CHAPTER 28

Cold War Conflict and Consensus

1945–1965

The Idealization of Work in the East Bloc

This relief sculpture, a revealing example of Socialist Realism from 1952, portrays (from left to right) a mail carrier, a builder, a miner, and a farmer, with their proud wives behind them. It adorns the wall of the central post office in Banská Bystrica, a regional capital in present-day Slovakia (formerly part of Czechoslovakia). Citizens in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries of the East Bloc saw many such works of public art that idealized the dignity of ordinary workers and the advantages of communism.

CHAPTER PREVIEW

Why was World War II followed so quickly by the Cold War?

What were the sources of postwar recovery and stability in western Europe?

What was the pattern of postwar development in the Soviet bloc?

How did decolonization proceed in the Cold War era?

What were the key changes in social relations in postwar Europe?

The defeat of the Nazis and their allies in 1945 left Europe in ruins. In the immediate postwar years, as Europeans struggled to overcome the effects of rampant death and destruction, the victorious Allies worked to shape an effective peace accord. Disagreements between the Soviet Union and the Western allies emerged during this process and quickly led to an apparently endless Cold War between the two new superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. This conflict split much of Europe and then the world into a Soviet-aligned Communist bloc and a U.S.-aligned capitalist bloc and spurred military, economic, and technological competition.

Amid these tensions, battered western European countries fashioned a remarkable recovery, building stable democratic institutions and vibrant economies. In the Soviet Union and the East Bloc — the label applied to central and eastern European countries governed by Soviet-backed Communist regimes — Communist leaders repressed challenges to one-party rule but also offered limited reforms, leading to stability there as well.

The postwar decades also brought fundamental change on a global scale, as people living in Europe’s colonies won liberation from imperialist rule. Cold War hostilities had an immense impact on this process of decolonization. At the same time, evolving class structures, new migration patterns, and new roles for women and youths remade European society, laying the groundwork for major transformation in the decades to come.

“The data from the timeline are as follows.

1945: Yalta Conference; end of World War II in Europe; Potsdam Conference; Nuremberg trials begin.

1945 to 1960s: Decolonization of Asia and Africa.

1945 to 1965: The United States takes lead in Big Science.

1947: Truman Doctrine; Marshall Plan.

1948: Foundation of Israel.

1948 to 1949: Berlin airlift.

1949: Creation of East and West Germany; formation of NATO; establishment of COMECON.

1950 to 1953: Korean War.

1953: Death of Stalin.

1954 to 1962: Algerian War of Independence.

1955 to 1964: Khrushchev in power; de- Stalinization of Soviet Union.

1955: Warsaw Pact founded.

1956: Suez crisis.

1957: Formation of Common Market; Pasternak publishes Doctor Zhivago.

1961: Building of Berlin Wall.

1962: Cuban missile crisis; Solzhenitsyn publishes One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

1964: Brezhnev replaces Khrushchev as Soviet leader.”

Why was World War II followed so quickly by the Cold War?

In 1945 the Allies faced the momentous challenges of rebuilding a shattered Europe, dealing with Nazi criminals, and creating a lasting peace. The Allies found it difficult to cooperate in peacemaking, and Great Britain and the United States were soon at loggerheads with the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.). By 1949 most of Europe was divided into East and West Blocs allied with the U.S.S.R. and the United States, respectively. For the next forty years, the competing superpowers engaged in the Cold War, a determined competition for political and military superiority around the world.

The Legacies of the Second World War

In the summer of 1945 Europe lay in ruins. Across the continent, the fighting had destroyed cities and landscapes and obliterated buildings, factories, farms, rail tracks, roads, and bridges. Many cities — including Leningrad, Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest, Rotterdam, and Coventry — were completely devastated. Postwar observers compared the remaining piles of rubble to moonscapes. Surviving cities such as Prague and Paris were left relatively unscathed, mostly by chance.

The human costs of the Second World War are almost incalculable (Map 28.1). The death toll far exceeded the mortality figures for World War I. At least 20 million Soviets, including soldiers and civilians, died in the war. Between 9 and 11 million noncombatants lost their lives in Nazi concentration camps, including approximately 6 million Jews. One out of every five Poles died in the war, including 3 million of Poland’s 3.25 million Jews. German deaths numbered 5 million, 2 million of them civilians. France and Britain both lost fewer soldiers than in World War I, but about 350,000 French civilians were killed in the fighting. Over 400,000 U.S. soldiers died in the European and Pacific campaigns, and other nations across Europe and the globe also lost staggering numbers. In total, about 50 million human beings perished in the conflict.

MAPPING THE PAST

MAP 28.1 The Aftermath of World War II in Europe, ca. 1945–1950

By 1945 millions of people displaced by war and territorial changes were on the move. The Soviet Union and Poland took land from Germany, which the Allies partitioned into occupation zones. Those zones subsequently formed the basis of the East and West German states. Austria was detached from Germany and similarly divided, but the Soviets later permitted Austria to reunify as a neutral state.

ANALYZING THE MAP Which groups fled west? Who went east? How would you characterize the general direction of most of these movements?

CONNECTIONS What does the widespread movement of people at the end of the war suggest about the war? What does it suggest about the ensuing political climate?

“The map shows the following.

City substantially destroyed. Kyiv, Ploesti, Bucharest, Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna, Warsaw, Königsberg, Leningrad, Dresden, Berlin, Wurzburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Bonn, Bremen, Hamburg, Kiel, Rotterdam, Coventry, London, Caen, Milan, Genoa, Bologna, Rome, and Naples.

Allied occupation of Germany and Austria, 1945 to 1955. East and West Germany was divided into British, Soviet, U.S., and French zones following the allied occupation. Soviet Zone extended along the borders of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary including the cities Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna, the French Zone was distinctly on the west and extended along the regions bordering Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg, and Belgium including the city of Frankfurt, the British Zone bordered Belgium near Bonn and Cologne in West Germany and included Hamburg and Kiel on the north, and the U. S. Zone included the region surrounding Bremen on the North Sea coast, the region to the east of the French Zone surrounding Munich and bordering Czechoslovakia.

Territory lost by Germany. Königsberg and the region surrounding the city on the south and the region to its southwest, bordering East Germany. The region was incorporated into Poland in 1945 while Königsberg and the region to its east, bordering Lithuania were incorporated into the U.S.S.R in 1945.

Territory gained by the Soviet Union. Bessarabia (from Romania, 1940 to 1947), from Czechoslovakia, the eastern corner (1945 to 1947), from Poland, the eastern region including Brest (1940 to 1947), Lithuania (to U.S.S.R, 1940), Latvia (to U.S.S.R, 1940), Estonia (to U.S.S.R, 1940), from Finland, the southeastern corner (1940 to 1956).

Baltic refugee movement was rampant from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Brest to the Soviet Union on the east and across the Baltic Sea to Sweden on the west while Russians migrated across Ukraine to reach Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland (Brest), and as far as Bessarabia. Finns from Leningrad and surrounding regions moved to Finland. Poles from Ukraine traversed the Polish territory gained by the Soviet Union westward, arriving at Warsaw and Krakow in Poland and moved further to the western part of Poland. Czechs moved from the central region of Czechoslovakia toward its borders on the north and southwest. German refugee movement from Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia adopted a northwestward route through the British Zone to reach the U. S. Zone in West Germany while those from Poland and Prague (Czechoslovakia) moved through the Soviet Zone in East Germany to Cologne, and other regions in West Germany. Peoples settled by International Refugee Organization were moved from West Germany to France, across the Atlantic Ocean via Rotterdam, and as far as the Mediterranean Sea via Switzerland and France.

The map also shows the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, and the Baltic Sea, and Turkey, Cyprus, Crete, Greece, Albania, Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearic Islands, Spain, Portugal, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.

A map in the inset highlights the same region.”

The destruction of war also left tens of millions homeless — 25 million in the U.S.S.R. and 20 million in Germany alone. The wartime policies of Hitler and Stalin had forced some 30 million people from their homes in the hardest-hit war zones of central and eastern Europe. The end of the war and the start of the peace increased their numbers. Some 13 million ethnic Germans fled west before the advancing Soviet troops or were expelled from eastern Europe under the terms of Allied agreements. Forced laborers from Poland, France, the Balkans, and other nations, brought to Germany by the Nazis, now sought to go home. A woman in Berlin described the “small, tired caravans of people” passing through the city in spring 1945 pushing “pitiful handcarts piled high with sacks, crates, and trunks.” The elderly refugees were particularly wretched, “pale, dilapidated, apathetic. Half-dead sacks of bones.”1

Displaced Persons in the Ruins of Berlin The end of the war in 1945 stopped the fighting but not the suffering. For the next two years, millions of displaced persons wandered across Europe searching for sustenance, lost family members, and a place to call home.

These displaced persons or DPs — their numbers increased by concentration camp survivors and freed prisoners of war, and hundreds of thousands of orphaned children — searched for food and shelter. From 1945 to 1947 the newly established United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) opened over 760 DP camps and spent $10 billion to house, feed, clothe, and repatriate the refugees.

