The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War

Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Craig Daigle, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Craig Daigle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134700721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This new Handbook offers a wide-ranging overview of current scholarship on the Cold War, with essays from many leading scholars.

The field of Cold War history has consistently been one of the most vibrant in the field of international studies. Recent scholarship has added to our understanding of familiar Cold War events, such as the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and superpower détente, and shed new light on the importance of ideology, race, modernization, and transnational movements.

The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War draws on the wealth of new Cold War scholarship, bringing together essays on a diverse range of topics such as geopolitics, military power and technology and strategy. The chapters also address the importance of non-state actors, such as scientists, human rights activists and the Catholic Church, and examine the importance of development, foreign aid and overseas assistance.

The volume is organised into nine parts:

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• Part I: The Early Cold War

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• Part II: Cracks in the Bloc

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• Part III: Decolonization, Imperialism and its Consequences

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• Part IV: The Cold War in the Third World

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• Part V: The Era of Detente

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• Part VI: Human Rights and Non-State Actors

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• Part VII: Nuclear Weapons, Technology and Intelligence

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• Part VIII: Psychological Warfare, Propaganda and Cold War Culture

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• Part IX: The End of the Cold War

This new Handbook will be of great interest to all students of Cold War history, international history, foreign policy, security studies and IR in general.

PART I The Early Cold War

Incompatible Universalisms The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Beginning of the Cold War

Mario Del Pero

DOI: 10.4324/9781315882284-1

At the end of World War II vast parts of Europe, Russia, and Asia lay in ruins. Between 60 and 70 million people, a majority of them civilians, had lost their lives in the worst carnage in human history. Millions of displaced people wandered around Europe. For the first and only time in history, nuclear weapons had been used in a war and against civilians. “No other conflict in recorded history,” wrote historian Tony Judt, “killed so many people in so short a time.”¹

Two powers stood above the others: the United States and the Soviet Union. Their troops occupied most of Europe and portions of East Asia; their military and national security apparatuses were fully mobilized; their confidence had been bolstered by the war successes and the final, absolute defeat of their formidable enemies, Japan and Germany. There was also a third member in the anti-Fascist coalition that had won the war: Great Britain. Prostrated by the costs of war, and lacking the necessary resources, Britain was far inferior to the countries that would soon be labeled as the two “superpowers.” The post-World War II system was thus bipolar: there were two power poles, theoretically capable of balancing each other and acting as magnets to attract lesser allies in need of help, protection and patronage. This new bipolarism was nevertheless highly asymmetrical. One pole, the United States, was incommensurably more powerful than the other.

At the end of the war, the Soviet Union possessed a gigantic military apparatus, retaining a standing army of approximately 10 million men. In its westward advance, it had occupied most of Central–Eastern Europe, where it established friendly or at least non-hostile regimes. It controlled part of Germany and hoped to extract from the former enemy reparations and resources necessary for its reconstruction. The heroic struggle against the Nazi enemy had bolstered the myth of the Soviet Union and of its leader, Iosif Stalin. The USSR had been able to transform itself into a major industrial power and defeat Hitler’s Germany; it thereby saved Europe from Nazi dominance and gained international legitimacy, prestige and recognition.

But the costs had been immense. The country was devastated; according to most estimates, it had lost between 20 and 25 million people in the war, and a vast portion of its industrial potential. Seventy thousand villages and 1,700 Soviet towns had been destroyed. In 1945, women exceeded men by about 20 million: an imbalance that would affect demographic trends for many years to come.²

In the bipolar frame, the contrast between the weakness of the Soviet Union and the augmented strength of the United States was therefore remarkable. The U.S. was the only country to emerge from the war richer and more powerful. Thanks to the stimulus provided by defense spending, its GDP had increased by 60 percent during the war and its economy had finally overcome the dramatic post-1929 recession; at the end of the war, the U.S. possessed 65 percent of the world’s gold reserves and 50 percent of its manufacturing capacity; the dollar was soon to become the dominant currency. The United States had lost 400,000 men in the conflict: significant as this was as a national sacrifice, it paled in comparison to what the USSR and all the other participants in the war had experienced. Furthermore, its national territory had been left unscathed – the U.S. suffered no attacks on its soil – while the projection of its power had been reinforced by the acquisition of a vast network of bases around the world and the monopolistic possession of the atomic bomb.³ The contrast was thus between a real global power, the United States, and one that was such only in ambition and in potentia, the Soviet Union.

