The Cold War

This is a modern linguistic map of Europe. Ignoring the Caucasus mountain area, the colors on the map do a good job differentiating language families and subfamilies. The greens are Romance, the oranges are Germanic, the blues are Slavic, the two magentas are the Baltics, the Celtics are pink, and the browns are the isolates in the Indo-European family, Greek and Albanian. The non-Indo-European family Finno-Ugric is in yellow.

The Cold War divided all Romance and Germanic language countries from all Slavic, Uralic and Baltic countries. The only exceptions are East Germany and Romania.

East Germany

At the end of World War II Germany had been defeated and a great re-alignment occured. Germany itself was divided into four zones before the peace was cemented, with an army of each of the USA, USSR, UK and France occupying one sector. In the capital itself, there was an international zone, which had an unusually ineffective policing system .

The Soviet Army stayed in Germany and overrode any linguistic-based sentiments of the German people. Within ten months of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Germany was reunited.

Romania

Romania (and, after WWII, the breakaway portion now known as Moldova) were completely surrounded by Warsaw Pact countries. In this case geography overrides language. Perhaps it is interesting to note that the highest level defector in the history of the Soviet Union was a Romanian .

Early Cold War Conflicts

The first major revolt against Soviet (Slavic) rule was in the richest(?) of the non-Slavic countries, in this case Uralic Hungary.

Greece was an early flashpoint. Greece is not any of Germanic, Slavic, Romantic or Uralic, but its own branch of the Indo-European family. The local communists fought with the local royalists both during the Nazi occupation, for control of the resistance movement, and then in a full blown civil war from 1946 to 1949. My theory would suggest that Greece's unique position as being not part of either sides major language families made its fate less certain, and the likelihood of war more likely. The royalists won and Greece joined NATO.

Albanian, like Greek, has no direct cousins in the Indo-European family. And, like Greece, Albania had an unusual place in the "bipolar" world that emerged in Europe after WWII. Albania became the only Communist country in the world to align itself with China instead of the Soviet Union.

Post-Cold War Conflicts

After the collapse of the Soviet Union there were many sub-conflicts created, many of them in the caucasus region, and a few others .

Further Research Possibilities

Did the countries of Asia, Africa and Oceania which took sides in the Cold War match any linguistic map?