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Journal Information The aim of the Review of International Studies is to promote the analysis and understand of international relations. Its scope is wide-ranging both in terms of subject matter and method. The RIS is designed to serve the needs of students and scholars interested in every aspect of international studies, including the political, economic, philosophical, legal, ethical, historical, military, cultural and technological dimensions of the subject. The editors of the RIS are receptive to the extensive array of methodologies now employed in the humanities and social sciences. Each issue contains research articles and review articles; on occasion, an issue may also include a debating forum, a teaching article and an interview. The Review of International Studies is the official journal of the British International Studies Association. Publisher Information Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org) is the publishing division of the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s leading research institutions and winner of 81 Nobel Prizes. Cambridge University Press is committed by its charter to disseminate knowledge as widely as possible across the globe. It publishes over 2,500 books a year for distribution in more than 200 countries. Cambridge Journals publishes over 250 peer-reviewed academic journals across a wide range of subject areas, in print and online. Many of these journals are the leading academic publications in their fields and together they form one of the most valuable and comprehensive bodies of research available today. For more information, visit http://journals.cambridge.org. Rights & Usage This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. The Cold War (1947–1948) is the period within the Cold War from the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to the incapacitation of the Allied Control Council in 1948. The Cold War emerged in Europe a few years after the successful US–USSR–UK coalition won World War II in Europe, and extended to 1989–91. It took place worldwide, but it had a partially different timing outside Europe. Some conflicts between the West and the USSR appeared earlier. In 1945–46 the US and UK strongly protested Soviet political takeover efforts in Eastern Europe and Iran, while the hunt for Soviet spies made the tensions more visible. However, historians emphasize the decisive break between the US–UK and the USSR came in 1947–48 over such issues as the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the breakdown of cooperation in governing occupied Germany by the Allied Control Council. In 1947, Bernard Baruch, the multimillionaire financier and adviser to presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Harry S. Truman, coined the term “Cold War” to describe the increasingly chilly relations between three World War II Allies: the United States and British Empire together with the Soviet Union.[1] The list of world leaders in these years is as follows: Clement Attlee (UK); Harry Truman (US); Vincent Auriol (France); Joseph Stalin (USSR); Chiang Kai-shek (Allied China). Further expansion of communism in Europe[edit]Several of the other countries that the Soviet Union occupied that were not directly annexed into the Soviet Union became Soviet satellite states. Other states were converted into Soviet Satellite states, such as East Germany,[2] the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Hungary,[3] the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic,[4] the People's Republic of Romania and the People's Republic of Albania,[5] which aligned itself in the 1960s away from the Soviet Union and towards the People's Republic of China. In East Germany after local election losses, a forced merger of political parties in the Socialist Unity Party ("SED"), followed by elections in 1946 where political opponents were oppressed.[6] In the non-USSR annexed portion of Poland, less than a third of Poland's population voted in favor of massive communist land reforms and industry nationalizations[7] in a policies referendum known as "3 times YES" (3 razy TAK; 3xTAK), whereupon a second vote rigged election was held to get the desired result.[8][9][10] Fraudulent Polish elections held in January 1947 resulted in Poland's official transformation to the People's Republic of Poland. Initially, Stalin directed systems in the Eastern Bloc countries that rejected Western institutional characteristics of market economies, democratic governance (dubbed "bourgeois democracy" in Soviet parlance) and the rule of law subduing discretional intervention by the state.[11] They were economically communist and depended upon the Soviet Union for significant amounts of materials.[12] While in the first three years following World War II, massive emigration from these states to the West occurred, restrictions implemented thereafter stopped most East-West migration, except that under limited bilateral and other agreements.[13] Implementation of containment[edit]In January 1947, Kennan drafted an essay entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct."[14] Navy Secretary James Forrestal gave permission for the report to be published in the journal Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X."[15] Biographer Douglas Brinkley has dubbed Forrestal "godfather of containment" on account of his work in distributing Kennan's writing.