Two Super Powers Emerge

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the economic and political consequences of the Cold War for Europe (Skill 1.B; LO D).
• Account for KC-4.1.IV.C: how the United States exerted strong military, political, and economic influence in Western Europe through the world monetary and trade systems and the geopolitical alliances including NATO.
• Account for KC-4.1.IV.D: how countries east of the Iron Curtain came under the military, political, and economic domination of the Soviet Union within COMECON and the Warsaw Pact.
• Account for KC-4.2.V.A: how the Soviet bloc economic model combined central planning, extensive social welfare, and specialized production with the restriction of individual rights, suppression of dissent, and constraints on emigration.
• Account for KC-4.2.V and KC-4.2.V.B: how Eastern European nations oscillated between repression and limited reform under Soviet influence, with Khrushchev's de-Stalinization producing revolts and reimposition of Soviet control.
• Account for KC-4.2.V.D.i: how the rise of new nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe produced peaceful revolution in most countries but instability in some former Soviet republics.

Topic 9.4 covers the parallel emergence of two superpower-led blocs that organized European political and economic life from 1947 to 1991. The lesson is structured in four parts: the Western alliance under United States leadership (KC-4.1.IV.C); the Eastern bloc under Soviet hegemony (KC-4.1.IV.D, KC-4.2.V.A); the long-running Eastern European pattern of revolt and reimposition (KC-4.2.V, KC-4.2.V.B); and the post-1989 emergence of new nationalisms across the former Soviet bloc (KC-4.2.V.D.i).

The Western alliance under United States leadership (KC-4.1.IV.C). The United States exerted strong military, political, and economic influence in Western Europe across the Cold War period. The principal Western institutional architecture combined four reinforcing layers. The first layer was the Bretton Woods monetary-economic framework: the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (both established at the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944, operational from 1947); the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (October 1947) and its eight successive trade-liberalization rounds (Geneva 1947 through Uruguay 1986-1994); the United States dollar as the principal Western reserve currency anchored on gold convertibility at $35 per ounce until the August 1971 Nixon Shock. The framework supported the long Western European postwar economic miracle (Topic 9.2 covered) and integrated Western European trade into a global system organized around American economic primacy.

The second layer was the Marshall Plan and its institutional successors. The European Recovery Program (1948-1952) delivered approximately $13 billion in postwar economic reconstruction aid. The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC, April 1948) coordinated the European-side administration; the European Payments Union (1950-1958) permitted multilateral settlement of intra-European trade balances; the OECD (from September 1961, with the United States and Canada as full members) extended the institutional framework into the post-Marshall-Plan period. The third layer was NATO and the broader Western military framework. NATO (founded 4 April 1949 with twelve members) provided the principal Western collective-defense framework; West Germany joined NATO in May 1955; Greece and Turkey acceded in February 1952; Spain acceded in May 1982. The American military presence on European territory ran through approximately 100 facilities across the Western alliance: Ramstein Air Base (Germany; principal United States Air Force facility in Europe); Aviano Air Base (Italy); Lakenheath and Mildenhall (United Kingdom); Naples and Sigonella (Italy); Rota and Moron (Spain); Souda Bay (Greece); Incirlik (Turkey). Approximately 270,000 American military personnel were stationed in Western Europe at the early-1960s peak; the figure substantially declined after the Cold War to approximately 65,000 by 2010.

The fourth layer was the broader Western political-cultural framework. The Council of Europe (founded 5 May 1949 with ten members; Strasbourg-based) provided the principal Western European political-cultural body and produced the European Convention on Human Rights of 4 November 1950 and the European Court of Human Rights (operational from 1959). The Western European Union (founded 1948 from the predecessor Brussels Treaty Organization, reorganized 1954) provided a parallel European-level military framework that the broader NATO institutional architecture absorbed. The European Coal and Steel Community of 1952 (Topic 9.10 will examine) initiated the long-running European integration project. The Atlantic-bridging cultural-academic-scientific exchanges (the Fulbright Program from 1946; the Marshall scholarships from 1953; the substantial postwar European academic emigration to the United States) anchored the long Western Atlantic relationship.

