Introduction: Empire by Consent versus Empire by Coercion

What role did Yugoslavia play during the Cold War? Did the US create an “empire by consent” in Western Europe after World War II? Did the Soviet Union create an “empire by coercion” in Eastern Europe? Did both superpowers create Empires or spheres of influence, dividing Europe into two power blocs? What function did Yugoslavia serve in this tug of war between the two superpowers?

The US created an “empire” in Western Europe following World War II, incorporating West Germany into the US-led capitalist market economy and into the US-led NATO military alliance. It was an “empire” because the US created a political, economic, and military bloc which it controlled and exploited for its benefit and national interests. (1) By this standard definition, the US-led bloc was part of “the American Empire”. By 1953, the US had adopted a balance of power approach to security that necessitated the creation of two opposing blocs, or two rival “empires” or power aggregations as enunciated in the Truman Doctrine of 1947.

The key to the Cold War in Europe was Germany. By 1953, US foreign policy toward Germany had ossified to the point where detente with the Soviet Union was not possible in the next decade. Three factors were responsible for this ossification of US policy: The Truman Doctrine, the incorporation of Germany into the US-led capitalist market system, and the incorporation of West Germany into the US-led NATO military alliance.

Tito, far right, with Stalin, center, and Molotov in April, 1945 in Moscow.

Yugoslavia between East and West

Yugoslavia did not play a dominant role in the US-Soviet Cold War conflict the way Germany did. At the start of the Cold War in 1945, Yugoslavia was part of the Soviet Communist bloc. A shooting war between the US and Yugoslavia was narrowly averted in 1945 during the territorial dispute with Italy, a key US ally, over Trieste. Paradoxically, the US and Britain had supported the Soviet-backed and Soviet-allied Communist guerrilla movement of Josip Broz Tito while rejecting the British and US ally General Draza Mihailovich, who was anti-Communist. In other words, the US and Britain brought the Communist regime to power in Yugoslavia, under the rationale that it was more effective against the German occupation and that it had a larger basis of support within the Yugoslav population.. By 1948, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform and the Soviet-led Communist bloc of nations. This resulted in a radical shift in US foreign policy towards Yugoslavia. US policy now exploited the rift between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union and the Soviet or Communist bloc. Yugoslavia was, in its turn, able to exploit its “unaligned” position between the two superpowers and their two respective blocs or “empires”. This unaligned position created balance and stability in Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav regime was able to play the two superpowers off against each successfully and to benefit economically and strategically and militarily. Once the Cold War ended in 1989, this balance and stability ended as well for Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was no longer juxtaposed between two powerful military and economic blocs. With the break-up of the USSR and the Warsaw pact, the Communist bloc disintegrated. This resulted in throwing the balance off kilter for Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was now under pressure from the US-led bloc. Yugoslavia could not withstand this pressure and by 1991, Yugoslavia began disintegrating and falling apart. To understand the Yugoslav breakup and the subsequent secessionist and separatist conflicts that ensued, the role of Yugoslavia during the Cold War has to be analyzed.

Containment

US foreign policy evolved and developed from 1945 to 1953 into a rigid policy of containment and confrontation with the Soviet Union. What is the key to explaining the role of Germany in US foreign policy? Geir Lundestad argued that the US had created “an empire by invitation” in Western Europe from 1945-1952, while the Soviets had an “empire by force” or imposition. (2) Both the US and USSR created “empires”, but the US created an “empire of liberty”, while the Soviets created a totalitarian empire by force. How did this empire result? Was it planned? Was it inherent in US foreign policy or diplomacy?

Tito signing agreement of friendship and cooperation between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in April, 1945 in Moscow with Stalin in the background.

