After 1945: Cold War, Cold Peace

contribution to the launch of Mihály Fülöp’s book, The Unfinished Peace: the Council of Foreign Ministers and the Hungarian Peace Treaty of 1947 at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 3 May 2013

Why did the attempts to establish peace after the WW1 fail? How was this different from after WW2? Why was peacemaking concluded in the particular form that it took, in other words what were the contingent circumstances that shaped the attitudes of those who took the policy decisions? And how did they understand the other players? In other words, I put the stress on chance, accident, happenstance and, it may be, human frailty, on the fallibility of knowledge, on the interpretation of precedent and on unintended consequences. Linear thinking, that B followed A, hence there is a causal nexus between the two, is a classic example of error. Assumptions of linearity are deeply coded in Western thinking.

[1] There was terrible loss of life in WW1, but this was mostly military; the civilian population affected only where there was direct fighting, was not targeted. Besides, on the Western front, the fighting was static, thereby sparing the civilian population. On the Italian front, the fighting took place in a relatively narrow area, whilst the civilians on the Eastern front were not a part of anyone’s focus. WW2 was different, though fewer soldiers were killed, civilian deaths and urban destruction were horrendous. Hence the imperative to eliminate war from European history was far stronger than after 1918.

[2] There was a learning process. The Paris Peace Settlement was about revenge, maximising one’s security by adding territory, about dismantling the landward empires of the east (to ensure that they would never again threaten the victorious allies); to that can be added war guilt and reparations (Kriegsschuld is both), there was no attempt to plan for reconciliation and the Western allies, the victors had no real conception of how the new states that they brought into being would function as states. The mental model was the slow dismantling of the Ottoman empire in the 19th century, but no one really cared about the semi-functional cases that came into being. After WW2, things were different, partly because the motives were different (the destruction was on a different quality and scale), partly because the Paris Peace Settlement model was seen to have failed (evidently).

[3] The process of modernity was far from complete in 1914, by 1945 it was largely – not wholly finished – the conversion of peasants into citizens and the corresponding enlargement of the public sphere. The two wars accelerated this process. This subsequently gave democracy a different quality from the interwar period, by diffusing power.

[4] Peace was easier to make in 1947, because it did not really have Central and South-Eastern Europe to bother with. The region was under Soviet control, for many in the West this was a stabilising process, an attitude that lasted throughout the communist period.

[5] There was and is an element of disdain towards Central and South-Eastern Europe in this.  The two world wars both had their casus belli in the region and post hoc operated as propter hoc, causation is frequently attributed on this flawed basis. For many this became a good reason to put the region into cold storage, Central and South-Eastern Europe being given their statehood was seen tacitly somehow as a historic error. The cold storage metaphor reemerged shortly after 1989.

[6] There were further lessons learned from the interwar period. (a) Populations could be moved en masse, forcibly if need be or exterminated or ethnically cleansed for the purpose of establishing mono-ethnic, homogeneous states – mono-ethnicity was seen as a stabilising factor. The experience of the League of Nations with the nationalities issue was central in this. The fact that this was a copy of Nazi methods troubled no one. (b) Despite the Paris Peace Settlement, while “guilt” was redefined as “war criminality”, thus a matter of individual rather collective action, nevertheless victorious and defeated states were treated differently. The former got their territories back (Alsace-Lorraine), the latter had to live with losing territory, whether these were gained in WW2 or as a result of WW1 (Italy). Poland both lost and gained. Bulgaria, though on the defeated side, actually gained territory. Hungary lost what it had acquired in 1938-1941 and even lost the Bratislava bridgehead. Czechoslovakia lost Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which could have been a gain.

[7] There was another tacit principle in operation. The shapes of states could change, but no new states could come into being (unlike 1918). The Baltic states, having been swallowed by the Soviet Union, stayed swallowed.

[8] Even more important was the proposition that the arrangement and configuration of states now arrived at was to be regarded as permanent, if not actually immanent. States, therefore, were no longer to be seen as products of history, but were sacralised in their existing form as supratemporal and, equally, as supraspatial. Helsinki finalised this as between West and East. German reunification was the one exception, or was intended to be. Clio does not like to be fettered.

