Globalization and geopolitics

Session N°1.

 The Cold War, an expression used by the financier Bernard Baruch and the journalist
Walter Lippman to characterize the: "long trial of strength that began between the United
States and the Soviet Union after the dissolution, the day after the capitulation of the
Reich, of the anti-Hitler coalition".
 Indeed, the "cold war" was the confrontation between two blocs of States that were thus
measured by the strength of their armed forces and their cohesion, without acts of
violence other than limited clashes or at most military operations remaining localized.

The Yalta conference

The Yalta Conference was a meeting of three World War II allies: U.S. President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. The trio met
in February 1945 in the resort city of Yalta, located along the Black Sea coast of the Crimean
Peninsula. The “Big Three” Allied leaders discussed the post-war fate of defeated Germany and the
rest of Europe, the terms of Soviet entry into the ongoing war in the Pacific against Japan and the
formation and operation of the new United Nations.

Tehran Conference

Prior to the Yalta Conference, the three leaders met in November 1943 in Tehran, Iran, where they
coordinated the next phase of war against the Axis Powers in Europe and the Pacific.

At the Tehran Conference, the United States and Britain had committed to launching an invasion of
northern France in mid-1944, opening another front of the war against Nazi Germany. Stalin,
meanwhile, had agreed in principle to join the war against Japan in the Pacific after Germany was
defeated.

By February 1945, as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin gathered again at Yalta, an Allied victory in
Europe was on the horizon. Having liberated France and Belgium from Nazi occupation, the Allies
now threatened the German border; to the east, Soviet Union troops had driven back the Germans
in Poland, Bulgaria and Romania and gotten within 40 miles of Berlin.

This put Stalin at a distinct advantage during the meeting at the Black Sea resort, a location he
himself had proposed after insisting his doctors had barred him from traveling long distances.

I. The decisive year: 1947

A. The Truman Doctrine

 Unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman was suspicious of Stalin. The possession of
nuclear weapons convinces him that it is possible to erect a dam against his ambitions..
 Truman, in fact, despaired, the day after the Potsdam Conference [17 July to 2 August
1945], of finding common ground with Moscow..
 On March 12, 1947, he proposed the Truman Doctrine: the United States would intervene
economically or militarily when it deemed it necessary in order to preserve its strategic or
economic interests; It is the support of the doctrine of containment.
  The Truman doctrine of economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey led the United
States to support the governments of these countries in 1947 against the internal or
external communist pressures they were undergoing.
 At the same time, a kind of Truman doctrine for internal use was also announced: the
presidential decree of March 21, 1947 henceforth made it possible to verify the political
loyalty of civil servants. Faced with an ideological threat that he fears for the United States,
Harry Truman set in motion the formidable mechanisms of the Cold War and McCarthyism,
of which he will be the first victim and which it will be very difficult to stop.

The Truman Doctrine is an American foreign policy that pledges American "support for
democracies against authoritarian threats."[1] The doctrine originated with the primary goal of
containing Soviet geopolitical expansion during the Cold War. It was announced to Congress by
President Harry S. Truman on March 12, 1947,[2] and further developed on July 4, 1948, when he
pledged to contain the communist uprisings in Greece and Turkey. More generally, the Truman
Doctrine implied American support for other nations threatened by Moscow. It became the
foundation of American foreign policy, and led, in 1949, to the formation of NATO, a military
alliance that still exists. Historians often use Truman's speech to date the start of the Cold War.[3]

Truman told Congress that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who
are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."[4] Truman
contended that because totalitarian regimes coerced free peoples, they automatically represented
a threat to international peace and the national security of the United States. Truman argued that
if Greece and Turkey did not receive the aid, they would inevitably fall to communism with grave
consequences throughout the region.

The Truman Doctrine was informally extended to become the basis of American Cold War policy
throughout Europe and around the world.[5] It shifted American foreign policy toward the Soviet
Union from a wartime alliance to a policy of containment of Soviet expansion, as advocated by
diplomat George Kennan. It was distinguished from rollback by implicitly tolerating the previous
Soviet takeovers in Eastern Europe.

