Decolonization, Revolution, and the Cold War

Decolonization, Revolution, and the Cold War

1945–1968

CHAPTER PREVIEW

1. The World Remade

• How did the Cold War and decolonization shape the postwar world?

2. Nationalism in South Asia and the Middle East

• How did religion and the legacies of colonialism affect the formation of new nations in South Asia and the Middle East after World War II?

3. Revolution and Resurgence in East and Southeast Asia

• How did the Cold War shape reconstruction, revolution, and decolonization in East and Southeast Asia?

4. Decolonization in Africa

• What factors influenced decolonization in Africa after World War II?

5. Populist and Revolutionary Pathways in Latin America

• Why did populism emerge as such a powerful political force in Latin America?

6. The Limits of Postwar Prosperity

• Why did the world face growing social unrest in the 1960s?

AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR, THE WORLD FACED DEEP AND SWIFTcurrents of change that swept from the decolonization of Asia and Africa to social revolutions such as those in China and Cuba. These transformations were the outcome of movements that began well before the Second World War and were accelerated by the war’s upheaval. The transformations took place in the international context of the Cold War, a rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union.

As people in Asia and Africa pushed back against centuries of Western expansion and demanded national self-determination and racial equality, new nations emerged and nearly every colonial territory gained formal independence between 1945 and the early 1960s. A revolution in China consolidated Communist rule and initially followed the Soviet model, but then veered in new directions. Rather than form an allied Communist front, China and the Soviet Union became economic and political rivals.

The Cold War that emerged between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. following the world war did not involve armed conflict between the two nations. But it became a global experience in which each country backed rival factions in conflicts around the world. The Cold War also imposed a division between western European countries allied to the United States, and eastern European nations that the Soviet Union brought into its zone of influence.

The World Remade

How did the Cold War and decolonization shape the postwar world?

The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union divided postwar Europe and became a long, tense standoff, the Cold War. As the Cold War took shape, three events separated by barely two years foreshadowed the changes that would take place in the world following the Second World War: the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947; the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948; and the Communist revolution in China in 1949. All had their roots in the decades preceding the Second World War — and even predating the First World War. Yet each was shaped by the war and its outcomes.

The Cold War

The Cold War originated in disputes over the political outcome of the war. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin insisted that his country needed control of eastern Europe to guarantee military security from Germany. While U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt had been inclined to accommodate these demands, his successor, Harry Truman, demanded free elections throughout eastern Europe. Stalin refused.

The United States’ status as the only country that possessed atomic weapons at the end of the war bolstered Truman’s tough stance. Just as the U.S. sense of security came from having a monopoly on the atomic bomb, Stalin pursued security by militarily occupying eastern Europe and imposing compliant governments that would provide a buffer against the threat of western European aggression. These countries were considered Soviet satellites — nations whose politics and economics were modeled on and dictated by the Soviet Union.

President Truman misread these occupations as a campaign for world domination. Communist movements in Greece and China, beyond Stalin’s occupation zone, fed these fears. In October 1945 Truman issued the Truman Doctrine, aimed at “containing” communism to areas already occupied by the Soviet army by providing military and economic support to governments threatened by Communist control. (His reference to regimes imposed by force applied only to Europe and countries threatened by communism, not to European colonial domination of Asia and Africa.)

Truman asked Congress for military aid for Greece and Turkey to prevent the spread of communism. Soon after, Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed a broader package of economic and food aid — the Marshall Plan — to help Europe rebuild. Stalin refused Marshall Plan assistance for eastern Europe. The Soviet Union’s support for the overthrow of the democratically elected Czechoslovakian government in 1948 and its replacement by a Communist government shocked the U.S. Congress into approving the Marshall Plan in April 1948.

A lasting pattern of escalating reactions to real and perceived provocations was established between the U.S. and Soviet Union. Stalin retaliated by blocking road traffic through the Soviet zone of Germany to Berlin, prompting the U.S. and its allies to airlift millions of tons of provisions to the West Berliners. After 324 days the Soviets backed down: containment seemed to work. In 1949 the United States formed an anti-Soviet military alliance of Western governments: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Stalin countered by tightening his hold on his satellites, united in 1955 under the Warsaw Pact. Europe was divided into two hostile blocs. British prime minister Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Berlin Airlift Residents of Berlin watch a U.S. Air Force cargo plane land with supplies to support West Berliners during the Soviet blockade (1948–1949).

Berlin Airlift. Residents of Berlin watch a U.S. Air Force cargo plane land with supplies to support West Berliners during the Soviet blockade from 1948 to 1949.

The Soviet Union, with its massive army arrayed across eastern Europe, and the United States, with its industrial strength and atomic weapons, emerged as superpowers whose might dwarfed that of other countries. Superpower status reached an awkward balance after the Soviet Union developed its own atomic weapons in 1949. Both nations pitched themselves into a military and geopolitical confrontation that stopped short of outright war: the Cold War (Map 31.1).

MAP 31.1 Cold War Europe in the 1950s Europe was divided by an “iron curtain” during the Cold War. None of the Communist countries of eastern Europe were participants in the Marshall Plan.

Map shows the following countries as NATO members: Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Great Britain, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and West Germany. The map shows the following countries as Warsaw Pact Members: Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria.

Unaligned country: Spain, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Austria, and Switzerland. Other communist states that were not part of the Warsaw Pact included: Yugoslavia. Countries that participated in the Marshall Plan were: Portugal, Ireland, Great Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, West Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. An inset in the map shows the Berlin Wall separating East and West Germany from 1961 to 1989.

An ideological divide defined the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States saw itself as the defender of a “free world” governed by liberal principles such as free markets, private property, and individual rights protected by democratic constitutions. The Soviet Union defined itself as the defender of the rights of workers and peasants against their exploiters, the rights of colonial peoples against their colonizers, and economic development based on planning and equitable distribution. The Cold War sharpened the distinctions between these models, creating opposing paths that the superpowers pressured other countries to follow.

The United Nations

In 1945 representatives of fifty nations met in San Francisco to draft a charter for a new intergovernmental organization called the United Nations. Like that of its predecessor, the League of Nations (see “The Paris Peace Treaties” in Chapter 28), the immediate goal of the United Nations was to mediate international conflicts in order to preserve peace. But in 1945 the founders of the United Nations foresaw a more ambitious role than the League of Nations had played: the UN would also support decolonization; promote economic development; and expand access to health care, worker protections, environmental conservation, and gender equity.

The United Nations was divided into two bodies: a General Assembly that met annually and included all nations that signed the UN Charter; and a Security Council made up of five regional powers, each of which held veto power over the council’s decisions, making it a body that in effect functioned only through unanimous consent. Roosevelt intended the Security Council to include the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, China, and Brazil. Because of U.S. influence over Latin America, British and Soviet leaders feared the Brazilian seat would simply be a second vote for the United States, so they insisted that France instead be the fifth member of the Security Council. After the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the government of Taiwan held China’s seat until the United Nations transferred it to the People’s Republic of China in 1971.

The UN gave critical support to decolonization efforts. Its charter defended the right of self-determination, and it served as a forum for liberation movements to make claims or negotiate the terms of independence. The UN also provided a platform for opponents of colonialism to condemn those colonial powers that resisted their calls for self-determination. In addition, UN member nations volunteered military forces to serve around the world as peacekeepers, who have provided a buffer to ease violent disputes and served as observers to ensure that agreements were being met or that abuses were not being committed in conflict areas.

In its early years, the United Nations mediated Indonesia’s demand for independence from the Netherlands, which fought a four-year war to reoccupy the former colony. The UN deployed peacekeepers in the newly created border between India and Pakistan, and it helped determine the terms under which Britain relinquished control of Palestine and Jordan, as well as the terms for the creation of Israel in 1948. The agenda of the United Nations evolved as new member states joined. In 1960 alone, eighteen African nations were seated at the UN, forming part of an “Afro-Asian bloc” committed to rapidly completing the decolonization process and advancing postcolonial economic development.

The Politics of Liberation

The term Third World emerged in the 1950s among obervers who viewed Africa, Asia, and Latin America as a single entity, different from both the capitalist, industrialized “First World” and the Communist, industrialized “Second World.” The idea of a Third World had particular appeal amid the Cold War rivalry, because it allowed advocates to try to stake out an autonomous space outside of Cold War pressures. Despite deep differences between them, most so-called Third World countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America were poor and economically underdeveloped — meaning less industrialized — and were thus also referred to as “nonindustrial” or “industrializing” nations.

Many areas of the Third World were still colonies of European countries at the end of the Second World War, though this status was challenged by nationalist liberation movements. The roots of many liberation movements often reached back to the nineteenth century. Colonial powers repressed these movements, but after the Second World War those colonial powers were weaker and nationalist movements grew more insistent. The quest for liberation took many forms. Economically, nations emerging from colonialism sought industrialization and development to end dependence on former colonizers. Politically, they sought alliances with other industrializing nations to avoid the neocolonial influences of more powerful nations. Intellectually, they reacted against Western assumptions of white supremacy.

