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Waqar Zaidi, Planning, Production and Reconstruction in Postwar Europe: Fourth BAlzan Workshop,
Birkbeck College, London, 26 June 2007
This was the fourth and final workshop of the Balzan Project on the history of
European reconstruction after World War Two. The previous workshops had
compared reconstruction in Western and Eastern Europe and reconstruction after
World War One with reconstruction after World War Two, and had focused on the movement of
populations and their relief and rehabilitation.1 This one focused on planning, particularly industrial,
agricultural and urban planning, within the context of immediate postwar European reconstruction.
Situated at the fruitful intersection between cultural and economic history, the papers permitted
investigation of a wide range of themes, including clashing ideologies, epistemic communities and
continuities from the Third Reich. Comments and discussions revealed that crucial areas still need to
be better understood in relation to postwar
planning, including the national arms industries, the relationship to the Common Agricultural Policy
(CAP), and, of course, ideological divides between East
and West.
John R. Gillingham (University of Missouri, St Louis) kicked off with a
paper addressing the foundations of postwar German economic growth. Many of the histories of
postwar Germany have argued or assumed, he noted, that state planning laid the foundations of
postwar German economic growth ? a prominent example being Barry Eichengreen?s argument that
the revival of central wage-bargaining was central to postwar German economic growth. Gillingham, in
his paper ?Planning Europe after 1945: the German Case?, argued that, actually, there was no central
coherent planning within West Germany of any significant relevance to its future economic growth ?
particularly in comparison to France and Britain. The planning for postwar reconstruction that had
been carried out during World War Two was wrecked by contrary Allied planning (for example the
Morgenthau plan) as well as the Potsdam settlement. Confusion and conflict in Allied policy delayed
recovery and limited early postwar decision-making to the short term.
Some recovery did take place, however, because in actuality Germany was richer and more
capable than is generally supposed. Many Nazi-era economic controls remained in place during the
early postwar period, and planning became a matter of resolving industrial bottle-necks (for example
in transport) and of recreating capitalist institutions. Allied policy-making was nevertheless frustrated
for many years, and faltering reconstruction was eventually saved through the intervention of German
policy-makers such as Ludwig Erhard who, having backgrounds outside of the traditional
communities of planners and policy-makers, used pre-existing and recently revised institutions to
implement pragmatic and ?quick-fix? policies ? most prominently the currency devaluation of 1948.
Wage-gains were deferred in favour of reinvestment in the early fifties, leading to the economic
strengthening of Germany and creation of a ?German model? which influenced market regulation in the
rest of Western Europe. This German recovery, concluded Gillingham, was not predicated on
Keynesianism or any other tradition of economic thought dating to the interwar period, and
consequently should not be seen as a triumph of ?planning?.
Katherine Lebow (University of Virginia) presented a study of planning for and within the city
of Nowa Huta, Poland?s ?first socialist city? and possibly the most visible and celebrated of such
cities built in the Eastern bloc countries after World War Two. Her paper ?Three Ironies of Stalinist
Planning? revealed a history of planning very much at odds with what we might expect from this most
Stalinist of cities. Firstly, contrary to common perceptions, plans for the creation of Nowa Huta drew
deeply on indigenous pre-Stalinist thinking ? planning for the creation of new steel-works and
associated cities was already well advanced prior to the advent of the one-party Communist state in
Poland. Secondly, contrary to the characterization of socialism by its critics, there was no linear
connection between ?blueprint? and action during the creation of Nowa Huta ? concrete plans were
often made to achieve fuzzy goals, and the final construction was often wildly different from initial
conceptualization. Lastly, Lebow noted that the centralized nature of planning for Nowa Huta
encouraged demands for grass-roots participation. She presented a case-study from early 1957,
when a citizens? committee in the city was given permission to build a church and was allotted a
prime parcel of land. The reversal of this decision in 1958, couched in the language of planning and
resource allocation, caused significant and violent clashes between protestors and security forces ?
dubbed the ?Battle for the Cross?. Her concluding remarks stressed the poverty of theses which
characterized authoritarian regimes as being ideologically committed to forcing reality to fit
preconceived plans.
