A Concise History of the World Since 1945 - States and Peoples PDF

‘This new edition does a superb job integrating early 21st century developments into an extremely readable and comprehensive history of the world since 1945. The politics of climate change, China’s ascendancy, and the strange rise of Trump, are all...

‘This new edition does a superb job integrating early 21st century developments into an extremely readable and comprehensive history of the world since 1945. The politics of climate change, China’s ascendancy, and the strange rise of Trump, are all A CONCISE A CONCISE HISTORY OF THE WORLD SINCE 1945 here.’ – Nick Doumanis, University of New South Wales, Australia From migration to science, politics to the environment, this is a lively synthesis of global history since the end of World War II. Offering a gripping account of an interdependent world and the challenges facing individuals in the twenty-first century, the narrative is arranged around two key tensions: the struggle between authoritarian HISTORY OF THE WORLD and democratic governance structures and the competing forces of cultural fragmentation and globalisation. Considering the historical experience of Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as the West, Spellman addresses the ever-expanding gulf between the Global North and Global South while also covering the environmental impact of development on SINCE 1945 the planet’s delicate ecosystems. Thoroughly updated and refreshed throughout, this second edition: Offers coverage up to the present day, including the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the refugee crisis and COVID-19 Contains updated material on environmental issues, including the Trump administration’s distrust of climate science S TAT E S A N D P E O P L E S Pays greater attention to social history, particularly questions of gender and recent developments around issues of sexuality This is the ideal introductory guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on global history since 1945. It is also a fascinating primer for anyone with an interest in global history and the issues affecting the world today. W. M. SPELLMAN is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, USA. W. M. S P E L L M A N Cover image © Joel Carillet / Getty Images W. M. S P E L L M A N Spellman_MECH v3.indd All Pages 18/08/2020 14:44 A Concise History of the World Since 1945 A Concise History of the World Since 1945 States and Peoples W. M. Spellman © W. M. Spellman under exclusive licence to Macmillan Education Limited 2006, 2020 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted their right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This edition published 2020 by RED GLOBE PRESS Previous editions published under the imprint PALGRAVE Red Globe Press in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Education Limited, registered in England, company number 01755588, of 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW. Red Globe Press® is a registered trademark in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-352-01022-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-352-01020-6 paperback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sus- tained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. For Nanci Meyer  CONTENTS Acknowledgmentsix Timelinex Introduction: dynamic tensions in recent global history 1 Part I From bipolar to multipolar world 9 1 The Cold War in global context, 1945–1991 11 Triumph and disquiet: the human prospect in 1945 11 Early superpower tensions 17 Expanding the circle of conflict 28 The Khrushchev era, 1955–1964 39 From detente to denouement 44 Power and principle 50 2 The end of empire and the problem of neocolonialism53 Decolonization and its discontents 53 The South Asian precedent 57 Africa’s hope and misfortune 68 Anticolonialism and nationalism in the Middle East 81 Southeast Asia 84 The overlooked empire: Russia 87 Assessing the colonial legacy 88 3 An elusive new world order, 1991–2020 93 Integration and fragmentation in wider Europe 95 The resurgence of China 110 Ambiguity in Latin America 123 Terrorism and troubled democracy 129 Part II Globalization and its discontents 141 4 When borders don’t matter: development and global culture 143 Classical liberalism in crisis 144 The Keynesian consensus 146 North and South, rich and poor 155 vii viii CO N T E N T S Neoliberal economics 165 Globalization and disquiet 171 5 When borders do matter: international migration and identity 180 States and refugees 183 Provisional guests 193 Globalization and identity 202 Global equity and migration 208 Part III Body and spirit 211 6 Science, technology, and the environment 213 Population and healing 217 Energy and power 232 Goods, services, and culture 237 Debate over the environment 244 Uncertain future 252 7 Religion, rights, and civil society 255 Christianity becomes a global faith 258 Challenges in the Islamic world 274 Indian and Israeli confessional politics 282 East Asian transitions 287 Rights, gender, and religion 290 Ancient faith and modern values 297 Conclusion: hope and misgiving in the new century 299 Further reading 308 Index314  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The idea for a concise, topical history of the period since 1945 was prompted by my experience teaching in an interdisciplinary humanities program at the undergraduate level. The module focused on the reading of key primary texts, but students often lacked familiarity with the broader political and cultural context in which the readings were composed. This second edition takes the story to 2020, and while the main themes of the original book remain, a series of important transitions and unexpected turns in global history have taken place over the past decade. I have tried to capture some of these and assess their larger significance for states and peoples as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. In any short introductory survey, one is deeply indebted to specialist scholars in what continues to be a dynamic period in the human experience. A sampling of some of the recent literature that has informed my thinking is provided in the “Further reading” section. A number of colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, made it possible for me to com- plete this new edition. Special thanks are reserved for my department chair, Tracey Rizzo, and to our former Provost, Joseph Urgo. Both colleagues allowed me valuable time to write while I transitioned back to the faculty after a decade on the administrative front. My graduate students in a 2017 colloquium on the human condition helped to refine some of the argu- ments made in the book. In particular, Leon Newman and Sophia Ungert thankfully pushed back at more than a few of my muddled assessments. Off campus I benefited from the collective wisdom of Robert Montgomery, Bruce Greenawalt, Stephen Miller, and Baron Millard, each of whom kept the discussion of recent international relations moving forward in fruitful directions. I received generous critical feedback and guidance from the anonymous readers for Red Globe Press, and I was fortunate to work with senior commissioning editor Rachel Bridgewater as this new edition took shape. As always, members of my family offered support in the form of time and tolerance that I probably did not deserve: thanks again to Nancy Costello, Margaret Costello, and Robert Burke. The book is dedicated to another family member who, despite the miles that separate us, has always made physical distance irrelevant to the gift of friendship. ix  TIMELINE POLITICS 1945 United Nations (UN) established 1947 Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan 1947 India and Pakistan win independence 1948 State of Israel established 1948 Berlin blockade 1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 1949 Republic of Indonesia established 1949 Communist victory in China 1950 Outbreak of Korean War 1953 Death of Stalin 1955 Warsaw Pact 1956 Suez crisis 1956 French withdrawal from Vietnam 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary 1957 Ghana first sub-Saharan African nation to win independence 1957 Great Leap Forward begins 1960 Eighteen African nations secure independence 1961 Berlin Wall erected 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis 1964 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) founded 1964 American Civil Rights Act passed by Congress 1966 Great Cultural Revolution begins 1967 Arab–Israeli war 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia 1974 Richard Nixon resigns presidency 1975 End of Vietnam War 1975 Helsinki Agreement 1976 Death of Mao Zedong 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan 1979 Iranian revolution 1980 Founding of Solidarity union in Poland 1985 Gorbachev assumes power 1989 Fall of communism in Eastern Europe 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre x  TIM EL INE xi 1991 Dissolution of Soviet Union 1992 War erupts in former Yugoslavia 1994 Democratic elections in South Africa 1998 Hindu nationalists win Indian general election 2001 Palestinian intifada begins 2001 Terrorist attacks in New York and Washington 2001 Overthrow of Taliban 2003 US and British invasion of Iraq 2004 Terrorist train bombing in Madrid 2004 NATO and EU incorporate most of Eastern Europe 2005 Terrorist attacks on London Underground 2006 Terrorist attacks in Mumbai 2008 Barack Obama elected first African-American US president 2010 Terrorist attacks in Moscow Underground 2011 Beginning of Arab Spring and Syrian civil war 2011 Iraq war ends 2014 ISIS declares Islamic caliphate 2014 Russia annexes Crimea 2016 UK votes to leave the EU 2016 Failed coup attempt in Turkey 2017 North Korea tests long-range ballistic missiles 2018 China abolishes presidential term limits 2020 Britain leaves the EU; US president impeached ECONOMICS AND DEMOGRAPHICS 1945 International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank chartered 1950 World population passes 2.5 billion 1953 China’s first Five Year Plan 1957 European Economic Community (EEC) 1973 First global oil crisis 1974 World population passes four billion 1978 Deng Xiaoping begins market reforms in China 1993 World Trade Organization (WTO) established 1993 European Union (EU) 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 1997 Asian bubble crisis 1999 World population passes six billion 2001 China enters WTO 2002 EU adopts euro currency xii TIMELINE 2003 China’s exports to US reach $150 billion 2004 EU accepts ten new member states 2008 Global recession begins 2010 European sovereign debt crisis 2012 World population passes seven billion 2015 European migration crisis 2015 Trans-Pacific trade partnership 2015 Iran agrees landmark nuclear deal 2015 China abandons one-child policy 2017 Australia becomes 25th nation to legalize same-sex marriage 2019 Global gross domestic product reaches $88 trillion 2020 Global population reaches 7.7 billion NATURE, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 1947 Transistor 1951 Hydrogen bomb 1953 Double helix structure of DNA 1954 First commercial electricity generated by atomic reactor 1955 Polio vaccine 1957 Sputnik launched 1958 Boeing 707 jetliner 1960 Birth control pill 1961 First man in Space (Yuri Gagarin) 1962 First satellite television transmission 1963 Measles vaccine introduced in US 1966 First photos of “Spaceship Earth” 1967 First heart transplant 1967 First