The former colonies faced intense pressure to align themselves ideologically and economically with either the United States or the Soviet Union, and few could resist the pressure or the incentives those powers brought to bear. Nonetheless, to varying degrees, they tried to operate independently from the two superpowers in a number of ways. In 1955 leaders of twenty-nine recently independent nations in Asia and Africa met in Bandung, Indonesia, to create a framework for political and economic cooperation so they could emerge from colonialism without having to resubordinate their nations either to their former colonizers or to pressures from the Cold War superpowers. The participants outlined principles for rejecting pressure from the superpowers and supporting decolonization. In 1961 nations participating in the Bandung Conference met in Yugoslavia, where Marxists who had come to power in the struggle against Nazi Germany zealously guarded their independence from the Soviet Union, to form a Non-Aligned Nations Movement.

Dependency and Development Theories

In 1948 the United Nations established the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) in Santiago, Chile, to study economic development. Under the direction of Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, ECLA produced Latin America’s main intellectual contributions to the twentieth century: a diagnosis of reasons why less industrialized regions of the world lagged economically and technologically behind Europe and the United States. These ideas were known as dependency theory.

According to dependency theory, the first regions to industrialize in the nineteenth century — western Europe and the United States — locked in a lasting economic advantage magnified by colonialism and neocolonialism. This advantage trapped countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia in roles as exporters of agricultural and mineral commodities and importers of capital and technology. According to this analysis, the prosperity of Europe and the United States was built on the impoverishment of other regions, an inequality that increased over time as the value of commodities decreased relative to the value of manufactured and technological goods.

How could this pattern be broken? Could a country that grew coffee become a country that manufactured cars? This question would be asked many times around the world in the second half of the twentieth century, and it would be answered in many ways.

One approach was modernization theory, which suggested that societies passed through phases of development from primitive to modern, and that adopting the political, economic, or cultural practices of places like the United States was the best remedy for poverty. This theory shaped U.S. foreign aid programs, which deployed armies of experts offering advice in areas ranging from revising legal codes to digging wells. These experts often did not understand local conditions, believing that the American way was always best. Regardless of their intentions, these projects were often riddled with unintended negative consequences, which led to mistrust of U.S. aid.

For peoples emerging from colonialism, dependency theory was more appealing. Newly independent nations faced enormous pressures: rural poverty pushed millions into cities where good jobs were scarce. Cities and the countryside alike had insufficient schools and health care. Dependency theorists favored state planning to both induce industrialization and distribute resources more equitably. A common tool to do this was import substitution industrialization (ISI). Under ISI policies, countries imposed trade barriers to keep certain foreign products out and provided subsidies for domestic industries to make the same goods. Dependency suggested that even ISI was not enough, and that deep social reforms were needed, such as the redistribution of large farming estates to rural workers, as well as state control of major industries and banks.

The governments that attempted land redistribution or the nationalization of foreign firms faced a backlash by landowners, foreign corporations, and political conservatives. In many cases, reformist governments were deposed in military coups supported by the United States. One example was Guatemala, where a democratically elected government pursued the redistribution of land held by large U.S. companies. The government was overthrown in 1954 in a coup organized by the U.S. government.

The experience in Guatemala hardened Cold War views. The events led the United States to expand its containment doctrine to Latin America, where it stepped in to block governments whose reforms it interpreted as Communist. For Latin American reformers, the events in Guatemala suggested that peaceful, gradual change would be blocked by the U.S. and that more radical paths were needed. One person drawing this lesson was an Argentine medical student volunteering in Guatemala at the time of the coup. Ernesto “Che” Guevara (CHAY goo-eh-vahrah) (1928–1967) developed an approach to revolution using tactics he outlined in a manual called Guerilla Warfare. Guevara believed that private property and wage labor were forms of exploitation that could be overthrown by free workers volunteering their labor to help liberate others.

Within Catholicism, ideas of social reform and liberation crystallized into a movement called liberation theology. The movement emerged in Latin America amid reforms of the Catholic Church by Pope John XXIII (pontificate 1958–1963), who called on clergy to engage with the contemporary world — a world characterized by poverty and exclusion. In 1968 the Latin American Council of Bishops gathered in Medellín, Colombia, and invoked dependency theory as it called on clergy to exercise a “preferential option for the poor” by working toward “social justice,” including land redistribution, the recognition of peasants’ and labor unions, and condemnation of economic dependency and neocolonialism.

Liberation Theology Participants at a meeting of ecclesiastical base communities in Brazil gather under a banner reading “Altar of Martyrs: Your Blood Nourishes Our Base Communities.” This 1986 meeting, eighteen years after the Medellín Conference, shows the lasting impact of liberation theology in Latin America.

Participants at a meeting of ecclesiastical base communities in Brazil gather under a banner reading “Altar of Martyrs: Your Blood Nourishes Our Base Communities.” This 1986 meeting, eighteen years after the Medellĺn Conference, shows the lasting impact of liberation theology in Latin America.

Drawing on dependency theory and sometimes verging on revolutionary Marxism, priests attracted to liberation theology challenged governments, fought against landowners and business owners they saw as oppressors, and formed community organizations, or ecclesiastical base communities, where the residents of poor neighborhoods could gather to discuss their problems and devise solutions. After the 1970s Popes John Paul II (pontificate 1978–2005) and Benedict XVI (pontificate 2005–2013) suppressed liberation theology and silenced its most outspoken thinkers. Advocates of liberation theology greeted the naming of a pope from Latin America, Francis, in 2013 as a return to the focus on fighting poverty and social exclusion within the Catholic Church.

Interpreting the Postcolonial Experience

Many intellectuals who came of age during and after the struggle for political emancipation embraced a vision of solidarity among peoples oppressed by colonialism and racism. Some argued that genuine freedom required a total rejection of Western values in addition to an economic and political break with the former colonial powers. Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) expressed these views in his powerful study of colonial peoples, The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

According to Fanon, a French-trained black psychiatrist from the Caribbean island of Martinique, decolonization is always a violent process whereby colonizers are replaced by an absolutely different species — the colonized, those he called “the wretched of the earth.” During decolonization the colonized masses mock colonial values, “insult them, and vomit them up” in a psychic purge. Fanon believed that throughout Africa and Asia the former imperialists and their local collaborators — the “white men with black faces” — remained the enemy:

During the colonial period the people are called upon to fight against oppression; after national liberation, they are called upon to fight against poverty, illiteracy, and underdevelopment. The struggle, they say, goes on…. We are not blinded by the moral reparation of national independence; nor are we fed by it. The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too…. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.¹

Fanon gave voice to radicals attacking imperialism and struggling for liberation.

As countries gained independence, some writers looked beyond wholesale rejection of the industrialized powers. They, too, were anti-imperialist, but they were often also activists and cultural nationalists who celebrated the histories and cultures of their peoples. Many did not hesitate to criticize their own leaders or fight oppression and corruption.

The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (chee-NOO-ah ah-CHAY-beh) (1930–2013) sought to restore his people’s self-confidence by reinterpreting the past. For Achebe, the “writer in a new nation” had first to embrace the “fundamental theme” that Africans had their own culture before the Europeans came and that it was the duty of writers to help Africans reclaim their past. In his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, Achebe brings to life the men and women of an Ibo village at the beginning of the twentieth century, with all their virtues and frailties. Woven into the story are the proverbs and wisdom of a sophisticated people and the beauty of a vanishing world:

[The white man] says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.²

In later novels Achebe portrayed the postindependence disillusionment of many writers and intellectuals, which reflected trends in many developing nations in the 1960s and 1970s. He developed a sharp critique of rulers who seemed increasingly estranged from national realities and corrupted by Western luxury.

Novelist V. S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad in 1932 of Indian parents, also castigated governments in the developing countries for corruption, ineptitude, and self-deception. Another of Naipaul’s recurring themes is the poignant loneliness and homelessness of people uprooted by colonialism and Western expansion.

For peoples emerging from colonial domination, or confronting the poverty and social exclusion that was commonplace outside of industrialized nations, the postwar challenge of liberation was not simply political and economic, but also cultural and spiritual. The middle decades of the twentieth century saw a broad awakening of voices among peoples who had been rendered voiceless by their marginalization.

Nationalism in South Asia and the Middle East

How did religion and the legacies of colonialism affect the formation of new nations in South Asia and the Middle East after World War II?

The three South Asian countries created through independence from Britain and subsequent partition, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, reflected the dominant themes of cultural and economic nationalism that characterized the end of colonialism, but ethnic and religious rivalries greatly complicated their renewal and development.

