StudySpace: Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, 2 e.

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1. Competing Blocs
1. The breakup of Europe's empires and the demise of European world leadership led to the division of the world into three blocs
2. The United States and Soviet Union-superpowers
1. Both believed in respective ideologies had universal application
1. United States-liberal capitalism
2. Soviet Union-Communism
2. Size
3. Possession of atomic weapons
4. Each embodied a model of civilization that could be applied globally
3. Third World countries fought internal wars over the legacy of colonialism
4. Internal and external produced tensions and conflicts that challenged the three-world order
2. World War II and its aftermath
1. By the late 1930s, German and Japanese ambitions to expand and to become, like Britain, France and the United States, colonial powers brought these conservative dictatorships into conflict with France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and eventually the United States
1. World War II was more global in scope and in context than World War I
2. Distinctions between citizens and soldiers were further eroded
3. The acts of barbarism robbed Europe of any lingering claims to cultural superiority
1. In the war's wake, anti-colonial movements successfully pressed their claims for national self-determination
2. The war in Europe
1. The war began with Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939 and Britain and France's decision to oppose it militarily
1. Within two years, Germany and Italy controlled virtually all of Western Europe
1. The German tactic of blitzkrieg, or lightning war proved decisive
2. Britain escaped conquest, but German planes waged aerial war on British cities
2. In June 1941, the Germans invaded and nearly conquered the Soviet Union
2. Nazi occupation brought terror and displacement to Europe
1. The war required more laborers. With men off fighting, women became highly sought after for the workforce
2. 12 million foreign laborers were brought to Germany for war production goals
3. The German offensive halted in the Soviet Union with defeat in the battle of Stalingrad in 1942
1. For the next two years, the Red Army slowly forced German troops from Eastern Europe
2. British and American troops battled German forces in the air and on the seas and in northern Africa
3. Allied Forces finally opened up a second front in Western Europe with the successful D-Day invasion of June 1944
4. In May 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally
4. The war in Europe had devastating human and material costs
1. The Soviets lost up to 20 million people, both military and civilian
2. Aerial bombings in German and British cities brought unprecedented hardships
3. Two-thirds of Europe's Jews were killed systematically in German "death camps"
4. Nazis killed or imprisoned gypsies, homosexuals, Communists, and Slavs
3. The war in the Pacific
1. Throughout the 1930s Japan had expanded its influence in Asia
1. In 1931 it conquered Manchuria
2. In 1937, it invaded and conquered much of coastal China
1. During this war, Japanese troops inflicted terror on the Chinese population, the most notorious example being the "Rape of Nanjing"
3. German occupation of Western European countries in 1940 left their colonies in Southeast Asia at the mercy of Japanese forces
4. The United States became the chief obstacle to Japanese expansion and, as a result, Japan launched an attack on the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 in hopes of a surprise knockout blow
1. The strategy backfired and the United States quickly mobilized for total war
2. Germany and Italy also declared war on the U.S. in light of their Tripartite Pact with Japan
5. In 1942 Japan seized the British-ruled Southeast Asian colonies of Singapore, Malaya, Burma, etc.
1. Japan dubbed its new empire the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere
2. The Japanese exploited these areas despite their calls of "Asia for Asians"
1. Millions were drafted for labor
2. Two hundred thousand mainly Korean "comfort women" were forced to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese army
6. American mobilization tilted the balance of power in the Pacific against Japan by 1943
1. In August 1945, President Harry Truman, in the hope of saving the American army the monumental task of invading Japan proper, authorized the use of atomic weapons to force Japan to surrender
1. Japan surrendered a few days after two bombs destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
2. The bombs left environmental devastation by polluting air, land, and groundwater
3. The beginning of the cold war
1. The Second World War left Europe in ruins
1. Physically the continent was a wreck, and psychologically, old regimes had lost credibility
2. Socialism and Soviet-style communism attracted wide support
2. Rebuilding Europe
1. The principal Allies in the fight against Hitler-the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain-distrusted each other and disputed how to address Europe's postwar recovery
2. The United States decided to "contain" Soviet influence where it already existed in Eastern Europe thus initiating a "cold war" between the former allies
1. This policy contributed to the division of Germany into mutually hostile states loyal to opposing sides in the cold war after the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949
2. To shore up democratic governments and capitalist economies in Western Europe, President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in 1947, which promised massive economic and military aid
3. These efforts culminated in the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949; a military alliance between Western Europe and North America against the Soviet Union
