Introduction

The WWI (the Great War)

the first modern, industrialized total war

The demise of 4 European empires: Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman (in
Turkey)

The WWII

even more total in nature and global in scope, and helped bring about fundamental changes in world politics

The most tangible legacy of the WWII = the atomic bomb

After 1945, the USA and the USSR both emerged as ‘superpowers,’ combining global political ambition with military capabilities that included weapons of mass destruction

Nuclear weapons posed unprecedented challenges to world politics and to the leaders responsible for conducting post-war diplomacy

The onset of the cold war in Europe marked the collapse of the wartime alliance between the UK, the USSR, and the USA

The cold war, with the growth of nuclear arsenals, threatened the very existence of humankind

Since 1900, world politics transformed in a variety of ways; the 3 principal changes have shaped int’l politics and the world we not inhabit
1) The transition from European crises to modern, industrialized total war
2) The end of empire and the withdrawal of European countries from their imperial acquisitions
3) The cold war: the political and military and nuclear confrontation between the US and the USSR
Modern total war

The origins of the WWI have long been debated

Debates among historians about the war’s origins focused on political, military, and systematic factors

Responsibility for the war was diffuse, as its origins lay in complex dynamics of the respective alliances and their military imperatives
VS

Fritz Fischer (West German historian) argued that German aggression, motivated by the internal political needs of an autocratic elite, was responsible for the war (more influential post-war interpretation)
 At the end of the WWI, the victors imposed a statement of German war guilt in the final settlement, primarily to justify the reparations they demanded

However, the debate about the origins of the war is in retrospect, and it is the motivations of those who fought that could explain why WWI erupted

The masses of the belligerent nations shared nationalist beliefs and patriotic values

Most thought war would be short, victorious, and glorious

the reality was different
 WWI was a total war in a sense that whole societies and economies were mobilized: men were conscripted into armies and women went to work in factories
 A brief timeline of WWI

1914 – Japan went to war as an ally of Britain

1917 – the US entered the war under President Woodrow Wilson; the overthrow of the Tsar and the seizure of power by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in November soon led Russia to withdraw from the war

1918 – the allied offensive who had defensive military technologies, symbolized by the machine gun, triumphed over the tactics and strategy of attrition achieved the rapid advances that helped

bring an end to the war; increasing effective British naval blockade brought an end to the war

The Peace Treaty of Versailles failed to tackle the central problem of European security after 1870 and precipitated German revanchism by creating new states and devising contested borders

Some scholars say 1914-1945 represented a 30-year war
 The effect of German society was significant  all modernized states suffered mass unemployment, but, in Germany, inflation was acute

Others see the period 1919-1939 as a 20-year crisis

Economic factors were also crucial

the effects of the Great Depression weakened the forces of liberal-democracy in many areas and strengthened the appeal of communist, fascist, and Nazi parties

Economic and political instability provided the ground in which support for the Nazis took root

Adolf Hitler came into power in 1933 and the transformation of the German state began

A controversial analysis provided by A. J. P. Taylor in 1961

Hitler was no different from other German political leaders (what was different was the particular philosophy of Nazism and ideas of racial supremacy and imperial expansion)

Recent debates about appeasement have focused on whether there were realistic alternatives to negotiation, given the lack of military preparedness with which to confront Hitler

A brief timeline of WWII

1939 – the defensive military technologies of the WWI gave way to armoured warfare and air power, as the German blitzkrieg brought speedy victories over Poland, and in the west

1941 – the invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler

1942 – after the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question,’ German anti-Semitism and the development of concentration camps gains new momentum

The rise and fall of Japan

After 1919, int’l attempts to provide collective security were pursued through the League of
Nations

but it was never met because many states invaded other states for territorial expansion

In 1868, Japan had emerged from several centuries of isolationism to pursue industrial and military modernization and then imperial expansion
 Japan invaded China in 1937

Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941 after the imposition of American economic sanctions on Japan

The defeat of Germany in 1945 came before the atomic bomb was ready

The destruction of the Japanese cities remains a huge controversy

Gar Alperovitz, in 1965, argued that, as President Truman knew Japan was defeated, his real motive was to coerce Moscow in pursuit of post-war American interests in Europe and Asia

this claim generated angry and dismissive responses from other historians
End of empire

The demise of imperialism in the 20 th
century marked a fundamental change in world politics

During the age of imperialism, political status accrued to imperial powers

After 1945, imperialism became obsolete and the belief that national self-determination should be a guiding principle in int’l politics marked a transformation of attitudes and values

