From a historical perspective, World War II can be perceived as the
culmination of the imperialist era. Competition among the European
powers for markets and sources of raw materials began to accelerate during
the early years of the nineteenth century and intensified as the effects of the Industrial
Revolution made their way through western and central Europe. By 1900, virtually
all of Asia and Africa had come under some degree of formal or informal colonial
control. World War I weakened the European powers but did not bring the era of imperialism
to an end, and the seeds of a second world confrontation were planted at
the Versailles peace conference, which failed to resolve the problems that had led to
the war in the first place. Those seeds began to sprout in the 1930s when Hitler’s
Germany sought to recoup its losses and Japan became an active participant in the
race for spoils in the Pacific region.
As World War II came to a close, the leaders of the victorious Allied nations were
presented with a second opportunity to fashion a lasting peace based on the principles
of social justice and self-determination. There were several issues on their
postwar agenda. Europe needed to be revived from the ashes of the war and restored
to the level of political stability and economic achievement that it had seemingly
attained at the beginning of the century. Beyond the continent of Europe, the colonial
system had to be dismantled and the promise of self-determination enshrined in
the Atlantic Charter applied on a global scale. The defeated nations of Germany,
Italy, and Japan had to be reintegrated into the world community in order that the
revanchist policies of the interwar era not be repeated. Finally, it was vital that
the wartime alliance of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union be
maintained into the postwar era so that bitter national rivalries among the powers
did not once again threaten world peace.
In the decades following the war, the first three
goals were essentially realized. During the 1950s
and 1960s, the capitalist nations managed to recover
from the extended economic depression
that had contributed to the start ofWorldWar II
and advanced to a level of economic prosperity
never before seen. The bloody conflicts that had
erupted among European nations during the first
half of the twentieth century came to an end, and
Germany and Japan were fully integrated into the
world community. At the same time, theWestern
colonial empires in Asia and Africa were gradually
dismantled, and the peoples of both continents
once again recovered their independence.
But if the victorious nations of World War II
had managed to resolve several of the key problems
that had contributed to a half century of
bloody conflict, the ultimate prerequisite for success—
an end to the competitive balance-ofpower
system that had been a contributing factor
in both world wars—was hampered by the emergence
of a grueling and sometimes tense ideological
struggle between the socialist and capitalist
blocs, a competition headed by the only two remaining
great powers, the Soviet Union and the
United States. While the two superpowers managed
to avoid an open confrontation, the postwar
world was divided for fifty years into two
heavily armed camps in a balance of terror that
on one occasion—the Cuban Missile Crisis—
brought the world briefly to the brink of a
nuclear holocaust.
In retrospect, the failure of the victorious world
leaders to perpetuate the Grand Alliance seems
virtually inevitable. Although the debate over
who started the Cold War has been raging among
historians for decades, it seems clear that the underlying
causes of the ideological conflict lie not
within the complex personalities of world leaders
such as Joseph Stalin and Harry Truman (although
they may have contributed to the problem)
but much deeper in the political, economic,
and social conditions that existed in the world at
midcentury. The rapid recovery of Western Europe
had reduced the bitterness of class conflict
and helped build strong foundations for the cooperative
system of capitalist welfare states that
emerged in the postwar era throughout the region,
but much of the remainder of the world was just
entering the early stages of the Industrial Revolution
and was thus vulnerable to the bitter political,
economic, and social turmoil that had marked
the European experience in the twentieth century.
Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising
that the capitalist and the Communist
nations would become entangled in a bitter competition
over influence in the Third World. Representing
dynamic and mutually contradictory
ideologies, both the United States and the Soviet
Union were convinced that they represented the
wave of the future and were determined to shape
postwar reality to reflect their own worldview.
The particular form that the Cold War eventually
took—with two heavily armed power blocs
facing each other across a deep cultural and ideological
divide—was not necessarily preordained,
but given the volatility of postwar conditions
and the vast gap in mutual understanding and
cultural experience, it is difficult to see how the
intense rivalry that characterized the East-West
relationship could have been avoided.
World History
