Potsdam Agreement | How a world order emerges and disappears

It was called the Tripartite Conference of Potsdam. In the summer of 1945, the Allied heads of state, excluding France, negotiated the postwar order. On the sidelines of a meeting on July 24, 1945, US President Harry S. Truman took "Generalissimo" Joseph W. Stalin aside and mentioned almost casually that "we have a new weapon of unusual destructive power." The General Secretary of the CPSU seemed to show no particular interest, merely saying he was pleased to hear this, if it could be used effectively against the Japanese. While still in Potsdam, Truman issued the order for action, which shortly thereafter condemned Hiroshima and Nagasaki to an unimagined nuclear catastrophe.

Stalin had long been aware of this new type of weapons-technological "progress" by the USA and had already given orders to accelerate its own nuclear program. It was clear to him that here, in Potsdam, on the outskirts of the capital of the jointly destroyed Nazi empire, the future world order would be negotiated, better negotiated. The "bomb" would shape it. He knew about the intrigues of the USA and Great Britain against the USSR, including the plans for "Operation Unthinkable," which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had just commissioned – a war against the Soviet Union, including German Wehrmacht prisoners of war.

No Potsdam without Yalta, no negotiations without mistrust

Nevertheless, four years of joint Allied struggle against the fascist powers offered hope for a better world order of peace and cooperation. Six months earlier, in Yalta, the terminally ill US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, together with Stalin and Churchill, had outlined the contours of this new order, which was to include the establishment of a new international body of nations to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." The United Nations was to be sustained by "faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human personality, in the equal rights of men and women and of all nations, large and small," as well as "respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law."

The war against the fascist Axis powers in Rome and Berlin had been won, and Germany was occupied. But a dangerous enemy in the Far East had not yet been defeated. The defeat of the Japanese Empire was only a matter of time; the intervention of the Red Army on August 9th on this final front of the Second World War, agreed upon with the Western Allies, would also end the war in the Pacific-Asia region. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, 1945, would have been unnecessary.

The representatives of the major Allied powers who traveled to Potsdam in mid-July 1945, having also seen the devastated Berlin, a "ghost city" as Truman called it, knew what was at stake: nothing more and nothing less than the establishment of a new world order. Following Roosevelt's death in April, the USA was represented by Truman, while the British were initially represented by Churchill at the conference in Cecilienhof Palace, which began on July 17. However, after a few days, Churchill had to cede his seat at the table of the "Big Three" to the new British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, due to his election defeat. Stalin was the longest-serving and most experienced statesman in this Potsdam meeting.

The Soviet party and head of state knew that his liberation mission was no longer well-received. He was allowed to crush the fascist Wehrmacht, but seizing the opportunity to establish an order in Eastern Europe that suited him and pave the way for communists to power there would be considered sacrilege. In Washington and London, people remembered the deadly hostility toward communism, which had only been temporarily frozen because of the far worse enemy, Hitler's fascism. Stalin was mistrusted; the new nuances in Soviet policy, which initially had no intention of exporting the Soviet model of socialism, were ignored or understood. According to the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, the leading circles in the USA assumed that "all belligerent states outside the USA were fields of ruins," and that the United States, which had not been hit by bombs, was therefore in a privileged position. Moreover, the European continent in particular seemed to them to be "inhabited by hungry, desperate and probably radicalized people who were only too ready to heed the call for social revolution and economic policies that would have been incompatible with the international system of free enterprise, free trade and free investment that was supposed to save the United States and the world," according to Hobsbawm.

An anti-fascist, democratic Germany

In July/August 1945, the atmosphere gave one a sense of what was to come. The first issue was the fate of defeated Germany. At the beginning of the Potsdam Conference, plans to dismember the country were off the table; the four occupation zones agreed upon at the Yalta Conference of the "Big Three" from February 4 to 11, 1945, were intended to be a temporary solution and not prevent the establishment of a new, unified German state. What was undisputed was that Germany would cede its former eastern territories to the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and that the new eastern border would run along the Oder and Neisse rivers. This meant a massive population exchange, euphemistically referred to by many affected Germans as a "transfer."

Post-war Germany, divided into four occupation zones – now including France as a victorious power – was given four premises, the four big "Ds": denazification, demilitarization, decentralization, and democratization, in order to "give the German people the opportunity to prepare to rebuild their lives anew on a democratic and peaceful basis," as the Potsdam Agreement states. Mind you, these were initially the guidelines for a militarily defeated Germany and not the cornerstones of a new world order.