Throughout the vast umma (world of Islam), nationalism became a powerful force after 1945, stressing modernization and the end of subordination to Western nations. The nationalists who guided the formation of modern states in the Arab world struggled to balance Cold War pressures from the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as the tension between secular modernization and Islam. At the heart of this world, Jewish nationalists founded the state of Israel following the Second World War. The Zionist claim to a homeland came into sharp, and often violent, conflict with the rights and claims of the Palestinian people displaced by the creation of Israel.

Independence in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh

World War II accelerated the drive toward Indian independence begun by Mohandas Gandhi (see “Gandhi’s Resistance Campaign in India” in Chapter 29). In 1942 Gandhi called on the British to “quit India” and threatened another civil disobedience campaign. He and the other Indian National Congress Party leaders were soon after arrested and were jailed for much of the war. Thus India’s wartime support for Britain was substantial but not always enthusiastic. Meanwhile, the Congress Party’s prime rival skillfully seized the opportunity to increase its influence.

The Congress Party’s rival was the Muslim League, led by lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948). Jinnah feared that India’s Hindu majority would dominate national power at the expense of Muslims. He proposed the creation of two separate countries divided along religious lines:

The Hindus and Muslims have two different religions, philosophies, social customs, literatures. They neither inter-marry, nor dine together, and indeed, they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions…. To yoke together two such nations under a single State, one as a numerical minority and the other as majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a State.³

Gandhi disagreed with Jinnah’s two-nation theory, which he believed would lead to ethnic sectarianism rather than collaboration.

Britain agreed to speedy independence for India after 1945, but conflicts between Hindu and Muslim nationalists led to murderous clashes in 1946. When it became clear that Jinnah and the Muslim League would accept nothing less than an independent state of Pakistan, the British government mediated a partition that created a predominantly Hindu nation and a predominantly Muslim nation. In 1947 India and Pakistan gained political independence from Britain as two separate nations (Map 31.2).

MAP 31.2 The Partition of British India, 1947 Violence and fighting were most intense where there were large Hindu and Muslim minorities — in Kashmir, the Punjab, and Bengal. The tragic result of partition, which occurred repeatedly throughout the world in the twentieth century, was a forced exchange of populations and greater homogeneity on both sides of the border.

Map shows India and Assam (east of Bangladesh) to be part of India. Map shows Pakistan and modern day Bangladesh (on the eastern border of India) to be Pakistan. The area Jammu and Kashmir in the North are shown to be disputed area controlled by India. A small area north of there is shown to be disputed area controlled by Pakistan. Much of all of this territory, except for the part of the Indian peninsula south of Bombay, is shown to be British India before independence.

Violence and mass expulsions followed independence. Perhaps a hundred thousand Hindus and Muslims were slaughtered, and an estimated 5 million became refugees. “What is there to celebrate?” exclaimed Gandhi in reference to independence, “I see nothing but rivers of blood.”⁴ Gandhi labored to ease tensions between Hindus and Muslims, but in the aftermath of riots in January 1948, he was killed by a Hindu gunman who resented what he saw as Gandhi’s appeasement of Muslims.

After the ordeal of independence, relations between India and Pakistan remained tense. Fighting over the disputed area of Kashmir, a strategically important northwestern border state with a Muslim majority annexed by India, lasted until 1949 and broke out again in 1965–1966, 1971, and 1999 as tensions continued.

In India, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) and the Indian National Congress Party ruled for a generation and introduced major social reforms. Hindu women gained legal equality, including the right to vote, to seek divorce, and to marry outside their castes. The constitution abolished the untouchable caste. In practice, less discriminatory attitudes toward women and untouchables evolved slowly — especially in rural villages, where 85 percent of the people lived.

The Congress Party pursued state-driven economic development, but population growth of about 2.4 percent per year consumed much of the increased output of economic expansion. The relocation of millions during the partition of India and Pakistan exacerbated poverty. The Congress Party maintained neutrality in the Cold War, distancing itself from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead India became one of the leading voices in the Non-Aligned Nations Movement.

At independence, Pakistan was divided between eastern and western provinces separated by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory, as well as by language, ethnic background, and social custom. The Bengalis of East Pakistan constituted a majority of Pakistan’s population as a whole, but were neglected by the central government, which remained in the hands of West Pakistan’s elite after Jinnah’s death. In 1971 the Bengalis revolted and won their independence as the new nation of Bangladesh after a violent civil war. Bangladesh, a secular parliamentary democracy, struggled to find political and economic stability amid famines that resulted from monsoon floods, tornadoes, and cyclones in the vast, low-lying, and intensely farmed Ganges Delta.

Arab Socialism in the Middle East

In the postwar period, new Arab states in the Middle East emerged from colonial rule. For centuries the region had been dominated by the Ottoman Empire. After the First World War, France and Britain claimed protectorates in the former Ottoman territories. Britain already claimed Egypt as a protectorate and France controlled Algeria. New nations emerging from colonial rule in the Middle East embraced Arab socialism, a modernizing, secular, and nationalist project of nation building aimed at economic development, a strong military, and Pan-Arab unity.

Arab socialism held particular significance for women in Middle Eastern societies. It cast aside religious restrictions on women’s education, occupations, public activities, and fashions. In countries like Egypt and Iraq, the openness of education and access to professions enjoyed by urban, typically affluent women symbolized an embrace of Western modernity, although senior posts in government, the professions, and business were still dominated by men.

In 1952 army officers overthrew Egypt’s monarchy and expelled the British military force that occupied the country. The movement’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970), built a nationalist regime aimed at eradicating the vestiges of colonialism. Applying the principles of Arab socialism, Nasser pursued the secularization of Egyptian society, created an extensive social welfare network, redistributed rural lands, and promoted industrialization.

Nasser’s National Charter called for the nationalization of transportation, mining, dams, banks, utilities, insurance, and heavy industry. In the countryside the size of landholdings was limited and estates were broken up. As Nasser declared, “When we started this revolution, we wanted to put an end to exploitation. Hence our struggle to put capital at the service of man, and to put land at the service of man, instead of leaving man at the service of the feudalist who owns the land.”⁵

In 1956 Nasser took a symbolic and strategic step toward national sovereignty when he ordered the army to take control of the Suez Canal, still held by Britain and France. A coalition of British, French, and Israeli forces invaded to retake the canal. The Soviet Union offered support to Egypt. To prevent Soviet intervention and a Soviet-Egyptian alliance, the United States negotiated a cease-fire that granted Egypt control of the canal. Alongside control of the canal, Nasser’s other main economic accomplishment was the Aswan Dam on the Nile River, which generated electricity for industrialization in northern Egypt while allowing southern Egypt to control flooding and increase agricultural production. Nasser negotiated the funding and technical expertise for the dam with both the United States and the Soviet Union, eventually settling on Soviet aid. The Suez crisis and the Aswan Dam were examples in which a nationalist leader like Nasser successfully played the superpowers against each other.

Military officers in other Arab countries emulated Nasser’s nationalism and socialist developmentalism. In Syria and Iraq these nationalists formed the Pan-Arab socialist Ba’ath Party. For members of national Ba’ath parties, Egypt was a model for developing a single-party state that implemented nationalist and development aspirations. Syria briefly merged with Egypt from 1958 until 1961, forming the United Arab Republic. Officers who resented Nasser’s control of Syria revolted against Egypt and established a separate Syrian government dominated by the Ba’ath Party. In Iraq the Ba’ath Party helped overthrow the British-backed monarchy in 1958, leading to Ba’ath Party rule that ended when a U.S. military invasion toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The Arab-Israeli Conflict

Before the Second World War, Arab nationalists were loosely united in their opposition to the colonial powers and to Jewish migration to Palestine. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Palestinians and new Arab states emerging from British and French domination strenuously opposed Jewish settlement in Palestine (see “Arab-Jewish Tensions in Palestine” in Chapter 29). In 1947 the British government announced its intention to withdraw from Palestine in 1948. The difficult problem of a Jewish homeland was placed in the hands of the United Nations, which passed a plan to partition Palestine into two separate states — one Arab and one Jewish (Map 31.3). The Jews accepted, and the Arabs rejected, the partition of Palestine.

MAP 31.3 The Middle East After 1947 The partition of Palestine by the United Nations resulted in the creation in 1948 of Israel, which faced repeated conflicts with rival Arab states.

This map shows Israel, including Gaza, Tel Aviv, and Haifa as being a Jewish state after UN partition of Palestine, 1947. Map shows small areas west and east of Gaza, and east of Haifa as an area added by Israel after War of 1948 to 1949. The map shows the Sinai Peninsula and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, as an area controlled by Israel after the Six Day War in 1967.

