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READING 1
Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton, “Culture, Power, and
Perspective: War and Peace in the Twentieth Century,” in In the Balance:
Themes in Global History (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1998), 817–26, 829–37.
Abstract: This essay examines World War II and the political, cultural, and
social changes that resulted from this struggle. It explores both the war in
Europe and the war in the Pacific, and details its costs in human lives and
resources. It then discusses the fundamentally different world order that
emerged in the war’s aftermath, where European dominance no longer
reigned supreme.
World War II
Neither the League of Nations nor individual nations were able to stop the
Japanese attack on China, German rearmament, remilitarization of the
Rhineland and absorption of central European states, Italy’s invasion of
Ethiopia, or the Spanish Civil War. Japan, Germany, and Italy, had embarked
on similar designs backed by similar government ideologies and policies.
They consolidated their assault on international law and order by joining in
an alliance known as the Axis. The classic example of response to Axis actions
came in 1938 when the British and French prime ministers met with Hitler,
poised to attack Czechoslovakia. Their diplomatic effort to check German
aggression without the risk of armed resistance was an approach that came to
be known as “appeasement.” As a policy, appeasement was as much dictated
by British and French domestic politics and economic realities as it was a
reflection of the hope for a conciliatory and reasonable response to demands
made by the Axis, and a policy that would continue the noble aim of the
peacemakers after World War I.
The War in Europe
The faulty idealism of the policy of appeasement applied to Hitler was
revealed when Hitler gained British and French approval for annexing the
Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia, which was inhabited by Germans. In
return Hitler promised to halt his plans to annex all of the Czech republic, a
promise that lasted only until March 1939 when the remainder of
Czechoslovakia was occupied. Six months later, following a Nazi-Soviet
nonaggression pact, Germany and its new ally, the Soviet Union, invaded
Poland. Britain and France abandoned appeasement and declared war. World
War II in Europe had begun.
Within two months Germany invaded and occupied Denmark, Norway, the
Netherlands, Belgium, and France in a rapid effort to confirm its hegemony
over the continent. The two-thirds of France in German hands became a part
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of Hitler’s Reich; what remained was the collaborationist Vichy government,
a German puppet state that maintained a tenuous independence until 1942
when it too was absorbed by Germany.
The Holocaust
From 1942 the Nazi language of elimination (“the final solution”) and
genocide became a gruesome reality when the victims of propaganda and
discrimination were branded with ink identity numbers and herded into
camps to be removed from German cities and occupied territory, enslaved or
killed. For years Jews and members of other groups attacked by the Nazis
were forcibly detained by the state. Between 1942 and 1945 Jews were sent to
concentration camps, where those who were strong enough were used as
slave labor and the weak were gassed to death by assembly-line methods or
“eliminated” in other ways. The largest of the camps was Auschwitz, where
more than 1 million Jews died.
The full impact of the horrors of the concentration camps only became evident
to people around the world when the camps were liberated at the end of the
war. More than 15 million people were exterminated in the Holocaust (from the
Greek holo, “whole”; caustos, “burned”), including Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and
homosexuals. The complicity of those who watched the killings in silence or
knew about them and did nothing remains the most troubling and unexplained
aspect of the century’s history. It is a history that could not be silenced.
The Battle of Britain
With the fall of France, Great Britain faced Germany alone. Since the English
Channel separated the British Isles from the continent, Hitler had to rely on
the German air force as the primary weapon with which to assault England.
Within six weeks of the fall of France, Hitler launched a massive air campaign
against the British Isles that is known as the Battle of Britain. Between August
and October 1940, the Battle of Britain involved indiscriminate massive day
and night bombing designed to destroy British production and demoralize
the public. Civilians, including women and children, huddled together in
cold and dark underground shelters listening to the air assault.
The foremost obstacle to German success was the British Royal Air Force
(RAF). Not until the Battle of Britain did the RAF, significantly aided by
technological innovations like radar, show its greater skill and quality against
the experience and strength of the German air force. The success of the RAF
greatly bolstered British morale and saved British industry.
The Great Patriotic War
As fatal to German plans as the RAF was Hitler’s unannounced attack on his
Russian ally. Believing that the Soviet Union constituted a threat to German
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security and ambitions, and anxious to gain control of food supplies and raw
materials, especially oil, in the Soviet Union, the Germans launched their
invasion on June 22, 1941. Great Britain no longer stood alone, and when the
United States joined Britain and Russia against the Axis powers in late 1941
following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, the
second phase of World War II commenced what was known to the Russians
as the “great patriotic war.” Within four months the Germans reached the
vicinity of Moscow, when a combination of the extreme Russian winter and a
Soviet counteroffensive checked them. In the following year the Russians
halted a German offensive into the Ukraine in a bitter siege at Stalingrad.
