R4.12 Europe during and after the Cold War (1945–2020)

The Cold War divided Europe for more than forty years into a Western bloc led by the United States and an Eastern bloc controlled by the Soviet Union. Its end in 1989–1991 reunited Germany and opened the way for most of the former Soviet bloc to join the European Union, which by 2020 shaped the laws, trade and borders of almost the whole continent.

The emergence of the Cold War in Europe, 1945–1949

The Cold War began as the breakdown of the Grand Alliance, the wartime coalition of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union that defeated Nazi Germany. By 1949 the former allies had divided Europe, and Germany within it, into two hostile blocs. The vertical timeline of 1945–1949 shows how each step by one side was followed by a step from the other.

Strains in the wartime alliance

The alliance had always been one of necessity. The Soviet Union had been the enemy of the Western powers since the revolution of 1917, and Stalin had signed the Nazi–Soviet Pact with Hitler in 1939. The war against Germany created a common purpose from June 1941, but suspicion remained on both sides.

• The second front. Stalin demanded that Britain and the United States open a second front in France from 1942 to relieve pressure on the Red Army. The Western Allies did not land in Normandy until June 1944, which Stalin suspected was a deliberate choice to let the Soviet Union bleed.

• Poland. Britain had gone to war in 1939 to defend Poland, and a Polish government-in-exile sat in London. In 1943 the Germans revealed the graves of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn, murdered by the Soviet secret police in 1940; when the London Poles asked for an inquiry, Stalin broke off relations with them. He backed a rival communist committee, known from 1944 as the Lublin Poles. When the Polish Home Army rose against the Germans in Warsaw in August 1944, the Red Army halted outside the city while the rising was crushed.

• Spheres of influence. In October 1944 Churchill and Stalin made the informal percentages agreement in Moscow, which assigned the Soviet Union predominance in Romania and Bulgaria and Britain predominance in Greece. Both leaders were already thinking in terms of spheres of influence, whatever they said in public about self-determination.

Yalta and Potsdam

The two great conferences of 1945 settled the outline of post-war Europe but left its hardest questions open. Their wartime diplomacy and their impact on Germany up to 1949 belong to the study of the Second World War; here they matter as the starting point of the Cold War.

The change of leaders between the two conferences mattered. Roosevelt, who had hoped to manage Stalin through personal diplomacy, died on 12 April 1945; his successor Harry Truman was less experienced and more inclined to plain speaking. Churchill was replaced during the Potsdam conference by Clement Attlee after Labour’s election victory. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, days after the conference ended, showed that the United States now held a weapon the Soviet Union did not have until August 1949.

Ideological differences

Both sides believed their system was right for the whole world. Soviet leaders expected conflict between capitalist states, and in the long run their collapse; American leaders saw open markets and elected governments as the basis of peace, and regarded the closed economies of the 1930s as one cause of the war. Each therefore read the other’s actions through its ideology, so that ordinary moves for security or advantage looked like steps in a plan for expansion.

In 1946 both sides put these views into words. In an election speech on 9 February 1946, Stalin told Soviet voters that capitalism made wars inevitable and that the country must rebuild its heavy industry to be ready for them. Two weeks later George Kennan, a senior diplomat at the US embassy in Moscow, sent Washington an analysis of more than five thousand words of Soviet behaviour, the Long Telegram.

In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.

George F. Kennan, telegram from the US embassy in Moscow to the State Department, 22 February 1946 (the “Long Telegram”). Kennan was answering a request from Washington to explain Soviet hostility, and he wrote to persuade officials who still hoped for cooperation. The telegram presents Soviet policy as driven by ideology and by the insecurity of the regime, not by any American action. It was circulated widely in Washington and shaped the policy later called containment, which Kennan himself thought should be mainly political and economic, not military.

Two weeks later Winston Churchill, now leader of the British opposition, gave the Western case its best-known image. Speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with Truman on the platform, he described the line that divided Europe.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace”, speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946. Churchill spoke as a private citizen, but his purpose was political: he wanted an Anglo-American partnership to face the Soviet Union, at a time when many Americans expected their troops to leave Europe. Stalin compared the speech to Hitler’s racial theories in an interview in Pravda. The phrase iron curtain described a division that was in fact still incomplete in 1946: Czechoslovakia had a freely elected government with a communist prime minister, and Vienna and Berlin were under four-power occupation.

The Soviet side drew a similar picture. In September 1946 the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Nikolai Novikov, reported to Moscow that the United States was aiming at world domination and preparing for war against the Soviet Union. Each side’s experts now described the other as a fixed and expansionist enemy.

The roles of Stalin and Truman

Stalin: security, empire and ideology

Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator since the late 1920s, had seen Russia invaded through Poland in 1914 and 1941. The Soviet Union lost about 27 million people in the Second World War. His first aim was a belt of friendly governments in Eastern Europe, a buffer zone that would prevent any future invasion and give the Soviet Union control of Germany’s eastern lands and resources.

What “friendly” meant in practice was a government controlled by communists. Between 1945 and 1948 the communist parties of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia took power with the help of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police (their methods became known as salami tactics). Stalin was cautious elsewhere: he kept to the percentages agreement in Greece, withdrew Soviet troops from northern Iran in 1946 under Western pressure and told the French and Italian communists to work within parliamentary politics. Historians therefore debate whether he had a plan for expansion or reacted opportunistically to Western moves.

Truman: from cooperation to containment

Truman, US President from April 1945, kept up Roosevelt’s policy of cooperation for a year, but his patience ran out over Poland, Iran and Soviet pressure on Türkiye (officially called Turkey in English until 2022) for bases on the Turkish Straits in 1946. In February 1947 the British government told Washington that it could no longer afford to support the Greek government against communist guerrillas in the Greek Civil War (1946–1949), or to aid Türkiye.

Truman’s response, announced to Congress on 12 March 1947, was the Truman Doctrine: a promise of US support for free peoples resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure, and a request for 400 million dollars of aid for Greece and Türkiye. Truman described a world divided between two ways of life, and the doctrine committed the United States to containment, the policy of stopping the further spread of Soviet power and communism, without a fixed limit in time or place.

The table of Stalin’s and Truman’s policies shows why neither leader alone explains the breakdown. Each pursued security in a way that the other saw as aggression. Stalin’s control of Eastern Europe convinced Western leaders that he would go further if allowed; Truman’s containment and dollar aid convinced Stalin that the United States was trying to roll back Soviet influence and rebuild Germany against him.

Economic factors and the Marshall Plan

Economic disputes divided the allies from the start. The Soviet Union, devastated by war, wanted large reparations from Germany; Britain and the United States, which were paying to feed their own zones, wanted German industry to recover so that Germany could pay its way. When reparations by zone left the western zones carrying the cost of feeding Germans, the Americans stopped deliveries of plant from their zone to the Soviet Union in May 1946, and Britain and the United States merged their zones into Bizonia on 1 January 1947.

By 1947 Western Europe as a whole was in crisis. The severe winter of 1946–1947 caused fuel shortages and hunger, and European countries were running out of the dollars they needed to buy food, coal and machinery from the United States. In France the Communist Party had won 28 per cent of the vote in November 1946, and in Italy the communists and their socialist allies together won about 40 per cent in 1946. On 5 June 1947 the US Secretary of State, George Marshall, offered American help for a European recovery programme.

Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. … Any government which maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us.

George C. Marshall, address at Harvard University, 5 June 1947. Marshall spoke to a university audience, but his real audiences were European governments and a US Congress reluctant to spend money abroad. The speech presents aid as humanitarian and open to all, including the Soviet Union; the warning against governments that “block the recovery” anticipated a Soviet refusal. Kennan’s planning staff, which drafted the ideas behind the speech, expected that Moscow would reject conditions that required open accounts and joint planning.

The Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, attended the conference on the plan in Paris in late June 1947 but walked out on 2 July, calling it American interference in European affairs. Poland and Czechoslovakia wanted to take part; Stalin ordered them to withdraw, and the Czechoslovak ministers were summoned to Moscow in July to be told so. Sixteen Western European states then drew up the plan, and in April 1948 Congress approved the European Recovery Program. The OEEC (Organisation for European Economic Co-operation) was set up to share out the aid.