Map shows a very small area west of Suez and a very small area south of Damascus as being Israeli controlled after Yom Kippur War, 1973. Egypt and Syria are shown as areas united as United Arab Republic, from 1958 to 1961. The Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 is shown to have taken place south of Port Said.

By early 1948 an undeclared civil war raged in Palestine. When the British mandate ended on May 14, 1948, the Jews proclaimed the state of Israel. Arab countries immediately attacked the new state, but Israeli forces drove off the invaders and conquered more territory. Roughly nine hundred thousand Palestinian refugees fled or were expelled from old Palestine. The war left an enormous legacy of Arab bitterness toward Israel and its political allies, Great Britain and the United States. In 1964 a loose union of Palestinian refugee groups opposed to Israel and seeking a Palestinian state joined together, under the leadership of Yasir Arafat (1929–2004), to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Nationalist leaders in neighboring Syria and Egypt cultivated political support at home through opposition to Israel and threats to crush it militarily. This tension repeatedly erupted into war. On June 1, 1967, when Syrian and Egyptian armies massed on Israel’s borders, the Israeli government went to war, launching air strikes that destroyed most of the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces. Over the next five days Israeli armies defeated Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Palestinian forces and took control of the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. In the Six-Day War (also known as the 1967 Arab-Israeli War), Israel proved itself to be the pre-eminent military force in the region, and it expanded the territory under its control threefold.

After the war Israel began to build large Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, home to millions of Palestinians. On November 22, 1967, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, which contained a “land for peace” formula by which Israel was called upon to withdraw from the occupied territories, and in return the Arab states were to withdraw all claims to Israeli territory, cease hostilities, and recognize the sovereignty of the Israeli state. The tension between rival territorial claims persisted.

Revolution and Resurgence in East and Southeast Asia

How did the Cold War shape reconstruction, revolution, and decolonization in East and Southeast Asia?

In Asia Japan’s defeat ended the Second World War, but other conflicts continued: nationalists in European colonies intensified their struggle for independence, and in China Nationalist and Communist armies that had cooperated against the Japanese invaders now confronted each other in a renewed civil war. In 1949 Communist forces under Mao Zedong triumphed and established the People’s Republic of China. The Communist victory in China shaped the nature of Japan’s reconstruction, as its U.S. occupiers determined that an industrially and economically strong Japan would serve as a counterweight to Mao. U.S. fear of the spread of communism drew the country into conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, intensifying the stakes in the decolonization struggle across East and Southeast Asia.

The Communist Victory in China

When Japan surrendered to the Allies in August 1945, Communists and Nationalists both rushed to seize evacuated territory. Communists and Nationalists had fought each other before the Second World War, but had put aside their struggle to resist Japanese invasion. With the war over, the Nationalists and Communists resumed their conflict. By 1948 the Nationalist forces had disintegrated before the better-led, more determined Communists. The following year Nationalist leader Jiang Jieshi and 2 million mainland Chinese fled to Taiwan, and in October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (Map 31.4).

MAP 31.4 Decolonization in Asia After the Second World War, countries colonized by Britain, France, the Netherlands, Japan, Australia, and the United States gained their independence. In cases such as Vietnam and Indonesia, independence came through armed struggles against colonizers who were reluctant to leave.

Map shows the different countries in Asia, who they were colonized by, and when they achieved independence. Great Britain was the former ruler of Pakistan, which achieved independence in 1947; Bangladesh, which achieved independence in 1971, Myanmar, which achieved independence in 1948, Brunei, which achieved independence in 1984, and Malaysia, which achieved independence in 1963. France was the former ruler of Laos, which became independent in 1949; North and South Vietnam, which achieved independence in 1954; and Cambodia, which achieved indepence in 1953. The Netherlands was the former ruler of Indonesia, which achieved independence in 19455, and Timor-Leste achieved independence in 1999 from Indonesia. United States was the former ruler of the Philippines, which became independent in 1946. North and South Korea achieved independence from Japan in 1948 and Papua New Guinea achieved independence from Australia in 1975. Colonial conflicts are shown to have taken place in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, South Vietnam, Timor-Leste, and Brunei. Postcolonial conflict is shown to have taken place in Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Vietnam.

Communism triumphed in China for many reasons. Mao Zedong and the Communists had avoided pitched battles and concentrated on winning peasant support and forming a broad anti-Japanese coalition. By reducing rents and promising land redistribution, they emerged in peasant eyes as China’s true patriots.

Between 1949 and 1954 the Communists consolidated their rule. They seized the vast landholdings of a minority of landlords and rich peasants and redistributed the land to 300 million poor peasants. Meanwhile, as Mao admitted in 1957, mass arrests led to the summary execution of eight hundred thousand “class enemies”; the true figure is probably much higher. Millions more were deported to forced-labor camps.

Mao and the party looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration in the early 1950s. China adopted collective agriculture and Soviet-style five-year plans to promote industrialization. The Soviet Union provided considerable economic aid, and Soviet technicians built factories. In the cultural and intellectual realms, too, the Chinese followed the Soviet example. Basic civil and political rights were abolished. Temples and churches were closed. The Chinese enthusiastically promoted Soviet Marxist ideas concerning women and the family. Full equality, work outside the home, and state-supported child care became primary goals.

In 1958 China broke from the Marxist-Leninist course of development and began to go its own way. Mao proclaimed a Great Leap Forward in which industrial growth would be based on small-scale backyard workshops and steel mills run by peasants living in gigantic self-contained communes. The plan led to economic disaster, as land in the countryside went untilled when peasants turned to industrial production. As many as 30 million people died in famines that swept the country in 1960–1961. When Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev criticized Chinese policy in 1960, Mao condemned him and his Soviet colleagues as detestable “modern revisionists.” Khrushchev cut off aid, splitting the Communist world apart.

Mao lost influence in the party after the Great Leap Forward fiasco and the Sino-Soviet split, but in 1965 he staged a dramatic comeback, launching the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He sought to purge the party and to recapture the revolutionary fervor of the guerrilla struggle. The army and the nation’s young people responded enthusiastically, organizing themselves into radical cadres called Red Guards. Students denounced their teachers and practiced rebellion in the name of revolution. Mao’s thoughts, through his speeches and writings, were collected in the Little Red Book, which became scripture to the Red Guards. Here the young Red Guards learned the underlying maxim of Mao’s revolution: “Every communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ ”⁶

The Red Guards sought to erase all traces of “feudal” and “bourgeois” culture and thought. Ancient monuments and countless works of art, antiques, and books were destroyed. Party officials, professors, and intellectuals were exiled to remote villages to purify themselves with heavy labor. Universities were shut down for years. Thousands of people died, many of them executed, and millions more were sent to rural forced-labor camps. The Red Guards attracted enormous worldwide attention and served as an extreme model for the student rebellions in the West in the late 1960s.

Conflict in Korea

As Japanese forces were withdrawn after 1945, Korea was divided into Soviet and American zones of occupation, which in 1948 became Communist North Korea and anticommunist South Korea. When the Communists triumphed in China in late 1949, many fearful Americans saw new evidence of a powerful worldwide Communist conspiracy. When the Russian-backed Communist forces of North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, President Truman sent U.S. troops to lead a UN coalition force to stop what he interpreted as a coordinated Communist effort to dominate Asia.

The Korean War (1950–1953) ended in a stalemate with little more than symbolic gains for either side. North Korea conquered most of the peninsula, but the South Korean, American, and UN troops repelled their foes north to the Chinese border. At that point China intervened and pushed the South Koreans and Americans back south. In 1953 a fragile truce was negotiated, and the fighting stopped. The United States had extended its policy of containing communism to Asia, but drew back from invading Communist China and possibly provoking nuclear war.

Japan’s American Reconstruction

When American occupation forces landed in the Tokyo-Yokohama area after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, they found only smokestacks and large steel safes standing amid miles of rubble in what had been the heart of industrial Japan. Japan, like Germany, was formally occupied by all the Allies, but real power resided in American hands. U.S. general Douglas MacArthur exercised almost absolute authority. MacArthur and the Americans had a revolutionary plan for defeated Japan, introducing reforms designed to make Japan a free, democratic society along American lines.

Japan’s sweeping American revolution began with demilitarization and a systematic purge of convicted war criminals and wartime collaborators. The American-dictated constitution of 1946 allowed the emperor to remain the “symbol of the State.” Real power resided in the Japanese Diet, whose members were popularly elected. A bill of rights granted basic civil liberties and freed all political prisoners, including Communists. Article 9 of the new constitution abolished the Japanese armed forces and renounced war. The American occupation left Japan’s powerful bureaucracy largely intact and used it to implement fundamental social and economic reforms. The occupation promoted the Japanese labor movement, introduced American-style antitrust laws, and “emancipated” Japanese women, granting them equality before the law. The occupation also imposed land reform that strengthened the small independent farmers, who became staunch defenders of postwar democracy.

