Economic Recovery versus Containment: The Anglo-American Controversy over East—West Trade,1947-51

Abstract

Sørensen, V. Economic Recovery versus Containment: The Anglo-American Con troversy over East-West Trade, 1947-51. Cooperation and Conflict, XXIV, 1989, 69- 97.

The article examines the Anglo-American controversy over economic warfare between 1947 and 1951, and aims to show that Britain's rejection of economic warfare as strategy for the containment of the Soviet Union was directly connected to the British economy's dependency on east-west trade and that the acceptance of economic warfare in 1950/51 was not part of the changed security preferences which led to British rearmament in August 1950, but a consequence of the American Congress's decision in 1951 to link military aid directly to east-west trade. As such, the article's conclusions tend to support Adler-Karlsson's (1968) classical argument that considerations for economic and military aid determined Western Europe's acceptance of economic warfare between 1950 and 1953/54. However, the article also shows that the US administration's leverage with respect to Britain and Western Europe was significantly constrained by considerations for the NATO Alliance and the US international economic regime and that it was the administration's attempt to defend its discretionary powers over foreign aid against an increasingly hostile Congress which was responsible for the administration's coercion of its most important NATO partner in 1951. Thus, the article concludes that the use of economic sanctions in 1950/51 should not be seen as a re-assessment of the utility of coercion as an option for US policy, but as a historical accident of the McCarthy years which confirms the political liability of coercion as an instrument for US international power in the post-war period.