For DPs, going home was not always the best option. Soviet citizens who had spent time in the West were seen as politically unreliable by political leaders in the U.S.S.R. Many DPs faced prison terms, exile to labor camps in the Siberian gulag, and even execution upon their return to Soviet territories. Jewish DPs faced unique problems. Their families and communities had been destroyed, and persistent anti-Semitism often made them unwelcome in their former homelands. Many stayed in special Jewish DP camps in Germany for years. After the creation of Israel in 1948, over 330,000 European Jews left for the new Jewish state. By 1952 about 100,000 Jews had also immigrated to the United States. When the last DP camp closed in 1957, the UNRRA had cared for and resettled many millions of refugees, Jews and non-Jews alike.

When the fighting stopped, Germany and Austria had been divided into four occupation zones, each governed by one of the Allies — the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France. The Soviets collected substantial reparations from their zone in eastern Germany and from former German allies Hungary and Romania. In Soviet-occupied Germany, administrators seized factories and equipment, even tearing up railroad tracks and sending the rails to the U.S.S.R.

The authorities in each zone tried to punish those guilty of Nazi atrocities. Across Europe, almost 100,000 Germans and Austrians were convicted of war crimes. Many more were investigated or indicted. In Soviet-dominated central and eastern Europe — where the worst crimes had taken place — retribution was particularly intense. There and in other parts of Europe, collaborators, non-Germans who had assisted the German occupiers during the war, were also punished. In the days and months immediately after the war, spontaneous acts of retribution brought some collaborators to account. In both France and Italy, unofficial groups seeking revenge summarily executed some 25,000 persons. French women accused of “horizontal collaboration” — having sexual relations with German soldiers during the occupation — were publicly humiliated by angry mobs. Newly established postwar governments also formed official courts to What were the sources of postwar recovery and stability in western Europe?

In the late 1940s the outlook for Europe appeared bleak. Yet the continent recovered, with the nations of western Europe in the lead. In less than a generation, many western European countries constructed democratic political institutions, while a period of unprecedented economic growth and a consumer revolution brought a sense of prosperity to ever-larger numbers of people. Politicians entered collective economic agreements and established the European Economic Community, the first steps toward broader European unity.

The Search for Political and Social Consensus

In the first years after the war, economic conditions in western Europe were terrible. Infrastructure of all kinds barely functioned, and runaway inflation and a thriving black market testified to severe shortages and hardships. In 1948, as Marshall Plan dollars poured in, the battered economies of western Europe began to improve. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 further stimulated economic activity, and Europe entered a period of rapid economic progress that lasted into the late 1960s. Never before had the European economy grown so fast. By the late 1950s contemporaries were talking about a widespread economic miracle that had brought robust growth to most western European countries.

There were many reasons for this stunning economic performance. American aid got the process off to a fast start. Moreover, economic growth became a basic objective of all western European governments, for leaders and voters alike were determined to avoid a return to the dangerous and demoralizing stagnation of the 1930s.

The postwar governments in western Europe thus embraced new political and economic policies that led to a remarkably lasting social consensus. They turned to liberal democracy and generally adopted Keynesian economics (see “Germany and the Western Powers” in Chapter 26) in successful attempts to stimulate their economies. In addition, whether they leaned to the left or to the right, national leaders in the core European states applied an imaginative mixture of government planning and free-market capitalism to promote economic growth. They nationalized — or established government ownership of — significant sectors of the economy, used economic regulation to encourage growth, and established generous social benefits programs, paid for with high taxes, for all citizens. This consensual framework for good government lasted until the middle of the 1970s.

In politics, a new team of European politicians emerged to guide the postwar recovery. Across the West, newly formed Christian Democratic parties became important power brokers. Rooted in the Catholic parties of the prewar decades, the Christian Democrats offered voters tired of radical politics a center-right vision of reconciliation and recovery. Socialists and Communists, active in the resistance against Hitler, also increased their power and prestige, especially in France and Italy. They, too, provided fresh leadership as they pushed for social change and economic reform.

Across much of continental Europe, the centrist Christian Democrats defeated their left-wing competition. In Italy, the Christian Democrats were the leading party in the first postwar elections in 1946, and in early 1948 they won an absolute majority in the parliament in a landslide victory. In France, the Popular Republican Movement, a Christian Democratic party, provided some of the best postwar leaders after General Charles de Gaulle (duh GOHL) resigned from his position as head of the provisional government in January 1946. West Germans, too, elected a Christian Democratic government from 1949 until 1969.

As they provided effective leadership for their respective countries, Christian Democrats drew inspiration from a common Christian and European heritage. They firmly rejected authoritarianism and narrow nationalism and placed their faith in democracy and liberalism. At the same time, the anticommunist rhetoric of these steadfast cold warriors was unrelenting. Rejecting the class-based politics of the left, they championed a return to traditional family values, a vision with great appeal after a war that left many broken families and destitute households; the Christian Democrats often received a majority of women’s votes.

Following their U.S. allies, Christian Democrats advocated free-market economics and promised voters prosperity and ample supplies of consumer goods. They established education subsidies, family and housing allowances, public transportation, and public health insurance throughout continental Europe. When necessary, Christian Democratic leaders accepted the need for limited government planning. In France, the government established modernization commissions for key industries, and state-controlled banks funneled money into industrial development. In West Germany, the Christian Democrats broke decisively with the straitjacketed Nazi economy and promoted a “social-market economy” based on a combination of free-market liberalism, limited state intervention, and an extensive social benefits network.

Though Portugal, Spain, and Greece generally supported NATO and the United States in the Cold War, they proved exceptions to the rule of democratic transformation outside the Soviet bloc. In Portugal and Spain, nationalist authoritarian regimes had taken power in the 1930s. Portugal’s authoritarian state was overthrown in a left-wing military coup only in 1974, while Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco remained in power until his death in 1975. The authoritarian monarchy established in Greece when the civil war ended in 1949, bolstered by military support and kept in power in a series of army coups, was likewise replaced by a democratic government only in 1975.

By contrast, the Scandinavian countries and Great Britain took decisive turns to the left. Norway, Denmark, and especially Sweden earned a global reputation for long-term Social Democratic governance, generous state-sponsored benefit programs, tolerant lifestyles, and independent attitudes toward Cold War conflicts.

Even though wartime austerity and rationing programs were in place until the mid-1950s, Britain offered the most comprehensive state benefit programs outside Scandinavia. The social-democratic Labour Party took power after the war and ambitiously established a “cradle-to-grave” welfare state. Many British industries were nationalized, including banks, iron and steel industries, and utilities and public transportation networks. The government provided free medical services and hospital care, generous retirement pensions, and unemployment benefits, all subsidized by progressive taxation that pegged tax payments to income levels, with the wealthy paying significantly more than those below them. Although the Labour Party suffered defeats throughout much of the 1950s and early 1960s, its Conservative opponents maintained much of the welfare state when they came to power. Across western Europe, economic growth and state-sponsored benefits systems raised living standards higher than ever before.

Toward European Unity

Though there were important regional differences across much of western Europe, politicians and citizens supported policies that brought together limited state planning, strong economic growth, and democratic government, and this political and social consensus accompanied the first tentative steps on the long road toward a more unified Europe.

A number of new financial arrangements and institutions encouraged slow but steady moves toward European integration, as did cooperation with the United States. To receive Marshall Plan aid, the European states were required by the Americans to cooperate with one another, leading to the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation and the Council of Europe in 1948, both of which promoted commerce and cooperation among European countries.

European federalists hoped that the Council of Europe would evolve into a European parliament with sovereign rights, but this did not happen. Britain, with its still-vast empire and its close relationship with the United States, consistently opposed conceding sovereignty to the council. On the continent, many prominent nationalists and Communists agreed with the British view.

Frustrated in political consolidation, European federalists turned to economics as a way of working toward genuine unity. Christian Democratic governments in West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg founded the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 (the British steadfastly refused to join). The founding states quickly attained their immediate economic goal — a single, transnational market for steel and coal without national tariffs or quotas. Close economic ties, advocates hoped, would eventually bind the six member nations so closely together that war among them would become unthinkable.

In 1957, the six countries of the Coal and Steel Community signed the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community, or Common Market. The first goal of the treaty was a gradual reduction of all tariffs among the six in order to create a single market. Other goals included the free movement of capital and labor and common economic policies and institutions. The Common Market encouraged trade among European states, promoted global exports, and helped build shared resources for the modernization of national industries. European integration thus meant not only increased transnational cooperation but also economic growth on the national level.

In the 1960s, hopes for rapid progress toward political as well as economic union were frustrated by a resurgence of nationalism. French president Charles de Gaulle, re-elected to office in 1958, viewed the United States as the main threat to genuine French (and European) independence. He withdrew all French military forces from what he called an “American-controlled” NATO, developed France’s own nuclear weapons, and vetoed the scheduled advent of majority rule within the Common Market. Thus, the 1950s and 1960s established a lasting pattern: Europeans would establish ever-closer economic ties, but the Common Market remained a union of independent, sovereign states.