The Eastern bloc under Soviet hegemony (KC-4.1.IV.D, KC-4.2.V.A). Countries east of the Iron Curtain came under the military, political, and economic domination of the Soviet Union within COMECON and the Warsaw Pact. The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON; established by Soviet announcement on 25 January 1949) coordinated Eastern bloc economic relations across the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the German Democratic Republic (joined 1950), Mongolia (1962), Cuba (1972), and Vietnam (1978); Yugoslavia held observer status from 1964. COMECON coordinated industrial specialization (Czechoslovakia and East Germany supplied machinery and industrial goods; Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary supplied agricultural products; the Soviet Union supplied raw materials and energy at administered prices substantially below world-market rates); operated the transferable ruble (from 1964) as the bloc's separate currency-clearing mechanism; and produced the Comprehensive Programme for Socialist Economic Integration (1971) that attempted but largely failed to deepen bloc-level economic coordination.

The Warsaw Pact (formally the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance) was signed in Warsaw on 14 May 1955 in response to the May 1955 admission of West Germany to NATO. Founding members: the Soviet Union, Albania (left 1968 after the Czechoslovak intervention), Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. The treaty's Article 4 committed members to mutual collective defense; Article 5 created a Joint Command of the Pact's Combined Armed Forces, headquartered in Moscow under Soviet supreme command (the principal commanders: Marshal Ivan Konev 1955-1960, Marshal Andrei Grechko 1960-1967, Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky 1967-1976, Marshal Viktor Kulikov 1977-1989). Soviet military forces stationed permanently in Eastern European territory included approximately 380,000 troops in East Germany (Group of Soviet Forces in Germany), approximately 70,000 troops in Czechoslovakia (Central Group of Forces from 1968), approximately 40,000 troops in Hungary (Southern Group of Forces from 1956), and approximately 40,000 troops in Poland (Northern Group of Forces from 1945). The Pact's principal military operations included the November 1956 Hungarian intervention and the August 1968 Czechoslovak intervention.

The Soviet bloc economic model (KC-4.2.V.A) combined central planning, extensive social welfare, and specialized production with substantial restrictions on individual liberty. The principal features: Soviet-style five-year plans coordinated by central planning ministries (Gosplan in the Soviet Union, with parallel institutions in each Eastern European state); collectivized agriculture (substantially complete by the early 1950s in most Eastern European states except Poland, where collectivization was partially reversed after the 1956 unrest); state ownership of industry; administered prices for principal consumer goods; comprehensive social-insurance and health-care systems; subsidized housing and public transportation; full employment as official policy commitment. The model produced rapid industrialization in the immediate postwar years (East German GDP recovered to 1939 levels by 1955; Polish industrial output approximately tripled between 1949 and 1965); the long-running pattern of low productivity, persistent shortages of consumer goods, environmental degradation, and substantial repressed inflation became the principal sources of late-Cold-War Eastern European discontent.

The political-civil-rights dimension of the Eastern bloc model substantially restricted the individual liberties that the Western postwar institutional response (Topic 8.11 covered) had codified. Communist Party monopoly on political authority was institutionalized through Article 6 of the Soviet 1977 Constitution and parallel provisions in the Eastern European constitutions; opposition parties were nominally allowed but operated under Communist-Party leadership in the "national front" arrangements. Independent civil-society institutions (independent trade unions, religious organizations operating outside state-approved frameworks, independent press, independent academic and cultural associations) were systematically suppressed. The principal Eastern bloc internal-security services — the Soviet KGB, the East German Stasi (approximately 91,000 official employees and approximately 173,000 informants by 1989), the Polish SB, the Czechoslovak StB, the Hungarian Allamvedelmi Hatosag, the Romanian Securitate, the Bulgarian Komitet za Darzhavna Sigurnost — conducted extensive surveillance and political-prosecution operations. Constraints on emigration, particularly within the Soviet bloc and to the West, were substantial: the Berlin Wall (Topic 9.3) was the principal physical instrument; the broader pattern of restricted exit visas, family separation, and the prosecution of "anti-Soviet propaganda" extended across the period.

