The early 1960s saw some of the worst crises of the Cold War. In 1961, the issue of divided Berlin and the persistent brain drain of young East Germans to the West ultimately resulted in the erection ofthe Cold War’s most grotesque symbol, the Berlin Wall. A year later, another drama unfolded in the Caribbean after American planes photographed evidence of Soviet nuclear installations in Cuba. For a few weeks, the world - or at least those Americans tuned in to the coverage of the crisis - held their breath as a nuclear exchange appeared imminent. Both crises were, fortunately, solved (or at least diffused) through diplomatic channels. Yet, if the term "bipolarity" carried a true meaning, it was there and then, in the crisis-ridden early 1960s, when the Soviets and the Americans confronted each other "eyeball to eyeball," as Secretary of State Dean Rusk put it during the Cuban missile crisis, that bipolarity had the potential of escalating into a true global confrontation.
In Europe, the twin crises of 1961-62 were cruel reminders of the central role that the Soviet Union and the United States continued to play in determining the course of international relations. It may have been the Germans (East and West) that were most immediately touched by the tension over Berlin; it was surely the Europeans (East and West) that would suffer most should war break out. But it was Soviet and American tanks that faced each other at Checkpoint Charlie in the fall of 1961. A year later, no ally - not even Britain despite the ruminations of London’s erstwhile ambassador David Ormsby-Gore - was truly consulted in the course of the Cuban missile crisis. Nikita Khrushchev, for his part, had naturally seen little point in asking the members of the Warsaw Pact for their views on the matter. Europeans appeared as powerless bystanders in crises that had the potential of destroying not only their way of life, as nuclear theorists reminded people in the age of mutual assured destruction (MAD), but all kinds of life.2
Consequently, the Cold War appeared primarily, if not exclusively, as a game which could be decided only by the two principal protagonists.
Europeans were held hostage to the irreversible division of their continent, confirmed by the presence of Soviet and American troops in the center of Europe, and by the guardianship of officials in Washington and Moscow over massive and ever-growing nuclear arsenals. Worse, Europe seemed increasingly like a sideshow in the context of international relations in the 1960s. There were many other more urgent, more controversial, and, ultimately, more important issues. The Vietnam War, numerous postcolonial conflicts in Africa, and the never-ending scuffles in the Middle East commanded far more attention from American and Soviet policymakers than the diplomacy of a continent divided yet stable. To the chagrin of Europeans, policymakers in Washington and Moscow were also assigning more and more importance to the emerging triangular relationship between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Compounding their plight, Europeans - East and West - were economically dependent on the two superpowers. Although the place of the United States in the international economic structure was undergoing a major transformation in the 1960s and 1970s with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system,270 the United States retained a sizable positive trading balance vis-a-vis Western Europe. Similarly, the record of foreign direct investment (FDI) shows a continued European dependency on the United States.271 In the Soviet bloc, economic dependency was based on the continued dominance of the USSR over its Warsaw Pact client states who were compelled to follow the rules of the Soviet-led Comecon. Prevailing practices prevented any meaningful contacts between East European economies and Western Europe.272 Europe, then, was most definitely in the shadow of the superpowers.
What is then missing from the above description is the simple fact, increasingly documented by historians in recent years, that the Cold War international system was not a simple hierarchical construction. As John Gaddis puts it: "the 'superpowers,’ during the Cold War, were not all that 'super.’"273 There was much more fluidity and bargaining within the blocs than is usually portrayed. Multipolarity existed under the cloak of bipolarity, and the weak influenced the policies of the strong. To a large extent it had been the East
Germans who “drove the Soviets up the wall," as one historian has summed up the outcome of the Berlin crisis.274 Likewise, American restraint during the Cuban missile crisis - the Kennedy administration’s decision not to use airstrikes to destroy nuclear installations - was in part a result of sensitivity to the concerns of NATO allies about the consequences that might follow (for example, Soviet retaliation against Western forces in Berlin). And, perhaps most important of all, the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s was as clear an indication as any that the idea of a monolithic Communist bloc was but an imaginary construction.275
In the end, the crises of the early 1960s offered a great many challenges and opportunities to which Europeans responded in a variety of ways. In both East and West, though, it was evident that the caricature-like division of Europe and the world did not always conform to the interests and aspirations of individual nations and their leaders. Most importantly for the present discussion, East-West detente in Europe was in large part a response to the alternative policies advanced by a number of countries in the aftermath of the “Crisis Years." Indeed, any analysis of European detente needs to employ Tony Smith’s concept of “pericen-trism," the idea “that junior actors may have interests, passions, and types of leaders wanting to take advantage of what they perceive to be an international contest to give shape to domestic, or regional, or even global organizations of power that they conceive of in their own nationalist or ideological terms." In the 1960s and 1970s, there were several such “junior actors" in Europe, pursuing either their own national interests or the economic and political integration of the continent (or, more often, a mixture of both).276
World History