It was clear, and the diverging practices in the East and West occupation zones soon demonstrated, that these ambitious goals were understood differently by those involved. This particularly applied to "democratization," which could and did be interpreted in contradictory ways: on the one hand, to secure the—albeit modified, denazified, and partially decentralized—power and property relations of German capital, or, on the other, to overcome them by orienting oneself toward a perhaps socialist, but ultimately implying the Soviet-Stalinist, social model.

The agreements also addressed the question of how to deal with the consequences of the war and who would be responsible for paying reparations. Despite some concessions, this deal proved to be detrimental to the Soviet Union and its occupation zone. East Germany had to pay significantly more reparations and also suffered greatly from sometimes arbitrary dismantling. There was agreement among the Allies regarding the criminal prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which was then seriously pursued at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945/46 and the following years. The Nuremberg Principles also laid the foundation for modern international criminal law.

In historical, well-known imperial tradition, the “Big Three” demarcated their spheres of influence in Potsdam in 1945 without consulting the peoples.

In well-known historical imperial tradition, the "Big Three" demarcated their spheres of influence. This secured the status quo in Eastern Europe, as well as in the Middle East, for both the victorious Eastern power and the Western powers. However, the affected peoples, and often not even their political representatives, were not consulted; they had to resign themselves to their fate. Among those who suffered and had to adapt were Western Europe's communists and socialists, who, in this constellation, were forced to abandon their revolutionary visions. National or socialist liberation movements, such as those in Iran, Vietnam, and China, also felt this at first. At that time, China's seat at the UN was occupied by a representative of Chiang Kai-shek's anti-communist government.

Social developments, however, are often subject to uncontrollable dynamics; weaknesses on one side are immediately exploited by the other. And yet, for over four decades, the bipolar world order ushered in at the Potsdam Conference remained in broad outline. All sides had pledged to treat the other's sphere of influence as inviolable. This remained the case whether revolutions were attempted in Iran or Guatemala, or whether the real socialist path defined by Moscow was being questioned in Berlin, Budapest, Prague, or Warsaw. This worked as long as both sides developed economically and kept themselves in check militarily, especially as the newly emerging "communist bloc" was able to assert itself in the competition between systems.

A good twenty years after Potsdam, it was the Warsaw Pact states that took the initiative for a Conference on European Security, initiating the so-called CSCE process. The primary goal was to establish the inviolability of the borders and spheres of influence of the various systems under international law. However, the representatives of the Eastern alliance overlooked the fact that the world had evolved, and mere military strength with a nuclear stalemate was no longer sufficient. The social achievements of the real socialist states no longer met growing individual needs and clashed with economic power; the economy in the so-called "Eastern Bloc" suffered from an inability to reform. Meanwhile, a new neoliberal upheaval, seemingly aimed at the interests of the individual, was taking place in the West, weakening the counterforces there that had attempted to contain capitalism after 1945 with a welfare state and other democratization efforts. Above all, however, the Western states now relied on that part of human rights which they considered suitable for undermining the quasi-monolithic real socialist states: individual human rights, the call for civil liberties, which, with media penetration, noble words and hard currency, suggested to the citizens of Warsaw, Prague or Berlin that social security was not a bad thing, but that freedom of travel, entrepreneurship and individual self-determination were even more important against the omnipotence of the state and party.

Yes, in 1945, a world order was established in Potsdam that promised peace, at least in Europe, but which often teetered on the brink of nuclear conflagration, enabled socialist revolutions in Vietnam, China, and Cuba, and experienced a decolonization process supported by the "socialist camp"—but ultimately came to an end with a serious change in the international balance of power and the loss of the attractiveness and defensive capabilities of one side, real socialism.

This abrupt end was sealed at a summit meeting on a stormy night off Malta on December 2-3, 1989, aboard the Soviet cruise ship "Maxim Gorky," between the last CPSU General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, and then-US President George W. Bush Sr. The location was deliberately chosen: Roosevelt and Churchill had met in Malta in February 1945 to coordinate negotiations with Stalin. Gorbachev then declared at the joint press conference: "The world is leaving one era and entering another. We are at the beginning of a long road to a peaceful era. The threat of violence, mistrust, and psychological and ideological struggle should be a thing of the past." Bush said: "We can achieve lasting peace and transform East-West relations into lasting cooperation." Fine words, as it soon proved, were useless. The world order of Yalta and Potsdam was over. And the idea of the CSCE soon faded as well.

The circle had closed with the Potsdam Conference of the "Big Three" and the "Seasick Summit," as journalists called the 1989 Malta meeting because of the rough Mediterranean, which in retrospect can be seen as a powerful symbol for the stormy years of world politics that followed.

The Berlin historian Dr. Stefan Bollinger is a member of the Historical Commission of the Left Party and the Leibniz Society.