The US had no long-range plan or strategy for Germany in 1945. As John Gaddis noted, the US had no “grand design” after the end of World War II. (3) As Jean Smith showed, US policy evolved and crystallized towards Germany from 1945 to 1953 in a gradual and incremental process. (4) Why and how did US foreign policy towards Germany ossify by 1953? Three events occurred that ossified US policy towards Germany by 1953. American military capability in Europe was not as severely limited as it was in 1945. The Soviet Union still had an advantage in ground forces in Europe, but by 1953, the US had set up the NATO alliance that greatly boosted US capability on the ground. Military planning was complete and coordinated by 1953. Economically, Germany was integrated in the US-led market system. The US had clearly defined foreign policy objectives in Germany and Western Europe by 1953. Finally, a broad consensus had emerged in the US about the need and necessity of containing Communism, in Germany, or in Korea, as exemplified by the Truman Doctrine. The US Congress became bipartisan in support of an aggressive containment policy by 1953. (5)  There was broad popular support in the US for aggressive action against Communism. Economically, socially, politically, militarily, all sectors of American society had been mobilized by 1953 to fight the threat of Communism. This popular consensus would be dramatically illustrated by the Sen. Joseph McCarthy “Communist witch hunts” which reached their climax at about 1953. Concomitantly with popular support and consensus, there was political consensus, in the Executive Branch, and in Congress. (6) US policy became one of confrontation and aggressive response to the Communist threat, not only in Germany, but in other parts of the globe. The Vietnam War would be a result of this confrontation and aggressive policy of containment in the next decade. But how did US foreign policy become so ossified by 1953 towards Germany? Was it always so rigid? Did the US create an “empire by consent” in Germany?

US foreign policy on Germany in 1945 was not formulated or developed. There were no clear-cut US policy goals towards Germany. The US had “no conceptual road-map, no clear image of Germany’s place in the world, no idée maitresse with which to plot Germany’s future.” (7) Initially, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt envisioned a harsh and punitive settlement for Germany that would dismember the country. (8) Roosevelt supported the Morgenthau Plan of US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau which sought to destroy the German economy and industrial capacity and create a “pastoral” or agrarian society. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff directive 1067 of April, 1945, sated that the goals of US policy in Germany consisted of demilitarization and decartelization. This meant that German industry and German military power would be destroyed. The goal was “preventing Germany from becoming again a threat to the world.” (9) Under 1067, any measures which sought to rehabilitate the German economy or which sought to maintain or strengthen the German economy were prohibited. Major General Lucius Clay stated that “our first objective is to smash whatever remaining power Germany may have with which to develop a future war potential.” (10) US policy thus initially was punitive towards Germany, similar to the Versailles Treaty of 1919.

There was also strong public pressure for demobilization and disarmament of American forces in Europe. (11)

Both US President Harry Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill rejected the Morgenthau Plan and Roosevelt’s initial plan to dismember Germany. By 1947, US policy towards Germany began to change and evolve. Why was there an important shift in US policy?  Truman and Churchill did not want to repeat the mistakes of World War I. Both had participated in that war and witnessed the disastrous economic, social, political, and military consequences following Versailles in 1919.

Tito meeting Winston Churchill in August, 1944, in Naples, Italy.

US Policy of “Double Containment”

As Anne Deighton showed in The Impossible Peace, no agreement could be reached between the US, USSR, and Britain on how to resolve the issue of unifying Germany. (12) Should Germany be reunited? On what terms should Germany be reunited? No agreement was reached. This meant that the division of Germany had to continue. Truman, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, George Kennan, and Lucius Clay favored a demilitarized Germany. This resulted in conventional military advantage on the ground for the Soviets. The Soviets had 27 divisions in East Germany, their zone of occupation, and could rely on up to 100,000 “People’s Police”, or paramilitaries which were seen as a camouflaged army. ((13) US policymakers thus began to see that a demilitarized Germany meant that the Soviet Union had military conventional superiority in Germany. Indeed, under Halfmoon, an emergency war plan announced by the JCS in April, 1948, it was conceded by the US that they could not defend Germany or Europe military on the ground. (14) Under Halfmoon, a US military retreat behind the Rhine River was proposed. Instead, the US plan was to use British air bases to bomb the Soviet Union with atomic bombs if war resulted. A dilemma thus emerged for the US. How do you strengthen the US position vis-à-vis the USSR without militarizing Germany? At first, US policy sought to contain both Germany and the USSR, a policy called “double containment”. (15)

