Bipolar Containment

The UN Charter preserves Westphalia at planetary scale, with the Security Council's five permanent vetoes as the structural reservation of Great Power sovereignty. Decolonization extends the nation-state to most of Africa and Asia. The Cold War is, structurally, Westphalia frozen in place by mutually assured destruction.

Part of Farewell To Westphalia

15 moments in this segment.

1. 1945-06-26 — The UN Charter. Delegates of 50 founding states convene at the United Nations Conference on International Organization, San Francisco, spring 1945. Place: War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, San Francisco Figures: Edward Stettinius, United States · V.M. Molotov, Soviet Union · Anthony Eden, United Kingdom · T.V. Soong, Republic of China · Georges Bidault, France · 50 founding member states The Five Permanent Vetoes Article 27 of the Charter: substantive decisions of the Security Council require the concurring votes of all five permanent members. The veto is not an oversight or a Cold War concession. It is the structural reservation of Great Power sovereignty within a planetary institution. Westphalia within Cosmopolis. Each veto preserves an emperor. Wilson's 1919 League had aimed at majoritarian collective security; the United States blocked it precisely because that majoritarianism could bind US action. Roosevelt's 1945 UN learns from that failure. The Great Powers get a permanent seat and a veto; in exchange, they actually join. Sovereign Equality and Its Limits Article 2.1 enshrines the sovereign equality of all its Members. Article 2.7 forbids UN intervention in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state. The Westphalian principle of 1648 is now in a planetary charter, ratified within months by 50 states and eventually by 193. The article will be stress-tested across decolonization (most of Africa joins the UN as new sovereign states between 1957 and 1980), Korea (1950, the only major UN-authorized war), Suez (1956), the Cuban missile crisis (1962), Vietnam, Iraq (1991 and 2003), Kosovo (1999), Libya (2011), Crimea (2014), Ukraine (2022). The Charter's text holds; the practice strains, and strains, and strains. Video: British Pathé newsreel from the United Nations Conference on International Organization. Delegates of the fifty founding states sign the Charter, San Francisco, 26 June 1945.
2. 1945-11-20 — The Nuremberg Trials. Defendants in the dock at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945. Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop and Keitel in the front row. Place: Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, Bavaria Figures: Robert H. Jackson, US chief prosecutor (on leave from the Supreme Court) · Geoffrey Lawrence, British presiding judge · Hartley Shawcross, British chief prosecutor · Roman Rudenko, Soviet chief prosecutor · François de Menthon, French chief prosecutor · 24 defendants including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer The London Charter Four governments (the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the Provisional Government of France) sign the London Charter on 8 August 1945, six weeks after Germany's unconditional surrender and two days after Hiroshima. The Charter constitutes an International Military Tribunal and defines three categories of indictable offense: crimes against peace (the planning and waging of aggressive war), war crimes (the established Hague and Geneva violations), and a new category drafted at London, crimes against humanity (murder, extermination, enslavement, and persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated). The last category is the load-bearing one. War crimes had been prosecutable since the late nineteenth century. Crimes against humanity reach inside the sovereign frontier of the perpetrating state and apply international law to acts a government commits against its own citizens. The Westphalian wall of domaine réservé has, by treaty, been breached. The Defendant Cannot Hide Behind the Office The trial of the 24 major defendants runs for 218 court days. The IMT delivers verdicts on 1 October 1946: twelve sentenced to death (ten hanged, Göring suicides the night before, Bormann tried in absentia), three to life, four to long prison terms, three acquitted. The judgment's enduring contribution is Article 7 of the Charter, applied as binding law: the official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government Departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment. Sovereign immunity, the doctrine that an officeholder cannot be tried in another jurisdiction for acts of state, is, by precedent, pierced. The principle propagates. The UN General Assembly affirms the Nuremberg Principles in Resolution 95(I) on 11 December 1946. The 1948 Genocide Convention codifies a sub-category of crimes against humanity. The ICTY (1993), ICTR (1994), and ICC (2002) all build on the Nuremberg architecture. The arc from Nuremberg runs through Pinochet's 1998 arrest in London and to the ICC arrest warrants issued for sitting heads of state in the 2020s. Westphalia's cuius regio survives in the UN Charter (see [[un-c Video: British Pathé coverage of the opening of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, November 1945. Lord Justice Lawrence presides; the principal Nazi defendants stand in the dock.