coronary artery bypass 1969 First moon landing 1970 Pocket calculator 1970 First “Earth Day” 1974 CAT scan 1975 First global agreement on endangered species 1977 Last recorded case of smallpox 1977 Apple personal computer 1977 Magnetic resonance imaging 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident 1979 First baby from artificial insemination 1980 First 24-hour cable news broadcast  TIM EL INE xiii 1981 IBM personal computer 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident 1991 World Wide Web 1992 UN’s Rio Earth Summit 1993 First satellite global positioning system 1997 Sheep cloned from adult cell 1997 Kyoto climate protocol 1997 Toyota introduces hybrid auto 2003 Human genome sequencing published 2004 Facebook founded 2004 Massive tsunami kills 300,000 2005 YouTube launched 2005 First commercial GPS satellite launched 2006 Twitter founded 2007 Apple releases iPhone 2013 Ebola epidemic in West Africa 2015 International Paris climate accord 2016 Warmest year on record worldwide 2017 US withdraws from Paris climate accord 2018 Arctic sea ice decline at rate of 12 percent per decade 2020 Advent of fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology 2020 Outbreak of covid-19 pandemic  INTRODUCTION: DYNAMIC TENSIONS IN RECENT GLOBAL HISTORY This is a book about some key aspects of the human experience since 1945, focusing on two central points of tension or debate. The first involves the struggle between two political and economic systems: a centralizing, authori- tarian, personality-centered political order and command economy on the one side, and an open, broadly representative political system and market-­ based economy on the other side. This first tension or debate remained at the forefront of world history from 1945 until the late 1980s, making its mark on cultural and intellectual life, shaping international relations, and abetting an enormous, and enormously expensive, military arms race. The Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States of America (US) were the prin- cipal antagonists in this debate, although both “superpowers” were joined, sometimes reluctantly, by a host of allies and surrogates around the globe. The Soviet system, with its closed, one-party political order, centralized eco- nomic planning, and high levels of social control, began to unravel with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and finally collapsed in 1991, ending more than three decades of Cold War with a US-led coalition of Western powers. The sudden demise of the USSR suggested to some observers that the “end of history” had arrived and that a “new world order” of international peace, market-driven economic prosperity, and liberal democracy was in formation. Although at one level the Western democracies seemed to have triumphed over Marxist authoritarianism, the story is in fact far more complicated and ambiguous. Despite the failure of Soviet-style communism, rights-denying authoritarian states, where “citizens” were actually unprotected servants of the regime, remained the norm around the globe well into the twenty-first century. Western-style liberal democracy, with its emphasis on dispersion of power and social trust, together with personal freedoms and the rule of law to settle dis- putes, remained very much the exception rather than the rule in global politics. During the early 2000s, post-Soviet Russia moved back towards undemocratic rule on the domestic front and confrontation on the international stage. Large portions of the Muslim world, together with a number of Latin American and postcolonial African states, remained in the grip of autocratic strongmen, while for one-fifth of the world’s population living in China, the communist party elite jealously guarded its monopoly on political power, even as the country began its brisk march along the path of capitalist economics, what the reformist leader Deng Xiaoping called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” 1 2 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 And while the postwar Western democracies were committed to the defense of personal freedoms, they too adopted their own enhanced forms of social and economic controls, beginning with the Cold War, and these controls remain in place over both individuals and the wider economy today. Large-scale government regulatory agencies, targeted social programs, and expansive domestic security structures became commonplace elements of democratic culture after 1945. In addition, free-market capitalism was subject more extensively to the directing hand of the state. Economic life continued to be driven by market forces, but the national security require- ments of the state played an increasingly important role in the fields of trade and tax policy, scientific research, industrial development, and information technology. In fact the Cold War contributed mightily to the growth of a symbiotic relationship between the military and private industry in the West, as well as to the expansion of central government surveillance and information-gathering capabilities. Inherent in these broader developments was the potential for an even greater amplification of the state’s role in the lives of citizens. By the late 1990s, it had become clear that the breakup of the USSR had not ushered in the anticipated new world order. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as the fear of organized terrorism increased in the Western world, the cost of military preparedness and the implications of a broader surveil- lance culture for democratic freedoms became topics of much-heated debate. That debate only intensified after the non-state terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, subsequent US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a wider, if often clandestine, “war on terror” focused on radical Islamist groups around the world. When coupled with a growing estrangement between the West and a resurgent Russian state, together with the rise of strident nationalism and populist politics across much of Europe and the US after 2016, the entire edifice of post-World War II liberal democracy and transnational integration was placed on the defensive. The second tension or debate addressed by this book involves the interac- tion between the powerful integrative forces of what has come to be termed “globalization,” or world culture, and the competing provincial forces of cultural singularity, affirmation of difference, and the claim that all peoples organized into sovereign countries are in some sense unique. The postwar world witnessed both the proliferation of new nation-states and the valoriza- tion of separate peoples, together with their varied political, material, cul- tural, and religious traditions. Sadly, this affirmation of difference sometimes took an ugly turn, engendering strident ethnocentrism and bloody regional conflicts. The dissolution of communist Yugoslavia; the fraying of national  I N T RODUCT I ON : DY NAMI C T ENS I ONS IN R EC ENT GL OBA L H ISTOR Y 3 sensibilities in Nigeria and Rwanda; violent opposition to Russian authority in Chechnya and Russian interference in eastern Ukraine; the breakup of Africa’s largest country (Sudan) after decades of civil war – each was symp- tomatic of the rising power of separatism in a world of multiethnic states. From Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq to Muslim Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang region, the claims of regional autonomy and demands for state- hood ran headlong into the countervailing winds of socially constructed national unity. At the same time, however, a powerful global system of diplo- macy, finance, commerce, science, communications, and consumerism, dominated by the West and carrying with it many of the social and cultural assumptions of the West, eroded the texture of cultural difference, and fos- tered resentment among some peoples and communities that were insistent on maintaining distinct, if in some sense imagined, patterns of life. Despite increasingly strong rhetoric emphasizing the value of multicultur- alism and diversity, rhetoric that emerged in the West during the final dec- ades of the twentieth century and continues into the twenty-first, the fact is that the world has become significantly less diverse with the advent of mod- ern transportation networks, global trade, instant communications, multi- national political, financial, and legal institutions, and the predominant influence of Western material culture. The result has been an intense debate between those who seek to preserve a place-bound identity, together with specific social and cultural conventions at regional or even national levels, and those who champion the value of shared, rules-based global institu- tions, commerce, culture, and enumerated human rights. The latter group views its position as healthy inclusion and the predicate to human advance- ment, while its opponents are portrayed as narrow-minded xenophobes and divisive exclusionists. For many thoughtful opponents of recent globalizing trends, however, the primary danger of “world culture” involves the growth of multinational business and financial networks whose allegiance is to no state, while for others, the most troubling feature of the post-Cold War world is the unrivaled military, economic, and cultural influence of one major power: the US. This second tension overlapped the first chronologically, but it became one of the preeminent themes in global history after the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s. Indeed one might argue that the tension or debate between particularism and developing world culture, or between regional difference and global uniformity, constitutes the fundamental fault line around which much of contemporary culture and civilization is arranged. Its reach was enormous, affecting everything from ideas concerning national sovereignty, the status of women, environmental protocols, and educational practice, to the role of religion in civil society, the debate over the nature and reach of 4 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 the “borderless” international community, alleged “universal” principles of law and justice, and definitions of human rights. By concentrating on these two dynamic tensions in recent world history, and adopting a thematic approach to our consideration of the period since 1945, this book seeks to bring a wide range of seemingly disparate developments into sharper focus. Of course no survey text, topical or otherwise, can hope to cover all aspects of the human experience since 1945. And no historian can claim to be above the clash of interpretations regarding the significance of recent global developments. The interpretive model presented here is designed principally to facilitate reflection, discussion, and further debate. It makes only modest claims as a synthesizing narrative, for I am aware that all organ- izing principles are conditioned by time, place, and personal biases. Historians of the postcolonial non-Western world, for example, would argue that the interpretive framework of this book aligns closely with a Western-­ dominated, “Great Power” point of view. Other voices would counter that a focus on the West is the inevitable product of one civilization’s unprece- dented rise, both in terms of pace and scale, to global dominance during the past three centuries, irrespective of whether or not one