European Recovery

In this course we have analyzed the factors that led to two world wars:  Romanticism, Nationalism, the rise of mass society, Imperialism, Social Darwinism, Nihilism.  World War II did not put an end to mass society, but the defeat of Italy, Germany and Japan spelled the end for Imperialism, Social Darwinism and Nihilism, if not Romanticism and Nationalism.

In place of these ideals, a new order was imposed by the victors--Britain, U.S. and the Soviet Union.  Actually two orders were imposed.  Democratic liberalism in the West and autocratic communism in the East.  While they were strarkly different in many ways, these two new orders had some important aspects in common.  In theory, at least, they both rejected imperialism, racism and nihilism, the dark legacy of the past and of Naziism especially.   Nihilism, the idea that morality was an impediment to creative geniuses, was discredited by Hitler's perversion of the idea, and the horrors unleashed by the Nazi willingness to ignore the moral claims of humanity.  Social Darwinism, the idea that struggle and war (especially between the different races) is necessary to progress, was discredited, once again, by because of Nazi excesses.  Finally, the European system of empires was discredited both as an expression of aggressive nationalism, and as an expensive and unjust domination of some nations by others.

After the war, then, one sees the steady dismantling of empires, the promotion of human rights and national independence,  and a renewed search for moral order.  The new superpowers renounced empire, declared themselves the champions of human dignity and moral order.  After that, however, ideological differences, mixed with a struggle for power, divided the superpowers in an ongoing conflict.  Both sides accused the other of being imperialist and immoral.
 

Establishing the New World Order

In February 1945, as Germany was collapsing, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin met to forge the post-war order.  One thing they agreed on was the establishment of the United Nations.  Another agreement was the Soviet promise to help the U.S. defeat Japan.  They also agreed to divide Germany and Berlin into four zones of occupation.  There was less agreement at the Potsdam Conference in July, 1945, just after the German surrender.  The Soviets wanted to maintain its authority in Eastern Europe, which it had just conquered, while Britain and the U.S. demanded free elections in every country.  It seemed to the Stalin and the Soviets that the U.S. and Britain wanted to dominate Europe and install governments unfriendly to the Soviet Union.  President Truman dropped two atomic bombs on Japan to end the war quickly, but also to prevent the Soviets from having a stake in the Japanese victory to awe the Russians with American military superiority.  The Russians could see the threat.
 

The Cold War

The Cold War was a war because it was a conflict between two great powers for dominance around the world.  It was cold, because a direct war was too dangerous.  The two superpowers had another method of fighting:  maintaining an ideological battle in countries throughout the world.  Civil war in Greece between communists and non-communists was the first test case.  Truman proclaimed the so-called "Truman Doctrine" that the U.S. would support any country that was fighting a communist takeover.  With U.S. support, the communist movements in Greece and Turkey were defeated.

But the main issue was a Western Europe devastated by war.  Communism was an attractive solution to unemployment and poverty.  In 1946, the Conservative Party and Prime Minister Churchill, the hero of the war, lost soundly in national elections to the Labor Party, which promised socialist legislation.  In France, Italy and Germany, the communism had significant and growing political support.  The United States and Western European governments responded in two ways:  first, by accomodating a certain amound of socialism, and second with the implementation of the  Marshall Plan, devised by American Secretary of State George Marshall.  The U. S. paid huge sums in grants and loans to European nations to rebuilt their economies.  The European nations, in the meantime, built up a stong system of guaranteed health care, unemployment insurance, free higher education, and other measures to ensure the ecomomic welfare of the working people.  These economic policies, along with the Truman Doctrine solidified Western Europe under American protection, and led the Soviets to respond by solidifying Eastern Europe in a Warsaw Pact.  The Soviets actually did the opposite of the Marshall Plan; they drained resources from Europe to rebuild the Soviet Union.  From beginning to end, the economic superiority of the United States was the ultimate weapon of the American side.

To solidify and build up Germany, the U.S. and Britain prepared to establish a new democratic government, free market and currency in Western Europe.  Fearing that its hold in Germany was threatened, Stalin closed Berlin to force the Western allies out of Eastern Germany.  The U.S. responded with the Berlin Airlift that proceeded for a year between 1948 and 1949, until Stalin gave up.  The Berlin Wall was constructed later--in 1961 to keep East Germans from fleeing to the increasingly prosperous West.

The peak of the Cold War was 1949.  In that year, NATO was established, the Soviets tested their own bomb years before we thought they could, and Mao Tse Tung's Communists gained control in China after a civil war.  These events definitely sent a chill through the West, and the fall of China to communism in particular inspired the United States to intervene to stop communist conquests in Korea (1950-53).  In 1950, the North Korean communist government, with the apparent support of Stalin, attacked South Korea and nearly defeated it.  Believing this to be part of a larger Soviet-led communist expansion throughout the world, the United States send an army under General McArthur to defeat the North Koreans.  He did, and nearly conquered North Korea itself, until the Chinese sent forces in defense of the North.  McArthur wanted to use nuclear weapons to defeat the Chinese, but President Truman refused, and fired McArthur.  The Cold War, Truman decided, must remain cold.  At home, however, the hunt for communist traitors in the American government and entertainment busines heated up, led by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and California Representative Richard Nixon
 
 
Before Gorbachev, there was Khruschev

Like Mikhail Gorbachev in our day, Nikita Khruhshev, who succeeded Stalin after 1953, recognized that brutal dictatorship and poor economic performance in comparison to the West was unnacceptable in the long run.  He denouned the ruthlessness of Stalin's regime, and sought to improve the standard of living for Soviet consumers.  This policy of relaxation (as in Gorbachev's time) had the effect of inspiring revolt against the Soviet Union in its sattelite states.  In 1956, the Hungarians declared themselves a free nation.  The Soviet army crushed this revolt.  A similar series of events led to army intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968.  In our time, 1989, the Soviet Union did not have the political and economic will even to hold the Soviet Union together.  Khruhshev also hoped to gain leverage against the United States by placing nuclear missles in Cuba in 1962.  In a moment when the world was perhaps closest to world war, Kennedy forced Khruhsev to blink and back down.  The Soviet leader was only slightly more successful in keeping pace with the United States economically, though he won great prestige with the early superiority of the Soviet space program.
 

Dismantling Empire

The process of dismantling the European Empires was not without trouble.  France faced civil war within itself over whether to grant independece to Algeria.  Vietnam had been lost in an ignominious defeat in 1954, and many in France did not want to lose more.  After four years of war, President Charles DeGaulle, the hero of World War II, arranged for Algerian independence in 1962.  Even with independence, peace was not assured.  India was divided between Hindus and Muslims who fought a bloody civil war until India granted Pakistan  independence apart from India.  These nations are still enemies.  In Africa, newly independent nations were also divided ethnically and religiously, and were often quite poor.  This was a recipe for instability and civil war, which continues today.  South Africa is the most famous case.  A white-dominated South Africa proclaimed its independence from the British Empire after World War II, and immediately embarked on the aggressive policy of racial separation and suppression called Apartheid.

The United States, also became mired in the mess of decolonization.  Communist nationalists in Vietnam had defeated their France rulers, were preparing to establish control in Vietnam.  While the Soviets, Chinese, and many others denounced us for imperialism, the U. S. deployed had nearly a half million men, of whom about 56,000 died, in an unsuccessful attempt to create a capitalist , pro-American South Vietnam.  We learned a bitter lesson about intervening in other's civil wars.  The Soviets learned the same in the 1980s in Afganistan.

What does American victory in World War II and the Cold War mean for the new world order?  Will it be a more peaceful or less peaceful time;  more boring or less boring?