by Kevin Reilly
The United States as a Global Power
An American Century?
Containing Communism
An Empire of Culture
Resisting the American Empire
Achieving Independence
The End of Empire
Afro-Asian Struggles
The Foundations of Anticolonialism
Independence Achieved
Variations on a Theme
New Nations on the Global Stage
The Rise of the Third World
The “Third World” as an Idea
Nonalignment
A New International Economic Order?
Resistance by the Rich
The Debt Problem
The Assertion of Islam
The Revival of the Middle East
The Roots of Islamic Renewal
Islamic Renewal in Practice: The Case of Iran
Islamic Assertion on a Global Stage
Successes, Failures, and Fissures
The Collapse of Communism
Three Routes to the End of Communism
The Soviet Union
Eastern Europe
China
Explaining the Soviet Collapse
The Chinese Difference
The End of the Cold War
Conclusion: Something New; Something Old
A HUNDRED years ago, Europeans dominated the world. The past century, however, witnessed a series of challenges, shocks, or realignments that substantially altered that pattern. This chapter highlights these global realignments: six “political earthquakes” that in rapid succession transformed older patterns of world history and reshaped the lives of billions all across the planet. Chapter 12 continues this exploration of the past 100 years by examining a set of global processes that, perhaps less visibly and more slowly, have changed our lives.
The European Crisis,
1914-1945
As the twentieth century dawned, world power was pretty much in European hands. Europeans directly governed colonies encompassing Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and elsewhere; they indirectly dominated China and much of the Middle East through periodic military intervention and economic penetration; and people of European descent ruled in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and much of the Pacific. The industrial economies of Europe and the United States generated unprecedented wealth and power while commanding the natural resources and the markets of the world. Militarily, European states were vulnerable only to one another. Their schools and universities produced the besteducated citizens and the most advanced scholars and technicians. And their scientists had unlocked many of the secrets of the universe. No wonder most Europeans felt self-assured, even arrogant and superior, when comparing themselves to the world’s other peoples.
But the first half of the twentieth century brought down this “proud tower”1 of European civilization, and much of the destruction was self-inflicted. In just over three decades (1914-1945), Europe seemed to self-destruct in an orgy of violence known as the world wars. Their vaunted capitalist economic system unraveled in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Their claims to moral superiority lay in tatters as the rise of fascism—a highly emotional, nationalistic, authoritarian, and revolutionary movement—mocked Western rationalism, democracy, and humanitarian values. In Germany and eastern Europe, it led to the grotesque horrors of the Holocaust and the slaughter of millions of citizens. What had happened?
World War I
The Roots of War . This “European crisis” was the product of Europe’s own deeply rooted internal flaws, cracks in the foundation of the “proud tower.” Perhaps the most serious of those flaws was the endemic rivalry of European states, which both generated and glorified war. For nearly a century (1815-1914), a precarious balance of power had kept European states generally at peace. But by the early twentieth century, those rivalries were upset by the emergence of a recently unified Germany as a new and ambitious “Great Power,” aspiring to its “place in the sun.” The growth of popular nationalism, an accelerating arms race in highly destructive weaponry, and a system of rigid alliances that divided Europe into two armed camps by 1914 compounded the tensions, raised the stakes, and created a crisis waiting to happen. Then a single spark, the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a Bosnian-Serb nationalist, ignited a war that set Great Britain, France, and Russia (and later the United States) to war against Germany, the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and briefly Italy, which switched sides in 1915. It was a war that no country had actually intended but also one that no statesmen, despite much last-minute diplomacy, were able to prevent. The Great War was an accident, but Europe’s system of competitive nation-states made it accident prone. The conflict ground on for four long years, much of it bogged down in “trench warfare,” before the British and French, joined now by the Americans, staggered to victory over Germany and its allies.
The Costs of War . It was a war of unprecedented and appalling casualties, caused in part by the introduction of various new weapons, such as poison gas, tanks, machine guns, submarines, and airplanes. Single battles produced deaths numbering in the hundreds of thousands, while a total of some 10 million lives were lost during the four years of the conflict (1914-1918) with perhaps twice that many wounded or maimed for life. On the home front, it was a “total war” in which governments took control of their economies, set women to work in factories producing munitions, and in wartime propaganda depicted the enemy in the most brutal and inhumane terms. A conflict of entire societies, not simply their military forces, took shape during World War I.
A Global Conflict . Although focused primarily within Europe, the war was global in several ways. Parts of it were fought in the colonies, as British and French forces seized German territories in Africa. Millions of colonized people from Africa, India, and elsewhere were drafted into the service of European powers. Japan took over German possessions in China and made heavy demands on China itself. Australia and New Zealand entered the world stage, suffering devastating losses in an attack on the Ottoman Empire near Istanbul at Gallipoli. Finally, the United States joined the war in 1917, marking its emergence as a global military power. With fresh American help providing a key boost to the Allies, Germany surrendered in November 1918.