Independence of a state was often slow and marked by prolonged and armed struggle

various factors influenced the process of decolonization

The cold war complicated and hindered the transition

The attitude of the colonial power

The ideology and strategy of the anti-imperialist forces

The role of external powers


Different imperial powers and newly emerging independent states had different experiences of withdrawal from empire

Britain

Between 1947 and 1980, 49 territories were granted independence

Withdrawal from India, the ‘Jewel in the Crown’ of the empire, in 1947 was the most dramatic  paved the way for the creation of the world’s largest democracy

Indian independence was largely an exception in the early post-war years, as successive
British gov’ts were reluctant to rush towards decolonization

End of empire in Africa came in the end of 1950s and early 1960s

From a European perspective, the British experience was more successful than the
French (withdrawal from Kenya and Malaya)
 However, in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, the transition to ‘one person one vote’ and black majority rule was prevented by a white minority aided by the South African gov’t

Under apartheid (a political system in South Africa in which people were divided into racial groups and kept apart by law), after 1948, the South Africans engaged in what many saw as the internal equivalent of imperialism

France

France had been occupied during the WWII, and successive gov’ts sought to preserve
French int’l prestige by maintaining her imperial status

In Indo-China after 1945, Paris withdrew after prolonged guerrilla war and military defeat at the hands of Vietnamese revolutionary forces

In Africa, France withdrew from empire, while attempting to preserve its influence (in
Algeria, however, many French people refused to leave because Algeria was thought to be part of France itself to most French

led to a war from 1954-1962)
 Legacies and consequences: nationalism or communism?

The pattern of decolonization in Africa was diverse, reflecting:

Attitudes of colonial powers

Nature of local nationalist or revolutionary movements

Involvement of external states, including cold war protagonists

Tribal factors

Tribal division was important in examining the political stability of the newly independent states and how capable the new political leaderships were in tackling their political and economic problems

In Asia, the relationship between nationalism and revolutionary Marxism was a potent force

For the Vietnamese, centuries of foreign oppression by Chinese, Japanese and French soon focused on a new imperialist adversary, the US

The US spoke of a domino theory, in which if one state fell to communism, the next would be at risk

so decides to go into South Vietnam but withdraws in 1973

Decolonization was a key development in the 20 th
century

While imperialism withered, other forms of domination or hegemony took shape (i.e. Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, and American hegemony in Central America)
Cold war

The rise of the US and the USSR as two world powers after 1945 was of paramount importance in int’l politics

conflict between these two superpowers provided one of the crucial dynamics in world affairs and affected every part of the globe

Some historians date the origins of the cold war to the ‘Russian revolution’ of 1917

But, most focus on events between 1945 and 1950

Central questions in debates about the origins and dynamics of the cold war

Whether the cold war was inevitable

Whether it was the consequence of mistakes and misperceptions

Whether it reflected the response of courageous Western leaders to malign and aggressive

Soviet intent

1945-1953: Onset of the cold war

In Europe, the future of Germany, and of various Central and Eastern European countries, notably Poland, were issues of growing tension between the former wartime allies
 Reconciling principles of national self-determination with national security was a formidable task

In the West, growing feeling that Soviet policy towards Eastern Europe was guided not by historic concern with security but by ideological expansion

In 1947, Truman justified limited aid to Turkey and Greece to rhetorically declare that
America would support those threatened by Soviet

The Truman doctrine and the associated policy of containment expressed the self-image of the US as inherently defensive

underpinned by the Marshall Plan for European economic recovery

The first major confrontation of the cold war took place over Berlin in 1948
 Stalin severed road and rail communications in Berlin (the former German capital was left deep in the heart of the Soviet zone of occupation)

The crisis saw the deployment of American long-range bombers in Britain

US military deployment as followed by political commitment enshrined in the NATO treaty in 1949

the key article of the treaty: an attack on one member would be treated as an attack on all

The alliance was to defend Western Europe

Also it meant the willingness of the US to use nuclear weapons to deter Soviet
‘aggression’

Conflicts in Asia and elsewhere were also crucial
 In 1949, the 30-year long Chinese civil war ended in victory for the communists

In 1950, the North Korean attack on South Korea was interpreted as part of a general communist strategy (the war lasted for 3 years, and North and South Korea remained locked in seemingly perpetual hostility, even after the end of the cold war)

In 1948, the founding of the state of Israel reflected the legacy of the Nazi genocide and the failure of British colonial policy

