Fenby - Crucible : thirteen months that forged our world

To my family

The past is not another country. Even a relatively short period can have deep effects that persist decades later. So it is with the thirteen months covered in this book that saw an extraordinary coalescence of events across the globe. The twenty-first century has brought challenges unimagined then, ranging from climate change to terrorism, sectarianism and the impact of technology. The global balance has shifted with the rise of Asia and relative decline of the West. Still, the time from June 1947 to June 1948 really did change the world, shaping much of it in a form that gives the period a lasting relevance for our day.

Two years after the end of by far the most devastating conflict the planet had experienced, with 55 million or more dead, the Cold War became entrenched between two great powers, which, drawing on the ideological divide between capitalism and socialism that had marked the twentieth century, each believed the inexorable tide of history was on its side as its political, economic and social model would sweep away the old world epitomised by Europe and the traditional soft power while laying a network of strong and stable diplomatic, economic and military engagements. With a defence budget of $9 billion in 1948, the US occupied more than two hundred military bases around the world, was the predominant naval power and had a huge strategic air force. The only nation with the atom bomb, it now felt responsibility for what happened elsewhere, its confidence boosted by victory on a two-front global conflict and the economic uplift as wartime activity put a final end to the downturn that had begun in 1929.

Americas emergence was balanced by the presence of a very different power in the vast Soviet land empire stretching from Asia to the heart of Europe, motivated by the belief that the iron laws of history would ensure eventual victory. Though America dominated most meaningful measures of power and ruled the oceans, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), inheriting the land empire of the Tsars, appeared to embody the vision of the geo-politician Halford Mackinder, of a superpower embracing the Eurasian Heartland. Its armed forces had played the major part in the defeat of Hitlers Germany with a victory that handed it a deep security zone for the hard state system directed by its Vozhd (Boss) from his red-walled corner office in the Kremlin. While far behind the United States in its development, the Soviet economy grew strongly after 1945, averaging 8 per cent annual expansion, as it brought under-used potential into play and mobilised resources under strong political control. Big projects organised on military lines, re-armament and production of capital goods acted as a spearhead for expansion. But the scale of destruction was such that output did not regain its pre-war level until the end of the 1940s and, in sharp contrast to the US,

The struggle between the two great powers would last more than four decades and shape global events, with effects still felt as Russia seeks to restore its influence and the international community comes to terms with the prospect that the United States may no longer be ready to exercise the function it took on in the later 1940s. Still, for all its dangers, particularly after the USSR developed atomic weapons in 1949, the conflict in Europe was always circumscribed by the way in which neither of the superpowers challenged the other in The Cold War would have moments of great danger, but the way its early years were managed shows how big-power governments can pursue national interests while balancing strategic advantages and acknowledging that some issues are best left to work themselves out in their own fashion.

Though most international histories of the period focus largely on the emergence of the struggle between the US and USSR played out primarily over a Europe unable to fend for itself, the direct influence of the two powers in the rest of the world was often absent or marginal. Seeing this period through the prism of the Cold War is to distort events that determined the fates of hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa in ways that persist to our day. Reducing it to a trial of strength between the countries led by Harry Truman and Josef Stalin is to ignore the extraordinary multiplicity of major developments across the globe and the way in which, at this stage at least, nationalism played a more important role in liberation struggles than allegiance to an ideological master in a far-away capital.

The SovietAmerican contest had no impact on the independence of India and Pakistan. Despite intelligence service warnings that Jewish refugees included Communists and fears that Arab nations might lean towards Moscow if a Zionist state was created, the Cold War was not a significant factor in the ending of the British Mandate in Palestine, the creation of Israel and the Arab invasion that followed. In South Africa, proponents of apartheid made much of the Red threat but Communist influence was slight while independence movements elsewhere on the continent were driven by nationalism, not allegiance to the Kremlin. There was much US but little Communist presence in Latin America, where the challenge to right-wing governments came from populist movements calling for economic and social reform. Even in China, Cold War parameters were subject to local distortion. Soviet help had been vital for the survival of the Communist forces in 19456, but they then evolved in their own way, with Mao Zedong frequently ignoring advice from Stalin. Preferring to keep the huge neighbour divided and believing the Chinese revolutionaries were not yet ready to take power, the Kremlin signed a treaty of friendship and alliance with Chiang Kaisheks Nationalist regime and advised the Great Helsman to check the advance of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) at the Yangtze to divide the country on the lines of Germany and Korea. For its part, Washington grew increasingly unready to bail out its wartime ally and came to regard China as peripheral to its core Asian strategy.

Though Stalin said he wanted to unleash a movement of liberation and talked of using anti-imperialist sentiment to bring down capitalism, the Cold War at this stage did not play much of a role in the struggle in Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaya and parts of Africa. The Kremlin was suspicious of the nationalism that powered the fight against colonialism. The Cominform, the international Communist organisation created in 1947, was exclusively European in membership. Stalin thought Asian revolutionaries were dangerously petit bourgeois. Oh, you Orientals. You have such rich imaginations, he remarked when Ho Chi Minh asked for aid.

Indonesian Republicans worked for a time with the Communist Party but then turned against its ally in a brutal settling of scores. In the Philippines, which gained independence from the US in 1946 and gained a $620 million aid package, despite sharp economic and social disparities, it was not until 1950 that the Communist Party decided a revolutionary situation existed. Communists in Malaya took action earlier, but did not operate under Soviet guidance and drew more support from the Chinese communitys resentments than from ideology. The British high commissioner, Malcolm MacDonald, concluded in 1948 that there was little sign of Soviet activity in the region, noting that if you suppress a nationalist severely enough, you will find

This was a period of great violence as confrontations persisted that had outlived the world war, or had been fanned by it. The processes of nation building or regime change were often extremely lethal with a combined death toll of millions. Mass population movements brought enormous suffering, altered nations and deprived cosmopolitan cities of their historic flavour amid ethnic cleansing.