The Global Age: Europe 1950-2017 (The Penguin History of Europe) - Hardcover

Kershaw, Ian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 073522398X ISBN 13: 9780735223981

Publisher: Viking, 2019

Synopsis

The final chapter in the Penguin History of Europe series from the acclaimed scholar and author of To Hell and Back

After the overwhelming horrors of the first half of the twentieth century, described by Ian Kershaw in his previous book as being 'to Hell and back,' the years from 1950 to 2017 brought peace and relative prosperity to most of Europe. Enormous economic improvements transformed the continent. The catastrophic era of the world wars receded into an ever more distant past, though its long shadow continued to shape mentalities.

Yet Europe was now a divided continent, living under the nuclear threat in a period intermittently fraught with anxiety. There were, by most definitions, striking successes: the Soviet bloc melted away, dictatorships vanished, and Germany was successfully reunited. But accelerating globalization brought new fragilities. The interlocking crises after 2008 were the clearest warnings to Europeans that there was no guarantee of peace and stability, and, even today, the continent threatens further fracturing.

In this remarkable book, Ian Kershaw has created a grand panorama of the world we live in and where it came from. Drawing on examples from all across Europe, The Global Age is an endlessly fascinating portrait of the recent past and present, and a cautious look into our future.

About this title

About the Author:

Ian Kershaw, author of To Hell and Back, The End, Fateful Choices, and Making Friends with Hitler, is a British historian of twentieth-century Germany noted for his monumental biographies of Adolf Hitler. In 2002, he received his knighthood for services to history. He is a fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in Bonn, Germany.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

The Tense Divide
 

. . . it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’.
—George Orwell, on the atomic bomb, 1945
 
By 1950, as the immediate aftermath of the Second World War subsided, a new Europe, riven in two – ideologically, politically and socio-economically – had emerged. It was the beginning of a completely changed era in the continent’s history, one of unprecedented insecurity. It was an era intrinsically shaped by the division that the war had left as its overriding legacy – and by the appalling threat of nuclear annihilation.

For more than four decades the Cold War was to drive the two halves of Europe apart. The largely separate development took place, however, with one vital feature in common: the primacy of military power. This military power, the dominant feature of post-war Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain, was now controlled by only two countries: the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Both were preoccupied with security. Both were determined to prevent the enemy dominating Europe. The novelty in their tense relationship was that it rested ultim- ately on weaponry of such fearful destructiveness that neither side dared use it. Within the space of only a few years it became the power of com- plete destruction. Both the United States and the Soviet Union – one already a superpower, the other on the verge of becoming one – had built atomic bombs by 1949. Four years later both the USA and the USSR had acquired the immensely more powerful hydrogen bombs and were soon in possession of nuclear arsenals capable of destroying civilized life on the planet several times over.

During the years 1950 to 1962 the Cold War was at its most intense, and most dangerous. For much of this period Europe was the centre of the Cold War – though in a nuclear age superpower confrontation anywhere on the globe could have had the direst repercussions for the European continent.
 

THE HEAT OF THE COLD WAR
The emerging conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in the immediate post-war years had been threatening at times but had avoided disaster. No sooner had the new decade begun, however, than a dangerous crisis threatened to have grave consequences. That the crisis erupted over distant Korea was the most obvious indicator that Europe could not avoid being part of a global conflict between the superpowers. Whereas before 1945 the United States had been reluctantly drawn into European affairs to fight intwo world wars, Western Europe now became in essence an appendage – if an important one – of American foreign policy. Meanwhile the eastern bloc (apart from Yugoslavia, which had in the aftermath of the war successfully asserted its independence from Moscow) was even more directly committed to support of the USSR in its worldwide confrontation with the USA.

Korea had been annexed by the Japanese in 1910 and ruled by them until the end of the Second World War. The Korean peninsula was then divided more or less in half at a demarcation line on the 38th parallel by an agreement between the Americans and Soviets to split the administra- tion of the country temporarily. By 1948 expectations of a reunited Korea had disappeared. The division congealed into a communist republic in the north, effectively a Soviet satellite and seen by Moscow as part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and a vehemently anti-communist republic in the south, dominated by American interests. But the victory of communism in China in September 1949, after more than two decades of bitter civil war with Chiang Kai- shek’s Nationalists (which had run alongside the immensely bloody war against the Japanese invaders between 1937 and 1945), had left the Korean peninsula exposed. The south remained a non- communist enclave in a vast region of communist dominance. When, on 25 June 1950, the North Koreans crossed the demarcation line and attacked the south of the partitioned country, superpower confrontation escalated dangerously. The United States, committed to the containment of Soviet power and highly allergic to the prospects of further expansion of communism, in Southeast Asia as well as in Europe, could not con- template the loss of South Korea and the evident threat that Japan would then face.

