The Main Participants of the Cold War - Essay Example

COLD WAR: The cold war started after Second World War. The main participants and the enemies were Soviet Union and United s. This war is said to be Cold War as during this war none of both countries directly attack on each other, never said directly even a single word. They used words as their weapons. They tried to show their opponents lower from each other. They played havoc with conflicts in different regions of the world as in case of Hot War, there would be much danger due to use of nuclear weapons. Over the years the leaders of both side of countries changed but this war continued for a long period of time. There were three political groups of the countries of the world. 1- United States leading West 2- Soviet Union commanding East 3- Non Allied Countries ( Neutral Countries) Soviet Union took its alliance that were having communist system or were favoring the communist system. Soviet Union tried to empower communism all over the world while United States and its alliance supported many countries of the world to weaken the communism. The economy of United States was affected badly due to this War. The detailed discussion on the link of the Cold War with the decrease in the Britain Economy is given in the following text: After the end of World War II, the Soviet unions decided to spread communism all over the world. The United States determined to stop the spread of Soviet power and communism. For this purpose it provided much financial support to its alliance. The alliances were democracies that were not in favor of communists too. Though they were not able to stop the spread of communism in Eastern Europe, the U.S and Britain were determined to preserve Western Europe from the reach of communists. In the World War II Soviet Union has gained much popularity in the West Europe due to the resistance against the Nazi forces. So there was a chance of election of communist parties in France and Italy. Harry Trumann was the first US president started to fight the cold War. Britain was the first country that investigated for the nuclear weapons' development. In 1945, Britain was an activist world power. It possessed the second largest national navy, and its Empire-Commonwealth was genuinely global. The Dominions stretched from Canada to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; it had colonial possessions from the north to the south of the African continent, to the east of Suez, in south and south-east Asia, as well as many scattered, and often strategic, island outposts. India was proclaimed as the 'jewel in the crown' of the Empire. A major problem for the historians analyzing the impact of military expenditure on the usual working of the economy of a country just after the war is the fact ignored by the liberal economic theory. This theoretical shortfall reflects the fact that the mobilization for industrial warfare can only be achieved through suspending the normal economic operation. While accepting necessity to plan the wartime economy, most British economists considered that after the hostilities and War activities, the resources will be allocated to the market as usual. This is what the liberal economists oppose. As a part of conversion, the British policy makers faced crucial situation about scaling down the Britain's efforts with its diminished economy and military power in the post war world. Alec Ciancross accepts that the Britain's Defence efforts may have been extraordinarily large and says that the real problem for Britain was the role it was asked to play was beyond its strength. But the other historians criticize the leadership of Britain who did not face the fact that Britain would not be able to meet the global military commitments. The question arises here is this that did the excessive military costs were responsible for low investment leading to weak economy of Britain Usually it seems to be answered that the short term expenses of the war would not affect the long term economy policies. Defence economists analyze short term and even small changes in the economy and expenditures of the country. The crucial questions are whether the Britain's Defence efforts were scaled down enough at the end of the war or whether the highly adverse war efforts were high enough to affect the economy. Britain's post war procurement strategy probably exacerbated the excess demand in the economy thus necessitating a continuation of economic controls and thereby potentially delaying a more rapid transition to a peace economy. Britain's cold war strategy emerges 1 Well before the war ended military planners were determining the elements of this reasonably clear cold war strategy. The first priority was the extent to which British national interests could be protected and perhaps even advanced after the war. What was to be its global strategy Strategic thinking involves not only geography, but also ideas. The British had wrestled - literally as well as intellectually - with both German nationalism and with communism in the first half of the twentieth century: how to live with Bolshevism had concerned Whitehall even as World War I was coming to a close (the choice between the 'Bache or the Bolshie's'). The effort of trying to compare the threat of communism from 1917 onwards with that of the rise of Nazism and fascism had played havoc with traditional 'balancing' notions that dominated British thinking about the European continent and had contributed to the scarring debate about appeasement in the 1930s. The period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact between 1939 and 1941 confirmed Whitehall's distrust of both Germany and the Soviet Union, a distrust that was in reality not much mitigated by the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Thus anti- communism and anti-Soviet thinking