5

Dualisms: Decolonization and the Cold War

Translatio Imperii / Britain and America / Geography and Ideology / Greek Questions—Far Eastern Answers /Asian Crisis and Western Freedoms / Worlds Divided—Worlds Apart / Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek /Dulles and Mendès-France/ Dien Bien Phu and European Integration / History Neutralized— History Revived

On 21 February 1947—a late Friday afternoon, just before closing-time—Loy Henderson, head of the newly established Office for Near Eastern and African Affairs in the U.S. State Department, received an urgent telephone call from the British Embassy informing him of the first secretary’s imminent arrival. About an hour later, Herbert M. Sichel appeared and delivered two extremely important documents: the British government’s formal announcement of its intention to end its engagement in the Balkans and the Levant as of 31 March; and an accompanying diplomatic note stating that England no longer saw itself in a position to continue providing support for Greece and Turkey.¹

In historical perspective, this routine diplomatic event represents the end of one epoch and the beginning of another: a translatio imperii of our time.² This was meant to be more than a mere relaying of the imperial baton from one naval power, Great Britain, to another, the United States. Rather, beyond that transaction, it marked a shift from the traditional ciphers at play in world events, based on a philosophy of balance of power, to an order relying on ideological values.3 From that point onward, the Soviet Union and the United States would find themselves at loggerheads in a traditional area of the game of nations— confronting each other in the perpetually critical region of the Straits and the adjacent area of Greece and Turkey—a confrontation duly replacing the historical antagonism between Russia and England. This conflict over values, the opposition between East and West, thus emerged in the zone of traditional European and imperial antagonism, extending then from the Balkans to Central Asia. From there it would turn global.⁴

With its cradle lying in the Straits, the Cold War’s birth certificate was issued by Harry Truman on 12 March 1947 in a dramatic speech to a joint session of Congress. On this occasion, Truman solicited support for Greece and Turkey while announcing American readiness to defend principles of freedom wherever they were menaced by totalitarianism. Without specifically naming the adversary, he spoke of a conflict between two ways of life, one based on self-chosen institutions, the other on the exercise of power by a minority. At the present moment in history, he stated, every nation had to choose between these alternatives.⁵ And he pledged American support to all who resisted totalitarian assault. Greece and Turkey, in especially precarious situations, were to be given generous aid.

The Truman Doctrine and the announcement the following June of the Marshall Plan for Europe’s economic recovery soon encountered resistance from the emerging Eastern bloc. In September 1947, representatives of the European Communist parties agreed to establish the Cominform.⁶ Out of consideration for his Western allies, Stalin had dissolved the Comintern in 1943. The institution of a new Communist information bureau itself signaled the reactivation of an ideological conflict that had been held in abeyance. Andrey Zhdanov, in charge of ideology and propaganda, saw two worlds pitted against each other: the “imperialist and antidemocratic camp” and the “anti-imperialist and demo-crati ccamp.”7 In this way, the Communist side reacted to the challenge of the Truman Doctrine with its own, quasi-theological, “two worlds theory.” A power-political opposition thus now assumed an ideological cast.⁸

The Truman Doctrine signaled the end of America’s intentions to demobilize its forces and leave the Continent.⁹ The ensuing Cold War would be based on a nuclear bipolarity between East and West persisting over four decades and marked by a fusion of two dimensions of conflict revealing different degrees of intensity: the traditional great-power struggle and the new ideological antagonism overvalues and worldviews.¹⁰ The antagonism had no fixed boundaries; it would influence both domestic and foreign affairs. Still, it is striking that it crystallized precisely at those points where the continental power of Russia and the maritime power of Britain had collided for generations.¹¹

That the imperial insignia would be transferred from Great Britain to America was not self-evident. As the United States saw its own historical role, it was not at all clear it was meant to succeed Britain, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, where England has been defending the lifelines of its empire, above all its ties with the Indian crown colony. Such concerns were alien to America: an inveterate opponent of colonialism and a sponsor of free trade—of most-favored-nation status, the “open door,” and an “undivided world market,” in contrast to the policies of restricted markets and protectionism pursued by the colonial empires. In America’s view, it was not proper to maintain these empires; they were ballast best jettisoned.¹²

During World War II, and in light of events in the Far East and Southeast Asia, the United States became convinced that the dissolution of the colonial empires was a matter of urgency. In their advance southward, especially when they encountered Europe’s colonial possessions, the Japanese had made use of a transparent but effective anticolonial rhetoric.¹³ The speed with which the Japanese overran French, Dutch, and British colonies was not lost on Franklin D. Roosevelt. The indigenous peoples had seen no reason to fight for the interests of their European masters. The situation grew critical when the British bastion of Singapore fell in February 1942 and an Indian uprising erupted the following summer—the greatest threat to British rule since the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58.¹⁴

Mindful of the danger of a Japanese attack on India, Washington tried to persuade London to accommodate the demands of India’s national movement. Roosevelt referred to America’s own struggle for independence and its anticolonial tradition. Indeed, according to Article 3 of the Atlantic Charter, the right of self determination was to be extended to peoples under colonial rule.15 But in a decisive speech to parliament in November 1942, Winston Churchill rejected such a notion, remarking famously that he had not become His Majesty’s prime minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.¹⁶ England spared no efforts in its bid to win American support for its view. Thus, for example, Lord Halifax, appointed British ambassador to Washington in 1941, had served (as Lord Irwin) as viceroy of India between 1926 and 1931. He seemed especially well suited to explain the British view of the Indian situation to the Americans.¹⁷ Still, it was virtually impossible to postpone the unraveling of Britain’s rule over India. The process would not be initiated by Churchill, voted out of office in 1945, but by the Labor cabinet of Clement Attlee, who was weary of empire and concerned with building a welfare state at home.¹⁸ On 20 February 1947, Attlee publicly announced Britain’s imminent withdrawal from India; he also let it be known that his country was renouncing its control over Burma and Palestine. The next day witnessed the delivery in Washington of the documents speaking of Britain’s inability to hold the historical line on the “northern tier” in Greece and Turkey.¹⁹

T_he English decision to dissolve the empire had been preceded in 1946–47 by one of the harshest winters of the century.²⁰ Heavy snowstorms had buffeted the British Isles, and record low temperatures had caused critical energy shortages. Production had stagnated dramatically. In view of January’s catastrophic impact, chancellor of the exchequer Dalton warned that the country was facing financial collapse and that cuts in spending were urgently needed. The cabinet thus decided to halt aid payments to Greece. Nevertheless, such turmoil caused by nature was not really the source of the power transfer from England to America. The process had already begun in the wake of the Great War and had been visible to all sides during the interwar period.²¹

Nevertheless, in the face of British urging and predictions of the loss of Greece and Turkey to real or imagined Soviet machinations, America hesitated to take up the burden. To many in Washington, the British appeal was far less ingenuous than it seemed on the surface. Some accused Britain of trying to manipulate America,²² suspecting a ploy by “perfidious Albion” to buttress its tottering empire with the help of American troops and dollars.While exaggerated, such suspicions were not entirely base less. With the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine, Washington had committed itself to confronting Communism everywhere, and this could entangle it in conflicts contrary to its own interests and anticolonial ethos. In particular, alliance obligations could draw the United States into the colonial affairs of its European partners.²³ Such apprehensions would later prove well founded, especially in what became known as the Third World, where anticolonial nationalist movements would be led by Communist parties.

Conflicts of ideological origin thus threatened to fuse with the desire for national liberation.²⁴ Such entanglements could become ubiquitous, especially where the United States was saddled with allies like France, which would spare no efforts in trying to offset the disgrace of capitulation to Germany in 1940 through an aggressive colonial policy in Indochina and Africa.²⁵ The British, of course, had much less to compensate for, and the decolonization of their possessions could be facilitated by the tradition of indirect rule.²⁶ Paradoxically, precisely because of its universalist and assimilationist traditions, French colonialism would become entangled in exceptionally violent conflicts, with the indigenous populations pressing for complete independence from the Union Française. France’s mission civilisatrice would drown in torrents of blood—in Madagascar, Indochina, and Algeria.²⁷

In an era of renewed universal civil war between freedom and equality, the confluence of an anticolonial struggle unfolding under the aegis of national liberation with social-revolutionary aspirations would work to the benefit of the Eastern bloc. The United States tended to read this struggle in terms of the civil war, thus becoming involved in disputes for which it had a traditional distaste. In this way the anticolonial impetus within the national liberation movement would shift to the side of the Soviet Union and the emerging socialist camp.²⁸ The People’s Republic of China would lay claim to the most direct link between Communism and national liberation; for some time the incipient conflict between North and South in the camp of international Communism would remain hidden from view.

Especially in Vietnam, Communism and national liberation underwent a complex fusion. Here American involvement diverged from its anticolonial tradition, but the involvement was hardly a historical accident. The United States had already been engaged in conflicts in East Asia and along its Pacific rim during World War II.²⁹ It had played a decidedly active part in the arc of crisis stretching from China and Korea to Indochina that began to emerge at the end of the 1940s. The manifold conflicts in that region soon fell into patterns corresponding to the ideological opposition between Communism and anti-Communism. In that context, during hot phases of the Cold War the region could serve as a real battlefield for an ideological struggle whose epicenter remained in Europe. The significance of far-removed, secondary theaters in the universal civil war of ideologies and values would only increase during the most anxious phase of nuclear deterrence. In the 1960s and 1970s, the main arenas would shift from Asia to Africa, where it would overlap with zones in which late colonial conflicts were still raging, as in the Portuguese domain. As the confrontation extended across the globe, the superpowers avoided the main front running through Central Europe. In the eye of the hurricane, military calm prevailed.

