9.1 Contextualizing Cold War and Contemporary Europe

In 1945 much of Europe was rubble. Cities such as Warsaw, Berlin, Dresden and Rotterdam had been bombed or fought over, bridges and railways were wrecked, and food and fuel were scarce. Tens of millions of Europeans had been killed, and millions more were refugees or displaced persons: survivors of the camps, former forced laborers, prisoners of war and people fleeing the Red Army.

Borders and populations shifted again. Poland was moved west, losing land to the Soviet Union and gaining German land up to the Oder and Neisse rivers. Roughly 12 million Germans fled or were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and other parts of eastern Europe. Germany itself was divided into four occupation zones run by the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, and Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, was split the same way.

A superpower is a state with enough military, economic and political strength to act everywhere in the world. After 1945 only two qualified. The United States had suffered no fighting on its mainland, produced about half the world's manufactured goods right after the war, and alone had the atomic bomb until 1949. The Soviet Union had lost about 27 million people but had the largest army in Europe, and its troops occupied the eastern half of the continent.

Their systems were opposites. The United States stood for capitalism, an economy based on private ownership and markets, and for multiparty democracy. The Soviet Union stood for communism, an economy owned and planned by the state, under the rule of one party. Each side believed its system should spread and saw the other as a threat.

The wartime alliance had been a marriage of convenience. At the Yalta Conference (February 1945) and the Potsdam Conference (July–August 1945), the Allies agreed to divide Germany and promised free elections in liberated eastern Europe. Stalin, who wanted friendly governments on the Soviet Union's western border after two German invasions, instead helped communists take control in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and, by 1948, Czechoslovakia. In 1946 Winston Churchill warned that an “Iron Curtain” had come down across the continent. By the late 1940s Europe was split between a U.S.-backed West and a Soviet-controlled East (9.3, 9.4).

The war also broke the European empires. Britain and France were exhausted and deeply in debt, Japan's wartime conquests had shown that European colonial rulers could be defeated, and colonized peoples who had fought for the Allies demanded the freedom the Allies claimed to defend. Within about 20 years most of Asia and Africa was independent (9.9).

Western Europeans responded to their weakness partly by working together. Recovery aid from the United States (9.2) and the first steps toward European integration (9.10) both started in this postwar moment. So, in a sense, did the welfare state (9.6), as governments promised citizens who had sacrificed in the war a fairer, more secure life.