The Cold War in Europe and the Developing World

While the Cold War has been largely understood as a non-shooting war between the United States and the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1991, the effects on the nations of Europe and the developing world cannot be overestimated. In both Europe and the developing world, sides were created by the U.S. and USSR and proxy wars emerged from time to time. In addition, the burgeoning political landscape of the developing world, including the frequent outbreak of civil wars, was a principle outcome of the Cold War. In examining specific historical examples, we can better understand why Europeans and people in the developing world perceived the Cold War so differently from the U.S. and USSR.

In Europe, alliances were built centered on the U.S. and USSR in the forms of, respectively, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. However, where this fault line was most pronounced was in Germany, where, by 1949, NATO- and Warsaw Pact-aligned nations emerged in West and East Germany, respectively. From the standpoint of the superpowers, the division of Germany was most acute during the Berlin Blockade and when the Berlin Wall was built. However, for average Germans, the experience was more consistently anxiety-producing. As the textbook points out, haggling by the superpowers over positioning of missiles in Europe, with a common adage in Germany at the time stating that "The shorter the distance of the missile, the deader the German."[1]

In addition, proxy wars erupted in both Europe and the developing world. In Europe, the most prominent case was the Greek Civil War, with the U.S. and USSR backing disparate sides for control over the country. The war was particularly destructive for a country that had suffered enormously under Nazi occupation, and for Greeks with no specific sympathy to a particular side, the war left the lasting impression that their lives were less important to the superpowers than the establishment of spheres of influence. This sense of superpower callousness also occurred in the civil wars that erupted in Korea and Vietnam, to varying extents.

The wars in Korea and Vietnam were the consequences of wartime partitioning of territories between U.S. and USSR spheres of influence. Elsewhere in the developing world, proxy wars arose in situations of power vacuums due to decolonization, which itself came as recompense for the participation of soldiers from developing nations. A key example of such a proxy war was the Angolan Civil War that began in 1975, with the decolonization process that began with Portuguese withdrawal. Sides were drawn between guerrilla organizations supported by the U.S. via South Africa, on the one hand, and those supported by the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Cuba, with this side's support dating back to guerrilla war against Portugal. The war went on far longer than many other post-colonial civil wars largely because of the claiming of interests by superpowers.

Ultimately, the effect of the Cold War on Europe and the decolonizing world was one of extensive anxiety and suffering. Because the primary battleground of the Cold War was Europe, the constantly looming threat of nuclear war left generations of Europeans anxious about their destruction by callous superpowers. In the developing world, this callousness was magnified by the proliferation of proxy wars like that in Angola that were devastating for the general population. Although U.S.-USSR proxy wars ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, new ones have arisen since then, particularly in Africa. Superpower positioning over spheres of influence has ended, but callousness with human life, unfortunately, has not.

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     [1] Felix Gilbert and David Clay Large, The End of the European Era, 6th edition (New York: Norton, 2009), 502.