Chapter 28: Cold War Conflict and Consensus

Postwar Europe and the Origins of the Cold War

• In 1945 the Allies faced the momentous challenges of rebuilding a shattered Europe, dealing with Nazi criminals, and creating a lasting peace.

• For the next forty years, the competing superpowers engaged in the Cold War, a determined competition for political and military superiority around the world.

The Legacies of the Second World War

• In the summer of 1945 Europe lay in ruins.

• Across the continent, the fighting had destroyed cities and landscapes and obliterated buildings, factories, farms, rail tracks, roads, and bridges.

• The human costs of the Second World War are almost incalculable.

• The death toll far exceeded the mortality figures for World War I.

• The destruction of war also left tens of millions homeless— 25 million in the U.S.S.R. and 20 million in Germany alone.

• These displaced persons or DPs— their numbers increased by concentration camp survivors, released prisoners of war, and hundreds of thousands of orphaned children— searched for food and shelter.

• For DPs, going home was not always the best option.

• Soviet citizens who had spent time in the West were seen as politically unreliable by political leaders in the U.S.S.R

• When the fighting stopped, Germany and Austria had been divided into four occupation zones, each governed by one of the Allies— the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France.

• The authorities in each zone worked to punish those guilty of Nazi atrocities.

• In Germany and Austria, occupation authorities set up “denazification” procedures meant to eradicate National Socialist ideology from social and political institutions and identify and punish former Nazi Party members responsible for the worst crimes.

• The Nuremberg trials marked the last time the four Allies worked closely together to punish former Nazis.

• As in the West, however, former Nazis who cooperated with the Soviet authorities could avoid prosecution.

• Thus, many former Nazis found leading positions in government and industry in both the Soviet and Western zones.

The Peace Settlement and Cold War Origins

• In the years immediately after the war, as ordinary people across Europe struggled to come to terms with the war and recover from the ruin, the victorious Allies— the U.S.S.R., the United States, and Great Britain— tried to shape a reasonable and lasting peace.

• Once the United States entered the war in late 1941, the Americans and the British had made military victory their highest priority.

• At Teheran, the Big Three jovially reaffirmed their determination to crush Germany, followed by tense discussions of Poland’s postwar borders and a strategy to win the war.

• Stalin, concerned that the U.S.S.R. was bearing the brunt of the fighting, asked his allies to relieve his armies by opening a second front in German-occupied France.

• When the Big Three met again in February 1945 at Yalta, on the Black Sea in southern Russia, advancing Soviet armies had already occupied Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, part of Yugoslavia, and much of Czechoslovakia, and were within a hundred miles of Berlin.

• The Allies agreed at Yalta that each of the four victorious powers would occupy a separate zone of Germany and that the Germans would pay heavy reparations to the Soviet Union.

• The Yalta compromise over elections in these countries broke down almost immediately.

• Here, then, were the keys to the much-debated origins of the Cold War.

• Stalin, who had lived through two enormously destructive German invasions, was determined to establish a buffer zone of sympathetic states around the U.S.S.R. and at the same time expand the reach of communism and the Soviet state.

West Versus East

• The Cold War took shape over the next five years, as both sides hardened their positions.

• After Japan’s surrender in September 1945, Truman cut off aid to the ailing U.S.S.R. In October he declared that the United States would never recognize any government established by force against the will of its people.

• The Soviet Union was indeed consolidating its hold on central and eastern Europe.

• In fact, the Soviets enjoyed some popular support in the region, though this varied from country to country.

• In western Europe, communism also enjoyed some support.

• In Italy, which boasted the largest Communist Party outside of the Soviet bloc, Communists won 19 percent of the vote in 1946; French Communists earned 28 percent of the vote the same year.

• By early 1947 it appeared to many Americans that the U.S.S.R. was determined to export communism by subversion throughout Europe and around the world.

• The United States responded with the Truman Doctrine, aimed at “containing” communism to areas already under Communist governments, a policy first advocated by U.S. diplomat George Kennan in 1946.

• Military aid and a defense buildup were only one aspect of Truman’s policy of containment.

• In 1947 western Europe was still on the verge of economic collapse.

• Recognizing that an economically and politically stable western Europe would be an effective block against the popular appeal of communism, U.S. secretary of state George C. Marshall offered Europe economic aid— the Marshall Plan—to help it rebuild.