The confrontation had emerged from a traditional zone of political crisis in Europe: the zone of the Eastern Question and the nineteenth-century Great Game. In Asia Britain had enclosed its Indian and neighboring possessions with a security cordon, the “northern tier” as it came to be known. Russia was determined to protect its southern flank, open to the Black Sea, from possible attack by the naval powers.³⁰ Such fears were by no means baseless. Each side could cite a series of events confirming its sense of peril. Thus in the Crimean War of 1853–56—the nineteenth century’s world war, or, as Disraeli called it, the “Indian War”—the naval powers of Britain and France, bolstered by a Piedmontese detachment, had penetrated into the Black Sea to repel Russia’s attack on the Ottoman Empire and a possible breakthrough into the Mediterranean.³¹ Under Palmerston, the English hoped to eliminate their Russian rival once and for all as a prospective sea power, driving it back to its historical boundaries as a land-locked continental power.³²

These ambitious British plans would not be realized. The Crimean War ended more or less in a military stalemate, even if the subsequent peace accord rendered Russia defenseless on its Black Sea coast.³³ But already in October 1870, following the Battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War, Russia abrogated the humiliating “Pontus provisos” and began once again, as a redoubtable land power,to interfere in the affairs of Europe and Asia.The Crimean War experience had left it with an awareness of the vulnerability of its southern flank in the face of the great naval powers.³⁴ This lesson would be reconfirmed during the Russian Civil War of 1918–20, when Britain and France again penetrated into the Black Sea region,advancing into southern Russia in support of the White civil war armies.And the plans of Britain and France in 1940, when World War II was still confined to Europe, to open a further front against Germany and Russia in the Black Sea area served to reinforce this sense of vulnerability. The Soviets justified their repeated demands for border revisions and changes in the status of the Straits by referring to the trauma of the Crimean War and the West’s intervention in the civil war. In their political memory, these past events had taken on the iconic significance of an attack by naval powers on a vulnerable land power.³⁵

The main actors in the early phase of the Cold War, Churchill and Stalin, paid special attention to this region, if only on account of their own political pasts. Both men had been closely connected personally with the fate of southern Russia, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and naturally the Hellespont.³⁶ During the civil war, Stalin, the Georgian, had been entrusted with political supervision of the struggle against Wrangel in the south. As head of the Soviet negotiation team, he had concluded the border treaties of 1921 with Turkey and Persia, which allowed him to demonstrate his intimate knowledge of the region.³⁷ Stalin was exceedingly distrustful of Turkey under Kemal Atatürk, and unlike Lenin, he had supported the establishment of the short-lived Azerbaijani Soviet Republic of Gilan on Persian soil. For his part, as First Lord of the Admiralty (1911–15) Churchill had promoted the installation of oil-fired engines for the British fleet and had played a decisive role in 1914 in acquiring the majority of shares in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company for the British navy. During World War I, he had organized a joint land and sea operation in a bid to break through the Dardanelles and restore physical contact with the Russian allies. This led in 1915 to the legendary Gallipoli campaign.³⁸ The expedition encountered heavy German-Ottoman resistance and ended in disaster; it was an Allied defeat in which Mustafa Kemal Pasha played a decisive role as commanding officer.³⁹ During the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war, Churchill became a spokesman for the interventionists; as colonial minister after the war he had to grapple with questions concerning the eastern Mediterranean, Persia, and the Near East—the very region in which Britain and Russia had traditionally come into conflict. It was thus obvious that the 1941 alliance between London and Moscow had been concluded on a basis not of concord but of geopolitical necessity. This relation between the two powers on the flanks of Europe was strategically dictated; they had set aside their ideological differences for the sake of joint defense against a hegemonial threat from the Continent’s center, from Germany. In a union that bore all the hallmarks of being forced, genuine agreement could not be expected.

Against this backdrop, the alliance that emerged in the 1941–45 period can be understood as reflecting a provisional truce in the universal civil war of values. Indeed, just before Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, the alignment had been completely different. In line with Russian-British antagonism in the Straits and elsewhere, the Soviets had drawn closer to the Anti-Comintern Pact, an alliance increasingly directed against Britain, while insisting to Nazi Germany on their historical interests in the Straits and the Balkans, especially Bulgaria. Stalin was acting according to the same, traditional Russian aspirations, already explained to Hitler by Molotov in Berlin in November 1940, when he approached the Western allies with similar demands just after Stalingrad.⁴⁰ Indeed, the decisive Soviet victory at Stalingrad would be followed by increasing signs of a return to the traditional antagonism between Britain and Russia in the Straits, the Transcaucasus, and Iran, where the two countries had long confronted each other as power-political rivals. In particular, the pressure that Moscow was beginning to exert on Turkey evoked political contours that were familiar from the past.⁴¹

Immediately after the revolution, the Bolsheviks had loudly distanced themselves from the traditional imperialist aims of the czarist empire. But in August 1939, the Soviets again pressed for a role in supervising the Straits, an intention running contrary to the accord reached at Montreux in 1936. Turkey categorically rejected the Soviet request, instead signing a treaty of mutual assistance with France and Britain in October.⁴² The treaty’s motivation was by no means ideological; along with its anti-Soviet component, it was also directed against Italy. Moscow now denounced Ankara and the Western powers as warmongers. It even kept up the pressure after the Nazi German attack in 1941,⁴³ insisting that Turkey declare war on the German Reich—a notion that the far weaker Turkey rejected, with British agreement. Moscow then accused the Turkish government of colluding with the Axis powers.⁴⁴ The Turks repeatedly tried to elude Soviet insistence upon an alliance—an understandable effort, since the Soviets had linked their declaration of war on Germany with a demand to station Soviet troops on Turkish soil. The Turks suspected, not without reason, that such troops would not be withdrawn once the war was over.⁴⁵ But Moscow was also well advised to maintain a degree of mistrust toward its southern neighbor. Apparently wishing to exploit an opportune moment, Turkey concentrated troops on its Russian frontier just when the Soviet Union had its back to the wall at Stalingrad.⁴⁶

From a wider historical perspective, Turkey’s situation bore a striking resemblance to Poland’s. For geopolitical and historical reasons, Turkey feared it would suffer a similar fate, succumbing to a Russian attack. In his meetings with Allied representatives after 1939, the Turkish foreign minister repeatedly cited the Polish precedent. For the Turks, the breaking of relations between Stalin and the Polish government-in-exile after the exhumation of mass graves at Katyn in 1943 and the problem of Poland’s eastern border made the Polish question a touchstone for their own security.⁴⁷ They believed they could see the contours of Turkey’s future in Poland’s present reality. This perspective was bolstered by historical recollections reaching back to the eighteenth century. Since the unfavorable Peace of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774), which followed the sultan’s crushing defeat by the Russians, a dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire along the lines of the first Polish partition (1772) had been easily imaginable. The fact that it had not occurred in the nearly 150 years preceding World War I was due to the European balance. Not least of all, the intensifying antagonism between England and Russia since the 1830s had guaranteed the Ottoman Empire’s continued survival.⁴⁸

But the Eastern Question concerned more than the fate of the Ottoman Empire. Poland, which at the height of its power had stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, itself comprised an Eastern question.⁴⁹ But while Poland had ceased to exist as a state in the aftermath of successive partitions, the Ottoman Empire had remained largely unscathed. In any event, the last Muslim universal empire could preserve itself intact as long as it remained a cornerstone of a peaceful European order and the sea power Britain and the land power Russia held each other in check.⁵⁰ With Turkey’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers in 1914, this historical constellation came to an end, and Turkey suffered the same fate that had befallen Poland at the end of the eighteenth century: partition. Poland’s lot, like Turkey’s, was thus closely bound up with Russia’s power, which was expanding toward the south and the west. After a temporary weakening of the Russian Empire by world war, revolution, and civil war, a development favorable for both the restitution and eastward expansion of Poland and the reconstitution of the Turkish state, Russia in the garb of the Soviet Union reassumed its historical role in the course of World War II—and now with an enormous increase in power. Neither Turkey nor Poland could remain indifferent to this turn of events.Being so well aware of the historical parallel between their fate and the Poles’, the Turks looked Argus-eyed to the north, seeking to draw some conclusions regarding their own future based on the West’s stance toward Russia.⁵¹ To this extent, Poland was indeed a touchstone for Turkey.

After the turning point at Stalingrad, the antagonism between the partners in the anti-Hitler coalition, which has been set aside in 1941, became conspicuous again. And with the war’s conclusion, it erupted in full. Nevertheless, something fundamental had indeed changed, for the Soviet Union had emerged from the conflict with far more power. This was in striking contrast to Britain, whose power had obviously ebbed. Furthermore, with Germany’s absolute defeat (as well as Japan’s in the Far East) and the drastic demotion of France, Russia had become Europe’s sole remaining continental power. Also, it had gained enormously in prestige as a result of its victory over Nazi Germany, since it had paid a higher price in suffering, misery, and sheer effort than any other country. Hence after 1945 the Soviet Union benefited from a mutually reinforcing increase in both power and moral standing. Both in Eastern Europe and in the area of the “northern tier,” Stalin seemed eager to exploit this combination, whether for reasons of expansionism or an inflated need for security. On the Soviet Union’s western flank, in much of Eastern Europe but especially in Poland, the Western allies believed that Stalin had confronted them with a fait accompli. They sought to offset the Soviets’ one-sided advance in a terrain far more suitable to the maritime Anglo Americans: in the Levant, where Russia faced a substantially weakened but still intact Britain hoping to maintain its imperial hold in the eastern Mediterranean and coastal region, especially in Greece and Turkey. When Western discontent grew in the aftermath of the Potsdam Conference and Truman declared in 1946 that he was tired of pampering the Soviets, the confrontation that would hold the world in suspense for more than four decades was under way. That the zone in which it crystallized was the Straits, the Transcaucasus, and Iran suggests a kind of historical recidivism: immediately after World War II, the great powers had reassumed the positions that they had inherited from the previous century.

Three areas of conflict here emerged as prominent: the confrontation between the Anglo-Americans and the Soviets in Iran; the tensions between the former allies due to Soviet pressure on Turkey; and the frictions arising from the Greek Civil War, including territorial demands by Greece on its northern neighbors Yugoslavia and Bulgaria (and vice versa). Here, too, the mold was familiar: the Balkan hostilities followed the contours of the historical Macedonian question. In the area of the “northern tier,” it seemed that nineteenth-century conflicts persisted and only the political semantics had changed. The diction of geopolitical antagonisms, of a challenged balance of power, and of ethnic conflicts had been converted into the diction of universal ideological struggle. The Eastern Question had thus returned as the Cold War’s midwife.