3. 1947-03-12 — The Truman Doctrine. President Harry S. Truman addresses a joint session of Congress to request aid for Greece and Turkey, 12 March 1947. Place: Joint session of the United States Congress, Washington Figures: Harry S. Truman, President · George Marshall, Secretary of State · Dean Acheson, Under-Secretary · Arthur Vandenberg, Republican Senate Foreign Relations chair · the Greek and Turkish governments, the proximate beneficiaries The British Withdrawal Telegram On 21 February 1947, the British embassy in Washington delivers two notes: His Majesty's Government, bankrupt after the war and the coal-shortage winter, will cease military and financial aid to Greece and Turkey on 31 March. The civil war in Greece (the communist-led ELAS against the royalist government) and the Soviet pressure on the Turkish Straits will, on the British account, be the United States' problem from April. Acheson briefs congressional leaders on 27 February in language designed to dramatize the stakes; Vandenberg, the indispensable Republican, tells Truman he must scare hell out of the American people to get the appropriation through a Republican Congress. Truman addresses a joint session on 12 March. The speech requests $400 million for Greece and Turkey and articulates a general principle: it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. The appropriation passes both houses by overwhelming margins by 22 May. The British retreat from a sphere of influence becomes the occasion for the American assumption of a global one. Containment as Declared Policy George Kennan's Long Telegram of 22 February 1946, recast as the X article in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, supplies the intellectual frame: the Soviet Union is an expansionary power that respects only force, and US policy should be the patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. The Truman Doctrine is containment in its first operational form. The Marshall Plan (see [[marshall-plan-1947]]) follows within three months as the economic instrument; the Berlin airlift (see [[berlin-blockade-1948]]) within sixteen months as the demonstration; NATO (see [[nato-founded-1949]]) within two years as the institutional architecture. The doctrine is non-Westphalian in a particular sense. It commits the United States to act, in principle, anywhere on the planet, on the basis of the internal political composition of states. Westphalia's cuius regio survives as the Charter's Article 2.7; over it, Truman lays a second principle: in any contest between communist and non-communist sovereignty, the United States is a party. The Cold War's structural shape is, from this speech forward, set. Video: Surviving film of President Truman's 12 March 1947 address to a joint session of Congress requesting aid to Greece and Turkey, held by the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.
4. 1947-06-05 — The Marshall Plan. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, whose 5 June 1947 Harvard commencement speech proposed the European Recovery Program. Place: Memorial Church, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Massachusetts Figures: George C. Marshall, Secretary of State · Will Clayton, Under-Secretary for Economic Affairs (the plan's principal drafter) · Ernest Bevin, British Foreign Secretary (who calls Marshall's speech a lifeline to sinking men) · V. M. Molotov, Soviet Foreign Minister (who walks out of the Paris conference on 2 July) Harvard Commencement Marshall speaks for eleven minutes at the Harvard commencement on 5 June 1947. The address is short on specifics by design: the United States stands ready to assist any European government willing to coordinate a recovery program. The offer is, formally, open to the Soviet Union and its satellites. Molotov attends the Paris organizing conference of 27 June, finds the conditions (open economic data, joint planning, integration into a Western trade system) unacceptable, and walks out on 2 July. The Soviets compel Czechoslovakia and Poland (both initially interested) to withdraw. The plan becomes, by Soviet refusal, a Western-bloc instrument. Sixteen states form the Committee of European Economic Co-operation by September 1947 (later the OEEC, eventually the OECD). The Economic Cooperation Act passes Congress on 3 April 1948 after the Czechoslovak coup of February has concentrated Republican minds. Paul Hoffman runs the Economic Cooperation Administration from Washington; Averell Harriman runs the Paris counterpart. Thirteen Billion Dollars and a Continent Over four years (April 1948 to June 1952) $13.3 billion in grants and loans flows to sixteen Western European countries (roughly $173 billion in 2024 dollars, or about 5 percent of US GDP for 1948 alone). The United Kingdom receives the largest share, France the second, West Germany the third. The aid is conditioned on internal liberalization, removal of trade barriers between recipients, and rejection of communist participation in government. The French and Italian communist parties (the largest in non-Soviet Europe and credibly contesting for power in both countries in 1947) are excluded from coalition cabinets by mid-1947, a condition the United States makes explicit through diplomatic channels. The Plan is Westphalian state-rebuilding undertaken at the expense of one Westphalian sovereign for the benefit of sixteen others. It is also the precondition for the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) and the Treaty of Rome (see [[treaty-of-rome-1957]]). The OEEC, created to administer Marshall aid, becomes the institutional habit of European cooperation that the EEC will inherit. By 1952 Western European industrial production stands 35 percent above 1938 levels. The recovery is r Video: Secretary of State George C. Marshall's Harvard commencement address proposing the European Recovery Program, 5 June 1947. Audio from the Marshall Foundation archive.