3. To Stalin, containment looked like a direct threat
1. Stalin believed the Soviet Union deserved to be dominant in Eastern Europe in order to protect its postwar security
2. The Soviet Union responded to the Western Alliance with a military alliance-the Warsaw Pact-between itself and the nations it dominated after the war in Eastern Europe in 1955
3. The Nuclear Age
1. The arms race led to stockpiling of nuclear weapons and multiple delivery systems on both sides
1. These armories, however, prevented all-out direct war between the two antagonists
2. Open confrontation emerged in Asia, where there were no well-defined Soviet and American spheres, such as existed in Europe, after the Second World War
1. The Korean War embroiled American, North Korean, South Korean, and Chinese troops in a contest to control the Korean peninsula between 1950 and 1953
1. This conflict energized America's anti-Communist agenda and led to new alliances
2. In 1951, the U.S. signed a peace treaty with Japan, whereby the U.S. committed itself to defending Japan in case of invasion, stationed troops and ships there on a permanent basis, and initiated large-scale financial aid to rebuild the economy
4. Decolonization
1. After the war, anti-colonial leaders set about dismantling the European order using the lessons of mass politicization and mass mobilization that had developed in the 1920s and 1930s
1. The process of decolonization and nation-building that followed exhibited three patterns
1. Civil war such as in China
2. Negotiated independence in India and much of Africa
3. Incomplete decolonization where large numbers of European settlers complicated the process
2. The Chinese Revolution
1. After the war the Communist Party vowed to achieve full political and economic independence for China
2. The Communist Party had gained momentum over two decades
1. In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist regime drove the Communists into the mountains
2. Soon Mao Zedong took over the leadership of the party
1. In 1934, under attack from the Nationalists, they embarked on a 6,000 mile "Long March" to the northwest of the country to escape further attacks
3. Under Mao, the party reached out to the vast rural population to fight the Japanese
1. Mao's emphasis on a peasant revolution helped him win broad support in China and served as a model for other Third World revolutionaries after 1945
2. Mao also emphasized women's liberation
4. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, the Communists and the Nationalists commenced a bloody civil war.
1. The Nationalists, having lost credibility after their losses to the Japanese and because of their postwar corruption, proved no match for Communist forces and fled to the island of Taiwan in 1949
3. Negotiated independence in India and Africa
1. In India and Africa, the British and the French, realizing that only violent coercion would sustain their empires in the postwar era, withdrew in an orderly manner
2. India
1. Although independence came nonviolently, India came dangerously close to civil war immediately afterward
1. Within the Indian National Congress Party, there was much disagreement over the direction of India after independence
1. Gandhi wanted a nonmodern utopia of self-governing villages
2. Nehru looked to Western and Soviet models for establishing a modern nation-state
2. The Muslim minority increasingly questioned the direction of Indian nationalism that was often predicated on Hindu myths and symbols
1. Riots broke out between Muslims and Hindus in 1946
3. Middle-class leaders were alarmed at the potential for radical peasant movements
4. On August 14 and 15, 1947, British forces left a partitioned subcontinent between a Muslim majority Pakistani nation-state and a Hindu majority Indian nation-state
1. Within days 1 million people had been killed in sectarian violence
2. 12 million immigrated between the two countries
3. Gandhi's fast in protest of the violence helped to bring about peace, but he himself was assassinated a few months later by a Hindu extremist
4. Nehru and the Congress Party developed a workable system in India over the next decade that emulated Soviet style economic planning and Western democratic institutions
3. Africa for Africans
1. World War II and the period immediately after saw the ranks of nationalist movements swell
2. African migrated to cities in search of a better life
3. Faced with rising nationalist demands, European powers agreed to decolonize
1. Ghana (British Gold Coast) became the first independent state
2. By 1963, all of British Africa except Southern Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe) was independent
4. Charismatic nationalist leaders took charge of political powers
1. Nkrumah led Ghana
2. Azikiwe ruled Nigeria
5. Decolonization in French-ruled Africa followed a similar path
1. At first, the French attempted assimilation into metropolitan France
1. The French electorate balked at these policies and under President de Gaulle, France dissolved its political ties in Africa
6. Among the new leaders in Africa, the sense of creating something different from existing patterns was strong
1. Nkrumah, Azikiwe, and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania looked to Africa's pre-colonial traditions that would enable the continent to develop an African form of socialism without going through depredations of capitalism
1. African personality was steeped in communal values of social justice and equality as opposed to European individualism
2. Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal best epitomized these views
1. He and others developed the idea of "Negritude," which claimed that people of African descent were more humane and had stronger communal feelings than Europeans