The Consumer Revolution

In the late 1950s western Europe’s rapidly expanding economy led to a rising standard of living and remarkable growth in the number and availability of standardized consumer goods. Modern consumer society had precedents in the decades before the Second World War, but the years of the “economic miracle” saw the arrival of a veritable consumer revolution: as the percentage of income spent on necessities such as housing and food declined dramatically, nearly full employment and high wages meant that more Europeans could buy more things than ever before. Shaken by war and eager to rebuild their homes and families, western Europeans embraced the new products of consumer society. Like North Americans, they filled their houses and apartments with modern appliances such as washing machines, and they eagerly purchased the latest entertainment devices of the day: radios, record players, and televisions.

The consumer market became an increasingly important engine for general economic growth. For example, the European automobile industry expanded phenomenally after lagging far behind that of the United States since the 1920s. In 1948 there were only 5 million cars in western Europe; by 1965 there were 44 million. No longer reserved for the elites, car ownership became possible for better-paid workers. With the expansion of social security safeguards reducing the need to accumulate savings for hard times and old age, ordinary people were increasingly willing to take on debt, and new banks and credit unions and even retail outlets increasingly offered loans — or “credit” — for consumer purchases on easy terms.

Traffic Jam in Paris The consumer revolution of the late 1950s brought a rapid increase in the number of privately owned automobiles across western Europe. Major European cities began to experience one of the more unfortunate but increasingly common aspects of postwar life: the traffic jam. Contemporary advertisements, like this 1952 French ad for the Dyna Panhard Junior 130 Sprint, played up the youthful, sporty aspects of the new auto-mobility.

The photo shows a traffic jam in Paris due to privately owned cars. The ad for Dyna Panhard Junior 130 Sprint features a young man driving the Sprint while a bunch of young men and women in sportswear come forward to look at the car.

What were the sources of postwar recovery and stability in western Europe?

In the late 1940s the outlook for Europe appeared bleak. Yet the continent recovered, with the nations of western Europe in the lead. In less than a generation, many western European countries constructed democratic political institutions, while a period of unprecedented economic growth and a consumer revolution brought a sense of prosperity to ever-larger numbers of people. Politicians entered collective economic agreements and established the European Economic Community, the first steps toward broader European unity.

The Search for Political and Social Consensus

In the first years after the war, economic conditions in western Europe were terrible. Infrastructure of all kinds barely functioned, and runaway inflation and a thriving black market testified to severe shortages and hardships. In 1948, as Marshall Plan dollars poured in, the battered economies of western Europe began to improve. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 further stimulated economic activity, and Europe entered a period of rapid economic progress that lasted into the late 1960s. Never before had the European economy grown so fast. By the late 1950s contemporaries were talking about a widespread economic miracle that had brought robust growth to most western European countries.

There were many reasons for this stunning economic performance. American aid got the process off to a fast start. Moreover, economic growth became a basic objective of all western European governments, for leaders and voters alike were determined to avoid a return to the dangerous and demoralizing stagnation of the 1930s.

The postwar governments in western Europe thus embraced new political and economic policies that led to a remarkably lasting social consensus. They turned to liberal democracy and generally adopted Keynesian economics (see “Germany and the Western Powers” in Chapter 26) in successful attempts to stimulate their economies. In addition, whether they leaned to the left or to the right, national leaders in the core European states applied an imaginative mixture of government planning and free-market capitalism to promote economic growth. They nationalized — or established government ownership of — significant sectors of the economy, used economic regulation to encourage growth, and established generous social benefits programs, paid for with high taxes, for all citizens. This consensual framework for good government lasted until the middle of the 1970s.

In politics, a new team of European politicians emerged to guide the postwar recovery. Across the West, newly formed Christian Democratic parties became important power brokers. Rooted in the Catholic parties of the prewar decades, the Christian Democrats offered voters tired of radical politics a center-right vision of reconciliation and recovery. Socialists and Communists, active in the resistance against Hitler, also increased their power and prestige, especially in France and Italy. They, too, provided fresh leadership as they pushed for social change and economic reform.

Across much of continental Europe, the centrist Christian Democrats defeated their left-wing competition. In Italy, the Christian Democrats were the leading party in the first postwar elections in 1946, and in early 1948 they won an absolute majority in the parliament in a landslide victory. In France, the Popular Republican Movement, a Christian Democratic party, provided some of the best postwar leaders after General Charles de Gaulle (duh GOHL) resigned from his position as head of the provisional government in January 1946. West Germans, too, elected a Christian Democratic government from 1949 until 1969.

As they provided effective leadership for their respective countries, Christian Democrats drew inspiration from a common Christian and European heritage. They firmly rejected authoritarianism and narrow nationalism and placed their faith in democracy and liberalism. At the same time, the anticommunist rhetoric of these steadfast cold warriors was unrelenting. Rejecting the class-based politics of the left, they championed a return to traditional family values, a vision with great appeal after a war that left many broken families and destitute households; the Christian Democrats often received a majority of women’s votes.

Following their U.S. allies, Christian Democrats advocated free-market economics and promised voters prosperity and ample supplies of consumer goods. They established education subsidies, family and housing allowances, public transportation, and public health insurance throughout continental Europe. When necessary, Christian Democratic leaders accepted the need for limited government planning. In France, the government established modernization commissions for key industries, and state-controlled banks funneled money into industrial development. In West Germany, the Christian Democrats broke decisively with the straitjacketed Nazi economy and promoted a “social-market economy” based on a combination of free-market liberalism, limited state intervention, and an extensive social benefits network.

Though Portugal, Spain, and Greece generally supported NATO and the United States in the Cold War, they proved exceptions to the rule of democratic transformation outside the Soviet bloc. In Portugal and Spain, nationalist authoritarian regimes had taken power in the 1930s. Portugal’s authoritarian state was overthrown in a left-wing military coup only in 1974, while Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco remained in power until his death in 1975. The authoritarian monarchy established in Greece when the civil war ended in 1949, bolstered by military support and kept in power in a series of army coups, was likewise replaced by a democratic government only in 1975.

By contrast, the Scandinavian countries and Great Britain took decisive turns to the left. Norway, Denmark, and especially Sweden earned a global reputation for long-term Social Democratic governance, generous state-sponsored benefit programs, tolerant lifestyles, and independent attitudes toward Cold War conflicts.

Even though wartime austerity and rationing programs were in place until the mid-1950s, Britain offered the most comprehensive state benefit programs outside Scandinavia. The social-democratic Labour Party took power after the war and ambitiously established a “cradle-to-grave” welfare state. Many British industries were nationalized, including banks, iron and steel industries, and utilities and public transportation networks. The government provided free medical services and hospital care, generous retirement pensions, and unemployment benefits, all subsidized by progressive taxation that pegged tax payments to income levels, with the wealthy paying significantly more than those below them. Although the Labour Party suffered defeats throughout much of the 1950s and early 1960s, its Conservative opponents maintained much of the welfare state when they came to power. Across western Europe, economic growth and state-sponsored benefits systems raised living standards higher than ever before.

Toward European Unity

Though there were important regional differences across much of western Europe, politicians and citizens supported policies that brought together limited state planning, strong economic growth, and democratic government, and this political and social consensus accompanied the first tentative steps on the long road toward a more unified Europe.

A number of new financial arrangements and institutions encouraged slow but steady moves toward European integration, as did cooperation with the United States. To receive Marshall Plan aid, the European states were required by the Americans to cooperate with one another, leading to the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation and the Council of Europe in 1948, both of which promoted commerce and cooperation among European countries.

European federalists hoped that the Council of Europe would evolve into a European parliament with sovereign rights, but this did not happen. Britain, with its still-vast empire and its close relationship with the United States, consistently opposed conceding sovereignty to the council. On the continent, many prominent nationalists and Communists agreed with the British view.

Frustrated in political consolidation, European federalists turned to economics as a way of working toward genuine unity. Christian Democratic governments in West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg founded the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 (the British steadfastly refused to join). The founding states quickly attained their immediate economic goal — a single, transnational market for steel and coal without national tariffs or quotas. Close economic ties, advocates hoped, would eventually bind the six member nations so closely together that war among them would become unthinkable.

In 1957, the six countries of the Coal and Steel Community signed the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community, or Common Market. The first goal of the treaty was a gradual reduction of all tariffs among the six in order to create a single market. Other goals included the free movement of capital and labor and common economic policies and institutions. The Common Market encouraged trade among European states, promoted global exports, and helped build shared resources for the modernization of national industries. European integration thus meant not only increased transnational cooperation but also economic growth on the national level.

In the 1960s, hopes for rapid progress toward political as well as economic union were frustrated by a resurgence of nationalism. French president Charles de Gaulle, re-elected to office in 1958, viewed the United States as the main threat to genuine French (and European) independence. He withdrew all French military forces from what he called an “American-controlled” NATO, developed France’s own nuclear weapons, and vetoed the scheduled advent of majority rule within the Common Market. Thus, the 1950s and 1960s established a lasting pattern: Europeans would establish ever-closer economic ties, but the Common Market remained a union of independent, sovereign states.

