Cold War and the Fear of Subversion
Cold War and the Fear of Subversion
Post-war Western Europe converged towards an American model of high-wage consumerist capitalism, considerably attenuating class conflict. In Western Europe, Christian democracy and Social Democracy cooperated in constructing a democratic constitutional order. In the Soviet buffer-zone states of eastern Europe, bourgeois civil society was eliminated slice by slice: by a sequence known as ‘salami tactics’. This was partly in reaction to the perceived Western aggression of the ‘Marshall Plan’. Western Cold Warriors – drawing the lesson that Popular Frontism was only a means to the end of totalitarian communisiation – characterised Communist ‘subversion’ as an endemic corruption of leftist movements. This was considered to be a particular problem in the under-developed ‘Third World’. Fearing both subversion and outright war, a gigantic ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ grew up in the United States, placing pressure upon that country's traditions of democratic and free-market civil society.
Keywords: consumerism, Marshall Plan, buffer states, communisation, salami tactics, subversion, Cold War, third world, Military-Industrial Complex, Christian Democracy
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