thinks of that perva- sive rise as benevolent or malign. Although uncomfortable with recent scholarly criticism of historical narrative as little more than perspectival, subjective analysis, I am sensitive to the fact that when attempting to address essential themes in the thought and culture of the recent past, each of us is limited by our particular frame of reference, self-understanding, and engage- ment in a variety of issues that constantly demand our attention. In other words, we are often too close to events to be able to evaluate their signifi- cance in a dispassionate manner. Too often, we make sweeping judgments on the basis of developments that may, in the long run, prove to be less than central to the main contours of global history. While acknowledging these limitations, however, it is helpful to be reminded that we all do history, all the time. Our days consist of thousands of perceptions of individuals, places, and things, with overlaps and intercon- nections at every turn. But the story that frames what those images and perceptions mean is provided by us as we arrange the events of our days into a narrative. In a very real sense, we write our own lives, assigning meaning and significance to some events, forgetting others, creating a history of our own existence out of the raw material of experience, available sources, and interpretation. Since the 1980s, traditional political history – largely the story of male elites – has been complemented by a growing volume of social history, fruitful examinations of the lives and experiences of common women and men. Through these histories, from the personal level to the national and world stage, we attempt to come to an understanding of who  I N T RODUCT I ON : DY NAMI C T ENS I ONS IN R EC ENT GL OBA L H ISTOR Y 5 we are, what we are doing, and how to live. Unlike the journalist who attempts to relate the facts about a contemporary event, the historian seeks to uncover the shared social context of a past era, and to use that social context to uncover meanings that are true to those who lived them, and which make sense to a reader who is embedded in the current social milieu. Consciously or not, we are all engaged in this latter process. We tell stories about the past, and we attempt to give those stories meaning in order to bet- ter understand events in our own lives. This brief volume is divided into three parts. Some of the chapters address state matters and international relations, while others focus on peoples and issues without reference to territorial boundaries or linear sequencing. Unlike most surveys of the period, this one tries not to privilege develop- ments in international politics. To do so would be redundant in light of the many fine studies of recent political and international history now available and noted in the “Further reading” section. More importantly, to highlight politics would be to place the Western states constantly at the center of the narrative, for the developed West undoubtedly had an inordinate impact on the shape of the contemporary world. Instead, I have elected to provide a more thematic analysis of the past seven-plus decades, devoting equal atten- tion to influential economic, technological, social, intellectual, and reli- gious trends. In many cases, these trends had their origin with peoples, not states, and some first emerged or had their greatest impact in regions of the globe whose political influence may have been limited, but whose interac- tions with the West were both dynamic and transformative. Chapters 1 and 2 will address some key political developments under the heading of “The bipolar world order,” but even here the text is careful to treat events from the perspective of states and peoples who lived outside the boundaries of the superpower countries. This is especially the case in Chapter 2, where the problem of neocolonialism is addressed. Chapter 3 explores some of the main challenges facing the international community in the post-Cold War world, paying particular attention to the rise of non-state terrorism and the more recent turn in some liberal democracies towards a strident, exclusion- ary nationalism, together with a rejection of multilateral approaches to com- mon problems. The focus then shifts in Parts II and III, where we will investigate a range of broadly defined material, cultural, and intellectual topics that can best be understood with reference to one or both of the book’s core tensions. Part II, “Globalization and its discontents,” devotes two chapters to lead- ing issues in the postwar debate between cultural difference and transna- tional integration. Chapter 4 examines the prolific breath and influence of international business, finance, and capitalist economics generally. During 6 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 the final two decades of the twentieth century, the advent of the interna- tional corporation as a potent agent of cultural homogenization, not to mention the power of the investing community to influence the well-being of regional and national economies, prompted both applause and spirited political opposition around the world. Chapter 5 looks at the multiple chal- lenges posed by voluntary and involuntary international migration during a period when the number of sovereign nation states grew dramatically. In the first two decades after World War II, international migration typically involved the orderly procession of peoples from former colonies to the old imperial centers, or movement across one border into a neighboring state. More recently, however, migration patterns have reflected both larger shifts in the global economy and a higher incidence of involuntary flight due to domestic political crises. Non-Western “highly skilled” migration to the US, and South Asian migration to oil-producing Arab states, illustrates the for- mer phenomenon. The unprecedented surge of majority Muslim refugees into Western Europe after 2015, and the equally unprecedented political backlash against these newcomers in many of the receiving countries, illus- trates the latter. As the multigenerational victims of civil wars, failed states, and brutalizing regimes undertook their dangerous passage to the West, anti-immigrant political movements operating under the banner of resur- gent nationalism moved rapidly from the fringes of European and American political life and into the mainstream. Here it is essential to remind ourselves that most of the world’s popula- tion lives outside of the prosperous and demographically stagnant West (increasingly referred to as the global North), and that economic disparities between rich and poor countries continue to grow at an alarming pace. This may be one of the most significant – and troubling – developments in recent global history. The simple fact that population growth was (and remains) most dramatic in countries whose economies are least able to cope with the added pressure on resources is one of the many reasons to highlight regions, and idea systems, outside of the West in any history of the global commu- nity since 1945. The tension between globalization and particularism, between integration and the defense of difference that is at the heart of this study, cannot be understood outside of a discussion of what some scholars have termed the “North–South divide” between developing states and the economically dominant countries located north of the equator. Although discussion of this problem was largely muted in the industrialized world at the beginning of the twenty-first century (or wished away by proponents of market-based solutions to regional poverty), this cleavage promises to be one of the central, and perhaps least tractable, dilemmas facing the international community in coming decades.  I N T RODUCT I ON : DY NAMI C T ENS I ONS IN R EC ENT GL OBA L H ISTOR Y 7 In Part III, “Body and Spirit,” our attention turns first to the engines of change in the natural and material world. During the past half-century, the contributions of theoretical and applied science to world health and nutri- tion, and the role of technology in changing (some would say “improving,” others “degrading”) the quality of life have been fast-paced and conspicuous. The intense manipulation of nature for human purposes, coupled with the triumph of consumer culture and the normalization of planned obsoles- cence, has led to a host of unintended consequences that now threaten the long-term health, and perhaps even the viability, of our common home. The rapid rise of information technology (IT), and in particular social media, during the first two decades of the current century opened a new and fluid chapter in global culture. The power of social media both to inform and misinform exacerbated concerns over the expanding reach of governments and private actors to shape everything from public discourse and the out- come of elections, to consumer habits and personal relationships. These developments are discussed in Chapter 6. The final chapter interrogates humankind’s ongoing interest in the trans- cendent, and especially the place of major world religions within the context of modern civil society. Too often relegated to a few lines or an unobtrusive subsection in general histories of the period, religious allegiance often allied with the claims of the nation-state but sometimes fostered powerful and occasionally violent political action against the state. The widespread notion in the West, inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, that the capacity of religion to inform action would wane as science, industry, and consumer culture gained momentum, has not been borne out by events of the very recent past. If anything, organized religion, even those traditions facing crises within their leadership structures, has reasserted its place as a preeminent force in contemporary world politics, and as a directive agent in the personal lives of billions of people. Often related to religion, but not exclusively dependent upon a religious worldview, is the question of human rights. Recent discourse over what con- stitutes human rights, which are assumed to be universal and easily defined by Enlightenment thinkers – and how those rights should be protected – has been contentious and divisive. And inseparable from the human rights debate is the changing status of one-half of the world’s inhabitants since World War II. Arguably more than anything else, women’s quest for social, political, economic, and religious parity has accentuated the predicament created by principled attempts to reconcile universal standards or funda- mental rights with respect for divergent cultural traditions. Changes in the status of women and minorities in the Western world after World War II, together with universalist claims put forward by the United Nations and 8 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 other international bodies regarding essential human rights, often came up against the myriad values, beliefs, and practices of non-Western cultures. The book concludes with some reflections on the unprecedented, and perhaps unhealthy, pace of change in the post-World War II world, how the centuries-old rhythms of life, already unsettled by the onset of industrializa- tion in the West during the nineteenth century, are now being recast around the globe at an ever-accelerating speed. It also considers the extent to which the territorial state as we have known it since the advent of modern nation- alism in the wake of the American and French Revolutions is best suited to address the multiple challenges of the twenty-first century. For good or ill, most of the readers of this book have abandoned the habits of thought that informed earlier generations, and now expect their world to be changed, to be otherwise, quickly and almost as a matter of course. Whether or not this rapidly changing world will be better, or even sustainable, and whether the state is adequately equipped to guide peoples in a manner that will ensure the survival of our increasingly fragile planet – these, I would suggest, are very much open questions at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century.  