The New Penguin History of the World (180 page)

Some far-sighted men could see a deep irony in this. In many ways, Germany had been one of the most progressive countries in Europe; the embodiment of much that was best in its civilization. That Germany should fall prey to collective derangement on this scale suggested that something had been wrong at the root of that civilization itself. The crimes of Nazism had been carried out not in a fit of barbaric intoxication with conquest, but in a systematic, scientific, controlled, bureaucratic (though often inefficient) way, about which there was little that was irrational except the appalling end which it sought. In this respect the Asian war was importantly different.
Japanese imperialism replaced the old western imperialisms for a time, but many among the subject peoples did not much regret the change. Propaganda during the war attempted to give currency to the notion of a ‘fascist’ Japan, but this was a distortion of so traditional a society’s character. No such appalling consequences as faced European nations under German rule would have followed from a Japanese victory.

The second obvious result of the war was its unparalleled destructiveness. It was most visible in the devastated cities of Germany and Japan, where mass aerial bombing, one of the major innovations of the Second World War, proved much more costly to life and buildings than had been the bombing of Spanish cities in the Spanish civil war. Yet even those early essays had been enough to convince many observers that bombing alone could bring a country to its knees. In fact, although often invaluable in combination with other forms of fighting, the huge strategic bombing offensive against Germany, built up by the British Royal Air Force from tiny beginnings in 1940, and steadily supplemented by the United States Air Force from 1942 onwards, up to the point at which their combined forces could provide a target with continuous day and night bombing, achieved very little until the last few months of the war. Nor was the fiery destruction of the Japanese cities strategically so important as the elimination of its sea-power.

Not only cities had been shattered. The economic life and communications of central Europe had also been grievously stricken. In 1945, millions of refugees were wandering about in it, trying to get home. There was a grave danger of famine and epidemic because of the difficulty of supplying food. The tremendous problems of 1918 were upon Europe again, and this time confronted nations demoralized by defeat and occupation; only the neutrals and Great Britain had escaped those scourges. There were abundant arms in private hands, and some feared revolution. These conditions could also be found in Asia, but there the physical destruction was less severe and prospects of recovery better.

In Europe, too, the revolutionary political impact of the war was obvious. The power structure, which had been a reality until 1914 and had an illusory prolongation of life between the two world wars, was doomed in 1941. Two great peripheral powers dominated Europe politically and were established militarily in its heart. This was evident at a meeting of the Allied leaders at Yalta in February 1945 at which Roosevelt secretly agreed with Stalin on the terms on which the USSR would enter the war against Japan. Yalta also provided a basis for agreement between all three great powers which was to be the nearest thing to a formal peace settlement for Europe achieved for decades. Its outcome was that old central Europe
would disappear. Europe would be divided into eastern and western halves. Once again a Trieste–Baltic line became a reality, but now new differences were to be layered on top of old. At the end of 1945 there lay to the east a Europe of states which, with the exception of Greece, all had communist governments or governments in which communists shared power with others. The Russian army, which had overrun them, had proved itself a far better instrument for the extension of international communism than revolution had ever been. The pre-war Baltic republics did not emerge from the Soviet state, of course, and the Soviet Union now also absorbed parts of pre-war Poland and Romania.

Germany, the centre of the old European power structure, had effectively ceased to exist. A phase of European history which she had dominated was at an end, and Bismarck’s creation was partitioned into zones occupied by the Russians, Americans, British and French. The other major political units of western Europe had reconstituted themselves after occupation and defeat, but were feeble; Italy, which had changed sides after Mussolini had been overthrown, had, like France, a much strengthened and enlarged communist party which, it could not be forgotten, was still committed to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. Only Great Britain retained its stature of 1939 in the world’s eyes; it was even briefly enhanced by its stand in 1940 and 1941, and remained for a while the recognized equal of Russia and the United States. (Formally, this was true of France and China, too, but less attention was paid to them.) Yet Great Britain’s moment was past. By a huge effort of mobilizing its resources and social life to a degree unequalled outside Stalin’s Russia, the country had been able to retain its standing. But it had been let out of a strategic impasse only by the German attack on Russia, and kept afloat only by American Lend-Lease. And this aid had not been without its costs: the Americans had insisted on the sale of British overseas assets to meet the bills before it was forthcoming. Moreover, the sterling area was dislocated. American capital was now to move into the old Dominions on a large scale. Those countries had learnt new lessons both from their new wartime strength and, paradoxically, from their weakness in so far as they had relied upon the mother country for their defence. From 1945, they more and more acted with full as well as formal independence.

