In Europe

‘containment’.
    The first step leading to that war of containment was the swerve to the political left that took place all over Europe, including the West: in England, the Conservatives had been replaced by Labour, in France the Communist Party became the country's largest, with a quarter of all votes in the October 1945 elections. In Italy, by late 1945, the PCI had 1.7 million members, and in the Netherlands and Norway the social democrats were making a clear mark on government policy. Countries everywhere were rushing to establish government pension plans and other social facilities, and in France a whole series of concerns – natural gas,coal, banks, Renault – had even been nationalised. With regard to foreign policy, however, most European social democrats entertained very conventional views, and the communist cabinet ministers in France and Italy maintained a low profile as well.
    Still, the Americans were becoming increasingly worried about the European ‘shift to the left’. When Churchill's government was replaced by a Labour cabinet in July 1945, they reacted immediately: within a few days, the celebrated Lend-Lease agreement had been withdrawn. Strict conditions were established for receiving Marshall Plan aid. In May 1947, the communists were removed from the government of France; a month later the Italian government also took on a clearly anti-communist aspect. When the Korean War broke out in 1950 and the Netherlands did not wish to send combat troops to this ‘decisive struggle’ against communism, the United States immediately threatened to stop all Marshall Plan assistance to that country. Later, President Truman would admit that the Marshall Plan was intended in part to curb the popularity of the left: ‘Without the Marshall Plan, it would have been difficult for Western Europe to remain free of the tyranny of communism.’
    The growing tension was accompanied by an immense propaganda offensive. Harold Macmillan warned of an ‘invasion of the Goths’; the Lenten pastoral letter from the Dutch bishops in 1947 dealt largely with ‘Godless communism’; dockworkers’ strikes in Amsterdam (1946) and London (1949), like the miners’ strikes in Belgium (1948), were seen as ‘communist plots’ to take over the country, and books like George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949) and
The God that Failed
(1950), as well as a collection of essays by Arthur Koestler, André Gide and other former ‘fellow travellers’ caused great furore. Three years later, almost nothing was left of the general sympathy for the brave Red Army in 1945.
Life
magazine dedicated an entire issue to the discrepancy in the number of troops maintained by the two superpowers: 640,000 GIs were faced off against 2.6 million Red soldiers. Hollywood films like
I Married a Communist
,
I was a Communist for the FBI
,
Red Planet Mars
and
The Red Menace
played to packed cinemas.
    This – at least partly spontaneous – mobilisation against communism strengthened the bonds between all non-communists. Just as during the war, a common enemy had been found, and this sense of unity becamealmost as important as the struggle itself. Both the left and the right began reconsidering their standpoints. In Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria, the social democrats dropped the term ‘class struggle’, while the Christian Democrats came up with new social policies: all across Europe, old conflicts were being abandoned or mollified. Anti-communism served in this as a kind of crystallisation point, a binding anti-ideology. Without a doubt, Stalin can be seen as one of the founders of a united Europe.
    In this way, sometime in winter 1946, the Soviet Union suddenly changed from a friend into a foe. From his office in Moscow in mid-February, the American diplomat George Kennan sent his superiors in Washington a biting analysis of Soviet policies. In that historical ‘long telegram’, Kennan pointed out the Soviet Union's permanent urge to expand its power and entered a plea for a new ‘containment doctrine’.‘At the bottom of the Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs is a traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,’ he wrote, and the main element of United States policy ‘must be that of a long term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies’.
    Three weeks later, on 5 March, 1946, the Cold War became a reality for one and all with Churchill's famous ‘Iron Curtain’