1945 was marked by the advance of the Soviet Army. In Eastern and Central Europe, Russia now established itself as a hegemonial power. The first region to come under its sway was the Baltic, where the situation existing in 1940 was restored, followed by Poland and countries formerly allied with the Axis powers such as Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. The following year revealed a kind of contrary movement, with Iran witnessing a first confrontation between the former allies. In 1941, Britain and Russia had partitioned the country into spheres of influence in a manner analogous to their 1907 compromise in the Great Game, while the Americans supplied the Soviets with war matériel via Iran as part of the lend-lease accord. At the beginning of March 1946, the Soviet Union refused to withdraw its troops from northern Iran, violating an agreement it had reached in 1942. Instead, the troops were used to reinforce efforts at forming an autonomous government in Iranian Azerbaijan. Moscow also decided to once again raise the Kurdish issue, thus calling into question the borders drawn up after World War I.⁵² In the spring and summer of 1946, tensions in Iran between the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans intensified when it became known that the Soviets had dispatched tanks into Tabriz and the border zone between Iran and Turkey. It was against this backdrop that Churchill, with President Truman on the rostrum, delivered his famous address in Fulton, Missouri, in which he referred to an “iron curtain” that had descended across the Continent from Stettin to Trieste. It had also emerged that Soviet troops in Bulgaria had been reinforced and that the hospitals there and in Rumania had been equipped for treating casualties resulting from possible military action.⁵³

These signs attested not only to enhanced Soviet influence in Iran but, above all, to a maneuver directed against Turkey. In the West, it was believed that the Soviets were exploiting the situation in pursuit of their interest in the Straits and “south of Baku and Batumi” (an interest already raised in 1940 in their negotiations with Germany). In intimidating fashion, Molotov had demanded that Turkey agree to both a revision of the Montreux Straits Treaty that would guarantee Soviet security and the establishment of a Soviet military base in the Straits. This demand had been accompanied by another that created panic in Ankara: that Turkey transfers its eastern Transcaucasian regions around Kars and Ardahan to the Soviet Union.⁵⁴ More than almost anywhere else, the checkered history of the areas in question mirrored the conflict-ridden relations between Russia and the former Ottoman Empire. In raising questions about Kars and Ardahan, the Soviet Union seemed bent on realizing the aspirations of its imperial Russian heritage. Throughout the nineteenth century, Russia had repeatedly conquered these areas in the course of wars with the Ottomans—in 1806, 1828, 1855, and 1877. Except for the last venture, the czar had always been forced by the nations protecting the balance of power to relinquish the disputed territories. Since 1877 and the Treaty of San Stefano, they had remained under Russian control until finally, in 1921, they were restored to Turkey in the border agreement negotiated by Stalin.⁵⁵ But 1946 witnessed a renewed attempt by Russia to raise territorial demands on Turkey in the Transcaucasus region. After rejecting the Russian call for revision in August, Ankara, fearing attack by twenty-five Soviet divisions massed in the southern Caucasus, felt forced to maintain its army on alert at full strength (600,000 men). This effort put further strains on its precarious budget, heated up inflation, and left the country dependent on British financial aid.⁵⁶

The accumulation of conflicts in the region of the former Eastern Question and the Great Game alarmed the West. After all, in the words of the American secretary of war Patterson, this area was the “crossroads of the world.” And the American ambassador in Athens, McVeagh, informed Washington uneasily that by pushing south, Russia was threatening to break open “the lock of world domination.” Dean Acheson, one of the architects of American foreign policy and later secretary of state, saw any Soviet attack in the region as having grave repercussions for Western Europe, especially Italy and France with their strong Communist parties. He described the events being played out as of “pivotal” importance.⁵⁷ In this context of looming danger, Greece served as a final barrier.

In his talks with Churchill at Potsdam, Stalin proposed a revision of the agreement concerning the Dardanelles. The Soviet Union required a fortified harbor in the northern Aegean, that is, Dede Agach (present-day Alexandroúpolis) on the Thracian coast of Greece, not far from the Turkish border.⁵⁸ By circumventing the Bosporus, this demand was designed to allay Turkey’s anxieties. It evoked Molotov’s effort to gain permission from Berlin in 1940 for Soviet-protected Bulgarian access to the Aegean. Such access would only have been possible through Bulgarian territorial expansion at Greece’s expense. And in fact, in December 1946 the new Bulgarian premier and former Comintern chief Georgi Dimitrov directly presented Athens with territorial demands.⁵⁹ At the same time, Yugoslavia was increasing its pressure regarding the question of Trieste. Given this constellation of demands, it appeared that the newly established people’s democracies in the Balkans were not acting on their own initiative. The West suspected the guiding hand of the Soviets behind the scenes.

The British and Americans thus viewed Greece as a “soft spot,”⁶⁰ a possible gateway for Soviet expansion into the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, the Near East, and possibly also Southern Europe—Italy and France. After 1945, Greece appeared highly vulnerable; the war’s aftereffects weighed heavily on the country, wedged as it was between the Balkans and the Aegean.⁶¹ While other countries were gradually showing signs of recovery, Greece still showed the full effects of the harsh requisitions and reprisals by its German, Italian, and Bulgarian occupiers. Its transportation system was practically nonexistent. Indeed, there were only five locomotives and forty automobiles left in the entire country.⁶² Of the seven million Greeks before the war, half a million had died of starvation, disease, and executions. Thousands had starved to death on the streets of Athens during the winter of 1941– 42. After consultations with the Allies and the Axis powers, the Swedish Red Cross had attempted to alleviate the misery by shipping wheat.⁶³ The poorer people in the cities were the most severely affected, but the rural populace was also exposed to extreme deprivation. The worst off were those Greeks who, after having fled Asia Minor in 1922, had been resettled in northern Greece, in the areas conquered in 1912–13 in Macedonia and Thrace. A substantial portion of the partisans in the Greek resistance had been recruited from their ranks.

This resistance was led by the Greek Communist Party (the KKE)⁶⁴—a role that in 1942 brought the party out of its shadowy existence during the interwar period, transforming it into a mass movement that included the National Liberation Front (EAM) and its paramilitary organization, the ELAS; about a third of the Greek population were active members.⁶⁵ The dramatic rise of the Greek Communists was due not only to conspiratorial skill but above all to the paralysis of the bourgeois parties: the Liberals and the Popular Party. These parties represented the two dominant political camps of the interwar era, the republicans and the royalists; both camps had made accommodations with the German occupiers out of a hope for leniency. The resulting political vacuum was filled by the KKE. Through its resistance, the party attracted republican elements while drawing on an antimonarchical mood with roots in the 1930s.⁶⁶ For it had been the monarchy (restored in 1935) that had paved the way for the unpopular dictator Metaxas. The circumstances of the prewar period continued into the war, making it easier for the EAM, born in resistance against the occupation, to mobilize remaining political resources on its own behalf.⁶⁷ The question of the king’s return helped spark the civil war’s decisive phase. Emerging in 1917, a sharp opposition between republicans and royalists would come to stamp Greece’s political life as a “national schism”—the ethnikos dichasmos. The charismatic republican Elefthérios Venizelos, a visionary of Greater Greece and the architect of Greek expansion in the Balkan Wars, had been pitted against King Constantin I.⁶⁸ Their dispute concerned whether to enter World War I.While Venizelos saw such a step as a chance for Greece to expand its territories in Macedonia and Asia Minor at the expense of its traditional adversaries Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (who were allied with the Central Powers), Constantin, who was sympathetic to the Germans and related to the Prussian House of Hohenzollern, rejected such designs. When against expectations Constantin declined to ask Venizelos to form a government after the 1916 elections, the latter proclaimed a revolutionary government in Salonika, calling on England and France to intervene and banish the king from the country. After Venizelos was voted out of office in 1920, Constantin returned, only to be held accountable for the rout of the Greek expeditionary force in Anatolia in1922.⁶⁹ Heab dicated in favor of his son, George II, and went into exile—cursed by the million and a half refugees and expellees from Asia Minor, who blamed him for their fate. The “national schism” now had its blood-soaked founding event. From this point onward, the most diverse conflicts, social antagonisms, and political idiosyncrasies— whether between new and old elites, old Greeks and new Greeks, indigenous and resettled citizens, north and south—were rationalized in terms of the republican-royalist split.⁷⁰

The split widened in 1944 when it became known that King George II intended to return. He had been encouraged by the British government, more specifically by Churchill, who believed the monarchy would serve as a pillar of stability in postwar Greece. Britain viewed Greece’s strategic position as a cornerstone of its imperial policies. Also, the king’s restoration would presumably help prevent the country from falling under Communist rule. Hence rather than opting to alienate ordinary Greeks from the Communists, the British insisted on the king’s return, contributing not inconsiderably toward plunging Greece into civil war.⁷¹ The resurgent antagonism between royalists and republicans now became tied to the ideological conflict between left and right, which proved highly convenient for the EAM.

In any event, the expectations of the Communist left regarding establishment of a people’s democracy in Greece would be disappointed from the start. In November 1944, Greece was the only Balkan country included in Great Britain’s sphere of influence through the notorious “percentage agreement” between Churchill and Stalin.⁷² The Soviet dictator intended to keep this agreement, especially since it afforded him a free hand in Rumania and Bulgaria. The British presence in Greece after the country’s liberation from the Germans was so strong that it suggested comparisons with Lord Cromer’s turn-of-the-century rule in Egypt; people actually spoke of a protectorate. The British appointed governments and dismissed ministers. They controlled the budget, which they also largely covered; they determined economic and monetary policy; in practice, they were in charge of the Greek army.⁷³ And they had become partisans in Greece’s civil war, turning the left into their enemies. In view of the resurgence after 1945 of a universal civil war between protagonists of freedom and protagonists of equality, it seemed inevitable that ties would form between the parties active on one or the other sides of the Greek schism and the parallel parties active in the emerging global dualism.

The Soviets were not actively engaged in the Greek Civil War, although they also made no efforts to hide their sympathies. Stalin was well aware of the dangers of interceding in this conflict. Relations between the former wartime allies had been severely tested by the Polish question. Meanwhile, the Truman Doctrine had been declared, in large measure as a response to the civil war raging in Greece; it involved massive economic and financial assistance for the right-wing government in Athens. In April 1948, in view of the worsening conflict between East and West, Stalin tried to dissuade the Yugoslavian and Bulgarian Communists from continuing to intervene in Greece through support of the KKE and units of the Democratic Army associated with it.⁷⁴ But his advice was ignored, since these states’ solidarity with the Greek Communists was largely bound up with their own national aspirations.⁷⁵ Both Yugoslavia and Bulgaria hoped to expand their borders at the expense of their southern neighbor—a hope once again reflecting historical continuities. Couched in Communist rhetoric, the territorial claims voiced in Sofia and Belgrade were hinged to the vexing Macedonian question.⁷⁶

The Greek Civil War, ostensibly a conflict between social classes, increasingly displayed ethnic and territorial components.77 Thus, for example, the Communists in Greek Macedonia enjoyed considerable prestige among the local Slavic-speaking populace for the simple reason that in the 1920s they had championed the notion of an independent Macedonia. Here they were following the Comintern’s directives—a deference that earned them few friends in Greece.⁷⁸ The situation was especially aggrieving to the seven-hundred-thousand-odd Greek refugees from Asia Minor who had resettled in Macedonia; they had already lost a homeland once. In December 1935, after the resolutions of the Seventh Comintern “Brussels conference,” the individual parties were given a free hand in their alliance policies. This autonomy furnished the Greek Communists with at least the possibility of renouncing the Comintern’s “internationalist” support for Macedonian independence in favor of championing Slavic and other minority rights.