Soviet and American Plans

Despite these differences, Moscow and Washington shared some common geopolitical assumptions and each thought it possible and necessary to continue their collaboration. Both assumed that some sort of bipolar, possibly British–Soviet, equilibrium would emerge in Europe; both hoped for a period of peace and stability; each believed that time was on its side and that its universal model of modernity would in the end prevail; neither wanted a new war or the collapse of the wartime alliance.

But a war, fortunately cold, they in the end got. Structural factors, misperceptions, fears, opportunism and strategic mistakes converged in nourishing a vicious spiral that rapidly ended the collaboration of the previous years. In a brief span of time, the two allies of the anti-Fascist war became total and irreconcilable enemies, intent on mobilizing their military apparatuses and alliances against each other and waging a full-fledged ideological war.

To understand why and how this happened, it is necessary to, first, compare the U.S. and Soviet plans, ideas and visions for the postwar period and understand why they proved to be incompatible; and second, focus on some of the key turning points of the period 1945–50, when a novel situation of no peace/no war – of a “peace impossible, war unlikely,” in the words of Raymond Aron – gradually emerged. A novel situation required a specific, and itself ambiguous, metaphor – the “Cold War” – to describe its unique and highly contradictory character.⁴

Between 1944 and 1946, the United States redefined and clarified its goals and visions for the postwar international order. The U.S. had three basic objectives, which stemmed not just from an assessment of the radical changes in the international system which the war had brought, but also by what were considered to be the “lessons of history” and the need to avoid repeating the mistakes that had led to World War II.

The first American goal was to preserve, and possibly expand and consolidate, the condition of clear and unchallengeable superiority enjoyed by the United States at the end of the war. The global correlation of forces should work to the advantage of the U.S.; its 1945 preponderant power had to be rendered structural and permanent. This meant keeping and extending a capillary network of bases around the world and maintaining an advantageous balance of power, where the United States could control, directly or indirectly, the main economic and geopolitical pivots, in Asia and Europe, and have access to crucial resources and raw materials, particularly in the Middle East.

The second objective was to restore, and update, the capitalist and liberal international order that had collapsed after the 1929 crisis. Compromises were needed, and a form of “embedded” and partial liberalism, whereby international economic multilateralism coexisted with national interventionism, was finally instituted.⁵ Nevertheless, ideological assumptions and economic imperatives pushed in the direction of promoting free trade and removing the obstacles to profitable opportunities for investment. The assumption was that greater economic interdependence would stimulate growth, guarantee political stability and foster peace among nations.

The third and last goal was to avoid a return of isolationism in the United States. Postwar geopolitical globalism required a costly, proactive and interventionist foreign policy that many in the U.S. still opposed. It meant making permanent, and even expanding, the military and national security apparatuses established during the war; accepting high defense expenditures and a very intrusive state; and projecting power globally, by keeping troops and forces in occupied areas much longer than originally planned. The presence of an external, existential threat – part real, part perceived, part invented and exaggerated – served this function well: it offered a powerful catalyst to generate the necessary, and somehow missing, domestic consensus on what was soon to become Washington’s Cold War policy and strategy.⁶

When implemented, however, these goals and visions proved to be incompatible with those of the Soviet Union. The USSR had to face the immense task of its economic and physical reconstruction. It needed aid from the U.S. and reparations from the German territory it now co-occupied with the United States, Great Britain and France. A deterioration of the relationship with its wartime ally was not in its interest.

Like the United States, Moscow had three main objectives in 1945. The first originated from a conception of security that maximized the importance of controlling space: in Asia and particularly in Central–Eastern Europe. The main pillar of the postwar Soviet security strategy was the establishment of a sphere of influence in the countries which the Soviet armed forces had occupied in their drive West during the last phase of the war: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. Relying on local pro-Soviet communist parties, the USSR sought friendly regimes in the area that were willing to accept both limitations of their national sovereignty and subservience of their foreign and security policies to Moscow. There was an element of geopolitical orthodoxy in such a vision: the assumption was that Germany still constituted the main security threat and that a buffer zone must be established between the Soviet and the German territories. And there was also a degree of uncertainty on how this objective – creating a Soviet sphere of influence in Central–Eastern Europe – could be pursued and achieved. Conditions varied from country to country; plans had not been defined; and the military operated often in a chaotic as well as brutal and uncoordinated way. That the Soviets should somehow control half of Europe was not, however, up for discussion and the legitimacy of such a request was recognized also by the United States and Great Britain.⁷

