The Struggle for Power: A Guide to International Relations since 1945

Acknowledgements


In writing this book, I have been fortunate to receive help from a number of people. First I warmly acknowledge the wise counsel and unstinting support of Professor Jack Spence, OBE, formerly of King’s College, London and Mr. William Tyler, MBE, former principal of the City Literary Institute in London: both have made suggestions which have greatly enhanced the quality of this book. Likewise, Professor Geoffrey Till, former Dean of the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham, and Mr. Adrian Phillips, notable author and historian, have read the whole script and made numerous suggestions for improvement. Other friends who have given me much mental and moral support include Mr. John Smith, CBE, former Colonial Governor of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands and Professor Anthony Fletcher, formerly of Sheffield and Durham Universities. To all the foregoing, I am and remain most grateful.

However, I cannot conclude without paying the warmest possible tribute to my partner, Wendy Maher, who has supported me in this venture from start to finish and done me proud. Such errors as remain, alas, are mine and mine alone.

Jonathan Farley January 2023



ACADEMIC COMMENDATIONS


Jonathan Farley has produced a well researched and cogently argued account of post 1945 international relations. The text will be an invaluable and timely source both for students and the lay public seeking a detailed account and invigorating analysis of a complex topic. The tone throughout is dispassionate and the substance always relevant, demonstrating sophisticated perception and scholarship.

Professor JE Spence OBE
Kings College, London
Dept of War Studies

•••

A wonderful guide to modern global history for amateur and professional alike. Written in an easy and absorbing style. Highly recommended.

William Tyler MBE – former Principal of The City
Literary Institute, London

•••

We all have less time than we would like and we all know that the pace of change in the world around us is getting faster and faster. We are all affected to some extent at least, and often substantially, by what happens everywhere else. Trying to keep up with all of this, while avoiding the simplifying lure of fake news, is getting more and more difficult for the average, interested citizen. We need to do it, we want to do it, but there’s just no time. Hence the value of reader-friendly and balanced surveys like the one in this book. Jonathan Farley shows how important the past is to the present and future, and covers all of the really important aspects of the world around us. He does this in a concise and readable way which is authoritative, fair and balanced. He ends with some thoughtful remarks about the future that the past has produced and explains the things that as interested – maybe concerned – citizens we should all be thinking about. Whether as your first step into understanding the world around us, or as your last and only one, this book is highly recommended.

Professor Geoffrey Till, OBE
Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham



Introduction


This is not a book intended for established students of international politics but rather for those interested in the subject and anxious to know more about it. It does not therefore pre-suppose any great degree of knowledge on the part of readers but it does pre-suppose that they will be people of alert and enquiring minds, attributes essential to achieving the goals to which this book aspires. In terms of our educational system it should be useful to those in the upper echelons of secondary schools and in the first two years of university but, hopefully, its appeal will be wider than that.

My own credentials for writing it at all stem from nearly thirty years spent as a tutor and lecturer in the Department of History and International Affairs at the former Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Between 1968 and 1997 several thousand serving naval officers came my way as students of the various forces – economic, political, strategic and diplomatic – which together made up the contemporary world. Naturally their performance varied: those with questing and conscientious minds succeeded, those without them did not. I, as their tutor, had the responsibility of paving their way and smoothing their path towards a greater understanding and appreciation of the world in which they lived. My task was to kick open doors hitherto closed to them: theirs to explore the rooms which lay beyond. Obviously, there were times when I fell short of success, but overall I like to think that my efforts were valued and rewarded, not in any financial sense but in that of delivering a student body more aware and enlightened when they departed than when they arrived.

The Department of History and International Affairs, of which I was a member, was aptly named, for the international politics of today can only be understood in the context of their past history. To take the Middle East as an example, the Arab and Israeli conflict over Palestine cannot be properly understood without reference to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and the Balfour Declaration of the previous year. Had the former held together the Balfour Declaration of 1917 would have been null and void. However, as things turned out, both these events opened the way for the return of the Jews to the former Turkish province of Palestine and their inevitable collision with those who were already there, the Arabs. Indeed, it is not sufficient to return just to 1917 but arguably to 135 AD when, following the second Jewish revolt against rule from Rome, the Romans expelled the overwhelming majority of them from Palestine. Thereafter they became a diaspora, a wandering people, settling by their wits wherever they could but always intending eventually to return to their ancestral home in Palestine. They alternatively wandered, settled or were expelled for nearly 2,000 years until the events of the first twenty years of the twentieth century provided them with the possibility of return.