The Greek Communists and the Slavo-Greeks had already forged closer ties during the war. The Slavo-Greeks had played a key role in the anti-German struggle; also, they had served as a link between the Greek and the Yugoslav partisans. During the civil war, they formed an independent Slavic-Macedonian National Liberation Front that fought together with the ELAS against the Athens government.⁷⁹ Especially in the struggle’s final phase, the Slavo-Greeks in the north comprised a large proportion of the units in the Democratic Army, and their cadres maintain the vital connection with Belgrade. Yugoslavia had emerged from the war as the major power in the Balkans, and the help of the South Slavic Federation was crucial for the Greek Communists, whose fighters could cross the border without problems. Furthermore, there were Democratic Army training camps and supply depots in Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria.⁸⁰ Above all, Communist Yugoslavia offered the Greek Communists a hinterland essential for their operations. All told, without Yugoslav help the Greek Communists would have been hopelessly outclassed by the Greek government troops, which were well equipped by the West.

All internationalist proclamations to the contrary, Yugoslav involvement in the Greek Civil War was hardly altruistic. Rather, it was integral to the Yugoslav Communists’ comprehensive strategy in the region. The South Slavic Federation under Tito was seeking to enhance the leading position in the Balkans that it had gained through its own hard efforts. Predictably, Yugoslavia’s developing power led to ill feeling among neighboring comrades and provoked Stalin’s opposition.⁸¹ The relationship between the Yugoslav and the Albanian Communists was reminiscent of colonial subjugation. In the Yugoslav view, minuscule Albania was best off contenting itself with the role of supplying raw materials for its more powerful neighbor.⁸² In the north, in Carinthia and around Trieste, ethnic and territorial tensions were rising. In the south, the Macedonian question was to prove ruinous for the Greek Communists in the Greek Civil War.

Yugoslavia and Bulgaria made no effort to conceal their territorial demands vis-à-vis Greece. It was even suspected that as the monarchy’s heir Tito was seeking control over Salonika.⁸³ But what would have politically fatal consequences for the Greek Communists were the expectations of their fraternal parties in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria in the event of a KKE victory and the transformation of Greece into a people’s democracy, namely, that the Greeks would relinquish both Aegean Macedonia and Thrace. To be sure, the territorial ambitions of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were not in harmony, and the Macedonian question was also an issue between them. Tito claimed all of Macedonia for Yugoslavia; Dimitrov, for that very reason, was in favor of an independent Macedonia. Correspondingly, Belgrade was trying to pressure Sofia into surrendering its own portion of Macedonia.⁸⁴ The August 1947 Treaty of Bled then revealed the hopes of Belgrade and Sofia to resolve their differences over the Macedonian question at Greece’s expense.⁸⁵ Tito and Dimitrov agreed that in the event of a Communist victory in the Greek Civil War, Yugoslavia would absorb Greece’s Aegean Macedonia while the Greek portion of Thrace would be transferred to Bulgaria. (The rulers also envisaged the eventual unification of their two states in the framework of a larger South Slavic Federation, a proposal that had been broached in 1944 but was opposed by the Soviets.)

These plans for Greek territorial surrender presented the Greek Communists with a serious dilemma. The vexing Macedonian question had overtaken them again, and they were being asked in effect to square a circle. If they wanted to assert their identity as part of the international Communist movement, they had to endorse the sacrifice of certain areas of Greek territory, thus committing treason—a plunge into a political abyss.⁸⁶ If, in contrast, they wished to preserve the national prestige they had gained so arduously through wartime resistance, then they had to oppose their fellow Communists in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. But this would jeopardize their prospects in the civil war, especially since without Yugoslav support and the Slavo-Greek formations fighting at their side, they would be unable to stabilize their worsening military situation.

Hence as a result of the Macedonian question, the Greek Communists risked falling into the same political isolation that had plagued them during the interwar period.⁸⁷ In the civil war’s final phase, the old constellation had reappeared: the Greek Communists were now ready to surrender parts of Greece to their traditionally despised Slavic neighbors or intervene in support of an independent Macedonia. This development deprived them of any backing they had still enjoyed in Greece, while contributing to an intensified ethnicization of the civil war.⁸⁸ The “reaction” portrayed itself as Greek, while the “revolution” assumed a Slavic hue. Nowhere else in Greece did the right gain more new adherents than in Macedonia.⁸⁹ In March 1949, KKE radio, broadcasting from Rumania, confirmed that the party was now calling for an independent Macedonia.⁹⁰ This sealed a defeat that at least preserved the Communists from the stigma of treason. But the direct source of the defeat was closely tied to the emergence of another schism, already visible in February 1948: that in the Communist bloc between Stalin and Tito. In response to the KKE’s aligning itself with Stalin, the Yugoslavs closed their border with Greece, an action severing the Democratic Army from its hinterland and its supply of essential matériel.⁹¹ With the Greek Civil War thus over, thousands of Greek Communists, especially the many Slavo-Macedonians in their ranks, embarked on the long trek into exile.⁹²

The events in Greece confirmed many of the Western powers’ old fears. In particular, Sofia’s demand, supported by Moscow, for a revision of the border in Thrace pointed to persisting, traditional aspirations in the question of the Straits. Direct Bulgarian access to the Aegean would have compromised Turkey’s role as sole guardian of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. The thrust of such a demand recalled the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, as well as the Soviet offer to Sofia in the spring of 1941 to support Bulgarian expansion to the Aegean in return for permission to station Soviet troops on its soil. What had been promoted in the nineteenth century through Pan-Slavic arguments was now simply being couched in another idiom: that of the ideological antithesis between East and West.

The transfer to the United States of Great Britain’s traditional role in the Eastern Question was followed by a universalizing of the British-Russian tension that had reemerged after the Second World War. The conflict between East and West over Iran, Turkey, and especially Greece now led to a reformulated diction, with that reflecting traditional diplomatic constellations making way for abstract principles manifest in the Truman Doctrine, rightly termed the “first shot in the cold war.”⁹³ The doctrine was, in fact, a direct response to the dramatic situation in Greece; a definitive globalization of the opposition between freedom and equality, that is, a universal civil war of values and ideologies, only became apparent with the outbreak of the Korean War.⁹⁴ Still, the dire situation in Greece would be repeatedly cited whenever it was perceived as necessary to justify Washington’s engagement in similar situations, “Greece” thus emerging as a metaphor for the transition from local civil wars to the universal civil war. When North Korean forces invaded South Korea in June 1950, Truman referred to the latter country as the “Greece of the Far East.”⁹⁵ Likewise, President Eisenhower used the Greek example to describe the situation in Vietnam in 1957.⁹⁶

In an age of ideologies, the world had become united in its division. The various conflicts, however diverse and deep-rooted their origins, had fused into one conflict over values and principles. This fusion was no superficial ploy; the conflict was all-embracing because by its very nature it could only be universal. Hence even tangential conflicts were rationalized along the ideological lines of a modern war of faith; in the end, the war’s codes, signs, and other tokens were absorbed into numerous constellations not tied to it in any obvious way.

The Cold War’s first hot battle was fought in Korea. That it happened here is remarkable, since Europe, and not Asia, was the confrontation’s real locus.⁹⁷ In 1948–49 both the Soviet Union and the United States had withdrawn their troops from the Korean peninsula, which had been divided between North and South at the thirty-eighth parallel. To be sure, with their antithetical worldviews the regimes in  and Seoul had been tirelessly proclaiming their desire to unite the country by destroying the foe.⁹⁸ There had been repeated skirmishes along the partition boundary; sabotage and military diversion had become a daily routine. Kim I1 Sung, North Korea’s totalitarian ruler, constantly strove to harm Syngman Rhee, his dictatorial counterpart in the South, and vice versa. But it seemed a long way from this policy of pinpricks to a veritable war. Also, it could be assumed that the United States would intervene on the battlefield should the North try to take over the South by force of arms, and it was imperative to avoid such intervention at all costs.⁹⁹

However, the North Koreans considered American intervention in the event of war improbable, and Kim I1 Sung tried to convince Stalin and Mao that this assessment was sound; the Korean peninsula was, after all, at the furthest periphery of American interest. In January 1950, the U.S. secretary of state, Dean Acheson, had carelessly remarked that Washington considered neither Korea nor Taiwan to be part of its western Pacific “defensive perimeter”—as opposed to Japan or the Philippines.¹⁰⁰ Perhaps this comment misled Kim into believing that the risk incurred by an attack on the South was smaller than it actually was. In any event,  solicited Moscow’s support for its plan to unite Korea by force. The North Korean army command had developed a highly optimistic scenario for concluding operations in a few days: the American’s would not get involved in an “internal” Korean affair, and the South Korean populace would itself rise up to oust the hated Rhee regime. But despite  repeated assurances that Washington would not be drawn into a domestic conflict between the two Koreas, Stalin remained skeptical. The Soviets refused to commit themselves, instead referring the North Koreans to Beijing.

Mao Zedong had just concluded a successful revolution on the Chinese mainland, forcing his nationalist opponent, Chiang Kaishek, to flee with his supporters to Taiwan. While Mao was skeptical of the North Korean plan, he was less inclined than Stalin to dismiss the enthusiasm of his Korean comrades.¹⁰¹ For his own goal was the military unification of Taiwan with the Communist mainland, and for this he required Soviet backing just as much as the North Koreans did. So despite his misgivings, Mao was unwilling to reject their notion out of hand. The impression created by his ambivalence, namely, that the Chinese would not turn down  request for aid (regarded as highly unlikely in any case), was critical for the North Korean decision to attack. The North Koreans were also able to use this ambiguity to convince the Soviets that China would indeed stand by them in the event of hostilities. Still, until North Korea’s June 1950 assault on the South, neither the Soviets nor the Chinese were clear about the exact extent of their commitments to  After MacArthur’s landing at Inch’on, the North Koreans’ situation turned desperate; in November, despite his reservations, Mao felt it necessary to support them with “volunteers.”

Mao’s decision to risk a confrontation with America may have been a result of Soviet pressure, with Stalin reminding him of the obligation he had incurred to North Korea; on the other hand, it may have resulted from an apparent Soviet willingness to accept the loss of North Korea under certain conditions. Also, the prevailing view in Beijing was that a confrontation with “imperialism” was inevitable, and better now than later. The Chinese saw this view confirmed when on 27 July Washington sent the Seventh Fleet into the Formosa Straits to prevent the Korean conflict from developing into one between the two Chinas, which were already poised for battle.¹⁰³ The Red Chinese construed this preventive act as a blatant provocation: as they saw things, the “imperialist” Americans would stop at nothing to topple their revolution, the product of so much effort and sacrifice. Since Washington had already come to France’s aid in February 1950 in its struggle against the Communist Vietminh, Mao believed he was facing a coordinated action by the American imperialists—a “U.S. invasion of Asia,”¹⁰⁴ perhaps culminating in a campaign against China. Such fears seemed confirmed when U.N. troops under MacArthur advanced north from Inch’on, crossing the thirty-eighth parallel; by November 1950 they were nearing the Yalu River frontier, which bordered China’s industrial center in Manchuria.¹⁰⁵ The Chinese “volunteers” who had been prepared for this possibility intervened massively, driving the Americans back. In this way, the Korean War had expanded from a territorial civil war between the two Koreas into a Sino-American confrontation.¹⁰⁶

The hostility between Red China and the United States characterizing the 1950s did not have deep roots. Throughout World War II, the Americans and the Chinese Communists were inclined toward mutual cooperation.¹⁰⁷ In the summer of 1944, a delegation of American experts paid a visit to Yan’an, the center of Mao’s revolutionary forces. At the invitation of Zhou Enlai, they had been sent into rebel territory by General Stilwell and the Office of Strategic Services to take a closer look at the Chinese Communist partisan army. The so-called Dixie Mission was deeply impressed by Mao’s troops, which they believed represented an especially dynamic variant of Chinese nationalism:¹⁰⁸ linking patriotic aspirations with the social-revolutionary concerns of the long-suffering peasantry, the Communists had succeeded in organizing the struggle against the Japanese in areas relinquished by Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt and incompetent Kuomintang. The legendary American journalists Edgar Snow and Anna Louise Strong reported this with barely concealed sympathy for the cause of the Chinese revolution. And indeed, the triumph of the Chinese Communists and later defeat of the Kuomintang were based on this combination of patriotic struggle against external foes and internal social-revolutionary measures.

