By 1950, a period had begun during which the central characteristics of the world political order seemed increasingly to be frozen and irremovable, whatever might be going on elsewhere. Then, after a quarter-century or so, came a quickening of the pace of change, reaching its climax in the 1980s. By 1990, landmarks taken for granted for thirty years and more had disappeared (sometimes almost overnight) while others were already called in question. But this happened after a long time, during most of which a prolonged and bitter Soviet-American antagonism overshadowed almost every other part of international life, casting a blight over most of the world, and constituting a source of crime, corruption and suffering for thirty years. Cold War was far from the only force shaping history, and perhaps not the most fundamental in those years, but it was central to them.
Its first serious struggles took place in Europe, where the first phase of post-war history was brief and may be thought to have ended with the communist takeover of government in Czechoslovakia. At that moment, the continent’s economic recovery had hardly begun. But there were some grounds for hope about other, older problems. The familiar German threat had gone away; there was now no menace from her once-great power. Instead, her former opponents now had to grapple with the vacuum of power in the centre of Europe. Further east, boundary changes, ethnic cleansing and wartime atrocity had left Poland and Czechoslovakia without the problems of racial heterogeneity they had been obliged to live with before 1939. Yet in a new way Europe was divided as never before and that fact was embedded in the worldwide Soviet-American antagonism, whose exact origins have been and can still be much debated. In one sense, after all, it was only a late and spectacular manifestation of the rupture of ideological and diplomatic history in 1917. Communist Russia had from the start approached international affairs in a new and uniquely troublesome way. For it, diplomacy was not just a convenient way of doing business but a weapon for the advance of a revolution. Even that, though, would have mattered much less if history had not produced by 1945 a new world power, the long-awaited modernized Russia, far better placed than any Tsarist empire to have its own way in eastern Europe, and to advance its ambitions in other parts of the world. Soviet diplomacy after Stalin’s accession to power often reflected historic ambitions, and Russian national interest, shaped by geography and history, was to prove inseparable from the ideological struggle. Communists and those who sympathized with them everywhere believed they must safeguard the Soviet Union, the champion of the international working class and, indeed (true believers affirmed), the guardian of the destinies of the whole human race. However they qualified it in practice, when Bolsheviks had said their aim was to overthrow the non-communist societies, they meant it, so far as the long run was concerned. After 1945 other communist states had come into existence whose rulers agreed, at least in words, and the result was a Europe, and a world, increasingly divided into two camps.
By 1948, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Czechoslovakia had all ceased to have any non-communists in their governments, while communists dominated that of Bulgaria. Then, the opening of the Marshall Aid programme was almost at once followed by what was to prove to be the first battle of the Cold War, over the fate of Berlin. It was decisive in that it apparently established a point at which, in Europe, the United States was prepared to fight. It does not seem that this outcome had been anticipated by the Russians, though they had provoked it by seeking to prevent the re-emergence of a reunited and economically powerful Germany, which would not be under their control. That conflicted with the western powers’ interest - to reanimate the German economy, at the very least in their own occupation zones and to do this before Germany’s future political shape was settled, in the certainty that it was vital for the recovery of western Europe as a whole.
In 1948, without Soviet agreement, the western powers introduced a currency reform in their own sectors. It had a galvanic effect, releasing the process of economic recovery in western Germany. Following on Marshall Aid, available (thanks to Soviet decisions) only to the western-occupied zones, this reform, more than any other step, cut Germany in two. Since the recovery of the eastern half could not be integrated with that of western Europe, a revived western Germany might now emerge by itself. That the western powers should get on with the business of putting their zones on their feet was undoubtedly economic sense, but eastern Germany was thenceforth decisively on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Currency reform divided Berlin, too, and thereby prejudiced communist chances of staging a popular putsch in the city, isolated though it was within the Soviet occupation zone.