were already firmly part of the British cultural landscape in the 1940s. It was the military chiefs and intelligence officers who were the main driving force of Britain's future cold war strategy. New evidence confirms the extent to which intelligence, and those with access to intelligence material played a central role and generated a mindset about Soviet intentions that was to dominate thinking for the next fifty years. The Joint Intelligence Committee was at the apex of the intelligence gathering system, and was chaired by a senior Foreign Office official with a membership drawn from the Chiefs of Staff. In 1943, a Post Hostilities Planning Committee was established, whose work was overseen by a ministerial Armistice and Postwar Committee, chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister of the coalition government, Labor's Clement Attlee. This committee was at the centre of intense arguments about the extent to which the Soviet Union should be considered a postwar threat. These committees were examining Soviet capabilities as well as behavior. Assessments were based upon a mixture of ideological pre-disposition to distrust Soviet intentions, as well as geo-strategic analyses; although some thought that such radical debates should be off-limits while the war was still being fought, as any leaks to the Soviets might create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet planning had to be concerned with the balance of power rather than with nebulous indications of goodwill to the Soviet Union. An anti-Soviet mindset can already be detected in the intelligence community from 1943 onwards, with racist attitudes towards the 'semi-oriental' Soviet forces, and an appreciation on the ground of how the Soviets behaved which was confirmed from the very top of the military hierarchy, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke himself. The Foreign Office was more ambivalent about seeing the Soviet Union as the next great challenge for British interests while the war was still on and while the Soviets remained an important military ally, although there was still considerable apprehension about Europe's postwar future. In a revealing exchange of minutes as early as mid 1942, it was observed that the current trend of Soviet policy would amount to the extension of exclusive Soviet influence over the whole of Eastern Europe. Britain could not stop 'the establishment of Russian predominance in Eastern Europe if Germany is crushed and disarmed and Russia participates in the final victory.' In this case, it would seem that the worst fears of 'the Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks and Turks are justified and their only hope for the future lies in the Germany strong enough to counteract Soviet predominance. The strategists were all too well aware of the financial disaster that could descend upon the country as the war ended. For Britain was bankrupt. The costs of war had emptied British coffers, and had also placed a huge strain on its imperial creditors. Yet even this was seen as only a temporary phenomenon: it was the price of victory, and a price that the Americans would surely help to pay. National retreat from global status after military victory was entirely counter-intuitive both for British bureaucrats and politicians. In the early 1950s Britain found itself in the grip of a serious economic crisis. The principal causal factor was the massive rearmament program agreed to by the Labour government following the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Initially costed at 3,600 million over three years, in January 1951 the program was increased to 4,700 million. The subsequent diversion of resources from the productive economy saw a balance of payments surplus of 307 million in 1950 turned into a deficit of 369 million by 1951. In 1952, Treasury calls for major cut-backs in Defence expenditure to help ease the situation provided the economic backdrop to the Chiefs of Staff's celebrated 'Review of Defence Policy and Global Strategy. Approved by the Cabinet's Defence Committee in June, the Service Chiefs' recommendations regarding an independent British nuclear capability were partly based on the cost-effectiveness of nuclear over conventional Defence. The Global Strategy paper has since become one of the most discussed documents by historians of post-war British foreign and Defence policy and has all but eclipsed Anthony Eden's parallel review of 'British Overseas Obligations'. Yet when the two papers are viewed in tandem - as they were meant to be - they represent a co-ordinate politico-military attempt to square the circle of how to maintain a world role and national security with diminishing resources. Moreover, in terms of the present discussion, Eden's Cabinet memorandum of 18 June 1952 marks the formal enunciation of power-by-proxy. For the British electorate in 1945, it was the domestic agenda that was most important. The Labour Party had promised to implement the ambitious Beverage Report of 1943 and to create a genuine welfare state. This would ensure that the postwar traumas of the 1920s and 1930s became nothing more than a distant memory. So, flushed with its success in the 1945 general election, Labour now had to balance Britain's overseas interests with the demand for domestic reconstruction. They had to weave their way through uncharted waters, between the commitment to reconstruction, the tough geo-strategy required to sustain British global and imperial interests, and the containment of communism and the Soviet Union. This had to be done in spite of the noisy opposition that came from the left wing of the Labour Party itself. Post War Recovery and the Economic Legacy of the Second World War: 2 In 1945 the British government presented a report to its Parliament that 25 percent of the war expenditures have been