The Americans correctly presumed that the North Koreans would not have attacked without Stalin’s authorization. The Soviet dictator had, in fact, given a green light some weeks earlier, though he was unwilling to send combat forces, looking to the Chinese to provide military assis- tance, if necessary. The American leadership took the view that communist expansion had to be halted there and then if a domino effect were to be prevented. If the fall of Korea were not arrested, argued President Harry Truman, then the Soviets would ‘swallow up one piece of Asia after another’. And ‘if we were to let Asia go, the Near East would collapse and [there was] no telling what would happen in Europe’. Not for the last time in post-war Europe, the failed appeasement policy of the 1930s was cited as a motive for military action. The appeasers had failed to stop Hitler. If the communist advance were not now stopped in its tracks, it would lead to a third world war.

The United States gained the backing of the United Nations, estab- lished in October 1945, to use force to defend a member nation under attack. This was the first time that this had happened, and it arose from a Soviet mistake. Both Stalin and the United States leadership were satisfied, when it was agreed at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 to create the United Nations Organization, that they would have the right of veto in any vote in the envisaged Security Council, whose five perman- ent members would also include Britain, France and China. Through a Security Council controlled by the great powers, it was imagined that the United Nations would prove far more effective than the League of Nations had been. The fallacy of such a presumption was to be repeatedly demonstrated during the Cold War when the use of the veto by one or the other superpower almost invariably produced stalemate on the Security Council. The exception was in 1950 when a temporary Soviet boycott of the Security Council in protest at the refusal to give a seat to Communist China enabled approval for the aid necessary to repel the invasion of South Korea and to re-establish peace and security. Stalin quickly realized his error and the Soviets again took their seat on the Security Council. But it was too late to stop a United Nations Command force, dominated by the USA, being sent to support the South Korean military. By the time the war ended the United Nations Command, which had incorporated the South Koreans, totalled almost 933,000 troops. The overwhelming majority of them were South Koreans (591,000) and Americans (302,000). A number of European countries – Britain and, with far smaller contingents, France, Belgium, Greece and the Nether- lands, along with a tiny contribution from Luxembourg – sent combat troops.

The Americans took the initiative throughout, expelling the North Koreans from the south, then pushing on beyond the demarcation line and into the north. Fearful of outright hostilities with the United States, Stalin rejected North Korean requests for Soviet intervention. The Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, however, was not prepared to see Korea fall wholly under American control, perhaps offering a gateway to an attack on a future date on China itself (whose relations with the Soviet Union were already less than harmonious). In autumn 1950 Mao had dispatched a sizeable force, eventually numbering about 300,000 troops, and forced the US Eighth Army into panicky retreat. It was a first indication that the West would have to reckon with China as a major military power. Within two months, the whole of North Korea was again under communist control and the South Korean capital, Seoul, had fallen. An alarmed Washington considered dropping an atomic bomb.

The United States still possessed a huge supremacy – 74 to 1, according to some estimates – in operational atomic bombs, compared with the Soviet Union. But what, exactly, would be the targets? In a war fought overwhelmingly in the Korean countryside, this was not obvious. And the prospects of a massive retaliatory escalation of what was a regional war, possibly extending to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or even atomic bombs dropped on European cities, had to be contemplated. Towards the end of 1950 the prospect of the widening of the conflict lead- ing to a third world war was a very real one. The American military leadership had drawn up a list of Russian and Chinese cities as targets and considered delivering an ultimatum to China to retreat beyond the Yalu river. If necessary there would be a resort to ‘prompt use of the atomic bomb’.
 
Wiser counsels prevailed. And by spring 1951, by which time the Chinese offensive had been blocked with much bloodshed, the Americans had regained the initiative, and the UN Command troops had eventually forced back the communist army. For the next two years both sides remained mired in a horrible war of attrition. In the armistice con- cluded in July 1953 the Korean War ended much as it had started, with each side behind the demarcation line at the 38th parallel. The three-year bitter war had cost the lives of nearly three million dead and wounded – the vast majority of them Koreans from both sides of the divide. American casualties numbered almost 170,000, over 50,000 dead, and those of the European contingents over 8,000, the majority of them British.