[16] The use of the word "containment" originates from this so-called "X Article": "In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."[17] Restatement of Policy on Germany[edit]The hunger-winter of 1947, thousands protest in West Germany against the disastrous food situation (March 31, 1947). The sign says: We want coal, we want bread Having lost 27 million people in the war, the Soviet Union was determined to destroy Germany's capacity for another war, and pushed for such in wartime conferences. The resulting Morgenthau plan policy foresaw returning Germany to a pastoral state without heavy industry. Because of the increasing costs of food imports to avoid mass-starvation in Germany, and with the danger of losing the entire nation to communism, the U.S. government abandoned the Morgenthau plan in September 1946 with Secretary of State James F. Byrnes' speech Restatement of Policy on Germany.[18] In January 1947, Truman appointed General George Marshall as Secretary of State, and enacted JCS 1779, which decreed that an orderly and prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of "a stable and productive Germany."[19] The directive comported with the view of General Lucius D. Clay and the Joint Chiefs of Staff over growing communist influence in Germany, as well as of the failure of the rest of the European economy to recover without the German industrial base on which it previously had been dependent. Administration officials met with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and others to press for an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets.[20] After six weeks of negotiations, Molotov refused the demands and the talks were adjourned.[20] Marshall was particularly discouraged after personally meeting with Stalin, who expressed little interest in a solution to German economic problems.[20] The United States concluded that a solution could not wait any longer.[20] The Greek Civil War and the Truman Doctrine[edit]Both East and West regarded Greece as a nation well within the sphere of influence of Britain. Stalin had respected the "percentages agreement" with Winston Churchill to not intervene, but Yugoslavia and Albania defied the USSR's policy and sent supplies during the Greek Civil War to the army of the Communist Party of Greece, the DSE (Democratic Army of Greece). The UK had given aid to the royalist Greek forces, leaving the Communists (without Soviet aid and having boycotted the elections) at a disadvantaged position. However, by 1947, the near-bankrupt British government could no longer maintain its massive overseas commitments. In addition to granting independence to India and handing back the Palestinian Mandate to the United Nations, the British government decided to withdraw from both Greece and nearby Turkey. This would have left the two nations, in particular Greece, on the brink of a communist-led revolution. Notified that British aid to Greece and Turkey would end in less than six weeks, and already hostile towards and suspicious of Soviet intentions, because of their reluctance to withdraw from Iran, the Truman administration decided that additional action was necessary. With Congress solidly in Republican hands, and with isolationist sentiment strong among the U.S. public, Truman adopted an ideological approach. In a meeting with congressional leaders, the argument of "apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one" was used to convince them of the significance in supporting Greece and Turkey. It was to become the "domino theory". On the morning of March 12, 1947, President Harry S. Truman appeared before Congress to ask for $400 million of aid to Greece and Turkey. Calling on congressional approval for the United States to "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures," or in short a policy of "containment", Truman articulated a presentation of the ideological struggle that became known as the "Truman Doctrine." Although based on a simplistic analysis of internal strife in Greece and Turkey, it became the single dominating influence over U.S. policy until at least the Vietnam War. Truman's speech had a tremendous effect. The anti-communist feelings that had just begun to hatch in the U.S. were given a great boost, and a silenced Congress voted overwhelmingly in approval of aid. The United States would not withdraw back to the Western Hemisphere as it had after World War I. In September, 1947 the Central Committee secretary Andrei Zhdanov declared that <quote>"[the Truman Doctrine]]…intended for accordance of the American help to all reactionary regimes, that actively oppose to democratic people, bears an undisguised aggressive character".</quote> From then on, the U.S. actively fought communist advances anywhere in the globe under the ostensible causes of "freedom", "democracy" and "human rights." The U.S. brandished its role as the leader of the "free world." Meanwhile, the Soviet Union brandished its position as the leader of the "progressive" and "anti-imperialist" camp. May 1947 crises, the Marshall Plan and the Czechoslovak coup d'état[edit]Comporting with the Truman Doctrine, Marshall pressured France and Italy under the threat of denying any financial aid into purging communists from their governments in the events known as the May 1947 crises. Nevertheless, he subsequently announced in a speech delivered on 5 June 1947[21] a comprehensive program of American assistance to all European countries wanting to participate, including the Soviet Union and its satellites, called the Marshall Plan.