Key terms Modern History final

Permanent Mandate Commission

A commission created by the League of Nations to oversee the developed nations’ fulfillment of their international responsibility toward their mandates.

Balfour Declaration

A 1917 statement by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour that supported the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Zaibatsu

Giant conglomerate firms established in Japan beginning in the Meiji period and lasting until the end of World War II.

Long March

The 6,000-mile retreat of the Chinese Communist army in 1934 to a remote region on the northwestern border of China, during which tens of thousands lost their lives.

New Deal

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's plan to reform capitalism in the United States through forceful government intervention in the economy.

Totalitarianism

A radical dictatorship that exercises complete political power and control over all aspects of society and seeks to mobilize the masses for action.

Fascism

A movement characterized by extreme, often expansionist nationalism, anti-socialism, a dynamic and violent leader, and glorification of war and the military.

Collectivization

Stalin's forcible consolidation, beginning in 1929, of individual peasant farms in the Soviet Union into large, state-controlled enterprises.

Nazism

A movement born of extreme nationalism and racism, dominated by Adolf Hitler from 1933 until the end of World War II in 1945.

Europe First Policy

The military strategy, set forth by Churchill and adopted by Roosevelt, that called for the defeat of Hitler in Europe before the United States launched an all-out strike against Japan in the Pacific.

Cold War

The post-World War II conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Truman Doctrine

The 1945 American policy of preventing the spread of Communist Rule.

Marshall Plan

A 1948 American plan for providing economic aid to Europe to help it rebuild after World War II.

Modernization theory

The belief, held in countries such as the United States in the mid-twentieth century, that all countries evolved in a linear progression from traditional to mature.

Liberation theology

A movement within the Catholic Church to support the poor in situations of exploitation that emerged with particular force in Latin America in the 1960s.

Arab socialism

A modernizing, secular, and nationalist project of nation building in the Middle East aimed at economic development and the development of a strong military.

Great Leap Forward

Mao Zedong's acceleration of Chinese development in which industrial growth was to be based on small-scale backyard workshops run by peasants living in gigantic self-contained communes.

Pan-Africanists

People who, through a movement beginning in 1919, sought black solidarity and envisioned a vast self-governing union of all African peoples.

OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries)

A cartel formed in 1960 by oil-exporting countries designed to coordinate oil production and raise prices, giving those countries greater capacity for economic development and greater leverage in world affairs.

Neoliberalism

A return beginning in the 1980s to policies intended to promote free markets and the free circulation of capital across national borders.

Intifada

Beginning in 1987, a prolonged campaign of civil disobedience by Palestinian youth against Israeli soldiers; the Arabic word Intifada means ‘shaking off.’

Junta

A government headed by a council of commanders of the branches of the armed forces.

Apartheid

The system of racial segregation and discrimination that was supported by the Afrikaner government in South Africa.

Tiananmen Square

The site of a Chinese student revolt in 1989 at which Communists imposed martial law and arrested, injured, or killed hundreds of students.

Détente

The progressive relaxation of Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Glasnost

Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev's popular campaign for government transparency and more open media.

Perestroika

Economic restructuring and reform implemented by Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that permitted an easing of government price controls on some goods, more independence for state enterprises, and the establishment of profit-seeking private cooperatives.

Solidarity

Led by Lech Walesa, an independent Polish trade union organized in 1980 that worked for the rights of workers and political reform.