Mark Mazower (University of Columbia), commenting on Gillingham?s paper, noted that it was
really about the absence of planning, a case-study of prosperity occurring once planning had been
jettisoned. Gillingham?s thesis, noted Mazower, was predicated on characterizing German policy-
makers such as Erhard as outsiders ? outside, that is, of epistemic communities which carried out
postwar planning during World War Two. But, asked Mazower, is it possible that Third Reich planners
in the early 1940s produced plans which looked similar to the eventual postwar reality ? that perhaps
Erhard was actually part of a Third Reich planning epistemic community? Gillingham?s paper
suggested that Germany broke with a tradition of national autarchy dating back to the thirties only in
the postwar period; Mazower posed instead the possibility that Germany had already largely broken
with this tradition and replaced it with European autarchy during World War Two ? much earlier than
Gillingham suggested.
Mazower noted that Lebow?s paper raised a significant number of questions regarding the
nature of planning in Poland and across Eastern Europe, and seemed to address a clash between
bourgeois and Stalinist planning policy. What was the relationship, he wondered, between German
wartime planning and postwar planning in Poland? Is it possible that Polish postwar planning was
consciously directed against wartime German planning? Was planning more important as rhetoric in
the postwar Stalinist era, rather than as an attempt to create a material existence? More broadly, he
wondered if there was a single distinctive European story about planning, or whether European
postwar history really is one of wildly different types of planning. Further comments from the floor
generally centred on the need to specify and distinguish between different types and levels of
planning in order to understand their ideological motivation.
To these thoughts from Mazower, and questions from the floor, Gillingham responded that
German wartime planning was fundamentally different from postwar planning. Third Reich planning
presupposed and was founded upon a German victory over Europe; it depended much less on the
state, and much more on organized business. This type of planning did carry over to the postwar
period in certain aspects, however: for example through consumer-industry financing of production
industries. Lebow, in response to the suggestion that there might be a clash of planning ideologies at
play in the history of Nowa Huta, noted that Polish wartime and early postwar planning was not an
exercise in ideology. New industrial towns met the very real and pressing need for housing, and many
of the early postwar planners in Poland were young professionals reacting to the opportunities of
reconstruction and pursuing their own professional and social goals.
Jacek Kochanowicz (Warsaw University) began the second half of the workshop with his
paper on early postwar economic planning in Poland: ?A Dual Reconstruction: Notes on the Polish
Recovery and the Beginnings of Systemic Change, 1944?49?. He argued that there were two
coexisting approaches, one Communist and the other Social Democratic, to high-level planning and
economic reconstruction between 1944 and 1949. Both were embodied in different distinct
institutions: the Centralny Urza_d Planowania (Central Planning Office ? ?CUP?) under the leadership
of Czeslaw Bobrowski, incorporated the latter, and the Ministry of Industry and the Economic
Committee of the Council of Ministers, headed by the Stalinist economist Hilary Minc, the former.
The Ministry of Industry began formulating quarterly plans in April 1946, followed quickly by
yearly investment and coal-extraction targets as well as distribution lists for crucial industrial
resources such as coal, steel and timber. The Ministry used the pre-existing hierarchical structure of
state industry to set mandatory production targets for, and allocate resources to, state industries and
enterprises in a manner similar to the Soviet model. The CUP, meanwhile, was formed in 1945 to co-
ordinate and plan beyond industry and for the whole economy. The CUP allocated state funds to
state and non-state organizations, and also set various types of targets for state and non-state
enterprises. Its planning encompassed the whole economy, and assumed and allowed for a
significant private sector. The social-democratic approach embodied by the CUP was eventually
unable to withstand the onslaught of growing Communist influence and Stalinization. The CUP was
dissolved in the beginning of 1949 amongst charges of ineptitude, ?bourgeois? methods of national-
income accounting and insufficient ?Marxist foundations?, and new Stalinist state institutions were
created leading to the setting up of a full-scale Soviet-style command economy.
