‘Rival Desirabilities’: Britain,East–West Trade and the Cold War,1948–51

This article provides a new perspective on British trade policy towards the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It argues that the Attlee government pursued an ambivalent economic strategy during the formative years of the Cold War. On the one hand, British policy makers sought to prevent Soviet military build up by implementing an international embargo on East–West trade. On the other, the economic and financial weakness of the United Kingdom drove Whitehall to sign trade agreements with the Soviet bloc governments in order to preserve access to the profitable non-dollar markets of Eastern Europe. This approach led to conflict with the Truman administration over Cold War economic policy, as the United States wanted to restrict Soviet access to Western technology and industrial goods. By 1951 Britain had succeeded, in partnership with France, in moderating US demands for a comprehensive trade embargo which, if instituted, would have severely limited the access of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) nations to the non-strategic markets of the Soviet bloc countries. As such, this episode offers further evidence to suggest that British governments exercised considerable influence over the USA during the early years of the Cold War.