Yalta System

Name and scope

In Russian-language historiography the standard name for this order is the Yalta-Potsdam system of international relations. As the name indicates, it refers to the framework of international relations fixed by the treaties and agreements of the Yalta Conference (February 1945) and the Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945).[P105] The two conferences wound up the Second World War and reshaped the postwar European order, and the term went on to denote the international order that governed the postwar world from 1945 to 1991.

Origins: the bipolar design born at Tehran

The roots of the Yalta system reach back to the Tehran Conference of 1943. Already there the position of two powers, the USSR and the United States, grew conspicuously stronger, and the decisive role in determining the contours of the postwar world increasingly passed to them. The preconditions of a future bipolar world were thus conceived while the war was still being fought, and the trend became fully manifest at Yalta and Potsdam.[P106]

Structural features

• Bipolar structure. The multipolar organisation of international relations was dismantled and a bipolar structure emerged, led by two superpowers, the USSR and the United States. The wide lead of these two powers over the rest of the world in military, political, economic and cultural-ideological capacity produced two dominant 'centres of power' that shaped the whole international system.[P111]
• Spheres of influence and divided nations. The division of the world into the spheres of influence of two super-states, in Europe and on the periphery alike, gave rise to 'divided' countries (Germany, Korea, Vietnam, China), while military-political blocs under Soviet and American leadership deepened the geopolitical structuration of the confrontation.[P114]
• A weak treaty-legal basis. The Yalta-Potsdam order had no firm treaty-legal foundation. The agreements underlying the postwar order were either oral and never officially recorded, or fixed mainly in declaratory form.[P117]

The Yalta betrayal controversy

In Western and above all Eastern European memory the system carries the pejorative sense of great powers bargaining away the fate of small nations. Scholarly judgement, by contrast, divides: against the narrative that Yalta handed over Eastern Europe stands the argument that the conference merely ratified where the Red Army already stood, while on paper free elections were promised.[P2] The dispute shows that 'Yalta system' is at once an analytical category and a site of political memory.

End

The end of the Potsdam era came with the collapse of the world socialist camp. After the failed attempt to reform the Soviet economy, its demise was confirmed by the Belovezha Accords of 1991.[P109]