East-West Negotiations over Austria in 1949

With the exception of 1955, when the Austrian State Treaty was actually signed, the year 1949 was the most important period in the great power negotiations over Austria's fate. After two years of failure to reach agreement among the four occupying powers, frustrated largely by the intransigence of the Soviet government, a change occurred which marked a watershed in the negotiations. At the Paris Conference of Foreign Ministers in June 1949, Soviet policy appeared to provide an unprecedented opportunity for a treaty, albeit on economic terms favourable to the USSR. During the next five months, the western response to the Soviet initiative was disjointed and chaotic, characterized by conflict among the three western powers and also in particular within the United States bureaucracy. The prospect of an imminent withdrawal from Austrian territory was the subject of intense debate, especially between the British, who consistently favoured a treaty on virtually any terms, and the Americans, whose policy was subject to the vicissitudes of bureaucratic infighting between the pro-treaty State Department and the anti-treaty Defense Department. Ironically, when the Americans finally came to the conclusion that a treaty was desirable even on Soviet terms (late October 1949), Soviet negotiating policy again changed. By mid-November, regardless of tremendous economic concessions now offered by the western powers, any opportunity for a treaty clearly had evaporated. Significant movement in the direction of a four-power agreement did not occur again until the Soviet demarche which led to final signature in 1955.1 The purpose of this paper is to examine the critical five-month period between June and November 1949, focusing upon the policies of the four great powers and evaluating the extent to which the Soviet initiative might have been a lost opportunity for the three western

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