The first goal of Cold War strategy was the drive for prosperity which, if successful, would enable the West to pre-empt and outflank Communist expansionary plans.
Once hostilities had ended in 1945, the initial instinct to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a mortal threat to her neighbours was accompanied, almost immediately, by plans to help her people, many of whom were facing starvation in the first post-war winters. Next, in the shadow of the rapidly escalating Soviet threat, the target was adopted of rebuilding the economies and societies of both Germany and Western Europe as a whole.
The phenomenon of mass consumer capitalism, which over time was to have great influence on the national cultures of Western Europe was as yet unknown to the public at large, even as a concept. The situation almost everywhere in Europe in the later 1940s was, rather, one of general scarcity, and it was the way in which these conditions allowed for and even encouraged Communist ideas that was the chief concern. The preoccupation with rebuilding occurred in response to the left-wing theory that it was only extensive state control that could alleviate poverty and bring about a contented society. Prosperity thus became the priority, to be effected as widely and as rapidly as could securely be achieved, with the requisite support being provided by the Allied victors of the recent fight against fascism (in particular, the United States). The Cold War strategic imperative was to show the average person in non-Soviet Europe that life under a free-market capitalist system could be better, and that the poverty and depression remembered from pre-war times could be overcome. New opportunities could and would be opened up to the individual citizen, and this without the wholesale state takeover of the economy and society which was then occurring in Soviet-dominated Central and Eastern Europe.
While the threat of Communism as an expanding world-system was only too evident in the wars in Greece (from 1944), Malaya (from 1948) and Korea (from 1950), the biggest blow, certainly in the eyes of the Americans, was the military takeover of China by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. But it was Western Europe itself, lying as it did in the shadow of what was now an immensely powerful Soviet Union, that was initially the chief focus of the East-West struggle. Here Marshall Aid provided by the USA played a major role in the reconstruction of the many battered economies of Western Europe. The United States had emerged least damaged by far of all the major combatant nations, and made the significant decision in 1948 to provide the massive financial assistance which helped to trigger an economic renaissance particularly in West Germany, Italy, France and the Benelux countries. Though Britain herself was the largest recipient, she did, however, have commitments arising from a world role which had existed before, during and after the war. Some critics charge that Britain after 1945, instead of recognising her now substantially reduced importance in the world, suffered from “delusions of grandeur”, which served only to hold back her economic development. But the rapid onset of the Cold War (which had, in fact begun even before the German surrender of May 1945) and the gradual appreciation on both sides of the Atlantic of the threat which the new expanding totalitarian system posed all over the world, meant that Britain, of necessity, continued to have a central role in the immediate post-war order. The United States was now far stronger in resources and military power terms but the partnership was crucial, as seen in Britain’s significant role in nurturing the growth of a new constitutional, free-market state in West Germany, in her response to the launching in 1948 of an attempted Communist takeover in British-controlled Malaya, and in her role in blocking the advance of the Greek Communists.
In 1947, the nature of the post-war military confrontation between what was now seen as “East” and “West” was formalised by the framing by the United States of the Truman Doctrine, under which the USA would, in effect, take the lead in action, both by persuasion and by military means, to stifle and outflank both Communist influence and the physical expansion of the Communist system of life. What was confirmed in 1947 was that the Western Allies of World War 2 were already in a new world conflict, one that, thankfully, had not had recourse so far to the post-war equivalent of unrestricted panzer division warfare. The aim of blocking the Communists, and simultaneously encouraging economic prosperity, was obviously only a long-term goal. In part this was because of the attachment felt by many towards the system pioneered by the Soviets, the system which had been successful in the herculean task of crushing Nazism, and in part because for the populations concerned, it was results not promises that mattered. But by now the paymaster United States was committed, was in it for the long term, and ready to develop the measures necessary to the task.
The Cold War goal of ever-widening prosperity was not possible without security. For trade and industry to thrive in Western Europe a secure and stable social and political atmosphere, long missing from European affairs, needed to be embedded, assured and predictable in the long-term. And for those growing up in the 1950s, despite the fear of nuclear war, this defence umbrella was crucially successful in promoting long-term economic development. Landmarks in the establishing of a secure Western (liberal capitalist) Europe separate from the now Communist-dominated eastern sphere, included the Berlin Airlift of 1948/9, as a result of which the non-Soviet sectors of Berlin remained free from the control exerted by the Soviet Union over East Germany as a whole, the creation of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) in 1949 and the establishment of a new state in the West of Germany, the Federal German Republic, in the same year. The latter was to be the chief economic and social bulwark against Communist advance in Central Europe during the key period of the Cold War in Europe, which extended through the 1950s and 60s. The Federal Republic’s long-term success was therefore essential. Britain and the United States played a central role in forging this infrastructure of free-market Europe, while the United States was, from the start, by far the most important guarantor of military resistance to the Soviets through NATO.
Little considered at the time, the cultural repercussions of this Cold War strategy were to be enormous, even revolutionary, to a degree unmatched even by those which famously ensued as a result of the fighting of World War 1. While the structures of society and the formality of class divisions were certainly shaken after 1918, and while the death toll of both First and Second World Wars was greater than any waged in Europe before, it was the very fact that military combat was at the heart of these conflicts that separates them from the Cold War and accounts for the difference in cultural effects. After 1945, and particularly after 1949, when the Soviet Union brought their own atom bombs to the table, straightforward military onslaught became less likely to be the way in which the contradictions between the mutually-exclusive systems based on Communism and Capitalism would be resolved. Essential now was the winning of hearts and minds, through propaganda, manipulation of the media, economic development and the selective use of force. With echoes of Europe’s religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, the new “Cold” war was to be waged to a significant degree at a social, psychological and cultural level.
Some major questions remain at this point. Due to the relative absence of all-out war, life for the bulk of Western populations in the Cold War was able to proceed largely along “normal” lines. In World War 1 practically every family in the combatant countries was affected by the blood-letting. Why then is it asserted that the cultural implications of the Cold War were so great for those so relatively untouched?
And, most importantly, why was it that, despite the magnitude of the changes in European and American life wrought by the economic development post-1945, it was the second of the points of Cold War strategy listed above, the point which deals with decolonisation and the expansion of liberty world-wide, that was, in fact, to have the most explosive and long-lasting effect on the national culture, not only in Britain and the United States, but across Europe and in the continents outside Europe?
To be continued.
Junius 2 