It only took a few years for this huge change in the position of the greatest of the old imperial powers to become clear. Symbolically, when Great Britain made its last great military effort in Europe, in 1944, the expedition was commanded by an American general. Though British forces in Europe for a few months afterwards matched the Americans, they were by the end of the war outnumbered. In the Far East, too, although the
British reconquered Burma, the defeat of Japan was the work of American naval and air power. For all Churchill’s efforts, Roosevelt was by the end of the war negotiating over his head with Stalin, proposing
inter alia
the dismantling of the British empire. Great Britain, in spite of its victorious stand alone in 1940 and the moral prestige this gave, had not escaped the shattering impact of the war on Europe’s political structure. Indeed, it was in some ways the power which, with Germany, illustrated it best.

Thus was registered in Europe the passing of the European supremacy also evident at its periphery. In the last and only briefly successful attempt by a British government to thwart American policy, British forces secured Dutch and French territories in Asia just in time to hand them back to their former overlords and prevent the seizure of power by anti-colonial regimes. But fighting with rebels began almost immediately and it was clear that the imperial powers faced a difficult future. The war had brought revolution to the empires, too. Subtly and suddenly, the kaleidoscope of authority had shifted, and it was still shifting as the war came to an end. The year 1945 is not, therefore, a good place at which to pause; reality was then still masked somewhat by appearance. Many Europeans still had to discover, painfully, that the European age of empire was over.

6
The Shaping of a New World

After the First World War, it had still been possible to embrace the illusion that an old order might be restored. In 1945, no one in authority could believe such a thing. This was one healthy contrast between the circumstances of the two great attempts of this century to reorder international life. Neither, of course, could start with a clean sheet on which to plan. Events had closed off many roads, and crucial decisions had already been taken, some by agreement, some not, about what should follow victory. One of the most important of the Second World War had been that, once more, an international organization should be set up to maintain international peace. The fact that the great powers saw such an organization in different ways, the Americans as a beginning to the regulation of international life by law and the Russians as a means of maintaining the Grand Alliance, did not prevent them pressing forward. So the United Nations Organization (UNO) came into being at San Francisco in 1945.

Much thought, naturally, had been given to the failure of the League of Nations to come up to expectations. One of its defects was avoided in 1945: the United States and Russia belonged to the new organization from the start. Apart from this, the basic structure of the United Nations resembled that of the League in outline. Its two essential organs were a small Council and a large Assembly. Permanent representatives of all member states were to sit in the General Assembly. The Security Council had at first eleven members, of whom five were permanent; these were the representatives of the United States, the USSR, Great Britain, France (at the insistence of Winston Churchill) and China. The Security Council was given greater power than the old League Council and this was largely the doing of the Russians. They believed that there was a strong likelihood that they would always be outvoted in the General Assembly – where, at first, fifty-one nations were represented – because the United States could rely not only on the votes of its allies, but also on those of its Latin American satellites. Naturally, not all the smaller powers liked this. They were uneasy about a body on which at any one moment any of them was
likely not to have a seat, which would have the last word and in which the great powers would carry the main weight. Nevertheless, the structure the great powers wanted was adopted, as, indeed, it had to be if any organization was to work at all.