The Consumer Revolution

In the late 1950s western Europe’s rapidly expanding economy led to a rising standard of living and remarkable growth in the number and availability of standardized consumer goods. Modern consumer society had precedents in the decades before the Second World War, but the years of the “economic miracle” saw the arrival of a veritable consumer revolution: as the percentage of income spent on necessities such as housing and food declined dramatically, nearly full employment and high wages meant that more Europeans could buy more things than ever before. Shaken by war and eager to rebuild their homes and families, western Europeans embraced the new products of consumer society. Like North Americans, they filled their houses and apartments with modern appliances such as washing machines, and they eagerly purchased the latest entertainment devices of the day: radios, record players, and televisions.

The consumer market became an increasingly important engine for general economic growth. For example, the European automobile industry expanded phenomenally after lagging far behind that of the United States since the 1920s. In 1948 there were only 5 million cars in western Europe; by 1965 there were 44 million. No longer reserved for the elites, car ownership became possible for better-paid workers. With the expansion of social security safeguards reducing the need to accumulate savings for hard times and old age, ordinary people were increasingly willing to take on debt, and new banks and credit unions and even retail outlets increasingly offered loans — or “credit” — for consumer purchases on easy terms.

Traffic Jam in Paris The consumer revolution of the late 1950s brought a rapid increase in the number of privately owned automobiles across western Europe. Major European cities began to experience one of the more unfortunate but increasingly common aspects of postwar life: the traffic jam. Contemporary advertisements, like this 1952 French ad for the Dyna Panhard Junior 130 Sprint, played up the youthful, sporty aspects of the new auto-mobility.

The photo shows a traffic jam in Paris due to privately owned cars. The ad for Dyna Panhard Junior 130 Sprint features a young man driving the Sprint while a bunch of young men and women in sportswear come forward to look at the car.

What were the sources of postwar recovery and stability in western Europe?

In the late 1940s the outlook for Europe appeared bleak. Yet the continent recovered, with the nations of western Europe in the lead. In less than a generation, many western European countries constructed democratic political institutions, while a period of unprecedented economic growth and a consumer revolution brought a sense of prosperity to ever-larger numbers of people. Politicians entered collective economic agreements and established the European Economic Community, the first steps toward broader European unity.

The Search for Political and Social Consensus

In the first years after the war, economic conditions in western Europe were terrible. Infrastructure of all kinds barely functioned, and runaway inflation and a thriving black market testified to severe shortages and hardships. In 1948, as Marshall Plan dollars poured in, the battered economies of western Europe began to improve. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 further stimulated economic activity, and Europe entered a period of rapid economic progress that lasted into the late 1960s. Never before had the European economy grown so fast. By the late 1950s contemporaries were talking about a widespread economic miracle that had brought robust growth to most western European countries.

There were many reasons for this stunning economic performance. American aid got the process off to a fast start. Moreover, economic growth became a basic objective of all western European governments, for leaders and voters alike were determined to avoid a return to the dangerous and demoralizing stagnation of the 1930s.

The postwar governments in western Europe thus embraced new political and economic policies that led to a remarkably lasting social consensus. They turned to liberal democracy and generally adopted Keynesian economics (see “Germany and the Western Powers” in Chapter 26) in successful attempts to stimulate their economies. In addition, whether they leaned to the left or to the right, national leaders in the core European states applied an imaginative mixture of government planning and free-market capitalism to promote economic growth. They nationalized — or established government ownership of — significant sectors of the economy, used economic regulation to encourage growth, and established generous social benefits programs, paid for with high taxes, for all citizens. This consensual framework for good government lasted until the middle of the 1970s.

In politics, a new team of European politicians emerged to guide the postwar recovery. Across the West, newly formed Christian Democratic parties became important power brokers. Rooted in the Catholic parties of the prewar decades, the Christian Democrats offered voters tired of radical politics a center-right vision of reconciliation and recovery. Socialists and Communists, active in the resistance against Hitler, also increased their power and prestige, especially in France and Italy. They, too, provided fresh leadership as they pushed for social change and economic reform.

Across much of continental Europe, the centrist Christian Democrats defeated their left-wing competition. In Italy, the Christian Democrats were the leading party in the first postwar elections in 1946, and in early 1948 they won an absolute majority in the parliament in a landslide victory. In France, the Popular Republican Movement, a Christian Democratic party, provided some of the best postwar leaders after General Charles de Gaulle (duh GOHL) resigned from his position as head of the provisional government in January 1946. West Germans, too, elected a Christian Democratic government from 1949 until 1969.

As they provided effective leadership for their respective countries, Christian Democrats drew inspiration from a common Christian and European heritage. They firmly rejected authoritarianism and narrow nationalism and placed their faith in democracy and liberalism. At the same time, the anticommunist rhetoric of these steadfast cold warriors was unrelenting. Rejecting the class-based politics of the left, they championed a return to traditional family values, a vision with great appeal after a war that left many broken families and destitute households; the Christian Democrats often received a majority of women’s votes.

Following their U.S. allies, Christian Democrats advocated free-market economics and promised voters prosperity and ample supplies of consumer goods. They established education subsidies, family and housing allowances, public transportation, and public health insurance throughout continental Europe. When necessary, Christian Democratic leaders accepted the need for limited government planning. In France, the government established modernization commissions for key industries, and state-controlled banks funneled money into industrial development. In West Germany, the Christian Democrats broke decisively with the straitjacketed Nazi economy and promoted a “social-market economy” based on a combination of free-market liberalism, limited state intervention, and an extensive social benefits network.

Though Portugal, Spain, and Greece generally supported NATO and the United States in the Cold War, they proved exceptions to the rule of democratic transformation outside the Soviet bloc. In Portugal and Spain, nationalist authoritarian regimes had taken power in the 1930s. Portugal’s authoritarian state was overthrown in a left-wing military coup only in 1974, while Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco remained in power until his death in 1975. The authoritarian monarchy established in Greece when the civil war ended in 1949, bolstered by military support and kept in power in a series of army coups, was likewise replaced by a democratic government only in 1975.

By contrast, the Scandinavian countries and Great Britain took decisive turns to the left. Norway, Denmark, and especially Sweden earned a global reputation for long-term Social Democratic governance, generous state-sponsored benefit programs, tolerant lifestyles, and independent attitudes toward Cold War conflicts.

Even though wartime austerity and rationing programs were in place until the mid-1950s, Britain offered the most comprehensive state benefit programs outside Scandinavia. The social-democratic Labour Party took power after the war and ambitiously established a “cradle-to-grave” welfare state. Many British industries were nationalized, including banks, iron and steel industries, and utilities and public transportation networks. The government provided free medical services and hospital care, generous retirement pensions, and unemployment benefits, all subsidized by progressive taxation that pegged tax payments to income levels, with the wealthy paying significantly more than those below them. Although the Labour Party suffered defeats throughout much of the 1950s and early 1960s, its Conservative opponents maintained much of the welfare state when they came to power. Across western Europe, economic growth and state-sponsored benefits systems raised living standards higher than ever before.

Toward European Unity

Though there were important regional differences across much of western Europe, politicians and citizens supported policies that brought together limited state planning, strong economic growth, and democratic government, and this political and social consensus accompanied the first tentative steps on the long road toward a more unified Europe.

A number of new financial arrangements and institutions encouraged slow but steady moves toward European integration, as did cooperation with the United States. To receive Marshall Plan aid, the European states were required by the Americans to cooperate with one another, leading to the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation and the Council of Europe in 1948, both of which promoted commerce and cooperation among European countries.

European federalists hoped that the Council of Europe would evolve into a European parliament with sovereign rights, but this did not happen. Britain, with its still-vast empire and its close relationship with the United States, consistently opposed conceding sovereignty to the council. On the continent, many prominent nationalists and Communists agreed with the British view.

Frustrated in political consolidation, European federalists turned to economics as a way of working toward genuine unity. Christian Democratic governments in West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg founded the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 (the British steadfastly refused to join). The founding states quickly attained their immediate economic goal — a single, transnational market for steel and coal without national tariffs or quotas. Close economic ties, advocates hoped, would eventually bind the six member nations so closely together that war among them would become unthinkable.

In 1957, the six countries of the Coal and Steel Community signed the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community, or Common Market. The first goal of the treaty was a gradual reduction of all tariffs among the six in order to create a single market. Other goals included the free movement of capital and labor and common economic policies and institutions. The Common Market encouraged trade among European states, promoted global exports, and helped build shared resources for the modernization of national industries. European integration thus meant not only increased transnational cooperation but also economic growth on the national level.

In the 1960s, hopes for rapid progress toward political as well as economic union were frustrated by a resurgence of nationalism. French president Charles de Gaulle, re-elected to office in 1958, viewed the United States as the main threat to genuine French (and European) independence. He withdrew all French military forces from what he called an “American-controlled” NATO, developed France’s own nuclear weapons, and vetoed the scheduled advent of majority rule within the Common Market. Thus, the 1950s and 1960s established a lasting pattern: Europeans would establish ever-closer economic ties, but the Common Market remained a union of independent, sovereign states.

