The Formative Period of Atlantic Relations and the European Pillar, 1948–55

Abstract

Support for West European unity has been a consistent theme of US foreign policy since the early post-World War II period. Initially shaped by the emerging cold war, American policy advocated unity as a means to end Europe’s fratricidal national rivalries, to promote economic and trade cooperation to advance recovery and political stability, to buttress Western Europe’s capability to resist domestic communist radicalism and external pressures from the Soviet Union, and to stabilise and anchor West Germany within a Western economic and political order. The aim was to consolidate a West European entity as a component of a wider Atlantic community representing the western pole of the emerging bipolar European and global cold war configuration.