The Battle for Africa
While an air war raged over Britain and the Germans and Russians struggled
for control of the Soviet Union, the British fought the Axis in North Africa. It
was essential for the British to protect the Suez Canal, their life line to India,
Australia, and New Zealand. From the beginning of the war, they established
their line of defense at the western border of Egypt in order to prevent Axis
armies from moving eastward from the Italian colony of Tripolitania (modern
Libya).
In October 1942 the British undertook an offensive against the Italians in
conjunction with the landing of British and American troops in Morocco and
Algeria. The aim was a joint attack from east and west that would drive the
Axis out of North Africa. The costly campaign shifted back and forth across
the deserts of North Africa, but by the spring of 1943, following the Axis loss
of Tripolitania, the Axis “Army Group Africa,” by now dominated by the
Germans, surrendered. The southern flank of Europe, across the
Mediterranean, was open for Allied assault.
The Assault on Europe
Russian demands that the Americans and British come to their aid by
launching a second-front assault on Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” were
answered soon after the surrender of Axis armies in North Africa. In the
summer of 1943, British troops landed in Sicily and Americans at Salerno on
the mainland to begin a slow and destructive attack on Italy. As Allied forces
fought their way up the peninsula, Mussolini was removed from power. The
Germans took over Italy and continued to offer strenuous resistance until an
Allied offensive achieved a breakthrough that brought about the capitulation
of German forces in Italy by the beginning of May 1945.
The Allies opened up an even more significant second front in western
Europe on June 6, 1944, when the invasion of France began. Despite desperate
German resistance, Paris was liberated in a little more than two months. The
Allies reached the borders of Germany and the Netherlands in the fall of 1944
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and commenced a three-pronged invasion that carried them deep into
German territory by spring 1945, at the same time that a major Soviet
offensive brought their troops into contact with the Allies. On April 30 Hitler
committed suicide, and on May 7, at Reims in France, representatives of a
German provisional caretaker government signed an unconditional
surrender; the following day the Germans repeated the act of capitulation at
Soviet headquarters in Berlin. The war in Europe was over.
Naval Technology and the War at Sea
The war in Europe had been primarily fought on the land and in the air,
though Allied control of the sea was no less important to victory in World
War II than it had been in World War I. Naval warfare was waged on the
surface and under the seas, and even in the air. The identical pattern of
conflict between small groups of highly trained fighting men manipulating
complex weapons systems, of competing technologists, and of commanders
exercising control at a very long distance, though not new, emerged with the
development of war in the air as it had at sea. An important innovation in
naval warfare was the introduction of the aircraft carrier, which enabled
aircraft, taking off on the high seas, to take part in naval battles, provide cover
for troop landings from ships, and engage in long-distance bombing of
targets on land.
But it was the submarine, which had proved its worth in World War I, that
was the major weapon in the war at sea in World War II. German U-boats, in
conjunction with the German air force, were extensively employed in the
effort to defeat Great Britain quickly after the fall of France. The U-boat
campaign against British shipping produced a successful Allied response
from Britain and the United States. In the United States, ships were
constructed in such numbers and so speedily that a “bridge of ships” was
maintained, enabling Britain to keep up her struggle against Germany. Large
convoys of merchant ships carrying supplies sailed under the protection of
battleships skilled in antisubmarine combat. Sensitive electronic detection
devices, known as sonar, were perfected, and effective depth bombs
neutralized the U-boat menace. About 700 German submarines were
destroyed while Allied shipping losses attributed to U-boats amounted to an
incredible 21 million tons.
Navies and merchant marines made definite contributions to the mobility
characteristic of World War II. Large numbers of men and heavily
mechanized equipment could best be transported to distant battle zones by
ship, despite great advances in air transport, which was faster and
increasingly used as the war persisted. Nowhere were naval power and air
power more significant than in the struggle in the vast Pacific.