The Consumer Revolution

In the late 1950s western Europe’s rapidly expanding economy led to a rising standard of living and remarkable growth in the number and availability of standardized consumer goods. Modern consumer society had precedents in the decades before the Second World War, but the years of the “economic miracle” saw the arrival of a veritable consumer revolution: as the percentage of income spent on necessities such as housing and food declined dramatically, nearly full employment and high wages meant that more Europeans could buy more things than ever before. Shaken by war and eager to rebuild their homes and families, western Europeans embraced the new products of consumer society. Like North Americans, they filled their houses and apartments with modern appliances such as washing machines, and they eagerly purchased the latest entertainment devices of the day: radios, record players, and televisions.

The consumer market became an increasingly important engine for general economic growth. For example, the European automobile industry expanded phenomenally after lagging far behind that of the United States since the 1920s. In 1948 there were only 5 million cars in western Europe; by 1965 there were 44 million. No longer reserved for the elites, car ownership became possible for better-paid workers. With the expansion of social security safeguards reducing the need to accumulate savings for hard times and old age, ordinary people were increasingly willing to take on debt, and new banks and credit unions and even retail outlets increasingly offered loans — or “credit” — for consumer purchases on easy terms.

Traffic Jam in Paris The consumer revolution of the late 1950s brought a rapid increase in the number of privately owned automobiles across western Europe. Major European cities began to experience one of the more unfortunate but increasingly common aspects of postwar life: the traffic jam. Contemporary advertisements, like this 1952 French ad for the Dyna Panhard Junior 130 Sprint, played up the youthful, sporty aspects of the new auto-mobility.

The photo shows a traffic jam in Paris due to privately owned cars. The ad for Dyna Panhard Junior 130 Sprint features a young man driving the Sprint while a bunch of young men and women in sportswear come forward to look at the car.

What was the pattern of postwar development in the Soviet bloc?

In the counties of the East Bloc, the Soviet Union established firm control over the peoples it had supposedly “liberated” during the Second World War. Although reforms after Stalin’s death in 1953 led to economic improvement and limited gains in civil rights, postwar recovery in Communist central and eastern Europe was deeply influenced by developments in the U.S.S.R.

Postwar Life in the East Bloc

The “Great Patriotic War of the Fatherland” had fostered Russian nationalism and a relaxation of dictatorial terror. Even before the war ended, however, Stalin was moving the U.S.S.R. back toward rigid dictatorship, disappointing citizens who hoped for greater freedoms and perhaps a turn to democracy. By early 1946 Stalin maintained that another war with the West was inevitable as long as capitalism existed. Working to extend Communist influence across the globe, the Soviets established the Cominform, or Communist Information Bureau, an international organization dedicated to maintaining Russian control over Communist parties abroad, in western Europe and the East Bloc. Stalin’s new superpower foe, the United States, served as an excuse for re-establishing a harsh dictatorship in the U.S.S.R. itself. Stalin reasserted the Communist Party’s control of the government and his absolute mastery of the party. Rigid ideological indoctrination, attacks on religion, and the absence of civil liberties were soon facts of life for citizens of the Soviet empire. Millions of supposed political enemies were sent to prison, exile, or forced-labor camps.

As discussed earlier, in the satellite states of central and eastern Europe — including East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria — national Communist parties remade state and society on the Soviet model. Though there were significant differences in these East Bloc countries, postwar developments followed a similar pattern. Popular Communist leaders who had led the resistance against Germany were ousted and replaced by politicians who supported Stalinist policies. With Soviet backing, national Communist parties absorbed their Social Democratic rivals and established one-party dictatorships subservient to the Communist Party in Moscow. State security services arrested, imprisoned, and sometimes executed dissenters. Show trials of supposedly disloyal Communist Party leaders took place across the East Bloc from the late 1940s into the 1950s, but were particularly prominent in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. The trials testified to the influence of Soviet advisers and the unrestrained power of the domestic secret police in the satellite states, as well as Stalin’s urge to establish complete control — and his increasing paranoia.

Yugoslavia was an exception to the general rule of Communist takeover. There Josip Broz Tito (TEE-toh) (1892–1980), a Communist leader active in the anti-Nazi resistance, successfully resisted Soviet domination and established an independent Communist state. Because there was no Russian army in Yugoslavia, the country remained outside of the Soviet bloc and prospered as a multiethnic state until it began to break apart in 1991.

Within the East Bloc, the newly installed Communist governments moved quickly to restructure national economies along Soviet lines, introducing five-year plans to cope with the enormous task of economic reconstruction. Most industries and businesses were nationalized. These efforts transformed prewar patterns of everyday life, even as they laid the groundwork for industrial development later in the decade.

Nowa Huta, A Model Polish Steel Town Steel was the idol of the Stalinist era, and model steel factory cities were established across the East Bloc. Nowa Huta (New Foundry), erected in the early 1950s on the outskirts of the Polish city of Kraków, epitomized the model. The monumental Central Square, pictured here, was the center of the planned city. Streets radiated out into blocks of modern apartment buildings that housed the men and women who worked in the massive steel complex in the background.

In their attempts to revive the economy, Communist planners gave top priority to heavy industry and the military. At the same time, East Bloc planners neglected consumer goods and housing, in part because they were generally suspicious of Western-style consumer culture. A glut of consumer goods, they believed, created waste, encouraged rampant individualism, and led to social inequality. Thus, for practical and ideological reasons, the provision of consumer goods lagged in the East Bloc, leading to complaints and widespread disillusionment with the constantly deferred promise of socialist prosperity.

Communist regimes also moved aggressively to collectivize agriculture, as the Soviets had done in the 1930s (see “The Five Year Plans” in Chapter 27). By the early 1960s independent farmers had virtually disappeared in most of the East Bloc. Poland was the exception: there the Stalinist regime tolerated the existence of private agriculture, hoping to maintain stability in the large and potentially rebellious country.

For many people in the East Bloc, everyday life was hard throughout the 1950s. Socialist planned economies often led to production problems and persistent shortages of basic household items. Party leaders encouraged workers to perform almost superhuman labor to “build socialism,” often for low pay and under poor conditions. In East Germany, popular discontent with this situation led to open revolt in June 1953. A strike by Berlin construction workers protesting poor wages and increased work quotas led to nationwide demonstrations that were put down with Soviet troops and tanks. At least fifty-five protesters were killed and about five thousand were arrested during the uprising. When the revolt ended, the authorities rescinded the increased work quotas, but hardliner Stalinists within the East German government used the conflict to strengthen their position.

Rebellion in East Germany In June 1953 disgruntled construction workers in East Berlin walked off the job to protest low pay and high work quotas, setting off a nationwide rebellion against the Communist regime. The protesters could do little against the Soviet tanks and troops that put down the revolt.

Communist censors purged culture and art of independent voices in aggressive campaigns that imposed rigid anti-Western ideological conformity. In the 1950s and 1960s the Communist states required artists and writers to conform to the dictates of Socialist Realism, which idealized the working classes and the Soviet Union. Party propagandists denounced artists who strayed from the party line and forced many talented writers, composers, and film directors to produce works that conformed to the state’s political goals. In short, the postwar East Bloc resembled the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s, although police terror was far less intense.

Reform and De-Stalinization

In 1953 the aging Stalin finally died, and the dictatorship that he had built began to change. Even as Stalin’s heirs struggled for power, they realized that reforms were necessary because of the widespread hardship created by Stalinist repression. The new leadership curbed the power of the secret police, gradually closed many forced-labor camps, and tried to spur economic growth, which had sputtered in the postwar years. Moreover, Stalin’s belligerent foreign policy had led directly to a strong Western alliance, which had taken steps to isolate the Soviet Union.

The Soviet leadership was badly split on the question of just how much change could be permitted while still preserving the system. Conservatives wanted to move slowly. Reformers, led by the remarkable Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), argued for major innovations. Khrushchev (kroush-CHAWF), who had joined the party as a coal miner in 1918 and risen to a high-level position in Ukraine in the 1930s, emerged as the new Soviet premier in 1955.

To strengthen his position and that of his fellow reformers, Khrushchev launched a surprising attack on Stalin and his crimes at a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956. In his famous “secret speech,” Khrushchev told Communist delegates startled by his open admission of errors that Stalin had “supported the glorification of his own person with all conceivable methods” to build a propagandistic “cult of personality.” The delegates applauded when Khrushchev reported that Stalin had bungled the country’s defense in World War II and unjustly imprisoned and tortured thousands of loyal Communists. (See “Evaluating Written Evidence: De-Stalinization and Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech.’”)

The U.S.S.R. now entered a period of genuine liberalization — or de-Stalinization, as it was called in the West. Khrushchev’s speech was read at Communist Party meetings held throughout the country, and it strengthened the reform movement. The party maintained its monopoly on political power, but Khrushchev enlisted younger, reform-minded members. Calling for a relaxation of tensions with the West, the new premier announced a policy of “peaceful coexistence.” In domestic policies, state planners shifted resources from heavy industry and the military toward consumer goods and agriculture, and they relaxed Stalinist workplace controls. Leaders in other Communist countries grudgingly adopted similar reforms, and the East Bloc’s generally low standard of living began to improve.