B. The Marshall Plan

 On June 5, 1947, in a speech at Harvard, Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposes a

plan that bears his name.
 Since Europe's economic and political situation is unstable, the United States, he says in
essence, cannot remain indifferent; Their interests are at stake. U.S. policy is directed
"against any doctrine or country, but against hunger, poverty, despair and chaos."
Washington therefore proposes to provide the Europeans with the dollars they need,
provided that they determine their own needs and ensure the distribution of American
credits.
 This proposal, generous and self-serving at the same time, follows the exposition of the
Truman Doctrine, which dates from March 12, 1947 and aims to rescue the Greek and
Turkish governments threatened by "communist subversion". Yet it is addressed to all
European countries, including the Soviet Union. Moscow seems to be hesitating; then, at
the end of June, at the Paris Conference, Molotov made known his government's refusal.
 The USSR does not allow nations within its sphere of influence to express an opinion
divergent from its own, and compels Czechoslovakia and Poland to refuse their.
 Sixteen European countries meet in Paris during thethe summer of 1947 at the invitation
of the US Secretary of State. From their deliberations will emerge a common program and
a new organization, the O. E.C.E., founded on 16 April 1948. From April 3, 1948 to
December 31, 1951, twelve billion dollars will be provided by the United States (5/6 in the
form of grants, 1/6 in the form of loans); 26 per cent will go to Britain, 23 per cent to
France ($2,800,000). Marshall aid will be relayed by military aid, then merged with it.
 Despite its political consequences (rupture between Western and Eastern Europe), the
Marshall Plan allowed Western Europe to return to the path of prosperity and to
undertake its first efforts towards unification.

C . Creation of the CIA

 The Central Intelligence Agency was created at the proposal of President Truman by the
National Security Act (September 18, 1947), passed by Congress in 1947. It is placed under
the direct authority of the President of the United States, who appoints its director with
the advice and consent of the Senate.
 The first directors of the CIA were: Admiral Sidney Souers (January 23 to June 10, 1946),
General Hoyt Vanderberg (June 10, 1946 to May 1, 1947), Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter
(May 1, 1947 to October 7, 1950) and General Walter Bedell Smith (October 7, 1950 to
February 9, 1953).
o Its first civilian director was Allen W. DULLES (1953-1961).
 In addition to its coordinating responsibilities, the CIA's primary objective, according to the
National Security Act of 1947, is the research, exploitation, and analysis of information
obtained legally or illegally, in order to "provide the highest U.S. officials with objective
estimates." The majority of its staff is assigned to the systematic analysis of countless
publications of all kinds, from all countries, the content of which is subject to the
assessment of specialists.
 It sends its agents abroad, or recruits them locally in the various countries, but it also
develops "technological espionage" and possibly mounts political operations against
foreign regimes deemed hostile to the interests of the United States..
 The various intelligence services:
o G-2
o ONI
o FBI
o Department of State

o
D. The Zhdanov Doctrine

 On 5 October, an information office of the Communist Parties, the Kominform, was created
to replace the Communist International, which had been dissolved in 1943 at the height of
inter-allied collaboration against the Axis. Soviet delegate Andrei Zhdanov had the
participants in the constituent meeting approve the thesis that the world was now divided
into two camps, "imperialism which is preparing war against the USSR and the latter, with
the peaceful countries allied with it".
 Violent strikes break out in Western European countries where communists have been
driven out of government everywhere. The revolutionary unrest, latent in Southeast Asia
since the surrender of Japan, is rapidly intensifying.
 The Cominform
o A small body, initially made up of nine member parties (Soviet, Yugoslav, Bulgarian,
Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, Czechoslovakian, French and Italian), then eight
following the eviction of the Yugoslav Communist Party, the Cominform never
received new memberships during its existence. Consecrating the division of the
world into two camps, the Information Bureau will become the spokesman of the
socialist camp.

II. The clash of blocs: 1948-1954

A. Economy

 Creation of the OEEC on 16 April 1948 :

o One of its immediate tasks was to participate in the distribution of Marshall aid
(which the United States had decided to grant to a number of nations).. Alain-
Pierre Rodet, journaliste.
 Just FYI on the Soviet side.
o The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), an intergovernmental body
founded in Moscow in January 1949.
o The Warsaw Pact, a military alliance treaty signed in the context of the Cold War
on 14 May 1955 between seven Eastern European States, under the aegis of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)).