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The War in Asia and the Pacific
Victory in Europe did not mean that the war was over. Though Germany and
Italy had been defeated, Japan was still an active and potent enemy, despite the
fact that domestic conditions in Japan were desperate. Throughout the war,
opposition to militarism and Japan’s pursuit of empire festered, though it was
suppressed by the government’s “thought police” (kempeitai). Anonymous
graffiti collected from the walls of private and public places by the thought
police between December 1941 and early 1944 bear mute testimony to the
hidden opposition to the war: “Look at the pitiful figures of the undernourished people. Overthrow the government. Shoot former Prime Minister
Konoe, the traitor (December 1941); No rice. End the war. Give us freedom
(June 1942); Anglo-American victory, Japanese German defeat (October 1943).
Following the invasion of China in 1937–1938, Japan had moved into
Southeast Asia and occupied territory from Burma to Singapore on the Asian
mainland and a vast array of islands stretching from Indonesia and the
Philippines into the central Pacific. Japan’s expansion on the Asian continent,
beginning in 1931, was stimulated by demand for raw materials and markets;
its continuing advance into Southeast Asia was driven by increasing needs
for oil, tin, and rubber, which Southeast Asia had in abundance. Critics later
called this cycle the “China Quagmire,” referring to the idea that Japan was
sucked deeper and deeper into war as each advance demanded more
resources to sustain it. Japanese propagandists justified Japan’s role in Asia as
exercising beneficial political and economic leadership for Asian countries
through the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere;” however much
Southeast Asians resented European colonial powers, few were taken in by
the Japanese claim that their imperial goals worked for the benefit of Asians.
Because the long struggle in Europe had exhausted its allies, the burden of
the campaign to defeat Japan fell on the United States. It was a campaign of
naval warfare, “island hopping” whereby the Japanese had to be driven from
one after another of the many Pacific islands they had occupied, and air
power. On the Asian mainland the Japanese put up stiff resistance. In support
of the land campaigns, the Americans took the war to Japan itself by an air
offensive—launched from bases in China, liberated Pacific islands, and
aircraft carriers—designed to destroy Japanese industrial centers and morale.
Despite land, sea, and air efforts, Japan showed no signs of ending the war
quickly. Toward the end of the sixth year of World War II, an air raid by the
United States on the Japanese main island dropped an atomic bomb on the
city of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945), destroying military targets and killing
outright 80,000 civilians. The detonation of a second atomic bomb over
Nagasaki on the southern island of Kyushu (August 9, 1945), before the
effects of the first were properly registered, brought about Japanese surrender
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(September 2, 1945). World War II ended exactly six years after it had begun,
and nuclear warfare had become a global reality.
Secretly developed by an international team of scientists working for the U.S.
government in various laboratories and tested in the deserts of New Mexico,
the atomic bomb was a weapon of incredible terror and destruction. The
question of whether the bomb should have been used, or even developed,
raises an issue that has never been resolved. Military justification for the
dropping of the bomb, that it would put a quick end to a seemingly
interminable war and accordingly save lives, particularly Allied lives.
Nevertheless, much of the world continues to ask: Could not other means, such
as stringent blockading, have accomplished the same ends? Was it necessary to
drop the bomb on a city? Above all, why was it necessary to drop a second
bomb? What of the environmental results of atomic explosions? Peace replaced
war at the cost of enormous uncertainty and questioning.
Peacemaking
In yet another way World War II recapitulated the experience of World War I.
While both conflicts raged, attention was given to the shaping of the postwar
world. After two global wars, the planet was conflict oriented, its nations
suffering deepening divisions between classes, cultures, and races. President
Wilson had pinned his hopes on a League of Nations that would guarantee a
peace without victors or vanquished and “make the world safe for democracy.”
The Allied vision of the postwar world, reflecting the powerful influence of
President Franklin Roosevelt, was perhaps less idealistic and more pragmatic.
It was formulated in a series of wartime conferences, beginning with the
meeting of Roosevelt and Churchill at Casablanca in Morocco in January 1943,
where they declared a policy of unconditional surrender as basic to any peace
agreement. They were joined by representatives from Russia and other
countries in a series of conferences held to design a peace based on victory that
would deal harshly with the vanquished. At a meeting held in Cairo, Egypt, in
November 1943, the fate of the Japanese empire was agreed upon, and at a
meeting at Yalta in Soviet Crimea, agreement on the future of Germany and
eastern Europe was arranged.
