Europe

Abstract

After the devastation of WWII Europe reconstructed and then enjoyed a long period of peace and this was so despite the Iron Curtain and the confrontations across it that marked 40 years of the Cold War. There was violence, of course, but it was localized and, broadly, took two forms: either it consisted of massive interventions by the Soviet Army to maintain Russian control of its East European satellites or Warsaw Pact allies as in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland and East Germany; or it took the form of long-running sectarian violence by particular minorities within states as with the troubles in Ulster for Britain, the Basque separatists in Spain or the various left-wing revolutionary groups that arose during the 1960s such as the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany. These violent uprisings or longer-lasting attacks upon the status quo might, and often did, employ terrorist tactics as in Northern Ireland but did not resort to the use of mercenaries. Europe, on the other hand, was a major source of mercenaries over these years for operations beyond its own frontiers. Several western European countries, and most notably Britain and France, supplied mercenaries, either with the direct connivance of governments or, more generally, with governments doing nothing to prevent their recruitment for operations in the Third World. The Soviet Union, however, was not a source of mercenaries since the nature of its government system would not allow the recruitment of mercenaries in the way they could be recruited in the West.