.files/image087.jpg "POST-WAR GERMANY AND CENTRAL EUROPE")
The Soviet response was to disrupt communication between the western occupied zones of Germany and Berlin. Whatever their original motives, the dispute escalated. Some western officials had already had it in mind before this crisis that a severance of western Berlin from the three western zones might be attempted; the word ‘blockade’ had been used and Soviet actions were now interpreted in this sense. The Soviet authorities did not question the rights of the western allies to access to their own forces in their own sectors of Berlin, but they disrupted the traffic that ensured supply to the Berliners in those sectors. To supply them, the British and Americans organized an airlift to the city. The Russians wanted to demonstrate to the West Berliners that the western powers could not stay there if they did not want them to; they hoped thus to remove the obstacle that the presence of elected non-communist municipal authorities presented to Soviet control of Berlin. So, a trial of strength was underway. The western powers, in spite of the enormous cost of maintaining such a flow of food, fuel and medicine to keep West Berlin going, announced they were prepared to keep it up indefinitely. The implication was that they could be stopped only by force. American strategic bombers moved back to their wartime bases in England. Neither side wanted to fight, but all hope of cooperation over Germany on the basis of wartime agreement was dead.
The blockade lasted over a year and defeating it was a remarkable logistical achievement. For much of the time, over 1000 aircraft a day achieved an average daily delivery of 5000 tons of coal alone. Yet its real significance was political. Allied supply was not interrupted nor were the West Berliners intimidated. The Soviet authorities made the best of defeat by deliberately splitting the city and refusing the mayor access to his office. Meanwhile the western powers had signed a treaty setting up a new alliance, the first Cold War creation to transcend Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came into existence in April 1949, a few weeks before the blockade was ended by agreement. The United States and Canada were members, as well as most western European states (only Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal and Spain did not join). It was explicitly defensive, providing for the mutual defence of any member attacked, and thus yet another break with the now almost-vanished isolationist traditions of American foreign policy. In May, a new German state, the Federal Republic, emerged from the three western zones of occupation and in the following October, a German Democratic Republic (the GDR) was set up in the east. Henceforth, there were to be two Germanys, it seemed, and the Cold War ran along an Iron Curtain dividing them, and not, as Churchill had suggested in 1946, further east, from Trieste to Stettin. But a particularly dangerous phase in Europe was over.
That as well as two Europes there might also be two worlds divided by Cold War soon seemed likely. In 1945 Korea had been divided along the 38th parallel, its industrial north being occupied by the Russians and the agricultural south by the Americans. The problem of reunification was eventually referred to the United Nations. After failing to obtain elections for the whole country that organization recognized a government set up in the south as the only lawful government of the Republic of Korea. By then, though, the Soviet zone had also produced a government claiming sovereignty over the whole country. Russian and American forces both withdrew, but North Korean forces invaded the south in June 1950 with Stalin’s foreknowledge and approval. Within two days President Truman had sent American forces to fight them, acting in the name of the United Nations. The Security Council had voted to resist aggression, and as the Russians were at that moment boycotting it, they could not veto United Nations action.
The Americans always provided the bulk of the UN forces in Korea, but other nations soon fielded contingents. Within a few months they were operating well north of the 3 8th parallel. It seemed likely that North Korea would be overthrown. When fighting drew near the Manchurian border, however, Chinese communist forces intervened and drove back the UN army. There was now a danger of a much bigger conflict. China was the second largest communist state in the world, and the largest in terms of population. Behind it stood the USSR; a man could (in theory, at least) walk from Erfurt to Shanghai without once leaving communist territory. The threat emerged of direct conflict, possibly with nuclear weapons, between the United States and China.
Prudently, Truman insisted that the United States must not become involved in a greater war on the Asian mainland. That much settled, further fighting showed that although the Chinese might be able to keep the North Koreans in the field, they could not overturn South Korea against American wishes. Armistice talks were started. The new American administration, which came into office in 1953, was Republican and unequivocally anticommunist, but knew its predecessor had sufficiently demonstrated its will and capacity to uphold an independent South Korea and felt that the real centre of the Cold War was in Europe rather than in Asia. An armistice was signed in July 1953. Subsequent efforts to turn this into a formal peace have as yet failed; nearly fifty years later, the potential for conflict remained high between the two Koreas. But in the Far East as well as in Europe the Americans had won the first battles of the Cold War, and in Korea they had been real battles; estimates suggest the war cost three million dead, although most of them were Korean civilians.