• The Marshall Plan was one of the most successful foreign aid programs in history.

• In 1949 the Soviets established the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), an economic organization of Communist states intended to rebuild the East Bloc independently of the West.

• In the late 1940s Berlin, the capital city of Germany, was on the frontline of the Cold War.

• Success in breaking the Berlin blockade had several lasting results.

• The Berlin crisis also seemed to show that containment worked, and thus strengthened U.S. resolve to maintain a strong European and U.S. military presence in western Europe.

• In 1949 the United States formed NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), an anti-Soviet military alliance of Western governments.

• That same year, the Soviets countered by organizing the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance among the U.S.S.R. and its Communist satellites.

• In both political and military terms, most of Europe was divided into two hostile blocs.

• The superpower confrontation that emerged from the ruins of World War II took shape in Europe, but it quickly spread around the globe.

• By 1955 the Soviet-American confrontation had become an apparently permanent feature of world affairs.

Big Science in the Nuclear Age

• During the Second World War, theoretical science lost its innocence when it was joined with practical technology (applied science) on a massive scale.

• The impressive results of this directed research inspired a new model for science— Big Science.

• After the war, scientists continued to contribute to advances in military technologies, and a large portion of all postwar scientific research supported the growing arms race.

• Sophisticated science, lavish government spending, and military needs came together in the space race of the 1960s

• Advanced nuclear weapons and the space race were made possible by the concurrent revolution in computer technology.

• Big Science had tangible benefits for ordinary people.

• During the postwar green revolution, directed agricultural research greatly increased the world’s food supplies.

• Farming was industrialized and became more and more productive per acre, resulting in far fewer people being needed to grow food.

• In sum, in the nuclear age, Big Science created new sources of material well-being and entertainment as well as destruction.

The Western Renaissance/Recovery in Western Europe

The Search for Political and Social Consensus

• In the first years after the war, economic conditions in western Europe were terrible.

• Infrastructure of all kinds barely functioned, and runaway inflation and a thriving black market testified to severe shortages and hardships.

• By the late 1950s contemporaries were talking about a widespread economic miracle that had brought robust growth to most western European countries.

• There were many reasons for this stunning economic performance.

• The postwar governments in western Europe thus embraced new political and economic policies that led to a remarkably lasting social consensus.

• In politics, the Nazi occupation and the war had discredited old ideas and old leaders, and a new team of European politicians emerged to guide the postwar recovery.

• Across the West, newly formed Christian Democratic parties became important power brokers.

• Rooted in the Catholic parties of the prewar decades, the Christian Democrats offered voters tired of radical politics a center-right vision of reconciliation and recovery.

• Across much of continental Europe, the centrist Christian Democrats defeated their left-wing competition.

• As they provided effective leadership for their respective countries, Christian Democrats drew inspiration from a common Christian and European heritage.

• Following their U.S. allies, Christian Democrats advocated free-market economics and promised voters prosperity and ample supplies of consumer goods.

• Though Portugal, Spain, and Greece generally supported NATO and the United States in the Cold War, they proved exceptions to the rule of democratic transformation outside the Soviet bloc.

• By contrast, the Scandinavian countries and Great Britain took decisive turns to the left.

• Economic growth and state-sponsored welfare measures meant that, by the early 1960s, western European living standards were higher than ever before.

Toward European Unity

• Though there were important regional differences across much of western Europe, politicians and citizens supported policies that brought together limited state planning, strong economic growth, and democratic government, and this political and social consensus accompanied the first tentative steps on the long road toward a more unified Europe.

• A number of new financial arrangements and institutions encouraged slow but steady moves toward European integration, as did cooperation with the United States.

• European federalists hoped that the Council of Europe would evolve into a European parliament with sovereign rights, but this did not happen.

• Frustrated in political consolidation, European federalists turned to economics as a way of working toward genuine unity.

• In 1957 the six countries of the Coal and Steel Community signed the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community, or Common Market

• The development of the Common Market fired imaginations and encouraged the hopes of some for rapid progress toward political as well as economic union.

• Thus the 1950s and 1960s established a lasting pattern: Europeans would establish ever-closer economic ties, but the Common Market remained a union of independent, sovereign states.

