Eastern Europe
The Soviet bloc's western glacis, c. 1945–1989
Also known as: Eastern Europe
The Soviet bloc's western glacis from 1945 to 1989 — and, before that, the inter-war zone of small successor states between Germany and Russia. A recurring strategic theatre throughout T&H (T&H 36).
Quigley's Framing
Quigley treats Eastern Europe as a structurally unstable buffer zone: the territory between the historic core of Western Civilization and the Eurasian heartland controlled from Moscow. The zone's small-state pluralism — Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, the Baltic states — is read as economically non-viable and militarily indefensible without external guarantee. The inter-war French alliance system and the post-war Soviet hegemony are the two principal solutions attempted, with very different costs.
Strategic Role
The inter-war chapters of T&H trace the failure of the French eastern alliance system, culminating in the Munich crisis of 1938 and the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. The wartime and post-war chapters trace the Soviet absorption of the region into the Warsaw Pact, with particular attention to the Berlin crises, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and the construction of the Iron Curtain. Quigley reads the Cold War division of Europe along the Elbe line as a tacit Anglo-American acceptance that the eastern half of the continent would be conceded to Moscow in exchange for the western half being secured.
Civilizational Lens
In The Evolution of Civilizations Eastern Europe appears as the contact zone between three civilizations — Western, Orthodox, and (historically) Islamic — and Quigley argues that the region's small-state geography is itself a product of that civilizational layering. The post-1945 division along religious-civilizational lines (Catholic Poland and Hungary on one side of the line, Orthodox Romania and Bulgaria on the other, mixed cases like Yugoslavia internally fractured) is treated as confirming the underlying pattern.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 36 Quigley
Eastern Europe is the structurally unstable buffer zone between the historic core of Western Civilization and the Eurasian heartland.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 668 Quigley
The inter-war French eastern alliance system failed at Munich; the post-war Soviet hegemony succeeded at the cost of forty years of repression.