5. 1947-08-15 — The Partition of India. A refugee train crosses the new Indo-Pakistani frontier in the Punjab, autumn 1947. Some fifteen million people were displaced by Partition. Place: Karachi (Pakistan, 14 August) and New Delhi (India, 15 August) Figures: Louis Mountbatten, last Viceroy · Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India · Muhammad Ali Jinnah, first Governor-General of Pakistan · Cyril Radcliffe, the British barrister who drew the line in five weeks having never visited India · Mohandas Gandhi, absent from the Delhi celebrations The Radcliffe Line The Indian Independence Act receives royal assent on 18 July 1947 and sets the transfer of power for the night of 14–15 August. Cyril Radcliffe arrives in India on 8 July with no prior knowledge of the subcontinent, is given five weeks and a small staff to partition Punjab and Bengal, and submits his award on 12 August. Mountbatten withholds the line's publication until 17 August (two days after independence), so that the new sovereigns inherit the violence rather than the empire. Radcliffe burns his papers before leaving and never returns. He later refuses payment for the work. The line cuts through Lahore, Amritsar, Calcutta, and across the canal systems of Punjab. Roughly 14 million people are displaced in the months that follow, the largest sudden migration in recorded history. Communal massacres on trains, in villages, in city quarters, kill between one and two million. The Kashmir question (a Hindu maharaja, a Muslim majority, a contested instrument of accession dated 26 October 1947) erupts into the first India-Pakistan war within ten weeks of independence and remains unresolved in the present. The Largest Single Addition Since Versailles Two sovereign states, with a combined 1947 population of roughly 390 million, enter the international system in 36 hours. It is the largest single addition to the Westphalian state roster since the post-Versailles settlement and the largest by population in the system's history. Both states join the UN within a year (India on 30 October 1945 as a founding member, Pakistan on 30 September 1947). Both inherit the colonial state apparatus (civil service, army, railway, treasury) and divide it under Mountbatten's arbitration. The Indian decolonization template (negotiated transfer to a successor government within the inherited administrative frontier) is the one most of Africa and Asia will follow over the next thirty years. The opposing template, partition along communal lines drawn by the departing power, will recur in Palestine within a year (see UN Resolution 181, 29 November 1947), in Ireland a generation earlier, and in Korea and Vietnam within the decade. The Westphalian state system absorbs both versions and treats the resulting frontiers as inviolable thereafter; Kashmir is the durable counter-example. Video: Mountbatten's transfer of power and the partition of British India into the new dominions of India and Pakistan, August 1947. Some fifteen million people would be displaced.
6. 1948-06-24 — The Berlin Blockade and Airlift. Berliners watch a US Air Force C-54 Skymaster descend toward Tempelhof Airport during the airlift, 1948. Place: West Berlin and the Berlin air corridors Figures: Lucius D. Clay, US military governor in Germany · Ernst Reuter, Lord Mayor-elect of West Berlin · Curtis LeMay and William Tunner, commanders of the airlift · Vasily Sokolovsky, Soviet military governor The Currency Trigger The Western occupation zones introduce the Deutsche Mark on 20 June 1948 to replace the discredited Reichsmark. The new currency is extended to the Western sectors of Berlin (an island 100 miles inside the Soviet zone) on 23 June. The Soviets respond on 24 June by closing all road, rail, and canal access to the Western sectors and cutting electricity. The legal status of the Western presence in Berlin rests on inter-Allied agreements of 1944–45; the Soviets do not formally repudiate those agreements but argue that the ground corridors are matters of bilateral courtesy. The Western sectors hold roughly 2.4 million people with stocks for thirty-six days of food and forty-five of coal. Clay proposes an armored convoy to force the autobahn; Truman vetoes the option. The remaining instrument is the air corridor, which the 1945 agreements specify by treaty. The first C-47 lands at Tempelhof on 26 June 1948 with 80 tons of cargo. Two-Point-Three Million Tons Operation Vittles (American) and Operation Plainfare (British) deliver 2.3 million tons of supplies on 277,728 flights over 324 days. At peak (Easter Sunday 1949) a plane lands at one of the three West Berlin airfields every 62 seconds. RAF Sunderland flying boats land on the Havel; coal accounts for two-thirds of tonnage; the entire operation is run on a tighter schedule than the prewar German rail system had managed. The Soviets lift the blockade on 12 May 1949 without securing any of their objectives. The episode is the template for the rest of the Cold War. Both sides assert sovereign rights to the same physical space (Berlin, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan), and the contest is conducted through credible non-military pressure rather than through the inter-state war the Westphalian system had treated as the normal sovereign instrument. The Federal Republic of Germany is proclaimed on 23 May 1949 (eleven days after the blockade ends); the German Democratic Republic on 7 October 1949. Two German sovereignties from one, with Berlin as the wound that will reopen at the Wall (1961) and close again in 1989 (see [[fall-of-the-berlin-wall-1989]]). Video: British Pathé footage of the Anglo-American airlift sustaining West Berlin during the Soviet blockade. C-54s and Dakotas land at Tempelhof and Gatow with food, coal and flour.
