strongly influenced their differing international agendas and limited their respective abilities to achieve policy accommodation with one another. In the U.S.’s case, enormous domestic pressure to demobilize following World War II came just as the rising specter of the Cold War demanded a global U.S. presence to protect the free world. With the onset of the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. attempted to deter Soviet expansion by way of its nuclear arsenal, rather than with a troop presence. To offset the U.S.’s lack of troops, it expected Europe, which included France and West Germany, to pick up the slack by mobilizing conventional forces.

Saddled with enormous war debt, constant political turnover, an ailing colonial war in Indochina, and largely dependent on U.S. economic aid, France found the U.S.’s desires to lessen its presence in Europe unacceptable. While not against the idea of German rearmament, the French found little comfort in U.S. desires to maintain a defensive perimeter off the main continent, providing a nuclear shield in the interim. Having found their homeland the battleground for three wars in a seventy year period, the French wanted no part in seeing Europe become the potential battleground for a conventional and possibly nuclear exchange. They demanded British and American continental commitments to prevent both a return of German militarism in addition to bulwarking against the Soviet threat.

Carefully and copiously footnoted, and written with an uncanny amount of nuance in this relatively brief work, Creswell persuasively argues that despite all obstacles the French achieved their goals. Creswell’s work definitively shows that by the mid-1950s, with characteristic diplomatic subtlety and activism, France had secured all of the British and U.S. assurances it desired from the outset, to include permanent continental commitments to Europe as well as limitations on German militarization. Creswell’s superb study is recommended to all scholars of the Cold War, even across disciplines. In addition to its historiographic value, Creswell’s findings challenge many previously held notions within International Relations Theory regarding the nature of the bipolar system, including the role that domestic politics play in determining international policy and the role “secondtier” powers can play in influencing the bipolar system.