Chapter Summary

The Second World War left Europe in ruins. The United States and the Soviet Union had different concepts of postwar Europe. Their differences resulted in the Cold War.

The Second World War left the U.S. and the Soviet Union as the two strongest powers. Three decades of distrust and ideological differences quickly turned them into foes. Germany and Berlin were to be administered by the four Allied powers. By 1948 cooperation failed and Germany was divided into a western zone under the direction of the U.S., Britain, and France and a Soviet-dominated zone in the east. In order to protest the economic reconstruction of western Germany, the USSR blockaded the western districts of Berlin in 1948. The Russian blockade was halted when an American airlift of goods relieved the Berlin population. In 1949 the division of Germany into two separate governments—the western Federal Republic of Germany and the eastern German Democratic Republic—became permanent. Germany’s division was symptomatic of the separation on the entire world into two, ideologically opposite, camps. All of Eastern Europe fell into the orbit of the Soviet Union.

The U.S. initiated a policy of containing the Soviet Union and created alliances to surround its enemy. The United States formed NATO in Europe, SEATO in Southeast Asia, and CENTO in the Middle East. To balance the U.S. alliances, the Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact that brought together all of the Eastern European nations dominated by the USSR.

At the end of the Second World War only the United States had nuclear technology at its disposal, In 1949, the Soviet Union developed its own nuclear bomb and by 1974 Britain, France, India and China had also joined the Nuclear club. The proliferation of nuclear weapons produced paranoia among the political leadership of each superpower as they raced to dedicate more national resources to the development of more powerful weapons. Despite arms limitations agreements to limit the testing and spread of nuclear weapons continued.

The end of World War II brought an end to the empires of western Europe. In India Mahatma Gandhi led a campaign of passive resistance against British rule that led to self-government in 1946. Pakistan and India separated into Muslim and Hindu states. The British colonies of Burma and Ceylon similarly achieved independence in 1948.

The Japanese empire dissolved in the aftermath of World War II. Independence movements in Asia tended to be communist. Communists came to power in China in 1949. Korea was divided at the end of the Second World War. Communist China supported North Korea in a war to annex South Korea, an ally of the United States. After three years of war, Korea was permanently divided in 1953. In Indochina communist insurgents waged war against the French until 1954, at which time Vietnam was divided into a communist state in the North under Ho Chi Minh and a South Vietnamese state protected by the United States. The Communists continued to press for independence until 1973, when the United States withdrew its forces from the south.

In Africa decolonization occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1960 Britain and Belgium were prepared to grant independence to their colonies. Of the British colonies only Rhodesia and South Africa retained ruling white minorities. The French resisted relinquishing their colonies. In Algeria a war for independence dragged on from 1954-1962 and brought France to the brink of political collapse. In 1962, General Charles de Gaulle, agreed to grant Algeria independence. Despite independence, former colonies continued to be dominated by the industrialized powers of the West.

In the Middle East, both the Soviet Union and the United States used their economic aid to create friendly states. The U.S. gave its support of the new state of Israel while Egypt and Syria turned to the Soviet Union for aid. The oil-rich regions of Iran were also a bone of contention between the superpowers. To prevent the growth of Soviet influence, the U.S. assassinated a political leader in Iran and put a puppet government in place. In 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal. When the British and French attempt to regain control of the canal, joint pressure by the U.S. and the Soviet Union forced them to withdraw. The creation of Israel at the expense of Palestinian nationalist interests produced instability in the region.

The U. S. also acted to prevent the spread of communism in Latin America, often without success. Heavy-handed U.S. policies caused anti-Americanism in Latin American countries. In 1959 Fidel Castro led a successful communist revolution in Cuba. By 1962 the USSR and the U.S. were threatening war over the existence of missiles in Cuba. The crisis passed when Khrushchev ordered the dismantling of the missile bases.

In contrast to the Soviet Union with its destroyed cities and economy ravaged by war, the United States emerged from World War II economically prosperous and looking for new markets.

The war reduced the European population and destroyed the physical plants of its industries. The war created millions of displaced persons who needed to be repatriated. Housing even the reduced European population was impossible. Agricultural production was at fifty percent of prewar levels. Without internal sources of investment capital to rebuild, Europe was dependent on money from abroad.

In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. sought to establish new markets, particularly in light of the collapse of the productive capacity of Western European industries. In both Europe and Japan, the United States acted to restore economies as potential consumers of American goods. The Truman Doctrine stated the principle that American aid would be forthcoming to nations resistant to Communism. More concretely the U.S. initiated the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe. Most Western European nations eagerly accepted the U.S. offer of aid. The Soviet Union and the Eastern European states refused, despite being eligible under the initial terms of the plan. The Marshall Plan did achieve the economic resuscitation of Western Europe without producing massive inflation.