 

America’s efforts to remake Japan in its own image were powerful but short-lived. As Mao’s forces prevailed in China, American leaders began to see Japan as a potential ally, not as an object of social reform. The American command began purging leftists and rehabilitating prewar nationalists. The Japanese prime minister during much of the occupation and early post-occupation period was Shigeru Yoshida. A former diplomat with a facility for negotiating with Western nations, Yoshida was the ideal leader in Western eyes for postwar Japan. He channeled all available resources to the rebuilding of Japan’s industrial infrastructure, while he left the military defense of the country to the American occupying forces.

Baseball in Japan Though baseball arrived in Japan in the late nineteenth century, it increased in popularity during U.S. occupation. This photo from 1950 shows children in their baseball uniforms, with a U.S. Jeep in the background.

This photo from 1950 shows two young Japanese boys in their baseball uniforms, with a U.S. Jeep in the background.

The occupation ended in 1952 with a treaty that restored Japan’s independence and a role for Japan as the chief Asian ally of the United States in its efforts to contain the spread of communism. Japan’s industry provided matériel used by the U.S. armed forces in Korea and Vietnam, and a Security Treaty provided territory for U.S. military installations, particularly the island of Okinawa.

The Vietnam War

French Indochina experienced the bitterest struggle for independence in Southeast Asia. With financial backing from the United States, France tried to reimpose imperial rule there after the Communist and nationalist guerrilla leader Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) declared an independent republic in 1945. French forces were decisively defeated in the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu. At an international peace conference later that year, French Indochina gained independence. Laos and Cambodia became separate states, and Vietnam was temporarily divided into separately governed northern and southern regions pending elections to select a single unified government within two years. The South Vietnamese government refused to hold the elections, and civil war between it and the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or North Vietnam, broke out in 1959.

Cold War fears and U.S. commitment to the ideology of containment drove the United States to get involved in Vietnam. The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (elected in 1952) refused to sign the Geneva Accords that temporarily divided the country, and provided military aid to help the south resist North Vietnam. Eisenhower’s successor, John F. Kennedy, increased the number of American “military advisers.”

In 1964 U.S. president Lyndon Johnson greatly expanded America’s role in the Vietnam conflict, seeking to “escalate” the war sufficiently to break the will of the North Vietnamese and their southern allies without resorting to “overkill,” which might risk war with the entire Communist bloc. South Vietnam received massive U.S. military aid, and large numbers of American forces joined in combat. The United States bombed North Vietnam with ever-greater intensity, but it did not invade North Vietnam or launch a naval blockade of its ports.

Most Americans first saw the war as a legitimate defense against communism, but the combined effect of watching the results of the violent conflict on the nightly television news and experiencing the widening military draft spurred a growing antiwar movement on U.S. college campuses. By the late 1960s growing numbers of critics in the U.S. and around the world denounced American involvement in the conflict. The north’s Tet Offensive in January 1968, a major attack on South Vietnamese cities, shook Americans’ confidence in their government’s ability to manage the conflict. Within months President Johnson announced he would not stand for re-election, and he called for negotiations with North Vietnam.

Elected in 1968, President Richard Nixon sought to disengage America from Vietnam. He intensified the bombardment of the enemy while simultaneously pursuing peace talks with the North Vietnamese. He also began a slow process of withdrawal from Vietnam in a process called “Vietnamization,” which transferred the burden of the war to the South Vietnamese army, cutting American forces from 550,000 to 24,000 in four years. Nixon finally reached a peace agreement with North Vietnam in 1973 that allowed the remaining American forces to withdraw by 1975.

Despite U.S. efforts, the Communists proved victorious in 1975 and created a unified Marxist Vietnam. After more than thirty-five years of battle, the Communists turned to a nation-building process that had been delayed by decades of war against colonial rule and the U.S. effort to force a political and economic model on the country as part of its doctrine of containment of communism. Millions of Vietnamese civilians faced reprisals for aligning with the United States, including Hmong (ha-MUHNG) and Degar peoples, such as the Mnong (MUH-nong), and other ethnic minorities. They first fled to refugee camps elsewhere in Southeast Asia and later settled as refugees in the United States.

Decolonization in Africa

What factors influenced decolonization in Africa after World War II?

By 1964 most of Africa had gained independence (Map 31.5). Only Portugal’s colonies and southern Africa remained under white minority rule, gaining their independence after long armed struggles that ended in 1975. Many national leaders saw socialism as the best way to sever colonial ties and erase exploitation within their new borders. But institutional barriers left over from the colonial era hampered these efforts: new nations inherited inefficient colonial bureaucracies, economic systems that privileged the export of commodities, and colonial educational systems intended to build servants of empire. The range of actions available to new leaders was narrowed by former colonizers’ efforts to retain their economic influence and by the political and ideological divisions of the Cold War.

MAP 31.5 Decolonization in Africa, 1947 to the Present Most African territories achieved statehood by the mid-1960s, as European empires passed away, unlamented.

Map shows the different countries in Africa, who they were colonized by, and when they achieved independence. Great Britain was the former ruler of Egypt (independence achieved 1922); Sudan (1956); Djibouti (1977); Sierra Leone (1961); Ghana (1957); Nigeria (1960); Uganda (1962); Kenya (1963); Tanzania (1964); Zambia (1964); Zimbabwe (1980); Botswana (1966); Rwanda (1962); Burundi (1962); South Africa (Republic 1961).

France was the former ruler of Tunisia (1957); Morocco (1956); Algeria (1962); Mauritania (1962); Senegal (1960); Gambia (1965); Guinea (1958); Cote D’Ivoire (1960); Burkina Faso (1960); Mali (1960); Benin (1960); Niger (1960); Chad (1960); Central African Republic (1960); Cameroon (1960); Gabon (1960); Republic of Congo (1960); Madagascar (1960).

Italy was the former ruler of Libya (1951); Somalia (1960).

Belgium was the former ruler of Democratic Republic of the Congo (1960).

Portugal was the former ruler of Guinea-Bissau (1974); Sao Tome and Principe (1975); Angola (1975); Mozambique (1974); Malawi (1964).

Other countries freed from colonial powers are Liberia (1820s); Namibia (freed from South Africa in 1990); South Sudan (freed from Sudan in 2011); Eritrea (freed from Ethiopia in 1993).

Colonial conflicts are shown to have taken place in Algeria, Western Sahara, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Madagascar.

Postcolonial conflicts are shown to have taken place in Egypt, Algeria, Western Sahara, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Mozambique, and Angola.

Populist protests and uprisings, 2010-2011 are shown to have occurred in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Cote D’Ivoire, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

The Growth of African Nationalism

African nationalism resembled similar movements in Asia and the Middle East in its reaction against colonialism, but there were important differences. First, because the imperial system and Western education did not solidify in Africa until after 1900 (see “Colonialism’s Impact After 1900” in Chapter 25), national movements came of age in the 1920s and reached maturity after 1945. Second, Africa’s multiplicity of ethnic groups, coupled with colonial boundaries that often bore no resemblance to existing ethnic geography, greatly complicated the development of political — as distinct from cultural — nationalism. Was a modern national state based on ethnic or clan loyalties? Was it to be a continent-wide union? Would the multiethnic territories carved out by European empires become the new African nations? Such questions were not fully addressed until after 1945.

The first nationalist impetus came from the United States and the Caribbean. The most renowned participant in this “black nationalism” was W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). Du Bois (doo-BOISS) was a cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the United States and organized Pan-African congresses in Paris during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and in Brussels in 1921. Pan-Africanists sought black solidarity and a self-governing union of all African peoples. Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) was the most influential Pan-Africanist, rallying young, educated Africans to his call of “Africa for the Africans.”

In the 1920s a surge of anticolonial nationalism swept educated Africans in French and British colonies. African intellectuals in Europe formulated and articulated négritude, or blackness: pride, self-confidence, and joy in black creativity and the black spirit. This westernized African elite pressed for better access to government jobs, steps toward self-government, and an end to discrimination. They claimed the right to speak for ordinary Africans and denounced government-supported chiefs for subordinating themselves to white colonial leaders.

The mass protests that accompanied the deprivations of the Great Depression, in particular the cocoa holdups of 1930–1931 and 1937–1938, fueled the new nationalism. Cocoa dominated the British colonial economy in the Gold Coast (which became Ghana). As prices plummeted after 1929, cocoa farmers refused to sell their beans to the British firms that fixed prices and monopolized exports. Farmers organized cooperatives to cut back production and sell their crops directly to European and American chocolate manufacturers. The cocoa holdups mobilized the population against the foreign companies and demonstrated the power of mass organization and protest.

