War and Peace

Abstract

Wars of liberation brought together the ‘Second World’ with Africa and Asia in the postwar period. This chapter traces how both sides recognized commonalities of purpose: how the memory of struggle of the Soviet Red Army, the Yugoslav partisans or even the nationalist Polish Home Army during the Second World War was integrated into a professed commitment to defend a hard-won anti-fascist and anti-imperialist world. Weapons were provided by Eastern Europeans as expressions of solidarity,and later as business opportunities; training camps for liberation movements were established across the region and beyond; its militaries took part in peace missions (e.g. following Vietnam), engaged in reconstruction efforts (e.g. Algeria) or resettled populations after other conflicts (e.g. Korea). Third World leaders sought to represent their own struggles as models to be supported by their Eastern European partners, whilst also identifying with the manner in which Europeans had overcome conflict on their own continent. Nevertheless, violence which had once been accepted as legitimate by a generation that had lived through the Second World War was more and more associated with the supposedly excessive demands of liberation movements, or with the threatening terrorism of Islamic groups. By the last decades of the Cold War, Eastern European Communist states were increasingly divided on these questions—whilst the Soviets and the GDR still saw revolutionary violence as acceptable in some circumstances, other elites preferred to propagate peace, solutions based in international law, and trade.