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Cold War – The Cold War in Europe, 1941-55
In this course, Dr Mathias Haeussler (University of Cambridge) explores the origins of the Cold War in Europe. We begin by providing a broad introduction to the Cold War itself – what it was, as well as its long-lasting political, historical and cultural legacy. After that, we turn to the historiographical debate that that surrounded the origins of the Cold War, focusing in particular on the orthodox, revisionist and post-revisionist positons. In the third module, we explore some of the longer-term causes of the Cold War, going all the way back to the February Revolution in 1917, and tracing events from there to the end of the Second World War. In the fourth module, we look more closely at the breakdown of the wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, before moving on in the fifth module to focus on how the division of Germany into four Occupation Zones would eventually lead to the two great, nuclear-armed alliances in post-war Europe: NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
Introduction
In this module, we provide a broad introduction to the course as a whole, focusing in particular on, what the Cold War actually was, as well as its historical cultural legacy in the film, music, and the public imagination.
Hi, I'm Matias Heisler. I'm a research fellow at more than college.
00:00:02Cambridge and I worked mainly on the history of Europe in the post war years.
00:00:06And what dominated that history of Europe above all was the Cold War.
00:00:11But what do we actually mean? When we talk about the Cold War
00:00:17at first sight, it seems like a stupid question. We all have some images in our head.
00:00:20When we talk about the Cold War,
00:00:25we think about nuclear weapons. We think about the atomic bomb,
00:00:27about the Cuban missile crisis,
00:00:31perhaps where the world came close to the brink of nuclear Armageddon
00:00:32in October 1962.
00:00:37You might also think about some of the analogies being drawn today in the
00:00:39political debate about the potential new Cold War between Russia and the West,
00:00:43or even perhaps America and China.
00:00:47But we may also think about some of the cultural artefacts that we have today.
00:00:50Movies like Dr Strangelove or older James Bond movies.
00:00:54We think about music, a song like 99 red balloons
00:00:59from the 19 eighties, or even a band today. Like the Cold War kids,
00:01:03you may think of literature spy novels like John le Carre,
00:01:07the spy who came in from the cold.
00:01:10So the Cold War
00:01:14is absolutely everywhere, and we associate many things with it.
00:01:15But at the same time, after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989
00:01:20to concrete,
00:01:25memory of the Cold War period has faded remarkably quickly into the distance,
00:01:26almost vague memory,
00:01:31particularly since one side of the conflict, the Soviet Union
00:01:33and its ideology. Communism
00:01:37vanished from the Earth almost overnight,
00:01:39so it is somewhat hard to imagine today, from our perspective,
00:01:43how the Cold War absolutely dominated Europe from the
00:01:47late 19 forties to the late 19 eighties,
00:01:50its international relations as well as its domestic politics.
00:01:54It's economies as well as its culture.
00:01:57So the first question we really need to ask is what actually, was the Cold War?
00:02:02What was it all about?
00:02:07Most fundamentally, of course, it was the struggle between two superpowers
00:02:10the United States
00:02:15and the Soviet Union
00:02:16and their respective visions of how the world should work.
00:02:17It was a struggle between two Universalist ideologies.
00:02:21American capitalism,
00:02:25based on free markets and individual freedom
00:02:27versus Soviet communism based on social equality,
00:02:30stage regulated planned economies.
00:02:33But It was also very real.
00:02:38Geo strategic conflict,
00:02:39a conflict of the world's two by far most powerful military nations,
00:02:41both with capabilities to destroy the world many times over.
00:02:45It was also a cultural war between two very different systems,
00:02:51between two very different visions of how societies should work at a modern age.
00:02:55And this struggle was a conflict that played out most acutely,
00:03:01most dramatically in Europe,
00:03:05as both the United States and the Soviet Union sought to fill in
00:03:07the power vacuum that had emerged after Germany's defeat
00:03:11in 1945.
00:03:15In due course,
00:03:17it would become a struggle that divided the continent divided Europe into two halfs
00:03:18the capitalist West versus the Communist East,
00:03:24with the different institutions, different alliances,
00:03:28different political and economic systems.
00:03:31It would also divide one single country, Germany, into to
00:03:35the West German capitalist Federal Republic of Germany
00:03:39and the East German German Democratic Republic,
00:03:43and was a struggle that even divided an entire city, Berlin,
00:03:47into two halfs west and East Berlin
00:03:51from 1949.
00:03:54But then, of course, also symbolised by the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
00:03:56So what I want to do in this lecture is to ask, How did this conflict come about?
00:04:02Why did the Cold War start?
00:04:06This is not as clear cut as it might seem at first.
00:04:09After all, in 1945 the United States,
00:04:13the Soviet Union were still allies united in their fight to defeat Nazi Germany.
00:04:15So what's the future Conflict between these two allies really inevitable,
00:04:22or might have been different ways?
00:04:26Why did that wartime alliance break down so rapidly?
00:04:29But I also want to ask what Europe's own role in all of this was.
00:04:33Was Europe merely a pawn in the game, merely the arena for the super power struggle?
00:04:38Or can some of the reasons for the emergence of the Cold
00:04:43War actually be found in the situation of 19 forties Europe itself?
00:04:46These are some of the questions I want to address in this lecture,
00:04:52and I first want to give you an introduction of how historians have debated the issue
00:04:55the different ways in which I've tried to explain how the Cold War came about.
00:05:00Then I want to look at some of the long term origins of the war.
00:05:05Long term developments in Russia and in America
00:05:09before then,
00:05:13looking more closely at the deterioration of superpower relations in the late
00:05:1319 forties and finally at the division of Europe and Germany itself.
00:05:18
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Haeussler, M. (2018, August 15). Cold War – The Cold War in Europe, 1941-55 - Introduction [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-origins-of-the-cold-war-1941-55/the-breakdown-of-the-wartime-alliance
MLA style
Haeussler, M. "Cold War – The Cold War in Europe, 1941-55 – Introduction." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/the-origins-of-the-cold-war-1941-55/the-breakdown-of-the-wartime-alliance