Cold War, Decolonisation and Non-Aligned Movement Notes

The years between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 are called the Cold War. The two victors of the war, the United States and the Soviet Union, never fought each other directly, yet they divided the world into two armed camps, fought proxy wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and raced each other in arms and in space. The same decades saw the European empires break up as colony after colony in Asia and Africa became independent, and saw many of those new states refuse to join either camp. That refusal grew into the Non-Aligned Movement, in which India took the lead. Examiners draw from all three strands, usually as a single date, place or person.

How the Cold War began

The wartime alliance broke down over the fate of eastern Europe. Winston Churchill described the division in his speech at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, where he said an iron curtain had descended across the continent. The American answer was containment, set out by the diplomat George Kennan and announced as the Truman Doctrine on 12 March 1947, which promised help to countries resisting communism. Economic aid followed in the Marshall Plan, the European Recovery Programme, from 1948; the Soviet bloc replied with Comecon in 1949. The first crisis came over Germany, where the Soviet Union blocked the land routes into West Berlin from June 1948 and the Western powers supplied the city by air for almost a year. Military blocs completed the division: the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was signed at Washington on 4 April 1949, and the Soviet Union answered with the Warsaw Pact on 14 May 1955.

The flashpoints, decade by decade

Between the crises came detente, a thaw marked by arms control: the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks produced SALT I in 1972 and SALT II in 1979. The thaw ended with Afghanistan and returned only under Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policies of glasnost and perestroika loosened the Soviet grip on eastern Europe.

Decolonisation in Asia and Africa

Independence came to Asia first. India and Pakistan became free in 1947, Burma and Ceylon in 1948, and Indonesia was recognised in 1949 after four years of fighting the Dutch. France lost Indochina after the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, settled at the Geneva Conference the same year. In Africa, Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah became in 1957 the first colony south of the Sahara to win independence; 1960 is remembered as the Year of Africa because seventeen countries became free in that single year, and in the same year the United Nations General Assembly adopted its declaration on granting independence to colonial countries and peoples. Algeria won independence from France in 1962 after a war begun in 1954, Kenya followed in 1963 under Jomo Kenyatta, Zimbabwe in 1980 and Namibia in 1990, the last mainland colony in Africa. The Suez Crisis of 1956, after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, showed that Britain and France could no longer act as imperial powers without American consent.

Panchsheel and the Non-Aligned Movement

Jawaharlal Nehru argued that newly free states should judge each issue on its merits rather than sign away their freedom to a bloc. The policy was given a moral code in the five principles of peaceful coexistence, Panchsheel, written into the agreement on trade with the Tibet region of China on 29 April 1954: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. The Asian-African Conference at Bandung in Indonesia in April 1955 brought twenty-nine countries together and spread the idea. After a meeting of Nehru, Josip Broz Tito and Nasser in 1956, the first summit of non-aligned countries met at Belgrade in September 1961 with twenty-five members; Nehru, Tito, Nasser, Sukarno of Indonesia and Nkrumah of Ghana are counted its founders. The term non-alignment is credited to V. K. Krishna Menon, who used it in a United Nations speech in 1953. Non-alignment meant neither neutrality nor passivity: the movement campaigned against colonialism, apartheid and nuclear weapons, and in 1964 its members formed the Group of 77 to press economic demands. India hosted the seventh summit at New Delhi in 1983, where Indira Gandhi took the chair.