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Post Wwii

Essay Two The Second World War ended in Europe with Nazi Germany's defeat in May 1945. By this time, all Eastern and much of Central Europe was under Soviet employment. Following World War II, many Europeans were trying to reach peace. Europeans were encouraged to center their daily lives around helping their countries’ efforts to achieve peace and prosperity. In the first decade following World War II, Moocow thoroughly exploited its new European empire to support the massive effort to rebuild. In Eastern Europe, communism started to emerge. Moscow’s government decided to ignore the Yalta agreement, a set of rules agreed upon by Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin postwar Europe and the war in the Pacific. Europe was plagued with frequent and destructive wars, particularly the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and World War II. European leaders, out of a desire to secure a lasting peace in Europe, agreed that the best method to do so was to unite the nations economically and politically. Thus began the European Union. The most important event in the formation of market-based development in the immediate post-WWII period was the 1947 signing of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Western Europe (Brose 296.) The Marshall Plan was an economic strategy developed by Western leaders to stifle communism from spreading to Western Europe. Initially, it emerged as a counteractive attempt, due to the urgent distrust of the Soviet’s socialist ideology. Out of fear of having the Soviet Union take advantage of the plan, America made the terms deliberately difficult for the Soviet Union to accept. Set against the Cold War hysteria of the decades following WWII, the fear of communism was the ideological basis for the Marshall Plan; and was thus legitimized policymakers and academics. The obvious successes of the Marshall Plan were that it facilitated trade, commerce, and ongoing relations among European countries and the United States....