The Eastern European pattern of revolt and reimposition (KC-4.2.V, KC-4.2.V.B). Eastern European nations were bound by their relationships with the Soviet Union, which oscillated between repression and limited reform until the collapse of communist governments in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union. The principal episodes of Eastern European protest followed a recurring pattern: domestic political-economic dissatisfaction; reform-Communist or reform-coalition leadership; the Soviet Union's decision about whether to tolerate the reform or reimpose direct or indirect control. Khrushchev's Secret Speech to the 20th Party Congress on 25 February 1956 ("On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences") denounced Stalin's "cult of personality," the 1930s show trials, and the deportations of the wartime period. The speech, never formally published in the Soviet Union but widely circulated, produced the destabilizing process of de-Stalinization that the Hungarian and Polish events of 1956 demonstrated.

The first major Eastern European revolt was the East German uprising of 16-17 June 1953, in which approximately one million East German workers struck against the regime's announced increase in production quotas; the uprising was suppressed by Soviet military forces and East German police on 17 June 1953 with approximately 55-125 deaths. The Polish October of 1956 produced the return of Wladyslaw Gomulka (who had been imprisoned in the Stalinist period) to the leadership of the Polish United Workers' Party on 19 October 1956 and the limited reform settlement that produced partial decollectivization of agriculture, expanded religious-life accommodation with the Catholic Church under Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (released from internment on 28 October 1956), and reduced Soviet direct interference in Polish internal affairs. The Hungarian Revolution of 23 October to 4 November 1956 (covered in Topic 9.3) produced the substantially more confrontational pattern: Imre Nagy's reform-Communist government announced Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact on 1 November 1956; Soviet military intervention on 4 November 1956 produced approximately 2,500 Hungarian deaths, approximately 200,000 refugees, and Nagy's eventual secret trial and execution on 16 June 1958.

The Prague Spring of 5 January to 21 August 1968 produced the second major confrontational episode. Czechoslovak First Secretary Alexander Dubcek's "socialism with a human face" reform program included expanded press freedom, expanded freedoms of association, partial economic decentralization, federalization of the Czechoslovak state (Czech and Slovak republics within a federal Czechoslovakia from 1 January 1969), and rehabilitation of victims of the 1948-1956 political repression. Five Warsaw Pact armies (Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, East Germany; Romania declined to participate; Albania withdrew from the Pact in protest) intervened on 20-21 August 1968 with approximately 500,000 troops. Dubcek was arrested and replaced by Gustav Husak in April 1969; the subsequent "normalization" period reversed most of the Prague Spring reforms. The Brezhnev Doctrine, articulated by Leonid Brezhnev at the 5th Polish United Workers' Party Congress on 12 November 1968, codified the Soviet right to intervene in Warsaw Pact states facing internal "deviations." The doctrine organized Soviet bloc relations through the renunciation of the doctrine by Gorbachev at the United Nations General Assembly on 7 December 1988.

The Polish Solidarity movement of 1980-1981 produced the third major confrontational episode and substantially shaped the late Cold War. Strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk in August 1980, led by electrician Lech Walesa, produced the Gdansk Agreement of 31 August 1980 between the Polish government and the strike committee that authorized independent self-governing trade unions — the principal break with the Soviet bloc's monopoly-trade-union pattern. The Independent Self-Governing Trade Union "Solidarity" (NSZZ Solidarnosc) registered approximately 10 million members by early 1981 (approximately one-third of the Polish working-age population). Polish Communist Party First Secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski, under substantial Soviet pressure, declared martial law on 13 December 1981; approximately 10,000 Solidarity activists were interned; martial law was formally lifted on 22 July 1983. Solidarity continued as an underground movement and re-emerged after 1988 to lead the Round Table Negotiations of February-April 1989 that produced the partially free Polish elections of 4 June 1989 and the subsequent Solidarity-led government under Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Topic 9.7 will examine the 1989 transitions in detail.

