The Presence of the Superpowers in Europe (1947–54): An Overview

Abstract

The span of seven or eight years under review in chapters 7–10 were of course dramatic and tense in their own right. But they also determined the institutions and alignments that governed international (and often national) politics for more than forty years. We have learned once again from the unforeseen transformations in Eastern Europe during the last few years that the pace of historical change is often discontinuous. Brief, but extraordinary periods of turbulence can destroy and then create new political arrangements that will remain apparently stable for up to half a century — then to undergo another round of great transformations. The stable estatist and aristocratic order of the mid-eighteenth century was convulsed between the French Revolution and the Congress of Vienna. New principles and political legitimacy were introduced and political frontiers were transformed. But when the battles and regime changes came to an end, the post-Vienna equilibrium accommodated the industrialization of Western Europe and the renewed advent of middle-class political participants. A generation later the revolutions of 1848 and the national movements in their aftermath buffeted the Vienna settlement in turn. ‘Hitchhiking’, so to speak on Prussian power they led to a new equilibrium after the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Russian wars, an extraordinary few decades of economic growth and world expansion, but one that succumbed to its own inner tensions in the early twentieth century.