The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (73 page)

The third major element in the buttressing of Russian power was Stalin’s renewed emphasis upon the internal discipline and absolute conformism of the late 1930s. Whether this was due to his increasing paranoia or a carefully calculated set of moves to reinforce his own dictatorial position—or a mixture of both—is hard to say; but the events spoke for themselves.
⁵⁸
Anyone with foreign connections was suspect; returning prisoners-of-war were shot; the creation of the state of Israel, and thus an alternative source of Jewish loyalties, led to renewed anti-Semitic measures within Russia. The army leadership was cut down to size, with the respected Marshal Zhukov being removed as commander of the Soviet ground forces in 1946. Discipline within the Communist party itself, and admission to the same, was tightened; in 1948, the entire party leadership of Leningrad (which Stalin always disliked) was purged. Censorship was intensified, not only over literature and the creative arts, but also over the natural sciences, biology, linguistics. This overall “tightening” of the system naturally fitted in with the reasserted collectivization of agriculture mentioned earlier, and with the rise of Cold War tensions. It was also natural that a similar process of ideological stiffening and totalitarian controls should take place in the Soviet-dominated states of eastern Europe, where the elimination of rival parties, the holdings of show trials, the drive against individual rights and properties, became the order of the day. All this, and in particular the elimination of democracy in Poland and (in 1948) in Czechoslovakia, led to a considerable ebbing of western enthusiasm for the Soviet system. Again, it is unclear whether these measures were all carefully calculated—there was, and is, a crude logic in the Soviet elite’s desire to isolate its satellites as well as its own people from the ideas and riches of the West—or whether it simply reflected Stalin’s increasing paranoia as his end approached. Whatever the cause, there would be one massive stretch of territory totally immune from the influences of any “Pax Americana,” and indeed offering an alternative to it.

This growth of the Soviet Empire appeared to confirm the geopolitical predictions of Mackinder and others that a gigantic military power would control the resources of the Eurasian “Heartland”; and that the further expansion of that state into the periphery or “Rimland” would need to be contested by the great maritime states if they were to preserve a global balance of power.
⁵⁹
It would still be another few years before U.S. administrations, shaken by the Korean War, completely abandoned their earlier ideas of “One World” and replaced them with
the image of an unrelenting superpower struggle across the international arena. Yet to a large extent this was implicit in the circumstances of 1945; the United States and the USSR were the only nations now capable, as de Tocqueville had once put it, of swaying the destinies of half the globe; and both had fallen prey to “globalist” thinking. “The USSR now is one of the mightiest countries of the world. One cannot decide now
any
serious problems of international relations without the USSR …” Molotov claimed in 1946,
⁶⁰
an echo of the earlier American intimation to Moscow (when it seemed that Churchill and Stalin might come to a private agreement over eastern Europe) that “in this global war there is literally no question, political or military, in which the United States is not interested.”
⁶¹
A serious clash of interests was inevitable.

But what of those former Great Powers, now merely middleweight countries, whose collapse was the obverse side of the rise of the superpowers? It needs to be said immediately that the defeated fascist states of Germany, Japan, and Italy were in a different category from that of Great Britain and, perhaps, of France also in the immediate post-1945 period. When the fighting ceased, the Allies went ahead with their plans to ensure that neither Germany nor Japan would ever again be a threat to the international order. This involved not only the long-term military occupation of both countries but, in the German case, its division into four occupation zones and then, later, into two separate German states. Japan was stripped of its overseas acquisitions (as was Italy in 1943), Germany of its European gains and of its older territories in the east (Silesia, East Prussia, etc.). The devastation caused by the strategic bombing, the overstraining of the transport system, the decline of the housing stock, and the lack of many raw materials and export markets was compounded by the Allied controls upon industry—and, in Germany, by the dismantling of industrial plant. German national income and output in 1946 was less than one-third that of 1938, a horrendous reduction.
⁶²
In Japan, a similar economic regression had occurred; real national income in 1946 was only 57 percent that of 1934–1936 and real manufacturing wages were down to only 30 percent of the same; foreign trade was so minimal that even two years later, exports were only 8 percent and imports 18 percent of the 1934–1936 figure. Japan’s shipping had been eliminated by the war, the number of cotton spindles cut from 12.2 million to 2 million, coal output halved, and so on.
⁶³
Economically as well as militarily, their days as powerful nations seemed over.

