Following World War II, Europe became a dangerous power vacuum that invited intervention from the world’s new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union.
As the uneasy alliance between these two powers disintegrated and both eventually became engaged in the COLD WAR, Europe found itself divided between them. In both the Western and Eastern blocs, European nations were largely denied the ability to make independent decisions, and attempts to break free from their alliances met with marked hostility and, with regard to the Eastern bloc, occasionally outright force.
The military situation in Europe following World War II provided the Soviet Union with control over Eastern
Europe. With its armies spread out across the Balkans, the Soviet Union installed friendly governments in several Eastern European countries in order to create a buffer zone against a revived Germany. In Poland, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, claiming that the nation had served as a “corridor” for German advances, insisted that the new Polish government cohere around a group of communist exiles known as the Lublin Poles. For added protection, the Soviet Union absorbed the states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In 1947, the Soviet Union overthrew the democratically elected noncommunist government of Hungary. The following year, it helped communists seize power in Czechoslovakia. With communist states also in Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, the Soviets forged a sphere of influence in 1955 that was institutionalized as the Warsaw Pact.
President John F. Kennedy stands on a platform overlooking the Berlin Wall. (Kennedy Library)
Fearful that the Soviet Union sought to extend its sphere of influence farther west, the United States sought to rebuild Western Europe as a bulwark against communism. In February 1946, George F. Kennan, an American diplomat in Moscow, wrote a “Long Telegram” that urged American policymakers to realize the severity of the communist threat, arguing that the Soviet Union blended Russia’s historic sense of insecurity with an expansive political ideology. To meet this danger, Kennan articulated what became known as the “containment” policy, which stated that the United States should contain the Soviet Union within its present boundaries; such a policy, Kennan believed, would ultimately enable the internal contradictions of communist ideology to unravel the Soviet Union. The next year, the Truman administration, in response to perceived communist aggression in Turkey and Greece, provided economic and military aid and announced that the United States would assist any nation attempting to resist communist subjugation. In 1948, the United States offered the Marshall Plan, which outlined an aid package for reconstructing Western Europe, then in 1949 created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a permanent alliance with other Western European states and Canada designed to deter Soviet aggression, proclaiming that an attack against one member of the alliance would be considered an attack against all.
This division persisted throughout the 1950s and 1960s despite attempts in both blocs to strike a more neutral course. In Western Europe, the administration of French president Charles de Gaulle offered the greatest challenge to American leadership. After taking power in 1959, the former leader of Free French forces during World War II sought to reduce American influence in France and reach some sort of accommodation with the Soviets. De Gaulle pursued a unilateral French nuclear weapons program, closer ties for France with the Soviet Union, and greater French influence in the Third World. He untied French currency from the dollar and pulled French troops out of
NATO. Despite all of de Gaulle’s efforts, however, France remained wary of the Soviet Union and thus remained firmly embedded in the Western bloc.
The Soviet Union faced even greater threats to its leadership. Three years after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, the new Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev shocked communist Europe with a scathing denunciation of Stalin’s brutal policies. Interpreting his speech as an implicit endorsement of Yugoslavian premier Marshal Tito’s independent policies, revolutionaries in Poland and Hungary moved for greater independence from Moscow. In Poland, the Soviet Union responded to riots with force. In Hungary, where revolutionaries actually established a new government and announced that Hungary was leaving the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union crushed the resistance, killing at least 4,000 Hungarian students and workers. By the late 1960s, the Soviet Union faced another potential threat when Czechoslovakia, under Alexander Dubdek, attempted to initiate a major reform of the communist system. Spurred by communist intellectuals, economists, and politicians, the Prague Spring, as the movement came to be known, sought to enable greater popular participation in the political system, foster the growth of free enterprise, and promote greater respect for individual liberties. Under Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union responded to Dubhek’s reform with an invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia.
The division of Europe persisted well into the next quarter century. Symbolized by the construction of the Wall in the divided city of Berlin, Europe remained split between two hostile superpowers. Efforts to achieve both autonomy and harmony in Europe reached fruition with the age of detente.
Further reading: A. W. DePorte, Europe between the Superpowers: The Enduring Balance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979); Mark Mazower, The Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999).
—Brian Etheridge
World History
