Two Camps Doctrine

The declaration

The founding conference of the Cominform met at Szklarska Poreba in Poland in September 1947. The report Zhdanov delivered there defined the postwar world as divided into two camps: an imperialist, anti-democratic camp led by the United States and an anti-imperialist, democratic camp led by the USSR.

The formulation contained a change in the reading of the situation. During the war the logic of the anti-fascist alliance had sustained the prospect of cooperation with Western capitalist states, and communist parties had taken part in coalition governments. The two camps doctrine discarded that prospect and defined the opposition as a permanent structure.

Policy implications

Consequences appeared at once in two directions. In Eastern Europe the process by which communist parties excluded their coalition partners and established single-party power accelerated, and forced mergers with social democratic parties proceeded. States that had been considering participation in the Marshall Plan reversed course, and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, founded in 1949, constituted a separate economic sphere.

In Western Europe communist parties left or were excluded from coalition governments. The French and Italian parties were forced out of government in 1947 and recast their work around opposition to the Marshall Plan and strike struggles. The structure in which the policy of each party was directly subordinate to Soviet foreign policy was also established in this period.

Fractures

The dichotomy soon ran into exceptions. When Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform in 1948, conflict inside the socialist camp became visible and exposed the problem that a two-camp scheme could not handle antagonism within a camp. From the mid-1950s the formation of the non-aligned movement asserted a third position belonging to neither.

The official Soviet line changed as well. When the Twentieth Party Congress of 1956 formulated peaceful coexistence, competition and coexistence between systems were stressed in place of permanent opposition, and the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s broke the unity of the socialist camp itself. The two camps doctrine is treated as the ideological frame of the early Cold War and is cited afterwards as a case showing the limits of camp logic in the analysis of international relations.