Strengthening its security via the creation of a buffer zone on its Western borders, while simultaneously focusing on the domestic reconstruction, was a vital precondition for achieving the second Soviet goal: buying time. Stalin and the Soviet leadership believed that history was on their side and that sooner or later the inevitable contradictions of capitalism would explode once again. The Soviet Union aimed at projecting a counter-universalism to the U.S.–liberal one. The ultimate, messianic goal was to expand socialism globally. To do so, it was necessary to reinforce the socialist motherland, the USSR itself, and prepare for a recrudescence of tensions among capitalist states and work to render the period of U.S. unquestioned superiority transient and historically contingent.

The final objective of the Soviet Union was to punish, divide and exploit Germany, which had invaded Russia and the USSR twice in the previous thirty years. Just as with Central and Eastern Europe, Stalin’s plans were initially flexible, if not inconsistent, although the brutal behavior of the Soviet army shocked many observers and made more difficult the collaboration with the other occupying powers in Germany. The rest of Europe fell under what was soon to become the U.S. sphere of influence. Moscow recognized this geopolitical partition of the Continent and the hegemony of the United States in its Western half. It hoped, however, that postwar Western European governments would not be hostile to the USSR and that existing pro-Soviet parties could play a role in their national polities.

From Collaboration to Confrontation

There was, therefore, a flexibility that bordered on incoherence in the Soviet approach. What were not flexible or negotiable, however, were the Soviet reparation requirements from defeated Germany: an issue that immediately created a rift between Moscow and the other occupying powers. Germany was the first and primary theatre where the transition from the U.S.–Soviet wartime collaboration to Cold War antagonism became patent. The other two areas were the Near and Middle East and East Asia. In all these theatres the incompatibility between the plans of the “superpowers,” along with their numerous inconsistencies and omissions, emerged very quickly.

In typical liberal fashion, the Truman administration believed that political radicalism – and communism was considered one of its quintessential manifestations – prospered in conditions of economic poverty and distress. The rapid economic recovery of postwar Europe was therefore deemed necessary for both political and economic reasons: to create the liberal economic space the U.S. wanted, but also to foster the political stability needed to consolidate the postwar order and prevent radical groups from influencing it. It was soon realized that these goals could be achieved only through the involvement and participation of Germany, or at least of its Western zones occupied and administered by the United States, Great Britain and France. Despite the devastation of the war, Germany remained the main economic power in Europe, thanks to its industries, technological know-how and coal. If adequately managed and reintegrated into the European sphere, Germany could act as the economic locomotive the rest of the Continent badly needed. Punishing the old enemy and curtailing its industrial potential – as the Soviets and, initially, the Americans wanted to do – became irreconcilable with the U.S. objective of promoting a rapid economic recovery of at least that part of Europe that fell under its domain.⁸

Furthermore, accepting the punitive Soviet position risked provoking the resentment of the German population, which itself needed to re-establish manufacturing infrastructure and the export of industrial commodities to pay for foodstuff and raw materials. In the months after the end of the war, the German population was living or, indeed, starving, on little more than 1,000 daily calories per capita. This state of affairs could not last indefinitely, for it heightened the fears of the British and the Americans that the country could fall into the hands of the Soviet Union and its German communist allies.

Notwithstanding public declarations to the contrary, the Truman administration and U.S. officials began very early to consider a division of Germany both inevitable and desirable.⁹ The plans to punish the former enemy were abandoned; in January 1947, the U.S. and Britain united their zones of occupation, creating the so-called Bizone. It was the first step of the process that would eventually lead to the creation of a new West German state, although France did not initially join the other two Western countries.

This fueled the fears and concerns of the Soviet Union that, just a few months after the end of the war, the German state could be resurgent, integrated economically and, in perspective, even militarily into the U.S. sphere of influence. As often in these early phases of the Cold War, the actions of the Soviet Union proved counterproductive for Moscow, exacerbating fears and anxieties in the West and thus strengthening the position of those hardliners in the...