lost. This was an amount of 7,300 millions pounds. Within this figure the British experts assumed that the internal disinvestment in less beneficial or non essential industries was of an amount of 885 millions pounds. The internal disinvestments was dwarfed by the external disinvestment in the form of selling British overseas investments in order to pay for essential imports during the war amounting 4,200 millions pounds and the destructions of buildings, capital/ finance goods and shipping due to war damage ( amounting 2200 million pounds). In their calculations, Treasury officials counted the considerable government funded investment in new factories and machine tools for the war production effort. In their contribution to Harrison, Broad berry and Howlet show that the official 1945 report overestimated the reduction in the nation's capital stock by 25 percent or approximately 6 percent of the pre war wealth. However the proceeding studies showed that the economy substantially benefited from government financed war time investments after the end of the war. Therefore they argue that the figure of destruction (1240millions pounds at the constant rate of 1938 prices) and internal disinvestments ( 612 millions pounds at the constant rate o 1938 prices) has to be reduced by the amount of the government investment ( 513 millions pounds at the constant rates of 1938 prices ) during the war. Compare to the net losses during the war damage and the internal disinvestments, the British losses of human capital (144 millions pounds as per constant rates of 1938 prices) remained rather limited. Due to the rise of Keynesian's economic theory, the contemporary economists devoted considerable attendance to the emerging trends in capital formation and investment behavior in the immediate post war period. Their analysis of economic conversion process and policy advised predominantly focused on the need to compensate for net losses in the domestic stock. John Hicks in his inaugural lectures at University of Oxford in 1947 argued that after prolong starvation of new capital during the war effort, the normal productive process would require substantial new investment to recover fully and achieve per war productivity levels. During the initial period of reconstruction, industry would experience a short of capital as well as of labor until the conversion to the peacetime production gets complete. Conclusion: Britain experienced much economic pressure because of major contribution in the Cold War as compared to the other European countries. There are two clusters suggested by analysts; one that believes that if Attlee Government had pursued different socialist foreign policy then the Cold War between super powers must not be happened while the second one says that if Attlee had resisted American pressure more vigorously, Korean rearmament program might not undermined the economic recovery boom. The third school of thought believes that the rate of growth of Britain's economy was slower than the other European countries. The policy makers should adopt different policies for the expenses spend on military and Defence during the Cold War. Unconcerned with the facts that other European countries did not pay their fair contribution in the Western part and that Britain contributed most, all analysts suggest that adoption of alternative policies would prevent Britain from this decline. Historians have moved on from the debate about who started the cold war. Yet it is inadequate simply to talk of the cold war simply as just one phase of foreign policy, or as a period of history from roughly 1945 to 1989. Since the end of the cold war, more archival access and fresh, often inter-disciplinary thinking that is taking place in a new political environment have transformed the ways in which we understand the cold war. The cold war emerged in different ways in each country and its characterization is still essentially shaped by national political environment. For this reason, the rise of interest in the importance of Commonwealth and colonies, decolonization and the 'Third World' in the cold war is especially relevant for the UK, whose own imperial footprint lay across the world, and whose cold war arena was genuinely global . REFERENCES: 1. Managing the Americans: Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and the Pursuit of 'Power-by-Proxy' in the 1950s, Kevin Ruane; James Ellison, Contemporary British History, Volume 18, Issue 3 Autumn 2004 , pages 147 - 167 2. Britain and the Economic Problem of the Cold War: The Political Economy and the Economic Impact of the British Defence Effort, 1945-1955 (Modern Economic and Social History), Till Geiger, Ashgate Publishing (September 30, 2004)The Cold War: A New History, John Levis Gaddis, Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 26, 2006) 3. Britain, Germany and the Cold War: The Search for a European Dtente 1949-1967 (Cold War History), Gerald Hughes, Routledge (June 20, 2007) 4. After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World, A.N. Wilson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (October 13, 2005) 5. The Origins of the Cold War: An International History (Rewriting Histories), Melvyn Leffler, Routledge; 2 edition (June 13, 2005) 6. The Labour Party, War and International Relations, 1945-2006, Mark Phytian, Routledge; New edition (December 11, 2007) 7. Perspectives on World Politics, Richard Little, Routledge; 3 edition (December 12, 2005) 8. From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s, David Reynolds, Oxford University Press, USA (April 27, 2006) 9. Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy, Jeffery A. Angel, Harvard University Press (March 31, 2007) 10. Four Minute Warning: Britain's Cold War, Bob Clarke, Tempus (April 1, 2005) Read More

 

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