Sobre y subinversión en las empresas con dificultades financieras

The western alliance which was created to wage the Cold War came into existence on 4 April 1949, during the blockade of Berlin. Two years earlier such an alliance would have seemed impossible because of the strength of the communist parties of France and Italy, but during 1947 communists were excluded from the government of these two countries and the belief that they were ungovernable without communist partici-pation was proved false. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was an asso-ciation of 12 states which declared that an armed attack on any one of them in Europe or North America would be regarded as an attack on them all, and that each would, in such an event, go to the help of the ally attacked by taking such action, including the use of force, as it deemed necessary. The area covered by the treaty was defined as the territories of any signatory in Europe or North America, Algeria and islands, vessels or aircraft of any signatory in the Atlantic north of the tropic of Cancer; the treaty would also be brought into operation by an attack on the occupation forces of any signatory in Europe. Greece and Turkey joined the alliance in 1952 and the German Federal Republic in 1955. The creation of NATO was an affirmation of the dissolution of the wartime alliance. It was based on fear of Russian aggression, com-pounded by revulsion against the nature of Russian domination in eastern Europe, frustration turning to hostility in German affairs, the exposure of western Europe as a result of war damage and demobilization, and the failure to internationalize the control of atomic energy.

In 1945 the American war-making capacity had been supreme even without nuclear weapons, but in the next years a new pattern was created by American demobilization.

While American supremacy was guaranteed by the nuclear bomb, the Russians, by not demobilizing, established superiority in mobilized land power in Europe. Thus, all future attempts to disarm were bedevilled by the impossibility of comparing like with like; the defence of western Europe became dependent on nuclear power and nuclear strategy and ultimately the collective defence of western Europe provoked dissension about inter-allied control over nuclear weapons. Whereas in 1945 there had been some qualms and, on the Russian side, some hopes of an American retreat from Europe, four years later the United States was formally committed to a dominant role in European affairs for the next 20 years. Realizing too late what had been brought about, Stalin proposed in 1948 the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Germany, but his offer was regarded as a mere device to make the Americans take a long journey from which they would not return, while the Russians remained within striking distance of Germany.

So long as Germany was debatable ground the United States would remain on it.

Hence western Germany’s eventual place in NATO alongside its recent enemies.

The Cold War was a short episode in the history of Europe but it assumed at the time an air of permanence owing to the metaphors of frigidity and rigour in which it was discussed. Its two principal features were apparent in 1946 in the speeches by Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, in February in Truman’s presence and by Truman’s sec-retary of state, James F. Byrnes, at Stuttgart in September. These speeches showed that the tripartite wartime alliance was being replaced by a new pattern of two against one and that the United States, so far from turning its back on Europe (and in spite of the reduction of American forces in Europe from 2.5 million men to fewer than half a million at the date of the Fulton speech), regarded Europe as an essential American sphere of influence. Although Truman had to accept virtual exclusion from central and eastern Europe, he secured by the Truman Doctrine of March 1947 a foothold in the Balkans and the Middle East at the time when he was preparing to consolidate anti-communist and anti-Russian positions in western Europe by a combination of eco-nomic aid and military alliance – embodied in the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty. These were the beginnings of the policy of containment, designed to curb Russian power and change the Russian mood, but little more than a year after the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty this essentially European policy was complicated by a distant event, the outbreak of war in Korea, which became a drain on the forces available for containment in Europe and converted containment from a European to a more nearly global policy.

The Korean War also embittered the atmosphere. In the United States it was treated as evidence to fortify the myth of a masterly communist conspiracy to conquer the world. Senator Joseph McCarthy, alleging that this conspiracy extended into the United States government itself and other centres of influence, conducted a repellent smear campaign in which he and his associates intimidated important segments of the public service by denouncing as communists (or homosexuals) anybody who did not subscribe to their extreme views of how loyal Americans ought to think: a number of Americans were driven into exile and some to suicide, and the formulation and conduct of American external policies were corrupted and demoralized before McCarthyism was anaesthetized by a few bold individuals, by its own excesses and by the residual good sense of the American people – without much help from their more supine elected leaders. This atmospheric pressure affected the American election cam-paign of 1952 in which the Republicans, in their bid to recapture the presidency for the first time since 1932, adopted General Dwight D. Eisenhower as their candidate. The principal Republican spokesman on foreign affairs was John Foster Dulles, soon to be secretary of state.