Both the Soviet Union and the US helped the creation of a Jewish state in previously
Arab lands, though in the 1950s, Soviet foreign policy supported Arab nationalism

The pan-Arabism of the charismatic Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser vs.
Israel

Israel allied with Britain, France and the US and agreed secretly to attack Egypt in 1956

Britain, France, and the US developed complex relationships with Arab states, reflecting historical, strategic and economic interests

1953-1969: Conflict, confrontation, and compromise

One consequence of the Korean War was the build-up of American forces in Western Europe

Only Americans supported the idea that communism was a monolithic political entity controlled from Moscow

Nevertheless, Western Europe depended on the US for military security as the cold war confrontation in Europe was consolidated (the rearmament of the Federal Republic of
Germany in 1954 precipitated the creation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955)

By the 1960s, there were some 7,000 nuclear weapons in Western Europe alone

1953: the death of Stalin

Stalin’s eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev modernize Soviet society but helped unleash reformist forces in Eastern Europe

the situation in Hungary threatened Soviet hegemony, and in 1956, the intervention of the Red Army brought bloodshed in Budapest

Soviet intervention in Budapest was seen as the final spasms of European imperialism

In 1956, an attack on Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel happened as well

took over the
Suez Canal

British actions provoked domestic and int’l criticisms and left a serious rift in the
‘special relationship’ with the US 
Britain eventually abandoned the operation in

Egypt

Khrushchev’s policy towards the West mixed a search for political coexistence with the pursuit of ideological confrontation

Soviet supported movements of national liberalism

aroused fears in the West of a global communist challenge
 The US focused on the cold war perspectives and its economic and political interests but it didn’t commit itself to liberal democracy and national self-determination

The cold war saw the growth of large permanent intelligence organizations, whose roles ranged from estimating intentions and capabilities of adversaries to covert intervention in the affairs of other states

Crises over Berlin in 1961 and Cuba in 1962 marked the most dangerous moments of the cold war

there was a risk of direct military confrontation (Cuban Missile Crisis)

A more stable period of coexistence and competition after 1962

However, bureaucratic pressures drove the growth of nuclear arsenals (Britain in 1952,
France in 1960, and China in 1964)

Growing concern at the spread of proliferation of nuclear weapons led to the negotiation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968

it says that states that had nuclear weapons committed themselves to halt the arms race, while those who did not promised not to halt the arms race

Despite this treaty, by 1990, several states were developing nuclear weapons (Israel,
India, Pakistan, South Africa)

1969-1979: The rise and fall of détente

America’s commitment in Vietnam deepened, whereas Soviet-Chinese relations were deteriorating
 Because of Soviet-Chinese tension, the foundations for what became known as détente were laid between the USSR and US, and for what became known as rapprochement between China and the US
 Détente in Europe

Its origins in the Ostpolitik of the German Socialist Chancellor, Willy Brandt; agreement that recognized the peculiar status of Berlin, and the sovereignty of East
Germany
 Détente in the West

Associated with the political leadership of President Nixon and his adviser Kissinger, who were also instrumental in Sino-American rapprochement

Soviet-American détente had its roots in mutual recognition of the need to avoid nuclear crises, and in the economic and military incentives in avoiding an unconstrained arms race

This did not mark an end to political conflict, as each side pursued political goals

Both sides supported friendly regimes and movements, and subverted adversaries

all this came as various political upheavals were taking place in the ‘Third World’

In 1973, the Arab-Israeli war embroiled both the US and the USSR in what became a potentially dangerous confrontation

led to Egyptian-Israeli rapprochement

However, continuing political violence and terrorism, and the enduring enmity between
Israel and other Arab states proved insurmountable obstacles to a more permanent regional settlement

Soviet support for revolutionary movements in the ‘Third World’ was seen as evidence of duplicity

Moscow’s support for revolutionary forces in Ethiopia in 1975 killed détente (also the
Soviet role in Angola in 1978)

Growing Soviet military superiority = growing Soviet influence

December 1979 marked a point of transition in East-West affairs

NATO agreed to deploy land-based Cruise and Pershing II missiles in Europe if negotiations with the Soviets did not reduce what NATO saw as a serious imbalance

However, Soviet armed forces intervened in Afghanistan to support their revolutionary allies

the West condemned the USSR for its actions in the ‘Third World’


In the US, President Carter was constantly attacked by the Republicans for weak foreign and defense policy