Between 1948 and 1952 the United States gave about 13.3 billion dollars, mostly as grants, as the bar chart of the largest recipients shows. The aid paid for food, fuel, raw materials and machinery, and the local currency that governments received when they sold American goods (counterpart funds) was spent on investment such as power stations and railways. The plan also required the recipients to cooperate, reduce trade barriers and plan together, which encouraged the later moves to integration.

The Soviet answer was to tighten control of its own bloc. In September 1947, at a meeting in Szklarska Poręba in Poland, it founded the Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), which linked the ruling parties of Eastern Europe with the French and Italian communist parties. There Stalin’s spokesman Andrei Zhdanov declared that the world had split into two camps, an imperialist camp led by the United States and an anti-imperialist one led by the Soviet Union. A set of trade agreements between the Soviet Union and its neighbours, known in the West as the Molotov Plan, was followed in January 1949 by COMECON, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

Germany becomes the flashpoint, 1947–1949

Germany was where the two systems met. The four powers ran their zones through the Allied Control Council in Berlin, which needed unanimity and soon stopped working. In the Soviet zone, land was redistributed, industry nationalised and the Communist and Social Democratic parties forced to merge in April 1946 into the Socialist Unity Party (SED). In the western zones, the Americans and British concluded that a self-supporting West German economy was needed for the recovery of Western Europe.

At the London conference of February–June 1948, the three Western powers and the Benelux states agreed to create a West German state. On 20 June 1948 a currency reform replaced the worthless Reichsmark with the Deutschmark in the western zones. Shops that had been empty filled with goods within days. The Soviet authorities, who feared that the old currency would flood into their zone and that a West German state would be built on the new one, introduced their own currency and on 24 June cut all road, rail and canal links between the western zones and West Berlin.

The Berlin Blockade completed the division of Europe. Britain, France and the Benelux states had already signed the Brussels Treaty, a fifty-year defence pact, in March 1948, after the communist coup in Czechoslovakia. The blockade convinced them, and a US Senate that had always avoided peacetime alliances, that Western Europe needed an American guarantee. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on 4 April 1949. The Federal Republic of Germany was founded on 23 May 1949, and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic on 7 October 1949. In August 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb.

The diagram of the causes of the breakdown groups them as ideological, security and personal, and economic. They worked together. Ideology made each side expect the worst; Stalin’s takeovers in Eastern Europe and Truman’s commitment to containment turned that expectation into policy; and the decisions over Germany’s economy in 1947–1948 made the division permanent, because neither side would accept a united Germany that might join the other.

Germany divided: the Berlin Blockade and the two German states, 1948–1961

The Berlin Blockade and airlift, 1948–1949

When the blockade began, West Berlin held about 2 million people and food stocks for about a month. The Western powers rejected the options of withdrawing from Berlin or forcing a convoy through the Soviet zone, which risked war. Instead the US military governor, General Lucius Clay, and the British organised the Berlin airlift, flying supplies into the airfields of Tempelhof and Gatow and, from late 1948, a new airfield at Tegel built by Berliners.

Over eleven months the airlift made about 278,000 flights and delivered about 2.3 million tonnes of food, coal and other supplies. At its peak, on 16 April 1949, aircraft landed every minute or so. At least 70 British and American airmen died in accidents, along with German civilians. Stalin did not shoot down the planes, which would have meant war, and when it became clear that the city could be supplied through the winter, the blockade was lifted on 12 May 1949.

The Federal Republic under Adenauer

The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany) was a parliamentary democracy under the Basic Law of May 1949, a provisional constitution that looked forward to the reunification of Germany. Its first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), governed from 1949 to 1963. His priority was integration with the West: he believed that only a West Germany firmly tied to France, the United States and Western Europe could win back sovereignty and be safe from the Soviet Union.

• Western integration. West Germany joined the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) and the European Economic Community (1957), and reconciled with France.

• Rearmament. After the Korean War broke out in 1950, the United States pressed for West German troops. When the French parliament rejected a European army in 1954, West Germany regained sovereignty and joined NATO in May 1955. The new armed forces, the Bundeswehr, were founded that year, despite large protests.

• The Hallstein Doctrine (1955). West Germany claimed to be the only legitimate German state and broke off relations with any country (except the Soviet Union) that recognised the GDR, as it did with Yugoslavia in 1957.

• Rejecting neutrality. In March 1952 Stalin offered a united, neutral Germany. Adenauer and the Western powers treated the offer as a manoeuvre to stop West German integration. Whether it was a missed chance is still debated.

The economic recovery of the 1950s, the Wirtschaftswunder, gave the new democracy a legitimacy that the Weimar Republic had never had.

The German Democratic Republic under Ulbricht

The German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) was in theory a multi-party democracy, but real power lay with the SED, led from 1950 by Walter Ulbricht, a communist who had spent the Nazi years in Moscow. In July 1952 Ulbricht announced the “planned construction of socialism”: faster collectivisation of farms, pressure on private business, a drive for heavy industry and an attack on the churches. The results were food shortages and a rise in emigration to the West.

After Stalin’s death in March 1953, the new Soviet leaders told Ulbricht to slow down, and some measures were reversed. But a 10 per cent increase in work norms (the output workers had to produce for the same pay) remained. On 16 June 1953 building workers on East Berlin’s Stalinallee went on strike, and on 17 June protests spread to more than 500 towns, with demands for free elections. Soviet tanks crushed the uprising; at least 55 people were killed, and thousands were arrested.

The uprising of 1953 shaped the GDR for the rest of its existence. The SED learned that it depended on Soviet force, and it expanded the secret police; it also learned to fear its own workers, and gave priority to wages and consumer goods. In the West, 17 June became a public holiday, the “Day of German Unity”.

Republikflucht was the GDR’s most serious problem. After the inner-German border was fortified in 1952, most of those who left crossed from East to West Berlin, where movement between the sectors was still open, and flew from there to West Germany. About half were under 25, and many were doctors, engineers, teachers and skilled workers, whose departure damaged the economy and showed the world that East Germans preferred the West. The experience of these refugees in the West is part of the history of post-war displacement; here it matters as the cause of the Berlin crisis.

The Berlin Wall crisis, 1958–1961

West Berlin was both an escape route and a Western showcase deep inside the Soviet bloc. In November 1958 the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev issued an ultimatum: within six months the Western powers must leave and West Berlin become a demilitarised “free city”, or the Soviet Union would hand control of the access routes to the GDR. The Western powers refused, and Khrushchev let the deadline pass.

He tried again with the new US President, John F. Kennedy, at the Vienna summit of June 1961, threatening a separate peace treaty with the GDR by the end of the year. Kennedy answered with a large increase in US defence spending, but in a television address in July he spoke only of defending West Berlin, not access to East Berlin. In July 1961 alone about 30,000 East Germans fled.

The chain of causation leading to the Wall shows that it solved an East German problem. On the night of 12–13 August 1961, East German police and soldiers sealed the border around West Berlin with barbed wire, which was replaced within days by a concrete wall. The Western powers protested but did not act, because the Wall closed East Berlin, not West Berlin. Kennedy is reported to have remarked privately that a wall was a lot better than a war.

Tension peaked in October 1961, when a dispute over the right of US officials to enter East Berlin led to a standoff between US and Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie on 27–28 October. Both sides withdrew. The Wall was then made more deadly over the years, with a second wall, a “death strip”, watchtowers and orders to shoot. At least 140 people were killed at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, according to research by the Berlin Wall Memorial; one of the first to die in public view was the eighteen-year-old Peter Fechter, who bled to death at the foot of the Wall in August 1962. Several hundred more died at the inner-German border, although studies count them in different ways.

Kennedy visited West Berlin on 26 June 1963 and spoke to a crowd of hundreds of thousands outside the Schöneberg town hall.

There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. … Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.

John F. Kennedy, speech at the Rudolph-Wilde-Platz, West Berlin, 26 June 1963 (the “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech). Kennedy spoke partly to reassure West Berliners, who had felt abandoned in 1961, and partly to a world audience for whom the Wall offered the West its best propaganda. The speech presents the Wall as proof of communism’s failure; the SED called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, built to keep Western enemies out. The two names show how each side used the same structure to tell its own story.

The Wall had paradoxical effects. It stabilised the GDR, which could now plan its economy without losing its workforce, and it reduced the danger of war over Berlin, because the Soviet Union stopped pressing for the Western powers to leave. But it separated families for 28 years and became the most powerful symbol of the division of Europe.

