Fighting the Cold War on the Home Front: America, Britain, Australia and Canada

Abstract

The decade following World War II was the formative period of post-war alignment in international relations, the point of congealment for the Cold War. There is a vast literature on the international aspects of the events of this decade. Yet one of the striking characteristics of this era was domestic: 'a tightening of controls within the capitalist and communist camps, a construction of military blocs, a repression of those suspected of sympathies for the other side (persecution of Titoistsin Eastern Europe, McCarthyism in the USA)'.' This process of internal political repression was an element in the primordial division of the post-war world into two armed and relatively disciplined camps. It also had profound implications for the politics of the countries involved. The sharpening of ideological conflict and the deployment of coercion to consolidate a quasi-wartime national 'consensus' could not leave unmarked the practice of pluralist and competitive politics in capitalist democracies. It was in the United States, the leader and organiser of the Western bloc, where the impact of McCarthyism on liberal democratic practices was most evident. As a consequence, there is a large literature, often of high quality, on the domestic impact of the Cold War on the USA. There is, however, very little written about the domestic impact on the other English-speaking countries, where the lesser public impression of McCarthyism has generally been taken as notice of its absence. Yet the Cold War was launched in other Western nations allied to the US. The domestic implantation of the Cold War obviously differs according to the specific conditions of individual countries. The American variant-McCarthyism-has no privileged status as a model by which other countries must be judged.