The Cold War (1945-1991)
When the Second World War in Europe ended (8 May 1945), the continent where modern democracy and modern industrial civilization had been born looked like a heap of ruins. Six years of total war had destroyed cities, factories, rail lines and ports. The discovery of the German death camps seemed to show that Europe had also suffered a total moral collapse: the power of modern technology had been used to carry out mass murder on an unprecedented scale. The battered countries of Europe also seemed to have lost their autonomy. The fate of Europe and the world now depended on the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The American deployment of the atomic bomb in August 1945 raised fears about the very future of human civilization.
For nearly half a century, life in Europe was dominated by the division of the continent into two spheres of influence, one dominated by the US, the other by the Soviet Union. During the war, many people had hoped that these two powers would remain allied after they defeated Germany, but the legacy of distrust between them was too deep to be bridged easily. The Soviet Union remained deeply suspicious of the capitalist world, and determined to spread Communist ideals beyond its borders. As a result of their role in resistance movements against the Germans, the Communist movements in several western European countries emerged from the war much more popular than they had been before. Anti-communists in Europe and the American government feared that the Soviets would use this popularity to try to take over the whole continent.
Hopes for cooperation between the west and the Communist world faded rapidly, with each side blaming the other for this breakdown. In the countries of eastern Europe that they had occupied after the war, the Soviets installed “people’s democracies,” governments dominated by Communists and effectively controlled by Moscow. Major industries were nationalized and Soviet-style economic planning introduced. In western Europe, Communists were expelled from post-war coalition governments in 1947. The wartime Allies were unable to agree on the fate of defeated Germany, which remained divided into Soviet and western zones of occupation.
The Soviet-backed overthrow of the democratically elected government of Czechoslovakia in February 1948 showed that they would not tolerate any deviation from their control in eastern Europe. Except for Yugoslavia, where a home-grown Communist leader, Tito, managed to maintain some independence from Moscow, the countries of Eastern Europe were reduced to Soviet-controlled satellite states. Europe was at the brink of war in the fall of 1948, when the Soviets attempted to pressure the western powers into accepting their demands by cutting off land access to the German capital, Berlin. The US and Britain rejected these demands and kept the city supplied by an airlift. Although the Soviets backed down from the threat of war, the Berlin crisis made it clear that the division of Europe would last for a long time. The United States organized the western European countries, including the western half of Germany, into the NATO Alliance; the Soviets countered by creating the Warsaw Pact. The Communist takeover of China in 1949 and the Korean War (1950-1953) in Asia widened the gap between east and west.
What Winston Churchill had labeled the “Iron Curtain” hardened into what seemed like a permanent boundary. Stalin’s death in 1953 eased tensions somewhat, but when the Soviet Union crushed a revolt in Hungary in 1956 and the western powers did nothing to aid the rebels, the division of Europe became even more rigid. Soviet successes in science and technology, such as the launching of the first space satellite (Sputnik) in 1957 and the first astronaut in 1961, made it appear that the USSR was equal to or even ahead of the west in some key areas, although in fact its economy was lagging far behind the prosperity spreading in western Europe. Hopes that the Communist world might gradually become more democratic were dashed when the Russians suppressed the “Prague Spring” reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
As Europeans began to accept that neither side could hope to gain an advantage against the other in the Cold War, some cooperation between the two camps became possible. During the 1970s, both sides pursued a policy of detente or deliberate attempts to reduce tensions. The Soviet-bloc countries were eager to increase trade with the West, and travel between the two areas became easier. Nevertheless, the Cold War was far from withering away. The Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 revived fears of Communist aggression, as did the Soviet installation of SS-20 nuclear missiles targeted at western Europe in the early 1980s and the continued repression of movements for liberalization in the Soviet satellite states. Despite the installation of a reform-minded leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the Soviet Union in 1985, the idea that the Communist bloc could suddenly disappear still seemed hard to believe.
Postwar Europe and the Cold War (1945-1991)
I. General Features of European History after 1945
A. Europe’s reduced world role
B. Economic and social trends
C. Main features of political life
II. The Development of the Cold War (1945-1956)
A. Soviet and American strategies
1. the Soviet obsession with security
2. American aims: democracy and market capitalism
B. Toward the great schism
1. popular democracies and anti-communist coalitions
2. the division of Germany
3. the Prague coup and the Berlin crisis (1948-49)
4. two rival alliances: NATO and Warsaw Pact
C. Institutionalizing the Cold War
1. Stalin’s death (1953) and the rise of Khrushchev
2. the Hungarian Revolution (1956)
III. The Cold War as a Fact of Life (1956-1988)
A. The Sputnik era
B. The Berlin Wall
C. The ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968: ‘Communism with a human face’
D. The years of détente (1969-79)
E. The tensions of the 1980s: Afghanistan, Solidarity and SS-20s