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Social and cultural experiences in East and West Germany, 1961–1990

For almost thirty years after 1961, two German states with a shared language and past developed in opposite directions. Each defined itself against the other: West Germany as the free and prosperous Germany, East Germany as the anti-fascist and socialist one. Television made the comparison constant, because most East Germans could receive West German channels.

West Germany: prosperity, protest and the Nazi past

The economic miracle and the social market economy

Under the social market economy West Germany experienced the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”): growth averaged about 8 per cent a year in the 1950s and unemployment fell from more than 10 per cent in 1950 to about 1 per cent in the early 1960s. Its causes included the 1948 currency reform, Marshall aid, a skilled workforce swelled by millions of refugees and expellees, demand created by the Korean War, and a stable currency. By the 1960s most families owned a refrigerator and many a car; mass tourism took West Germans to Italy and Spain.

When the Wall stopped the flow of East Germans in 1961, West German industry turned to the Gastarbeiter. By 1973 there were about 2.6 million foreign workers in West Germany. They did much of the hardest and lowest-paid work in factories and mines, often lived in hostels, and had few political rights. The Turkish community, which numbered about 1.5 million by the 1980s, became the largest minority, and debates over citizenship and integration continued long after reunification.

Confronting the Nazi past

In the 1950s many former Nazis returned to careers in the civil service, the courts and business, and West Germans rarely spoke of the Holocaust. From the late 1950s this began to change. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–1965), in which 22 former camp staff were tried before a West German court, brought the details of mass murder before a wide public. The process of working through the past, known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, became a central theme of West German culture, from the novels of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass to the US television series Holocaust, watched by millions of West Germans in 1979.

The debate continued under Helmut Kohl. His visit with President Reagan to the military cemetery at Bitburg in 1985, where members of the Waffen-SS were buried, caused an international outcry, and in the “historians’ dispute” (Historikerstreit) of 1986 the philosopher Jürgen Habermas accused conservative historians such as Ernst Nolte of trying to relativise the Holocaust by comparing it with Soviet crimes. The disputes showed that the Nazi past remained central to West German identity.

1968, terrorism and the new social movements

A younger generation challenged both the Nazi past of their parents and the conformity of the Adenauer years. The Spiegel affair of 1962, when the government had journalists of the news magazine Der Spiegel arrested over an article on defence, had already shown how many West Germans would defend a free press. The student movement grew after a police officer shot dead the student Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shah of Iran in West Berlin on 2 June 1967. Its leader Rudi Dutschke was shot and badly wounded in April 1968, and protests against the Vietnam War, the right-wing Springer press and the Emergency Laws passed in May 1968 reached their peak that spring.

A small minority turned to violence. The Red Army Faction (RAF), also called the Baader-Meinhof group after two of its founders, carried out bombings and murders from 1970. In the “German Autumn” of 1977 it kidnapped and murdered the employers’ leader Hanns Martin Schleyer, and Palestinian allies hijacked a Lufthansa airliner to Mogadishu, where West German special forces freed the hostages. The state responded with new anti-terror laws, which critics saw as a threat to civil liberties.

The longer-lasting legacy of 1968 was peaceful. The women’s movement campaigned against the abortion law (paragraph 218 of the criminal code), which was reformed in 1976 to allow abortion on certain grounds. Environmental and anti-nuclear groups formed the Greens in 1980, who entered the Bundestag in 1983. The peace movement brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets against the stationing of new US nuclear missiles that NATO had decided on in 1979.

Ostpolitik

Ostpolitik broke with the Hallstein Doctrine. The Moscow Treaty and the Warsaw Treaty of 1970 accepted the existing borders, including the Oder–Neisse line. In Warsaw on 7 December 1970 Brandt knelt at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, an unplanned gesture that became a symbol of German acceptance of responsibility. The Basic Treaty of December 1972 established relations between the two German states, which both joined the United Nations in 1973. Critics on the right, led by the CDU, accused Brandt of accepting the division; supporters argued that contacts, visits and trade would loosen the GDR over time.

East Germany: the SED state and everyday life

The Stasi

The Stasi relied less on mass terror than on surveillance and quiet pressure. Its informal collaborators (IMs) reported on colleagues, friends and sometimes family. From the 1970s it used methods it called “decomposition” (Zersetzung): rather than imprisoning critics, it ruined their careers, spread rumours and broke up their relationships. When the files were opened after 1990, many East Germans discovered that people close to them had informed on them.

Honecker’s “unity of economic and social policy”

Erich Honecker replaced Ulbricht as SED leader in 1971 and ruled until 1989. He promised a “unity of economic and social policy”: stable prices for food, rent and transport, held down by subsidies; a huge housing programme of prefabricated flats, with the aim of solving the housing question by 1990; and more consumer goods. Living standards rose in the 1970s and were the highest in the Soviet bloc, although they stayed well below West Germany’s. East Germans waited more than ten years for a car, the small Trabant, and goods from the West were sold for hard currency in special Intershop stores.

Women, youth and the churches

• Women. The state needed women’s labour and promoted equality in work. By the 1980s about 90 per cent of working-age women were employed or in training, helped by free childcare and paid maternity leave. Abortion on request was legalised in 1972. Women still did most of the housework and were rare at the top of the SED.

• Youth. Most young people belonged to the Free German Youth (FDJ), and almost all took part in the Jugendweihe, a secular coming-of-age ceremony that replaced church confirmation. Western music and fashions were officially discouraged but widely followed.

• The churches. The Protestant churches, to which many East Germans still belonged, reached an agreement with the state in 1978 as the “Church in socialism”. In the 1980s they offered space for independent peace, environmental and human rights groups, whose badge “Swords into ploughshares” was banned in 1982.

Culture, sport and the limits of control

The SED promoted socialist art and censored writers and musicians. When the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann was stripped of his citizenship while on a concert tour in West Germany in November 1976, more than a hundred artists and writers protested, and many later left the GDR. Sport was used to win international recognition: East Germany, with 17 million people, often finished second or third in the Olympic medal tables, but its success depended partly on a secret state programme of doping, which damaged the health of many athletes.

Economic decline

Behind the social programmes the economy was weakening. Subsidies absorbed a growing share of spending, factories and housing in older city centres decayed, and pollution in the industrial south was among the worst in Europe. After the oil price rises of the 1970s the Soviet Union charged more for its oil, and the GDR borrowed from the West to pay for imports. In 1983 the West German politician Franz Josef Strauss arranged a loan of one billion Deutschmarks to keep it solvent.

The comparison table of the two Germanys shows that both were shaped by the Cold War. Each state’s identity, from the West’s consumer prosperity to the East’s social security and anti-fascism, was a claim to be the better Germany. After 1990 some East Germans felt a nostalgia for the security and community of the GDR, known as Ostalgie, even as the files of the Stasi showed how far the state had watched them.

Reasons for German reunification, 1989–1990

In January 1989 Honecker said that the Wall would still stand in fifty or a hundred years if the reasons for it remained. Within ten months it was open, and within two years East Germany had ceased to exist. The vertical timeline of 1989–1990 shows the two stages: the collapse of the SED regime, driven by East Germans themselves, and the process of unification, driven by governments and voters.

The collapse of the SED regime, 1989

The background was the reform course of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985, whose policies of openness and restructuring and whose abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine are explained in the study of Russia from 1985 to 1999. Honecker refused to follow him. In October 1989 the Soviet foreign ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov joked that the new line was the Sinatra Doctrine, after the song “My Way”, because each state could now go its own way. The SED had even banned a Soviet magazine, Sputnik, in 1988 for its critical articles. When the GDR’s rigged local elections of May 1989 were exposed by church groups who had counted the votes, and the SED praised the Chinese government’s crushing of the protests in Tiananmen Square in June, many East Germans concluded that their leaders would never change.

• Exit. In May 1989 Hungary began dismantling the fence on its border with Austria. Thousands of East Germans on holiday in Hungary tried to cross, and others occupied the West German embassies in Prague, Warsaw and Budapest. On 11 September Hungary opened its border to them, and about 25,000 East Germans had crossed into Austria by the end of the month. The flight of young people showed that the regime had lost its future.

• Voice. Those who stayed began to protest. New Forum, a citizens’ movement founded in September 1989, demanded dialogue. The Monday prayers for peace at the Nikolai Church in Leipzig turned into demonstrations. On 9 October about 70,000 people marched around the city centre chanting “We are the people”; security forces had been prepared, but no order to shoot was given, and after that night the protests spread across the country.