2. He promised to assimilate what was good from France but not to be assimilated into France.
4. Violent and incomplete decolonizations
1. Palestine, Israel, and Egypt
1. The British, who ruled Palestine in the interwar years, had issued the Balfour Declaration, making Palestine a "homeland" for Jews
2. Immigration of Jews, however, created conflict between fledgling Jewish and Arab nations
1. Arabs living in Palestine declared themselves Palestinians and worked towards self-determination
2. To dampen instability, the British curtailed Jewish immigration precipitously during World War II and immediately after
3. In 1947, the British announced their withdrawal from Palestine and asked the United Nations to decide its fate
1. The U.N. voted to create two states
1. Israel declared its existence in May 1948 but fretted about its insecure borders
2. Palestinians looked to Arab neighbors to help them gain control over the entire area
2. The ensuing Arab-Israeli War was won by Israel
1. The loss delegitimized Arab ruling elites
2. It also created 1 million Palestinian refugees in Arab countries
4. In response to their defeat over the partition of Palestine, Egyptian officers, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, overthrew King Faruq in 1952
1. Nasser quickly instituted broad land reform to gain support
2. He also banned political parties and enacted a new constitution that banned Communists and the Muslim Brotherhood and stripped old elites of most of their wealth
5. In 1956, seeking to assert Egypt's influence, Nasser seized control of the Suez Canal Company, controlled mainly by British and French investors
1. Israelis, French and British forces intervened
2. The Soviet Union and the United States forced their withdrawal
3. After regaining the canal, Nasser became a hero and symbol of pan-Arab nationalism across the Middle East, including among Palestinians
2. The Algerian War of Independence
1. The French considered Algeria a part of metropolitan France
1. Over 1 million European colons lived there
2. They owned the best land and monopolized political power
2. In 1954, Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) forces opened guerilla attacks on French troops
1. The war dragged on for eight years with atrocities committed by both sides
2. In 1958 colons and army officers started an insurrection that led to the collapse of the French government and the emergence of Charles de Gaulle as the leader of a government backed by a new constitution
3. In 1962, President de Gaulle and the FLN negotiated a peace settlement
1. 90 percent of the European population fled Algeria
3. Eastern and southern Africa
1. The Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, which commenced in 1952, forced the British to concede independence to the black majority there in 1963, despite the protests of 20,000 British settlers
2. Decolonization had to wait until the 1970s in Portuguese Angola, Portuguese Mozambique, and British Southern Rhodesia
3. African women played vital roles in the decolonization strategies
1. Organized demonstrations in Africa
2. Kenyan women supplied rebel forces in hiding with food, medical resources, and information on British military
4. South Africa defied these changes
1. In 1948, the Afrikaner-dominated Nationalist Party came to power and enacted a series of segregation laws called apartheid
1. The Group Areas Act restricted blacks to living in areas designated as homelands, only leaving them if they had official "passes"
2. The African National Congress protested these changes, which led to government repression
1. After the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, the ANC and its leader Nelson Mandela endorsed violence against the regime
2. Mandela was imprisoned and the ANC banned
3. The West, especially the U.S., continued to support the regime, seeing South Africa as a bulwark against the spread of communism in Africa
4. Vietnam
1. The French had ruled Vietnam since the 1880s
2. French reforms gave rise to a new indigenous middle-class intelligentsia that began to push for a Vietnamese nation-state in the interwar years
1. Ho Chi Minh looked to Marxism as a source of inspiration
2. During World War II he embraced Mao's idea of an agrarian revolution
1. He formed the Viet Minh-a Communist-led national liberation organization
2. When the French tried to restore their control after the Second World War, the Viet Minh opposed them with the use of guerilla tactics
1. In 1954, the Viet Minh won the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu
2. A Geneva peace conference divided the country into two zones, one controlled by Ho and the other by a French- and American-supported government
3. North Vietnam supported the efforts of the Viet Cong-Communist guerillas-to overthrow the southern regime and unite the country
4. During the 1960s the United States sent military forces to prop up the southern regime
5. Faced with antiwar protests at home and severe resistance by Vietnamese, Americans began to withdrawal troops after the presidential election of 1968
6. A failed U.S. policy of Vietnamization, implemented during America's troop withdrawal, led to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government in 1975
5. Three Worlds
1. As decolonization spread, the United States and the Soviet Union offered their models for economic and political modernization to the newly independent countries
2. Third World countries usually had ideas of their own but found their efforts toward modernization infringed upon by the two superpowers
3. The First World
