More than an airlift: Constructing the Berlin Blockade as a Cold War battle, 1946--1949

Fifty years ago the Berlin Blockade embroiled the world in the first great crisis of the Cold War. According to standard accounts, the Soviet Union imposed a total blockade on the western half of the city, threatening (West) Berlin with starvation and total economic collapse. Only the heroic efforts of the Anglo-American airlift kept the city alive and fought off the Soviet assault. This dissertation argues that at no point did a total blockade exist around West Berlin. Far from forming an airtight seal around the Western Sectors, the Soviet-imposed transportation and utility restrictions remained limited during the entire blockade. Even members of the American government recognized the fact that (West) Berlin's economy and the food and fuel requirements of its population were to a large extent being met by ongoing official and unofficial contacts with the surrounding Soviet Zone. Thus, the airlift can no longer be seen as the decisive, material weapon that determined the blockade's eventual outcome. This realization challenges existing conceptions of Soviet goals and Western interests in "blockaded" Berlin and suggests that this Cold War battle actually functioned in a radically different fashion.;Rather than simply a case of the great powers imposing their conflict on a local setting, the Berlin Blockade emerged as an international Cold War crisis when the great powers translated the local battle for control of the city into international ideological and strategic terms for deployment on a world stage. More generally, this suggests that the ongoing historiographical debates about Cold War origins have been misplaced. Instead of focusing exclusively on policy formulation and the various interests and ideologies driving it, Cold War scholarship must pay closer attention to the mechanisms with which its battles were contested. This dissertation proposes a new approach to Cold War history that for the first time moves beyond the heavily politicized debates about Soviet or American intentions and instead imbeds a discussion of its battles for power in the ways that its venues (or battlegrounds) shaped and determined the outcome of a clash that dominated the second half of the twentieth century.