McCarthyism apart, there were grounds for questioning the Democrats’ foreign policies. The United States was engaged in a grievous war; the USSR was not; contain-ment seemed to mean peace for the Russians who, although prevented from expanding,

remained unconstrained in their treatment of their satellites, whose fate bore uneasily on the American conscience. In his election speeches Dulles gave the impression that the Republicans would come to the aid of the enslaved people of eastern Europe and somehow liberate them from Russian domination. This was Dulles’ contribution, aimed at Americans with eastern European roots, to making a Republican president electable and after the Republican victory it was rapidly forgotten. Instead Dulles pro-ceeded with the policy of containment, filling the gap between NATO and the American position in Japan by fostering SEATO (the South East Asia Treaty Organization) and the Baghdad Pact (pp. 328, 395). He also tried to escape from the frustrations of con-tainment, which he had criticized for being a series of responses to Russian initiatives, by evolving a strategy of massive retaliation to be applied at times and places of American choosing. But when in Indo-China in 1954 the United States had the choice between massive retaliation and acquiescence in an ally’s defeat, it chose the latter and so acknowledged that massive retaliation contained a large element of bluff.

In Europe the United States, having successfully annexed western Germany to NATO, accepted as a corollary the impossibility of dislodging the Russians from eastern Germany, which was turned into a satellite communist adjunct of the Russian empire in Europe. After passing through similar stages – an economic council, a parliament, a constitution, the election of a president (Wilhelm Pieck) and prime minister (Otto Grotewohl) – the eastern zone became in March 1954 a separate state under the name of the German Democratic Republic. The integration of western Germany into the western camp involved the end of the occupation and the negotiation of agreements which would both ally the Federal Republic with other western states and allow the latter some control over German rearmament. The three principal western powers offered to terminate their occupation of the Federal Republic if it would join a European Defence Community in which national forces would be subject to interna-tional control, and in May 1952 a convention was signed at Bonn ending the occupa-tion and a European Defence Treaty was signed the next day. Elecoccupa-tions in 1953 gave Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union, a two-to-one victory and in 1954 the Federal Republic ratified the European Defence Treaty. The French parliament, however, refused to ratify a treaty which restored German military might without a countervailing British commitment, whereupon Britain jettisoned part of its traditional aversion to meaningful peacetime associations and promoted the Western European Union (WEU) created by the Treaty of Paris in 1954 and comprising Britain, France and the Benelux countries (which had been associated by treaty since 1948) together with Italy and the Federal Republic. The end of the occupation of West Germany was confirmed and the Federal Republic joined NATO. With the ratification of these agreements in May 1955 the Federal Republic became an almost fully fledged member of the western alliance. It forswore the manufacture of nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons and accepted a form of inspection over industrial concerns. In return it got a reiterated pledge on

reunification, the recognition of the government in Bonn as the government of the whole of Germany, and the privilege of contributing 12 divisions to NATO’s forces.

In March 1953 Stalin died. Churchill thought he saw an opportunity to arrest the collision course of the two alliances. In keeping with his own predilections in interna-tional diplomacy he proposed a personal meeting of heads of government, but the temper of the times was inimical, the Americans (and many in Britain) were cool, the West Germans suspicious, and Churchill himself soon afterwards suffered a stroke.