Although far away and not primarily involving Europeans, the Korean War had significant consequences for Europe, resulting from the dram- atic rise in American defence expenditure. The first test explosion of a Soviet atomic bomb in August 1949, before the Korean War, at the Semi- palatinsk test site in modern-day Kazakhstan, had already concentrated American minds on the need to advance the development of nuclear technology to keep ahead of the Soviets. President Truman had commissioned not just the accelerated production of atomic bombs but also, on 31 Jan- uary 1950, the building of a ‘super-bomb’. Military spending was already set to escalate by the time the outbreak of the Korean War sent it soaring. Within a year the US defence budget more than quadrupled. By 1952 military expenditure was consuming little short of one-fifth of American gross domestic product, up from less than a twentieth only three years earlier. On 1 November that year the Americans carried out the first test of their ‘super-bomb’ – a hydrogen bomb that ‘blotted out the whole horizon’ and obliterated the Pacific island (Eniwetok Atoll) where the explosion had taken place. Only nine months later, on 12 August 1953, the Soviets followed suit with their own test in a Central Asian desert. Winston Churchill later aptly spoke of a ‘new terror’ that brought ‘equal- ity in annihilation’.

Unsurprisingly, the Americans felt obliged to review not just their expenditure but also their overseas commitments in the light of a policy of global containment of a Soviet threat that was perceived to be a rap- idly growing menace. This obviously affected Europe. The Americans thought increasingly of aid to Europe in military terms. The Marshall Plan, established in 1947 to stimulate European economic recovery after the war through the provision of around $13 million over four years, was wound down. But by the end of 1951 American military aid to Europe had amounted to almost $5 billion. By 1952, as the build-up of arms increased in the wake of the Korean War, up to 80 per cent of American aid to Western Europe was directed at military purposes rather than civilian reconstruction.

In April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had been established as a pact that bound, initially, twelve countries – the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal and Iceland (extended in 1952 to include Greece and Turkey) – to the defence of Western Europe. But it was plain to American leaders from the start that NATO’s armed strength was inadequate. And they felt European countries needed to contribute more to their own defence costs; that the United States, starting to see itself as the world’s policeman, could not continue to carry a hugely disproportionate burden of European defence. Each of NATO’s European partners accordingly increased defence expenditure. West Germany, prohibited from the manufacture of arms but producing military machinery, tools and vehicles in ever greater numbers, benefited greatly from the demand for steel, increasing output by over 60 per cent between 1949 and 1953 – a boost to its burgeoning ‘economic miracle’. Expenditure had to be turned into military strength. So at a NATO meeting in Lisbon in 1952, members determined to raise at least ninety- six new divisions within two years.

However, the elephant in the room could not be ignored for much longer. Strengthening NATO could make little progress without the rearming of West Germany. Such a short time after it had taken a mighty alliance to crush Germany’s military power, once and for all it was thought, the prospect of a resurgent German militarism not surprisingly held scant appeal for her European neighbours (as well, understandably, as terrifying the Soviets). The Americans had raised the question of West German rearmament already in 1950, not long after the outbreak of the Korean War. They continued to press, and Western European NATO partners had to acknowledge that there was logic in their case. Why should the Americans continue to foot the lion’s share of the bill for the defence of Europe if the Europeans were prepared to do so little? From the European point of view, there was always the lingering fear that the United States might even retreat from Europe, as it had done after 1918 and had initially been envisaged following the end of the Second World War. And there was also the need to ensure that West Germany remained bound to the Western alliance, something that Stalin was prepared to test with an overture in 1952 – rejected outright by Western leaders – that dangled before German eyes the inducement of a unified, neutral Germany. Stalin’s initiative was interpreted in the West as an attempt to press the Americans to leave Europe. It also plainly aimed to head off the closer incorporation of the Federal Republic in the Western alliance (which the West German government, under its Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was keen  to  attain).  This was by now closely bound up with the question of a West German armed force.

Already in 1950 a proposal that appeared to offer a potential break- through in the conundrum of how to make West Germany a military power while not alienating European countries vehemently opposed to such a step had, surprisingly perhaps, come from the French. The French proposal, advanced in October 1950 by the Prime Minister René Pleven, was intended to avoid the accession of West Germany to NATO, the step sought by the Americans, by the formation of a European defence organization th...

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 073522398X
• ISBN 13: 9780735223981
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 704