CHAPTER OUTLINE

I. Introduction

II. Postwar Europe

A. The Austerity of the 1940s and the Economic

Recovery

III. Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Cold

War, 1945–49

A. NATO and the Warsaw Pact: Containment

and Confrontation

IV. The USSR under Stalin and Khrushchev,

1945–64

V. Great Britain: Clement Attlee and the Birth of

the Welfare State

VI. The French Fourth Republic: Jean Monnet and

the Planned Economy

VII. The Federal Republic of Germany: Konrad

Adenauer and the Economic Miracle

VIII. Europe and the World: The Age of
Decolonization, 1945–75

IX. The European Economic Community, 1945–75

X. The Cooling Down of the Cold War: Ostpolitik

and Détente, 1965–75

XI. An Era of Unrest and Violence, 1968–75

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CHAPTER 31

EUROPE IN THE AGE OF THE COLD WAR,

1945–75

E

urope was again a devastated continent in 1945

with homes, industries, transportation systems,

and entire cities in ruins. Chapter 31 begins by

describing the territorial changes that resulted

from World War II, the devastation in Europe caused

by the war, and the years of austere living that Euro-

peans faced to rebuild. The steady economic recovery

of Western Europe, with aid from the U.S. Marshall

Plan, produced growing prosperity in the late 1950s

and the 1960s. The West German economy recovered

at such a fast rate that it became know as the “economic

miracle.”

At the same time that Western Europe experienced

this recovery, it confronted a global rivalry between the

two strongest victors in World War II—the Soviet

Union and the United States. This struggle never led to

a shooting war between the rivals, but confrontations in

the age of atomic weapons were so menacing, and small

regional crises so frequent that the rivalry was called

the cold war. The chapter describes the European ten-

sion and crises—chiefly the creation of Communist

satellite states in Eastern Europe and threats elsewhere,

especially over Berlin—that led to the beginning of the

cold war in the late 1940s, and it describes the con-

frontations of the cold war during the 1950s and 1960s.

As the great powers of Europe recovered and sur-

vived the fears of a Communist takeover, the new

democracies evolved in different ways. The British, un-

der Prime Minister Clement Attlee, developed the wel-

fare state; the French, following the ideas of Jean

Monnet, developed a new form of capitalism within a

planned economy; and the Germans, under the leader-

ship of Konrad Adenauer, created a successful democ-

racy in contrast to the failed Weimar democracy of the

1920s. The chapter ends with decolonization, the dis-

mantling of ancient colonial empires; the beginning of

European economic unity with the creation of the

European Economic Community (EEC); and the steady

calming of the cold war in Europe, during a period of

détente.

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