Soviet Union`s Participation in the Cold War

Running Head : Soviet Union 's Participation in the Cold War

Soviet Union 's Participation in the Cold War

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Introduction

`Cold War ' was a term which the leading ylites of the major world powers believed precisely described the international system between 1947 and 1991 . It indicated a conflicting conflict between , and sometimes within states . On the one hand were those who believed that the world economic system was inevitably capitalist and , to a lesser extent , that the favored political system was liberal democratic . On the other side

were those who had take in the lessons of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 that states would be ruled by a small self-selecting revolutionary ylite which could throw out capitalistic economic organization . Military victory in the Second World War ensured that the United States would lead those states which took the former place , the Soviet Union the latter . At no time was the Cold War regarded as the only constituent of the international system . In each state there were leaders who favored other views , championing , among others things , internal reform , national renewal , imperial consolidation or intra-capitalist competition

As the British intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1953

There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilocus which says 'The fox knows many things , but the hedgehog knows one big thing . taken figuratively the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide and thinkers , and , it may be , human beings in general . For there exists a great chasm between those , on one side , who relate everything to a single central vision , one system , less or more coherent or articulate in terms of which they understand , think and feel . and , on the other side , those who pursue many ends , often unrelated and even contradictory , connected , if at all , only in some de facto way (Isaiah Berlin , 1992 ,

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In each of the major powers the Cold War paradigm dominated its competitors for the entire post-war period . Hedgehogs struggled against foxes and usually won

The birth of the ideal , 1945-1950

The Second World War brought unity proposals more firmly to the fore in surprisingly varied places . Hitler sought to create a 'new ' in Europe and to depict his invasion of Russia as a latter-day struggle against Bolshevism . In June 1940 Britain proposed an eternal union ' to France , in a last desperate bid to keep the latter in the war Resistance groups on the continent often produced schemes for a European structure which could avert another war and some were ready to form a political federation . In London representatives of the Belgian , Dutch and Norwegian governments-in-exile all hoped for British leadership of a postwar alliance system , and many British officials and ministers came to consider that a Western bloc could both control Germany in future and bolster British standing in the world in relation to America and Russia The British , like Norway 's Trygve Lie (who conceived...