22 - Europe

Summary

At the turn of the 1970s/1980s, the two halves of divided Europe overcame their parallel economic crises. Ballooning Eastern European debt to the non-socialist world, the Polish Crisis in 1980-81, and the economic impact of the Afghanistan War and the Iraq-Iran War permanently undermined Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. By late 1981, the USSR had neither the economic means nor the military stomach to maintain its influence by brute force. As a consequence, Hungary, Poland, and East Germany turned to the western world for credit and economic advice, which in turn accelerated the erosion of Soviet dominance. At the same time, western countries underwent a conservative transformation that partially helped to overcome the economic crises of the late 1970s that had emerged in the aftermath of the American abolition of the Bretton Woods system and the two Middle East oil shocks. In the 1980s, they emerged strengthened in economy terms and unified against the final Soviet attempt to seek supremacy in all of Europe through the stationing of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in East Europe. The structures for the end of the regional Cold War were in place.