Part I From bipolar to multipolar world  1 THE COLD WAR IN GLOBAL CONTEXT, 1945–1991 KEY TOPICS Triumph and disquiet: the human The Khrushchev era, 1955–1964 prospect in 1945 From detente to denouement Early superpower tensions Power and principle Expanding the circle of conflict TRIUMPH AND DISQUIET: THE HUMAN PROSPECT IN 1945 At the midpoint of the twentieth century, millions of Westerners looked back on the year 1945 with a measure of accomplishment and pride. For many who were alive during the 1940s, and especially for those who participated in World War II, the hard-fought military victory over fascist Germany and imperial Japan signaled a resounding affirmation of Western-style democracy, personal liberty, and the rule of law. In the case of Nazi Germany, state-sponsored brutality on a scale never before witnessed had been eradicated, while in the Pacific theater the insatiable territorial ambitions of the Japanese military had been thwarted. During the war, two major ideological adversaries, the US and the USSR, played down their many differences in order to defeat a common enemy. The range and tenacity of the fighting on numerous fronts around the globe guaranteed that millions of people were directly involved in the conflict, while the sacrifices of colonial peoples in Africa and Asia suggested to many in the West that empire could no longer be justified. Although the cost in human lives and physical destruction had been unprecedented (approximately 60 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives between 1939 and 1945), a colossal scourge had been lifted. Soon, it was hoped, a peaceful world would be restored, civilian pursuits again taken up, and a new international order established on the solid founda- tions of shared experience in battle. The formation of the United Nations (UN) by 50 states in San Francisco in the summer of 1945 augured well for a new era of international cooperation, one where the myriad mistakes made after the close of World War I would be avoided. 11 12 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 The fragile West The feeling of triumph over evil was especially compelling for those who had witnessed the many trials of parliamentary democracy during the first half of the twentieth century. Before 1914 the prophets of progress were applaud- ing the achievements of Western civilization. Highly competitive European nations experienced increased material affluence at home and unprece- dented influence abroad. Advances in industry, housing, transport, medi- cine, and public education all seemed to indicate that the Western world had indeed unlocked the secrets of political stability and material abun- dance. And then, quite suddenly, the illusions were shattered in the mud-­ encrusted trenches of the Western Front. Some ten million Europeans lost their lives during World War I, and those four years of fratricidal butchery spelled disaster for the German, Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian empires. An entire body of buoyant ideas and assumptions about human nature, progress, reason, the place of technology in modern culture, and human- kind’s ability to avoid future disasters all came under scrutiny. “War is hell,” wrote the decorated junior officer and poet Siegfried Sassoon from the trenches, “and those who institute it are criminals.” From the point of view of Woodrow Wilson, America’s idealistic wartime president, World War I had been a “war to end all wars,” a noble struggle “to make the world safe for democracy.” It did neither. Following a Carthaginian peace in which the fledgling German Weimar republic was obliged to accept responsibility for the misdeeds of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his wartime government, a decade of German resentment against the victors set the stage for the rise of belligerent and hate-filled Nazism. Instead of extending the principles of democratic self-government to their respective colonies, Britain and France enlarged their empires by taking control of former Ottoman territories in the Middle East. The US, having become the world’s leading creditor nation at the conclusion of the war, refused to join the new League of Nations and instead withdrew into isolationism during the 1920s, while in Russia a revolutionary communist government rejected the very foundations of the Western political and economic order. Some of Europe’s leading intellectual and artistic figures, including Evelyn Waugh, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, and Salvador Dalí, despaired of modern mass democracy and longed for the emergence of a “natural leader” who would be invested with wide powers to do good. The start of a worldwide economic depression in late 1929 merely confirmed the verdict, reached separately by fascists and communists, that political plural- ism and parliamentary democracy were doomed to extinction.  T HE COLD WAR I N GL OBAL C ONTEXT, 1945–1991 13 Democracy on the defensive That collapse seemed imminent during the 1930s. While the world’s few genu- ine democracies appeared dithering and incapable of lifting their people out of the economic crisis, dynamic leadership in the fascist states and in the USSR projected the image – if not the substance – of national unity and overriding purpose. Perhaps most importantly, these autocratic regimes seemed to place food on the table by guaranteeing full employment. Or at least this was the pic- ture offered for international consumption by finely tuned offices of propa- ganda. The noted American historian Carl Becker, in a pensive 1932 essay entitled “Liberalism: A Way Station,” wondered whether the values emerging out of the Enlightenment, such values as the autonomy of the individual and freedom of expression, once thought to be in harmony with universal natural laws, constituted no more than a temporary rest stop on the road to another, more efficient if less emancipating form of social, economic, and political organ- ization. Historian Roland Stromberg has written that in normal times “Hitler would never have found a political career through the usual boring channels; but he could fish in the troubled waters of post-war Germany, where the old order had fallen and everybody was groping for a new one.” Without question the emerging totalitarian order in Hitler’s Germany and in Stalin’s USSR imposed a new sense of collective purpose for many, but at a very high price indeed. Tragically, it would take another global conflict, and the senseless deaths of additional millions, before the myth of the omnicompetent leader was toppled (at least in the West) and widespread support for limited, ­rules-­based govern- ment restored. The Algerian-born French novelist Albert Camus, reflecting on the deceits of dictators, wrote that “none of the evils that totalitarianism claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.” Three years after the close of the war George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), an influential reverse utopia where claims to absolute truth in politics invariably result in the eviscera- tion of the human spirit. When Soviet Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced the brutal terror regime of Joseph Stalin in 1956 at the Twentieth Party Congress, he had no intention of relaxing one-party rule, but the revelations did stand as sober testimony to monstrous crimes committed in the name of the alleged communist utopia. By that date most of Europe’s com- munist parties had broken with their imperious mentors in Moscow. An optimistic view Four and a half decades later, with the peaceful collapse of the Soviet sys- tem, first across Eastern Europe in 1989 and then in Russia in 1991, the memory of World War II was recast by some Western scholars in terms of 14 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 the triumph of enduring liberal values, including the primacy of individual rights and freedoms, over the inhumane power of the absolutist state. Under this reading of history, the struggle against Nazi totalitarianism that con- cluded in Western Europe in 1945 had now reached a successful resolution with the failure of Soviet-style tyranny across the entire continent. In par- ticular, the remarkable economic transformation of Western Europe in the half-century since the end of the war, with men and women living longer, healthier, wealthier, and more comfortable lives than anyone could have imagined in 1945, seemed to legitimize a high level of confidence in demo- cratic rule. Victory in 1945 became an important preamble to a broader triumph of Enlightenment political and economic values, first with the end of Europe’s colonial empires in the 1960s and 1970s, and then with the downfall of communism during the final decade of the twentieth century. A pessimistic view There was another reality in 1945, one that found little comfort in the sin- gular fact of military victory over Germany and Japan. History’s most costly conflict had raged for six years in Europe, beginning with the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, and for eight years in China, inaugurated by the invading Japanese in 1937. It had involved the majority of the world’s nation-states, and it drew no distinctions between combatants and civilians. Indeed one-half of all those who died in the war were unarmed innocents, what contemporary military jargon antiseptically refers to as “collateral dam- age.” Conventional – and finally atomic – bombs dropped from distant air- craft led to the slaughter of millions of noncombatants in large urban areas. Most of Germany’s major cities were leveled, and the same was true for key urban centers in Japan. Only an emergency shipment of grain to Japan after the war averted mass starvation, while in Europe nutritional deficiencies were commonplace. Not only cities, but also farms, manufacturing plants, sewage systems, and transportation networks had been severely damaged, leaving manufacturing capacity in Europe at 20 percent of prewar produc- tion levels. In Central Europe, desperate people searched the rubble for food and shelter while relief agencies struggled against the odds to meet multiple and complex needs. The Soviets, who had endured the brunt of the fighting against Nazism, suffered almost half of the total fatalities in the European theater. Virtually everyone left alive in European Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia in 1945 had lost either a friend, a neighbor, or loved one during the previous four years. In the battle for one Russian city, Stalingrad, over one million Soviets had died – more than the total war dead from Britain and the US combined.  