The Consumer Revolution

• In the late 1950s western Europe’s rapidly expanding economy led to a rising standard of living and remarkable growth in the number and availability of standardized consumer goods.

• The purchase of consumer goods was greatly facilitated by the increased use of installment purchasing, which allowed people to buy on credit.

• Visions of consumer abundance became a powerful weapon in an era of Cold War competition.

• Politicians in both East and West claimed that their respective systems could best provide citizens with ample consumer goods.

• The race to provide ordinary people with higher living standards would be a central aspect of the Cold War, as the Communist East Bloc struggled to catch up to Western standards of prosperity.

Developments in the Soviet Union and the East Bloc

Postwar Life in the East Bloc

• The “Great Patriotic War of the Fatherland” had fostered Russian nationalism and a relaxation of dictatorial terror.

• Even before the war ended, Stalin was moving the U.S.S.R. back toward rigid dictatorship.

• As discussed earlier, in the satellite states of central and eastern Europe— including East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria— national Communist parties remade state and society on the Soviet model.

• Only Josip Broz Tito (TEE-toh) (1892–1980), the resistance leader and Communist chief of Yugoslavia, was able to proclaim political independence and successfully resist Soviet domination.

• Within the East Bloc, the newly installed Communist governments moved quickly to restructure national economies along Soviet lines, introducing five-year plans to cope with the enormous task of economic reconstruction.

• In their attempts to revive the economy, Communist planners gave top priority to heavy industry and the military, and neglected consumer goods and housing.

• Communist regimes also moved aggressively to collectivize agriculture, as the Soviets had done in the 1930s.

• For many people in the East Bloc, everyday life was hard throughout the 1950s.

• Communist censors purged culture and art of independent voices in aggressive campaigns that imposed rigid anti-Western ideological conformity.

• In the 1950s and 1960s, the Communist states required artists and writers to conform to the dictates of socialist realism, which idealized the working classes and the Soviet Union.

Reform and the De-Stalinization

• In 1953 the aging Stalin finally died, and the dictatorship that he had built began to change.

• Even as Stalin’s heirs struggled for power, they realized that reforms were necessary because of the widespread fear and hatred created by Stalin’s political terrorism.

• The Soviet leadership was badly split on the question of just how much change could be permitted while still preserving the system.

• To strengthen his position and that of his fellow reformers, Khrushchev launched a surprising attack on Stalin and his crimes at a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956.

• The U.S.S.R. now entered a period of genuine liberalization— or de-Stalinization, as it was called in the West. Khrushchev’s speech was read at Communist Party meetings held throughout the country, and it strengthened the reform movement.

• Khrushchev was proud of Soviet achievements and liked to boast that East Bloc living standards and access to consumer goods would soon surpass those of the West.

• De-Stalinization created great ferment among writers and intellectuals who sought freedom from the constraints of socialist realism, such as Russian author Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), who published his great novel Doctor Zhivago in 1957.

• Solzhenitsyn’s novel portrays in grim detail life in a Stalinist concentration camp— a life to which Solzhenitsyn himself had been unjustly condemned— and is a damning indictment of the Stalinist past.

Foreign Policy and Domestic Rebellion

• Khrushchev also de-Stalinized Soviet foreign policy. “Peaceful coexistence” with capitalism was possible, he argued, and war was not inevitable.

• In the East Bloc states, Communist leaders responded in complex ways to de-Stalinization.

• Hungary experienced an ultimately tragic revolution the same year.

• Led by students and workers— the classic urban revolutionaries— the people of Budapest installed Imre Nagy, a liberal Communist reformer, as the new prime minister in October 1956.

• At first, it seemed that the Soviets might negotiate, but the breathing space was short-lived.

• When Nagy announced that Hungary would leave the Warsaw Pact and asked the United Nations to protect the country’s neutrality, the Soviets grew alarmed about the possibility that Hungary’s independent course would affect other East Bloc countries.

• The outcome of the Hungarian uprising weakened support for Soviet-style communism in western Europe— the brutal repression deeply discouraged those who still believed in the possibility of an equitable socialist society, and tens of thousands of Communist Party members in the West resigned in disgust.

The Limits of Reform

• By late 1962 opposition to Khrushchev’s reformist policies had gained momentum in party circles.