Riots in eastern Germany in June encouraged those in the west who preferred to wait for the USSR to get into deeper trouble, while in the USSR Stalin’s death was followed by an interlude of three years. But neither in those years nor for a generation after did any Russian leader make any radical attempt to change the system which Stalin had inherited from Lenin. Nikita Khrushchev attacked Stalin as an individual and an icon;

Leonid Brezhnev adhered to the system for fear of something worse; Yuri Andropov, who was alert, and Konstantin Chernenko, who was not, accepted the inadvisability of doing otherwise. Only after 1989 did Mikhail Gorbachev embark on reform and Boris Yeltsin lead a revolution.

Stalin’s death followed very closely the election of Eisenhower to the presidency of the United States. Eisenhower was a president who had seen more of the world and its affairs than his immediate predecessor or any of his successors in the twentieth century.

By standing for that office he fended off a victory for the potentially isolationist or McCarthyite section of the Republican Party and, in partnership with his secretary of state John Foster Dulles, marginally but decisively adjusted Truman’s more com-bative nuclear style. He continued Truman’s policy of aid to anti-communist allies and developed the politics of arms control which became after many tedious years a major element in the dismantling of the Cold War. He eschewed the personal style which characterized Nixon and Reagan in their different ways and was of so retiring a nature that he was accused of indolence, but he may be judged in longer retrospect the most significant president of the United States in the relatively peaceable half of the twenti-eth century.

In the year before Stalin’s death the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had held its nineteenth congress after an unconstitutional delay of 13 years, probably occasioned by the party leaders’ need for time after the war to set many houses in order. Although nobody knew how nearly Stalin’s death was approaching, the succes-sion was uppermost in all minds. By his handling of the congress’s business Stalin indi-cated a preference for G. M. Malenkov who, having outlived A. A. Zhdanov, looked like outpointing his most serious rival N. S. Khrushchev. Zhdanov’s death in 1948 had been followed in 1949 by a purge of his associates; the older men had been regressing for some years and the two most eminent among them, Molotov and Mikoyan, had lost their ministerial posts (though not their other positions) in 1949; the police chief Lavrenti Beria, too, seemed somewhat less favoured and less powerful in the early 1950s, despite his control over a police force of 1.5 million men and a militia of

300,000. Then in January 1953 in a mounting frenzy of anti-Semitism nine doctors, seven of them Jews, were accused of complicity in the death of Zhdanov. This so-called doctors’ plot, which was declared to be baseless after Stalin’s death, combined anti-Semitism with an attack on Zhdanov’s enemies, and it was no secret that Zhdanov’s principal enemy was the man who had most markedly profited by his death, Malenkov.

When, therefore, Stalin died Malenkov’s position was less promising than it had seemed a year earlier, but it was still strong enough to ensure his succession to the top posts in both government and party. This initial victory was secured in alliance with Beria but it did not last long. Malenkov and Beria may have had some similar ideas, notably in helping the consumer industries at the expense of heavy and armaments industries, but Beria was an exceptionally unpopular and dangerous man, personally and ex officio, and for Malenkov the support of the country’s chief policeman was off-set by the hostility of the armed services, which disliked both Beria’s private army and Malenkov’s economic policy: Beria was killed within a few months of Stalin’s death.

Soon after the end of the war Stalin, who did not see himself as a Bonaparte and did not want any Bonapartes around, had set about putting the army and its leaders safely back in a position of subordination to the civil power, but in the struggle for power after his death the army was inevitably a major counter and Khrushchev, who had mil-itary friends from his days as a commissar on the Stalingrad front, decided to use it. At first he did not have to. The devolution of Stalin’s entire position on any one man was more than any of the principal civilian leaders, except Malenkov himself and possibly Beria, was prepared to tolerate. Power was almost immediately divided. Malenkov was forced to choose between being head of the government and head of the party. He chose the former and ceded the latter post to Khrushchev. The antagonism of the two men was thus institutionalized. Two teams of five faced each other. Malenkov and four others formed the top layer of government while Khrushchev and four others constituted the party secretariat. This position lasted until 1955 when Khrushchev defeated Malenkov, partly by reviving rumours of Malenkov’s complicity in Zhdanov’s death and the subsequent purge and by accusing Malenkov of having conspired with Beria to establish personal instead of collective rule on Stalin’s death and partly by manu-facturing a war scare which created the alliance between himself and the army. In February 1955 Khrushchev secured the removal of Malenkov and his substitution at the head of the government by Bulganin, who was destined to stay there as long as Khrushchev felt it inopportune to claim the post for himself. Bulganin was succeeded at the ministry of defence by Marshal G. K. Zhukhov. Other changes were made at top ministerial level where there seemed to be a shift from political veterans to technical experts, although the chopping and changing of these years more probably reflected uncertainties and inconsistencies in economic planning.

