The Transformative Impact of World War II
The Impact of the War
The article evaluates the degree to which the Second World War was responsible for the development of Europe since 1945. It seeks to disentangle effects that were clearly directly due to the war from those which can be seen as the result of changes already affecting pre-war Europe, and those due to post-war developments, such as the Cold War and the European Union. It examines the relationship between long term social, economic and cultural developments and the impact of the war and political turning points.
The Impact of the War
That great events have great effects seems a
truism and it would follow that the Second World War, a conflict which
caused a colossal loss of life, saw a continent divided as mighty armies
strove for supremacy, and ended with much of Europe in ruins and the
rest impoverished, must have had a transforming effect. Few would deny
that the great context for the development of Europe, politically,
socially and economically, in the immediate post-war years was the war,
but did it really transform Europe and, if so, for how long?
Among
the problems in assessing the changes to Europe, its nations,
societies, economies and cultures, that may or may not be seen as
consequent upon the war is the perennial historian's dilemma in
distinguishing between short and long term developments. Many of the
changes that seem at first sight to have been due to the conflict and
its aftermath may well have been simply the further effects of salient
developments evident before the war. Then, of course, the impact of the
war varied considerably as between the defeated and the victorious
states, and indeed between combatants and neutrals, the latter providing
a "control" for any assessment of the war's effects. Post-war Germany
and Poland looked very different in, say, 1950 to what they had been in
1939, but can the same be said for Sweden or, for that matter, Spain?
An
essay on this subject written in, shall we say, 1950, 1970 or 1992,
would have a very different perspective, for many of changes made by the
war were far from permanent and, arguably, post-war developments had a
greater effect. This is most obviously the case when we consider the
redrawing of the map of Europe in the immediate post war period. The war
ended with what in historical terms was an odd peace, for there was no
peace treaty with Germany,1 in part because the unconditional surrender
of the Axis powers had left no authority to conclude peace with, and
also because of the disintegration of the alliance of the victorious
powers shortly after the moment of victory. Nevertheless, states
(Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) disappeared, frontiers were changed,
and, most importantly, the division of Germany into occupied zones
provided the blueprint for the emergence of two German states. In
general, East Central Europe moved west, in terms of frontier changes,
seen most evidently in those of Poland, which lost territory to the
Soviet Union and gained it at the expense of what had been Germany, and
because of the movement of millions of people, expelled from their homes
and moving west in search of security. There was also a movement in the
opposite direction as Latvians and other Baltic people and numerous
other ethnic groups, such as Crimean Tartars, were forcibly moved
eastwards by the Soviet authorities.
A feature of the
post-1945 settlement was thus, if settlement is not an inappropriate
term, the brutal displacement of populations. Whereas the Versailles
Settlement had attempted to make frontiers coincide with national or
ethnic divisions, the aftermath of the Second World War saw peoples made
to fit frontiers. In particular, millions of Germans were expelled from
East Prussia and other German territory ceded to Poland, and from the
Sudetenland, while there were parallel movements of Poles from the
territories ceded to the Soviet Union into that gained from Germany.
Although the fate of Eastern and Central Europe was largely decided at
Yalta in February 1944, the future political shape of the continent was
formally agreed at Potsdam, 17 July to 2 August 1945, where the Allied
leaders decided that there should be an inter-allied council to
co-ordinate the four occupied zones of Germany and agreed that Austria
should be independent, France be returned Alsace-Lorraine, and
Czechoslovakia the Sudetenland, and that Poland's western frontier
should be the Oder-Neisse Line (previously the Curzon and then the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Line).
The palimpsest of the 1945
arrangements was distinct in 1950 and discernible in 1970 or even the
late 1980s, when troops of the wartime allies still garrisoned Berlin,
but by 1992, after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the "velvet"
revolutions in the satrap people's republics, and the reunification of
Germany, the map of Europe resembled that in the wake of the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk of March 1918, rather more than that of 1945-92, though
the end of Yugoslavia and recent events in the Ukrainian Republic remind
us that political geography is rarely permanent; a hundred-year-old
inhabitant of Lviv will have been an Austro-Hungarian, a Polish, a
Soviet, and a Ukrainian national during his or her lifetime.
We
must also consider the view that the two World Wars should not
necessarily be treated as autonomous but perhaps be seen as parts of a
single conflict, a "Thirty Years War" of the twentieth century,2 a
conflict that arose from the long-term political and economic rivalries
of great powers and Europe's fault lines which led these rivalries to
ignite into warfare. It is, indeed, possible to argue that the Cold War
period can be seen as at least a sequel to it. Such an interpretation of
the dark history of Europe in the twentieth century does, of course,
downgrade the importance of ideology and of the "great dictators" and
has been attacked on the grounds that the coming to power of Adolf
Hitler (1889–1945) was, not only the major cause of World War II, but
that his hysterical and paranoid agenda gave that war its own unique and
horrific nature.3 Acceptance of the "long war" thesis would tend to
shift enquiry from the particularity of World War II as an engine of
change to longer term European developments, problems and rivalries.
Nevertheless,
the outcome of the Second World War and the nature of the fracturing
alliance that triumphed was clearly the major factor in determining, in
political-geographic respects, the map of post-war Europe. Its impact
was clearly discernible for nearly half a century, although we can
debate whether it was the position of the armies of the western powers
vis-a-vis the Red Army in 1945 or the subsequent announcement of the
Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan in 1947, the formation of NATO in
1948, or the entry of West Germany into the alliance in 1954 that
decisively made for a divided Europe. In that the division was also an
ideological one, it determined the nature of economies and societies. It
is, however, when we come to the economic and social effects of the war
upon Europe, that determining the degrees and the ways in which the
experience of the war as well as its outcome shaped the post-war world
becomes difficult. The major problem is that of distinguishing between
pre-war influences, the experience of the war, its result, and the Cold
War, which followed so swiftly.
Source: A.W. Purdue, http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/alliances-and-wars/war-as-an-agent-of-transfer/a-w-purdue-the-transformative-impact-of-world-war-ii
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