History of the Iron Curtain

Ideology and politics have modified the map of Europe and of the world in general for decades, being of special relevance those moments in which the planet has been divided in two by ideological discrepancies. At certain times in these years, different terms have been used to refer to this division, one of these being Iron Curtain. In this lesson from a TEACHER we are going to offer you a Iron Curtain overview so that you better know what this term refers to and the causes that motivated this lifting of borders. We started!

We begin this summary of the Iron Curtain by discovering what exactly this historical event was. We call Iron Curtain or Iron courtain to imaginary border ideological and political that divided Europe in two for much of the 20th century: the Western europeHe who formed the capitalist bloc and the Eastern Europe that formed the communist bloc.

To understand division we must understand the two pacts that were signed as consequence of World War II, to unite countries and stop a possible future Third World War.

• On the part of capitalist bloc we can talk about the call North Atlantic Treaty, being an agreement by which all member countries agreed to help each other in future wars and at the same time defend themselves from the advance of communism. Some of the signatories of this pact were the United States, France and the United Kingdom.
• On the other hand, the Block formed by Socialist states was the call Warsaw pact, being a military agreement signed to serve as a counter to the pact signed by the capitalist bloc. Some of its signatories the USSR, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

We continue this summary of the Iron Curtain talking about the Cold War, a great conflict that faced United States and the USSR, serving as a basis the ideological war between both nations to defend capitalism on the one hand and defend communism on the other hand. Many were the nations that were part to a lesser or greater extent of the conflict, being those that we have named in the previous section as blocks, and serving the Iron Curtain to divide them.

The origin of the confrontation between blocks that would end up leading to the creation of the Iron Curtain can be found after the Second War World, being the moment in which there were numerous discussions between the Soviet and American governments about what should be done Over the occupied territories after war. Both countries wanted the occupied states to have an ideology similar to that of their own state, thus creating differences between the two regions.

It was at this stage that the British leader Winston Churchill spoke of the Iron Curtain for the first time to refer to the division of europe by the states now controlled by the USSR and whose influence was now Soviet. Churchill was afraid of the American retreat and that the USSR could expand its ideological influence in Europe weakened after the war.

The Capitalist Bloc and the Socialist Bloc

• It was this time when the socialist bloc was formed annexing the USSR to territories such as Estonia or Lithuania. At the same time numerous Soviet satellite states were formed, being states not annexed to the USSR but with governments with parties defended by the great Russian state. Among these satellite states we can find Czechoslovakia or Romania.
• On the other side were the states of the Capitalist bloc, NATO allies, and also a series of neutral countries whose economic system was much more united to the capitalist than to the socialist. Many of these countries were helped with the Marshall plan, being an economic plan that served for the United States to help the states economically after the war. Although these aid were in theory aimed at everyone, they were only requested by Western States, marking the difference between both parts of the Iron Curtain.

Regarding their physical form, we can talk about some real physical barriers that serve as an example of the existing separation by the Iron Curtain. These borders were some of the militarized in history, and as examples we can speak of the so-called Berlin Wall, of the existing one in part of Czechoslovakia and the one that separated Greece and Bulgaria.

To conclude this summary of the Iron Curtain, we must talk about the causes of its fall and the arrival of the European map that we know today.

The Soviet influence and the maintenance of the Iron Curtain was closely linked to the great economic power that the Eastern country had. So when this one had a political stalemate, its influence began to wane, helping less and less the states of the so-called Eastern Bloc. This situation in which the socialist states were less and less defended by the influence of the USSR led to a series of revolutions in 1989 in what looked like the beginning of the end of the Iron Curtain.

Little by little, the socialist states were ending with the Iron Curtain, the first of them being Hungary. The next step was Poland, where in surprising elections the anticommunists won with an absolute majority, thus beginning the revolutions that ended communism as it was understood at that time.

Many were the changes that arose in the countries due to the revolutions, but without a doubt due to the great influence and repercussion that the most relevant was the case of Germany. The Berlin Wall that separated both sides, after massive protests and constant wall crossings, was finally demolishedserving as a symbolism of the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Eastern Bloc.