The repercussions of the Second World War in Africa greatly accelerated the changes begun in the 1930s. Many African soldiers who served in India had been powerfully impressed by Indian nationalism. As African mines and plantations strained to meet wartime demands, towns mushroomed into cities, which became centers of discontent and hardship.

Western imperialism also changed. The principle of self-government was written into the United Nations charter and was supported by Great Britain’s postwar Labour government. Thus the key question for Great Britain’s various African colonies became the terms of self-government. Britiain and France were in no rush. But a new type of African leader was emerging. Impatient and insistent, these spokesmen for modern African nationalism were remarkably successful. These postwar African leaders formed an elite by virtue of their advanced European or American education, and they were influenced by Western thought. But compared with the interwar generation of educated Africans, they were more radical and had humbler social origins. Among them were former schoolteachers, union leaders, government clerks, lawyers, and poets.

 

Postwar African nationalists pragmatically accepted prevailing colonial boundaries to avoid border disputes and achieve freedom as soon as possible. Sensing a loss of power, traditional rulers sometimes became the new leaders’ worst political enemies. Skillfully, the new leaders channeled postwar hope and discontent into support for mass political organizations that offset this traditional authority. These organizations staged gigantic protests and became political parties.

Ghana Shows the Way

The most charismatic of this generation of African leaders was Kwame Nkrumah (KWA-may ihn-CROO-mah) (1909–1972). Nkrumah spent ten years studying in the United States, where he was influenced by European socialists and Marcus Garvey. He returned to the Gold Coast after the Second World War and entered politics. Under his leadership the Gold Coast — which he renamed “Ghana” — became the first sub-Saharan state to emerge from colonialism.

Nkrumah built a radical party that appealed particularly to modern groups such as veterans, merchant women, union members, and cocoa farmers. He and his party injected the enthusiasm of religious revivals into their rallies and propaganda as they called for “Self-Government Now.” Rejecting halfway measures, Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party staged strikes and riots.

After he was arrested in 1950, the “Deliverer of Ghana” campaigned from jail and saw his party win a smashing victory in the 1951 national elections. He was released from prison to head the transitional government. By 1957 now Prime Minister Nkrumah had achieved worldwide fame and influence as Ghana became independent. After Ghana’s breakthrough, independence for other African colonies followed. The main problem in some colonies was the permanent white settlers, not the colonial officials: wherever white settlers were numerous, as in Algeria, Kenya, and Rhodesia, they fought to preserve their privileged position.

French-Speaking Regions

Decolonization took a different course in French-speaking Africa. The events in the French North African colony of Algeria in the 1950s and early 1960s help clarify France’s attitude toward its sub-Saharan African colonies.

France attempted to retain Algeria, home to a large, mostly Catholic, European settler population, known as the pieds-noirs (black feet) because its members wore black shoes instead of sandals. In 1954 Algeria’s anticolonial movement, the National Liberation Front (FLN), began a war for independence, which the French colonial police and armed forces bitterly contested, leaving over 500,000 Algerians dead and millions more displaced. After the FLN won and created an independent Algerian state in 1962, an estimated 900,000 of the 1.25 million Europeans and indigenous Jews fled.

The war in Algeria and Indochina’s military victory divided France and undermined its political stability. As a result, it was difficult for France to respond to nationalists in its other African colonies until Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958. Seeking to maximize France’s influence over the future independent nations, de Gaulle devised a divide-and-rule strategy. He divided the French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa federations into thirteen separate governments, thus creating a “French commonwealth.” Plebiscites were called in each territory to ratify the new arrangement. An affirmative vote meant continued ties with France; a negative vote signified immediate independence and a complete break with France.

De Gaulle’s gamble was shrewd. The educated black elite — as personified by the influential poet-politician Léopold Sédar Senghor (LAY-o-pold SAY-dar SEHN-gohr) (1906–2001), who led Senegal’s government — identified with France and dreaded an abrupt separation. They also wanted French aid to continue. France, in keeping with its ideology of assimilation, had given the vote to the educated colonial elite after the Second World War, and about forty Africans held French parliamentary seats after 1946. These factors moderated French African leaders’ pursuit of independence.

In Guinea, however, a young nationalist named Sékou Touré (SAY-koo too-RAY) (1922–1984) led his people to overwhelmingly reject the new constitution in 1958. Inspired by Ghana’s Nkrumah, Touré laid it out to de Gaulle face-to-face: “We have one prime and essential need: our dignity. But there is no dignity without freedom…. We prefer freedom in poverty to opulence in slavery.”⁷

Weaker European nations such as Belgium and Portugal responded to decolonization in ways that were more destabilizing. Portugal’s dictatorship fought to keep its colonies, such as Angola and Mozambique. To ensure this, the Portuguese regime intensified white settlement and repression of nationalist groups. Belgium, which had discouraged the development of an educated elite in the Congo, abruptly granted independence in 1959, leaving in place a weak government. Independence resulted in violent ethnic conflict and foreign intervention. The United States backed a dictatorship by Mobutu Sese Seko (Muh-BOO-too SEH-seh SEH-koh), who renamed the country Zaire. Poverty deepened as the tremendous wealth generated from mining went into the hands of foreign companies and Mobutu’s family and cronies.

Populist and Revolutionary Pathways in Latin America

Why did populism emerge as such a powerful political force in Latin America?

In the decades after the Second World War, Latin American nations struggled to find a political balance that integrated long-excluded groups such as women, workers, and peasants. Populist politicians built a base of support among the urban and rural poor. They often combined charisma with promises of social change, particularly through national economic development that would create more and better job opportunities. In many cases, the conservative reaction against populists led the armed forces to seize power. Revolutionary leader Fidel Castro carved an alternative path in Cuba. Castro went beyond the reforms advocated by populists and sought an outright revolutionary transformation of Cuban society.

Economic Nationalism in Mexico

In the decades following the Mexican Revolution, a durable political and economic formula emerged under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which dominated public life while adhering to the social goals demanded by the movements that had fought in the revolution, especially the redistribution of land. By the end of the Second World War, Mexico had embraced economic nationalism — the effort to promote economic development through substitution of imports with domestic manufacturing and through state control of key industries like the oil sector.

As before the revolution, Mexicans faced a curtailed democracy, though in this case the government was controlled by a single party rather than a single individual. The PRI came to control elected office at every level, as well as networks of patronage. The party was also an omnipresent intermediary between business and labor. Mexico’s economy also grew consistently through the 1970s, in what was termed an “economic miracle.” This was a time of rapid urbanization, with people leaving rural areas for jobs in factories or for lower-paying service jobs, such as maids and janitors. The embrace of economic nationalism softened some of the edges of economic change that Mexicans had experienced in the liberal era, but social inequities remained. The upper and middle classes reaped the lion’s share of the benefits of this economic growth.

A housing and civic complex in the Tlatelolco (tlah-tehl-OL-koh) district of Mexico City symbolized both the promise of the Mexican economic miracle and also the limits to democracy in Mexico. In the 1960s the Mexican government built dozens of modernist apartment buildings and government ministries. Their centerpiece was the Plaza of the Three Cultures, which contained ruins from the Aztec Empire, a colonial Spanish church, and the contemporary nation reflected in modernist architecture. It was in Tlatelolco where government forces silenced political dissent in advance of the 1968 Olympics by opening fire on a student march.

Populism in Argentina and Brazil

Argentina and Brazil’s postwar economic development was shaped by populist politicians who championed economic nationalism. These politicians sought support from millions of people who gained the right to vote for the first time as universal suffrage spread through Latin America. Universal male suffrage was achieved in Argentina in 1912 and in Mexico in 1917. Women gained the right to vote across Latin America in the decades that followed, beginning with Ecuador in 1929 and Brazil in 1932. In most cases voters still needed to be literate to vote. To appeal to these millions of new voters, populist candidates promised schools and hospitals, higher wages, and nationalist projects that would create more industrial jobs.

At the turn of the century Argentina’s economy prospered through its liberal export boom (see “Latin America Re-enters the World Economy” in Chapter 27), but industrialization followed only haltingly and the economy faltered. Populist Juan Perón, an army colonel, was elected president in 1946 with the support of Argentina’s unions. Juan Perón was charismatic, but his wife, Eva, known as Evita, was even more so, and played a vital role in promoting Perón. Once in power, Perón embarked on an ambitious scheme to transform Argentina’s economy: The government would purchase all the country’s agricultural exports in order to negotiate their sale abroad at a higher price. Perón would then reinvest the profits in industry and raise worker wages to stimulate demand.