Shortly before the armistice, Stalin had died. It was very difficult to guess what this might imply. In due course, there seemed to have been something of a break in the continuity of Soviet policy, but that was not clear at the time. The new American president, Eisenhower, remained distrustful of Russian intentions and in the middle of the 1950s, the Cold War was as intense as ever. Shortly after Stalin’s death his successors revealed that they too had the improved nuclear weapon known as the hydrogen bomb. This was Stalin’s final memorial, guaranteeing (if it had been in doubt) the USSR’s status in the post-war world. Stalin had carried to their logical conclusions the repressive policies of Lenin, but he had done much more than his predecessor. He had rebuilt most of the Tsarist empire and had given Russia the strength to survive (just, and with the help of powerful allies) its gravest hour of trial. What is not clear is that this could only have been achieved or was worth achieving at such cost, unless (as may well be thought) to have escaped defeat and German domination was justification enough. The Soviet Union was a great power but, among the elements that made it up, it can hardly be doubted that one day Russia at least would have become one again without communism. Yet in 1945 her peoples had been rewarded for their sufferings with precious little but an assurance of international strength. Domestic life after the war was harsher than ever; consumption was for years still held down and both the propaganda to which Soviet citizens were subjected and the brutalities of the police system seem, if anything, to have been intensified after the war.
The division of Europe, another of Stalin’s monuments, was more apparent than ever at his death. The western half was by 1953 substantially rebuilt, thanks to American economic support, and was carrying a larger share of its own defence costs. The Federal Republic and the GDR moved further and further apart. On successive days in March 1954 the Russians announced that the eastern republic now possessed full sovereignty and the West German president signed the constitutional amendment permitting the rearmament of his country. In 1955 West Germany entered NATO; the Soviet riposte was the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of its satellites. Berlin’s future was still in doubt, but it was clear that the NATO powers would fight to resist changes in its status except by agreement. In the east, the GDR agreed to settle with old enemies: the line of the Oder-Neisse was to be the frontier with Poland. Hitler’s dream of realizing the greater Germany of the nineteenth-century nationalists had ended in the obliteration of Bismarckian Germany. Historic Prussia was now ruled by revolutionary communists, while the new West Germany was federal in structure, non-militarist in sentiment and dominated by Catholic and Social Democratic politicians, whom Bismarck would have seen as ‘enemies of the Reich’. So, without a peace treaty, the problem of containing the German power that had twice devastated Europe by war was settled at last. Also in 1955 came the final definition of land frontiers between the European blocs, when Austria re-emerged as an independent state and the occupying allied forces were withdrawn, as were the last American and British troops from Trieste, with a settlement of the Italo-Yugoslav border dispute there.
After the establishment of communism in China, a division also appearing worldwide was that between what we may call capitalist and command (or would-be command) economies. Commercial relations between Soviet Russia and other countries had been encumbered by politics from the October Revolution onwards. In the huge disruption of world trade after 1931 the capitalist economies had plunged into recession and sought salvation in protection (or even autarky). After 1945, though, all earlier divisions of the world market were transcended; two methods of organizing the distribution of resources increasingly divided first the developed world and then other areas, notably East Asia. The essential determinant of the capitalist system was the market - though a market very different from that envisaged by the old liberal free trade ideology, and in many ways a very imperfect one, tolerating a substantial degree of intervention through international agencies and agreement; in the communist-controlled group of nations (and some others) political authority was intended to be the decisive economic factor. Trade between the two systems continued, but on a cramped basis.
Neither system remained unchanged. Contacts between them multiplied as the years passed. None the less, they long appeared to offer the world alternative models for economic growth. Their competition was inflamed by the politics of the Cold War and actually helped to spread its antagonisms. Yet, this could not be a static situation. Before long one system was much less completely dominated by the United States, and the other somewhat less completely dominated by the Soviet Union than was the case in 1950. Both shared (though in far different degree) in continuing economic growth in the 1950s and the 1960s, but were later to diverge as the market economies moved ahead more rapidly. The distinction between the two economic systems nevertheless remained a fundamental of world economic history from 1945 to the 1980s.