Download The Cold War HIS / 308 The aftermath of World War II left Europe in

The Cold War
HIS / 308
The aftermath of World War II left Europe in devastation. Britain and France
were left drained and exhausted. Germany was defeated and divided into Allied
occupied zones. The US and the Soviet Union, although also drained, held
considerable power and soon rose to superpower status. The two nations became
rivals through conflicting ideologies and mutual distrust.
The Cold War was the open rivalry that developed between the US and the
Soviet Union after the Second World War. George Orwell, an English writer, first
used the term in an article published in 1945. He referred to a nuclear standoff
between superpowers with advanced weapons that could wipe out entire
populations within seconds. Thus, this war was not fought on the fields; rather it
was fought on political and economic arenas by diplomacy and propaganda (“Cold
War,” 2013).
The root of the Cold War was the ideological difference between the US,
which had a democratic government and a capitalist economy, and the Soviet Union,
which had an authoritarian government and a communist economy. The two
ideologies were polar opposites of each other, thereby fostering suspicion and
mistrust.
After WW II, the uneasy wartime alliance between the US and the Soviet
Union began to disintegrate. The end of the war found the Russians in charge of
large areas of Eastern Europe liberated by the Red Army. Stalin wanted to spread
communism in these countries and create a buffer zone composed of satellite
nations as defense against possible attacks on the Soviet. For this reason, the
Russians supported the local communist parties and brought along Moscow-trained
communist leaders to take over the reins of governments in these nations. By 1948,
the Soviets had installed left-wing governments in the countries of Poland, Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. In an attempt to halt the
spread of communism across Europe, the US offered economic aid to postwar
Europe under the Marshall plan. The Soviet viewed the plan as thinly veiled
American imperialism and urged its allies to reject the plan. In contrast, Western
European countries accepted the plan and later solidified their political alliance with
the US in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of 1949, which provides for
mutual defense in war. The Soviet responded with the Warsaw Pact in 1955, a
similar treaty between the USSR and the Soviet-led eastern bloc. Aside from forming
spheres of influence and alliances, the Cold War was also marked by a nuclear arms
race as the United Nations failed to curb the proliferation of atomic bombs. Russia
tested their first atomic bomb in 1949, which ended the US monopoly of the
technology. The arms rivalry came to a head in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which
almost plunge the world to the brink of nuclear war (“Cold War,” 2013).
The ramifications of the Cold War on Europe were manifold. In the words of
Winston Churchill, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” as Europe
was divided into the US-led western bloc and the Soviet-led eastern bloc as
represented by the NATO and the Warsaw pact. The most potent symbol of the
division in Europe was the Berlin wall, a barricade begun in 1961 to stop defections
from East to West Germany. Germany and its capital Berlin was divided after the
war into occupation zones held by different Allied forces. The division was supposed
to be temporary, yet when relations between the US and the Soviet worsened, the
Russians refused to cede their occupied zone. This led the US, Great Britain and
France to unite their sections in 1948, which became West Germany and was
declared a republic in 1949. The Russian occupied zone became East Germany and
was declared a Soviet satellite state in the same year (“Onset of the Cold War,”
2013).
The division of the continent meant that the progress of Eastern and Western
Europe diverged after the war. In order to prevent another war, the countries of
Western Europe took steps towards unity by working to achieve political and
economic integration. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was the first
effort towards integrating the coal and steel industries of Belgium, France, West
Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The same countries established
the European Economic Council (EEC) in 1957. In 1967, the European Commission
(EC), which was regarded as the predecessor of the European Union, was
established. Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Ireland joined the EC in 1973,
Greece in 1981, and Spain and Portugal in 1986. The goals of the EC were to
establish a single trade policy towards nonmember countries, and to create a
common market where goods, labor and investment can freely flow among the
member states. The EC was also concerned the establishment of a common
European currency (“European Union,” 2013).
In contrast, progress in Eastern Europe was largely in the control of the
Soviet Union. Soviet rule removed possible rivals to the communist party,
collectivized agriculture and began heavy industrialization. East European nations
became part of the Warsaw Pact to counteract the US-initiated NATO. In general,
after the death of Stalin, governments in Eastern Europe were granted greater
freedom from Soviet control concerning economic planning and cultural
development (Stearns, Adas, Schwartz, & Gilbert, 2004).
The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the
Soviet Union are inter-related. The USSR was vastly different when Mikhail
Gorbachev became Secretary General of the Central Committee in 1985 from what it
had been during the death of Stalin. The rise in the general level of education and a
greater awareness of the outside world ensured that well-educated professionals
had become an important social group, which was ready to embrace the cultural
liberalization introduced during the Gorbachev era. Aside from social changes, the
impact of policy failure contributed as well. Policy failure can be seen in the longterm decline of economic growth of the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the early
1980s. Technologically, the Soviet Union was falling behind the western countries
and the newly industrialized Asian countries. Its foreign policy was failing to win
allies and influence people. However, there was no political unrest and crisis within
the country. Rather, there was a series of decisive transformations that led to the fall
of communist Russia (Brown, 2011).
The first transformation was the opening of the political system. Gorbachev
built his platform on his glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (reconstruction)
policies when he assumed power. He introduced principles of liberalization and
democratization to the Politburo. There were increasing freedom of speech and
freedom of publication. In 1989, he successfully got the Communist Party to hold
contested elections for a new legislature to be called the Congress of People’s
Deputies. The elections resulted to the defeat of key party officials and victories of
outright critics to the party leadership, which included Boris Yeltsin. The second
transformation was the breakdown of the centralized economic system. Significant
reforms shifted the Soviet economy from a command economy to one in transition
to becoming a market economy; such reforms included permitting individual
enterprise, granting more autonomy to factories, and legalizing cooperatives. The
third transformation was the adaption of a concessionary foreign policy that led to
end of the Cold War. The premises of universal interests and values above class
interests, and that all nations had the right to choose their own political and
economic systems were the basis of this policy. The fourth transformation was the
abandonment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe. The Eastern European
nations took advantage of Gorbachev’s concessionary policy, and, in 1989, moved
away from communism. Although this was not what Gorbachev wanted, he refused
to use force to prevent the lost of the Soviet satellites (Brown, 2011).
The independence of the countries making up the “outer” empire, such as
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, had a destabilizing effect on the Soviet Union
itself. The countries making up the “inner” core of the Soviet empire, specifically
Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians, also began to clamor for independence. Even
Boris Yeltsin was demanding Russian independence from the Union in 1990.
Frightened by the eminent disintegration of the Union, the military and KGB waged
a coup against the government. The coup failed, but it weakened Gorbachev’s
leadership. This prompted Yeltsin, together with the leaders of the Slavic republics
of Belarus and Ukraine, to declare the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December
25, 1991. Fifteen new states emerged from the once Soviet empire (Brown, 2011).
The end of the Cold War lifted the Iron Curtain dividing Europe for over 40
years, and led to the reunification of Germany. This allows for a greater European
unity, integration and prosperity.
References:
Brown, A. (2011, February 17). Reform, Coup and Collapse: The end of the Soviet
State. Retrieved from
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/soviet_end_01.shtml
Cold War. (2013). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/125110/Cold-War
European Union. (2013). In Compton's by Britannica. Retrieved from
http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/article-200468/European-Union
Onset of the Cold War. (2013). In Compton's by Britannica. Retrieved from
http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/article-9311096/onset-of-the-ColdWar
Stearns, P, Adas, M., Schwartz, S., and Gilbert, M.J. (2004). World Civilizations: The
Global Experience, 4 ed., Pearson Education.