• Collapse. The Politburo forced Honecker out on 18 October. His successor Egon Krenz promised reforms, but on 4 November hundreds of thousands rallied in East Berlin. On the evening of 9 November the Politburo spokesman Günter Schabowski announced new travel rules at a press conference and, when asked when they took effect, said “immediately”. Crowds gathered at the crossing points, and the border guards opened them.

The chant changed in the weeks after the Wall opened, from “We are the people” to “We are one people”. Most East Germans had not been demanding unification in October; the movement for reform became a movement for unity when they saw the West at first hand and when the SED’s own figures showed that the GDR was close to bankruptcy. In October 1989 the chief planner Gerhard Schürer had warned the Politburo that merely stopping the growth of the debt to the West would mean a fall in living standards of 25 to 30 per cent.

The process of unification, 1989–1990

The West German chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU, 1982–1998) seized the opportunity. His Ten-Point Plan of 28 November 1989 proposed a gradual confederation; by early 1990 the continued flight of East Germans, about 2,000 a day, pushed him towards rapid union. The first free elections to the East German parliament, the Volkskammer, on 18 March 1990 were won by the CDU-led Alliance for Germany, with about 48 per cent of the vote, on a promise of quick unification and the Deutschmark.

• Monetary union. On 1 July 1990 the Deutschmark replaced the East German mark, at one to one for wages and for savings up to a limit. East Germans gained a strong currency overnight, but East German firms, whose costs had in effect risen several times over, could not compete.

• The international settlement. The Two Plus Four Treaty, signed in Moscow on 12 September 1990 by the two German states and the four wartime Allies, ended the Allies’ rights in Germany, fixed Germany’s borders, including the Oder–Neisse line, limited its armed forces to 370,000 and allowed a united Germany to stay in NATO. Gorbachev accepted NATO membership in July 1990, in return for West German credits and payments for the withdrawal of Soviet troops by 1994.

• Unification. On 3 October 1990 the GDR joined the Federal Republic under Article 23 of the Basic Law, which meant that West German institutions and laws were extended to the East.

The international dimension was decisive. The US President George H. W. Bush supported unification within NATO from the start. The British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the French president, François Mitterrand, feared a large Germany dominating Europe. Mitterrand accepted it once Kohl committed Germany to European monetary union and, after some hesitation, to recognising the Oder–Neisse border; Thatcher was left isolated. The Soviet Union, facing economic crisis and needing Western credit, gave way on every major point.

The diagram of the reasons for reunification separates the reasons the GDR was weak, the reasons it collapsed in 1989 and the decisions that turned collapse into unification. Economic failure explains why East Germans wanted the Deutschmark and why the SED could not buy their loyalty, but it does not explain the timing. That came from Gorbachev’s refusal to defend the regime, the opening of Hungary’s border and the courage of the Leipzig demonstrators, and the form of unification came from Kohl’s policy and the East German vote of March 1990.

The costs of unity

Unification brought freedom and the Deutschmark, but also shock. The Treuhand, the agency set up to privatise East German state enterprises, sold or closed thousands of firms, and industrial jobs in the East collapsed. Unemployment in the East rose to around 15 per cent and more in the mid-1990s, and more than a million people moved west. West Germans paid for the transfers through a solidarity surcharge on income tax from 1991. Many East Germans felt that their lives had been judged worthless and that westerners took the best jobs, a resentment that shaped politics in the East long after 1990.

The impact of the Cold War on Western and Northern Europe

Western Europe came out of the war exhausted, and in the Cold War it became both the main prize and a junior partner of the United States. The diagram of the institutions of divided Europe shows the organisations each bloc built; in the West they combined an American-led alliance with European economic integration.

The establishment and role of NATO

The heart of the treaty was a promise of collective defence.

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all, and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually, and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

North Atlantic Treaty, Article 5, signed in Washington, 4 April 1949. The wording was a compromise. The Western Europeans wanted an automatic American commitment to fight; the US Senate insisted that each member decide what action “it deems necessary”, to keep Congress’s power to declare war. The article was invoked for the first time after the attacks on the United States of 11 September 2001.

NATO became a standing military organisation only after the Korean War began in June 1950, which Western leaders feared was a model for an attack on Western Europe. It gained a supreme commander (first General Eisenhower), a headquarters near Paris and US troops stationed permanently in Europe. A remark attributed to its first secretary-general, Lord Ismay, summed up its purpose as keeping the Soviet Union out, the Americans in and the Germans down.

Northern Europe and the neutral states

The map of military alliances shows that a belt of states stayed outside both blocs. Norway, Denmark and Iceland joined NATO in 1949, but Norway and Denmark refused nuclear weapons and foreign bases on their soil in peacetime. Iceland hosted a US air base at Keflavík but used the threat of closing it to win concessions from Britain in the “Cod Wars” over fishing rights (1958–1976). Sweden remained neutral, though it cooperated secretly with NATO. Austria regained its independence in the Austrian State Treaty of May 1955 on condition of permanent neutrality, and Switzerland and Ireland kept their traditional neutrality.

Finland had fought the Soviet Union twice between 1939 and 1944 and lost territory. Its leaders, above all Urho Kekkonen (president 1956–1982), chose accommodation: Finland stayed out of NATO and the EEC and its press practised self-censorship about the Soviet Union, but it kept free elections and traded with both blocs. Critics used Finlandisation as a term of abuse for appeasement; Finns argued that it preserved their independence. Finland and Sweden joined NATO only after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Economic changes and the European Economic Community

Recovery and the “golden age”

Western Europe’s economies grew faster between 1950 and 1973 than ever before or since. In France the period became known as the Trente Glorieuses (“thirty glorious years”, 1945–1975), the name given to it by the economist Jean Fourastié in 1979; it began with the Monnet Plan of 1946, which directed investment into coal, steel, power and transport. Italy had its own “economic miracle” (1958–1963), when millions moved from the poor south to the factories of the north. The causes included Marshall aid, cheap energy, the movement of labour from farms to industry, American technology and the opening of trade within Europe.

Most of these states built a welfare state: public health systems, pensions, unemployment insurance and public housing, paid for by high taxes and growth. The Nordic countries went furthest. The Nordic model in Sweden, Norway and Denmark combined a market economy with universal welfare, high taxes, strong trade unions and agreements between employers and unions.

From the Schuman Plan to the EEC

Integration began with Franco-German relations. The French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, working from a plan drawn up by Jean Monnet, proposed on 9 May 1950 that the coal and steel industries of France and West Germany be placed under a common authority.

Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity. The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany. … The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.

Robert Schuman, declaration of 9 May 1950 (the Schuman Declaration), as published by the European Union. The declaration presents integration as a peace project, but its timing also reflects French interests: the United States wanted West German industry revived for the Cold War, and pooling coal and steel gave France a share in controlling the Ruhr. Its method of small, practical steps (“concrete achievements”) became the model for later integration.

The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was founded by the Treaty of Paris in April 1951 by the same six states. After an attempt at a European army failed in 1954, the six met at Messina in 1955 and signed the Treaties of Rome in March 1957, creating the European Economic Community and Euratom (for atomic energy). The customs union was completed in July 1968, and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), begun in 1962, guaranteed farm prices, which pleased French farmers but by the 1980s produced “butter mountains” and “wine lakes” and took most of the EEC budget.

The 1970s ended the golden age. The oil price rises of 1973 and 1979 brought stagflation, a combination of high inflation and high unemployment, and governments turned in different directions: Britain under Margaret Thatcher (prime minister 1979–1990) privatised state industries and curbed trade union power, while France under Mitterrand at first tried nationalisation and then, from 1983, reversed course.

The social impact of the Cold War in the West

The Cold War shaped Western European societies in less obvious ways than it shaped the East, but it touched politics, culture and everyday fears.

• Welfare and consensus. Governments of the centre-left and centre-right saw full employment and social security as the best answer to communism, a reason why the post-war consensus on the welfare state was so broad.

• Mass communist parties. In France and Italy communist parties kept the support of between a fifth and a third of voters but were kept out of national government from 1947. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) won 34.4 per cent in 1976 and, under Enrico Berlinguer, promoted Eurocommunism, an independent line that accepted parliamentary democracy and criticised the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

• Americanisation. Marshall aid and US troops brought American products, films, music and management methods. Coca-Cola, Hollywood and rock ’n’ roll were welcomed by many young people and resented by some conservatives and communists as cultural imperialism.