Kiran Patel (Humboldt University), speaking on ?The Long Shadow of the Reich: Agricultural
Planning in Postwar West Germany?, turned his attention to what he considered to be the central
paradox at the heart of West German agricultural planning after the war. Postwar German agricultural
planning, from a strictly economic viewpoint, was not particularly successful. Yet, argued Patel, it
was exactly these shortcomings from the viewpoint of economic planning which made agricultural
policy a success when viewed as social policy. In order to understand how and why this occurred, he
argued, it is crucial to realize that from the days of the Third Reich the character of postwar
Germanagricultural policy remained unchanged in some crucial ways ? most importantly, it retained
its statist character and, in the forties, its consumer orientation. Contradictions in Allied crisis
management, lack of co-ordination and a restrictive industrial policy made agrarian policy
unsuccessful between the Potsdam conference and 1948. From 1948 to 1949, despite two bumper
crops, agricultural planning impeded the rise of production as much as it supported it. Although
alternative paths were possible, the newly formed Federal Republic, founded in 1949, continued this
protectionist course and, crucially, introduced market regulation for all important agricultural
commodities ? in doing so it formally reintroduced the central elements of state planning so
prevalent in the 1930s. The advent of this protectionist agricultural policy did however herald a shift
away from an earlier consumer orientation and towards a producer-orientated strategy with a clear
social objective: the closing of the income gap between the agricultural population and those
employed in other sectors. The advent of the Federal Agricultural Law (Bundeslandwirtschaftsgesetz)
in 1955, thanks to the initiative of the extremely powerful German Farmers? Union (Deutscher
Bauernverband), along with the subsequent ?Green Plan? and ?Green Reports?, ensured that not just
big farmers but smaller ones benefited too. This German agricultural policy was, as social policy, a
success, argued Patel: the agricultural sector had immense symbolic importance to the country and
support for it boosted the legitimacy of the state.
Alan Milward (official historian at the Cabinet Office), in presenting his thoughts on the final
two papers and the workshop as a whole, focused on the relationship between the state and
planning. Although planning, he suggested, was not as important an activity as it is generally made
out to be, there existed nevertheless the issue of why states carried out social planning in the
postwar period. The persistence of ?social states? ? states characterized by social planning ? he
suggested, needed further investigation. An immediate need for housing, as well as culture, might
well form part of the explanation for their existence. The reason for a shift from housing to higher
levels of planning also needs to be understood, and may lie, he
suggested, with the peculiar needs of the armaments industries for modern war: their co-ordination,
planning and centralization. He suggested that an investigation of the needs of highly-geared modern
warfare in World War Two, for example Blitzkrieg, could explain the growth in trade and exports and
so also state planning in the wartime and postwar period.
In the ensuing discussion comparisons were made between Hungarian and Polish planning ?
it was noted that the split between the two opposing planning approaches occurred much later in the
Hungarian case. CAP was discussed, and comparisons were also made between postwar British and
German agricultural policies. It was noted however that comparative studies of Eastern and Western
European agriculturalpolicy were lacking and were needed to further our understanding of postwar
European planning.The importance of understanding postwar reconstruction to a fuller grasp of
Europe in the postwar period has long been recognized. The Balzan workshop programme has
illuminated some aspects of this reconstruction, and has highlighted the need for further research
into others. It has, moreover, suggested ways in which reconstruction can serve as a site for the
exploration of much wider issues of import to the history of Europe: issues of policy and ideology,
of social change and material culture. It has given us a sense of just how little we know about
reconstruction, and how knowing more may change our picture of Europe today.
Waqar Zaidi
Imperial College London.
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