Although Italy had switched sides in 1943, its economic fate was almost as grim. For two years, Allied forces had fought and bombed their way up the peninsula, severely adding to the damage caused by Mussolini’s strategical extravagances. “In 1945 … Italy’s gross national product had reverted to the 1911 level and had diminished by about 40
percent in real terms, as compared with 1938. The population, despite war losses, had increased largely as a result of repatriation from the colonies and the halt in emigration. The standard of living was alarmingly low, and but for international aid, especially from the United States, many Italians would have died of starvation.”
⁶⁴
Italian real wages were down to 26.7 percent of their 1913 value by 1945.
⁶⁵
In fact, all of these countries were terribly dependent upon American aid during this period; and, as such, were little more than economic satellites.

It was difficult to tell the difference, in economic terms, between France and Germany. Four years of plundering by the Germans had been followed by months of large-scale fighting in 1944; “most waterways and harbors were blocked, most bridges destroyed, much of the railway system temporarily unusable.”
⁶⁶
Fohlen’s indices of French imports and exports shows them plunging to virtually nothing by 1944–1945; France’s national income by that time was only half that of 1938, itself a gloomy year.
⁶⁷
France had no stocks of foreign currency, and the franc itself had not been accepted on the foreign exchanges; its value, when fixed at 50 to the dollar in 1944, was “purely fictitious,”
⁶⁸
and within a year it had slid to 119 to the dollar; by 1949, when things seemed more stable, it was 420 to the dollar. French party politics, and in particular the role of the Communist party, obviously interacted with these purely economic problems of reconstruction, nationalization, and inflation.

On the other hand, the Free French had been members of the “Grand Alliance” against fascism and had fought in many of the major campaigns, as well as triumphing in their “civil” war against pro-Vichy forces in West Africa, the Levant, and Algeria. Given the German occupation of France and the division in French loyalties during the war, de Gaulle’s organization was heavily dependent upon Anglo-American aid—which de Gaulle resented, even as he demanded more. Nonetheless, the British were eager to see France reestablished as a strong military Power in Europe as a check to Russia, rather than a collapsing Germany, and so France acquired many of the accouterments of Great Power status: an occupation zone in Germany, permanent membership in the UN Security Council, and so on. Although it could not regain its former mandates in Syria and Lebanon, it did seek to reassert itself in Indochina and in the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco; and with its overseas departments and territories, it still possessed the second-largest colonial empire in the world and was determined to hang on to it.
⁶⁹
To many outside observers, especially the Americans, this attempt to regain the trappings of first-class power status while so desperately weak economically—and so dependent upon American financial support—was nothing more than a
folie des grandeurs
. And so, to a large extent, it was. Perhaps its chief consequence was to disguise, at least for some more years, the extent to
which the strategical landscape of the globe had been altered by the war.

Although most Britons in 1945 would have felt indignant at the comparison, the continued appearance of their nation and empire as one of the Great Powers of the world also disguised the new strategical balances—as well as making it psychologically difficult for decisionmakers in London to readjust to the politics of decline. The British Empire was the only major state which had fought through the Second World War from beginning to end. Under Churchill’s leadership, it had been unquestionably one of the “Big Three.” Its military performance, at sea, in the air, even on land, had been significantly better than in the First World War. By August 1945, all the possessions of the king-emperor—including Hong Kong—were back in British hands. British troops and airbases were sprawled across North Africa, Italy, Germany, Southeast Asia. Despite heavy losses, the Royal Navy possessed over 1,000 warships, nearly 3,000 minor war vessels, and nearly 5,500 landing craft. RAF Bomber Command was the second-largest strategic air force (by far) in the world. And yet, as Correlli Barnett has forcefully pointed out, “victory” was not