7. 1949-04-04 — NATO Founded. President Truman signs the instrument of ratification of the North Atlantic Treaty in the Oval Office, 24 August 1949. Place: Departmental Auditorium, Washington Figures: Dean Acheson, US Secretary of State · Ernest Bevin, British Foreign Secretary · Robert Schuman, French Foreign Minister · Halvard Lange, Norwegian Foreign Minister · the foreign ministers of the other eight founding signatories Twelve Signatures The Brussels Treaty of 17 March 1948 commits five Western European states (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom) to mutual defense, but without American participation it lacks credible deterrent weight. Senator Arthur Vandenberg's Resolution 239 of 11 June 1948 clears the constitutional path for the United States to enter a peacetime alliance, the first since the 1778 treaty with revolutionary France. Negotiations at Washington run from July 1948 to March 1949. Twelve states sign on 4 April 1949: the five Brussels Treaty members plus the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway, and Portugal. Italy's inclusion is the contested case (former Axis; large Communist Party; barely on the Atlantic), accepted on French insistence and over Norwegian misgiving. Iceland's inclusion is the one against the Icelandic public's wishes; the riots in Reykjavík on 30 March 1949, the day the Althing ratifies, will not be forgotten in Icelandic memory. Article 5 The treaty's substantive commitment is Article 5: an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all, with each party committed to assist by such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force. The qualifier (as it deems necessary) preserves the Westphalian sovereign right of each member to determine its own response, while the collective framing commits the alliance as a whole. The Senate ratifies on 21 July 1949 by 82 to 13. The Federal Republic of Germany joins in 1955, prompting the Soviet response of the Warsaw Pact two weeks later. Spain joins after Franco's death (1982); the post-1989 enlargements take the alliance to 32 members by 2024 (with Finland 2023, Sweden 2024). Article 5 is invoked exactly once in the alliance's first seventy-five years, by the United States on 12 September 2001. The Westphalian principle of sovereign self-defense, pooled across a continent and an ocean, becomes the longest-lived military alliance in modern history. Video: Foreign ministers of the twelve founding members sign the North Atlantic Treaty at the Departmental Auditorium, Washington, with President Truman and Secretary of State Acheson present.
8. 1949-10-01 — The People's Republic of China. Mao Zedong proclaims the founding of the People's Republic of China from the rostrum of Tiananmen, 1 October 1949. Place: Tiananmen Gate (Gate of Heavenly Peace), Beijing Figures: Mao Zedong, Chairman · Zhou Enlai, Premier · Zhu De, commander-in-chief · Liu Shaoqi, vice-chairman · Chiang Kai-shek, retreating to Taiwan with the Republic of China government The Proclamation Mao reads the founding proclamation from the rostrum atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace at three o'clock on the afternoon of 1 October 1949. Below in the square, perhaps 300,000 people; on the rostrum, the leadership of the new state and the Communist Party. The Civil War is not formally over (Hainan and Tibet are not yet under PLA control), but the Republic of China government has lost the mainland. Chiang Kai-shek formally moves the seat of the Republic to Taipei on 7 December 1949. The Soviet Union recognizes the People's Republic on 2 October; the United Kingdom on 6 January 1950; the United States not until 1979. The world's most populous polity, roughly 540 million people in 1949, has become a sovereign communist state. The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance is signed in Moscow on 14 February 1950 after eight weeks of difficult negotiation. For the next decade the Soviet Union extends industrial aid, military equipment, and a security umbrella; in exchange, the new state aligns its foreign policy with Moscow's. The China Seat Westphalia's planetary extension, codified in the UN Charter (see [[un-charter-1945]]), now contains the second-largest communist state in the world, bordering twelve other states, sharing the Korean peninsula with the Soviet-aligned north. China's seat on the Security Council is held by the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 1949 until 25 October 1971, when General Assembly Resolution 2758 transfers recognition to the People's Republic. The Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s and the 1969 border clashes on the Ussuri convert what had looked like a bipolar contest into a triangular one, a structure Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon will exploit at Beijing in February 1972. The 1949 founding is the largest single addition of population to a single sovereign authority in the Westphalian era. The Korean War (see [[korean-war-begins-1950]]) follows within nine months and brings the new state into direct combat with the United States. The Sino-Soviet alignment will be the structural fact of the early Cold War; its dissolution, of the late one. The Chinese state that emerges from the long arc 1949 to the present is, in 2026, the second largest economy in the world and the principal challeng Video: Restored newsreel of Mao Zedong proclaiming the founding of the People's Republic from the Tiananmen rostrum, 1 October 1949.