The problem of creating a unified and coordinated defense strategy was complicated for the US by the fact that Four Powers occupied Germany. Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953, explained in his memoirs that “American ideas had changed greatly in the four years since the harsh occupation policy laid down in the April 1945 Joint Chiefs of Staff directive (JCS 1067). Why did US policy towards Germany change? Why did the US abandon the harsh and punitive Carthaginian peace for Germany? Acheson maintained that Lucius Clay had pronounced the policy goals of JCS 1067 as “unworkable”. (15) US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, in a speech on September 6, 1946, argued that Germany should not be turned into an “economic poorhouse” and that the Germans themselves should be given “primary responsibility for the running of their own affairs.” Economic factors contributed to this change in US policy. By destroying the economic potential of Germany, US policy only contributed to strengthening the Communist economies and in creating poverty and discontent in Germany and Western Europe. In order to integrate the economies of their spheres of occupation to foster greater economic productivity and efficiency, on May 29, 1947, Byrnes and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin agreed to unite the US and British zones into a single, unified economic unit known as “Bizonia”. The US still was not able to achieve a uniform or unified policy with regards to Germany because France opposed any plan that would strengthen Germany economically. In a May 8, 1947 speech in Cleveland, Mississippi, Acheson enunciated this new approach when he stated that the US should “push ahead with the reconstruction of those two great workshops of Europe and Asia---Germany and Japan.” President Truman, in his Memoirs (1955), referred to Acheson’s speech as “the prologue to the Marshall Plan.” (16) So by 1947, US policy was beginning to crystallize on integrating the German economy into the Western economy. US policy goals thus shifted in mid-1947 from a Carthaginian punitive occupation of Germany to a “more liberal” policy of allowing Germany to create “a self-sustaining economy” and allowing Germany greater economic initiative. US policy was beginning to gel on Germany. West Germany would be economically, politically, socially, culturally, and militarily integrated into a US block or defensive alliance system. On July 11, 1947, JCS directive 1779 reflected this change in US policy towards Germany. US policy thus was beginning the ossification process with regard to the US position on Germany. The outcome of the change in US policy favoring a more liberal economic approach in Germany was that German industrial output was allowed to reach the 1936 level, the last year of a German peace-time economy.

Why was there a change in US economic policy towards Germany? The US State Department quickly realized that a weak Germany economy was leading to “economic misery” in the other countries of Western Europe which only strengthened the popular appeal of already large Communist parties, especially in Italy and France. This was a repeat of the aftermath of World War I when economic ruin and collapse resulted from the punitive Versailles settlement. By punishing Germany economically, the US was inadvertently helping in the rise of Communism in Europe and strengthening the hand of the USSR. The US had to strengthen the economy of West Germany so that Western Europe as a whole could benefit. Strong Western economies would show the viability of capitalism and discourage Communist parties and movements. This was the rationale for the European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan, named after George C. Marshall, the new US Secretary of State since January 21, 1947, who sponsored this aid program that offered loans, raw materials and food to countries of Europe devastated by World War II. (17)