Like Wilson, Roosevelt believed that an international organization would help
establish and maintain a rule of law among nations, and once again the United
States took a leading role in creating such an organization. Roosevelt’s
proposals, which were less skeptically received than Wilson’s, resulted in the
San Francisco Conference (April–June 1945) that created a United Nations
organization even before the war in Europe was completed, though not before
Roosevelt’s death in 1945. The new international organization came into
existence before and apart from subsequent peace treaties. Fifty years after its
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creation, the United Nations continues to wrestle with the maintenance of
international order in a global climate of rapid change and instability.
The Balance Sheet Perspective on Global War:
Human and Material Costs
In contrast to nineteenth-century conflicts such as the Crimean and the
Franco-Prussian Wars, which were relatively brief and had fewer casualties,
the global wars of the twentieth century were of long duration and exacted
heavy tolls in human lives and resources. Loss of lives among civilian
populations could not be immediately nor easily estimated, and measuring
the spiritual anguish and emotional dislocation caused by the war and its
effects was virtually impossible.
World War I was unique in the numbers participating in and affected by it.
Previous wars, such as the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, had
required the active participation of large portions of the population, but never
before 1914 had war so extensively called into play all the human and material
resources of the participating nations. In World War I more than 10 million
soldiers perished and twice as many were wounded, many permanently
crippled and unable to return to normal peacetime lives. In World War II
conscription and the displacement of people fleeing war or persecution made
huge demographic changes across the European landscape. Between
September 1939 and early 1943, at least 30 million Europeans were deported or
fled from their homes. By recent estimates close to 60 million men, women, and
children lost their lives in World War II, and many millions more suffered the
indelible pain of loss and hardship. Twenty million people are estimated to
have succumbed to war and its effects in the Soviet Union alone.
Material costs were also too vast to be readily comprehended. Combatant
nations in World War I spent at the rate of $10 million an hour, and the
grand total of war expenditure (including property damage) has been
estimated at $186 billion. World War II cost the United States $341 billion
and cost Japan $562 billion; the Soviet Union lost approximately 30 percent
of its national wealth. These staggering figures take on true meaning only in
terms of what might have been accomplished by the expenditure of so
much energy, effort, and money for peaceful purposes such as feeding,
housing, and clothing people.
How War Changed Society
War tends to encourage the growth of state power for the mobilization of
resources and the mobilization of citizenry. Control of the economy,
government regulation and planning, and even requisitioning and rationing
were necessary in the pursuit of wartime goals. The demands of technological
innovation and the expense of new technology showed that the concentration
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of power in the hands of political leaders was an effective and essential way
to increase production and contribute to national power through military
successes.
Both World War I and II depended heavily on conscripted manpower. The
mass production of weapons required the mass production of soldiers. By
World War II fighting units were highly diversified, and the new dependence
on technology required many units dedicated to servicing and supplying that
technology. The traditional division between soldier and civilian
disappeared, as mechanics were as necessary as other soldiers to the war
effort. The importance of scientists and engineers grew as the realization
dawned that new weapons could tip the balance quickly in favor of one
belligerent over another. During World War II, European refugee scientists
fleeing Hitler’s Germany persuaded the British and American governments to
mount an effort for research and development that produced the first atomic
bomb. Science and other aspects of culture were harnessed to serve the
nationalist goals of societies.
The Impact On Daily Life
People felt the impact of war in many ways. Rationing of sugar, gasoline,
tires, automobiles, coffee and other goods, shortages, and inflation were
endured by millions. Welfare measures and expanding roles for labor unions
in the organization of the labor force were utilized in the interests of the war
effort. The war permitted the intrusion of states into the daily lives of
individuals and families, sometimes legislating motherhood. Managed health
care likewise was a product of the need to ensure workers’ health so that they
could achieve maximum productivity. In the postwar era technology that had
been created to meet military demands was applied to the production of
consumer goods.
Conflict in the Twentieth Century
As the engagement of almost all the nations of the world in global warfare
suggests, the twentieth century reflects the widespread and deep cultural
divisions among societies. The goals of the major combatants and their
alliances in World War II were complex and diverse, but the governments, if
not the entire populations, were ardently committed to the justness of their
causes and devoted enormous energy in propaganda efforts to convince both
their own people and sometimes the enemy that they were right.
Technological innovation, bureaucratic expansion, the ideological fervor were
all characteristics of participants in World War II, which only temporarily, if
at all, masked the divisions of race, class, and gender emerging in societies
around the world.