1. Building on the principles of liberal modernism, exemplified by the New Deal, the First World was committed to capitalism and democracy after World War II
2. Western Europe
1. The reconstruction of Western Europe was a spectacular success
1. Agricultural and industrial productivity soared
2. Consumer goods such as refrigerators and automobiles became commonplace
3. Governments sponsored elaborate welfare states
3. The United States
1. The United States entered a prolonged expansion during the Second World War that continued until the early 1970s
1. Home ownership became common
2. "American" made was synonymous with high quality
3. With the baby boom came the growth of suburbia
4. Anxieties over the cold war produced an anti-Communist hysteria among many Americans against suspected domestic subversives in the late 1940s and early 1950s led by Senator Joseph McCarthy
1. Tensions relaxed after 1954 but politicians of all stripes worked to avoid the "soft on communism" label
5. Also during the 1950s, African Americans began to protest segregation and discrimination and to demand an equal share of the economic pie
1. The NAACP won many court victories, especially against segregation in education
2. Martin Luther King successfully employed Gandhi's tactics of nonviolent confrontation to win support against segregation
6. The Japan "miracle"
1. American military and economic support allowed Japan to focus on rebuilding its destroyed infrastructure with up-to-date equipment
1. The U.S. opened its markets to Japanese products
2. Government policies channeled wages into savings and fostered the growth of export sectors
3. By the 1970s Japanese products had become sophisticated and successful in international markets
2. Japan's economy grew by 10 percent annually during the 1950s and 1960s
4. The Second World
1. The Soviets turned Eastern Europe into a bloc of Communist "buffer states" after World War II
1. The Soviet system continued to frown on private property and to emphasize state management of the economy with a cradle-to-grave comprehensive welfare system
2. The Soviet model appealed to many because of its egalitarian principles, despite its inability to provide the consumer goods common in the First World
1. Soviet science gained worldwide acclaim, especially after the launching of Sputnik in 1957
3. Repression and dissent
1. The Soviet system, however, was inhumane, brutally suppressing dissent and those it deemed dangerous to the state
2. Even returning Soviet soldiers who had been prisoners of war were sent to camps after World War II because they had had too much contact with foreigners
4. In the 1950s, the Communist Party tried to soften these abuses
1. With Stalin's death, the new party leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's human rights abuses as not part of true communism
2. Leaders in Poland and Hungary immediately liberalized political and economic controls
1. Soviet leadership soon crushed this dissent, although it did allow some economic and cultural autonomy
3. In the Soviet Union, dissidents of all stripes emerged, but they were carefully monitored and often imprisoned
5. The Third World
1. Leaders of newly independent countries were convinced that they could build strong democratic polities like those in the West and could promote rapid economic development as the Soviet Union had while avoiding the empty materialism they associated with the West and the state oppression that had occurred in Communist regimes
2. Limits to autonomy
1. This third way proved difficult
1. The West sought to insure that market structures and private property remained intact
2. The World Bank and the IMF loaned millions for development, but enforced a First World approach to modernization on Third World nations
3. First World multinational corporations also infringed on the sovereignty of many Third World nations and transferred wealth away from them back to their home countries
4. Both the United States and Soviet Union frowned upon neutralism and often impeded Third World autonomy
1. The Soviet Union backed Communist insurgencies around the globe
2. The United States used its global alliances to establish military bases around the world
3. Both superpowers contributed to the militarization of the Third World
1. In Africa and the Middle East, both superpowers sold weapons to regimes in return for support and often created "client states"
2. These became known as "neo-colonial" problems
1. By the 1960s, many new states were mired in debt and dependency and managed by corrupt regimes supported by one of the superpowers
3. Third World revolutionaries and radicals
1. During the 1960s Third World radicalism emerged as a powerful force
1. Revolutionaries drew on the world of Frantz Fanon who urged a decolonization of the mind as well as society
2. Mao's leadership in China also inspired many radicals elsewhere
1. In 1958, he initiated the Great Leap Forward
1. The bold initiative divided China into thousands of communes where peasants would figure out how to produce the food they needed and the industrial products that would propel China past the superpowers
2. The experiment failed miserably
1. Over 20 million perished from famine
3. In 1966 he launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
1. Millions of young people were urged to cleanse the Communist Party and society from "old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas"
2. The political tension kept the country in turmoil for ten years
4. Despite these failures, radicals found his style and emphasis on the peasants appealing
2. In Latin America, radicals dreamed of ending United States domination of the region