Reverberations . The legacy of World War I was evident throughout the twentieth century. That conflict destroyed the Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires, which had long been prominent features of Europe’s political order. In Russia in 1917, it prompted a massive revolutionary upheaval that toppled the tsar, brought communists to power, and initiated a century-long struggle with the capitalist countries of the West. Amid the rubble of the Ottoman Empire, the war redrew the map of the Middle East, creating the countries of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon. All except Turkey were placed under the control of the British or the French. Conflicting British promises to both Arabs and Jews regarding Palestine set the stage for an enduring struggle over that ancient and holy land. Europe’s political map also changed as a bevy of new independent states appeared—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, and others. The principle of national “self-determination,” articulated by the victors, echoed loudly throughout the twentieth century as subject peoples all across the world used it to further their own drives for greater freedom or independence from imperial rule. Within Europe, the war generated despair and disillusionment among educated people as they contemplated the immense and senseless horrors of that conflict. For many intellectuals, the very idea of progress, so prominent in nineteenth-century European thinking, was among the casualties of the war.
Capitalism in Crisis
The Great Depression of the 1930s disclosed another crack in the foundation of European civilization—the instability of its capitalist economy. To be sure, that economy in its industrial phase had given Europeans wealth and power unknown in human history. But it had also generated intense class conflict and inequality, and it had shown a
tendency toward instability as the imbalances between capital and labor left many unemployed. In the 1930s, stock prices dropped sharply, banks failed, factories closed, unemployment skyrocketed in the major industrial countries, breadlines and soup kitchens sprouted in many cities, and, more than ever, the poor despised the rich and the rich feared losing what they had. It seemed almost that the predictions of Karl Marx about the inevitable collapse of capitalism were coming true. Instead, the governments of Western countries learned how to manage—or at least to moderate—these instabilities through government spending and controlling the supply of money. Nevertheless, the vicious downturn in the economy wrought terrible damage, leaving millions impoverished. It also created conditions in which the Nazis came to power in Germany. A fringe racist and highly nationalist party with minimal popular support before the Depression, the Nazis, under the leadership of the charismatic Adolf Hitler, rode that disaster to power as they blamed Germany’s problems on Jews and communists and claimed to have answers to all the country’s economic and political woes.
Racism and the Holocaust
With its anti-Jewish, anticommunist, and intensely nationalist message, the Nazis gained growing support in Germany during the early 1930s and came to power constitutionally in 1933. They then proceeded to dismantle Germany’s young and fragile democracy, arrested hundreds of thousands of opponents, and established a single-party dictatorship. They also began to put their racist ideas into practice. At the heart of this effort lay tightening restrictions on the country’s Jewish population and then during World War II a systematic program to kill them all. The Nazi phenomenon and the ghastly Holocaust that followed from it grew out of a further flaw in European civilization—racism. That racism had found expression earlier in the African and Asian colonies of the major European powers, but in Europe itself it now joined an ancient antiSemitism and a modern narrow nationalism to provide the conditions in which the Holocaust occurred. In the deliberate murder of 6 million Jews—and as many communists, Gypsies, Poles and other Slavs, and people with disabilities—a modern administrative and technological apparatus for death served Europe’s oldest and most traditional hatreds. The Holocaust and the terrible war during which it took place greatly undermined those European claims to progress, virtue, benevolence, and civilization that had justified its global empires. Western pretensions to superiority rang hollow in the aftermath of two world wars and barbarities beyond imagination.
Another World War
World War II . The roots of World War II lay in the peace settlement of the first one. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) put the entire blame for World War I on the Germans and imposed very harsh terms on them. Much of Hitler’s popularity derived from his vociferous opposition to this treaty and his determination to end its restrictions on Germany. Once in power, Hitler rebuilt German military forces and set about a program of territorial expansion by which Germany absorbed Austria and Czechoslovakia (1938-1939) and then attacked Poland (1939), France (1940), and the Soviet Union (1941). These efforts to carve out for Germany a larger empire, a “living space” brutally cleansed of Jews, led to war in Europe beginning in 1939. The major theater of that war was the “Eastern Front,” in which the Soviet Union first absorbed invading German forces and then slowly pushed them out, suffering 25 million or more deaths in the process.
Japan was the Germany of Asia. In fact, as early as 1931, a militarized Japan carved out an empire that consisted of parts of China, Dutch possessions in Indonesia, British Malaya and Burma, and French colonies in Southeast Asia. It was a continuation of Japan’s remarkable rise to world power that had begun with its unique industrialization in the late nineteenth century. While Japan presented itself as leading an effort to oust Western imperialists from Asia, its brutality toward other Asians, particularly Chinese, marked it as yet another empire designed only to further its own economic and territorial interests. When the Japanese attacked the American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December 1941, the Asian and European conflicts were joined as Germany backed Japan and the United States declared war on both of them.