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Propaganda
Propaganda was an important strategy that all sides used to help win the
war. Hitler created a Ministry of Propaganda under the direction of Joseph
Goebbels (1897–1945), who orchestrated mass demonstrations of Nazi
supporters and coordinated the use of Nazi symbolism such as the swastika
while crafting negative images of Jews and others in contrast to the ideal of
Germanic nationhood. After the United States entered the war following the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, vivid imagery and powerful stereotypes
emerged on both sides of the Pacific.
Just as the films of Leni Riefenstahl were useful propaganda for the Nazis, the
forces of Hollywood created a propaganda campaign to convince American
troops that they were fighting for their way of life. The director Frank Capra
was called in by the U.S. government to prepare a series of documentaries to
be distributed to American troops. These films were called Why We Fight and
portrayed Japan as a demonlike enemy that represented the annihilation of
civilization. Political cartoons showed Japanese soldiers with simian features,
at once powerful and superhuman and pathetic and subhuman. Either image
dehumanized the Japanese soldier. The Japanese used similar dehumanizing
imagery in portrayals of American soldiers to strengthen the Japanese
soldiers’ will to fight.
Racism
The Axis powers, particularly Nazi Germany, were committed to building a
modern society based on racial purity; to this end they dedicated energy and
resources to eliminating those human beings who did not fit their description
of racial purity, including Gypsies and other minorities, along with the 6
million Jews who died in the Holocaust. The racism of the Nazis, widely
criticized by the Allies but only reluctantly acted on, found echoes in racial
discrimination that was part of both American and European societies. While
the U.S. government critized Nazi policies, anti-Semitism and segregation
laws that demeaned African American citizens were widely practiced in
American society.
Mobilization for the war effort also brought jobs to many African Americans.
In Detroit, where auto factories first hired minorities in large numbers, hate
strikes erupted in the plants and a race riot occurred in 1943. Unlike the
women workers whose presence had been tolerated because it was assumed
to be temporary, the black workers stayed after the war and Detroit became a
center of the Civil Rights movement.
The U.S. military establishment was segregated, and racial discrimination
extended to the defense industry. Despite the fact that African-American
troops saw heavy combat that they valiantly laid down their lives, they
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remained segregated in most situations and were frequently discriminated
against by white soldiers. Even the elite corps of black American bomber
pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen were subjected to racism by their
fellow white soldiers. American armies also included Native Americans and
Chicanos. The only secret U.S. military code never to be deciphered by the
enemy was based on a Native American language.
War in the Colonies
European armies included many thousands of colonized peoples from
Africa, Asia, and the Americas who fought alongside their colonizers.
Support for the war effort was not unanimous. For example, in the British
colony of Trinidad, where an American military base was situated, many
saw the class struggle as more important and resisted fighting in the war.
Black activist Elma Francois, whose occupation was clothes washer, was
tried for sedition in 1937, and she spoke for many oppressed peoples when
she claimed: “The only war we will fight in is the fight for better conditions,
peace, and liberty.” But many in the colonies did see combat. Their wartime
experiences forever changed the era’s understanding of colonial notions of
“civilization” and “barbarism.”
Japanese American Internment
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, U.S. immigration policy
was severely biased against nonwhites, except for purposes of importing
workers for hard labor. After Pearl Harbor the summary incarceration of
more than 110,000 persons of Japanese birth or ancestry on the Pacific coast in
either relocation (for the general population) or internment (for suspected
Japanese loyalists or troublemakers) camps between March and mid-August
1942 demonstrated the difference in the ways that European and nonEuropean immigrants were viewed.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1943 (Hirabayashi v. U.S.) upheld the right
of the military to treat Japanese Americans as enemy aliens, despite
protestations of loyalty and actions that confirmed loyalty. One example of
this was the all–Japanese American U.S. Army Unit 442, which fought
bravely on World War II battlefields and became the most highly decorated
unit in the army’s history. Japanese Americans also served the United States
during the war as translators. The 150,000 Japanese living in Hawaii were
not sent to internment camps because their labor was needed in agriculture
and to rebuild the shipyards, unlike the West Coast Japanese whose
confiscated agricultural lands and small businesses were desirable assets
coveted by others.