9. 1950-06-25 — The Korean War Begins. American troops disembark in Korea in the opening weeks of the war, summer 1950. Place: the 38th parallel, Korean peninsula Figures: Kim Il-sung, leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea · Syngman Rhee, President of the Republic of Korea · Joseph Stalin (who approves the invasion in April 1950) · Mao Zedong (who commits Chinese forces in October) · Harry S. Truman · Yakov Malik, Soviet UN ambassador, boycotting the Security Council The Boycotted Council Soviet ambassador Yakov Malik has been boycotting the UN Security Council since January 1950 in protest at the Council's continued seating of the Republic of China rather than the new People's Republic. The boycott is in its sixth month on 25 June, when North Korean forces cross the 38th parallel at four o'clock in the morning. The Security Council meets the same day. Resolution 82 condemns the invasion; Resolution 83, on 27 June, recommends that member states furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack. The Soviet veto is the structural reservation of Great Power sovereignty within the Charter (see [[un-charter-1945]]); on this one occasion, the empty Soviet chair lets the Council act. Resolution 84 (7 July) creates the unified command under United States leadership and authorizes the use of the UN flag. Sixteen states contribute combat forces; another five send medical units. It is the only major war fought under formal UN authority. The Soviets return to the Council on 1 August 1950 and the window closes; no comparable authorization will be available for any subsequent Cold War conflict. Three Years to a Line MacArthur's Inchon landing of 15 September 1950 reverses the early collapse and drives UN forces to the Yalu by late October. The People's Republic of China (see [[peoples-republic-of-china-1949]]), one year old, enters the war with 300,000 troops on 19 October. The line is pushed south of Seoul, then north, then stabilizes in mid-1951 near the 38th parallel where it began. Truce talks open at Kaesong on 10 July 1951 and last two years; the armistice is signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953 by the UN Command, the Korean People's Army, and the Chinese People's Volunteers. South Korea, refusing to sign, is not a party. Casualty estimates: roughly 3 million Koreans (mostly civilians), 180,000 Chinese, 36,500 Americans, 14,000 other UN-flag soldiers. No peace treaty has been signed. The Demilitarized Zone, drawn in 1953, is, in 2026, the most heavily militarized border on earth. The war fixes the Cold War as a militarized stalemate rather than a continuing series of negotiated settlements, produces NSC-68 as US strategic doctrine, quadruples the US defense budget, and transforms NATO from a paper alliance into a stationed force. The Westphalian frontier, in Korea, has been redrawn by com Video: The outbreak of the Korean War as Kim Il-sung's Korean People's Army crosses the 38th parallel into the South, leading to the first UN-authorised collective security action.
10. 1956-07-26 — The Suez Crisis. Crowds in Alexandria as President Gamal Abdel Nasser announces the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company, 26 July 1956. Place: Cairo, the Sinai, Port Said; emergency at the UN in New York; reckonings in London and Paris Figures: Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt · Anthony Eden, British Prime Minister · Guy Mollet, French Prime Minister · David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel · Dwight D. Eisenhower, US President · Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet First Secretary · Lester B. Pearson, Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs (who proposes the UN Emergency Force) Nationalization and Sèvres Nasser announces the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company on 26 July 1956 in a speech at Alexandria, citing the World Bank and Anglo-American withdrawal of finance for the Aswan High Dam the previous week. The Canal Company is a private concession dating to 1858, jointly held by British and French interests; the canal itself runs through Egyptian territory. Nasser offers full compensation at the closing share price. The act is legally defensible and politically intolerable to London and Paris. Through August and September, Britain and France pursue diplomatic options at the UN that they expect will fail. On 22–24 October at Sèvres outside Paris, British, French, and Israeli delegations agree a secret protocol: Israel will invade Sinai; Britain and France will issue an ultimatum demanding both sides withdraw from the Canal; Egypt will refuse; Britain and France will then occupy the Canal Zone as peacekeepers. The Israeli invasion begins on 29 October, the ultimatum on 30 October, the Anglo-French air campaign on 31 October, paratroop landings at Port Said on 5 November. By 6 November the canal is in coalition hands. Washington and Moscow Say No Eisenhower, six days from a presidential election he wins on 6 November, refuses to support the operation. The United States sponsors UN General Assembly resolutions demanding a ceasefire under the Uniting for Peace procedure (which bypasses the Security Council, where Britain and France hold vetoes). More damagingly, the US Treasury declines to support sterling in the foreign-exchange markets and indicates that any IMF assistance to Britain will be conditional on withdrawal. The pound loses 15 percent of its reserves in the first week of November. Khrushchev simultaneously threatens nuclear strikes on London and Paris. Eden accepts the ceasefire on 6 November; British and French forces withdraw by 22 December; Israeli forces by March 1957. The Crisis ends the postwar pretense that Britain and France remain autonomous Great Powers within the Westphalian system. Eden resigns in January 1957; the Fourth French Republic does not survive the next North African crisis, the Algerian, and falls to de Gaulle in 1958. Pearson's UN Emergency Force, deployed to Sinai under the General Assembly's authority, becomes the template for UN peacekeeping. The first UN-flag soldiers in blue helmets ar Video: President Gamal Abdel Nasser's Alexandria speech announcing the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company, 26 July 1956. The code-word "de Lesseps" triggers Egyptian seizure of the canal.
