With independence, newly established Third World states faced an equally acute set of dilemmas. Some actively sought alignment with the United States because a formal commitment to the West seemed to comport best with key domestic needs. In the case of Pakistan, for example, its governing elites pursued an American connection with vigour from their fragile country’s earliest days, becoming a formal ally in the mid-1950s through the negotiation of a bilateral security agreement with Washington and membership in two multilateral pacts. The US connection afforded Pakistan protection less from the Soviet Union than from India, its principal regional rival, or so top Pakistani decision-makers believed. It thus offered a means to help ensure the survival of a most precarious experiment in nation-building, given Pakistan’s ethnically, linguistically, and geographically divided polity, while strengthening the dominant position within that state of the Punjabi ethnic group that had pushed most aggressively for US aid and Western alignment. Throughout the decade and a half that followed, Pakistan’s Cold War commitments, and the military and economic aid that resulted from them, powerfully shaped the internal constellation of forces within the country. The alliance with the United States bolstered the Punjabi elite, and the Pakistani military in particular, at the expense of other internal contestants for power, distorting the nation’s political balance nearly from its inception.
In the case of Thailand, to cite another telling example, its leaders sought an American connection for a similar mix of reasons. They coveted an external patron as part of a long-established national strategy inspired by the traditional fear of China, their huge and potentially menacing neighbour—whether communist or not. The Cold War provided Thai elites with a means to secure that external patron since their needs happened to dovetail with America’s search for Third World allies. Like their counterparts in Pakistan, Thai military leaders also sought an American connection and the dollars sure to flow from it so as to tighten their own internal grip on power and to silence dissident voices. In the event, the course of modern Thai history was altered in profound ways.
Although each particular circumstance naturally reveals unique features, a broader pattern plainly obtains in which those Third World nations that opted for Western alignment did so more for domestic reasons than out of a fear of communism, and in which subsequent internal developments within those states were deeply influenced as a consequence. Such varied countries as Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Philippines, Ceylon, South Korea, and Thailand—to mention just some of the more prominent—each found their domestic priorities, available resources, and internal balance of forces severely affected by the decisions of their leaders to align formally or informally with the West. Some were newly emergent states, of course, the product of independence struggles; others were much older states whose status as self-governing entities had been compromised but never completely extinguished by the Western imperium. Yet, despite those widely divergent histories, the strong imprint left by the Cold War on each remains unmistakable.
The strategy of studied non-alignment appealed to another group of Third World leaders, those who believed that important national goals could be more effectively advanced by eschewing a formal commitment to either West or East. Indonesia’s Sukarno, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, among others, consciously strove for a position of independence for their nations from either of the Cold War power blocs. The complex factors that lay behind the latter’s calculations in pursuing a non-aligned course are broadly illustrative. ‘Once foreign relations go out of our hand into the charge of somebody else,’ warned Nehru, ‘to that extent and in that measure you are not independent.’ India’s first prime minister was convinced that his young nation could maximize its international stature and influence in world councils by assuming the role of a third force in international affairs. By so doing, moreover, Nehru’s ruling Congress Party could avoid the inevitable alienation of some powerful political forces within India’s remarkably diverse polity that would have resulted from a formal commitment to either West or East. By remaining unattached to the American or the Soviet spheres of influence, additionally, Indian planners calculated that they might be able to attract needed developmental assistance from both camps. ‘Even in accepting economic help,’ a realistic Nehru confided to an aide, ‘it is not a wise policy to put all our eggs in one basket.’ Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah, and others would have heartily agreed with that sentiment. Much to the consternation of American Cold Warriors, who frequently exhibited a you-are-with-us-or-you-are-against-us mentality, Washington was indeed compelled to compete for the non-aligned, or neutral, nations of the Third World.
One must, in sum, acknowledge the agency of Third World actors as they tried to harness the dominant international reality of their age, the Cold War, to maximize potential benefits—or at least to minimize potential damages. One must also recognize, however, that many of the Cold War’s consequences for Third World peoples and societies proved as unanticipated as they were beyond the control of any local actors. In that regard, it is worth re-emphasizing here that the Third World emerged as early as 1950 as the Cold War’s principal battlefield. Conflicts with local roots—from Korea, the Congo, and Vietnam to Angola, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua—became exponentially more costly because the superpower conflict became superimposed upon them. It is worth recalling here that the vast bulk of the estimated 20 million who died in the wars that raged across the globe between 1945 and 1990 were victims of Third World conflicts, most of which were at least indirectly connected to the Cold War.