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Pan-Asianism
The Japanese heralded Pan-Asianism in their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity
Sphere, a plan aimed, however hypocritically, to unite Asians against their
white European colonial oppressors. When the Japanese invaded Southeast
Asia in 1941–1942, they claimed to be liberators from European colonial
aggressors, and in India, Burma, and Indonesia the Japanese were met with
support from local nationalists seeking to overthrow their European colonial
masters. But the Japanese, like their Nazi allies, also had a strong sense of
their own superiority and ultimately proved to be as oppressive as the
Europeans they displaced, forcing other Asians to labor in factories and to
serve their Japanese rulers as they had Europeans. Pan-Asian unity was as
much a myth as that of the Aryan nation promoted by the Nazis.
War Atrocities and War Crimes Trials
Atrocities were carried out by Japanese soldiers in China as elsewhere,
though perhaps the most dramatic was the “Rape of Nanjing” in December
1937, when Japanese troops engaged in random and merciless slaughter of an
estimated 200,000 civilians in Nanjing and the surrounding area over a period
of six weeks. The secret documents of Unit 731, a Japanese military unit in
Manchuria whose doctors and scientists performed institutionalized murder
in the form of lethal medical experimentation, only came to light publicly
long after the end of the war. Such experiments as spreading bubonic plague
virus among the local Chinese population or the vivisection of captured U.S.
airmen at Kyushu Imperial University in 1945 mirror Nazi medical
experiments on the inmates of concentration camps.
No side was immune to accusations of atrocities. Toward the end of the war
in Europe, the British put the German city of Dresden to the torch in a
massive incendiary raid that killed 135,000 people, many of whom had fled
westward from the Soviet advance. The firebombing of Tokyo in spring 1945
razed 16 square miles of the capital city and killed between 80,000 and
100,000 civilians, who were “scorched and boiled and baked to death” in the
words of U.S. General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the bombing raid. The
atomic bombs were dropped only a few months later on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Trials were held after the
war ended to seek legal redress against war criminals. Some were sentenced
and a few individuals were executed, but these people, while guilty as
charged, were also scapegoats for the responsibility of many more.
Universal Human Rights and Values
The two world wars focused attention on the extremes of human behavior
and values and on the different interpretations of “human rights” that
cultures and governments constructed to promote domestic or international
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interests. After World War II organizations dedicated to international peace
and order began to discuss universal human rights—basic human needs,
decencies, participatory rights, and liberties. Could peoples from vastly
different cultural and political perspectives agree on a basic covenant of
human rights?
The Postwar Order
After 1945 the United States constructed a system of interlocking alliances
and organizations that were designed to protect its national interests globally
and to further economic ties. The most important of these was the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the principal organizational link
between the United States and Europe. Other alliances formed by the United
States in the postwar period include the Organization of American States
(OAS), the defense treaty with Australia and New Zealand (ANZUS), and the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The Soviet Union similarly
concluded the Warsaw Pact in postwar Europe to seal its relations with its
allies and client states in eastern Europe. Seemingly little had changed in the
perspectives of power. Status in the world community continued to be based
on strategic military strength and the global reach of political and economic
influence.
The Cold War
The emergence of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet
Union, is the clearest example of this postwar continuity of international
relations. Their rivalry and competitiveness resulted in the era known as the
“Cold War,” a period between the end of World War II and 1990, that arms
and security continued to play a defining role. During the Cold War,
suspicion and insecurity ran rampant. Russian distrust of the capitalist west
and western distrust of radicalism had existed since the Bolsheviks took
power in 1917. Russian and Allied self-interest, rather than mutual trust, had
prevailed during the war.
The Cold War was a global political chess game of moves and countermoves
that tensions between the two superpowers varied in intensity. The division
of Germany into Allied and Soviet zones of occupation after the war created
the frontline of the Cold War in Europe, which persisted in the division of the
city of Berlin and the two Germanys, East and West, until the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989. The division between the United States and the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR) deepened as a result of the Marshall Plan, by
which the United States provided about $22.5 billion to aid the recovery of
western Europe between 1948 and 1952. The Soviets perceived the 1949
military alliance of western governments (NATO) as a threat to their security.
They responded with the economic integration of central European satellite
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states and the Warsaw Pact, a counter military alliance. From West Asia to
Ethiopia to South Africa, the superpowers extended their perspectives
through conflicts and strategies involving “national security interests.” The
Cold War found expression in technological ventures, including the space
race to the moon, and in the continued development in military arms and
nuclear capability. The Cold War became global in scale; no part of the world
could be uninvolved.