11. 1957-03-25 — The Treaty of Rome. Foreign ministers of the Six sign the Treaties of Rome establishing the EEC and Euratom at the Palazzo dei Conservatori, 25 March 1957. Place: Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Capitoline Hill, Rome Figures: Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian Foreign Minister (and principal architect, via the Spaak Report) · Konrad Adenauer, West German Chancellor · Christian Pineau, French Foreign Minister · Antonio Segni, Italian Prime Minister · Joseph Bech, Luxembourg Prime Minister · Joseph Luns, Dutch Foreign Minister From Coal and Steel to Common Market The European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 pools the two industries most directly implicated in the war just past, under a High Authority that is the first supranational executive in European history. The proposed European Defence Community fails when the French National Assembly rejects it on 30 August 1954. The Messina Conference of June 1955 picks up the surviving thread: an inter-governmental committee under Paul-Henri Spaak produces a report (April 1956) proposing a common market and a separate atomic-energy community. The Spaak Report becomes the negotiating text. Suez (see [[suez-crisis-1956]]) the following autumn concentrates French and German minds on the value of pooling. Two treaties are signed in Rome on 25 March 1957 by the six Coal and Steel Community states: the European Economic Community treaty and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) treaty. The signing room is the same hall where Michelangelo's bronze plaque of Marcus Aurelius once stood and where the popes had received foreign ambassadors. The choice of venue is deliberate; the choice of date (Annunciation) is not coincidental either. Adenauer takes the night train from Bonn rather than fly; the Ge Sovereignty Above the State The EEC treaty creates a customs union (in force by July 1968), a common agricultural policy (codified 1962), free movement of labor and capital (progressive through the 1960s), and four institutions (Commission, Council, Assembly, Court of Justice) with powers that, in their respective domains, override national law. The European Court of Justice will establish the doctrine of direct effect in Van Gend en Loos (1963) and of primacy of EEC law in Costa v. ENEL (1964). Pooled sovereignty, the first significant attempt at it since 1648, is operational within seven years of signature. The Community expands from six to nine (1973: UK, Ireland, Denmark), twelve (1981, 1986: Greece, Spain, Portugal), fifteen (1995: Austria, Finland, Sweden), and after the 1989 reset to twenty-seven by 2013. The Maastricht Treaty (1992) makes it the European Union and adds monetary union; the euro circulates from 2002. Brexit (2020) is the first reversal. The Westphalian state, in this experiment, has consented in eleven languages and seventy years to be partially superseded by a supranational legal order. The experiment is unfinished; in 2026 it is the only one of its scale anywhere in the world. Video: Official European Commission archive footage of the signing of the Treaties of Rome at the Palazzo dei Conservatori, 25 March 1957, establishing the EEC and Euratom.
