Реферат на тему Реферирование Книги The Cold War 1945-1991

Содержание:

Introduction 3
Chapter 1: Origins, 1917–1945 4
Chapter 2: The Cold War Emerges, 1946–1952 5
Chapter 3: Global Stakes, 1953–1961 6
Chapter 4: From Crisis to Détente, 1961–1968 8
Chapter 5: The Cold War Declines, 1969–1976 9
Chapter 6: The Demise of Détente and the New Cold War, 1977–1985 10
Chapter 7: Renewed Détente and the End of the Cold War, 1985–1991 11
Conclusion 12

Введение:

The book under consideration is the second edition of the work of Michael L. Dockrill and Michael F. Hopkins, published by Palgrave Macmillan agency in 2006. The book is called «The Cold War».
The book is devoted to the significant part of the global history – the period of global geopolitical, military, economic and ideological confrontation between two political systems: socialism and capitalism, from 1946 to the end of 1980s. The center of socialism was in the USSR and the center of capitalism was in the United States. Political scientists call this period the Cold War.
The authors deal with several considerable issues devoted to this period. They accomplish three main objectives in this book. The primary purpose is to offer an informed assessment of opinion on a key episode or theme in European history.
Secondly, each title presents a distinct interpretation and conclusions from someone who is closely involved with current debates in the field. Thirdly, the book provides a succinct introduction to the topic, with the essential information necessary to understand the period and the literature being discussed. Equipped with an annotated bibliography and other aids to study, the book provides an ideal starting point to explore important events and processes that have shaped Europe’s history to the present day.
The book introduces readers to historical approaches which in some cases are very new and which would take many years to filter down to textbooks. It contains 7 chapters; each of them is devoted to a particular period of the Cold War.
This second edition has benefited from the documents emerging from the Soviet and East European archives and some Chinese archives. These materials provide a solid documentary foundation for the Cold War era, which is described by Michael L. Dockrill and Michael F. Hopkins in their book.

Заключение:

In their book «The Cold War» Dockrill and Hopkins dwell on a number of factors, which were responsible for the Cold War: the ideological differences between the Soviet Union and the West, the nuclear arms race, misperceptions of each other’s intentions and the overestimation of each other’s capabilities. Initial American post-Second World War plans did not go much beyond maintaining peace through the United Nations and encouraging free trade. Churchill was, however, more anxious than Roosevelt about Soviet aims in post-war Europe and the Mediterranean. For his part Stalin felt that the grand alliance of the war years and Soviet victories over Germany had enhanced the Soviet Union’s status as a great power and entitled it to secure and consolidate a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Given the huge Soviet wartime sacrifices, Britain and the United States felt bound, during the wartime conferences in Teheran and Yalta, to acknowledge Moscow’s hegemony in the countries ‘liberated’ by the Red Army.
Dockrill and Hopkins analyse the period through 7 chapters and come to the conclusion, that the end of the Cold War allowed Europe to become ‘whole and free’ as President Bush proclaimed in the summer of 1990, and the Western order has prevailed as a result of the defeat of Communism. If the Cold War signified a ‘long peace’, characterised by the lack of military conflicts between the great powers, its end threatened a more unstable period of international relations. This certainly was true in the case of the outbreak of the civil war in Yugoslavia, though the rest of Europe has remained relatively peaceful. The triumphalism of some Americans about the Cold War victory of democracy and market economics might well have exacerbated these questions.
The end of the book deepen the anxiety about the future, because there was a geopolitical and ideological struggle between the two superpower blocs from 1945 to 1990, but the new era is likely to be more complicated, as one ideology, communism, has all but disappeared and the United States is the only superpower.

Фрагмент текста работы:

Chapter 1: Origins, 1917–1945
The first chapter dwells on the origin of the confrontation between two opposed political systems. Antagonism had been inherent in the American–Soviet relationship since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The two great continental states represented totally opposed ideologies: the United States embraced the values of liberal democracy, while the Soviet Union was the first «socialist republic», aiming to overthrow the existing world order.
The authors of the book provide detailed analyses of the pre-war period of the cold war, saying that the competing ideologies of capitalism and communism, the Soviet repudiation of the former Tsarist debts and American intervention in the Russian Civil War resulted in a climate of suspicion and hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union which failed to dissipate even when the United States recognised the Soviet Union in 1933.
In early 1945 the Big Three, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, managed to reach a shaky agreement on the future of Germany and Eastern Europe, but with Roosevelt’s death the new President, Harry Truman, became suspicious of Soviet policy, particularly towards the Eastern European countries, now occupied by the Red Army. However, at the Potsdam Conference the three powers managed to paper over the cracks and produce an agreement which virtually confirmed the Yalta settlement, with Truman’s confidence buoyed up by news of the American explosion of the atomic bomb. But when the three foreign ministers met in London in September for detailed negotiations over the principles reached at Potsdam, Molotov proved to be unyielding in his determination to secure Moscow’s desiderata. The conference broke up without agreement and it seemed that East–West relations would plunge into acrimony. James Byrnes, Truman’s new Secretary of State in Moscow in December 1945 managed to achieve a temporary working arrangement between conflicting interests.
As it is pointed out in the conclusion to the chapter, much would now depend on Stalin’s view of future Soviet policy and on Truman’s reaction to any real or alleged Soviet attempt to alter the existing status quo.