Other historical examples abound. The European Union of 1992, at its inception in 1958 as the European Economic Community can only be fully appreciated in the context of European conflict, notably in the twentieth century but also in previous centuries. The Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648 and the Napoleonic Wars of 1802 to 1815 provide further examples of this. At the root of this conflict during the last 150 years has been the antagonism between Germany and France which culminated in the two world wars of the period 1914 to 1945. It was the determination of the powers of Continental Europe after 1945 to avoid any repetition of these that persuaded them to come together in the 1950s to create the European Economic Community and thereby to collaborate in pooling the resources of Europe rather than fighting over them. The United Kingdom (UK) stood aloof from this development because it regarded both its Commonwealth and American relationships as more important and the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe likewise, because they viewed the EEC as a capitalist and hence anti-communist block.

These two examples from the Middle East and Western Europe serve to illustrate the importance of history regarding the study of contemporary international politics. A further example, again from the Europe of the 1930s, can be found in Nazi Germany’s aggression against its neighbours. At that time, despite the League of Nations, there was no viable collective security system in Europe and a lack of political will on the part of both the UK and France either individually or together to resist German aggression. By the end of the 1940s the importance of collective security had been recognised by the leading powers of Western Europe and, most crucially of all, by the United States (US). In May 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation came into being and still exists today: no other multilateral treaty has lasted so long. Whatever the strategic relationship between East and West may be now, it is generally accepted that the existence of NATO did provide Western Europe with collective security, albeit at a high price in terms of defence expenditure early on and, rather later, the risk of mutual annihilation between 1962 and the eventual demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

My conclusion, therefore, is that the study of the contemporary political scene must be closely linked, indeed intertwined, with the study of history. The world of today has grown out of previous worlds: whether that of 1989 when Communism went into general retreat in Eastern Europe or 1949 when NATO was established or 1945 when Hitler was finally defeated or 1918 when the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were overthrown. Students of today’s world must know something of yesterday’s and the more, the better: they cannot know too much.

This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 is concerned with the world out of which we have moved and Part 2 the world we have just entered. Part 3 deals with the skills of study and research and how to acquire the material.

Last, I recall from the early years of Nigerian independence the old adage ‘give us a light and the people will find the way’. This is what my readers will hopefully do in regard to the politics of the modern world with the help of this book.



Part 1


The World
We Have Left
1945 to 1991


The Aftermath of War


May 1945 witnessed the end of the Second World War in Europe. Japan, Germany’s ally in that war, had yet to be defeated though the defeat came a few months later in August 1945 following the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its defeat, like that of Germany before it, brought to an end a period of oppression in China and South East Asia, the like of which had never previously been experienced.

The defeat of the Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, had been achieved but at enormous cost in terms of loss of life and material destruction. Though the First World War did not prove, as many at the time hoped, ‘a war to end all wars’, there was a genuine belief by 1945 that a better world could be built anew, once the war was over, on the foundations of the one which had just been destroyed. The establishment of the United Nations (UN) Organisation at San Francisco in the autumn of 1945 was the main manifestation of this hope. Every sovereign state would have the right of membership in the plenary body, the General Assembly and international security, or so it was thought, would be guaranteed by the five leading powers of the world, the USA, the UK, France, the USSR (Soviet Union) and the Republic of China as permanent members of the Security Council, all of whom had been belligerent against the Axis in the Second World War and all of whom, it was generally assumed, would be in agreement as to how international peace and security could thereafter be maintained. This optimism prevailed until the end of 1945 but evaporated in the course of 1946 as a result of disagreement within the Security Council on a number of critical strategic and ideological issues. The initial conflict occurred between the US, UK and France on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other as to how a defeated Germany was to be administered. The latter saw it as important to keep Germany permanently in thrall, whereas the Western capitalist powers saw the rehabilitation of Germany and its eventual reunification as vital to the long term security of Europe. The Soviet Union had other ideas: it could only favour the reunification of Germany if it was ultimately under Soviet control. It feared its reunification under any other terms: the memory of Operation Barbarossa was still fresh. By the same token, the USSR looked askance at the prospect of ‘free elections’ in post-war Poland, lest these should bring an anti-Communist government to power in Warsaw which would raise a future possibility of attack from the West. Notwithstanding the fact that these had been promised by the Soviet Union at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the latter was in a position to refuse them because, by the end of hostilities, the Red Army was in control of the whole of Poland and much of Eastern Europe. Winston Churchill enunciated his fears in a speech at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946, stating ‘that from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent and we do not know what goes on behind it’.

From 1946 onward, the politico-strategic antagonism between East and West increased yet further. In February 1948 the coalition democratic government of President Benes of Czechoslovakia was subverted by a coup engineered by that country’s Communist Party which was favourably disposed toward the Soviet Union. Dominant Communist party members succeeded in gaining access to key ministries such as defence and home security – with the result that Czechoslovakia was drawn rapidly into the Soviet sphere of influence, Russian troops being invited into the country and a machinery of internal repression rapidly established. Shortly afterwards in June 1948, the Soviet Union issued a challenge to the Western position in Berlin by cutting off the road and rail access routes to the city running through its zone of occupation. The Cold War had begun.