Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech

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Autor Larissa345

Veröffentlicht am 01.11.2018

Schlagwörter

Iron Curtain speech

Zusammenfassung

This presentation is about the Iron Curtain speech which was hold in 1946 by Winston Churchill. What was the intention of the speech, what was the content and what happened after this speech? Was the Iron Curtain speech the cause of the cold war?

When you talk about the Iron Curtain, you think of the Cold War. This meant sealing off the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union vis-à-vis the Western world.

The British politician Winston Churchill had coined this term in 1946. He thus described the isolation of the communist countries from the democratic countries. After the Second World War, Europe was divided into East and West by a sharply guarded border. East of the border were the countries which belonged to the sphere of influence of the communist Soviet Union such as Poland, Hungary, Romania or Bulgaria. To the west of this border were the democratic countries, which were more oriented towards the USA.
In Germany, the border ran through the middle of the country and separated the GDR from the Federal Republic of Germany. The GDR secured this border with high walls, barbed wire and watchtowers. In 1961 Berlin was divided into two parts by the heavily guarded Berlin Wall until 1989.
The postal revisionists prove their interpretations with a series of examples:
In the USA had only relied on STALIN’s promises after the war with regard to the granting of independent democratic development in the Eastern European countries. The Soviet security interests had been overlooked.
After 1945, the Soviet Union was less interested in building up its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe than in an expansive expansion of its social order. Rather, the goal of its foreign policy must be seen as the development of a so-called cordon sanitaire. This French term is to be understood as a security belt of allied states, which should protect the Soviet Union like a buffer against a resurgent Germany or also against other Western powers. After all, first Russia and then the Soviet Union were attacked twice from the West in both world wars.
Conversely, the politicians in Moscow had also perceived and misinterpreted the American reactions to their policies in Eastern Europe as aggressive measures directed against them. In this way, the Cold War would have “rocketed” due to mutual misinterpretations of the policies of both camps.
Even though the Iron Curtain hit Germany particularly hard because of the division, it was not only the Berlin Wall (13 August 1961 - 9 November 1989), the inner-German border and the Czechoslovak border fortifications to the Federal Republic that counted among them. It stretched throughout Europe from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea.
After the so-called Tito-Stalin break on 28 June 1948, Yugoslavia was no longer an Eastern bloc state and later founded the Non-Aligned Movement with Egypt, India and Indonesia, among others.
The Bering and La Pérouse Straits, the maritime borders of the USSR with the USA (Alaska) and Japan, were usually not included, although they were de facto part of the block border.
Parts of the inner-German border:
• Inner-German border
• Berlin Wall
• Border fortifications of Czechoslovakia to the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria
• Border fortifications between Hungary and Austria
• Bulgaria’s border fortifications with Greece and Turkey
The causes of the Cold War were on the one hand the clash of worldviews. Moreover, the ideological opposition between the Soviet Union and the United States had clearly emerged after the Russian October Revolution in 1917.
From a Western perspective, the Marxist-Leninist ideology of the Soviet Union (for example: classless communist society, dictatorship of the proletariat, nationalization of the means of production) with its claim to world revolution (traditional conception of the 1940s and early 1950s) was held responsible for the emergence and further development of the Cold War. Above all, the contrast between a market economy and a planned economy set the course for the fact that a common policy between West and East became impossible.
The collapse of the Eastern European economy was a major factor in the end. The planned economy had proved to be comparably efficient with the market economy and was unable to supply sufficient and competitive products. Instead of reducing the gap to the West, it grew.
People’s living standards fell, there was a shortage of consumer goods, technology is backward, agriculture cannot even provide enough staple food to supply people.
If the economy is unable to deliver, this naturally has a considerable impact on the state: a) it lacks financial resources; b) it loses legitimacy and acceptance among the people.
This is, of course, all the more serious the more strongly an economy is steered by the state itself - in a socialist state almost 100 per cent of the time.
The arms race is certainly also responsible for the economic misery. In order to be able to take part in this race on an ongoing basis, it was necessary to overtax the financial and economic possibilities.
The ideology and the political and social elites had lost much of their power of persuasion and prestige (in many states of the Eastern Bloc they had never possessed it). The elites had decoupled themselves from the people, thought and lived differently (in luxury). Ideology regarded itself as superior, but could not prove this in comparison to the West.

It should be noted that the USA also pursued the goal of a global expansion of its ideology (capitalism, democracy, parliamentarism, self-determination of the individual, etc.).
The collapse of the socialist system in practically all Eastern bloc states automatically ends the East-West conflict

In summary, Winston Churchill’s speech of March 5, 1946 was to a high extend the reason for the Cold War. There is no exact date for the beginning of the Cold War. Many assume that the Cold War began in 1945 with the victory over National Socialist Germany. After the Iron Curtain Speech, the Western powers moved further and further away from Roosevelt’s point of view. After his death in April 1945, his successor, Harry S. Truman, pursued a different policy. Truman’s view of Stalin remained extremely critical and he spoke the following words:
“If you don’t speak a clear language with Russia and face it with an iron fist, the next conflict is in sight. I am tired of pampering the Soviets”.
This view of the American president also shaped American poetry.
The West was planning to stabilize its own sphere of power and the Russians were also striving to expand their sphere of influence. Thus the “Cold War” was already preprogrammed.
The ideologies of the USA and the Soviet Union were not compatible under any circumstances. Soviet communism was opposed to capitalism and liberal democracy in the USA. The Iron Curtain served as a border guard for the communist countries. The main purpose of the Iron Curtain was to prevent people from fleeing communist-ruled countries to Western Europe.