Khrushchev was proud of Soviet achievements and liked to boast that East Bloc living standards and How did decolonization proceed in the Cold War era?

In one of world history’s great turning points during the Cold War era, Europe’s long-standing overseas expansion was dramatically reversed. The retreat from imperial control — a process Europeans called decolonization — was profoundly influenced by Cold War conflicts and remade the world map. In just two decades, over fifty new nations joined the global community (Map 28.3). In some cases, decolonization proceeded relatively smoothly. In others, colonized peoples won independence only after long and bloody struggles.

MAP 28.3 Decolonization in Africa and Asia, 1947 to the Present Divided primarily along religious lines into two states, British India led the way to political independence in 1947. Most African territories achieved statehood by the mid-1960s as European empires passed away, unlamented.

“The map shows the following.

Colonial confl¬ict. Indonesia, Malaysia, South Vietnam, Cyprus, P. D. R. of Yemen, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Angola, Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde.

Postcolonial con¬flict. Papua New Guinea, South Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Indonesia, the Philippines, the northern and eastern regions of India, Bangladesh, P.D.R. of Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Nigeria, Chad, Ghana, Algeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Cape Verde.

Former Rulers and the year of independence achieved.

Great Britain. Egypt (1922), Iraq (1932), Jordan (1946), Myanmar (Burma, 1947), Pakistan (1947), Bangladesh (a part of Pakistan in 1947, gained independence in 1971), India (1947), Sri Lanka (Ceylon, 1948), Israel (1948), Sudan (1956), Ghana (1957), Nigeria (1960), Cyprus (1960), Kuwait (1961), South Africa (Republic 1961), Sierra Leone (1961), Uganda (1962), Rwanda (1962), Burundi (1962), Malaysia (1963), Kenya (1963), Tanzania (1964), Malawi (1964), Zambia (1964), Malta (1964), Gambia (1965), Botswana (1966), Lesotho (1966), P.D.R. of Yemen 1967 (Unified 1990), Swaziland (1968), Mauritius (1968), Oman (1971), Qatar (1971), United Arab Emirates (1971), Bahrain (1971), Maldives (1975), Seychelles (1976), Zimbabwe (1980), and Brunei (1984).

France. Lebanon (1944), Syria (1944), Laos (1949), Cambodia (1953), North Vietnam (1954, Unified 1975), South Vietnam (1954, Unified 1975), Morocco (1956), Tunisia (1957), Guinea (1958), Madagascar (1960), Gabon (1960), Republic of Congo (1960), Cameroon (1960), Central African Republic (1960), Chad (1960), Niger (1960), Benin (1960), Togo (1960), Burkina Faso (1960), Mali (1960), Côte D’Ivoire (1960), Senegal (1960), Mauritania (1960), Algeria (1962), Comoros (1975), Djibouti (1977)

The Netherlands. Indonesia (1949).

Italy. Libya (1951), Somalia (1960).

Belgium. Democratic Republic of Congo (1960).

Portugal. Guinea-Bissau (1945), Mozambique (1974), Angola (1975), São Tomé and Príncipe (1975), and Cape Verde (1975).

United States. The Philippines (1946).

Others. Liberia (1820s), North Korea (1948, from Japan), South Korea (1948, from Japan), Singapore (1965, from Malaysia), Equatorial Guinea (1968, from Spain), Papa New Guinea (1975, from Australia), Western Sahara (Morocco, 1975, from Spain), Namibia (1990, from South Africa), Eritrea (1993, from Ethiopia), Timor-Leste (1999, from Indonesia), and South Sudan (2011, from Sudan). ”

Decolonization and the Global Cold War

The most basic cause of imperial collapse was the rising demand of non-Western peoples for national self-determination, racial equality, and personal dignity. This demand spread from intellectuals to ordinary people in nearly every colonial territory after the First World War. By 1939 the colonial powers were already on the defensive; the Second World War prepared the way for the eventual triumph of independence movements.

European empires had been based on an enormous power differential between the rulers and the ruled, a difference that had greatly declined by 1945. Western Europe was economically devastated and militarily weak immediately after the war. Moreover, the Japanese had driven imperial rulers from large parts of East Asia during the war in the Pacific, shattering the myth of European superiority and invincibility. In Southeast Asia, European imperialists confronted strong anticolonial nationalist movements that re-emerged with new enthusiasm after the defeat of the Japanese.

To some degree, the Great Powers regarded their empires very differently after 1945. Empire had rested on self-confidence and self-righteousness; Europeans had believed their superiority to be not only technical and military but also spiritual, racial, and moral. The horrors of the First and Second World Wars undermined such complacent arrogance and gave opponents of imperialism much greater influence in Europe. Increasing pressure from the United States, which had long presented itself as an enemy of empire despite its own imperialist actions in the Philippines and the Americas, encouraged Europeans to let go. Indeed, Americans were eager to extend their own influence in Europe’s former colonies. Economically weakened, and with their political power and moral authority in tatters, the imperial powers preferred to avoid bloody colonial wars and generally turned to rebuilding at home.

Furthermore, the imperial powers faced dedicated anticolonial resistance. Popular politicians, including China’s Mao Zedong, India’s Mohandas Gandhi, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, and many others provided determined leadership in the struggle against European imperialism. A new generation of intellectuals, such as Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, both from Martinique, wrote trenchant critiques of imperial power, often rooted in Marxist ideas. Anticolonial politicians and intellectuals alike helped inspire colonized peoples to resist and overturn imperial rule.

Around the globe, the Cold War had an inescapable impact on decolonization. Liberation from colonial rule had long been a central goal for proponents of Communist world revolution. The Soviets and, after 1949, the Communist Chinese advocated rebellion in the developing world and promised to help end colonial exploitation and bring freedom and equality in a socialist state. They supported Communist independence movements with economic and military aid, and the guerrilla insurgent armed with a Soviet-made AK-47 machine gun became the new symbol of Marxist revolution.

Western Europe and particularly the United States offered a competing vision of independence, based on free-market economics and, ostensibly, liberal democracy — though the United States was often willing to support authoritarian regimes that voiced staunch anticommunism. Like the U.S.S.R., the United States extended economic aid and weaponry to decolonizing nations. The Americans promoted cautious moves toward self-determination in the context of containment, attempting to limit the influence of communism in newly liberated states.

After they had won independence, the leaders of the new nations often found themselves trapped between the superpowers, compelled to voice support for one bloc or the other. Many new leaders followed a third way and adopted a policy of nonalignment, remaining neutral in the Cold War and playing both sides for what they could get.

The Struggle for Power in Asia

The first major fight for independence that followed World War II, between the Netherlands and anticolonial insurgents in Indonesia, in many ways exemplified decolonization in the rest of the Cold War world. The Dutch had been involved in Indonesia since the early seventeenth century (see “The Birth of the Global Economy” in Chapter 14) and had extended their colonial power over the centuries. During World War II, however, the Japanese had overrun the archipelago, encouraging hopes among the locals for independence from Western control. Following the Japanese defeat in 1945, the Dutch returned, hoping to use Indonesia’s raw materials, particularly rubber, to support economic recovery at home. But Dutch imperialists faced a determined group of rebels inspired by a powerful combination of nationalism, Marxism, and Islam. Four years of deadly guerrilla war followed, and in 1949 the Netherlands reluctantly accepted Indonesian independence. The new Indonesian president became an effective advocate of nonalignment. He had close ties to the Indonesian Communist Party but received foreign aid from the United States as well as the Soviet Union.

A similar combination of communism and anticolonialism inspired the independence movement in parts of French Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), though noncommunist nationalists were also involved. France desperately wished to maintain control over these prized colonies and tried its best to re-establish colonial rule after the Japanese occupation collapsed. Despite substantial American aid, the French army fighting in Vietnam was defeated in 1954 by forces under the guerrilla leader Ho Chi Minh (hoh chee mihn) (1890–1969), who was supported by the U.S.S.R. and China. Vietnam was divided. As in Korea, a shaky truce established a Communist North and a pro-Western South Vietnam, which led to civil war and subsequent intervention by the United States. Cambodia and Laos also gained independence under noncommunist regimes, though Communist rebels remained active in both countries.

India — Britain’s oldest, largest, and most lucrative imperial possession — played a key role in the decolonization process. Nationalist opposition to British rule coalesced after the First World War under the leadership of British-educated lawyer Mohandas (sometimes called “Mahatma,” or “Great-Souled”) Gandhi (1869–1948), one of the twentieth century’s most influential figures. In the 1920s and 1930s Gandhi (GAHN-dee) built a mass movement preaching nonviolent “noncooperation” with the British. In 1935 he wrested from the frustrated and unnerved British a new, liberal constitution that was practically a blueprint for independence. The Second World War interrupted progress toward Indian self-rule, but when the Labour Party came to power in Great Britain in 1945, it was ready to relinquish sovereignty. British socialists had long been critics of imperialism, and the heavy cost of governing India had become a large financial burden to the war-wracked country.