Post-1989 nationalisms (KC-4.2.V.D.i). The rise of new nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe produced peaceful revolution in most countries but produced instability in some former Soviet republics. The 1989 transitions across Poland, Hungary, East Germany (with reunification on 3 October 1990), Czechoslovakia (the Velvet Revolution of November-December 1989; the Velvet Divorce that produced separate Czech Republic and Slovakia on 1 January 1993), Bulgaria (overthrow of Todor Zhivkov on 10 November 1989), and Romania (the violent overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu on 22-25 December 1989; Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed on 25 December 1989 after a brief military trial) were largely peaceful with the principal Romanian exception. The Yugoslav dissolution after 1991 produced the principal European post-Holocaust violence: the Slovenian Ten-Day War of June-July 1991; the Croatian War of Independence of 1991-1995; the Bosnian War of 1992-1995 with the Srebrenica massacre of 11-22 July 1995 in which Bosnian Serb forces killed approximately 8,000 Bosniak men and boys; and the Kosovo War of 1998-1999 with the NATO bombing campaign of March-June 1999. Topic 9.5 will examine the Yugoslav atrocities in detail.

The post-Soviet space produced sustained instability across the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Nagorno-Karabakh War between Armenia and Azerbaijan (1988-1994; renewed conflict in 2020 and 2023); the Georgian civil conflicts and the South Ossetian and Abkhazian wars (1991-1993, with renewed Russian-Georgian conflict in 2008); the Tajik Civil War (1992-1997); the First Chechen War (1994-1996) and Second Chechen War (1999-2009) within the Russian Federation; the Russian-Ukrainian conflicts that began with the February 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and extended through the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine all demonstrated the long-running instability of the post-Soviet successor-state period. The post-1989 nationalisms also produced more pacific reorganizations: the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) achieved independence from the Soviet Union in August-September 1991; subsequent EU and NATO accession on 1 May 2004 and 29 March 2004 respectively integrated the Baltic states into the Western alliance. Topic 9.10 will examine the eastern enlargement of the European Union.

The Skill 1.B argument. Topic 9.4's suggested skill is 1.B (Explanation: explain a historical concept, development, or process). The skill applies in two principal ways. First, students should explain the parallel-and-opposed character of the two superpower-led blocs: the Western alliance and the Eastern bloc developed as mirror-image institutional structures (NATO/Warsaw Pact; OEEC-OECD/COMECON; IMF/World Bank versus Soviet bloc economic coordination; the Marshall Plan versus the Molotov Plan), but the parallel structures masked substantial differences in their internal organization, individual-rights register, and relation to civil society. Second, students should explain the long-running Eastern European pattern of oscillation between repression and limited reform: the principal episodes (1953 East Berlin, 1956 Hungary and Poland, 1968 Czechoslovakia, 1980-1981 Poland, 1989 across the bloc) were not isolated events but a recurring cumulative pattern that the Soviet hegemony increasingly could not contain.

Three sources framing the Eastern bloc institutional and ideological structure: the founding treaty, the de-Stalinization speech, and the doctrine of limited reform.

1. (Causation, Skill 1.B) Explain the parallel-and-opposed character of the two superpower-led blocs. How did NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the Bretton Woods institutions and COMECON, and the Marshall Plan and the Molotov Plan mirror each other in form, and how did they differ in substance?
2. (Causation) Account for KC-4.1.IV.C: how did the United States exert military, political, and economic influence in Western Europe? Cite specific institutions and instruments.
3. (Causation) Account for KC-4.2.V.A: how did the Soviet bloc economic model combine central planning, social welfare, and specialized production with the restriction of individual rights? Cite specific institutional features.
4. (Causation, Skill 1.B) Explain the long-running Eastern European pattern of revolt and reimposition. Cite the 1953, 1956, 1968, and 1980-1981 episodes and the cumulative pattern they produced.
5. (Causation) Account for the post-1989 emergence of new nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe. Why was the post-1989 transition largely peaceful in most Eastern European states but substantially violent in Yugoslavia and several former Soviet republics?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.