The final break with the USSR over Germany came with currency reform in the wake of the Marshall Plan. This was a crucial event in ossifying US policy in Germany vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. In implementing the Marshall Plan, currency reform was needed in Germany, necessitating the creation of a uniform currency. The new Deutsche Mark (DM) was introduced and production and price controls were ended in Bizonia in 1948. The new Mark was also introduced in West Berlin, which conflicted with the Soviet plan to introduce a uniform currency for all of Berlin. Acheson emphasized in his memoirs that the currency reform resulted in a total and final break with the USSR on Germany. Acheson wrote that “the much-needed currency reform for West Germany (though, at this time. Not for Berlin, still regarded as under four-power control) triggered the final break with the Soviet Union in Germany.” (18) The currency reform of 1948 was a water-shed event in the ossification of the US position in Germany. As Melvyn Leffler noted, the “Russians were making substantial concessions” in the Allied Control Council discussions on the currency reforms. “But the State Department no longer wanted an agreement” with the Soviets. (19)

Tito, middle, with Egypt's Abdel Nasser, left, and India's Jawaharlal Nehru on July 19, 1956 at the time of the Brioni Declaration, when the Non-Aligned Movement was formed.

The US policy to create a uniform currency for Bizonia and to give control of the German economy in their sectors to local control resulted in the Berlin Blockade, the first major crisis and conflict between the US and USSR in Germany. On June 7, the US, UK, France, and the Benelux countries had announced in London that they favored revitalizing the German economy. On June 11, the Soviets stopped rail traffic between Berlin and West Germany fro two days. On June 18, the US, UK, and France announced that they would introduce currency reform in West Germany. The Soviets responded with their own currency reform for East Germany and for all of Berlin. The US, UK, and France also introduced currency reform in West Berlin. The next day, the Soviets retaliated with a full land blockade of Berlin. The US response was the Berlin airlift. As Dean Acheson described in his memoirs, Present at the Creation, the US and Soviet confrontation over Berlin in 1948 came close to precipitating a war between the two superpowers. The Soviets had superiority on the ground while the use had air superiority. The Soviets could either not interfere in the airlift, or they could initiate an attack in an area where they lacked air superiority. Moreover, whoever fired the first shot would bear responsibility in starting a war. US policy on Berlin had thus ossified by the time of the Berlin Airlift of 1948. The Cold War was now in full swing in Germany. The two superpowers were now in hostile camps or blocks. Compromise and negotiation were precluded. The die was now cast.

Concomitantly with the economic revitalization and integration of Germany in the Western block under US leadership, was the plan to form a joint defensive military bloc against the Soviet Union. In choosing collective security in the form of mutually antagonistic military blocks, the US and USSR had chosen the “balance of power approach” to global security, rejecting “internationalism”. (20) This approach was based on the “realist” school headed by Hans Morgenthau. Under this foreign policy paradigm, nations only sought power; everything else was a chimera. (21). George F. Kennan was also a “realist”, who had devised the containment strategy. They created a zero-sum balance of power, Manichean ideological foreign policy paradigm for US foreign policy. By 1950, US foreign policy was based on a geopolitical balance of power paradigm in Germany.

The Truman Doctrine

Did US perceptions of the USSR ossify the US position on Germany by 1953? John Gaddis argued that people who actually lived through the Cold War saw it as a conflict between good and evil. (22) In his Memoirs, President Truman referred to “Soviet Russia” as an “imperialistic nation” and as a “totalitarian”. Truman saw the Soviet threat as “the new menace facing us” which “seemed every bit as grave as Nazi Germany and her allies had been.”(23) For Truman then, compromise, negotiation, or detente with the Soviet Union was out of the question because he regarded the USSR as a totalitarian nation which was as serious a threat as Nazi Germany had for the US. Truman delivered a speech on March 12, 1947 before a joint session of Congress to announce what came to be called “The Truman Doctrine”. In his Memoirs, Truman calls it “the turning point in America’s foreign policy, which now declared that wherever aggression, direct or indirect, threatened the peace, the security of the United States was involved.”  Truman argued that “the world today looks to us for leadership.” Truman saw it as “a critical period of our national life.” He described the new US global commitment as “the process of adapting ourselves to the new concept of our world responsibility” and described it as “a difficult and painful one. “ The US could not stand by with “easy detachment” or “indifference” “while the struggle for the rights of man goes forward in other parts of the world.” Truman wanted a clean break with the isolationist tradition that he recalled from World War I and the “Fortress America” movement. Truman created a bi-polar vision or dichotomy of the world into the “free world”, led by the US and its allies, and the “totalitarian” world represented by the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. The Truman Doctrine represented a crystallization or ossification of US policy. The US now had a strategy and plan and ideology for the Cold War.

