Political, diplomatic and cultural historians have long been critically re-examining the role of the United States in shaping the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. From 1948 to 1951 the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) gave $13 billion in financial assistance to war-ravaged European economies. The money was closely linked to the political goals of the Truman administration in containing communism and promoting an Atlanticist federalism in Europe. Towards the same goal, the US Central Intelligence Agency and other organizations sought covertly to influence European politics and to promote American values in the wider post-war world.
In this economic and cultural Cold War, science was seen by many as having a key role as a bearer of liberal democratic values and in combating both nationalism and communism. Until now, there have been few studies of the role of science in the ideological struggle for post-war European hearts and minds. John Krige's superb new book goes a long way towards repairing this omission. He shows for the first time how science was an integral part of the creation of American hegemony in post-war Europe. The means to this end were research grants, fellowships, conferences and training programmes, usually for ‘basic’ research, often administered by US foundations with links to government agencies.
Pushed by leading American scientists, the US State Department worked alongside the Marshall Plan's Economic Cooperation Administration to develop science as an integral part of US foreign policy. US physicists used UNESCO and links with the State Department to promote a ‘Brookhaven for Europe’ – the collaborative European accelerator laboratory that became CERN in 1952. CERN was thus a ‘coproduced instrument of European and American political interests’ (p. 57).
In the face of European criticism and US domestic isolationism, liberal elements in the State Department worked closely with non-governmental agencies such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, which had a legitimacy in Europe that Washington often lacked. In immediate post-war France, Warren Weaver and the Rockefeller Foundation worked through Louis Rapkine and the CNRS to reconstruct and reintegrate French science to the tune of $250,000, whilst simultaneously encouraging a westward-looking internationalism among French scientists and marginalizing communist researchers. By 1950 the Rockefeller Foundation had become more explicitly anticommunist. Its officials grilled CNRS geneticist Boris Ephrussi and his colleagues about their communism before agreeing to award him research funding. Here, argues Krige, they followed a US domestic political agenda in shaping European science.
Similarly, the Ford Foundation worked with State and the CIA to support the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the intellectual Cold War in Europe. From the mid-1950s, under the banners of Atoms for Peace and scientific internationalism, the foundation also supported Niels Bohr and his institute in Copenhagen, providing grants for visiting scientists at CERN, both to promote American and Atlanticist values and as an intelligence-gathering exercise. Bohr and CERN's leaders were aware of the CIA connections and were thus ‘not simply nodes in a network of international scientific exchange, they were also witting instruments of American foreign policy’ (p. 183).
After the shock of Sputnik in 1957, the Ford Foundation and NATO jointly supported educational and training schemes to increase European scientific manpower. In the 1960s, however, the growing maturity of European institutions and changes in the dynamics of the Cold War produced significant changes in relations with the USA. An attempt in the early part of the decade to create an international institute of science and technology – a European MIT – foundered on French and British scepticism. NATO sponsored a series of initiatives to import American-style operational research into the European context to aid joint military planning, but these too were defeated because of the very different relationships between academia and the military in Europe.
Krige recognizes that his case studies – excellent as they are – present only a partial account of the theme and the period. He nevertheless does an outstanding job of linking them through the changing contextual dynamics of the Cold War. In his conclusion he also notes that his key actors ‘may not have been employees of the State Department or, dare one say it, of the CIA’, but that ‘they certainly shared the values of the liberal internationalist wings in these organizations in the 1950s and worked closely with them’ (p. 258). Absent compelling evidence from either foundation or State Department archives to clinch the tie, the thrust of the argument earlier in the book is somewhat weakened, but here is a splendid opportunity for detailed follow-up work to assess the strengths and limitations of the claim. There is much scope, too, for exploring in more detail and in more cases the ways in which American hegemony shaped the content of post-war science – an issue that Krige touches on but does not develop in depth.
Similarly, Krige draws attention in passing to disagreements within the foundations, within and between government departments and in wider political society in the USA and in Europe about early Atlanticist foreign policy and the role in it of science. A fully nuanced, symmetrical account would require more context and archival detail about these disputes. In particular, Krige notes the exceptional nature of Britain in terms of his framework. None of his case studies centres on the UK, but the book raises intriguing questions as to how its analysis squares with recent work on twentieth-century British science (for example, David Edgerton's nation-centred Warfare State (Cambridge, 2006)) and with diplomatic historians' accounts of the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA.
These comments are not criticisms. Far from it. They indicate what a wonderfully rich topic Krige has opened up in the ground between the history of science and diplomatic and political history – and what important intellectual links he has made between disciplines. In American Hegemony Krige has produced a foundational book on post-war science and politics. It sets out a framework which will guide research in this area for years to come. It is telling, however, that despite its measured approach and rich archival basis, Krige feels the need to emphasize that his book is not ‘anti-American’ (p. 14). Though the ‘enemy’ has changed, perhaps the current intellectual climate in parts of the US – and Europe – is not so far removed from that in the 1950s that Krige analyses so purposefully.
