1956: The Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution

Thèmes abordés

Suez, crisis, Budapest, revolution, Hungary, France, USA, Israel, England, history, effects, international relations

Résumé du document

Human history has been riddled with periods of crisis. Such a crisis was the Hungarian protests in 1956 against the government and its Soviet imposed policies. The United States stayed away from the war waged by Israel, France and the UK against the Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser. If Morocco and Tunisia declared their independence, the war of Algeria took on more threatening proportions. But how far are these events linked?

Gunfire broke out on the evening of October 23, 1956, between the protesters and the political police in Budapest: this is the beginning of the Hungarian revolution and prelude to a bloody Soviet intervention. At the same time, from October 22 to 24, France, the United Kingdom and Israel were secretly developing, in Sevres, the plan for military intervention in Egypt. . On the morning of November 4, Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov put into action his plan to crush the insurgents in Budapest; on November 6, the Anglo-French Operation Musketeers landed at Port Said. On November 22, the last pockets of resistance in Hungary were crushed; on December 22, there were no more Western troops in Egypt. Budapest wept tears of blood, while the booming laugh of Gamal Abdel Nasser echoed in Cairo.

1956 is a pause, a sudden cold snap after the beginnings of a thaw in the Cold War. It began under the auspices of the detente: on April 18, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev arrived in London, and on May 15, the chairman of French Council, Guy Mollet, and his French Foreign Minister Christian Pineau, undertook an official visit to Moscow. Just five months later, the Egyptian loudspeakers announced to the Cairo population that World War III had begun.

When Soviet President Nikolai Bulganin wrote to the powers engaged in Egypt to threaten of massive retaliation, one quickly realizes that the inevitable conflict did not correspond to known archetypes as the United States had decided not to support its Franco-British allies.

Extraits

[...] Yet, all is not just the Cold War. When Soviet President Nikolai Bulganin wrote to the powers engaged in Egypt to threaten of massive retaliation, one quickly realizes that the conflict which is looming does not correspond to known archetypes. Because the United States has decided not to support their Franco-British allies 1 The Tears of Budapest The Hungarian tragedy is part of the desalinization and the crisis that began in the Soviet empire. In 1944, the mode of social management installed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1929, with the watershed Stalinist collectivization, has expanded to the whole of Eastern Europe. [...]

[...] In Poland and Hungary, the powers in place refused any movement[4]. Perfectly identical initially, the two crises are not undone in the same way. In Poland, Edward Ochab has the courage to hand the reformer Wladyslaw Gomulka, before tensions from turning to bloodshed; while in Hungary, Nagy came to power in the night of October 23, while the blood cast and the Soviets intervened once. While the situation in Poland until the end of October remains in the hands of communist reformers, it finally escaped from their Hungarian counterparts, overwhelmed by a movement that Russian tanks were radicalized. [...]

[...] Blasberg's article. Taking off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence. Matthew Connelly, p. 740-745. Blasberg's article. Diplomacy in the Middle East: the International Relations of Regional and Outside Powers. L. Carl Brown. Ed. I.B. Tauris. [...]

[...] Washington is at the origin of the crisis it is the US refusal to fund the future work of the Aswan dam that grows Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal Company. But if the United States faces a Raïs frustrating then their strategy of the Baghdad Pact, focusing on the Iraq of Nuri Saïd and a Turkey member of NATO since 1952, this is not the Cold War logic that will dictate their decision. They are inspired by the old American notion that the completion of the colonial era is a condition for the consolidation of the balance of power. [...]

[...] If the Soviet European space is confirmed, then it missed the opportunity of a controlled desalinization: the ultimate failure of Mikhail Gorbachev is implicit in that of Khrushchev The American empire is establishing itself as original. In 1956, it has expanded its network of alliances on all continents. Until then, this network has worked defensively to contain the Soviet threat. Now, the logic moves: the US does not position itself more as a leader of a block than in a regulator of world order. In this way, the Eisenhower Doctrine in December 1956[12], following the twin crises in fall, has a premonitory value: does it not foreshadow, in its way, the Bush Doctrine? [...]