During and after the Second World War, the Americans would have been quite content with a Chinese coalition government composed of Nationalists and Communists. In the summer of 1944, at the height of the war in Asia, the United States tried to secure massive participation by Chinese troops in an invasion of the Japanese islands.¹⁰⁹ In the summer of 1945, especially after the Japanese surrender on 14 August, there was great American concern about the vulnerability to Soviet machinations of a China torn by civil strife, especially in Manchuria. On the other hand, while undesirable, a Communist takeover in Beijing did not seem all that threatening. To foil any Soviet ventures, George C. Marshall, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was dispatched to work out a compromise between Mao and Chiang.¹¹⁰ But his efforts were fruitless, for the civil war parties proved unwilling to compromise: Mao saw Chiang’s demands as an invitation to capitulate, and for their part the Kuomintang refused to accept the Communists as equal partners in a coalition government. In keeping with the conventions of civil war, the antagonism persisted until the bitter end. General Marshall, appointed secretary of state by Truman after his return, now concentrated his energies on the incipient Cold War’s European theater.

Despite growing fears that a Communist victory in China would in fact deliver the country to the Soviets, the Americans maintained hopes for some time that Mao Zedong’s Chinese nationalism would prove more potent than international Communist solidarity, and that differences between the Soviets and the Chinese would soon come to the fore. Drawing an analogy with the Balkans in 1948, Washington thus counted on Mao to be an “Asian Tito.”111 In this vein George Kennan, then chief of planning in the State Department, expected tensions to emerge between the Soviets and the nationalist, independent-minded Chinese Communists; Kennan was convinced of the priority of Europe when it came to Western security. The tensions he anticipated did, of course, emerge, but much later. With Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972, the prevailing structure of two opposing, purely ideological blocs would split apart, to be superseded by a form of geopolitical multipolarity. This development would be catalyzed by Nixon’s trusted foreign-policy advisor Henry Kissinger, a statesman of German-Jewish origin who diverged from America’s dominant ideological confession, trusting more in the grand traditions and patterns of nineteenth-century European power politics.¹¹²

Several decades before this turn of affairs unfolded, the Communists emerged victorious from China’s civil war. This turn of events was especially surprising to Stalin, who in Teheran and Yalta had agreed with Roosevelt that the Kuomintang held the stronger cards. When the Americans granted the Soviets special concessions in Manchuria, to be negotiated with the Chinese Nationalists, this reflected Soviet regard for the Nationalists as amenable partners. This was based on a background of mutual trust; at the end of the 1930s, Moscow had supplied the Kuomintang with ammunition and other matériel in its struggle against the Japanese invaders. Stalin, moreover, was suspicious of the Chinese Communists. And he had little inclination to affront the Americans, who unlike the Soviets were militarily active in Asia. For such reasons, the Soviet strongman had called on Mao to reach an agreement with Chiang Kai-shek.¹¹³

The Americans incurred the irreconcilable enmity of the Chinese Communists by intervening, intentionally or not, in the civil war that had flared up again after the surrender of Japan. To disarm the Japanese in northeastern China and secure railways, harbors, and airports in Manchuria, the United States employed all the formidable naval and air capabilities at its disposal to transport hundreds of thousands of Kuomintang troops from southern China north.¹¹⁴ With this logistical support for Chiang, the Americans found themselves at odds with the Communists, who had launched a plan to gain control over this economically crucial region. Also, Truman’s call to the Japanese troops in China to surrender to the Kuomintang was denounced by the Communists as a brazen intervention in the civil war. Later Mao would repeatedly refer to the events in northeastern China when speaking about both the break with Washington and America’s position against the revolution he led. Despite the close ties that had actually been formed between the United States and Chinese Communists, Mao here reflected his allegiance to a historical narrative grounded in the conceptual vocabulary of the universal civil war. Within this narrative, the “imperialist” United States was assigned the role of paramount rogue.

The victory of the Chinese Communists in October 1949 and Chiang’s expulsion from the mainland to Taiwan gave rise to a wide range of world-revolutionary expectations. Even Stalin, whose assessment of situations was generally guided by realpolitik, was carried away by these events. A revolution proceeding in Europe solely because of Soviet rule appeared to be advancing in Asia by its own impetus. Revolutionary romanticism aside, these developments were highly advantageous for the Soviets: the Chinese revolution had dramatically transformed political relations between West and East. The friendship treaty concluded in 1950 between Beijing and Moscow ratified a slogan proclaimed by Mao that summer: “Lean to one side!”¹¹⁵ A not insubstantial portion of the globe was now “red.” In this manner, the Chinese Communists played their part in the world’s division, emerging as a party in the universal civil war. Correspondingly, the images and analogies he used continued to adhere to a polarized narrative schema: imperialism on the one side, Communist-oriented national liberation on the other side. Everywhere, he detected the machinations of the imperialists, with America at the fore. He recalled the early American interventions in China, such as during the Boxer uprising of 1900 and earlier the Taiping Rebellion of 1851–64, quelled with the help of American adventurers. These episodes of Chinese history were tied, in turn, to American participation in the Entente’s intervention in the Russian Civil War.¹¹⁶ Mao was so convinced of American hostility that he was astounded at the absence of imperialist intervention after Communist forces crossed the Yangtze River in April 1949 and took Shanghai a month later. To the bewilderment of the Communist Chinese, the hasty fortification of the coastal region proved superfluous: the Americans did not appear. Mao failed to understand that Washington wished to remain aloof from the civil war’s final phase¹¹⁷ and in fact felt no obligation to defend Taiwan. Hence when at the start of the Korean conflict in 1950 the U.S. Seventh Fleet was dispatched to the Straits of Formosa to draw a cordon between the Nationalists and the Chinese Communists, the Chinese Communists saw their fears as about to finally come true: American “imperialism” was now poised to strike. But it seemed more prudent not to confront it directly, with regular troops; rather, it could be confronted on the Korean front with “volunteers.”

The surprise attack by North Korean forces on the South brought America into the fray. If the  regime had contented itself with trying to destabilize the Rhee government through subversion, it is unlikely this would have occurred. The North Korean incursion awakened memories in Washington of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and of the proceedings in Munich in 1938.¹¹⁸ Such analogies and accompanying rhetoric spurred a swift and direct American response. Its initiative under U.N. auspices imposed certain restrictions on the campaign; the United States had to take its allies into consideration.

The transition to a universal civil war had already been implicit in the Truman Doctrine.¹¹⁹ The transition unfolded in a series of steps. Presented with the rhetoric of global intervention, Congress had been persuaded to provide support for Greece and Turkey; but as yet there was no generally recognized policy. Presidential directive NSC-68, which envisioned a tripling of the military budget to confront real or imagined Soviet machinations everywhere, was certainly a qualitative leap. As a fiscal conservative, Truman had hesitated to give final approval to the recommendations of the National Security Council, which he had solicited after the “loss” of China and the detonation of the first Soviet nuclear bomb in 1949. But North Korea’s wanton attack on the South seemed to confirm the assessment that the United States was facing a global and coordinated Communist conspiracy, guided by Moscow. Setting aside his reservations, Truman adopted the National Security Council recommendations in September, incorporating them into a presidential directive—a veritable call to arms. From now on the confrontation between the “free world” and Communism would encircle the globe.¹²⁰ Gray zones were thus colored black, the case, for instance, with various nationalist movements against traditional colonial powers. American troops were stationed permanently in Europe; West Germany was rearmed.¹²¹

A political paradox was playing itself out on the Korean peninsula. While in Europe the universal civil war’s antagonists avoided direct confrontation while standing face to face, the military vacuum created by the withdrawal of American and Soviet forces from the peninsula in 1948–49 opened up a space for both Kim I1 Sung and Syngman Rhee to become active, producing a hot war.¹²² The Korean peninsula now became a substitute zone for the East-West conflict, since by 1950 clear dividing lines had already been drawn at the conflict’s epicenter, Europe.¹²³ The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan had achieved their purpose. In Germany in 1948, the currency reform had passed its first test in relation to the crisis sparked by the Berlin blockade. In 1949, two ideologically stamped German states had been established whose mutual relations were not dissimilar to those between the two Koreas. NATO had been founded. In the West, the Soviets had encountered barriers erected against their expansionist ambitions. In Asia the confrontation was less clear-cut and seemed remote from the situation in Europe; the United States had yet to take a definite stand. For precisely these reasons— potently supplemented, as revealed in both the Chinese Civil War and the confrontation in Indochina, by a characteristic fusion of anticolonialism and Communist nationalism—Asia emerged as eminently suited for military conflict.