12. 1962-10-28 — The Cuban Missile Crisis. US Air Force U-2 reconnaissance photograph of a Soviet MRBM launch site at San Cristobal, Cuba, 14 October 1962. Place: Cuba; the White House Cabinet Room; the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street; the Kremlin Figures: John F. Kennedy, US President · Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet First Secretary · Fidel Castro, Prime Minister of Cuba · Robert F. Kennedy, US Attorney-General · Anatoly Dobrynin, Soviet ambassador to Washington · Vasily Arkhipov, Soviet submarine officer (B-59) who refused to authorize the nuclear torpedo Thirteen Days U-2 reconnaissance photographs of San Cristóbal in Pinar del Río, taken on 14 October 1962, reveal SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile launchers under construction. Kennedy is briefed on the morning of 16 October. The Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm) deliberates in secret for six days, considering options from diplomatic protest to invasion. Kennedy chooses naval quarantine, announced in a televised address on the evening of 22 October. The choice of the word quarantine rather than blockade is deliberate; under international law a blockade is an act of war. Soviet ships approach the quarantine line; some turn back; one (the Bucharest) is allowed to pass after inspection by signal. On 27 October (Black Saturday) a U-2 is shot down over Cuba, killing Major Rudolf Anderson; a second U-2 strays into Soviet airspace over Chukotka; the Soviet submarine B-59, hounded by US destroyers near the quarantine line and out of radio contact with Moscow, considers and rejects the use of its nuclear-armed torpedo (Arkhipov's vote against, as second-in-command, is the one that determines the rejection). The world is closer to nuclear war on that single day than at any ot The Quiet Deal Khrushchev sends two messages on 26 and 27 October. The first (private channel, conciliatory) offers withdrawal in exchange for a US pledge not to invade Cuba. The second (public broadcast, harder) demands also the removal of Jupiter intermediate-range missiles from Turkey. Robert Kennedy meets Dobrynin at the Justice Department on the evening of 27 October and conveys the President's agreement on both: a public non-invasion pledge, and a private commitment that the Jupiters in Turkey will be withdrawn within four to five months. The Jupiter element is kept secret for sixteen years. Khrushchev announces the withdrawal at nine in the morning, Moscow time, on 28 October. The crisis ends. The Washington-Moscow direct communications link (the hotline) is established 20 June 1963. The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is signed 5 August 1963. The Non-Proliferation Treaty opens for signature 1 July 1968. Détente, the SALT process, the Helsinki Accords (see [[helsinki-accords-1975]]), follow. The Westphalian system, having brushed against the possibility of its own physical end, builds the architecture by which the two surviving Great Powers will manage their nuclear duopoly for the next tw Video: CBS News broadcast of President Kennedy's 22 October 1962 address to the nation revealing Soviet missile sites in Cuba and announcing the naval quarantine.
13. 1964-08-07 — The Tonkin Gulf Resolution. USS Maddox (DD-731), the destroyer at the centre of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, refuels in the South China Sea, 1964. Place: United States Congress, Washington Figures: Lyndon B. Johnson, President · Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense · J. William Fulbright, Senate Foreign Relations chair (the resolution's floor manager, later one of its principal critics) · Wayne Morse (Oregon) and Ernest Gruening (Alaska), the two senators voting no Two Incidents, One Confirmed The USS Maddox, conducting signals-intelligence patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin in support of South Vietnamese commando raids on North Vietnamese coastal installations, engages three North Vietnamese P-4 torpedo boats on 2 August 1964. The exchange is real; one North Vietnamese boat is sunk, the Maddox is undamaged. On 4 August, in heavy weather, the Maddox and the Turner Joy report a second engagement and fire for two hours at radar contacts that the commanders on station, within hours, doubt were ever there. Captain John Herrick cables that review of action makes many recorded contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. McNamara is briefed on the doubts; Johnson is told. Johnson orders retaliatory air strikes (Operation Pierce Arrow) the same evening and addresses the nation at 11:36 p.m. on 4 August. The resolution is sent to Congress on 5 August, passes the House 416 to 0 on 7 August, and the Senate 88 to 2 the same day. Wayne Morse rises to argue that the executive is asking for an open-ended grant of war power in violation of Article I; he is voted down. All Necessary Measures The operative text authorizes the President to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression, and to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty. No declaration of war is requested; none is voted on. By 1968 there are 549,500 US troops in Vietnam; by 1973, 58,220 American dead and roughly two million Vietnamese (the higher estimates are higher). The resolution is repealed in January 1971 over Nixon's objections; the war continues until April 1975. The constitutional war-declaration power of Article I, the one element of US foreign policy the Founders most explicitly intended to differ from the British monarchical pattern, has, by this maneuver, been delegated to the executive in a single resolution. The War Powers Resolution of 1973, passed over Nixon's veto, attempts to reclaim it and is ignored or evaded by every subsequent administration. American Westphalian sovereignty over its own war-making is, from 1964 forward, executive rather than legislative; the pattern continues to the present, with Aut Video: President Lyndon Johnson's televised address of 4 August 1964 announcing retaliatory strikes against North Vietnam and requesting congressional authorisation, the speech that precedes the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.