T HE COLD WAR I N GL OBAL C ONTEXT, 1945–1991 15 Soviet productive capacity, especially in the agricultural sector, was deci- mated by the German invasion and occupation. Indeed Soviet agricultural output did not reach prewar levels until 1952. In addition, the Holocaust claimed the lives of six million European Jews, while a similar number of Slavs, gypsies, communists, pacifists, homosexuals, and disabled persons perished at the hands of the Nazis. Whereas World War I had been mainly a Europe-based conflict, World War II was truly global in reach. Approximately one million Bengalis died as a result of war-induced famine in India in 1943, and the same fate struck the Vietnamese in 1945. In China, the death toll from the protracted struggle against Japan was upwards of 15 million. The sands of North Africa were occupied and fought over by the principal combatants, tropical Pacific islands were scenes of terrible car- nage, and the world’s oceans were transformed into battle sites where mer- chant ships and their civilian crews became legitimate targets. No one was secure in a total war environment where technology and industrial produc- tion were focused on the twin goals of physical destruction and psychologi- cal demoralization. The eclipse of Europe Perhaps most importantly, the geopolitical primacy of Europe came to an abrupt and inglorious close as Soviet and American forces entered the rub- ble that was Berlin in April 1945. Science, industry, and technology had raised Europe to the pinnacle of global power at the start of the twentieth century, and these same amoral assets hastened its fall. For the previous four centuries, from the moment that the indefatigable Genoese navigator Columbus had reached landfall at Hispaniola in 1492, to the establishment of the British and French mandates in the Middle East during the 1920s, the projection of Western power, Western culture, Western religion, and Western ideas around the globe had defined the parameters of early modern society and then the modern world. The Americas, South and East Asia, Australasia, and Africa had each in their turn come under the dynamic and destructive influence of the Europeans. The unmatched success of European civilization during those 400 years, the creation of great empires, and the integration of non-Western peoples into the European economy, served to shrink the global community, to abridge cultural isolation and autonomy, and to involve distant lands and peoples in the dynastic conflicts of European kingdoms. During these centuries of pivotal change, the world became both interdependent and increasingly “Europeanized.” But now, having turned against itself in what some have described as the Second Thirty Years’ War (1914–45), that proud tower had suddenly 16 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 imploded. “What is Europe now?” Winston Churchill queried. “It is a rub- ble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.” In May 1945, British and American troops occupied newly liberated lands in Italy, France, and parts of Germany. To the east, the Soviet Red Army was in command of six nations: Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Stalin’s forces also controlled eastern Germany. Between 20 and 30 million Germans were displaced, homeless, and on the move. Many had been uprooted by the fighting, suffering deportation, polit- ical persecution, forced labor, and enemy attacks from the air. In addition, there were over eight million foreign workers in the German Reich in 1944, and most of these were there under duress. The brutality of the war had been carried out with scientific and calculated efficiency. In the case of Germany, what had once been Europe’s best-educated and most scientifi- cally advanced nation had descended almost overnight into a state where killing became bureaucratized and routine. The sheer physical destruction of the war was only eclipsed by the moral bankruptcy of those responsible for the Holocaust. Intellectual disquiet For some, the overwhelming horrors of the war transformed the texture of the argument in favor of self-government. No longer to be celebrated as a product of Enlightenment confidence in human nature and human ­potential, democracy had become a compulsory defense mechanism, an emergency survival strategy. The English literary scholar C. S. Lewis spoke for many when he confessed that he was a democrat owing to the existence of original sin. Human beings are “too wicked to be trusted with more than the minimum power over other men.” Existentialist writers and activists such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre spoke of the need for commit- ment in the face of an absurd universe, one where meaning had to be fash- ioned by a deliberate act of will. Colonial peoples pointed to the destruction of the Japanese empire as precedent for the end to European empire. How could the victors call for self-determination in postwar Europe and deny the same opportunity to non-Westerners? The road to renewal in 1945 was cir- cumscribed by the sobering lessons of the previous three decades, and more immediately by the grim reality of the Nazi extermination camps at Buchenwald, Belsen, and Auschwitz. So far, the twentieth century had been the bloodiest in human history, and it had yet to reach its chronological midpoint. For millions of people around the world, 1945 was a year of want and a time of acute mental anguish: civilization itself had arrived at a moral and material impasse.  T HE COLD WAR I N GL OBAL C ONTEXT, 1945–1991 17 EARLY SUPERPOWER TENSIONS The bitter and costly geopolitical conflict between the US and the USSR known as the Cold War became the dominant feature of international relations for almost 45 years. But the ideological and territorial divisions that hardened into the Cold War were anything but fixed in 1945. Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian, had cautioned that wartime alliances, such as the one that united the Greek city-states against the Persian threat, were inherently unstable, the prod- uct of mutual fear of a common enemy. The subsequent Peloponnesian War and the fall of Athens to Sparta appeared to confirm the gloomy thesis. But perhaps the claim was unwarranted when applied to Europe in 1945. For a moment in the spring and summer of that year, the differences separating the bourgeois West from Bolshevik Russia did not appear insurmountable. After all, the US had supplied the Soviets with abundant arms and supplies after 1941, and Stalin had disbanded the Comintern, the organization founded by Lenin to promote world revolution. Both US and Soviet leaders agreed on the need for reconstruction, and both states firmly opposed European imperialism. Surprisingly, noncommunist political parties, which dwarfed the communists in terms of membership, were allowed to operate without hindrance for some time in the Soviet-controlled zone of occupied Europe. In Hungary, for exam- ple, only 17 percent of the electorate supported the communist candidates in ­elections held in November 1945. A number of noncommunists participated in coalition governments across postwar Eastern Europe. In Western Europe, on the other hand, and particularly in France, Italy, Belgium, and Greece, com- munist parties enjoyed considerable strength, with party members even holding cabinet rank. In Britain, a new Labour government committed to the establish- ment of a wide-ranging socialist economic program replaced a respected war- time coalition headed by the Conservative prime minister, Winston Churchill. And at the newly organized UN, the 11-member Security Council was designed around the principle of establishing global consensus. Britain, France, China, the US, and the USSR held permanent seats on the Council, where all impor- tant decisions required a unanimous vote. Here, it was hoped, old-style power politics would be superseded by healthy debate and pragmatic consensus build- ing. Thus the ideological divide separating East and West, the historic tension between communist and capitalist systems, appeared somewhat permeable in the immediate aftermath of the terrible conflict. A second front It was obvious to all observers in the summer of 1945 that the difficult work of rebuilding broken economies and shattered lives would necessitate a high level of postwar cooperation and trust within the Grand Alliance. But 18 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 earlier differences over the prosecution of the war did not bode well for subsequent peacetime collaboration. There was no denying that a host of serious disagreements existed between the inter-Allied forces. First and fore- most was Stalin’s deep suspicion that the opening of a Western front against Germany had been delayed repeatedly by the British and Americans until June 1944 in order to undermine Soviet human and material resources. From the moment that Britain and the USSR had agreed a pact of mutual assistance in July 1941, Stalin had called for an assault by British forces into occupied France in order to relieve the enormous pressure on the Red Army in Russia. Churchill, recalling the debacle of a failed amphibious landing at Gallipoli in Asia Minor during World War I, was hesitant to mount a pre- mature attack against well-entrenched German forces in Normandy. He thought it would be the better part of wisdom first to secure North Africa as a staging point for an eventual return to the continent. Once the crossing into Italy was successful, enough German troops would be bogged down in defending the peninsula to make a Normandy landing more propitious. Only at a meeting in Tehran, Iran, in November 1943, after Churchill pro- posed yet another southern strategy – this time an attack on the Balkans – did Stalin receive assurances from Roosevelt and the British prime minister that the planned offensive would be centered on France. By this date the Red Army had already begun the process of dislodging the Germans from Soviet territory. Historians continue to debate the rationale for the joint Churchill–Roosevelt position on invading Western Europe; what mattered in 1945, of course, was how the deeply paranoid Soviet dictator chose to understand events. Eastern Europe The second area of disagreement involved Stalin’s insistence that future Soviet security mandated the formation of friendly governments to the immediate west of the USSR. The Soviets had incurred staggering human losses during the war: 7.5 million soldiers, and perhaps as many as eight mil- lion civilians, had died at the hands of the Nazi enemy. When we add deaths related to malnutrition, forced labor, and physical dislocation, a total of approximately 20 million Soviet citizens perished during the four-year con- frontation. By way of contrast, Britain and the US suffered a combined one million fatalities in all theaters. Since the overwhelming majority of Soviet war dead were males, the country experienced an acute drop in the overall birth rate. Together with the widespread destruction of farms, livestock, agri- cultural machinery, factories, transport infrastructure, and homes during the period of German occupation, it is hardly surprising that the Russians  T HE COLD WAR I N GL OBAL C ONTEXT, 1945–1991 19 demanded secure frontiers. The Nazi invasion, while certainly more destruc- tive than its predecessors, merely reinforced the popular perception that from Napoleon to Kaiser Wilhelm to Hitler, Russia’s sorrows originated in the West. For