From the beginning, with the disarming of the Japanese in Indochina by Chinese troops advancing from the north and the British army arriving from the south, Southeast Asia appeared to follow a distinct line of development. But the symbolism of Ho Chi Minh’s citations from the American Declaration of Independence in his proclamation of Vietnam’s independence in September 1945 would turn out to have been deceptive.¹²⁴ The Vietnamese Communists, once in the vanguard of a national resistance to Japanese occupation, soon emerged as America’s bitter enemy—a development that from our perspective does not seem self-evident. The peoples of Asia and others under colonial rule had placed great hope in the United States and President Roosevelt, who was, as suggested, ill-disposed toward colonialism. Had he not adopted the promises of the Atlantic Charter and sung the praises of self determination? Harry Truman, who became president at Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, also stood firmly in this tradition. Washington thus now tried to persuade Britain to relinquish India and a reluctant Netherlands to grant independence to Indonesia.¹²⁵ But history took a different turn in Indochina, drawing an anti colonial America to the side of colonial France. By degrees, Washington would become entangled in a drawn-out conflict. Robert S.McNamara,secretary of defense under President Kennedy and one of the key architects of this second Indochina war, would confess decades later that it had been a terrible mistake.¹²⁶

America acted against the standards set by its own tradition as a result of a particular mutation characterizing nearly all the relevant conflicts of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s: the mutation of national liberation movements against colonial powers into social revolutionary confrontations. Solely on account of the ideological rationalization accompanying these conflicts, they were readily conflated with the conflict between East and West. The drama in Indochina illustrates this conflation.¹²⁷ By the end of 1946, Indochina had probably become the most important arena in the struggle between France and a colonized population resisting its subjugation. Together with Korea, Indochina would become the stage for an increasingly global contest between East and West— a contest in which the traditional colonial powers increasingly receded behind an America rapidly distancing itself from its anti colonial heritage. More than any other conflict, the struggle in Indochina thus bore both of the era’s hallmarks: colonialism and the Cold War.¹²⁸ Its conclusion was also epoch making: the defeat of French troops at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, a conventional battle forced on the colonizing power by the indigenous population, was more than the defeat of France and its empire. It was understood as the historic defeat of the white man per se. Dien Bien Phu was the beacon signaling the end of the French colonial empire and the historical event that accelerated France’s withdrawal to Europe.

In February 1950, the United States came to the aid of France in its “dirty war”¹²⁹ in Indochina. America’s support for the French colonial power thus preceded the North Korean attack on South Korea and became the turning point in relations between East and West in Asia.¹³⁰ The American readiness to become engaged in Indochina on the side of France, which by all accounts was sparing no effort in ignoring the signs of the times, was based on weightier reasons than Washington’s general determination, in the sense of the Truman Doctrine, to confront the Communist threat everywhere. Hints of an approaching clash in Indochina between the universal civil war’s protagonists, a clash going beyond the colonial struggle of the past four years between French troops and the Vietminh, had begun to multiply after the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. It soon became known that the Red Chinese, whose troops were massed on the frontier with Indochina, were training its soldiers and providing the Vietminh with all manner of assistance, a development the French naturally found troubling. Yet the Chinese support was also convenient for the French, since their untimely colonial war could now be inscribed with the insignia of anti-Communism. Hoping to stress the national character of his struggle, Ho Chi Minh had just begun to distance himself from Mao Zedong’s revolution when the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was formally recognized by both Moscow and Beijing in January 1950.¹³¹ The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 lent further credibility to the anti-Communist rhetoric that France had resorted to for years in regard to Indochina. When the high commissioner and commanding general of the French Union Forces in Indochina, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, hurried to Washington in September 1951 to plead for increased assistance, he spoke of France’s difficult role as “foot soldier of the Free World.”¹³² France was trying to persuade Washington to share this responsibility. The situation shared some similarities with that of Britain in 1946–47, when the British found it necessary to press the Americans, oriented toward the present, to accept the yoke of history. A “Greek” constellation had also formed in Indochina.¹³³ In the Levant, in the eastern Mediterranean, American had supplanted Britain; in Asia, in Indochina, it seemed obliged to assume France’s onerous burden. The transfer of the power insignia was successful. After 1950, France no longer stood alone in Indochina; its colonial war had been subsumed into the universal civil war.¹³⁴

It did not really require great persuasive skills to convince the United States to support the French in Indochina with financial and material aid.¹³⁵ Washington by itself had come to realize the strategic importance of the Indochinese region, which far exceeded that of Korea or Taiwan. As already noted, in January 1950 Dean Acheson had described both countries as lying outside the American defensive perimeter in the western Pacific. In an analogy with Japan’s effort in World War II to gain control over Southeast Asia’s raw materials by invading Indochina and pre emptively attacking Pearl Harbor, the Americans viewed the region as a corridor for the possible conquest of the Philippines and Thailand from the north. Also, Indochina lay along the path to the British possessions in Southeast Asia, especially the resource-rich colony of Malaya, where the British, parallel to the French in Indochina, were successfully quelling a Communist guerrilla insurrection.¹³⁶ Furthermore, in the context of Japan’s reconstruction, Washington had selected Indochina as a substitute for the “lost” Chinese mainland; economic exchange—Japanese industrial products and services for Indochina’s raw materials—would help restore the economy of America’s former enemy in East Asia and, in view of the worsening antagonism between East and West, bind it to the United States on a long-term basis.¹³⁷ Hence in contrast to the approach taken toward Korea, the strategic and geopolitical importance of Indochina induced the Americans to forget their traditional anticolonialism, so that at the end of 1949, after the Communist triumph in China, they came to the aid of the embattled French.

Despite the American support that now began to flow to the troops of the Union Française, amounting at the height of the war to some 70 percent of its total costs, friction between Paris and Washington was constantly apparent.¹³⁸ In the end, two unequal partners with divergent motives were waging differing wars in Indochina. Beneath the umbrella of the Union Française, France was stubbornly trying to preserve its colonial empire. Washington was mainly buttressing the French for strategic reasons, in line with a domino theory steadily winning adherents; the United States thus urged Paris to grant full independence to the associated states of the union in Indochina: Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.¹³⁹ Consequently, it is not surprising that France’s colonial motives came into conflict with Washington’s anti-Communist policies. The French republic’s jealous colonial egoism affected nearly all transactions, from the conduct of the war to the distribution of American funds to local authorities. France steadfastly refused to permit the creation of truly independent Vietnamese combat units. Instead, the French troops were subjected to a largely ineffective process of “yellowing” through recruitment of local soldiers.¹⁴⁰ There were no plans for a genuine transfer of power to the Vietnamese. Ngo Dinh Diem, who as an anti-French nationalist and staunch anti-Communist was favored by the Americans, could be named prime minister of South Vietnam by Emperor Bao Dai only when the end of French involvement in Indochina was already in sight.¹⁴¹

Tensions between America and France only increased in the war’s final phase. At home, more and more voices were calling for Paris to end its “dirty war.” But the Americans were now urging the French to stand fast. Washington feared that negotiations would not only validate the Vietminh’s military triumphs but also lead to recognition of both the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the People’s Republic of China, which was still scorned as Red China and under a kind of diplomatic quarantine.¹⁴² In order to conclude the war, France had no option but to approach China, since without Chinese influence being brought to bear on the Vietminh the war would drag on indefinitely. In May 1953, a French economic delegation paid an official visit to Beijing and its Maoist government.¹⁴³ Great Britain, cochairman (together with the Soviet Union) of the Geneva Conference on Indochina in the summer of 1954, espoused a more moderate position; in any event, it had already established diplomatic relations with Mao’s regime. In this way, while Washington’s European allies made conciliatory moves toward China to enhance their maneuvering room in the region, the United States stuck with its ideological campaign. China’s entry into the world political arena had to be thwarted. The estrangement between America and its European allies, already palpable at Geneva, culminated in a genuine crisis in autumn 1956 when President Eisenhower forced Britain and France, acting in collusion with Israel, to halt their late-colonial Suez adventure. Under sharp censure by the world community, they withdrew from Egypt without having achieved their aims.¹⁴⁴

French tenacity in Indochina and American anti-Communism were difficult to reconcile. The tensions, exacerbated by differing traditions and mentalities, surfaced especially in relation to the conduct of the war.¹⁴⁵ The Americans construed the unaggressive and diffuse French approach, deriving from the colonial strategy of pacification developed by Marshal Lyautey in North Africa around the turn of the century, as an expression of the timorous Maginot Line posture that had led France to catastrophe in 1940.¹⁴⁶ France, determined to offset that historical debacle with victory in Asia, perceived American interference as haughty and humiliating. The French were suffering in any case from a sense of being in Washington’s pay. Not only were their weapons and materiel from U.S. Army stocks, but even their uniforms were American. France was fighting with borrowed power. The bitterness reached its acme when the French requested massive American aerial support to relieve their fortress at Dien Bien Phu, which was encircled by the Vietminh, and Washington declined. As long as France refused to internationalize the Indochina war, the Americans avoided anything that might draw them directly into combat.¹⁴⁷ But France’s chief concern was not struggling against Communism but maintaining control over a substantial portion of its colonial empire. If Indochina were lost, the possessions in North Africa might well also break free.¹⁴⁸ And in fact, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu would lead directly to the Algerian revolt in November 1954.

Washington decisively rebuffed France’s repeated calls for the deployment of American troops in Indochina. The Korean conflict had already involved thousands upon thousands of casualties. And while the United States government was sending draftees to Korea and thus risking public discontent, the French army in Indochina was largely made up of colonial troops; Paris was averse to mobilizing French regulars.¹⁴⁹ Its request that the Americans threaten to use nuclear weapons, as they had done in Korea to accelerate the signing of an armistice agreement, was ignored. The French undoubtedly drew conclusions from Washington’s refusal to provide them with the aegis of its absolute weapon. It was probably shortly after the Geneva Indochina conference that Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France, otherwise conciliatory in his stance and engaged in dismantling the empire, ordered the development of a French bomb.¹⁵⁰

The Americans had various reasons for not getting directly involved in the French war in Indochina. President Eisenhower had remarked early on, albeit in a private conversation, that the war was unwinnable, at least the way France was conducting it.¹⁵¹ But the true reasons for America’s distance lay deeper; they were connected with the role it had assumed after 1945 as a superpower in the universal civil war.¹⁵² Each time it directly entered a conflict, its full global prestige was on the line, its efforts to wage limited wars consistently thwarted. Extreme situations were thus to be avoided.¹⁵³ That the United States found itself mired in Vietnam less than a decade after the Geneva conference was due to the erroneous policy that McNamara would deplore more than thirty years later. The war against North Vietnam and the Vietcong was truly not winnable; the ends and means were totally disproportionate. America would withdraw from Vietnam in defeat in April 1975.¹⁵⁴ But its retreat was accompanied by a relatively small loss of prestige, since American policy had successfully exploited the burgeoning antagonism between Beijing and Moscow. France, for its part, had distanced itself from Washington since Dien Bien Phu. In 1966, under de Gaulle, it had left the military framework of NATO to seek its own way in the Western alliance.¹⁵⁵

The Indochina war was an Asian war, but it had major implications for France’s role in Europe. France, determined to halt the steady slide in its international standing, was equally present in both the Asian and the European arena. The dilemmas accompanying this double engagement and were soon transferred to the United States, which now had to assimilate tensions in Asia and Europe both politically and financially. America increasingly worried whether France, overtaxed by its colonial responsibilities, was capable of sustaining the burden of being Europe’s major Continental power in the Western alliance.¹⁵⁶ For despite its engagement in Asia,Washington was pursuing a policy of “Europe first”: it was essential that Western Europe be protected from a possible Soviet attack, French troops in Europe here being irreplaceable. Also, the Americans were actively arming the new Federal Republic of Germany and integrating it into NATO—a project tenaciously opposed by the French. In any event, America’s guarantee of West European security was only practicable if its Western allies jettisoned colonial empires siphoning off their urgently needed reserves.¹⁵⁷

