But while positions of strength were being built up in Europe, great changes were taking place in Asia. Western Europe was saved, and the line was stabilized, for the time being, along the present Iron Curtain. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization came into being and SHAPE took over. These were the days when the danger seemed so imminent that the West concentrated on building up military forces as rapidly as possible, working to specific dates and this was therefore the period in which the conception of political and economic integration for Europe was naturally in the forefront of Western political thought. The main effort was therefore devoted to reviving European strength, first economically and then militarily, through successive steps culminating in the North Atlantic Treaty and the creation of a coördinated Western military structure under SHAPE.
#Unity synonym free#
If Russia, at that time so much more powerful militarily than the West, could enlist, or even dominate, the strategic potential of Germany and France, she would have established a position which the remainder of the free world might not be able to match. Britain continued to bear the predominant responsibility in the Middle East maintained large forces in Malaya, Hong Kong and Far Eastern waters played a worthy part in Korea.ĭuring this time, Europe was regarded as the place where "the mortal danger" lay. However, even after these adjustments had been made, Britain still made a military and economic contribution to opposing Soviet ambitions out of proportion to her economic strength. For instance, the transfer of primarily British responsibility for protecting Greece and Turkey to the United States announced in the "Truman Doctrine," and symbolized by the stationing of a powerful American fleet in the Mediterranean, was a striking but by no means a unique example of the extension of American and the contraction of British overseas commitments. Yet the year that followed the announcement of the Marshall Plan marked a sharp break between the Western and the Communist worlds both in the political and in the economic spheres.Īs this second phase developed, shifts began to take place in the balance of power within the West itself, affecting particularly the Anglo-American partnership on which, in the last analysis, the stability of the free world is based. For instance, a form of four-Power control continues in Austria to this day. While the distinction between these phases is clear enough, nevertheless they overlapped to some extent in time. But it should be noted that it was heralded a year earlier by the speech of Sir Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, in which he had formulated bluntly and clearly the truths which Western statesmen were now beginning to realize. In effect it opened in June 1947 with the launching of the Marshall Plan. It was a phase in which the attention of the West was concentrated on Europe rather than Asia. The second phase may be described as that of the consolidation of the West and the building up of Western strength against the threat of Soviet aggression. The Palais Rose meeting in Paris in 1949, which failed to produce even an agenda for a four-Power meeting, marked the last abortive effort of importance. Though Western statesmen were becoming increasingly disillusioned about the possibility of any sort of real collaboration with Stalin, they continued to try to preserve such remnants of coöperation as they could. This phase stretches from the Potsdam Conference, through the conclusion of the lesser peace treaties, down to the final breakdown of four-Power arrangements at the London Conference at the end of 1947. But in China, political and economic realities had irrevocably undermined the wartime façade of authority of Chiang Kai-shek's régime in world affairs, and China was tacitly dropped except for her formal position on the Security Council of the United Nations. France resumed her moral position as a Great Power with some difficulty, geography and the confidence of her allies making good her initial military and economic weakness in the international equation.
During the first phase the Western Powers attempted to keep together the consortium of Great Powers which had been established during the war. It is of course a personal British interpretation.Ī glance back over the postwar international scene from 1945 until the end of 1952 suggests that it divides into two principal phases. An interpretation of how this came about and of its significance for the future now becomes possible. IT WAS apparent early this year that postwar international relations had entered a new phase.
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