Alan S. Milward

The wartime economic history: the German war economy

Alan Steele Milward was born on 19 January 1935 in Stoke-on-Trent, the only child of a Post Office employee, and attended a grammar school there. He studied medieval and modern history at University College London from 1953 to 1956, gaining a First Class BA, and took his PhD at the London School of Economics in 1960 under W. N. Medlicott, with a thesis on the armaments industry in the German economy during the Second World War. His first academic placement was the teaching of Indian archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

His first book, The German Economy at War (1965), accepted that Hitler prepared for a short blitzkrieg rather than a sustained war, a thesis since challenged by Richard Overy and Adam Tooze; he did not minimise the Nazi armament effort from 1936. He argued that the complete mobilisation of the economy for total war would have destroyed civilian support for the Nazi regime, so its stability rested on balancing civilian and military needs. The Nazis therefore prepared limited blitzkrieg wars within a new European fascist system, a strategy abandoned in 1942 after the failure to defeat the Soviet Union. The New Order and the French Economy (1970) affirmed the unwelcome premise that conquest might pay. A holiday in Norway and Finland stimulated his Scandinavian interests, and he was fluent in Norwegian, German, Italian and French.

The Marshall Plan controversy and The Reconstruction of Western Europe 1945-1951

In his 1984 book he argued that the Marshall Plan did not rescue Europe from collapse but eased a temporary crisis of rapid postwar recovery arising from the high demand for US imports whose cost the Europeans could not meet. On the counterfactual assumption that European consumption and food imports were frozen at 1947 levels, all Marshall Plan recipients except France and the Netherlands could have paid for their imports of machinery and raw materials, and recovery would have been slower but continued. On that basis he declared the Plan not economically necessary. He acknowledged, however, that not freezing consumption at the diminished 1947 level was precisely the point; the argument therefore shifted to political economy, austerity in Italy would have been dangerous given the strength of the Italian Communist Party, and the Plan genuinely mattered in France.

Adam Tooze, who had Milward as his PhD supervisor, dissents: the Plan mattered in breaking economic and political bottlenecks, and because it mattered in France it mattered for Europe as a whole. Milward himself, in a critique of Michael J. Hogan's work, wrote that the alleged economic crisis of the summer of 1947 in Western Europe did not exist, except as a shortage of foreign exchange caused by the vigour of the European investment and production boom. Tooze quotes that sentence in setting out the debate. Rendered into Korean it is a translation, better treated as a summary of Milward's argument than as a verbatim citation in English prose.

Integration theory: rescuing the nation-state

In The European Rescue of the Nation-State (1992) he argued that European integration was not a supranational ideal but a means to rescue national democracy and the nation-state after the fascist challenge. The construction of Europe was an act of domestic as well as foreign policy; it brought material rewards to a broad coalition of voters, and could be reversed if it no longer secured electoral success. He also found conventional explanations of European construction unconvincing, rejecting both the elite 'idea of Europe' and the unifying myth that most Europeans had resisted Nazi occupation, noting that resisters in western Europe were a minority. Integration was a complex process by which governments achieved goals undeliverable in purely national or international frameworks.

He mocked as "European saints" figures such as Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman who advanced visions of an idealised unity, insisting that national calculations and domestic political advantage prevailed over the international. On that basis he held that the EU's evolution was shaped by the practical national interests of its members rather than federalist goals. Scholars and former policy participants who confronted him at anniversary commemorations sharply dissented from his minimalist evaluation of the Marshall Plan and his insistence that the EEC emerged to serve national interests, though careful reading revealed probing and well-documented arguments that compelled fresh thinking.

Reputation and later years

He influenced many historians and political scientists, not least Andrew Moravcsik's Choice for Europe, and derived his reputation from his abilities as a linguist, archival researcher and political economist rather than from popular histories or media appearances. Friends and students remembered him as an "inspired contrarian"; Charles S. Maier said he sought to remove the mythology and reverence surrounding the Plan, Martin Westlake called him "brilliantly counter-intuitive", and Christopher Smout said his histories of the Second World War profoundly shaped our awareness. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1987 and of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters in 1994.

Invited by the Cabinet Office in 1993 to write the official history, with guaranteed access to records and independent judgment, he produced The Rise and Fall of a National Strategy 1945-1963 (2002). After a three-year illness he died on 28 September 2010, aged 75, and was buried on the eastern side of Highgate Cemetery; the second volume was never delivered. He married Claudine Lemaître in 1963 (divorced 1994) and the historian Frances Lynch in 1998.