• Nuclear fear and protest. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in Britain in 1958, organised marches to the weapons research centre at Aldermaston. The Euromissile decision of 1979 revived the movement: women set up a peace camp outside the US cruise missile base at Greenham Common in 1981, which lasted until 2000, and hundreds of thousands marched in Bonn, Amsterdam and London in 1981–1983.

• 1968 and terrorism. The student revolt of May 1968 in Paris, which grew into a general strike of several million workers, combined anger at the Vietnam War with protest against authority at home. In Italy the Red Brigades, a far-left terrorist group, kidnapped and murdered the former prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

• Decolonisation and migration. The end of empire, from the Suez crisis of 1956 to the Algerian War (1954–1962), brought migrants from former colonies to Britain, France and the Netherlands, and Cold War rivalry shaped how decolonisation happened.

Changing relations with the United States

Relations between Western Europe and the United States moved from dependence in the late 1940s towards a more equal and often difficult partnership. The Norwegian historian Geir Lundestad described the American presence as an “empire by invitation”, because Western European governments asked for US protection and aid; but they also tried to keep the freedom to follow their own interests.

Détente in Europe culminated in the Helsinki Final Act of 1 August 1975, signed by 35 states: the United States, Canada and almost every European state (Albania refused to take part). The Soviet Union saw it as Western acceptance of the post-war borders. The West insisted on a section on human rights and contacts between peoples, which dissidents in the East soon used to hold their governments to their own promises.

The impact of the Cold War on Central and Eastern Europe

Motives and methods of Soviet domination

Soviet control of Central and Eastern Europe rested first on the Red Army, which had occupied the region in 1944–1945. Stalin’s motives combined several aims, and historians weigh them differently:

• Security. A buffer of friendly states between the Soviet Union and Germany, after two invasions in a generation.

• Ideology. The spread of socialism, which Soviet leaders believed was the direction of history, and which made only communist-led governments truly “friendly”.

• Resources. Reparations, raw materials and industrial equipment to rebuild the war-damaged Soviet economy.

• Prestige and empire. Control of territory that the Russian Empire had sought for centuries, and a sphere of influence to match the Western one.

The road to a people’s democracy followed a common pattern, shown in the chain of the communist takeovers. Communists entered coalition governments as partners of socialists, peasant parties and liberals, but took the key ministries: the interior ministry and police, justice and propaganda. They then split their rivals, arrested or exiled their leaders, forced the socialist parties to merge with them, and held rigged elections. The Hungarian communist leader Mátyás Rákosi later described this as cutting off his opponents slice by slice, and the method became known as salami tactics.

From 1948 the process of Sovietisation remodelled each state on the Soviet pattern: a single ruling party, a planned economy, collectivised farms, a secret police and a cult of the leader. After the Tito–Stalin split of 1948, Stalin purged “national communists” suspected of independence. In Hungary the former interior minister László Rajk was tried and executed in 1949; in Czechoslovakia the party’s former general secretary Rudolf Slánský and thirteen others, most of them Jewish, were tried in November 1952 in a show trial with strong antisemitic overtones, and eleven were hanged.

The Warsaw Pact was signed nine days after West Germany became sovereign and joined NATO. It gave a legal basis for Soviet troops in Eastern Europe (useful once the Austrian State Treaty required Soviet troops to leave Austria) and a joint command under a Soviet marshal. In practice its main military operation was against one of its own members, Czechoslovakia, in 1968.

Soviet economic policies and COMECON

The Stalinist economic model was imposed across the bloc from 1948: planned economy under five-year or six-year plans, priority for heavy industry and armaments, nationalisation of industry and trade, and the collectivisation of agriculture (although Poland abandoned it after 1956, leaving most farmland in private hands).

In the early years the Soviet Union took resources out of the region. It removed whole factories from its zone of Germany as reparations, took a share of East German production through Soviet-owned companies into the mid-1950s, ran joint Soviet companies in Romania and Hungary that extracted oil and uranium, and bought Polish coal at below world prices. Later the flow reversed: from the 1960s the Soviet Union sold oil and gas to its allies at prices below world levels, a subsidy that grew after the oil price rises of the 1970s.

COMECON never matched the EEC. Trade was arranged in bilateral deals at fixed prices, currencies could not be exchanged freely, and members such as Romania resisted being assigned roles as suppliers of raw materials. Some governments experimented with reform. Hungary’s New Economic Mechanism of 1968, under János Kádár, gave firms more freedom and allowed small private businesses; the resulting goulash communism made Hungary the most comfortable country of the bloc. In the 1970s Poland under Edward Gierek and other states borrowed heavily from the West to buy technology and consumer goods; Poland’s foreign debt grew to more than 20 billion dollars by 1980. When the loans could not be repaid, governments raised prices and cut imports, which set off the crises of the 1980s.

The social impact of Soviet control

• Secret police and censorship. Each state built a secret police on the Soviet model: the UB and later SB in Poland, the ÁVH in Hungary, the StB in Czechoslovakia, the Securitate in Romania and the Stasi in East Germany. Labour camps held tens of thousands in the early 1950s.

• The churches. The Catholic Church was a major target. Cardinal József Mindszenty of Hungary was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to life imprisonment in a show trial, and Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński of Poland was held from 1953 to 1956. In Poland the Church survived as a national institution independent of the state, which made the election of a Polish pope in 1978 especially powerful.

• Social mobility and equality. Free education and the expansion of industry gave many workers’ and peasants’ children places at university and jobs in the cities, while the old middle classes and landowners lost property and status. Women entered paid work in large numbers, though they also carried the “double burden” of housework.

• Housing and consumption. Vast estates of prefabricated flats were built from the 1960s. Shortages, queues and waiting lists for cars and flats were part of everyday life, and connections and bribes often mattered more than money.

• Population policy. In Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Decree 770 of 1966 banned abortion for most women in an attempt to raise the birth rate, which led to thousands of deaths from illegal abortions and, later, to overcrowded orphanages.

Control was never complete. Western radio, especially Radio Free Europe, was widely heard, jokes about the regime circulated everywhere, and in Poland and Hungary the regimes from the 1960s accepted a tacit bargain: political passivity in return for tolerable living standards and a private life left mostly alone.

Opposition to Soviet control

1953 and 1956

Stalin’s death in March 1953 and Khrushchev’s denunciation of him in the “Secret Speech” of February 1956 shook the bloc. The East German uprising of June 1953 was the first open revolt. In June 1956 workers in Poznań, Poland, protested over wages and food; the army fired on them, killing at least 57. In October 1956 the Polish party brought back Władysław Gomułka, a communist imprisoned under Stalin, as leader against Soviet wishes. Khrushchev flew to Warsaw and Soviet troops moved, but Gomułka convinced him that Poland would remain communist and in the Warsaw Pact, and the “Polish October” ended in compromise: an end to collectivisation, more freedom for the Church and a more national style of communism.

Hungary went further. A student demonstration in Budapest on 23 October 1956 in support of Poland turned into a national uprising when the security police fired on the crowd. The reform communist Imre Nagy became prime minister, Soviet troops withdrew from Budapest, and on 30 October the Soviet government issued a conciliatory statement.

The Soviet Government regards it as indispensable to make a statement in connection with the events in Hungary. … However, this just and progressive movement of the working people was soon joined by forces of black reaction and counterrevolution, which are trying to take advantage of the discontent of part of the working people to undermine the foundations of the people’s democratic order in Hungary and to restore the old landlord and capitalist order.

Statement of the Soviet Government, 30 October 1956 (translation in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook). The statement offered to discuss the presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, and for a few days it seemed to promise compromise. Its language of “counterrevolution” had a second purpose: it defined the limits of acceptable change and prepared a justification for force. When Nagy announced a multi-party government and on 1 November declared Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and its neutrality, the Soviet leaders decided to intervene.

On 4 November Soviet forces attacked Budapest. About 2,500 Hungarians and more than 700 Soviet soldiers were killed, and about 200,000 Hungarians fled to the West. Nagy was later seized and, in June 1958, executed after a secret trial. The West, divided by the Suez crisis and unwilling to risk war, gave no help, despite the encouragement Radio Free Europe had broadcast. The lesson for the bloc was that Moscow would tolerate reform within limits, but not a challenge to one-party rule or membership of the Warsaw Pact.