[9] With a few exceptions, decolonisation could not and would not apply to Europe, even where the power relationship between metropole and region was colonial or semi-colonial. Cyprus, Malta and Ireland were the exceptions, though Iceland also falls into this category. Colonial or ex-colonial status has not been extended to the former subject territories of the landward empires of Europe and that includes the Soviet Union. True, they have not really sought it and the former overseas imperial states have enough post-colonial guilt to worry about anyway. Yet in the post-1991 world, where victimhood and victimhood competition play a vital role, the demand for ex-colonial status could have brought considerable advantages, even if it would have been immensely complex in some cases, with double and triple colonisations.

[10] The idea of Europe was reconfigured thanks to the recognition that only by reincorporating Germany and working hard to sustain the Paris-Bonn axis as its centre could the Europe of the Cold Peace be brought into being. No more Erbfeindschaft, therefore. Note that the absence of Franco-German competition over Central Europe, something that had bedevilled the region in the interwar years, was a helpful condition in this process – the dividend of the Cold Peace, one might say.

[11] Then, the new Europe was committed to democracy. This proposition was not so self-evident in 1950 as it is today. In the 1930s authoritarian systems were seen as normal and dynamic. Somewhere there emerged the proposition that democracy makes war impossible. The UK chose to stay outside this system, found itself obliged to accept the newly constructed power centre on the Continent, but then did what it could to prevent it from converting its economic power into political power.

[12] In this new Europe, state sovereignty remains, but some of that sovereignty has been  transferred to Brussels transferred voluntarily, or mostly so. Compare here the Brezhnev doctrine of limited sovereignty proclaimed in the aftermath of the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The EU is, in this sense, functioning on the basis of a limited sovereignty, but it is different from Brezhnev’s variant in that it is consensual, albeit small states have only a limited choice about falling into line. Ideally, the trade-off is that by acceding to this EU version of limited sovereignty, they gain something – the relationship between them and large powers is now properly regulated. Again this can be regarded as one of the benefits of the Cold Peace.

[13] The number of inter-state relations to be managed was relatively small – the proliferation of new states after 1918 was much disliked – hence in the West much revolved around the relationship between France and Germany. Scandinavia opted for a trade relationship with the UK, the Mediterranean dictatorships only rejoined Europe in the 1970s. The absence of Central and South-Eastern Europe in a way helped the coming into being of a “civilised” Europe, Western Europe, without the hairy barbarians to the east. Indeed, for 45 years Europe had a negative other, an alterity, to the east and this was extremely helpful in consolidating the very particular Europe that was being constructed by the Monnet method. The formation of Europe that was brought into being from the 1950s onwards and the European identity that was constructed around it are the evidence. The Cold Peace was, on this argument, a very helpful condition indeed to the European integration process and the emergence of the new Europe, though it’s hard to say whether or not it was a necessary condition.

[14] Was the 1947 peace-making a stepping stone towards the Cold War? Only in part, in that it made few gestures towards reconciliation between former enemies (these were early days), but did attempt to close a longue durée chapter of European history, that of territorial rearrangement after a war. There is no question in my mind that the absolute conservatism of the US towards territorial rearrangement, as well as the looming presence of the Soviet Union, were at the back of this, presumably in the belief that definitive frontiers promote stability. In political reality, this conservatism shifts a possible political fault line from the international to the domestic political arena, where in general majorities are strong enough to keep down transfrontier minorities or they do a deal (Belgium, Netherlands). Note that as the concept and practice of democracy evolved – an ever wider public sphere and the acceptance of minority action in politics (some minorities only), proliferating forms of representation – the conditions of territorial stability require a good deal more accommodation than once upon time.

[15] The 45 years of peace, however, the unintended child of the 1947 Peace Treaties, did have a consequence that few ever even conceived of at the time – the division of Europe left the West entirely without knowledge and experience of Central Europe. Hence the EU had no idea what to do with states that have had an utterly different history – the Mediterranean dictatorships were not a good model – and which have agendas of their own at odds with deep-rooted Western assumptions. Nor did the West understand – couldn’t? wouldn’t? – the dehumanising quality of communist rule. The putative coming together of Europe after 1989 and 1991 coincided with the euphoria of the victory over communism, the “end of history”, the unipolar moment, the US as hyperpower and a corresponding disdain for difference, not major difference, but enough minor differences to cause irritation. Central Europe just won’t conform and the West refuses to apply the rules of multiculturalism to Central Europe. The reason, presumably, is that doing so would threaten the West’s own assumptions, its own narratives, its universalist aspirations and the worldwide validity of whatever the West decrees. This source of friction, again a consequence of the Cold Peace, will run and run.

Sch. Gy.