For the blunt fact was that in securing a victorious outcome to the war the British had severely overstrained themselves, running down their gold and dollar reserves, wearing out their domestic machinery, and (despite an extraordinary mobilization of their resources and population) becoming increasingly dependent upon American munitions, shipping, foodstuffs, and other supplies to stay in the fighting. While its need for such imports had risen year by year, its export trade had withered away—by 1944 it was a mere 31 percent of the 1938 figure. When the Labor government entered office in July 1945, one of the first documents it had to read was Keynes’s hair-raising memorandum about the “financial Dunkirk” which the country was facing: its colossal trade gap, its weakened industrial base, its enormous overseas establishments, meant that American aid was desperately needed, to replace the cut-off Lend-Lease. Without that help, indeed, “a greater degree of austerity would be necessary than we have experienced at any time during the war.… ”
⁷¹
Once again, as happened after the First World War, the goal of creating a home fit for heroes would have to
be modified. But this time, it was impossible to believe that Britain was still at the center of the world politically.

Yet, the illusions of Great Power status lingered on, even among Labor ministers intent upon creating a “welfare state.” The history of the next few years therefore involved an earnest British attempt to grapple with these irreconcilables—improving domestic standards of living, moving to a “mixed economy,” closing the trade gap, and at the same time supporting a vastly extended array of overseas bases, in Germany, the Near East, and India, and maintaining large armed forces in the face of the worsening relations with Russia. As the detailed studies of the Attlee administration suggest,
⁷²
it was remarkably successful in many respects: industrial productivity rose, the trade gap narrowed, social reforms were enacted, the European scene was stabilized. The Labor government also found it prudent to withdraw from India, to pull out of the chaos in Palestine, and to abandon the guarantees to Greece and Turkey, so that it was relieved of at least some of its more pressing overseas burdens. On the other hand, that economic recovery had itself depended upon the large loan Keynes had negotiated in Washington in 1945, upon the further massive support which came via Marshall Plan aid, and upon the still-devastated state of most of Britain’s commercial rivals; it was, therefore, a delicate and conditional economic revival. Equally suspect, over the longer term, was the success of the British withdrawals of 1947. It certainly shed intolerable burdens; but that strategical “fancy footwork” was postulated on the assumption that in abandoning certain regions, Britain could relocate its bases to accord more with its real imperial interests—the Suez Canal rather than Palestine, Arabian oil rather than India. At this stage, there certainly was no intention in Whitehall of giving up the
rest
of the dependent empire, which in economic terms was more important to Britain than ever before.
⁷³
Only further shocks and the rising costs of hanging on would later force another reappraisal of Britain’s place in the world. In the meantime, however, it would remain an overextended but still powerful strategical entity, dependent upon the United States for security and yet also that country’s most useful ally—and an important strategic collaborator—in a world dividing into two large power blocs.
⁷⁴

All the efforts of British and French governments to the contrary, however, there was no doubt about “the passing of the European age.” While the U.S. GNP had surged by more than 50 percent in real terms during the war, Europe’s as a whole (but minus the Soviet Union) had fallen by about 25 percent.
⁷⁵
Europe’s share of total world manufacturing output was lower than at any time since the early nineteenth century; even by 1953, when most of the war damage had been repaired, it possessed only 26 percent of the whole (compared with the United States’ 44.7 percent).
⁷⁶
Its population was now only about 15–16 percent
of the total world population. In 1950 its per capita GNP was only about one-half of the United States’; moreover, the Soviet Union had by then significantly closed the gap, so that the total GNP of the powers was as shown in
Table 36
.