The Occupation of Japan
In theory an Allied operation, the Occupation of Japan was in reality an
American undertaking. General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme
commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), was in control of the Occupation
forces. Initially, members of political parties and labor union organizers
released from jail were allowed to recreate their organizations in the interest
of creating a “democratic” Japan. Officials and bureaucrats identified with the
militaristic ultranationalism of the war were removed from office, and some
military figures were tried for war crimes. The goal of the democratization
and demilitarization phase of the Occupation was to destroy the foundations
of the Japanese empire and to prevent its resurgence.
By 1947 the direction of Occupation policy began to shift. A general strike
called by the newly reorganized labor unions was prevented by the
Occupation authorities, and gradually former bureaucrats regained positions
in the economic and political hierarchies of the Japanese government.
Growing fears on the part of the United States that Communism was going to
overwhelm Asia influenced the policies of the American Occupation.
American authorities began to see Japan less as a defeated enemy to be
controlled and more as a potentially important strategic ally in Asia. Reform
and recovery became the key concerns of the Occupation after 1948 as the tide
turned clearly in favor of Communist victory in China.
When the Occupation ended in 1952, the United States had signed a peace
treaty with Japan linked to the U.S.-Japan Security Pact, which provided for
United States defense of Japan and the right of the United States to station
troops in Japan. Part of the new Japanese constitution concluded in 1947 was
a prohibition against maintaining armed forces capable of aggression. The
United States demanded the inclusion of this article as a means to prevent
Japan from launching another aggressive war. Because of this prohibition and
because of U.S. interest in maintaining a strategic Asian ally, the United States
has continued to maintain bases in Japan. Although there was considerable
opposition to the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, both domestically and abroad,
and serious demonstrations against the renewal of the treaty in 1960 forced
the resignation of the prime minister and the cancellation of a visit by the
United States president, it was renewed every ten years.
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The Korean War
The Korean War erupted in 1950 as tensions between the United States and
the Soviet Union heightened on the Korean peninsula following the postwar
drawing of a line at the 38th parallel demarcating the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea in the north from the Republic of Korea in the south. An
ally of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China felt threatened by the
landing of United Nations troops led by the American general Douglas
MacArthur, who advocated crossing the northern border of the Yalu River
into Chinese territory and eradicating the specter of Communism in Asia. The
Korean War, which ended in 1953, symbolized the growing strategic concerns
of the United States in Asia, reflected in the shift of Occupation policy toward
Japan, and the division of Korea paralleled the division of postwar Germany
and later of Vietnam between the two superpowers and their client states.
After the Cold War
The collapse of the USSR and the fragmentation of Eurasia in the closing
decade of the twentieth century ended the Cold War. The costs of this “war”
were higher than those of any other global conflict. Human, capital, and
technological resources were drawn into the worldwide competition of the
superpowers for political influence and strategic advantage. World military
spending from 1960 to 1990 was $21 trillion. Despite major arms reductions
(especially after the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in 1991), the international
perspectives on the role of weapons in creating security have not altered.
Nuclear dangers persist. Japan’s economic achievement and the united
postwar European economic community, as examples of successful
transformations that global interdependence is balanced with limited military
spending, are exceptions to the pattern of conflict and development. The
persistence of world poverty among 1 billion of the planet’s peoples and the
oppression of many more reminds us that “global politics in the human
interest” reaches beyond the dualistic and perhaps oversimplistic
perspectives of war and peace.
Summary
Despite its origins as a European conflict, World War II truly engulfed
nearly the entire globe because of connections among Europe, Asia, Africa,
and the Americas created by imperialism. Japan’s rise as a modern nation
state and its role as a powerful player in both Asian and global politics by
the early part of the twentieth century is a potent reminder of the influence
of European imperialism as a model. Japan adapted rapidly to the
developing global system of nation states and emerged as an Asian
imperialist power by World War I, becoming a world player in World War
II as a major ally of Germany and Italy.
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Even more than World War I, World War II was a total war. It showed how
effective an alliance among industry, science, and nationalism could be in the
creation of wartime culture and its instruments of mass destruction used in
the interests of the state. Though the era of mass armies supported by the
fanatical nationalism of the civilian population had passed, World War II was
a conflict between entire societies and cultures. The dropping of two atomic
bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 marked the
end of the world war, but not the end of the perspectives that saw the world
in terms of war and peace. Soon thermonuclear weapons, containing more
destructive power than used by humans in their entire recorded history,
made mass warfare utterly and completely obsolete. The powerful forces of
resistance and revolution, however, were not.
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