Combating Communism “from the Abodes of Righteousness”

Abstract

The cultural effects of waging war, the absence or presence of perceived providential favor for the nation, and the influence of religiosity, were pivotal in explaining US and EU European security cultures and how they developed during the Cold War. Emerging from the Second World War, the contrast between the US and West European experiences could not have been greater. Woodrow Wilson believed that battling evil was best achieved “from the abodes of righteousness,” and US victory in WWII appeared to many to confirm it.1 Western Europe lay in ruins, having lost more civilians than military personnel to war and its effects, a fact that distinguished the Second World War experience from that of the First, and clearly set apart the European from the American case. In the First World War, a war fought overwhelmingly on the battlefield, millions perished in Europe, but most of them were military personnel. In the Second World War, waged from the air as well as on land, civilian deaths and infrastructure damage reached catastrophic proportions, especially as a result of strategic bombing and the targeting of civilian centers alongside military targets. For example, by the end of the war, the Allies had dropped about 1.3 million tons of bombs on Germany. Over 40 percent of the urban areas of Germany’s 70 largest cities were destroyed as a consequence of bombing, and an estimated 305,000 civilians were killed.2 In Hamburg alone, Allied firebombing destroyed about 75 percent of the city, and some 45 thousand city dwellers perished. The numbers of people left homeless by the war reached into the millions, with over two million displaced persons in Germany alone.3 KeywordsForeign PolicyReligious ConvictionSoviet BlocNational Security CouncilNuclear DeterrenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.