Hence the funds France received from the Marshall Plan were being dissipated in the jungles of Indochina. But for the sake of Europe’s security, the United States had no choice but to supply France with whatever support it needed for its colonial war there.¹⁵⁸ The Americans feared, not unjustly, that if forced to choose between maintaining its empire and European security, France might be guided not by reason, not by Cold War logic, but by traditional considerations of prestige. It had maneuvered itself into a hopeless impasse, between the claims of the past and the exigencies of the present. The preservation of its colonial empire was incompatible with its obligation to promote European integration—an integration furthermore, that stipulated reconciliation with Germany and the fact of its rearmament.¹⁵⁹

Wedged between the needs of the European present and the draining demands of its colonies, France sought leeway for action. This was furnished by the project of European security— here as a traditional Continental power, France was certain of being indispensable for the British and the Americans. The French trump card was ratification of the treaty establishing a European Defense Community (EDC) comprising a West German contingent: with the Korean War’s outbreak in June 1950, the deployment of additional conventional forces in Europe had become unavoidable; in view of France’s colonial commitments in Asia, Germany alone seemed able to fill the breach. By degrees, the British and the Americans thus came to the conclusion that Germany had to be rearmed, but this required French agreement.¹⁶⁰ Under duress, Washington was ready to indulge any demand. For its part, Paris was adept at converting this inclination into support for its Indochina venture. At the NATO conference in Lisbon in April 1952, Prime Minister Edgar Faure thus made clear that France would be unable to sign the EDC treaty as long as it had to sustain the total burden of the war in Indochina. Washington immediately hastened to offer further pledges to the French.¹⁶¹

The American administration, particularly Secretary of State Dulles, saw itself faced with a necessary “deal”: support for France in Indochina in turn for French ratification of the EDC treaty. It was imperative to avoid affronting the sole remaining Western European Continental power. For such reasons, France had already managed to obtain the Western defense community’s protection for Algeria, recognized in Article 5 of the NATO treaty as part of French national territory. Now the problem seemed even thornier: the fewer troops France maintained in Europe because of its colonial obligations, the less it would be inclined to agree to German rearmament.¹⁶² This coupling of European security with French colonial policy, and a closely interconnected political paralysis that was undermining the Fourth Republic, could finally be overcome after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954.¹⁶³ The Laniel-Bidault government, which itself had basically supported the EDC treaty, now collapsed, opening the way for Pierre Mendès-France. With the signing of the Geneva Indochina accords in July 1954, Mendès-France ended the French Asian war; in August he brought the irksome EDC treaty to a vote—but without the cabinet’s recommendation. Although Mendès-France came to power as the grand liquidator of the French colonial empire, he would be unable to fulfill his historical mission, for he was toppled in February 1955 through a vendetta carried out by adherents of the EDC. But before this happened, he initiated the crucial process leading to Tunisian and Moroccan independence from French rule.¹⁶⁴

Dulles’ concerns would turn out to be well founded: with the end of the war in Indochina, French interest in the EDC, doubtful in any case, dissolved. Moreover, the Americans suspected Mendès-France of being an inveterate neutralist. He had been supported by the Communists in the chamber of deputies, even though he deftly eluded their advances. Rumors that he and Molotov had arranged a pact in Geneva—a marchandage planétaire¹⁶⁵—fit this image. The Americans understood the putative pact as follows: a favorable accord would emerge for France in Indochina, for which France in turn would foil the EDC treaty, hence the formation of a European army with West German participation.

As it turned out, the results of the Geneva agreement on Indochina were less onerous for France than had been feared. This relatively favorable outcome was due to the negotiating skills of the liquidateur, Mendès-France. He had threatened to expand the war if the negotiations failed to reach an immediate conclusion satisfactory to all. He had not hesitated to contact both the Vietminh and representatives of the Beijing regime, thus granting Communist China de facto recognition. For their part, Moscow and Beijing had pressured Ho Chi Minh to scale down his demands, which were generally thought excessive.¹⁶⁶ The division of Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel was thus the territorial expression of a compromise. Demarcating the border further north than the North Vietnamese had wanted was actually in line with American concerns—the greatest American fear had been fluid, indefinite fronts. In any case, South Vietnam had been saved for the West; with all the social-technical means at their disposal, the Americans were now determined to make it a showcase for the “free world.” Hence all told, the French defeat and withdrawal from Indochina were convenient for the United States, as they removed the colonial component from the central confrontation: the ideological confrontation between Western freedom and the Communist ideal of literal equality. Washington was convinced that it could decide the struggle in its favor by pursuing policies based on the better example. When Dulles stated that the United States now faced a clear-cut situation in Vietnam, devoid of any trace of colonialism, he was taunting the cunning of history. Dien Bien Phu, he declared, had been a “blessing in disguise.”¹⁶⁷ As it turned out, this “blessing” would become America’s curse.

T_he loss of Indochina was a key factor contributing to the final French rejection of the EDC treaty in August 1954. With the end of the war in Asia, the French believed they no longer needed America. Paris had not succeeded in drawing NATO into its colonial war in Asia through clamorous anti-Communist rhetoric. The North Atlantic alliance had remained faithful to its regional mission. When France had been forced to reveal its military destitution, neither the Americans nor the British had made their air forces available for a strike against the Vietminh.¹⁶⁸ After France’s defeat, America pursued its plans to create a Western alliance, analogous to NATO, for Southeast Asia. SEATO’s primary purpose was to combat Communism. The establishment of a regional alliance calibrated to the requirements of the universal civil war prompted the postcolonial states of Asia and Africa, who wished to eschew the East-West conflict, to reach an understanding among themselves. Meeting in April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia, with the participation of the People’s Republic of China (internationally legitimated through the Geneva Conference on Indochina), they formulated the principle of nonalignment, which soon led to the notion of “positive neutrality” between East and West.¹⁶⁹

The French National Assembly’s rejection of the EDC treaty had been carried out through a procedural ploy—a qualified majority arguing that the issue should not even be raised¹⁷⁰—that was humiliating to that body’s “Europeans.” The rejection prepared the way for West Germany’s entry into NATO, thus affording the Federal Republic a considerable gain in sovereignty.¹⁷¹ Such a turn of events was extremely surprising: the Pleven Plan, proposed by the French in light of both the Korean conflict and rising fears of a new war in Europe, had been designed to deny West Germany an independent military force within the NATO framework, thus thwarting the country’s “rearmament.”¹⁷² But shortly after the National Assembly rejected the EDC treaty, it met again to pass the Paris Treaties, which not only ended the Allied occupation of West Germany and formally approved a German-French compromise on the question of the Saar but also anticipated West Germany’s admission into NATO, hence the creation of an independent West German military force.

What explains France’s volte-face, its decision to act against its notion, developed in 1950, of an integrated European army and finally accept a rearmed Germany into the Western alliance, an option it had initially opposed? What had changed in France’s relations with Germany over those four dramatic years? What path had France been forced to travel since 1944–45 until it was finally prepared, in 1954, to come to terms with the inevitable—a new power constellation in Europe and the world? Although politically speaking this development unfolded over barely a decade, historically speaking it represents a considerable journey. It took France out of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

France needed that decade to abandon the traditional political patterns of its relationship with Germany, its historical rival on the Continent, to seek a new “European” understanding with its eastern neighbor, against the backdrop of the nascent Cold War. At the end of the Second World War, France’s double agenda of preserving its colonial empire and confirming its status as the dominant Continental power had impeded any such understanding. Especially among its allies, the defeat of 1940 and ensuing years of collaboration had damaged French repute. Free France under de Gaulle had not even been invited to the wartime Allied conferences—for the first time in its centuries-old history, France had not been included in the consultations of the great. It had played no part in the establishment of the new order—not in Casablanca, not in Teheran, not at Yalta, not in Potsdam. But following their maritime tradition, the British had been interested in confirming France’s Continental role after the war; at Great Britain’s request, the French had thus been granted an occupation zone in Germany, as a kind of trophy they hardly deserved. For its part Russia, having achieved unprecedented power in Europe after 1945, had scant esteem for France, although Stalin and de Gaulle had concluded a pact in 1944 directed—like the pact between England and France signed at Dunkirk in March 1947— against possible German expansionism.¹⁷³ In actuality, such pacts mirrored past constellations, and in view of ongoing changes and challenges would soon prove worthless. Because of its in-between status as both an occupied, collaborating nation and a formally resisting nation, France had not been truly destroyed by the war. Now it sought to exploit the moment, bidding to extend past patterns into the future: Germany was prostrate and should never be allowed to regain hegemony in Europe.¹⁷⁴ As it had after 1918, France planned Germany’s dismemberment. It raised the idea of a Rhenish Confederation in the Napoleonic tradition; the Rhine was in any case to be reaffirmed as Germany’s western border. But against the opposition of wartime allies who wished to preserve Germany’s unity, such ambitious demands could not be enacted; that being the case, then at least the potential economic power of France’s historical rival was to be curtailed: the Ruhr and the Saar, coal and steel, it was hoped, would be completely removed from German control.

France resisted the policies of the other victorious powers. In the joint committees pondering Germany’s present and future situation, the French delegates, still bound to fin de siècle and interwar patterns of political thinking, pursued obstructionist tactics. After 1945, France, the homeland of revolution, was oblivious to nascent ideological confrontation between the world powers. For a while, it could maintain such a stance. But a shift began to occur in 1947, owing not least of all to the dismal state of the French economy. France in fact depended on massive infusions of American aid beyond that provided through the Marshall Plan and soon found itself unable to escape the Cold War’s political undercurrents. With the Communists’ couplike seizure of power in Prague in February 1948, Western Europe was overtaken by a profound sense of foreboding. Nevertheless France continued to seek a special role for itself in the emerging institutions of the Western alliance, since, along with the East-West antagonism gripping Europe and the rest of the world,two questions from the past continued to absorb the republic: the question of its colonial empire and that of its relationship with Germany. In characteristic fashion, against the background of the unfolding ideological conflict, these questions coalesced.