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The Prague Spring, 1968

In January 1968 Alexander Dubček became leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and began reforms that he called “socialism with a human face”. The Action Programme of April 1968 promised freedom of speech and assembly, economic reform and rehabilitation of the victims of the purges; censorship was effectively ended. In June the writer Ludvík Vaculík published the “Two Thousand Words” manifesto, calling for reform from below. Dubček, unlike Nagy, never proposed leaving the Warsaw Pact, but the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the leaders of Poland and East Germany feared that the loss of party control would spread.

On the night of 20–21 August 1968, troops from the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded. Czechoslovaks resisted without violence, but more than a hundred civilians were killed in the following months. Dubček was taken to Moscow and forced to sign the Moscow Protocol; he was removed in April 1969, and his successor Gustáv Husák led a process of “normalisation” that expelled several hundred thousand reformers from the party. In January 1969 the student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in protest. The invasion was justified afterwards in Pravda.

The peoples of the socialist countries and Communist parties certainly do have and should have freedom for determining the ways of advance of their respective countries. However, none of their decisions should damage either socialism in their country or the fundamental interests of other socialist countries, and the whole working class movement, which is working for socialism. … The sovereignty of each socialist country cannot be opposed to the interests of the world of socialism, of the world revolutionary movement.

S. Kovalev, “Sovereignty and the International Obligations of Socialist Countries”, Pravda, 26 September 1968 (translation in the Internet Modern History Sourcebook). The article was written after the invasion, to justify it to communists at home and abroad who had protested, including the Italian, French and Romanian parties. It became known in the West as the Brezhnev Doctrine: socialist states had limited sovereignty, and the bloc had the right to intervene if socialism was threatened in any one of them. Its value as a source lies in showing how Soviet leaders reconciled the language of national independence with military control.

Two states found a different kind of independence. Albania, under the hard-line Stalinist Enver Hoxha, broke with Khrushchev in 1961, sided with China and formally left the Warsaw Pact in 1968. Romania under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and then Nicolae Ceaușescu resisted COMECON plans to keep it agricultural, kept relations with Israel and West Germany, and refused to join the invasion of Czechoslovakia, which Ceaușescu condemned in a speech to a huge crowd in Bucharest on 21 August 1968. Yet Romania remained a rigid one-party dictatorship at home. Moscow tolerated independence in foreign policy as long as communist rule was safe and the state stayed in the Warsaw Pact.

Poland, Solidarity and the dissidents, 1970–1981

Poland remained the bloc’s most rebellious state. Price rises in December 1970 led to strikes on the Baltic coast, where the security forces killed at least 41 workers, and Gomułka fell. In 1976 new price rises brought strikes in Radom and Ursus and the founding of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR), which joined intellectuals and workers. The election of the Archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyła, as Pope John Paul II in 1978, and his visit to Poland in June 1979, when millions attended his open-air masses, showed Poles how many they were.

In August 1980 a strike at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk spread along the coast. The Gdańsk Agreement of 31 August 1980 recognised the right to free trade unions, the first time a ruling communist party had accepted one. Solidarity became a mass movement for national renewal. Under Soviet pressure, and to prevent an invasion as he later claimed, General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law on 13 December 1981: Solidarity was banned and thousands of its activists were interned. It survived underground, and Wałęsa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983.

Elsewhere opposition came from small groups of intellectuals, the dissidents. In Czechoslovakia Charter 77, published in January 1977 and signed by the playwright Václav Havel, the philosopher Jan Patočka and others, called on the government to respect the human rights it had accepted at Helsinki. Its signatories were harassed and imprisoned, and Patočka died after police interrogation in March 1977. Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless (1978) argued that ordinary people kept the system going by outwardly conforming, and could undermine it by “living in truth”.

The comparison of the three crises shows a learning process on both sides. Hungary in 1956 showed that a challenge to the Warsaw Pact would be crushed; Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed that even reform within the party and the Pact would not be tolerated. Polish opposition after 1976 avoided both traps by organising outside the party, using the Church and the language of workers’ rights, and by avoiding violence. Martial law showed that the regime could still suppress such a movement, but not destroy it.

Tito and Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia was the one communist state in Europe that broke free of Soviet control and survived. Its leader, Josip Broz Tito, had led the communist Partisans in a war of liberation against the German and Italian occupiers and their local allies, and the Partisans freed most of the country themselves in 1944–1945. Tito therefore had his own power base, army and prestige, and did not owe his position to the Red Army.

At first Yugoslavia was the most radical and loyal of Stalin’s allies, but Tito pursued his own ambitions in the Balkans, including plans for a federation with Bulgaria and support for the Greek communists, and resisted Soviet control of his army and economy. In March 1948 Moscow withdrew its military and civilian advisers. The Yugoslav leaders replied in April.

No matter how deeply one might love the country of Socialism, the USSR, one should under no circumstances feel less love for his own country, which is also building Socialism, in this case the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, for which hundreds of thousands of its most progressive men have given their lives.

Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, letter to Stalin and Molotov, 13 April 1948 (signed by Tito and Edvard Kardelj; translation in Seventeen Moments in Soviet History). The letter still uses the language of loyalty to the Soviet Union, because the Yugoslav leaders hoped to avoid a break. Its claim, that a communist could love his own country as much as the Soviet Union, was exactly what Stalin could not accept from a satellite, because it implied that each party could decide its own path.

On 28 June 1948 the Cominform expelled Yugoslavia, and Soviet propaganda denounced Tito as a traitor. The Tito–Stalin split had three main consequences:

1. Repression at home. Tito purged supporters of the Cominform; several thousand were sent to the prison camp on the island of Goli Otok.

2. A new economic model. From 1950 Yugoslavia developed workers’ self-management, in which elected workers’ councils ran enterprises within a market framework, as a socialist alternative to Soviet central planning. Collectivisation was abandoned in 1953.

3. A third way in foreign policy. The United States, seeing a chance to weaken the Soviet bloc, gave Yugoslavia economic and military aid from 1949. Yugoslavia signed the Balkan Pact with Greece and Türkiye (1953–1954), but did not join NATO. Khrushchev visited Belgrade in 1955 and accepted, in the Belgrade Declaration, that there were different roads to socialism. In 1961 Belgrade hosted the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, with India and Egypt.

Yugoslavia’s open borders allowed hundreds of thousands of its citizens to work in Western Europe, and its living standards were higher than in most of the Soviet bloc. But the system depended on Tito. The 1974 constitution gave great power to the six republics and two autonomous provinces; after Tito’s death in May 1980, foreign debt, inflation and rivalry between the republics, especially Serbia under Slobodan Milošević from 1987, broke the federation apart in 1991. The wars that followed its break-up belong to the history of Europe after 1990.

The end of Soviet control, 1989–1991

The communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe fell in 1989 because the conditions that had sustained them disappeared at once. Their economies were stagnating and indebted; their populations, especially in Poland, had organised opposition; and Gorbachev made clear from 1988 that Soviet troops would not save them. How the Soviet Union reached this decision belongs to its own history; here the focus is on how each regime fell.

The table of the revolutions of 1989 shows a chain reaction: each regime’s fall made the next more likely, and the process accelerated. The British historian Timothy Garton Ash, who watched the revolutions, summed up the pace as ten years in Poland, ten months in Hungary, ten weeks in East Germany and perhaps ten days in Czechoslovakia. Only in Romania, where Ceaușescu had built a personal dictatorship independent of Moscow, was the end violent. COMECON was dissolved in June 1991 and the Warsaw Pact on 1 July 1991, and the Soviet Union itself broke up in December 1991.

European political integration after the Cold War, 1990–2020

The end of the Cold War changed the purpose of European integration. The EEC had been a Western European project sheltered by NATO; after 1989 it had to decide how to deal with a united Germany and with a dozen new democracies to its east that wanted to join.

The European Union and its expansion after 1990

The Maastricht Treaty was partly an answer to German reunification: France and others wanted a larger Germany bound more tightly into Europe, above all by sharing the Deutschmark in a common currency, and Kohl agreed. It also introduced the principle of subsidiarity, that the EU should act only where goals cannot be achieved better by member states, to reassure critics of centralisation.

Enlargement to the east followed. In June 1993 the European Council set the Copenhagen criteria for membership: stable democratic institutions, the rule of law, human rights and protection of minorities; a functioning market economy able to compete in the EU; and the ability to take on all EU law. Candidate states spent a decade rewriting their laws to meet them.