Britain withdrew peacefully, but conflict between India’s Hindu and Muslim populations posed a lasting dilemma for South Asia. As independence neared, the Muslim minority grew increasingly anxious about their status in an India dominated by the Hindu majority. Muslim leaders called for partition — the division of India into separate Hindu and Muslim states — and the British agreed. When independence was made official on August 15, 1947, predominantly Muslim territories on India’s eastern and western borders became Pakistan (the eastern section is today’s Bangladesh). Seeking relief from the ethnic conflict that erupted, millions of What were the key changes in social relations in postwar Europe?

While Europe staged its astonishing recovery from the Nazi nightmare and colonized peoples won independence, the basic structures of Western society were also in transition. A changing class structure, new patterns of global migration, and new roles for women and youths had dramatic impacts on everyday life, albeit with different effects in the East Bloc and western Europe.

Changing Class Structures

The combination of rapid economic growth, growing prosperity and mass consumption, and the provision of generous, state-sponsored social benefit programs went a long way toward creating a new society in Europe after the Second World War. Old class barriers relaxed, and class distinctions became fuzzier.

Changes in the structure of the middle class were particularly important. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the model for the middle class had been the independent, self-employed individual who owned a business or practiced a liberal profession such as law or medicine. Ownership of property — frequently inherited property — and strong family ties had often been the keys to wealth and standing within the middle class. After 1945 this pattern changed drastically in western Europe. A new breed of managers and experts — so-called white-collar workers — replaced property owners as the leaders of the middle class. The ability to earn an ample income largely replaced inherited property and family connections in determining an individual’s social position in the middle and upper-middle classes. At the same time, the middle class grew massively and became harder to define.

There were several reasons for these developments. Rapid industrial and technological expansion and the consolidation of businesses created a powerful demand for technologists and managers in large corporations and government agencies. Moreover, the old propertied middle class lost control of many family-owned businesses. Numerous small businesses (including family farms) could no longer turn a profit, so their former owners regretfully joined the ranks of salaried employees.

Similar processes were at work in the East Bloc, where class leveling was an avowed goal of the authoritarian socialist state. The nationalization of industry, expropriation of property, and aggressive attempts to open employment opportunities to workers and equalize wage structures effectively reduced class differences. Communist Party members typically received better jobs and more pay than nonmembers, but by the 1960s the income differential between the top and bottom strata of East Bloc societies was far smaller than in the West.

In both East and West, managers and civil servants represented the model for a new middle class. Well paid and highly trained, often with professional degrees, these pragmatic experts were primarily concerned with efficiency and practical solutions to concrete problems.

The structure of the lower classes also became more flexible and open. Continuing trends that began in the nineteenth century, large numbers of people left the countryside for the city. The population of one of the most traditional and least mobile groups in European society — farmers — drastically declined. Meanwhile, the number of industrial workers in western Europe began to fall, as new jobs for white-collar and service employees grew rapidly. This change marked a significant transition in the world of labor. The social benefits extended by postwar governments also helped promote greater equality because they raised lower-class living standards and were paid for in part by higher taxes on the wealthy. In general, European workers were better educated and more specialized than before, and the new workforce bore a greater resemblance to the growing middle class of salaried specialists than to traditional industrial workers. LOOKING BACK / LOOKING AHEAD

The unprecedented human and physical destruction of World War II left Europeans shaken, searching in the ruins for new livelihoods and a workable political order. A tension-filled peace settlement left the continent divided into two hostile political-military blocs, and the resulting Cold War, complete with the possibility of atomic annihilation, threatened to explode into open confrontation. Albert Einstein voiced a common anxiety when he said, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Despite such fears, the division of Europe led to the emergence of a stable world system. In the West Bloc, economic growth, state provision of social benefits, and the strong NATO alliance engendered social and political consensus. In the East Bloc, a combination of political repression and partial reform likewise limited dissent and encouraged stability. During the height of the Cold War, Europe’s former colonies won liberation in a process that was often flawed but that nonetheless resulted in political independence for millions of people. And large-scale transformations, including the rise of Big Science and rapid economic growth, opened new opportunities for women and immigrants and contributed to stability on both sides of the iron curtain.

By the early 1960s Europeans had entered a remarkable age of affluence that almost eliminated real poverty on most of the continent. Superpower confrontations had led not to European war but to peaceful coexistence. The following decades, however, would see substantial challenges to this postwar consensus. Youth revolts and a determined feminist movement, an oil crisis and a deep economic recession, and political dissent and revolution in the East Bloc would shake and remake the foundations of Western society.

Human Rights Under the Helsinki Accords

At the conclusion of the two-year-long Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (1973–1975), the representatives of thirty-five West and East Bloc states solemnly pledged to “respect each other’s sovereign equality” and to “refrain from any intervention, direct or indirect … in the internal or external affairs … of another participating state.” East Bloc leaders, pleased that the West had at last officially accepted the frontiers and territorial integrity of the Communist satellite states established after World War II, agreed to recognize a lengthy list of “civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms.”

Principle VII on Human Rights and Freedoms, from the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (August 1, 1975)

VII. Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief

The participating States will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.

They will promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural and other rights and freedoms all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person and are essential for his free and full development.

Within this framework the participating States will recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience.

The participating States on whose territory national minorities exist will respect the right of persons belonging to such minorities to equality before the law, will afford them the full opportunity for the actual enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms and will, in this manner, protect their legitimate interests in this sphere.

The participating States recognize the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for which is an essential factor for the peace, justice and well-being necessary to ensure the development of friendly relations and co-operation among themselves as among all States.

They will constantly respect these rights and freedoms in their mutual relations and will endeavor jointly and separately, including in co-operation with the United Nations, to promote universal and effective respect for them.

They confirm the right of the individual to know and act upon his rights and duties in this field.

In the field of human rights and fundamental freedoms, the participating States will act in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They will also fulfill their obligations as set forth in the international declarations and agreements in this field, including inter alia the International Covenants on Human Rights, by which they may be bound. The Affluent Society

While politics shifted to the left in the 1960s, Europe entered a decade of economic growth and high wages, which meant that an expanding middle class could increasingly enjoy the benefits of the consumer revolution that began in the 1950s. Yet this so-called age of affluence had clear limits. The living standards of workers and immigrants did not rise as fast as those of the educated middle classes, and the expanding economy did not always reach underdeveloped regions, such as southern Italy. The 1960s nonetheless brought general prosperity to millions, and the consolidation of a full-blown consumer society had a profound impact on daily life.

Many Europeans now had more money to spend on leisure time and recreational pursuits, which encouraged the growth of the tourist industry. With month-long paid vacations required by law in most western European countries and widespread automobile ownership, travel to beaches and ski resorts came within the reach of the middle class and much of the working class. By the late 1960s packaged tours with cheap group airfares and bargain hotel accommodations had made even distant lands easily accessible.

Consumerism also changed life at home. Household appliances that were still luxuries in the 1950s were now commonplace; televisions overtook radio as a popular form of domestic entertainment while vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, and washing machines transformed women’s housework. Studies later showed that these new “laborsaving devices” caused women to spend even more time cleaning and cooking to new exacting standards, but at the time electric appliances were considered indispensable to what contemporaries called a “modern lifestyle.” The establishment of U.S.-style self-service supermarkets across western Europe changed the way food was produced, purchased, and prepared and threatened to force independent bakers, butchers, and neighborhood grocers out of business.

Intellectuals and cultural critics greeted the age of affluence with a chorus of criticism. Some worried that rampant consumerism created a bland conformity that wiped out regional and national traditions. The great majority of ordinary people, they argued, now ate the same foods, wore the same clothes, and watched the same programs on television, sapping creativity and individualism. Others complained bitterly that these changes threatened to Americanize Europe. Neither group could do much to stop the spread of consumer culture.

Worries about the Americanization of Europe were overstated. European nations preserved distinctive national cultures even during the consumer revolution, but social change nonetheless occurred. The moral authority of religious doctrine lost ground before the growing materialism of consumer society. In predominantly Protestant lands — Great Britain, Scandinavia, and parts of West Germany — church membership and regular attendance both declined significantly. Even in traditionally Catholic countries, such as Italy, Ireland, and France, outward signs of popular belief seemed to falter. At the Second Vatican Council, convened from 1962 to 1965, Catholic leaders agreed on a number of reforms meant to democratize and renew the church and broaden its appeal. They called for new openness in Catholic theology and declared that masses would henceforth be held in local languages rather than in Latin, which few could understand. These resolutions, however, did little to halt the slide toward secularization.

Family ties also weakened in the age of affluence. The number of adults living alone reached new highs, men and women married later, the nuclear family became smaller and more mobile, and divorce rates rose rapidly. By the 1970s the baby boom of the postwar decades was over, and population growth leveled out across Europe and even began to decline in prosperous northwestern Europe. The Counterculture Movement

The dramatic emergence of a youthful counterculture accompanied growing economic prosperity. The “sixties generation” angrily criticized the comforts of the affluent society and challenged the social and political status quo.