Stalin, friendly states meant subservient client states, especially in terms of their political, economic, and military organization. During a summit meeting in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945, the Soviet dictator called for the imposition of a harsh peace against Germany, particularly in the areas of reparations and postwar political reconstruction. And while he prom- ised Roosevelt and Churchill that free elections would take place in Poland at the close of the war (the principle of free elections that was extended to all of Europe in the subsequent Declaration on Liberated Europe), Stalin had no intention of allowing the formation of Western-style liberal democracies in Soviet-occupied countries. Most of these countries were fiercely nationalistic and anti-Russian, but their military establishments were no match for the battle-hardened Red Army. At a July 1945 summit in Potsdam, Germany, Stalin confronted two new, and untested, leaders: Clement Attlee of Britain and Harry S. Truman of the US. Here, the Soviet leader refused to follow through on the controversial elections issue. Deepening Western suspicions The US had emerged from the war as the dominant global power, with a monopoly on atomic weapons, military mastery in the air and on the seas, the strongest private-sector economy, and the most advanced manufacturing base. The continental US had not been attacked during the war, and its immediate neighbors had never posed a threat to national security. In 1945 the American economy accounted for nearly 50 percent of the world’s gross national product (GNP). Russia, on the other hand, may have been a major military power in May 1945, but economically it was poor, backward, and seriously disadvantaged in terms of useable physical plant. It had relied heavily on American Lend-Lease assistance in order to prosecute the war against Germany, and just before the Potsdam meeting Stalin requested massive postwar reconstruction loans from the US. This economic weak- ness was offset somewhat by the rapid postwar demobilization of American troops in Western Europe, made necessary by political opinion at home and involving a reduction in personnel from 12 million to 1.4 million by 1947. The Soviet military, close to 11 million men in 1945 and reduced to 3 mil- lion by 1948, was thus in a strong position to enforce Moscow’s dictates on its zone of influence. In addition, wartime physical and human devastation in Russia was offset by the fact that Stalin ruled an empire that comprised 20 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 one-sixth of the world’s land mass, rich in natural resources, and with a population of some 200 million people who understood the consequences of disloyalty, or even suspicion of disloyalty. Thousands of Soviet prisoners of war returned home in 1945 only to be exiled by Stalin to forced-labor camps or executed for fear that they had been contaminated by anti-Soviet ideas during their imprisonment. By 1953 an estimated five million of these internal exiles were living and working in Soviet labor camps, and approxi- mately half a million political murders had been carried out. Even Marshal Georgii Zhukov, the military commander who led the defense of Moscow and later conquered Berlin, was reassigned to postwar commands distant from the seat of power. Stalin reached the height of his control in 1945; many Soviet citizens viewed their leader as a national hero despite his brutal domestic policies, and victory in what became known as the “Great Patriotic War” intensified the cult of personality that developed around the dictator. In the minds of some policy makers in the West, including those within the new Truman administration, an effective countervailing force was neces- sary in order to prevent the extension of Soviet power – indeed, possible Soviet hegemony – across the European continent. It had not been forgot- ten that the Bolsheviks had stated publicly during the interwar years that their ultimate goal was the downfall of capitalism and the establishment of global communism. Stalin had no master plan for global hegemony, but the perception was growing in the West that he did. Now, with the war over, balance-of-power politics was poised to trump Wilsonian internationalism and the hope for greater postwar cooperation. Lend-Lease funds were no longer available after the defeat of Germany, and by early 1946 the prospect of future American loans to the USSR had evaporated. In a now famous speech delivered at Fulton, Missouri in March 1946, former Prime Minister Churchill warned his American audience that with respect to the Russians, “there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for military weakness.” Referring to the establishment of an “iron curtain” across the European continent, Churchill counseled that security could only be found in an alliance among the Western democracies, including the US. The speech encapsulated the broader ideological division now guiding policy makers on both sides of the political divide. For the Western democracies, Soviet expansion into the European heartland meant the repudiation of the 200-year-old Enlightenment project, with its emphasis on individual rights, the sanctity of property, freedom of thought and expression, self-government, and reli- gious pluralism. Some policy makers in the West maintained that the Soviet state mirrored its tsarist predecessor in its attempt to extend Russian impe- rial influence into the Middle East, the Balkans, and Central Europe.  T HE COLD WAR I N GL OBAL C ONTEXT, 1945–1991 21 The communist perspective Stalin’s dictatorship was a brutal caricature of Marx’s vision of the final stage of human history, and there was no denying that the Soviet command economy, the collectivized farms, the forced labor camps, and the stultifying bureaucracy together constituted a problematic path to the alleged goal of human equality. But from the Russian, and later Chinese communist per- spective, it was the West that had the long and undistinguished record of international aggression and imperialism. And with the defeat of Japan in August 1945, the US had become the unrivaled power in the Pacific Basin, establishing a string of military bases with distinctly offensive capabilities. For Stalin, the hostility of the capitalist West toward all newly formed com- munist states demonstrated that a strong defensive posture was crucial if the Marxist alternative were to survive. The rhetoric of working-class solidarity, however hopelessly miscast in predominantly agricultural societies such as Russia and China, was put forward as a bold alternative to the ruthless class warfare characteristic of all capitalist societies. Stalin argued that the heavy hand of the state was necessary in nascent communist states so long as the forces of international capitalism stood united in their opposition to the dream of a classless society. The precipitate cutoff of US military aid to the USSR in 1945 provided the most immediate evidence of the West’s unswerv- ing hostility. One month before Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech, Stalin and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov stated publicly that the Western democracies had become enemies of the Soviet state. The German dilemma At the geographical center of the embryonic Cold War was Germany, pros- trate and leaderless. An interim joint occupation of the country had been agreed by the Allies as early as November 1943 when Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met in Tehran. In February 1945, the “Big Three” issued a “Declaration on Liberated Europe” that called for free elections across occu- pied Europe, allowing each country to determine its own future form of government. The physical cost of total war was difficult to calculate, but something of its punishing nature was readily apparent to troops occupying Germany. Hitler had exhausted the natural and human resources of occu- pied countries in his racist bid for mastery, while massive Allied bombing crippled the productive capacity of the world’s first industrial continent. Food and housing were in short supply, transportation networks were frac- tured, and economic collapse was the norm everywhere. In the absence of a formal peace settlement with Germany, a dangerous power vacuum emerged in May 1945. 22 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 Earlier in the war the British and Americans had agreed with the Soviets that the political disintegration of the Nazi regime was essential to the future security of Europe. Churchill spoke of detaching the industrial Rhineland of Germany from any future Central European successor state, while as late as September 1944 Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, argued for a postwar German state that was predominantly agricultural. All of the Allies agreed that every remnant of National Socialism had to be destroyed. Although many Nazi officials were able to escape punishment by disappearing into the refugee population, the most influential leaders were tried and convicted by an international tribunal held in the city of Nuremberg in late 1945. Most of those convicted were executed. But the animosity directed against German citizens during the war changed appreci- ably at Yalta in February 1945. Churchill and Roosevelt now agreed that a punitive peace that left Germans bitter and resentful would only serve to advance Soviet interests on the continent. They opposed Stalin’s call for reparations from Germany in the form of money, industrial plant, and forced labor, focusing instead on the need for reconciliation and reconstruc- tion. At a meeting in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam in July 1945, Stalin, Truman, and Attlee agreed to the details of dividing Germany into tempo- rary occupation zones. A similar model was imposed on the capital city of Berlin, located deep in the heart of the Soviet zone. Although initially designed as a stopgap measure until a lasting structure could be devised for the entire country, these divisions would remain in place until the end of the Cold War some 40 years later. The Soviet decision to remove natural resources and relocate whole man- ufacturing plants from eastern Germany to Russia played an important role in prompting the West’s decision to unite the French, British, and American zones of occupation in 1947, inaugurating a de facto partition of the country. Alarmed over the escalating cost of administering their zone and providing relief for a people that in many cases had been reduced to a barter economy, the Western powers, all of whom had embraced parliamentary political sys- tems and capitalist economic structures, were eager to bring their portion of Germany into the community of prosperous democracies. Free provincial elections were called in 1947, and the two dominant political parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, looked to the West for eco- nomic aid and political support. When Allied foreign ministers finally came together in February 1947 to conclude peace treaties for the defeated Axis countries, no agreement was reached over Germany. While neither side desired partition in May 1945, the goal of internationalism in the heart of Europe fell victim to a sphere-of-influence perspective that was informed by a deepening culture of distrust.  