• Emboldened by American acceptance of the Berlin Wall and seeing a chance to change the balance of military power decisively, Premier Khrushchev secretly ordered missiles with nuclear warheads installed in Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba in 1962.

• Khrushchev’s influence in the party, already slipping, declined rapidly after the Cuban missile crisis.

• In 1964 the reformist premier was displaced in a bloodless coup, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

• Despite popular protests and changes in leadership, the U.S.S.R. and its satellite countries had achieved some stability by the late 1950s.

The End of Empires

• In the postwar era, in one of world history’s great turning points, Europe’s long-standing overseas expansion was dramatically reversed.

• The retreat from imperial control— what Europeans called decolonization— remade the world map.

Decolonization and the Global Cold War

• The most basic cause of imperial collapse was the rising demand of non-Western peoples for national self determination, racial equality, and personal dignity.

• European empires had been based on an enormous power differential between the rulers and the ruled, a difference that had greatly declined by 1945.

• To some degree, the Great Powers regarded their empires very differently after 1945 than before 1914, or even before 1939.

• Furthermore, the imperial powers faced dedicated anticolonial resistance.

• Around the globe, the Cold War had an inescapable impact on decolonization.

• Liberation from colonial rule had long been a central goal for proponents of Communist world revolution.

• Western Europe and particularly the United States offered a competing vision of independence, based on free-market economics and, ostensibly, liberal democracy—though the United States was often willing to support authoritarian regimes that voiced staunch anticommunism.

• After they had won independence, the leaders of the new nations often found themselves trapped between the superpowers, compelled to voice support for one bloc or the other.

• Many new leaders followed a third way, adopting a policy of nonalignment, remaining neutral in the Cold War and playing both sides for what they could get.

The Struggle for Power in Asia

• The first major fight for independence that followed World War II, between the Netherlands and anticolonial insurgents in the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), in many ways exemplified decolonization in the Cold War world.

• A similar combination of communism and anticolonialism inspired the independence movement in parts of French Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), though noncommunist nationalists were also involved.

• India, Britain’s oldest, largest, and most lucrative imperial possession, played a key role in the decolonization process.

• Britain withdrew peacefully, but conflict between India’s Hindu and Muslim populations posed a lasting dilemma for South Asia.

• As the Cold War heated up in the early 1950s, Pakistan, an Islamic republic, developed close ties with the United States.

• Where Indian nationalism drew on Western parliamentary liberalism, Chinese nationalism developed and triumphed in the framework of Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Independence and Conflict in the Middle East

• In some areas of the Middle East, the movement toward political independence went relatively smoothly.

• As part of the peace accords that followed the First World War, the British government had advocated a Jewish homeland alongside the Arab population.

• The Palestinians and the surrounding Arab nations viewed Jewish independence as a betrayal of their own interests, and they attacked the Jewish state as soon as it was proclaimed.

• The Arab defeat in 1948 triggered a powerful nationalist revolution in Egypt in 1952, led by the young army officer Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970).

• In July 1956 Nasser abruptly nationalized the foreign-owned Suez Canal Company, the last symbol and substance of Western power in the Middle East.

• The Suez crisis, a watershed in the history of European imperialism, showed that the European powers could no longer maintain their global empires, and it demonstrated the power and appeal of nonalignment.

Decolonization in Africa

• In less than a decade, most of Africa won independence from European imperialism, a remarkable movement of world historical importance

• Starting in 1957 most of Britain’s African colonies achieved independence with little or no bloodshed and then entered a very loose association with Britain as members of the British Commonwealth.

• The decolonization of the Belgian Congo was one of the great tragedies of the Cold War.

• Belgian leaders, profiting from the colony’s wealth of natural resources and proud of their small nation’s imperial status, maintained a system of apartheid there and dragged their feet in granting independence.

• With substantial financial investments in the Congo, the United States and western Europe worried that the new nation might fall into Soviet hands.

• In a troubling example of containment in action, the CIA helped implement a military coup against Lumumba, who was captured and then assassinated

• French colonies in Africa followed several roads to independence.

• Like the British, the French offered most of their African colonies the choice of a total break or independence within a kind of French commonwealth.