With the Marshall Plan came the tendency toward state control on national economies. On the economic models of John Maynard Keynes, states targeted full employment and were active in spending to initiate capital formation. The Office of European Economic Cooperation, the mechanism for administering the Marshall Plan, coordinated state planning and creation of international trade networks. The Marshall Plan began the process of economic integration in Europe. Integration of Europe was furthered by the Council of Europe which served as a forum for discussing questions of common concern. The first supranational economic union was Benelux—an economic alliance of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. By 1951 the Benelux nations along with France, Italy, and West Germany formed the European Coal and Steel Community that established a common market for coal and steel among member countries. The same countries created the European Economic Community, also known as the Common Market, in 1957 for the purpose of extending the integration of all markets. Great Britain joined the EEC in 1973. By the nature of its membership, the EEC sharpened economic and political differences between Eastern and Western Europe.

Under military occupation, Japan also received U.S. economic aid. With the support of the U.S., the Japanese economy rapidly modernized its destroyed physical plant. Without a military budget (the military was abolished after the war), capital could be directed entirely to industrial development. By the 1960s, Japan was an industrial giant with an affluent consumer society.

The Soviet Union countered the Marshal Plan with Comecon to promote economic reconstruction and to integrate the East European economies for the benefit of the Soviet Union. Under Stalin’s leadership Soviet Industry recovered making the Soviet Union the second largest industrial power. The Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was altered by Stalin’s death in 1953 and his replacement by Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin gave the impression that reform was imminent. Nationalist Communist leaders emerged in Poland and Hungary. The tempted liberalization in Hungary was suppressed by the Russian army. Soviet standard of living remained low as, all economic gain was plowed back into heavy industry. Despite Khrushchev’s promises of reform, the Soviet economy could not sustain increases in consumable items and a massive expenditure for a growing atomic arsenal. The Eastern European nations aligned with the USSR adopted Russian strategies for development of heavy industries with similar results: industrialization advanced but standards of living did not. To prevent immigration from Eastern Europe to the West through Berlin, the USSR constructed a wall in 1961 that symbolized the separation of political ideologies. In 1968 the liberal Czechoslovakian government of Alexander Dubcek was overthrown. Only Tito in Yugoslavia retained his independence.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, states formed welfare programs to provide for the support of their citizens, particularly children and the family. Countries attempted to resolve the issues of birth, sickness, old age, and unemployment.

The postwar recovery of Europe produced greater per capita wealth. The creation of welfare programs insured the safety of that wealth from disastrous economic consequences. As a result, people felt less restraint in spending. The new consumer economy did not redistribute wealth. The rich got richer and the poor stayed dependent on welfare. Women remained far behind in terms of pay for work.

Unlike the U.S., there was only a temporary surge in the birth rate in Europe following the Second World War. More forms of birth control became readily available by the 1960s, and women chose to have smaller families. In contrast, men and women desperately sought to reestablish family life after the war. In Britain women were once again urged to take up their accustomed place in the domestic household. Women were discouraged from joining the workforce, sometimes by justifying lower pay as an economic disincentive. The welfare system generally reinforced the financial dependence of women on men. In France women were accepted in the workforce and achieved literal equality with men in the welfare state. During the 1960s protests against government policies—civil rights and freedom of expression—became more common. Women’s equality was one of the issues most hotly debated. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) urged women to define sexuality and gender relationships in their own terms. The movement for women’s rights continued to grow into the 1970s.

The social tension created by the threat of nuclear war and growing economic affluence created a generation of dissenters. Young men and women rejected the cultural traditions of their parents and experimented with sexual freedom, drugs, and political radicalism. Birth control removed one of the major constraints to freer sexuality. Sex for pleasure outside the family unit became an acceptable form of social expression within the youth movement. Women were often exploited as sexual objects in films and magazines. The use of drugs expanded beyond medical purposes to production of experiences ranging from hedonistic gratification to mind-altering hallucination. Drugs allowed affluent young people to escape the limits of their society and flout the values of their elders.

By 1969 political protests were common in the U.S. and in western Europe. Protests in the 1960s coalesced around opposition to the war in Vietnam. Student protests, sometimes involving occupation of university buildings, were occasionally met with police repression. Most of the young protesters were members of the middle class. In Europe the mood of protest was exacerbated by a slowing economy that no longer offered guarantees of economic security. In 1969 a French protest spread beyond the University of Paris to the surrounding city, then the entire country. For a brief moment the working class and the bourgeois students were united in rejecting the political programs of the government. The moment quickly passed, because the two groups had so little in common.