The other main issue which caused grave constitutional dispute was the veto power given to the permanent members of the Security Council. This was a necessary feature if the great powers were to accept the organization, though in the end the veto was restricted somewhat, in that a permanent member could not prevent investigation and discussion of matters which especially affected it, unless they were likely to lead to action inimical to its interests.

In theory the Security Council possessed very great powers, but, of course, their operation was bound to reflect political reality. In its first decades, the importance of the United Nations proved to lie not in its power to act, but rather in the forum it provided for discussion. For the first time, a world public linked as never before by radio and film – and, later, by television – would have to be presented with a case made at the General Assembly for what sovereign states did. This was something quite new. The United Nations at once gave a new dimension to international politics; it took much longer to provide effective new instrumentation for dealing with its problems. Sometimes, the new publicity of international argument led to feelings of sterility, as increasingly bitter and unyielding views were set out in debates which changed no one’s mind. But an educational force was at work. It was important, too, that it was soon decided that the permanent seat of the General Assembly should be in New York; this drew American attention to it and helped to offset the historic pull of isolationism.

The United Nations General Assembly met for the first time, none the less, in London in 1946. Bitter debates began at once; complaints were made about the continued presence of Russian soldiers in Iranian Azerbaijan, occupied during the war, and the Russians promptly replied by attacking Great Britain for keeping her forces in Greece. Within a few days the first veto was cast, by the Soviet delegation. There were to be many more. The instrument which the Americans and British had regarded and continued to use as an extraordinary measure for the protection of special interests became a familiar piece of Soviet diplomatic technique. Already in 1946 the United Nations was an arena in which the USSR contended with a still inchoate western bloc which its policies were to do much to solidify.

Though the origins of conflict between the United States and Russia are often traced back a very long way, in the later years of the war the British
government had tended to feel that the Americans made too many concessions and were over-friendly to the Soviet Union. Of course, there was always a fundamental ideological division; if the Russians had not always had a deep preconception about the roots of behaviour of capitalist societies, they would certainly have behaved differently after 1945 towards their wartime ally. It is also true that some Americans never ceased to distrust Russia and saw her as a revolutionary threat. But this did not mean that they had much impact on the making of American policy. In 1945, when the war ended, American distrust of Russian intentions was much less than it later became. Of the two states the more suspicious and wary was the Soviet Union.

At that moment, there were no other true great powers left. The war had catalysed the realization of Tocqueville’s intuition a century before, that between them America and Russia would one day dominate the world. For all the legal fictions expressed in the composition of the Security Council, Great Britain was gravely overstrained, France barely risen from the living death of occupation and stricken by internal divisions (a large communist party threatened its stability), while Italy had discovered new quarrels to add to old ones. Germany was in ruins and under occupation. Japan was occupied and militarily powerless, while China had never yet been a great power in modern times. The Americans and Russians therefore enjoyed an immense superiority over all possible rivals. They were also the only real victors, in that they alone had made positive gains from the war. All the other victorious states had, at the most, won survival or resurrection. To the United States and USSR, the war brought new empires.

Though the empire of the Soviet Union had been won at huge cost, it now had greater strength than it had ever known under the Tsars. Soviet armies dominated a vast European glacis, much of which was sovereign Soviet territory; the rest was organized in states which were by 1948 in every sense satellites, and one of them was East Germany, a major industrial entity. Beyond the glacis lay Yugoslavia and Albania, the only communist states to emerge since the war without the help of Russian occupation; in 1945 both seemed assured allies of Moscow. This advantageous Soviet position had been won by the fighting of the Red Army, but it also owed much to decisions taken by western governments and to their commander-in-chief in Europe during the closing stages of the war, when he had resisted pressure to get to Prague and Berlin before the Russians. The resulting Soviet strategical predominance in central Europe was all the more menacing because the old traditional barriers to Russian power in 1914 – the Habsburg empire and a united Germany – were no more. An exhausted Great Britain and slowly reviving France could not be expected to stand
up to the Red Army, and no other conceivable counterweight on land existed if the Americans went home.