14. 1975-08-01 — The Helsinki Accords. President Gerald Ford and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev toast the signing of the CSCE Final Act in Helsinki, 1 August 1975. Place: Finlandia Hall, Helsinki Figures: Gerald Ford, US President · Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet General Secretary · Helmut Schmidt, West German Chancellor · Erich Honecker, East German General Secretary · Urho Kekkonen, Finnish President (host) · Aldo Moro, Italian Prime Minister · 35 heads of state or government in all Two Baskets, One Bargain The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe convenes in 1973 at Soviet initiative and Finnish hosting, after a decade of inconclusive Warsaw Pact and NATO exchanges. Negotiations run through 1973–75 at Helsinki and Geneva; the Final Act is signed 1 August 1975 by thirty-three European states (every European state except Albania), plus the United States and Canada. The text is divided into three baskets: Basket I (political-military), Basket II (economic and scientific cooperation), Basket III (humanitarian, including human contacts, information, culture, and education). The Soviet priority is Basket I, specifically the principle of inviolability of frontiers, which functions as a Western recognition of the postwar division of Europe (including the GDR, the Oder-Neisse line, the Baltic annexations). The Western counterpart is Basket III. The trade is consciously asymmetric on both sides. Brezhnev believes he has secured permanent ratification of Yalta; Western negotiators (especially the British and the Dutch) believe they have secured an instrument that will, slowly, corrode the closed system from within. Charter 77, Solidarity, Helsinki Watch The Final Act is published in full in the official press of every signatory state, including the Soviet Union and its satellites, as required by the agreement. Eastern European dissidents who had previously had to argue for human rights as a moral claim now have a treaty their own governments have signed. Charter 77 forms in Czechoslovakia in January 1977 explicitly invoking Helsinki; the Moscow Helsinki Group forms in May 1976; Polish KOR (1976) and Solidarity (1980) cite the Final Act repeatedly; Helsinki Watch is founded in New York in 1978, becoming Human Rights Watch in 1988. The accords give the dissident movements a vocabulary their regimes cannot publicly repudiate without repudiating their own signatures. Brezhnev's calculation, that the legitimation of borders mattered more than the soft human-rights commitments, proves wrong on a fifteen-year horizon. The Helsinki process and its CSCE follow-ups (Belgrade 1977, Madrid 1980, Vienna 1986) become the slow infrastructure through which Eastern European civil society organizes the 1989 revolutions. Cold War realism produces, by accident, the conditions of its own dissolution. The CSCE becomes the OSCE in 1995, with fifty-seven Video: AP Archive footage of the signing of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe at Finlandia Hall, 1 August 1975. Thirty-five heads of state and government sign.
15. 1985-03-11 — Gorbachev Becomes General Secretary. Mikhail Gorbachev, newly elected General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, 1985. Place: Politburo meeting, the Kremlin, Moscow Figures: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, age 54 · Andrei Gromyko, Foreign Minister (who delivers the nominating speech) · Yegor Ligachev (rival, then deputy) · Eduard Shevardnadze, future Foreign Minister · Alexander Yakovlev, future architect of glasnost Four Funerals and a Politburo Vote Leonid Brezhnev dies on 10 November 1982 after eighteen years in power. Yuri Andropov succeeds and dies fifteen months later, on 9 February 1984. Konstantin Chernenko, already terminally ill at his selection, dies on 10 March 1985 after thirteen months. The Politburo meets the following morning. Andrei Gromyko, the most senior figure present and Foreign Minister since 1957, delivers the nominating speech for Gorbachev: This man has a nice smile, but he has iron teeth. The vote is unanimous. Gorbachev, age 54, is the youngest Politburo member and the first general secretary born after the October Revolution. He inherits a Soviet economy growing at zero in real terms, a war in Afghanistan in its sixth year that has killed roughly 25,000 Soviet soldiers without securing the Kabul government, an arms race that is consuming 15 to 25 percent of GDP (the upper estimates are credible), and a system of permanent shortages that the satellite populations no longer take seriously. He has six years. Glasnost, Perestroika, and the Decision Not to Shoot Glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) are introduced at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February–March 1986 and formalized at the January 1987 Plenum. The Reykjavik summit with Reagan in October 1986 nearly produces an agreement to eliminate all nuclear weapons; the INF Treaty (December 1987) eliminates an entire class of intermediate-range missiles. The withdrawal from Afghanistan begins May 1988 and completes February 1989. The unilateral conventional-forces reductions announced at the UN on 7 December 1988 amount to 500,000 troops and 10,000 tanks from Eastern Europe. The decisive moment is what Gorbachev does not do. When Solidarity wins the partly-free Polish elections of 4 June 1989, when Hungary opens its border with Austria on 11 September 1989, when crowds gather in East German cities through October, when the Berlin Wall opens on the night of 9 November 1989 because the East German leadership cannot get a clear instruction from Moscow, the instruction that does not come is the order to use force. Brezhnev had ordered it in 1968 in Prague; Khrushchev in 1956 in Budapest. Gorbachev does not. The Soviet Union dissolves on 25 December 1991 into fifteen sove Video: Gorbachev's election as General Secretary of the CPSU on 11 March 1985, the day after Chernenko's death. At fifty-four he is the youngest member of the Politburo.