• Things were more difficult in the French colony of Algeria, a large Muslim state on the Mediterranean Sea where some 1.2 million white European settlers, including some 800,000 French, had taken up permanent residency by the 1950s.

• The resulting Algerian war— long, bloody, and marred by atrocities committed on both sides— lasted from 1954 to 1962

• By the mid-1960s most African states had won independence, some through bloody insurrections.

• There were exceptions: Portugal waged war against independence movements in Angola and Mozambique until the 1970s.

• Even after decolonization, western European countries managed to increase their economic and cultural ties with their former African colonies in the 1960s and 1970s

• This situation led a variety of leaders and scholars to charge that western Europe (and the United States) had imposed a system of neocolonialism on the former colonies.

Postwar Social Transformations

Changing Class Structures

• The combination of rapid economic growth, growing prosperity and mass consumption, and the implementation of generous welfare policies went a long way toward creating a new society in Europe after the Second World War.

• Changes in the structure of the middle class were particularly influential in this result.

• There were several reasons for these developments.

• Rapid industrial and technological expansion and the consolidation of businesses created a powerful demand for technologists and managers in large corporations and government agencies.

• Similar processes were at work in the Communist states of the East Bloc, where class leveling was an avowed goal of the authoritarian socialist state.

• In both East and West, managers and civil servants represented the model for a new middle class.

• Wellpaid and highly trained, often with backgrounds in engineering or accounting, these pragmatic experts were primarily concerned with efficiency and with practical solutions to concrete problems.

• The structure of the lower classes also became more flexible and open.

• Continuing trends that began in the 1800s, large numbers of people left the countryside for the city; the population of one of the most traditional and least mobile groups in European society— farmers— drastically declined

Patterns of Postwar Migration

• The 1850s to the 1930s had been an age of global migration, as countless Europeans moved around the continent and the world seeking economic opportunity or freedom from political or religious persecution.

• Some postwar migration took place within countries.

• Declining job prospects in Europe’s rural areas encouraged many peasants and small farmers to seek better prospects in cities.

• Many other Europeans moved across national borders seeking work.

• In the 1950s and 1960s West Germany and other prosperous countries implemented guest worker programs designed to recruit much-needed labor for the booming economy.

• Most guest workers were young, unskilled single men who labored for low wages in entry-level jobs and sent much of their pay to their families at home

• Europe was also changed by postcolonial migration, the movement of people from the former colonies and the developing world into prosperous Europe.

• These new migration patterns had dramatic results. Immigrant labor helped fuel economic recovery.

• Growing ethnic diversity changed the face of Europe and enriched the cultural life of the continent.

• The tensions that surrounded changed migration patterns would pose significant challenges to social integration in the decades to come.

New Roles for Women

• The postwar culmination of a one-hundred-year-long trend toward early marriage, early childbearing, and small family size in wealthy urban societies.

• Throughout history male-dominated society insisted on defining most women as mothers or potential mothers, and motherhood was very demanding.

• In the East Bloc, Communist leaders opened up numerous jobs to women, who accounted for almost half of all employed persons.

• All was not easy for women entering paid employment.

• Married women workers faced widespread and long-established discrimination in pay, advancement, and occupational choice in comparison to men.

• The injustices that married women encountered as wage earners contributed greatly to the movement for women’s equality and emancipation that arose in the United States and western Europe in the 1960s.

• Sexism and discrimination in the workplace— and in the home— grew loathsome and evoked the sense of injustice that drives revolutions and reforms.

Youth Culture and the Generation Gap

• The bulging cohort of so-called baby boomers born after World War II created a distinctive and very international youth culture, which brought remarkable changes to postwar youth roles and lifestyles.

• Youth styles in the United States often provided inspiration for movements in Europe.

• Youths played a key role in the consumer revolution.

• Marketing experts and manufacturers quickly recognized that the young people they now called “teenagers” had money to spend due to postwar prosperity.

• An array of advertisements and products consciously targeted the youth market.

• The new youth culture became an inescapable part of Western society.

• One clear sign of this new presence was the rapid growth in the number of universities and college students.

• The rapid expansion of higher education opened new opportunities for the middle and lower classes, but it also made for overcrowded classrooms

• Thus it was no coincidence that students became leaders in a counterculture that attacked the ideals of the affluent society of the postwar world and shocked the West in the late 1960s.