1. American intervention overthrew a Guatemalan government bent on land reform and damping the influence of the American United Fruit Company on the country's economic and political development
2. In Cuba, Fidel Castro launched a successful guerilla war against an American-backed regime in the late 1950s
3. When he redistributed land and nationalized foreign oil refineries, the U.S. government began to actively seek ways to overthrow the new regime
1. In 1961, the CIA sponsored the failed Bay of Pigs invasion manned by Cuban exiles and opponents of Castro
4. In 1962, Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union and appealed to his new ally to install nuclear weapons in Cuba in order to forestall any future American invasions
1. When the Soviets obliged, it brought the world the closest it has come so far to nuclear confrontation
2. Eventually the Kennedy administration convinced the Soviets to remove the weapons
3. Radicals throughout Latin America were emboldened by Castro's success and hoped to emulate him
4. The United States worked with allies in the region to combat these efforts
1. During the 1960s, the Alliance for Progress provided money and advisers to improve local land systems and teach the population the benefits of liberal capitalism
2. The CIA worked with the Chilean military to overthrow Salvador Allende, a left-wing, elected president, in 1973
5. By 1975, most rebel forces had been liquidated or isolated. Most of Latin America was run by military regimes, however
6. Tensions in the Three-World Order
1. Third World radicalism exposed vulnerabilities in the three-world order along with the continuation of the Vietnam War, dissidence in the Soviet bloc, and the rising fortunes of oil-producing nations and Japan
2. Tensions in the First World
1. During the 1960s, American society lost some of its confidence
1. The assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the violence against the civil rights movement in 1964, the urban race riots that engulfed the country from 1965 to 1968, and widespread opposition to the Vietnam war-especially on college campuses-disturbed millions
2. This unsettledness occurred at a time when President Lyndon Johnson led an effort to expand the welfare state and addressed the weaknesses in American capitalism
3. Johnson's programs and the civil rights movement unleashed other campaigns for social justice among Native Americans, Mexican Americans, homosexuals, and women, among others
1. The development of an oral contraceptive helped unleash a sexual revolution and freed many women to pursue careers outside the home
4. Protests against the Vietnam War helped contribute to the withdrawal of American troops from the conflict and encouraged greater dissent from the foreign policy consensus of containing communism abroad
3. Tensions in world communism
1. Following the successful example of Yugoslavia in 1948 and the unsuccessful attempts of Poland and Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia attempted to loosen Soviet domination in 1968 with the Prague Spring
1. The reformist government of Alexander Dubcek allowed for more political expression
2. Soviet troops crushed this momentum
2. Underground dissent continued to grow after the crushing of the Prague Spring in the Soviet Union and its satellites
3. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union allowed "national communisms" in many Eastern countries to emerge as well as in several Soviet republics, in return for loyalty
4. By the early 1970s, the Soviet Union and China had split from previous cooperation
1. In the 1960s, Romania gained autonomy in its foreign policy by playing off its larger Communist allies.
2. African nations exploited Sino-Soviet tension to gain further aid from the Soviet Union
4. Tensions in the Third World
1. Although the Third World never had a formal alliance, efforts to promote cooperation often foundered in the 1960s and 1970s
1. Several countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, and the Middle East formed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960 to gain more from world trade in this commodity
1. After the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, Arab members boycotted Israel's First World allies
1. The boycott dramatically raised the price of oil and led to economic crisis in the West
2. Other commodity producers tried to duplicate OPEC's success such as coffee and rubber
1. OPEC's triumph proved short-lived
1. New oil discoveries outside OPEC's orbit reduced pressures on consuming nations to purchase oil from OPEC at inflated prices
2. Most of the revenue gained from the boycott flowed back to First World banks or was invested in the United States and Europe
1. a First World banks loaned some of the money to poor countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America at high interest rates
3. Some countries escaped the cycle of underdevelopment, such as South Korea and Taiwan, where states nurtured industries, educated the population, and required foreign nationals to work with native firms
1. Their successes did little to change international markets
7. Conclusion
1. World War II completed a process that began with World War I
2. The new three-world order replaced European domination and the old liberal order
1. The United States and the Soviet Union became the world's superpowers
2. The nation-state, not empire, became the primary form for organizing communities
3. States gained increased power everywhere
3. Stresses in the three-world order that emerged after the war were beginning to undermine it by the 1970s

 

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