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President

committed to a more confrontational approach with the Soviets on arms control, ‘Third World’ conflicts, and East-West relations in general

1979-1986: ‘The second cold war’

The election of Reagan in 1980 was a watershed in Soviet-American relations

The issue that loomed large in the breakdown of relations between East and West was nuclear missiles in Europe

NATO’s decision to deploy land-based missiles capable of striking Soviet territory provoked great tension in relations between NATO and the USSR, and political friction within NATO

Reagan’s incautious public remarks showed how ill-informed he was in matters of nuclear

Soviet and American negotiators proved unable to make progress in talks on long-range and intermediate-range weapons

The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – a research program designed to explore the feasibility of space-based defenses against ballistic missiles – was criticized by the Soviets for Reagan’s real purpose of regaining the nuclear monopoly of the 1950s behind it

The program was eventually reduced and marginalized

This period (1979-1986) of tension and confrontation between the superpowers = the second cold war

In Western Europe and the Soviet Union, there was real fear of nuclear war

reaction to
Reagan’s rhetoric and policies

Reagan’s military intervention in Grenada in 1983, and Libya in 1986, Reagan’s policy towards Central America, and support for the rebel Contras in Nicaragua, were sources of controversy

In 1986, the Int’l Court of Justice found the US guilty for Reagan’s policy towards
Central America

Even though operation in Lebanon in 1983 failed, the Soviet leadership took very seriously the words of the Reagan administration and believed that Washington was planning a nuclear first strike

In 1983, Soviet air defenses shot down a South Korean civilian airliner in Soviet airspace

the US reacted by imminent deployment of US nuclear missiles in Europe, creating great tension

Throughout the early 1980s, the Soviets were handicapped by ageing political leaders, which gave more challenges to Soviet-American relationship

this changed when Gorbachev became
President in 1985

Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’ in foreign policy, and his domestic reforms, created a revolution, both in the USSR’s foreign relations and within Soviet society

At home glasnost (or openness) and perestroika (or restructuring) unleashed nationalist and other forces which destroyed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
 Gorbachev’s aim in foreign policy  to transform relations with the US and Western
Europe

When confronted with revolt in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev’s foreign ministry invoked
Frank Sinatra’s song, ‘I did it my way,’ to mark the end of the Brezhnev doctrine

Sinatra doctrine

Eastern Europe were allowed to do it their way (peaceful and speedy transition in Eastern Europe, and Germany was united)

Gorbachev signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987

used agreements on nuclear weapons as a means of building trust, and demonstrated the serious and radical nature of his purpose

Despite radical agreements on conventional forces in Europe, the end of the cold war marked success in nuclear arms control rather than nuclear disarmament

Conclusion

Enormous changes took place in 20 th -century politics

Total war

Since the WWI, the transformation of warfare into industrialized total war reflected a combination of technological, political, and social forces

After 1919, incapability of political leaders in restoring peace and stability created new obstacles to a stable order

The rise of Nazi Germany brought a new conflagration and new methods of fighting and killing

Nazi ideas of racial supremacy brought brutality and mass murder across Europe and culminated in genocide against the Jews

In 1948, Israel was created to help set in motion conflicts and events that continue to have global repercussions

End of empire
 End of empire and cold war conflicts in the ‘Third World’ has a close and complex relationship

Marxist ideology in various forms provided inspiration to many ‘Third World’ liberation movements, but provocation to the US (i.e. Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and Fidel
Castro in Cuba were primarily nationalists, who only turned to Moscow and to communism in the face of American and Western hostility)

The divisions between the USSR and the PRC also show diverging trends within the practice of Marxism

In the Middle East, Marxism faced the challenge of radical political ideas (pan-Arabism, revolutionary Islam)
 The role of the superpowers was apparent and significant

Cold war

The relationship between the cold war and the history of nuclear weapons is close

Debate about origins of cold war

use of nuclear weapons by the US vs. paranoia generated by the threat of total annihilation

Debate

nuclear weapons played an important role or not?

Nuclear weapons have been a focus for political agreement, and during détente, nuclear arms agreements acted as the currency of int’l politics

One central issue

how far cold war perspectives and the involvement of nuclear-armed superpowers imposed stability in regions where previous instability led to war and conflict

Both the cold war and the age of empire are over; the age of ‘the bomb’ and of other weapons of mass destruction continues

Despite the limitations of the human imagination, the global consequences of nuclear war remain all too little

but it is a global problem that remains as a common and urgent concern for humanity in the 21 st
century