Europe - Theater of the cold war

After a war which caused unprecedented loss of human life and material destruction, how was Europe to be rebuilt? When the war was over, this question was addressed at several conferences of the victorious Allies, of which the Yalta Conference of February 1945 made the most decisive contribution to shaping the future.

For the Soviets, the military position in Europe was favourable. Stalin, with domestic support strengthened by victory in the “Great Patriotic War,” wanted to exploit this to achieve two main aims: firstly, to rebuild the USSR, aided by large German reparation payments; and secondly, to stabilise his country's security by establishing a “buffer zone” in Eastern Europe, which depended on Soviet hegemony over this territory. On the insistence of the western powers at Yalta, the USSR signed the “Declaration on Liberated Europe”, in which the three victorious powers committed themselves to jointly assist the people in all liberated European states “to form interim governmental authorities (...) pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of Governments responsive to the will of the people; and to facilitate where necessary the holding of such elections.” But the wording of the declaration was vague enough to offer room for interpretation, especially concerning the definition of “democracy”.

Relations between the Allies deteriorated rapidly, with the resulting mutual distrust taking concrete form at the Potsdam Conference in July/August, 1945. But at this point, the anti-Hitler pact was still stronger than the tensions between the Allies. Stalin offended his allies by insisting on the Soviet-Polish border as defined in the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 23, 1939. In this “Soviet-German non-aggression pact”, the spheres of interest in Central Europe had been shared out with the USSR being promised the eastern part of Poland. As compensation for this shifting of its border westwards to the Oder-Neisse line, Poland was now compensated with territories in the east of the former German Reich. Without consulting the Allies, Stalin had put these areas conquered by the Red Army under Polish administration on March 1, 1945. Of the decisions made at the Potsdam conference, the one with farthest-reaching consequences for Germany involved its division into three separate occupied zones: Soviet, British and American. The French occupied zone was formed later from parts of the other two western zones, mainly on the insistence of Great Britain, which after the experience of the two World Wars wanted another European nation at its side in exerting long-term control over Germany. Berlin, which lay in the Soviet zone, was also divided into four sectors, administrated jointly by the Allies.

At the end of the war, the Soviet Union had been quick to take control in Central and Eastern Europe, under the guise of denazification. The USSR controlled the state apparatus and the media, allocating key positions in coalition governments or "National Fronts" to the Party faithful. The forces of opposition were silenced. Yugoslavia and Albania were the only countries where communists came to power under their own steam.

The Cold War was long viewed as a confrontation between the USA and the USSR, but especially in the early phase, decisive analyses that were to form the basis for political decisions came from the British. In the summer of 1944, British military commanders already considered the Soviet Union the next potential enemy in Europe, assessing a potential alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union as the “greatest danger in our history”. The British proposal for dividing Germany into three occupied zones was motivated by two different factors: to prevent possible attacks from a re-armed Germany; and as “an insurance against the possibility of an eventually hostile USSR”. In March 1946, in the presence of Truman and in agreement with his own successor, the British prime minister Clement Attlee, Churchill spoke in a speech about the new danger presented by the politics of the Soviet Union: “What [the Russians] desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” As a consequence, Churchill advocated a permanent military alliance of the English-speaking peoples. In the same speech, he coined the term “iron curtain” as an expression of the political reality of the divided Europe: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” Increasingly, the Truman administration became less willing to cooperate and moved towards a politics of containment in response to Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe. This shift in policy was due in part to the United States' victory over Japan and an awareness of being the sole nuclear power.

In March 1947, Truman asked Congress and the people for support in defending systems based on the principles of liberty, as he required Congress approval for a major program of financial and military aid for Turkey and Greece, where a civil war was underway. The Truman Doctrine heralded a new phase in post-war American politics. Instead of returning to their traditional isolationism, as they had after World War I, the United States began to make a commitment to peacetime Europe, which came to depend on its military protection. The Marshall Plan was announced in June 1947 as an economic extension of this policy for the whole of Europe. The economic rebuilding of Europe was to ensure social peace, as well as being beneficial in the mid-term for sales of American goods. The British, French and Soviet foreign ministers met in Paris at the end of June 1947 to discuss the Americans’ offer of aid. The conference ended on July 2 with the departure of Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister. In retrospect, this Paris conference appears as a turning point in East-West relations, as it represents the failure of the last attempt to work together within the anti-Hitler collation after the end of the war.

Stalin felt America's politics were aggressive and designed to depose him. The Soviets saw the Marshall Plan as a move to weaken their influence and banned Eastern European countries from joining. And indeed, one political effect of the Marshall Plan within Western Europe was a noticeable weakening of Communist unions (which were extraordinarily strong in France and Italy) as a result of economic stabilization. In September 1947, the Soviet Union sought to bolster its influence by founding "Cominform" (Information Bureau Of The Communist And Workers' Parties), whose main function was to discipline Europe’s other communist parties. This brought clarity on the aims of the USSR concerning the “friendly” states of Central and Eastern Europe: membership of the Socialist bloc was to involve absolute loyalty to the Soviet Union. In the post-war years, these countries began their transformation into satellite states. An ideological explanation for this was provided later that year by Andrey Zhdanov and Georgy Malenkov, the leaders of the Soviet delegation to the Conference of European Communist Parties in Poland. In their keynote speeches, they took the view that the phase of international cooperation was over and that the world was split into two large blocs: relations between the various Communist parties therefore needed tightening to allow the Socialist bloc to assert itself.

On the other side, as the superior military and economic power, the United States took its place at the head of the “free world.” In addition, the “American way of life” appealed to a Western Europe striving for renewal and prosperity. American hegemony was also apparent in the Western defence alliance, which was forged in response to a perceived threat from the Soviet Union. The organisation of NATO has a US-dominated Allied Supreme Command. On May 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO) was signed by the USA and Canada and by Great Britain, France, the Benelux states, Denmark, Italy, Iceland, Norway and Portugal. Turkey and Greece joined NATO in 1952, followed in 1955 by the Federal Republic of Germany.