After the Truman Doctrine, the US became what French political scientist Raymond Aron termed an “imperial republic”. Throughout US history, there was an oscillation between “globalism” and “isolationism”, between a crusading Wilsonian internationalism, what Aron called “the Wilson syndrome”, and a republic that avoided “entangling alliances” as George Washington prescribed. As Aron noted, the US realized that it had “world responsibility” in the inter-state system and the world economic market. For Aron, the “imperial republic” had to find a way between globalism and isolation, a middle way. This was the challenge that faced Truman in 1947. In his Memoirs, Truman explicitly discussed this issue and why the US had to assume leadership of the free world, “American paramountcy”. Truman committed American foreign policy to engagement in the world, a policy of aggressive containment and confrontation. Once this hurdle was surmounted, US foreign policy during the Cold War attained a consistency that remained throughout. As Truman himself noted, the Truman Doctrine was “a turning point” in US foreign policy during the Cold War. It crystallized US policy and created an ideology of the free world pitted against totalitarian Communist aggression. There was no turning back after this point. It was a defining moment in US foreign policy and created the ideological underpinning for the Cold War in Europe. The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 did not result in a change in US foreign policy towards Germany or the USSR because the US was by 1953 committed to a set foreign policy vision and agenda.

Yugoslavia: A Fissure or Breach in the Iron Curtain

Yugoslav Communist/Partisan guerrilla leader Josip Broz Tito met Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov during the signing of the Agreement on friendship and collaboration between Yugoslavia and the USSR in Moscow on April 11, 1945. Yugoslavia was firmly in the Communist or Soviet-led camp during the early stages of the Cold War. The US perceived Yugoslavia as part of a monolith Communist bloc directed from Moscow. US policymakers regarded Yugoslav foreign policy as an extension of Soviet foreign policy. The US policy of containment was, thus, applied to Yugoslavia. The break between Stalin and Tito in 1948 caught US policymakers totally by surprise. This was because they were deluded by their ideological rigidity and by fear of Soviet and Communist power, real or imagined. This paranoia would explode during the 1950s Communist witch hunts and Red Scare mass hysteria orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

What was the reaction to the Truman Doctrine of March, 1947 in Yugoslavia and the USSR? In September, 1947, the Soviet bloc created the Cominform, which was initially headquartered in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. The Truman Doctrine was perceived as a strategy for conducting an ideological and economic war against the Soviet-led Communist countries, which then included Yugoslavia. The Cominform, Communist Information Bureau, was called the "Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties" by the Communist countries.

The Cominform was created by the USSR as a reaction to the Truman Doctrine and as an ideological instrument in the Cold War struggle. It was founded in September, 1947, at a gathering of Communist party heads  founded in Szklarska Poreba, Poland. The conference addressed the issue of Marshall Plan Aid. The Paris Conference of July, 1947 proposed economic aid to western and eastern Europe. There was disagreement between the Communist states on whether to accept Marshall Plan Aid. The decision was ultimately reached to reject economic aid. The Cominform was intended to create a unified and consistent policy against the Western powers. The Soviet Union sought to coordinate and direct the policies of the national Communist parties. A publication of the Cominform was called “For Lasting Peace, For People’s Democracy.”

In June, 1948, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform, whose seat was then moved to Bucharest. The time following the Yugoslav expulsion is referred to as  the Informbiro period in Yugoslav history.

In 1956, the Cominform was disbanded after a thaw in relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. A modus vivendi or rapprocgement subsequently emerged between the two countries.