T HE COLD WAR I N GL OBAL C ONTEXT, 1945–1991 23 The Marshall Plan Crucial to the overall Western strategy of rebuilding Europe’s war-torn econo- mies was the implementation of the so-called Marshall Plan, named after American Secretary of State George C. Marshall. In a speech before the Harvard graduating class of 1947, Marshall addressed the issue of continued postwar dislocations on the European continent, inviting all affected nations, including the USSR and its satellites, to construct a comprehensive plan for economic recovery built around the promise of coordinated American finan- cial assistance. And although the Soviets attended the first planning meeting held in Paris at the end of June 1947, Stalin eventually rejected the offer and prohibited Eastern European client states from participating. Ostensibly, the Soviets took exception to the Plan’s requirement that the US have some supervisory role over and access to the budgetary records of the receiving countries. These conditions were interpreted by Stalin as a violation of the principle of national sovereignty. The additional requirement that Marshall Plan money be used to purchase American products struck the Soviets as yet another attempt to extend the influence of the capitalist system. The Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), the propaganda wing of the Soviet state, denounced the Marshall Plan as a sinister ploy to “establish the world supremacy of American imperialism.” In response, Moscow announced the establishment of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in January 1949 to coordinate the rebuilding of those states under Soviet control. Sixteen nations, all outside the Soviet sphere of influence, eagerly accepted Marshall Plan funds. Each stepped forward to receive a substantial aid package from the Americans, and the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, later to become the OECD) was created to supervise the generous grants. By 1952, the year when the Plan ended, over $13 billion in grants and credits had been extended to participants, and the enormous infusion helped to restart Europe’s industrial base while also serving to modernize the agricultural sector. As new factories were built and farms restored, production levels and agricultural output rose to exceed pre- war levels by the early 1950s. In West Germany, for example, the funds facili- tated a remarkable resurrection of the industrial economy, where production levels climbed to more than 50 percent over prewar levels. The contrast between life in East and West Germany became obvious to all who visited both zones, and the situation reflected very poorly upon the Soviet system. Under directions from the Kremlin, the Red Army began to install pro-­ Soviet communist regimes in every state under its control. By 1948 the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, together with the occupied countries of Eastern Europe, were compelled to adopt Soviet-style political systems and state-dominated command economies. 24 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 Overall, Western European states realized growth rates of 5 percent per year by 1952. The US also reaped significant long-term benefits from the Marshall Plan. Almost two-thirds of postwar European imports originated in America, and the reemployment of Europe’s laboring population trans- lated into the rapid stabilization of Europe’s democratic political systems. The effort to undermine the appeal of the communist alternative through economic revival had passed a crucial test, but the success of the Marshall Plan for Western Europe also served to exacerbate the ideological divide with the East. Communist parties in the West lost influence as prosperity returned, while communists in the Eastern bloc states silenced all opposi- tion political voices, jailed clerics who dared to challenge state orthodoxies, and censored the press with stultifying regularity. The Truman Doctrine While the Soviet presence in Eastern Europe was irreversible, short of a major military clash that few in the West welcomed, President Truman and his advisors were eager to foil potential Soviet influence elsewhere. Formal and highly secretive information-gathering and espionage organizations, led by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Council – both established in 1948 – faced off against their Soviet counter- parts in an ever-expanding theater of operations around the world, but most immediately along the southern rim of Eurasia. The first crisis occurred in Iran, where British and Soviet troops had been stationed during the war and where, in the summer of 1945, the USSR encouraged a secession movement by the communist-controlled Tudeh Party in the far northern province of Azerbaijan. Strong British and American opposition to this meddling led to the grudging withdrawal of Soviet forces in May 1946. The oil-rich regime of Mohammed Reza Pahlevi received firm backing from the British and the Americans, with the Truman administration providing essential military hardware and technical support to the monarchy. In Turkey, fear of growing communist influence, and in particular Western resentment over Stalin’s clumsy demand for Russian access to the eastern Mediterranean via Turkish waters, led to a swift and dramatic American response. In August 1946, after the Soviets called for joint Russian–Turkish control over the Turkish Straits and the cession of Turkish-held lands in the Caucasus, US naval forces were dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean by President Truman, who announced that a portion of the ships would remain permanently on sta- tion in the area. Further to the west, a communist guerrilla insurgency against the pro-­ Western monarchy in Greece, begun after the withdrawal of German occu-  T HE COLD WAR I N GL OBAL C ONTEXT, 1945–1991 25 pying forces in November 1944, led the American president to announce a sweeping change in US foreign policy. During the summer and fall of 1946 the Greek government made repeated appeals to Britain and the US for financial and material assistance against the rebels. In February 1947, Britain (which had intervened in the Greek conflict) put the US on notice that it could no longer continue to provide the Greek authorities with eco- nomic or military support. The winter of 1946–7 in Britain had been the coldest on record, and government spending on food and fuel depleted modest reserves. The British government had already received an emergency loan from the Americans of almost $4 billion in 1946, and it now found itself unable to maintain its far-flung international commitments. It was a watershed acknowledgment of the coming end of what had been the world’s largest empire, requesting that the Americans assume the burden of ­repulsing communist insurgency from afar. Truman responded in March 1947 in an address before a special joint session of the US Congress. In his speech, the president stated that “it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Congress, convinced that communist insurgency represented a threat to US strategic interests, immediately voted to increase military aid for both Turkey and Greece, although neither gov- ernment had come to power through the votes of “free people.” In the two years that followed, the US spent nearly $700 million in shor- ing up the Greek army and in providing valuable economic assistance. By 1949 the communists had been defeated, but not before American military trainers had begun to work closely with Greek forces in the field. The articu- lation of the “Truman Doctrine” played a major role in helping to refocus American public opinion concerning the West’s erstwhile wartime ally. While the Greek communists were in fact being supplied by neighboring Yugoslavia without the support of Stalin, Truman’s actions put the USSR on notice that the US would not withdraw from Europe as it had after World War I. A program of global “containment,” first articulated by George Kennan, a seasoned State Department policy planner and former deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Moscow, was now under way. Berlin airlift One of the first tests of the new policy took place in Berlin, the former German capital located in the heart of the Soviet-controlled sector. In July 1948, Stalin closed off road and rail access to the Western-controlled por- tions of Berlin, isolating 2.5 million inhabitants. For the next 11 months, 26 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 the US organized 277,000 airlifts into the city, an average of one plane every three minutes, bringing essential fuel, medicine, and foodstuffs, and cir- cumventing the Soviet land blockade. The Western allies stated their inten- tion to continue the airlift indefinitely, and more ominously, 60 American strategic bombers capable of dropping atomic weapons on Russian cities were reassigned to bases in Britain. A military showdown seemed imminent. The Soviets finally reversed their policy, but not before the Western powers decided to unify their three zones in West Germany into a new state: the German Federal Republic. Elections were held on August 14, 1949, and the pro-Western Christian Democratic Party led by Konrad Adenauer emerged victorious. The Soviets responded in October 1949 with the formation (without elections) of the German Democratic Republic, inaugurating what would become a nearly four-decade division of the country into capitalist and communist components. The pledge taken by both sides at Potsdam that Germany would not be permanently partitioned now seemed both naive and impractical. NATO An important part of containment policy involved the building of tradi- tional alliance systems. In the wake of the Berlin crisis, the governments of Western Europe asked for assurances from Washington that American mili- tary might would be employed on their behalf in the event of Soviet aggres- sion. Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg had already entered into a defensive military alliance known as the Brussels Pact Organization in March 1948, but given the huge Soviet advantage in avail- able ground forces in Europe, America’s large nuclear “umbrella” appeared to be the only credible guarantee against a potential communist incursion. The Truman administration concluded that the US needed to make a more formal commitment to the defense of Europe along conventional military lines. Enough Republican members of Congress were convinced that Europe’s economic recovery would be enhanced by this additional security, and in April 1949, the US joined in a regional defense pact with Canada, Iceland, France, Britain, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. At the heart of this new security alliance, called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), was a commitment by each signatory to come to the defense of any member state should it be attacked. The agreement was accompanied by an American pledge of $1.5 billion in military aid for the member states in Europe. Although there were only 100,000 US troops in Europe in the spring of 1949, NATO instantly trans-  T HE COLD WAR I N GL OBAL C ONTEXT, 1945–1991 27 formed American foreign policy, ending nearly two centuries in which the Atlantic Ocean was seen as a welcome divide between the new world and the old, and ensuring that the US would not disengage from European affairs as it had after World War I. Even Greece and Turkey joined the new pact in 1952, making these weak and volatile countries potential flashpoints in the emerging Cold War regime. Finally, in 1955 West Germany, now restored to full sovereignty, joined the NATO alliance and began the process of rebuilding its military. By this latter date, the division of Europe had assumed what appeared to be an irrevocable character. With the exception of Ireland, Switzerland, Spain, and Sweden, every European country had “taken sides” in the unfolding bipolar struggle. The nuclear arms race Soon after the US employed atomic weapons against Japan, Stalin ordered an intensive acceleration of the Soviet wartime program of research and development. In the summer of 1946, the Americans called for UN supervi- sion of nuclear research around the world, but Stalin refused to support the proposal. Lacking American financial assistance after the war, Stalin insisted on greater exertions from his own people, and the Soviet consumer econ- omy was further neglected in favor of heavy industry and the military. Uranium was extracted from mines in East Germany and Czechoslovakia (with little attention paid to the safety of workers who toiled in the mines), and the Russian scientific community, assisted by German researchers, became part of the overall Soviet defense establishment. Their work put an end to America’s atomic monopoly in July 1949, just as the NATO alliance was established. Four years later both countries had developed hydrogen bombs, devices with a destructive capacity 1,000 times more powerful than the weapons that had incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At first only the US had the ability to deliver these weapons in over- whelming force thanks to its fleet of long-range bombers, and Eisenhower’s hard-line Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, built American defense strategy around the doctrine of “massive retaliation” during the early 1950s. Under this dangerous strategy, the threat of nuclear attack would neutralize Soviet conventional strength on the European continent while saving American taxpayers the cost of maintaining expensive ground forces over- seas. But the policy was based on the absence of Soviet bases in the Western hemisphere or long-range bombers capable of reaching American cities, and the lack of intercontinental ballistic missile delivery systems (ICBMs). By the mid-1950s the two latter technologies had been developed. In October 1957 the Soviets stunned the West by launching the first man-made satellite, 28 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 called Sputnik, into orbit; competent observers quickly recognized that rocket power capable of sending an object into space could also deliver them anywhere on earth. The age of the ICBM had begun. Satellite technology for surveillance and missile guidance, again inaugurated by the Soviets in 1957, rounded out the early advances related to weapons of mass destruction. By the close of the 1950s, the two superpowers each had the previously unimaginable capacity to put an end to global civilization in an instant. For the first time in its history, the continental US was vulnerable to surprise attack from a potential enemy thousands of miles away. Over the next 20 years, both sides spent billions of dollars “enhancing” their stockpiles of weap- ons and “improving” delivery systems. In Western Europe, the amassing of medium-range nuclear missiles by the Americans led to fears that the conti- nent would be incinerated in the event of a conflict between the US and the USSR. Indeed in 1959 Khrushchev’s regime made this possibility explicit. Sadly, but perhaps inevitably, nuclear weapons technology proliferated beyond the superpowers, with France, Britain, China, India, and (while still unac- knowledged) Israel all joining the nuclear club by the 1970s. The cycle of weapons development, deployment, and numerical escalation transformed every regional superpower confrontation into a potential global cataclysm. EXPANDING THE CIRCLE OF CONFLICT The first phase of the Cold War ended with the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine and the adoption of the policy of containment as the basis of America’s posture toward the USSR. Abandoning any thought of a possible rollback of the existing Soviet sphere of influence, Western diplomatic and military strategy, led by the US, would now focus on resisting communist expansion around the globe. And the goal of securing reliable allies who embraced the anticommunist position trumped whatever concerns might be raised over the forms of government or the human rights record of these potential allies. During the next 40 years, diplomatic backing of and mili- tary assistance to anticommunist regimes that were themselves anti-­ democratic often placed the US and its European allies in an untenable position respecting their professed stand for individual freedom, political pluralism, and civilian rule. Communism in China The defeat of Japan in August 1945 brought about the collapse of an enor- mous East Asian empire and created a dangerous power vacuum in a num- ber of strategic areas. Japan’s main islands were occupied by American  T HE COLD WAR I N GL OBAL C ONTEXT, 1945–1991 29 forces, while the Soviets took charge in Manchuria. On the Korean penin- sula, a temporary partition was organized between the two emerging super- powers, but elsewhere in the former Japanese empire there were rival claimants to postwar political power. The subsequent struggles to establish claims to political legitimacy inevitably became part of the nascent Cold War discord. East Asia, which prior to the rise of Japanese imperialism had been part of the larger European-dominated world system, was now to find itself drawn into the Washington–Moscow rivalry. The inaugural setting for this ideological struggle was China, an enor- mous nation that had suffered greatly from civil conflict between the Nationalist government and rural-based communist insurgents since the late 1920s. In this vast and densely populated land, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek enjoyed the financial backing of the US by virtue of their strong anticommunist credentials. But Chiang’s forces had fared poorly dur- ing the years of Japanese occupation, and despite the infusion of American military aid beginning in 1942, the Nationalists did not win a single signifi- cant battle against the Japanese and had essentially hunkered down in the mountains of the interior. In the rural areas along the coast, however, and subsequently in distant north-central China, an alternative movement under the leadership of Mao Zedong had won the support of increasing numbers of resistance fighters. As early as the 1920s Mao had insisted (in opposition to classical Marxist– Leninist theory) that the revolutionary potential and leadership capacity of the peasantry was enormous. The communists successfully cultivated the oppressed peasantry by working to lower rents and by attacking exploitative landlords. The results of this campaign to win the backing of rural workers were impressive. By 1945 Mao stood at the head of a communist (mostly peasant) army of over one million men. In contrast, the Nationalists were so poorly organized that the US sent troops to hold some crucial Chinese ports while also (remarkably) charging the Japanese to stay in place until Nationalist administrators and soldiers could arrive. Despite this disarray, few observers thought that the communists were capable of winning over the entire country. Even the Russians were skeptical of Mao’s ability to pre- vail, and on the day before Japan accepted the Allied terms of surrender, Stalin concluded a treaty of friendship with Chiang’s government, calling upon Mao to join forces with the Nationalists. In January 1946, both sides signed a ceasefire and began discussions to form a unity government. It was all to little effect. The communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) held enormous sweeps of territory across China, and Mao’s continued call for fundamental land reform, something that the Nationalists had never taken seriously, translated into enormous political advantage for his movement. 30 A CO N C I S E H I S TO R Y O F T H E WO R L D S I N C E 1945 While the Americans continued to send military and financial resources to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, by 1947 it had become obvious that the corruption and complacency of the anticom- munist side could not be reversed. Despite continued warnings, Nationalist military leaders preferred to rule the provinces in a high- handed manner reminiscent of the old warlord system. Frustrated by the lack of progress, US forces were withdrawn from China, and American- sponsored mediation efforts between the two sides, led by General George C. Marshall, were abandoned. By the spring of 1948 the Nationalists’ military situation on the mainland had become untenable, and in 1949 Chiang withdrew to the island of Formosa (Taiwan). Within two years of this stunning military victory, achieved ­without the support of the USSR and against an American-armed opposition, Mao officially announced the formation of the Communist People’s Republic of China. Since his momentous victory occurred barely one year after a Soviet takeover in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade, and in the same year that the Soviets successfully tested an atomic bomb, many Western observers and pundits drew strong linkages between Mao’s suc- cesses and a purported worldwide communist conspiracy led by the USSR. Suddenly, events in East Asia appeared to be intimately con- nected with developments in the heart of Europe. In truth, relations between Mao Zedong and Stalin were anything but cordial. Stalin’s earlier support for the Nationalists was driven by his desire to prevent the formation of a unified and politically powerful China. Such a state, with three times the population of Russia, might pose a future chal- lenge to Moscow’s self-proclaimed leadership of the communist world. As late as 1948, Stalin was cautioning Mao against a final assault on Nationalist forces in the cities of South China, advice that was ignored by the Chinese communists. The Soviet ambassador to China even remained with the Nationalist government until the end of the mainland conflict in 1949. Sadly, the mirage of worldwide communist solidarity is what continued to drive both American foreign policy and the domestic political rhetoric of the major national parties. When Mao, desperate for foreign aid to begin the process of rebuilding China’s shattered economy after almost 20 years of military conflict, arrived in Moscow in 1950 and signed a Treaty of Friendship with the USSR, the proponents of containment theory in the US lamented the “loss” of China as a significant defeat for the free world. But from the Chinese perspective, the unfavorable terms of the treaty with Russia (the Chinese were forced to recognize Mongolian independence under Soviet protection) did little to affirm the supposed solidarity of Marxist–Leninist states.  T HE COLD WAR I N GL OBAL C ONTEXT, 1945–1991 31 Korean domino The Manichean worldview of both sides in the evolving bipolar conflict reached its first flashpoint on the occupied Korean peninsula less than a year after the creation of the People’s Republic of China. Like Germany, Korea had been partitioned after the conclusion of World War II, and the Soviets and Americans had failed to reach an