Thus, World War II took its final shape as Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and a militarized Japan (the “Axis”) faced off against Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States (the “Allies”). Fought in Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, it was even more of a “total war” since it not only militarized the home front but also targeted civilians in massive numbers. The war claimed perhaps 60 million fatalities, about 3 percent of the world’s population. Heavy bombing of entire cities from the air proved far more devastating to the civilian populations than during World War I, a trend that culminated in 1945 in the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States with newly created atomic bombs. A centrally directed Soviet economy and American techniques of mass production combined to vastly outproduce the Germans and Japanese and laid the foundations for military victory in 1945.
A World Reshaped
World War II pressed “reset” to global politics. Western Europe, which had largely dominated the globe for the previous 150 years, had been physically devastated, morally tarnished, and politically weakened. Recovering economically from these conflicts with substantial American assistance in the form of the Marshall Plan aid, Europe put aside some of its historical rivalries and moved toward greater cooperation. But Europe’s dominant position in global affairs was gone, replaced by that of the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union, battered by more than 25 million deaths, had nonetheless performed heroically, and its communist regime gained credibility. It also gained a major ally, as the Chinese Communist Party took power in that enormous country in 1949. The United States, with some 300,000 deaths, far fewer than other key combatants, and no invasion of its own territory, emerged as the single most powerful country in the world and the clear leader of the advanced capitalist nations. The wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States soon gave way to a bitter and intense rivalry known as the Cold War. This new conflict largely structured international relations until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Revolution and Communism
War and revolution go together like, well, revolution and war. One often causes the other. It is hard to envision the French Revolution without the European and Napoleonic war or the American Revolution without the War for Independence. Similarly, it is hard to imagine the Russian Revolution of 1917 without World War I or, for that matter, the Chinese Communist Revolution without World War II. In fact World War I produced not one but two revolutions in Russia in 1917—a sort of middle-class parliamentary revolution against the tsar and then, later in the year as the war dragged on, the revolution in which V. I. Lenin and the communists seized power. It is that second revolution that changed Russia and shook the world.
The Russian and Chinese communist revolutions inspired potential revolutionaries throughout the world. In addition to transforming the largest and the most populous countries on the planet, they offered an alternative to Western capitalism that appealed to many. Through the use of state power, they would mobilize their people and their resources to construct in record time thoroughly modern industrial societies. And by substituting a rationally planned economy for private property and the market, they would do so without the painful consequences of the capitalist path—repeated recessions and depressions, the gross exploitation of workers, endemic conflicts between rich and poor, and economic rivalries that led to war and imperial aggression. That was the promise of communist revolutions.
The Birth of Communism
Russia . Revolutionary and democratic socialist parties flourished in Europe and even parts of the Americas during the decades before World War I, but they were blindsided by a revolution carried out in the name of Marx in distant Russia. Communism was born in a place far removed from the advanced capitalist industrialized countries that Karl Marx saw as the seedbed of socialism. V. I. Lenin knew that Marx and the Western s
ocialists held a historical interpretation that envisioned socialism emerging from advanced capitalist society, when the contradictions of capitalism—abundance and inequality—could no longer be held together by markets and capitalists. But Lenin thought that Russia could be made to jump-start a socialist revolution even though capitalism had barely begun. It would just have to be dictatorial rather than democratic, organized by a tight cadre rather than an open parliament.
Russia was awash with revolutionaries. The war only magnified ancient inequalities, conflicts, and divisions in Russian society—the great gulf between a small landowning nobility and a vast peasant class, the dominance of Russians over the empire’s many other peoples, and the absolute authority of the tsar over all other groups in society. But the revolution also grew out of the country’s nineteenth-century efforts to modernize and industrialize as a means of maintaining its Great Power status. These efforts created or enlarged both an educated professional class of people and a heavily exploited urban working class, neither of which could find an outlet for their grievances in the autocratic tsarist system.
Revolution broke out as women demonstrated for lack of bread, soldiers mutinied and deserted, peasants seized land from the nobility, workers took over factories, and non-Russian nationalities asserted their independence. Within a year, the centuries-old tsarist monarchy was gone, and the Bolsheviks, more in tune with the revolutionary mood than rival parties, catapulted into power.
Few people expected this fragile toehold to last, but the Bolsheviks consolidated their power after a bitter civil war, renaming themselves the Communist Party. They even renamed their country the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the Soviet Union) after the “soviets” or grassroots workers’ councils that had sprung up in 1917 to assume local power as the tsar’s authority collapsed.