The table of enlargements shows that the 2004 “big bang” was the largest in the EU’s history, bringing in eight former communist states (three of them former Soviet republics) and about 75 million people. NATO expanded in parallel, taking in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999 and seven more states in 2004. Supporters saw enlargement as the reunification of Europe and the best guarantee of democracy in the new members; critics feared that a larger EU would be harder to govern and that cheap labour would undercut workers in the West.

The EU’s institutions were reformed to cope. The Treaties of Amsterdam (1997) and Nice (2001) made limited changes. A Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe was rejected by French and Dutch voters in referendums in May and June 2005, and most of its content was then placed in the Lisbon Treaty, which came into force on 1 December 2009 after Irish voters had first rejected and then accepted it. Lisbon created a permanent President of the European Council, strengthened the European Parliament and, in Article 50, set out for the first time how a member state could leave.

Economic policies and their impact

The single market, completed at the start of 1993, allowed the free movement of goods, services, capital and people across the member states. The euro was launched on 1 January 1999 in eleven states, with notes and coins from 1 January 2002; by 2020 nineteen states used it. Its rules, under the Stability and Growth Pact of 1997, limited government deficits to 3 per cent of GDP, and a single European Central Bank set interest rates for all of them. Regional and cohesion funds transferred money from richer to poorer regions, paying for roads, railways and training in Spain, Portugal, Greece and then the new eastern members.

The weakness of the euro was that its members shared a currency and an interest rate but not a budget. Cheap borrowing in the 2000s fed property booms in Spain and Ireland and government borrowing in Greece. When the global financial crisis of 2008 struck, investors lost confidence in these states. In the eurozone crisis, Greece (2010, 2012 and 2015), Ireland (2010), Portugal (2011) and Cyprus (2013) needed rescue loans from the EU and the International Monetary Fund, and Spain received aid for its banks in 2012. The loans came with demands for austerity: cuts in spending, wages and pensions, and tax rises.

In July 2012, with fears that the euro might break up, the President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, made a promise in London.

Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.

Mario Draghi, speech at the Global Investment Conference, London, 26 July 2012 (published by the European Central Bank). Draghi spoke to investors, and his words were meant to change their behaviour: by signalling that the bank would buy the bonds of states under attack, he made betting against the euro unprofitable. Borrowing costs for Spain and Italy fell without the bank having to spend money at once, which shows the power of a credible statement by a central bank.

The graph of unemployment from 2009 to 2020 shows the social cost of the crisis. Greek unemployment rose to almost 28 per cent in 2013 and Greece lost about a quarter of its output; youth unemployment in Greece and Spain exceeded 50 per cent. Germany, by contrast, prospered. The crisis split the EU between northern creditor states, which blamed southern governments for overspending, and southern debtor states, which blamed austerity imposed from Berlin and Brussels.

Social policies and their impact

• Free movement. EU citizens could live and work anywhere in the Union. The Schengen Agreement, applied from 1995, removed passport checks between most member states (Britain and Ireland stayed out). After 2004 millions moved west: by 2017 about one million Polish citizens lived in the United Kingdom, according to the Office for National Statistics.

• Rights and social protection. The Social Chapter of Maastricht, which Britain at first opted out of and joined in 1997, led to laws on working hours, parental leave and equal treatment. The Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000) became binding with the Lisbon Treaty in 2009.

• Education and identity. The Erasmus programme, begun in 1987, allowed students to study in other member states; by its thirtieth anniversary in 2017 about nine million people had taken part in it and its successor programmes.

• Migration and asylum. In 2015 about 1.3 million people applied for asylum in the EU, many fleeing the war in Syria. The Dublin rules, which made the country of first arrival responsible, broke down as people moved on through Greece and the Balkans. Germany accepted hundreds of thousands, and Chancellor Angela Merkel declared “we can do this” (Wir schaffen das) on 31 August 2015, but Hungary built border fences and several eastern states refused to accept refugees under an EU quota. A deal with Türkiye in March 2016 reduced arrivals in Greece.

The wars in the former Yugoslavia

The break-up of Yugoslavia tested the new Union at once. Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in June 1991; Bosnia and Herzegovina followed in 1992, and a war between its Serb, Croat and Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) communities lasted until 1995, killing about 100,000 people. Serb forces drove non-Serbs from their homes in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces murdered about 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica, a UN “safe area”, an act the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice later ruled to be genocide.

The EU’s attempts at mediation failed; the war ended only after NATO air strikes and the US-brokered Dayton Agreement of November 1995. In 1999 NATO bombed Serbia for eleven weeks to stop the expulsion of Albanians from Kosovo. The ICTY, set up in 1993, tried Milošević from 2002, though he died in 2006 before a verdict. The wars showed that the EU had little military power of its own, while Slovenia (2004) and Croatia (2013) later joined it.

Political resistance to the EU

Integration always had opponents. Margaret Thatcher set out the case against a federal Europe in a speech at the College of Europe in Bruges in 1988, after the President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, had predicted that most economic and social legislation would soon be made at European level.

We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels. Certainly we want to see Europe more united and with a greater sense of common purpose. But it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one’s own country.

Margaret Thatcher, speech to the College of Europe, Bruges, 20 September 1988. Thatcher spoke as a prime minister who supported the single market but opposed social regulation and political union. Her audience was a European elite in favour of integration, and her words were aimed as much at the British public and her own party. The speech became a founding text of British Euroscepticism, and later Leave campaigners treated it as such, although Thatcher herself argued for reform from within.

Resistance grew after Maastricht. Danish voters rejected the treaty in June 1992 and accepted it only with opt-outs in 1993; French voters approved it by just 51 per cent. Critics spoke of a democratic deficit: decisions taken by unelected officials and by governments meeting behind closed doors. After 2008 the eurozone crisis and the migration crisis fed populist parties of the right and left, which presented the EU as a threat to national sovereignty and identity: the UK Independence Party, the National Front in France, the Alternative for Germany (founded 2013), the League in Italy and Syriza in Greece. In Hungary under Viktor Orbán, who in 2014 declared that he was building an “illiberal democracy”, and in Poland under the Law and Justice party, governments limited the independence of courts and the media, and the EU began Article 7 proceedings against them (Poland 2017, Hungary 2018) for threatening the rule of law.

Brexit

The United Kingdom had joined in 1973 and voted to stay in a referendum in 1975, but it never shared the political vision of the founding members and stayed outside the euro and Schengen. In 2013 the Conservative prime minister David Cameron promised a referendum on membership, partly to answer the rise of UKIP and Eurosceptics in his own party. On 23 June 2016, 51.9 per cent voted to leave, on a turnout of 72 per cent. England and Wales voted Leave; Scotland (62 per cent Remain), Northern Ireland and London voted Remain.

The timeline of Brexit shows how long and divisive leaving proved. The main obstacle was the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which the peace process had made invisible and which both sides wanted to keep open. Parliament rejected Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement three times in 2019; her successor Boris Johnson agreed a revised deal, won a large majority in the election of December 2019, and the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020.

Political scientists such as Harold Clarke, Matthew Goodwin and Paul Whiteley, in Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (2017), stress immigration, national identity and the voters’ judgement of costs and benefits. Others stress economic inequality and austerity. Brexit showed that integration could be reversed, but the difficulty of leaving also discouraged other states: no other member moved to follow by 2020.

Post-Cold War developments in one country: Poland, 1989–2020

Poland was the largest of the states that left the Soviet bloc in 1989, with about 38 million people, and the place where the end of communism began. Its history after 1989 shows the main themes of post-Cold War change: economic transformation, integration into the West, and fierce argument over national identity. Germany and the United Kingdom are compared with it in outline; Spain and Russia have their own regional studies.

Economic changes

Poland began its transformation with the most famous programme of shock therapy in Europe. The finance minister Leszek Balcerowicz, advised by Western economists such as Jeffrey Sachs, introduced the Balcerowicz Plan on 1 January 1990: prices were freed, subsidies cut, the złoty made convertible and state firms exposed to competition. Inflation, which had reached several hundred per cent a year, was brought under control, and shops filled with goods. But output fell sharply in 1990–1991, many state factories closed, and registered unemployment rose from almost nothing to more than 16 per cent by 1993; it peaked at about 20 per cent in 2002–2003.

