History Essay.
How important were ideologies in the bringing of the Cold War until 1949?
“Ideologies have no heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves”. This is how John le Carré classifies the harsh thing called an ideology. An ideology is a system of idea or ideals to form the basis of an economical, philosophical or political theory. Destutt de Tracy first used the word in 1796 but this word only became “fashionable” in the XXth century with the rise of nationalism. Extremist ideologies rose, Nazism, Fascism or Communism made their appearance, but this was decades after the appearance of the World leading ideology: Democracy.
Ideologies have brought two of the World’s most important conflicts, the second World War which was the forecast of the Cold war leaded by the ideological war and more accurately the war between the USA, Germany, Italy and the USSR even though the two leading ideologies were the ones coming from the two largest nations (USA and USSR).
In the following essay we will see what major differences existed between the leading ideologies of the world and how these differences brought tensions nationally (USSR) as well as internationally. We will the see how the treaties, spheres of influences and alliances brought up a tension at an international scale and how changes of alliances altered the shape of the world. To conclude we will see that ideologies were not the only reason as shown with the Second Front and by the race to be a superpower.
We could classify the ideologies ruling the XXth century into two categories, the nationalist ones: Nazism, Fascism and Communism and the liberal ones: Democracy. The fact that those four ideologies did not serve the same purpose could be the first reason for tensions. We can see that even nationally tension rises, as an example the Bolshevik and Menshevik battle were international powers join the “war” in favour of the Mensheviks. The civil war lasted six years...