The Cold War’s impact within Europe
The Cold War’s impact within Europe offers the starkest of contrasts. If the Soviet–American contest can be blamed for a good deal of the warfare, devastation, and instability that racked the newly emerging areas between 1945 and 1990, then it conversely deserves much of the credit for the unprecedented era of peace, prosperity, and stability experienced by Europeans. Ironically, an ideological and geopolitical struggle that began as a conflict over the fate of Europe actually wound up not just sparing Europe but laying the essential foundation for the most sustained economic boom in European history. That boom was accompanied and made possible by a durable peace across the continent and rapid movement towards political and economic integration within Western Europe, each development abetted by the Cold War. The ‘Golden Age’ of capitalist expansion and productivity that spanned from the late 1940s through to the early 1970s essentially coincided with the first two and a half decades of the Cold War—and was fostered, in significant measure, by that same Cold War. Those years witnessed ‘the most dramatic, rapid and profound revolution in human affairs of which history has record’, in the apt assessment of historian Eric Hobsbawm. ‘For many of those who had lived through the Depression and war,’ adds historian John Young, ‘Western Europe seemed a promised land.’
Economic, political, and security trends proved mutually reinforcing in Cold War Europe. The approximately $13 billion pumped into Western Europe by American Marshall Plan aid between 1948 and 1952 certainly helped spur the great post-war boom, even if economic historians continue to debate the precise weight that should be assigned to the American contribution. The US security umbrella and US support for and encouragement of both West Germany’s integration into Western Europe and parallel movement towards broader regional integration also played an instrumental role. Western European statesmen sometimes followed the American lead but just as frequently took the lead themselves, seizing the opportunities afforded by the Cold War, the occupation of Germany, and the new-found US interest in European affairs to forge the kind of region-wide changes and internal economic and social reforms that they judged necessary. They and their American backers recognized from the start, as historian Herman-Josef Rupieper notes, ‘that if prosperity and democracy were to flourish in the Western half of a divided Europe then the Western Europeans, with American aid and protection, would have to mov
e toward an integrated political, military, and economic system.’ Leaders of key Western European states were also keenly aware that the problem of Germany, which had plagued the security of the continent for generations, needed to be resolved so that German productivity could be harnessed for the benefit of Europe’s economic recovery without Germany again emerging as a military menace.
They acted with creativity and resolve to find solutions to those problems. In July 1952, France, Italy, the German Federal Republic, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg formed the European Coal and Steel Community. In March 1957, in an even bolder and more significant step towards unity, the same six nations signed the Rome treaties establishing a European Economic Community (EEC) and a European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM). A historic rapprochement between France and Germany facilitated the development of those successful supranational institutions. ‘Germany and France are neighbours who waged war against each other again and again over the centuries,’ exclaimed West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. ‘This was a European madness that must end once and for all.’ The impressive growth rates of the EEC countries, which were in the vanguard of Western Europe’s economic boom, demonstrated the tangible advantages of swapping military competition for economic cooperation. By 1960, ‘the Six’ accounted in tandem for a quarter of the world’s industrial production and two-fifths of aggregate international trade.
Ordinary citizens of Western Europe were the prime beneficiaries of these developments. Sustained economic growth provided them with higher wages, shorter working weeks, generous social benefits, better nutrition, and improved health and education. The success of the productionist formula—essentially, bake a larger pie and all will benefit—also contributed to political stability, lessened traditional tension between labour and capital, and undercut the appeal of Western Europe’s communist parties. Unemployment virtually disappeared, averaging just 2.9 per cent throughout Western Europe in the 1950s and a mere 1.5 per cent in the 1960s. During the 1950s, per capita income in West Germany grew by an average of 6.5 per cent annually; in Italy, by 5.3 per cent; in France, 3.5 per cent. Compared to the past, veritable consumer paradises were created in Cold War Europe; working- and middle-class people increasingly earned sufficient incomes to attain goods that had previously been the province of the wealthy. In Italy, for example, private ownership of cars jumped from 469,000 in 1938 to 15 million in 1975. Ownership of refrigerators swelled from just 8 per cent of British households in 1956 to 69 per cent in 1971; three years later, 94 per cent of Italian homes boasted one. By 1973, 62 per cent of French families took annual vacations, more than double the number who did so in 1958. Tellingly, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan appealed for votes in the general election of 1959 with the remarkable slogan: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’
During the early post-war decades, Western European consumers significantly closed the gap that had long separated them from their American counterparts. By the 1960s, they each possessed what David Reynolds identifies as the essential attributes of consumer-oriented societies: ‘mass-produced domestic goods, a growing population with soaring incomes, extended credit, and aggressive advertising’. To the extent that the Cold War was also about the battle for the hearts, minds, and stomachs of rank-and-file citizens, the spectacular success of capitalist economies during the third quarter of the 20th century substantially bolstered the political and ideological claims of the United States and its Western allies.
The concomitant shortcomings of highly bureaucratized command economies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, which struggled to meet the basic needs of local populations, further strengthened Western claims to superiority. From the 1960s onwards, an ever-widening gap opened between material conditions in Europe’s Eastern and Western halves. Following the Second World War, the predominantly agrarian societies east of the Elbe River underwent an abrupt transition from capitalism to socialism—under the watchful eye of Stalin. Closely emulating the Soviet model, Eastern Europe’s ruling communist parties embarked on policies of rapid, forced industrialization while simultaneously subordinating nationalist impulses to the imperatives of ‘proletarian internationalism’, as defined by Moscow. Benefits for ordinary citizens ensued, to be sure: health care improved, diets improved, mortality rates dropped, access to education expanded, full employment was achieved. But those gains came at a very high cost in countries in which political repression, religious persecution, suppression of individual freedoms, and tightly enforced ideological conformity became the norm, as they had long been in the Soviet Union. The command economies of Eastern Europe recorded impressive progress through to the end of the 1950s, actually outperforming the economies of Western Europe in terms of annual growth rates. By the 1960s, however, that growth slowed appreciably as the problems inherent in inflexible, top-down planning models, along with the inability of Eastern bloc states to satisfy rising consumer demands, became increasingly evident.