B. Political and military

The creation of NATO (4 April 1949).

The creation, in Washington, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (O.T.A.N.) is

a consequence of the observation of the separation of Europe by what the British Winston
Churchill had called, in 1946, an "iron curtain". On 4 April 1949, ten Western European
States (Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway,
Portugal and the United Kingdom) concluded a defensive military alliance with Canada and
the United States.

The O.T.A.N. is the military counterpart of the Alliance which led, in 1948, to the
creation of the Organisation for European Cooperation economic, a body responsible for
 apportionment among States Western European democracy financial aid referred to as the
"Marshall Plan".

Just FYI:

 The French case: the four Communist ministers who belonged to the Ramadier
government within the framework of tripartism are dismissed (5 May 1947).
 The Prague Coup (1948) – see also (Edvard BENES).
 The Yugoslav case (28 June 1948) – see also (Marshal TITO).

C. The confrontation of blocs.

Greece: In early 1947, the Labour government decided that it could not continue to support the
Hellenic monarchy in the face of civil war and asked the Americans to do so in its place. By
accepting and engaging in an action that would lead, in two years, to the victory of the royalist
armies, the United States took the first step in an evolution that would very quickly make it, thanks
to its intact strength and its atomic armament, the undisputed leader of the "free world" or
"Atlantic".

Occupation zones in Germany and Austria

After World War II, the four victorious Allied powers -the United States, the Soviet Union, the
United Kingdom and France divided Germany and Austria into four occupation zones. From July
1945, each of the Powers assumed, on the basis of the quadripartite agreement, the government
of the zones for which it was responsible. The two capitals, Berlin and Vienna, are placed under the
joint administration of the four occupying powers.

The Berlin blockade

had marked the culmination of a series of measures taken by the Soviets to hinder Western
communications with their sectors and thus, no doubt, force them to abandon them.

The United States, Great Britain and France having promulgated a monetary reform in their zones
on 18 June 1948, having failed to reach agreement with Moscow on the means of putting an end
to generalized inflation, wanted to extend its provisions to West Berlin. Stalin responded by
blocking all land and river access.

Washington hastily improvised an airlift that, contrary to all expectations, managed to keep the city
active. The Soviets did not dare to intercept the Allied planes. A little less than a year later, on May
12, 1949, six weeks after the signing of the Atlantic Pact, the blockade was lifted in exchange for
the convening of a four-party conference. The latter was to separate a few weeks later without
having been able to agree on its agenda.

Western American "pactomania" bloc:

The United States will strive to accelerate the recovery of the defeated of the Second World War.

C. An internal hardening : the politics of paranoia

In the 1950s, revelations of espionage cases motivated by communist ideology generated what the
American writer Rebecca West called "the new betrayal."
Conflict between loyalty and freedom of speech

Most Americans and Britons who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1950s did so for
ideological reasons. Even if some (...) spy for money, almost all others take up the cause of
communism, whether it is the Cambridge Group, Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Elizabeth Bentley or
Whittaker Chambers.

Senator MacCarthy organizes the witch hunt in the United States.

The "witch hunt" that the Commission on Un-American Activities (H.U.A.C.) unleashed against
Hollywood in 1947 and that studio bosses cowardly accepted was disastrous for many artists who
were banned from work by "blacklists." Francis Bordat, Professor of American Civilization -
University of Paris X Nanterre.

Senator McCarthy's "Un-American Activities" Committee will force some into silence and exile,
others into denunciation.

On June 19, 1953, the Rosenbergs climbed into the electric chair. Guilty or innocent: spies in the
service of the USSR or victims of "American fascism"? The case has divided world opinion. Archives
and testimonies today demonstrate without appeal their guilt. Stéphane Courtois, Director of
research at CNRS University Paris X.

According to Alexander Feklissov [former KGB officer from 1939 to 1986] even considers Julius'
network as "one of the three main Soviet underground [intelligence] networks during and just
after World War II", along with the Cambridge Five (a network led by Kim Philby, infiltrated at the
head of British counterintelligence and in the Queen's entourage) and the atomic espionage
network (consisting of the scientist Klaus Fuchs, one of the designers of the American atomic
bomb). For him, it is "one of the most successful clandestine networks in the history of Soviet
technological intelligence".
Session N°2