Perón’s scheme worked in the immediate postwar period, when European agricultural production had not yet recovered from the war. But as commodity prices declined, Perón reduced government payments to farmers, who ceased to bring their harvests to market. In the coming decades Argentina never returned to the high rates of economic growth it had enjoyed at the beginning of the century. Many blamed Perón for distorting the economy for his own political gain. Others saw Perón’s efforts as halting a worse decline: Argentina’s economy had long been dependent on Britain, and as Britain’s capacity to import declined, so did Argentina’s fortunes.

Despite these economic setbacks, Perón initially remained highly popular, buoyed by the public appeals made by Evita. After Evita died of cancer in 1952, much of the magic slipped away. Amid the stagnating economy even Perón’s union supporters faltered, and he responded harshly to press criticism. In 1955 the armed forces deposed and exiled Perón. The military ruled Argentina for the next three years, conducting a process of “de-Perónization.” It banned Perón’s party and even forbade mention of his name. But Perón remained the most popular politician in the country. Presidential candidates could not win without discreetly winning the exiled Perón’s endorsement, and this veiled support for Perón by civilian leaders prompted repeated military interventions in politics.

In Brazil, reacting against the economic and political liberalism through which coffee planters dominated the country, the armed forces installed Getúlio Vargas as president in 1930. Vargas initiated democratic reforms but veered into a nationalist dictatorship known as the “New State” (1937–1945), inspired by European fascism. Despite his harsh treatment of opponents, he was popular with workers and was elected in 1950 to a new term as president, now reinvented as a populist who promised nationalist economic reforms. The armed forces and conservatives mistrusted Vargas’s appeals to workers and organized to depose him in 1954. Before they could act, Vargas killed himself.

The Vargas era saw rapid industrialization, the legalization of labor unions, and the creation of a minimum wage. JuscelinoKubitschek, elected in 1955, continued to build upon Vargas’s populism and nationalism. Between 1956 and 1960 Kubitschek’s government borrowed heavily from abroad to promote industry and build the futuristic new capital of Brasília in the midst of a wilderness. Kubitschek’s slogan was “Fifty Years’ Progress in Five.”

In 1961 leftist populist João Goulart became Brazil’s president. Goulart sought deeper reforms, including the redistribution of land and limits on the profits multinational corporations could take out of the country. In 1964 the armed forces, backed by the United States, deposed Goulart and held on to power for the next twenty-one years.

Communist Revolution in Cuba

Cuba remained practically an American colony until the 1930s, when a series of rulers with socialist and Communist leanings seized and lost power. Cuba’s political institutions were weak and its politicians corrupt. In March 1952 Fulgencio Batista (1901–1973) staged a coup with American support and instituted an authoritarian regime that favored wealthy Cubans and U.S. businesses.

The Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) brought Fidel Castro (1927–2016) to power through an armed insurgency that used guerrilla tactics crafted by Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Castro pursued deep economic reforms such as land redistribution and rent caps to help the urban poor. Because Castro’s nationalization of utilities and industries as well as land reform came at the expense of U.S. businesses, U.S. president John F. Kennedy staged an invasion of Cuba to topple Castro. When the invasion force, composed of Cuban exiles, landed at the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban revolutionary army, commanded by Castro, repelled it in an embarrassment to the United States.

Castro had not come to power as a Communist: his main aim had been to regain control of Cuba’s economy and politics from the United States. But U.S. efforts to overthrow him and to starve the Cuban economy drove him to form an alliance with the Soviet Union, which agreed to place nuclear missiles in Cuba to protect against another U.S. invasion. When Kennedy demanded the missiles be removed, the military and diplomatic brinksmanship of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis ensued. In 1963 the United States placed a complete commercial embargo on Cuba that remains in place although diplomatic relations were restored in 2015.

Castro now declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and relied on Soviet military and economic support, though Cuba retained a revolutionary mind-set that differed from the rest of the Soviet bloc. Castro was committed to spreading revolution to the rest of Latin America, and Guevara participated in armed struggles in the Congo and Bolivia before being assassinated by U.S.-trained Bolivian forces in 1967. Within Cuba activists swept into the countryside and taught people who were illiterate. Medical attention and education became free and widely accessible. The Cuban Revolution inspired young radicals across Latin America to believe in the possibility of swift revolution and brisk reforms to combat historic inequalities. But these reforms were achieved at great cost and through the suppression of political dissent. Castro declared in 1961, “Inside of the revolution anything, outside the revolution, nothing.”⁸ Political opponents were jailed or exiled.

The Limits of Postwar Prosperity

Why did the world face growing social unrest in the 1960s?

In the 1950s and 1960s the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as both western and eastern Europe, rebounded economically from the combined strains of the Great Depression and the Second World War. The postwar return of prosperity increased living standards but did not resolve underlying tensions and conflicts.

The Soviet Union Struggles to Move Beyond Stalin

The Cold War provided Stalin with the opportunity to revive many of the harshest aspects of the repression citizens of the Soviet Union had experienced in the 1930s, such as purges of soldiers and civilian officials and the revival of forced-labor camps. Stalin reasserted control of the government and society by reintroducing five-year plans to cope with the enormous task of reconstruction. He exported this system to eastern Europe. Rigid indoctrination, attacks on religion, and a lack of civil liberties became facts of life in the region’s one-party states. Only Yugoslavia’s Josip Tito (1892–1980), the popular resistance leader and Communist Party chief, could resist Soviet domination successfully because there was no Russian army in Yugoslavia.

After Stalin died in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev (CROO-shehv) (1894–1971) realized that reforms were necessary because of widespread fear and hatred of Stalin’s political terrorism. Khrushchev and the reformers in his administration curbed the secret police and gradually closed many forced-labor camps. Change was also necessary for economic reasons. Agriculture struggled, and shortages of consumer goods discouraged hard work. Moreover, Stalin’s foreign policy had provoked a strong Western alliance, isolating the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his crimes in a “secret speech” delivered to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956:

It is clear that … Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality, and his abuse of power. Instead of proving his political correctness and mobilizing the masses, he often chose the path of repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies, but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the party and the Soviet Government.⁹

The liberalization of the Soviet Union — labeled de-Stalinization in the West — was genuine. Khrushchev declared that “peaceful coexistence” with capitalism was possible. The government shifted some economic resources to production of consumer goods, improving standards of living throughout the booming 1960s. De-Stalinization opened new space for creative work and for expressing dissent. The writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) created a sensation when his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the Soviet Union in 1962. Solzhenitsyn’s novel portrayed life in a Stalinist concentration camp in grim detail and was a damning indictment of the Stalinist past.

De-Stalinization stimulated rebelliousness in the eastern European satellites. Poland won greater autonomy in 1956 after extensive protests forced the Soviets to allow a new Communist government. Led by students and workers, the people of Budapest, Hungary, installed a liberal Communist reformer as their new chief in October 1956. The rebellion was short-lived. After the government promised open elections and renounced Hungary’s military alliance with Moscow, the Soviet army invaded and crushed the revolution, killing thousands. When the United States did not come to Hungary’s aid, many eastern European reformers concluded that their best hope was to strive for incremental gains rather than broad change.

In August 1961 the East German government began construction of a twenty-seven-mile wall between East and West Berlin. It also built a ninety-mile-long barrier between the three allied sectors of West Berlin and East Germany, thereby completely cutting off West Berlin. Officially the wall was called the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall.” In reality the Berlin Wall prevented East Germans from “voting with their feet” by defecting to the West.

By late 1962 opponents had come to see Khrushchev’s policies as a dangerous threat to party authority. Moreover, Khrushchev did not succeed in alleviating tensions with the West. In 1962 Khrushchev ordered missiles with nuclear warheads installed in Cuba to shield it from U.S. invasion, triggering the Cuban missile crisis. The hard line taken by the U.S. over the placement of the missiles put the superpowers on the brink of war until Khrushchev backed down and removed the missiles. Two years later, Communist Party leaders removed him. After Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) and his supporters took over in 1964, they stopped further liberalization and launched an arms buildup, determined not to repeat Khrushchev’s humiliation by the United States.

Postwar Challenges in Western Europe and the United States

In 1945 much of western Europe was devastated by the war, and it faced mass unemployment, shortages of food and fuel, and the dislocation of millions of people. But in the decades that followed, western Europe experienced a dramatic recovery. Democratic governments thrived in an atmosphere of broadening civil liberties. Progressive Catholics and their Christian Democratic political parties were particularly influential. Socialists and Communists active in the resistance against Hitler returned with renewed prestige. In the immediate postwar years welfare measures such as family stipends, health insurance, and expanded public housing were enacted throughout much of Europe.

An immediate result of the Cold War was the partition between a Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and a Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) that had been occupied by the United States, Britain, and France. With the support of the United States, which wanted to turn an economically resurgent West Germany into a bulwark against Soviet expansion, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1881–1967), brought Germany firmly into the Western capitalist camp. He forged close ties with the United States, Great Britain, and France. He also initiated dialogues with leaders of Europe’s Jewish community and with Israel to encourage a reconciliation following the Holocaust. As Germany recovered from the war, it became Europe’s leading economic power, a member of NATO, and an architect of efforts at European unity.