Khrushchev’s personal pre-eminence lasted from 1957 to 1964 but was never as secure as it seemed to outsiders. It was won in spite of mistakes which were not forgotten, notably his failure when put in charge of agriculture by Stalin. His policy of

exploiting virgin lands in Kazakhstan was radical and sound but disastrously applied in the short run. His political acumen and agility enabled him to survive this setback and, for some years thereafter, the disfavour and machinations of his colleagues who, after forcing Malenkov into the shadows, discovered that Khrushchev was at least as keen on personal authority and impatient with the committee system. But when the elder statesmen in the party tried in 1957 to remove him, he outwitted them and strengthened his own position until he forfeited it through waywardness.

In external affairs Khrushchev’s term consisted of a short and emollient prelude when he was manoeuvring against domestic rivals and a longer period which displayed his erratic, if agreeable and extrovert, temperament. This latter period included major events: risings in Poland and Hungary, the launching of the first sputnik, the building of the Berlin wall, irremediable quarrels with China and his attempt to install nuclear missiles in Cuba.

In the uncertain years immediately after Stalin’s death Russian foreign policy was cautious. The German and Austrian problems were brought to the conference table, as were also Korea, where an armistice had been signed in July 1953, and Indo-China.

Bulganin and Khrushchev made their peace with Tito, surrendered Porkkala in Finland and Port Arthur, put forward new disarmament proposals, visited India, Burma, Afghanistan (the first non-communist recipient of Russian aid) and Britain, and repaired in July 1955 to a meeting at Geneva with the American president and the British and French prime ministers. This meeting was a demonstration in favour of relaxing the Cold War. It produced some euphoric notions – a non-aggression treaty between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, proposed by the USSR; a free-inspection zone, proposed by Eden; and an open-skies survey, proposed by Eisenhower. An ancillary conference of foreign ministers, designed to give point and precision to the Geneva atmosphere, was a failure and this first attempt to thaw the Cold War was brought to nought by the Polish and Hungarian revolts of 1956. But the leaders had met and had set an example of decent manners and the pursuit of tolerance. In the late 1950s the Russian armed forces were cut from 5.8 to 3.6 million. A further cut of 1.2 million, announced in 1960, was postponed, presumably as a result of military pressure which became more potent after the failure of the summit conference in Paris in 1960.

In relation to Germany Stalin’s successors toyed with schemes for reunification, evacuation and neutralization, but in the knowledge that the Americans were com-mitted to two propositions unacceptable to the USSR: reunification by means of free elections and not by sticking the two Germanies together (which the Russians wanted and which entailed treating the Federal Republic and the much smaller and undemo-cratically constituted Democratic Republic as equals), and freedom for the reunified state to make alliances (namely, to join NATO). At a conference in Berlin at the begin-ning of 1954 Eden and Molotov produced plans which demonstrated the

In relation to Germany Stalin’s successors toyed with schemes for reunification, evacuation and neutralization, but in the knowledge that the Americans were com-mitted to two propositions unacceptable to the USSR: reunification by means of free elections and not by sticking the two Germanies together (which the Russians wanted and which entailed treating the Federal Republic and the much smaller and undemo-cratically constituted Democratic Republic as equals), and freedom for the reunified state to make alliances (namely, to join NATO). At a conference in Berlin at the begin-ning of 1954 Eden and Molotov produced plans which demonstrated the