Like France’s colonial expansion in the last third of the nineteenth century, its “return” to Europe in the 1950s and 1960s was in many respects connected to its relations with Germany. After all, its intensified expansion abroad after both the founding of the German Empire at Versailles in 1871 and the accompanying loss of Alsace and Lorraine had partly served as compensation for having forfeited the Continental hegemony to which it had customarily laid claim. Pushed to the western periphery of Europe, it dedicated itself to constructing a colonial empire. Its orientation toward Africa in the early phase of the Third Republic had even been welcomed by Bismarck; he encouraged it as a kind of diversion from revanchism on the part of the recently defeated archenemy. In this respect, Bismarck was in basic harmony with leading politicians of the Third Republic. For example, Eugène Etienne, the statesman and proponent of colonial expansion, proclaimed in a campaign speech in Oran in 1885 that France had to gain respect overseas in order to be esteemed in Europe. Similarly, Léon Gambetta congratulated Jules Ferry on his occupation of Tunis by declaring that once again France was a great power.¹⁷⁵ But France’s energetic expansion in Africa generated ill will and conflicts with England, culminating in 1898 with the confrontation at Fashoda, which led to the brink of war.Paradoxically,the Fashoda affair ended in a compromise paving the way for the entente cordiale and the wartime alliance between Europe’s Western powers.

After 1945 France had no choice but to liquidate its colonial empire, closing a historical circle whose starting point was 1870– 71. The circle was closed at a time when the emerging East-West conflict made it imperative to shore up and rearm the western half of a totally defeated Germany. In light of Russia’s overwhelming might, the return of France—a traditional Continental power— to Europe and its finally reconciliation with West Germany were being pushed forward insistently by the West’s two maritime powers: the American masters, together with the British, their tutors in European affairs. To be sure, this new constellation on the old Continent created a dilemma for France.¹⁷⁶ Following traditional patterns, it was seeking to realize an impossible configuration: Germany was to be stronger than Russia but weaker than France; France aspired to strength both with Germany and against it.¹⁷⁷ This wish could be fulfilled only by the permanent military presence on the Continent of France’s Anglo-American allies. But they refused. Washington hoped to reduce its forces in Europe, while London, economically weakened and tired of its global responsibilities, saw itself as unable to enter into long-term commitments on the Continent in peacetime. It was generally assumed that only the newly founded Federal Republic could provide the military divisions lacking in Europe. France, however, was still not ready to accept an independent West German army in NATO. This is why, in view of the Korean War, it took refuge in defense minister René Pleven’s plan:¹⁷⁸ the creation of a supranational European army including West German contingents but denying the Federal Republic any access to command. Until Pleven’s fall in 1954, his plan—France’s ceding of sovereignty over its own armed forces for the sake of a German defense contribution exceeding its own—weighed heavily on French domestic policy.¹⁷⁹

The Pleven Plan and the ensuing EDC agreement were basically modeled on a proposal by French foreign minister Robert Schuman. In the spring of 1950, the French government, adopting the proposal, laid out plans for a supranational common market for coal and steel.¹⁸⁰ The Montan Union (European Coal and Steel Community) of 1952 was the first step in the direction of European integration. Concluded between West Germany, France, Italy, and the Benelux countries, it seemed to fulfill Churchill’s vision of a federated Europe, presented in Zurich in 1946. However, Britain’s absence from the arrangement dampened the euphoria. At their inception, the plans for a supranational administration of coal and steel were in fact meant more as a provisional and preventive measure taken to domesticate an ever-stronger West Germany than as an altruistic step toward an integrated European future. But the denationalization of strategically important industries was, of course, not imposed on a defeated Germany alone: with the cancellation of the international Ruhr statute of 1948, which regulated coal and steel production, and the establishment of a high authority under Jean Monnet’s direction, all the signatories to the treaty gave up effective national control over strategic resources. From a restrained punitive action against Germany, an authentic program of European integration had emerged. The key Western European players in 1950 thus sought to avoid the errors of 1919.

The generation of European politicians emerging after the war had come of age in the interwar era.¹⁸¹ Above all, the events of 1923, when French and Belgian troops invaded the Ruhr in accordance with French prime minister Raymond Poincaré’s “policy of productive pawns,” comprised one of their key experiences.Their pursuit of a policy of European unification after World War II was in part a delayed reaction to the destructive nationalism of the past. It is striking that these leading “Europeans” were individuals who tended to belong to the cultural and geographical margins of their different polities: the Rhinelander Adenauer was suspected after World War I of separatist leanings; Robert Schuman, the scion of a Lorraine family, had been born in Luxembourg, raised in German Alsace,and served during WWI in the German Imperial Army; and Alcide de Gasperi, from the irredentist region of Trentino, has been formerly a deputy to the Austrian imperial chamber in Vienna. Perhaps their particular origins and historical experiences were reflected in their strong espousal of supranational European policies; in any event, in the Montan Union they sought to defuse Franco-German discord through administrative and economic measures.¹⁸² The French had first introduced the code word “Europeanization” to neutralize Germany’s key industries, but with the membership of Italy and the Benelux countries, it was generalized and linked conceptually with the idea of Europe.

While France was prepared to accept a certain loss of control over coal and steel, any forfeiture of its military prerogative infringed on the heart of its sense of sovereignty. Since the 1951 election,the Gaullists, guardians of the nation and its colonial empire, had enjoyed massive representation in the National Assembly. In a rash of issues, European integration and considerations of military security came into conflict. The very distinction between the French Republic and the Union Française raised the problem of a command divided between troops stationed in Europe and troops deployed in the colonies. De Gaulle cautioned that the EDC project would split the French army and undermine the French Union.183 Because of its overseas commitments, France would be unable to match German troop strength in Europe, that is, to achieve a balance within the balance. But since the deployment of German forces was indispensable for the Americans, they threatened Paris with an alternative strategy: the peripheral defense of Europe by means of an external ring, well suited to a naval and air power, in the eastern Atlantic.¹⁸⁴ Furthermore, since 1953 the United States had been seeking to offset the lack of conventional forces on the Continent by developing and deploying tactical nuclear weapons.

Ironically enough, the resort to atomic weaponry would later afford France an escape from its dilemma vis-à-vis Germany. With the signing of a decree on the establishment of the Commission supérieure des applications militaires by Mendès-France in October 1954 and a decision, probably reached earlier, in favor of nuclear arms, France seemingly eased its consent to West Germany’s admission to NATO, as stipulated by the Paris treaties.¹⁸⁵ Since the Federal Republic had forsworn incorporation of nonconventional weapons into its arsenal on its own initiative, France’s nuclear armament neutralized the conventional strength of its historical rival, at least symbolically. France’s return to Europe and its accord with Germany in the framework of European institutions and the Western alliance were thus reinforced by nuclear means.¹⁸⁶

In 1954, far fewer obstacles impeded West Germany’s admission into NATO than in 1950. France had come to terms with the idea of a German defense contribution and felt more secure in NATO together with the United States and Britain than alone with West Germany in a European Defense Community. Britain’s previous refusal to join a European army had been a crucial hindrance to French participation.¹⁸⁷ Also, France now had greater trust in the German state. The nationalist silver lining contained in the so-called Stalin Note of 10 March 1952, in which the dictator proposed a unified—and fully neutral—Germany nearly forty years before unification would actually occur had not seduced the West Germans; they seemed much more strongly attracted by the prospect of Western integration under an aegis of freedom than by that of national unification in an uncertain future. Moreover, they were reacting to imposed political and national restrictions as more of a blessing than a burden. The boom triggered by the war in Korea propelled West German’s economy to new heights, laying the foundations of what in retrospect can be viewed as a “golden age” for its citizens.¹⁸⁸

From a historical perspective, the Cold War era was, paradoxically, an age of great neutralizations. The ideological confrontation between East and West and the distinction between friend and foe based on social values and principles—so similar to civil war—annulled the traditional political meaning of national memories inherited from the late nineteenth century and the interwar period. Long-standing conflicts, rivalries, and animosities were crushed beneath the opposition between blocs. Residues of old European particularism in the various national political cultures were neutralized by the Soviet threat, the presence of the United States, and the European institutions germinating in the biotope of the Cold War. In contrast to the interwar years, when America withdrew and left the Europeans to their own devices, the United States now attempted to preserve Europe not only from freedom’s ideological antithesis—the ideal of literal equality promoted by Soviet-style Communism—but also from itself. Washington had promoted the EDC project in considerable measure to effect a historical compromise between (West) Germany and France. A fundamental transformation had been imposed on the polities of Western Europe by the Soviet threat, the impact of America’s protective shield, and the paradigm of European integration. Its results show that the Cold War was a powerful historical accelerator. From being a cauldron of nationalism and war, Western Europe became a domain of international compromise and prosperity. Such success was probably due to the Atlantic Revolution and its universal republican sponsor—the United States. Atlantic values and ways of life thus took possession of the Continental European polities, civilizing their institutions. Of these, the Federal Republic of Germany was certainly the most profoundly altered. Simply by virtue of its division, Germany was denied the possibility of constituting itself as a nation. It found itself in the altogether providential situation of being exclusively a society. It was precisely this feature of the old Federal Republic that allowed the West German polity, more than any other in Europe, to internalize the structural and institutional effects of the external neutralization process.

The great neutralizing of previous history through the agency of the Cold War was brought about by the language and organizations of economics. It was much easier to regulate differences, enmities, and conflicts in an integrative process grounded in quantifying semantics and symbolism than in questions of grand politics and national security, which involved fundamental principles and existential motives. In this manner, the European Economic Community, set up in Rome in 1957, provided a far more solid and durable foundation for Europe’s gradual unification than the admirable but abortive EDC. The neutralization of Europe’s differences probably took the only viable course: it emigrated from the center—from politics, which had been contaminated by the legacy of history—to the periphery, the realm of economics. There, for decades, it practiced that forgetting of diverse pasts that makes politics possible in the first place. Having now crossed the threshold into another century, Europe will probably have urgent need of the reserves accrued from the successes of an era that itself has become history.

Acknowledgments

This book is obliged to many. When it saw light in German in the year 1999, it was by and large the outcome of my teaching on the twentieth century at the history departments of the universities of Essen and of Tel Aviv in the mid-1990s. To a wider academic audience the subject matter was presented during my stay as a visiting professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, in early 1997. The book was written during a sabbatical in 1997–98 at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna. Concerning the original version I owe a dept of gratitude to Dirk Blasius, John Bunzl, Detlev Claussen, Justus Cobet, Saul Friedländer, Avi Glezerman, Liliane Granierer, Andreas Heldrich, Markus Kirchhoff, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Lutz Musner, Iris Nahum, Susan Neiman, Moshe Postone, Anson Rabinbach, Florian Riedler, Christiane Schmidt, Bruno Schoch, Paola Traverso, Gotthard Wunberg, Zvi Yavetz, and Moshe Zimmermann.

The translation from German to English was not an easy task. I am particularly thankful to William Templer, and owe my gratitude as well to Carl Ebert and George Williamson. Special thanks to Joel Golb for his deep understanding of the cultural complexities with languages. Much appreciation goes to John Tortorice of the George L. Mosse Program, who made the publication possible with the University of Wisconsin Press.

This publication was supported by the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture at Leipzig University and the Franz Rosenzweig Research Centre for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Last but not least I would like to thank Robert Zwarg for his support in the final preparation of the manuscript and proofreading assistance.