What if NATO was basically a militarized EU how would this affect economy,Cold War, relations and whatever
What if NATO was an economic union?
- Thread starter gabbieridey
- Start date
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
I just talked to you about your tendency to constantly backseat moderate and naysay. I told you to take a look at your post history and realize that you’re constantly crapping on everything people post that doesn’t meet the Lalli Standard. This is a perfect example of you trying to throw cold water on a discussion for reasons I can’t even guess. You need to cut this out.
Kicked for a week. Please focus on being positive and helpful rather than negative and unpleasant when you return.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
Wasn’t the reasoning behind the EEC and it’s predecessors to unite Europe for security and economic growth? European economic integration doesn’t post date NATO by much.
I think it’s unlikely that European countries agree to be US economic satellites, though. I’ve played around with a Franco-British union scenario where the US is less actively involved in postwar European defense and most of Germany goes communist, and I think in that scenario tighter European economic integration is likely.
At what point? Doing this at NATO's inception would absolutely ruin western Europe as cheap plentiful American and Canadian goods would flood their still recovering markets. The commercial arrangements of the Bretton Woods System were absolutely pivotal in re-establishing and re-vitalizing European (and Japanese) industry, arguably even more-so than the direct aid afforded by the Marshal Plan.
Further, I have no doubt many critics of NATO would have a field day comparing the Euro-Dollar-Stirling (or whatever) to the Soviet imposition of the Transferable Ruble on its satellites.
TBF plenty of threads with more effort put into their OPs have been locked with a mod message to the effect of "please use the misc. >1900 thread for one liners like this".
In the aftermath of WWII, the US would probably drain Europe of tens of millions of laborers. US becomes more dynamic, Western Europe less, total American domination by the 1970s.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
Basically. If the US is part of it, it’s an American colony. It’s not implausible to have closer economic ties within Western Europe as part of a military framework, but the U.S. won’t be part of it.
For various reasons, I’d suspect a different Germany would be necessary. I posited the Soviets capturing all but the Ruhr, meaning the “EU” would be a Franco-British union that the Low Countries and rump Germany are allowed to join.
As one of the reasons for forming the EEC was to better compete with the US this is a non starter. One of the reasons France kept Vetoing Britain's entry was that the UK was too close to the US.
I mean for Western/Central Europe especially in the 1950s the US was already pretty economically pervasive (wrong word but brain fart moment). Other then Britain pretty much all the industrialized European countries had had their economies run down by blockade and denial of formerly imported resources (and markets for exports), being bombed to hell/ fought over by the various countries, being economically/industrially/financially heavily looted to various degrees by depending on the area and country the Nazis/Soviets/French/probably more I'm not thinking of. Along with having their economies run down by war efforts that especially for Europe involved their finances being wrecked and a combination of economic mismanagement and focusing all resources on the war effort which among other things led to much infrastructure and industrial machinery being worn down to a nub. And for the NATO Western/Central European countries they also had to deal with the loss of pre war markets and investments in what was now Soviet occupied/puppetized Central and Eastern Europe.
For the NATO aligned European countries of the time I can see why the EEC would be the key to preventing them from becoming/remaining US economic satellites in the long term. Yeah they had and wanted to do business with the US and definitely wanted the US involved in NATO and involved in the military alliance. But say including the US in any sort of EEC would probably be seen by the other members as essentially ensuring the deaths of their own industrial sectors (and most likely agricultural sectors as well). Since at least it would appear that the world wide dominant, not economically wrecked by the war, and their industries being at least seen as far more efficient/productive/larger and more well financed then their European rivals of the time. I mean in the early and mid 1950s I'm pretty sure any single member of the US "big 3" automakers produced more motor vehicles a year then every automotive manufacturer in Conintental Western/Central Europe combined (and frankly wouldn't be surprised if even with adding all of the output of the entire British motor vehicle industry to that pot still resulted in production numbers well below even the smallest of the Big 3.
Not really, more like COMECON.
What OP is proposing, btw, sounds to me like Battletech-universe Western Alliance. Fusion-powered mechs when?
This was basically the original idea of the Western Union/Brussels Treaty Organization, but for a different purpose altogether.
