I realize that there is more to it than that and the divisions in countries like Germany, Korea, and Vietnam had layers upon layers of complexity in them. BUT, was there ever a meeting between Americans and Soviets that essentially carved up the map like the Berlin Conference or the Sykes Picot agreement, where foreign occupiers of a land essentially started drawing lines on a map and agreed who controlled which part? Or did the divisions arise more from "That's just where each side's troops happened to be, and they formed their governments there"?
I guess the core of my question is, following all of the events and circumstances leading back hundreds of years, how was the final decision of which country would be communist and which country would be capitalist made? And what was the local reaction to such decisions?
Greetings! This is a great question, and it certainly touches on a fair few areas of interest for Cold War historiography and the narratives surrounding the origins of a decades long geopolitical conflict whose impact is still felt in many regions to this day. I shall be weighing in on the division of countries between American and Soviet spheres of influence, with some dabbling in the historiographical arguments here and there. Often times, especially at the beginning of the Cold War, we shall see that it was indeed a matter of "That's just where each side's troops happened to be." (though obviously not quite that simple). I should note however that the local reactions to these decisions are beyond my research on the matter, so any other AH traveler can (and should!) feel free to chime in with their tuppence on that part of the question. Preamble dealt with, let's begin.
"“There are at the present time two great nations in the world… the Russians and the Americans… Their starting point is different and their courses are not the same, yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”
- French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
Germany
When the Second World War in Europe ended with the fall of Nazi Germany, the postwar order was a major topic of discussion amongst the Allied powers. As a continuation of the discussions which had taken place in previous wartime conferences (namely Tehran and Yalta), the Potsdam Conference took place from July 17th to August 2nd 1945 between the "Big Three" Allied leaders whose duty it would be to decide the shape (and spheres) of postwar Europe. Ah....hang on a moment. Let's clear this key misconception out of the way first: the Big Three were no more by Potsdam. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was replaced by newly elected Labour Party PM Clement Attlee partway through the conference, and the US was being represented by former Vice-president Harry Truman, who had become President after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12th. In fact, of the original three wartime leaders, just one remained to exercise his influence over the last Allied wartime summit: Joseph Stalin, Premier of the Soviet Union.
At Potsdam, the Allied leaders faced a difficult series of decisions. All four of the major Allied powers (France, Britain, the USSR, and America) had troops within Germany when the surrender took place. The Soviet juggernaut had pushed from the east, and the to-be "western Allies" had pushed from the west. How then, to administer and run the German state now that the Nazi government had been defeated? No singular Allied power could claim that it had the right to do so, for all of them had interested in Germany, and all of them had troops which had contributed to the end of the (European) war. Thus the decision was taken to divide Germany into four "zones of occupation", and to further divide the capital city of Berlin (which had been captured exclusively by the Soviet Red Army) into four zones as well. However, these four zones were treated as a single economic unit, governed by the Allied Control Council, with military governors from each of the four powers being involved. Here is where things got slightly complicated. Although the entirety of Germany was technically presided over (at least temporarily) by the Allied Control Council, each military governor had the ultimate authority in their respective zone. Hence the Allied Control Council could only operate by unanimous agreement, a condition which was actually achieved many times between 1945 and 1947.
Each side administering Germany thus went about moulding the economic, political, and social aspects of their zone into a system that mirrored their own image back home. For the Western allies, this meant making their zone "safe" for capitalism, and for the Soviets, this meant making their zone (the largest out of the four) "safe" for communism. The result was that, as time went on in the immediate postwar years, each portion of Germany was transformed militarily, economically, and politically. This response will not go too far in-depth with the various disagreements and tension-building between the Americans and the Soviets in Germany, but relations over their zones of occupation did deteriorate significantly by 1947. By the time of the 1947 London meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers, the situation had gotten to the point where it seemed as though the reunification of Germany with a single government would no longer be feasible.
We must remember here the context in which the November-December London meeting occurred in. The Marshall Plan, America's massive economic aid program to Western Europe (with only Yugoslavia and Greece in the East receiving aid) was in full gear, and the Soviets had already gotten to work creating their bulwark of Eastern European puppets. Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim paints a good picture of this larger context:
"The lines of the Cold War were drawn clearly and firmly in the principal theatre, Europe, and these lines split Germany into two halves, each of which belonged to a rival camp. The landmarks in this process were the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the formation of the Cominform. In this intensifying Cold War between East and West, Germany was both the most important battleground and its greatest prize. The German problem became merged with the Cold War, and the Cold War came to centre increasingly on the German problem."
In the latter half of 1948 and the first half of 1949, the German question led to the Berlin blockade, itself a microcosm of the developing Cold War. The Soviets, in a move of shrewd geopolitical value, blockaded the Western sector of Berlin from any trade with the West German occupation zones, and the Western Allies responded with the remarkable Berlin Airlift. With this firm statement that the western powers were not going to be moved from Berlin, the Soviets backed down, and the lines of the Cold War in Europe crystallized around their focal point by 1950. Germany was to be the center of attention for much of the Cold War, but what about the rest of Europe? Why did the Western Allies seemingly agree to allow the Kremlin and Stalin to control the entirety of Eastern Europe (with several exceptions)? That is where we are headed next, to find out the origins of the "Iron Curtain".
Part 1 of 3