[20] Fearing American political, cultural and economic penetration, Stalin eventually forbade Soviet Eastern bloc countries of the newly formed Cominform from accepting Marshall Plan aid.[20] In Czechoslovakia, that required a Soviet-backed Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948,[22] the brutality of which shocked Western powers more than any event so far and set in a motion a brief scare that war would occur and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.[23] From animosity to open hostility[edit]Nazi–Soviet relations and Falsifiers of History[edit]Relations further deteriorated when, in January 1948, the U.S. State Department also published a collection of documents titled Nazi–Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of The German Foreign Office, which contained documents recovered from the Foreign Office of Nazi Germany[24][25] revealing Soviet conversations with Germany regarding the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, including its secret protocol dividing eastern Europe,[26][27] the 1939 German–Soviet Commercial Agreement,[26][28] and discussions of the Soviet Union potentially becoming the fourth Axis Power.[29] In response, one month later, the Soviet Union published Falsifiers of History, a Stalin edited and partially re-written book attacking the West.[24][30] The book did not attempt to directly counter or deal with the documents published in Nazi-Soviet Relations[31] and rather, focused upon Western culpability for the outbreak of war in 1939.[26] It argues that "Western powers" aided Nazi rearmament and aggression, including that American bankers and industrialists provided capital for the growth of German war industries, while deliberately encouraging Hitler to expand eastward.[24][26] The book also included the claim that, during the Pact's operation, Stalin rejected Hitler's offer to share in a division of the world, without mentioning the Soviet offers to join the Axis.[32] Historical studies, official accounts, memoirs and textbooks published in the Soviet Union used that depiction of events until the Soviet Union's dissolution.[32] Incapacitation of Allied Control Council and breakdown of relations[edit]Relations between the Western Allies (especially the United States and the United Kingdom) and the Soviet Union deteriorated and so did their cooperation in the administration of occupied Germany by the Allied Control Council. In September 1946, disagreement arose regarding the distribution of coal for industry in the four occupation zones and the Soviet representative in the council withdrew his support of the plan agreed upon by the governments of the United States, Britain and France.[33] Against Soviet protests, the two English-speaking powers pushed for a heightened economic collaboration between the different zones and on 1 January 1947 the British and American zones merged to form the Bizone. Over the course of 1947 and early 1948, they began to prepare the currency reform that would introduce the Deutsche Mark and ultimately lead to the creation of an independent West German state. When the Soviets learned about this, they claimed that such plans were in violation of the Potsdam Agreement, that obviously the Western powers were not interested in further regular four-power control of Germany and that under such circumstances the Control Council had no further purpose. On 20 March 1948, Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky walked out of the meeting of the council and no further Soviet representative was sent until 1970s, thus incapacitating in practice the council and abandoning any pretense of the World War II alliance's persistence. Significant documents[edit]The Cold War generated innumerable documents. The texts of 171 documents appear in The Encyclopedia of the Cold War (2008).[34]
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When the US Britain and France merged their zones in Germany the Soviet Union responded by doing what?In spring 1948, France announced its occupation zone would merge with those of Britain and the United States, turning “Bizonia” into “Trizonia.” At this point, the Soviets chose to retaliate by applying pressure on West Berlin.
What happened in 1948 with the US British and French parts of Germany?The Berlin Blockade was an attempt in 1948 by the Soviet Union to limit the ability of the United States, Great Britain and France to travel to their respective sectors of the city of Berlin, which lay entirely inside Russian-occupied East Germany.
What happened to the zones in western Germany in 1948?The crisis started on June 24, 1948, when Soviet forces blockaded rail, road, and water access to Allied-controlled areas of Berlin. The United States and United Kingdom responded by airlifting food and fuel to Berlin from Allied airbases in western Germany.
What happened in 1948 1949 during the Cold War?The Berlin Blockade (24 June 1948 – 12 May 1949) was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. During the multinational occupation of post–World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway, road, and canal access to the sectors of Berlin under Western control.
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