A similar pattern obtained in the USSR. Soviet growth rates declined from 5.2 per cent per annum in the 1960s to 3.7 per cent for the first half of the 1970s; 2.6 per cent for the second half of that decade; and a mere 2 per cent from 1980 to 1985. Plainly, citizens of the Soviet Union, who suffered from stagnant wages, drab living conditions, and frequent scarcities of essential consumer goods, found themselves, like their Eastern European compatriots, far from the workers’ paradises promised by Marx.
Periodic efforts to liberalize the political and economic systems within individual Warsaw Pact states invariably faltered throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The Soviet Union, whether under the rigid Stalin, the more flexible Khrushchev, or the dour Brezhnev, was simply unwilling to tolerate genuine structural reform or true political diversity within its sphere of influence. The flowering, and swift demise, of the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 made the limits of liberalization painfully clear. In January of that year, Alexander Dubc˘ek, a reform-minded communist leader, assumed power in Czechoslovakia. He strove to meet the popular clamour among Czechs for greater political freedoms and meaningful economic reforms while maintaining support from the Soviet Union and unity within his ruling Communist Party. It proved an impossible balancing act. During the evening of 20 August 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and, as in Hungary twelve years earlier, crushed a hopeful experiment with political pluralism (Box 5). Wisely, the Czechs chose not to resist, doubtless sparing thousands of lives. From that point forward, there could be little doubt that Soviet control in East Europe rested ultimately on naked power, and the willingness to use it.
Box 5 Brezhnev Doctrine
The Soviet Politburo decided to use force to expunge the stirring of political pluralism within Czechoslovakia because of a fear about the contagion of liberalism spreading throughout Eastern Europe, thereby undermining the Kremlin’s authority. On 26 September 1968, the official newspaper Pravda issued what came to be called the Brezhnev Doctrine to justify the invasion. It held that national leaders could pursue separate developmental paths, but only if those paths did not damage socialism within the country and did not damage the wider socialist movement. In other words, the Kremlin would set the limits on diversity within Eastern Europe.
The year 1968 marked an important juncture in the internal history of Cold War Western Europe as well. In May, students and workers in Paris mounted a series of demonstrations that nearly toppled the de Gaulle government. The French protests were only the most dramatic of a series of challenges to prevailing power structures that swept Western Europe, as well as the United States, in 1968. Although each had its local particularities, the flowering of a youth culture, a ‘New Left’, and an iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian spirit within most of the Western democracies suggests common bonds among them. The very success of the Cold War order in Western Europe had, it seemed, spawned a new generation that took the principal fruits of that order—peace, stability, material bounty, enhanced social benefits, and educational opportunities—for granted. In France, in Italy, in W
est Germany, and elsewhere, this new generation, galvanized partly by the unpopular American intervention in Vietnam, began to question some of the core verities of the Cold War. Did the containment of communism necessitate bloody, Third World interventions? Was the Soviet Union still a threat? Was the presence of US troops and nuclear weapons on European soil still justified? Could alternative Western policies reduce the chance of a nuclear Armageddon? The Cold War military and foreign policy consensus, in the event, began to erode within now-prosperous Western Europe, along with the political order that it had fostered.
The Cold War’s impact within the United States
The Cold War also left an indelible imprint on state and society within the United States. Indeed, it left hardly any aspect of American life untouched. As a direct result of the security fears induced by the communist/Soviet threat, the federal government assumed vastly enhanced power and responsibility, the ‘imperial presidency’ took centre stage, elections reverberated with fear-based appeals to a militant patriotism, those deemed as ‘soft’ on communism were demonized, a substantial increase in defence spending became a permanent feature of the federal budget, and a military-industrial complex took root within American society. The broad shifts in the country’s post-1945 residential patterns and occupational structures are, in significant measure, a by-product of the Cold War as well. So, too, is the co-opting of scientific and technological innovations for military-related purposes and the concomitant transformation of many top universities into leading sites of government-sponsored research. Many specific domestic priorities were similarly shaped, and in some cases explicitly justified, by the Cold War: from Eisenhower’s proposed interstate highway system, to increased federal spending on education, to space exploration. Even the course of the civil rights movement was affected by the Soviet–American contest, albeit in contradictory ways. Segregationists initially tried to derail the black freedom struggle by tarring its supporters with the brush of communism. Yet those efforts were ultimately offset by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations’ recognition that a continuation of the South’s system of racial subordination and the denial of essential rights to African Americans tarnished America’s global image and thus formed an unacceptable Cold War liability.
The Cold War Page 13