Amid the destruction and uncertainty brought by two world wars caused by Europeans and fought in Europe, many Europeans believed that only unity could forestall future European conflicts. The first steps toward economic unity were taken through close cooperation over Marshall Plan aid. These were followed by the creation in 1952 of a Coal and Steel Community, made up of France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. In 1957 these nations signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community, popularly known as the Common Market. The treaty’s primary goal was to eliminate trade barriers between them and create a single market almost as large as that of the United States.

Migrant laborers, mainly from southern Italy, North Africa, Turkey, Greece, and Yugoslavia, also shaped western European societies and drove their economic recovery. Tens of millions of migrant workers made it possible for western European economies to continue to grow beyond their postwar labor capacity. This was especially important in Germany, where they filled gaps left by the wartime loss of a large proportion of the adult male population. Governments at first labeled the migrants as “guest workers” to signal their temporary status, though in practice many would remain in their new homes. As their communities became more settled, migrants faced a backlash from majority populations and came to resent and resist their treatment as second-class citizens.

Guest Workers in Europe In the 1950s and 1960s thousands of workers from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Turkey immigrated into parts of Europe where the postwar growth in industrial production had created a scarcity of labor. Workers like this Italian seamstress and supervisor in a German factory fled a weak economy and high unemployment in their country of origin, seeking work in countries like Germany and France.

This photo shows an Italian seamstress at a sewing machine working on a leapord-print garment, while a male supervisor in a factory stands over her with his hands on his hips.

In the United States the postwar era was also shaped by economic recovery and social pressures. The Second World War ended the Great Depression in the United States, bringing about an economic boom that increased living standards dramatically. By the end of the war, the United States had the strongest economy and held an advantage over its past commercial rivals: its industry and infrastructure had not been damaged by war. After the war, U.S. manufactured goods saturated markets around the world that had previously been dominated by Britain, France, and Germany.

Postwar America experienced a social revolution as well: after a long struggle African Americans began to experience major victories against the deeply entrenched system of segregation and discrimination. This civil rights movement advanced on several fronts, none more prominent than legal victories that ended the statutory segregation of schools. African American civil rights activists challenged inequality by using Gandhian methods of nonviolent resistance: as civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), said, “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.” He told the white power structure, “We will not hate you, but we will not obey your evil laws.”¹⁰

The World in 1968

In 1968 pressures for social change boiled over into protests worldwide. The preceding two decades offered the world an example of how much people could change as decolonization swept much of the world. Revolutionary struggles stretched from Cuba to the remaining colonies in Africa and the war in Southeast Asia. The architecture of white supremacism and racial segregation was being dismantled in the United States. Young protesters drew upon recent history to appreciate how much could be achieved and looked at their world to see how much more was needed. Around the world, streets and squares filled with protesters.

In Czechoslovakia the “Prague Spring” — a brief period of liberal reform and loosening of political controls — unfolded as reformers in the Czechoslovakian Communist Party gained a majority and replaced a long-time Stalinist leader with Alexander Dubček (DOOB-chehk), whose new government launched dramatic reforms. Dubček and his allies called for “socialism with a human face,” which meant rolling back many of the strictures imposed by Stalin. He restored freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Communist leaders in the Soviet Union and other eastern European states feared that they would face similar demands for reform from their own citizens. Protests against the excesses of Communist rule erupted in Poland and Yugoslavia.

In France students went on strike over poor university conditions. When government responded with harsh punishments, larger and more radical student protests erupted. Labor unions called a general strike. The strikes captured the anxieties of the generation that had been raised in postwar Europe. For many of them, their governments’ postwar socialist reforms were incomplete and the time was now ripe for more far-ranging change — if not outright revolution. Similar student movements erupted across western Europe.

In Latin America students rose in protest as well. In Argentina students in the industrial city of Córdoba went on strike against the military dictatorship that had been in place since 1966. Joined by factory workers, the protesters took control of the city in an event known as the Cordobazo. In Brazil a national student strike challenged the military dictatorship that had been in power since 1964. In Mexico City, where the 1968 Olympic games would be held, students used the international visibility of the event to protest the heavy-handed ruling PRI Party. The Latin American students challenging their regimes were motivated by the example offered by revolutionary Cuba, which they saw as a model of swift social transformation.

The ongoing U.S. military intervention in Vietnam met with growing opposition worldwide. In Japan protesters denounced what they saw as the complicity of their government and businesses in the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, and challenged the Security Treaty that bound Japan and the United States. As the continuation of the war depended increasingly on military drafts, protests against the Vietnam War and against the draft erupted on college campuses across the United States and in its ally in the conflict, Australia.

In the United States the antiwar movement marked an increase in popular mobilization: civil rights marches in the South now extended to protests against discrimination and police violence in cities like Boston and Chicago. Protesters around the world were aware of each other and felt empowered by the sense that they were participating in a worldwide movement against the abuses of the established order. Their actions echoed Che Guevara’s call for “two, three or many Vietnams” of resistance against imperialism.

In 1968 it seemed that social movements worldwide were on the verge of opening the floodgates to a wave of radical change, but the opposite was more true. Protesters and reformers faced violent reactions from the powerful political and economic groups they challenged. Conservatives reacted against more than the protests of 1968: they sought to slow or sometimes reverse the dramatic changes that had taken place in the postwar era.

Around the world, protests were followed by violent crackdowns such as the Soviet deployment of tanks in Czechoslovakia in October 1968, which crushed the Prague Spring, unseated Dubček, and led to harsh persecutions of the Prague Spring’s supporters. In Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, military and paramilitary groups launched violent campaigns against protesting students and workers, such as the Mexican government’s shooting of protesters in Tlatelolco before the Olympics. In the United States assassins killed Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders. In 1967 Che Guevara was executed by Bolivian troops trained and led by the U.S. government. Around the world, revolutionary violence was met with increasingly violent repression.

Chapter Summary

The decades after the Second World War were an era of rebuilding, a term that had different meanings for different peoples. In Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan, rebuilding literally meant clearing the rubble from wartime devastation and restoring what had been destroyed. In Germany and Japan in particular, rebuilding meant charting political and economic paths different from the ones that nationalist fervor had forged.

For the United States and the Soviet Union, rebuilding meant developing a military and ideological complex with which to confront each other in the Cold War. In each country individually, rebuilding took other forms: in the Soviet Union it meant finding ways to reform the system of political terror and coercion through which Stalin had ruled; in the United States it meant struggling to overcome the structures of white supremacism and other forms of racial discrimination.

The idea of rebuilding took on its deepest meaning in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where rebuilding meant dismantling European colonialism to establish independent states. This required replacing not just colonial institutions but colonial mentalities, patterns of production, and forms of education, and developing ways of relating that were not based on terms dictated by colonizers. Intellectuals and artists strove to decolonize the mind as politicians worked to decolonize the state in a process that proved slow and difficult. In Latin America rebuilding meant finding the means to overcome patterns of social exclusion that were legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism. It also meant finding the means to industrialize, overcoming the patterns of dependency and underdevelopment diagnosed by Latin American intellectuals and social scientists.

The decades after 1945 showed how much was possible through mass movements, advancing industrialization, and political self-determination. But the balance of these years also showed how much more work remained to overcome poverty, underdevelopment, and neocolonialism.

 CONNECTIONS

The great transformations experienced by peoples around the world following the Second World War can best be compared to the age of revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (see Chapter 22). In both eras peoples rose up to undertake the political, economic, social, and cultural transformation of their societies. In both eras, history seemed to accelerate, driven by events that had impacts across the globe. As in the age of revolution, which saw the independence of the United States and most of Spanish America as well as the Haitian and French Revolutions, people swept aside old notions of authority tied to kings and empires. In Asia the Chinese Revolution and the independence of India and Pakistan marked the accelerating pace of liberation movements that dismantled European colonialism and ushered in new political ideologies and economic systems.

Liberation movements spanning the globe sought not only to end imperial domination and remove social boundaries imposed by white racism, but also to make deeper changes in how peoples perceived themselves and their societies. As radical and new as these ideas were, they nonetheless owed much to the Enlightenment ideals about liberal individual rights that were promoted by the ideologues of the French and American Revolutions.

Though the social revolutions in countries like China and Cuba and the independence movements across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East brought unprecedented deep and fast changes, they were only the first steps in remaking societies that had been created by centuries of colonialism. Uprooting the legacies of colonialism — in the form of poverty, continued domination of economies by foreign powers, limited industrialization, and weak states — remained a daunting challenge that societies continued to face in the future.