From 1992 Poland grew faster than any other former communist state. Small private businesses multiplied, foreign investment arrived, and EU membership from 2004 brought access to the single market and large regional funds for motorways, railways and farms. Poland was the only EU economy to avoid recession in 2009.

The graph of Poland’s output per head shows the scale of convergence: from 48 per cent of the EU average in 2000 to 78 per cent in 2020, measured in purchasing power. The gains were unevenly shared. Big cities such as Warsaw, Kraków and Wrocław boomed, while small towns and the rural east, where the closure of state farms and factories hit hardest, fell behind. Mass emigration after 2004, above all to Britain and Ireland, relieved unemployment and sent money home, but drained the country of young workers.

Social changes

• Inequality and class. A new middle class of entrepreneurs and professionals grew, while older industrial workers, the core of Solidarity in 1980, often lost out. The sense that the transition had a few winners and many losers shaped later politics.

• Emigration. About 2 million Poles were living abroad, at least temporarily, by the late 2000s, according to the Polish statistical office; their departure split families but brought new ideas and money back to Poland.

• Population. The birth rate fell to one of the lowest in Europe, and the population began to age and shrink, which later governments tried to reverse with large child benefits from 2016.

• Women and the family. The law of 1993 allowed abortion only in cases of rape or incest, a threat to the woman’s life or health, or severe foetal abnormality. When the Constitutional Tribunal struck down the last of these grounds on 22 October 2020, the largest protests since 1989 followed, led by the Women’s Strike movement.

Cultural changes

The Catholic Church emerged from communism with enormous prestige, and a Concordat with the Vatican was signed in 1993. Over the following decades church attendance fell, especially among the young, and revelations of clerical abuse damaged its authority. The question of what Poland stood for, a Catholic nation or a liberal European democracy, became the main divide in Polish culture and politics.

Memory was the other battleground. The Institute of National Remembrance (1998) opened the communist secret police files, and lustration laws required public officials to declare whether they had collaborated. Debates over Polish behaviour towards Jews in the Second World War, sharpened by the historian Jan Gross’s book Neighbors (2001) on the Jedwabne massacre, led in 2018 to a law penalising claims that the Polish nation was complicit in Nazi crimes, which was softened after international protests. The death of President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others in a plane crash near Smolensk in Russia in April 2010 deepened the divide, as his supporters refused to accept that it was an accident.

In 2015 the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, led by Jarosław Kaczyński, won both the presidency and a parliamentary majority, the first single-party majority since 1989. It combined generous social spending, such as a monthly payment for each child, with an emphasis on Catholic values and national sovereignty. It also brought the Constitutional Tribunal, the courts and public media under government influence, which its critics in Poland and the EU saw as an attack on the rule of law, and some local councils declared themselves free of “LGBT ideology” in 2019–2020.

Relations with the rest of Europe

Poland’s strategic aim after 1989 was to anchor itself in the West, so that it would never again be left between Germany and Russia. It signed a border treaty with united Germany in November 1990, confirming the Oder–Neisse line, and a treaty of good neighbourship in 1991. It joined NATO in 1999 and the EU on 1 May 2004, entered the Schengen area in 2007, but kept the złoty rather than adopting the euro.

Relations with the EU were close but became tense after 2015. Poland was one of the largest net recipients of EU funds, and public support for membership stayed high, above 80 per cent in most polls. Yet the PiS government refused to accept refugees under the EU’s relocation scheme in 2015–2017, and the dispute over the courts led the European Commission to begin Article 7 proceedings in December 2017 and to bring cases before the European Court of Justice. Towards Russia, Poland was among the most suspicious EU members: it opposed the Nord Stream gas pipelines from Russia to Germany and pressed for NATO troops on its territory, which arrived after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

Germany and the United Kingdom compared

The table of Germany and the United Kingdom shows how differently the end of the Cold War affected them. For Germany it brought unity, a decade of costly adjustment and then leadership of the EU; for the United Kingdom, enlargement and free movement, which it had supported, became a central reason for leaving. Spain’s democratic consolidation, EU membership and the Catalan crisis to 2020 are treated in the regional study of Spain, and Russia’s post-Soviet history in the study of the USSR and post-Soviet Russia.

Perspectives and debates

Who was responsible for the Cold War in Europe?

The debate on the origins of the Cold War has gone through several schools, each shaped by its own time and by the sources available to it.

The schools reflect their contexts. Orthodox accounts were written during the early Cold War and largely from Western government sources; revisionists wrote during the Vietnam War, when many Americans questioned their government’s motives; post-revisionists drew on newly opened US archives; and historians after 1991 could read some Soviet documents for the first time. Gaddis’s own shift, from shared responsibility in 1972 to an emphasis on Stalin in 1997, shows how new sources changed judgements. A balanced judgement can accept that Stalin’s actions in Eastern Europe were the main cause of Western fears, while recognising that US economic policy in Germany and Western Europe made a divided settlement more likely.

The Marshall Plan: engine of recovery or political project?

These views differ mainly on economics. Most historians agree that the plan’s political effects were large: it gave Western European governments confidence, tied West Germany to the West, and pushed recipients towards cooperation that led on to the Schuman Plan. Where they disagree is on how far the dollars themselves caused the long boom.

The GDR: dictatorship or “participatory dictatorship”?

After 1990 the opening of the Stasi files and the SED archives produced a debate about the nature of East German society. One view, held by many former dissidents and historians such as Klaus Schroeder, presents the GDR as a totalitarian regime that rested on surveillance and fear. Timothy Garton Ash, a British historian who lived in East Berlin, explored his own Stasi file in The File (1997), showing how ordinary people became informers.

Mary Fulbrook, in Anatomy of a Dictatorship (1995) and The People’s State (2005), argues that this picture leaves out most East Germans’ lives. She calls the GDR a “participatory dictatorship”: millions took part in its organisations, from parents’ councils to sports clubs, and many experienced it as a stable, ordinary society. Critics reply that participation in a state that controlled careers and travel was rarely free. The two views can be combined: the GDR’s stability came both from repression and from the compromises and real benefits that tied many citizens to it, which is why it lasted for forty years and then collapsed within weeks once the threat of force disappeared.

Why did communism collapse in 1989?

Accounts written soon after 1989, such as Garton Ash’s We the People (1990), emphasised people power: civil society, from Solidarity to the Leipzig marchers, overthrew the regimes. Stephen Kotkin and Jan Gross, in Uncivil Society (2009), argue that the decisive actor was the communist establishment itself, which was bankrupt and lost the will to rule; outside Poland, organised civil society was weak. Mary Elise Sarotte, in The Collapse (2014), shows how the opening of the Wall depended on accidents and on decisions by individuals on the night of 9 November. These views differ in emphasis: economic decline and Soviet withdrawal created the opportunity, while people in the streets and on the borders determined when and how it was taken.

European integration: ideals or national interests?

The Cold War fits into each interpretation. For federalists it gave urgency to an existing ideal; for Milward and Moravcsik it was a background condition, while national economic interests set the pace. The history of integration after 1990, from enlargement to Brexit, fits Moravcsik’s emphasis on bargaining between states, but the persistence of the European idea among the new members of 2004, who saw “returning to Europe” as a goal in itself, suggests that ideas also mattered.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: the breakdown of the wartime alliance

Paper 3: German reunification

Paper 3: opposition to Soviet control

Paper 3: Western European integration

Paper 3: integration after the Cold War

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how ideological differences, security concerns and economic disputes caused the breakdown of the wartime alliance by 1949.

• To do:

  I can describe the roles of Stalin and Truman and weigh their responsibility for the Cold War in Europe.

• To do:

  I can explain the aims, conditions and effects of the Marshall Plan and the Soviet response to it.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes, course and consequences of the Berlin Blockade (June 1948–May 1949).

• To do:

  I can explain why the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 and what effects it had.

• To do:

  I can compare social and cultural life in East and West Germany between 1961 and 1990.

• To do:

  I can explain why the SED regime collapsed in 1989 and why Germany was reunified in 1990.

• To do:

  I can explain the establishment and role of NATO and the position of the neutral states.

• To do:

  I can explain the economic changes in Western Europe, including the ECSC, the EEC and its enlargements.

• To do:

  I can describe the social impact of the Cold War in the West and the changing relationship with the United States.

• To do:

  I can explain the motives and methods of Soviet domination of Central and Eastern Europe, including the Warsaw Pact.

• To do:

  I can explain the impact of Soviet economic policies and COMECON, and the social impact of Soviet control.