After the Berlin Wall’s construction and existence of the same, the history of Germany and the rest of the world has changed. If you are an absolute beginner you may ask yourself why the USSR had to justify its building of this infamous barrier. In this blog post we will discuss what led to the causing of the Berlin Wall to be built.
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Western Threat
The main justification they offered was the thought that Western influence in East Germany and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc were liable to disrupt the eastern bloc. West Berlin, behind the Iron Curtain, was occupied by the Allies which gave it its status as a rich symbol of capitalism and democracy on top of the communist states. Such a flow of Western influence would be an embarrassment and loss for the USSR, and it wanted to stem the flow of East Germans defecting to the West.
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Economic Factors
Another reason to build the Berlin Wall was the economic disparity between East and West Germany too. The USSR dominated East Germany’s economy, and the East was unable to catch up with the rapidly thriving economy of the west. The wall was constructed to deter people of the Eastern Bloc from trying to escape to the West side, to prevent people from fleeing there.
2.1 Brain Drain
East Germany was also a matter of the brain drain (brain drain) phenomenon when there was the brain drain (brain drain) to the West and the highly skilled professionals and intellectuals left to East Germany. The idea was to stop this talent drain and keep skilled workers in East Germany for whom it needed workers for development.
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Cold War Tensions
On the development of the Berlin Wall, the justification of the Cold War settled the USSR. The idea of communism versus capitalism intensified tensions between the communist world headed by the USSR, and capitalist world run by America. The Berlin Wall not only physically cut East Germany off from the rest of the world, but was a demonstration of the Soviet Union’s authoritarian rule, a demonstration of power over East Germany.
3.1 Escalation of Crisis
At the start of the 1960s, the threat to Soviet control of East Germany increased because of the large number of defectors. Therefore, the USSR claimed that the Berlin Wall should have been built in order to avoid a political and military crisis escalating into a full blown affair between the two blocs of the major world powers.
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International Recognition
The USSR managed to appear not only to be neutral on the Berlin Wall issue, but also to justify the construction and operation of such a wall as a necessary measure for the protection of the Eastern Bloc, to earn international recognition and legitimacy. As the division between the world of capitalism and that of communism, the wall had helped the USSR to extend its sway over Eastern Europe and to assure that communism continued in its spread.
4.1 Relations with Allies
Relations between the USSR and its allies were also changed by the construction of the Berlin Wall, representing a promise to maintain the militancy of the Eastern Bloc.. In order to secure the loyalty to other communist states as well as to close neighbours of the West, the USSR demonstrated its strong stand against the Western influence.
Conclusion
For its justification to the building of the Berlin Wall, the geopolitical and ideological tensions of this Cold War epoch offer us valuable understanding because this line separated people and enemies who could have become friends. All of these factors were involved in why USSR decided to build this historic barrier as they all threatened Western influence, economic factors, Cold War tensions, the pursuit of international recognition.
A physical division ended when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and it also represented a significant moment in history ending with Eastern Bloc and the proving of democracy. Once we start to explore the reasons why the Berlin Wall went up, we can better comprehend the crazy drama of world history as it played out during the Cold War.
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