Simple demographics played an important role in the emergence of the counterculture. Young soldiers returning home after World War II in 1945 eagerly established families, and the next two decades brought a dramatic increase in the number of births per year in Europe and North America. The children born during the postwar baby boom grew up in an era of political liberalism and unprecedented material abundance, yet many came to challenge the growing conformity that seemed to be a part of consumer society and the unequal distribution of wealth that arose from market economics.

Braniff Airways Hostesses, ca. 1968 Sporting the latest “mod” styles, hostesses for Braniff International Airways wear uniforms made by world-renowned Italian fashion designer Emilio Pucci. The 1960s counterculture helped popularize the use of kaleidoscopic fluorescent colors and wild shapes in fashion, the fine arts, and advertising.

Counterculture movements in both Europe and the United States drew inspiration from the American civil rights movement. In the late 1950s and early 1960s African Americans effectively challenged institutionalized inequality, using the courts, public demonstrations, sit-ins, and boycotts to throw off a deeply entrenched system of segregation and repression. If dedicated African Americans and their white supporters could successfully reform entrenched power structures, student leaders reasoned, so could they. In 1964 and 1965, at the University of California–Berkeley, students consciously adapted the tactics of the civil rights movement, including demonstrations and sit-ins, to challenge limits on free speech and academic freedom at the university. Soon students across the United States and western Europe, where rigid rules controlled student activities at overcrowded universities, were engaged in active protests. The youth movement had come of age, and it mounted a determined challenge to the Western consensus.

Eager for economic justice and more tolerant societies, student activists in western Europe and the United States embraced new forms of Marxism, creating a multidimensional movement that came to be known as the New Left. In general, adherents of the various strands of the New Left believed that Marxism in the Soviet Union had been perverted to serve the needs of a repressive totalitarian state but that Western capitalism, with its cold disregard for social equality, was little better. What was needed was a more humanitarian style of socialism that could avoid the worst excesses of both capitalism and Soviet-style communism. New Left critics further attacked what they saw as the conformity of consumer society.

New Left ideas inspired student intellectuals, but much counterculture activity revolved around a lifestyle rebellion that had broad appeal. Politics and daily life merged, a process captured in the popular 1960s slogan “the personal is political.” Nowhere was this more obvious than in the so-called sexual revolution. The 1960s brought frank discussion about sexuality, a new willingness to engage in premarital sex, and a growing acceptance of homosexuality. Sexual experimentation was facilitated by the development of the birth control pill, which helped eliminate the risk of unwanted pregnancy for millions of women after it went on the market in most Western countries in the 1960s. Much of the new openness about sex crossed generational lines, but for the young the idea of sexual emancipation was closely linked to radical politics. Sexual openness and “free love,” the sixties generation claimed, moved people beyond traditional norms and might also shape a more humane society.

The revolutionary aspects of the sexual revolution are easily exaggerated. According to a poll of West German college students taken in 1968, for example, the overwhelming majority wished to establish permanent families on traditional middle-class models. Yet the sexual behavior of young people did change in the 1960s and 1970s. More young people engaged in premarital sex, and they did so at an earlier age than ever before. A 1973 study reported that only 4.5 percent of West German youths born in 1945 and 1946 had experienced sexual relations before their seventeenth birthday, but that 32 percent of those born in 1953 and 1954 had done so.2 Such trends were found in other Western countries and continued in the following decades.

Along with sexual freedom, drug use and rock music encouraged lifestyle rebellion. Taking drugs challenged conventional morals; in the infamous words of the U.S. cult figure Timothy Leary, users could “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” The popular music of the 1960s championed these alternative lifestyles. Rock bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and many others sang songs about drugs and casual sex. Counterculture “scenes” developed in cities such as San Francisco, Paris, and West Berlin. Carnaby Street, the center of “swinging London” in the 1960s, was world famous for its clothing boutiques and record stores, underscoring the connections between generational revolt and consumer culture.The United States and Vietnam

The growth of the counterculture movement was closely linked to the escalation of the Vietnam War. Although many student radicals at the time argued that imperialism was the main cause, American involvement in Vietnam was more clearly a product of the Cold War policy of containment. After Vietnam won independence from France in 1954, U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower (U.S. pres. 1953–1961) refused to sign the Geneva Accords that temporarily divided the country into a Communist north and an anticommunist south. When the South Vietnamese government declined to hold free elections that would unify the two zones, Eisenhower provided the south with military aid to combat guerrilla insurgents in South Vietnam who were supported by the Communist north.

President John F. Kennedy (U.S. pres. 1961–1963) increased the number of American “military advisers” to 16,000, and in 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson (U.S. pres. 1963–1969) greatly expanded America’s role in the conflict, providing South Vietnam with massive military aid and eventually some 500,000 American troops. Though the United States bombed North Vietnam with ever-greater intensity, it did not invade the north or set up a naval blockade.

In the end, American intervention backfired. The undeclared war in Vietnam, fought nightly on American television, eventually divided the nation. Initial support was strong. The politicians, the media, and the population as a whole saw the war as part of a legitimate defense against the spread of Communist totalitarianism. But an antiwar movement that believed that the United States was fighting an immoral and imperialistic war against a small country and a heroic people quickly emerged on college campuses. In October 1965 student protesters joined forces with old-line socialists, New Left intellectuals, and pacifists in antiwar demonstrations in fifty American cities. The protests spread to western Europe. By 1967 a growing number of U.S. and European critics denounced the American presence in Vietnam as a criminal intrusion into another people’s civil war.

Criticism reached a crescendo after the Vietcong staged the Tet Offensive in January 1968, the Communists’ first comprehensive attack on major South Vietnamese cities. The Vietcong, an army of Communist insurgents and guerrilla fighters located in South Vietnam, suffered heavy losses, but the Tet Offensive signaled that the war was not close to ending, as Washington had claimed. The American people grew increasingly weary of the war and pressured their leaders to stop the fighting. Within months of Tet, President Johnson announced that he would not stand for re-election and called for negotiations with North Vietnam.

President Richard M. Nixon (U.S. pres. 1969–1974) sought to gradually disengage America from Vietnam once he took office. Nixon intensified the bombing campaign against the north, opened peace talks, and pursued a policy of “Vietnamization” designed to give the South Vietnamese responsibility for the war and reduce the U.S. presence. He suspended the draft and cut American forces in Vietnam from 550,000 to 24,000 in four years. In 1973 Nixon finally reached a peace agreement with North Vietnam and the Vietcong that allowed the remaining American forces to complete their withdrawal and gave the United States the right to resume bombing if the accords were broken. Fighting declined markedly in South Vietnam, where the South Vietnamese army appeared to hold its own against the Vietcong.

Although the storm of criticism in the United States passed with the peace settlement, America’s disillusionment with the war had far-reaching repercussions. In late 1974, when North Vietnam launched a successful invasion against South Vietnamese armies, the U.S. Congress refused to permit any American military response. In April 1975 the last U.S. troops were evacuated from Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, and in July 1976 North and South Vietnam were unified under a Communist regime, ending a conflict that had begun with the anticolonial struggle against the French at the end of World War II. The 1960s in the East Bloc

The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 suggested that communism was there to stay, and NATO’s refusal to intervene showed that the United States and western Europe basically accepted this premise. In the West, the wall became a symbol of the repressive nature of communism in the East Bloc, where halting experiments with economic and cultural liberalization brought only limited reform.

East Bloc economies clearly lagged behind those of the West, exposing the weaknesses of central planning. To address these problems, in the 1960s Communist governments implemented cautious forms of decentralization and limited market policies. The results were mixed. Hungary’s so-called New Economic Mechanism, which broke up state monopolies, allowed some private retail stores, and encouraged private agriculture, was perhaps most successful. East Germany’s New Economic System, inaugurated in 1963, also brought moderate success, though it was reversed when the government returned to centralization in the late 1960s. In other East Bloc countries, however, economic growth flagged; in Poland the economy stagnated in the 1960s.

Recognizing that ordinary people in the East Bloc were growing tired of the shortages of basic consumer goods caused by the overwhelming emphasis on heavy industry, Communist planning commissions began to redirect resources to the consumer sector. Again, the results varied. By 1970, for example, ownership of televisions in the more developed nations of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary approached that of the affluent nations of western Europe, and other consumer goods were also more available. In the more conservative Albania and Romania, where leaders held fast to Stalinist practices, provision of consumer goods faltered.

The East German Trabant This small East German passenger car, pictured here in a 1980s advertisement, was one of the best-known symbols of everyday life in East Germany. Produced between 1963 and 1990, the cars were notorious for their poor engineering. The growing number of “Trabis” on East German streets nonetheless testified to the increased availability of consumer goods in the East Bloc in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1960s Communist regimes cautiously granted cultural freedoms. In the Soviet Union, the cultural thaw allowed dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to publish critical works of fiction (see “Reform and De-Stalinization” in Chapter 28), and this relative tolerance spread to other East Bloc countries as well. In East Germany, for example, during the Bitterfeld Movement — named after a conference of writers, officials, and workers held at Bitterfeld, an industrial city south of Berlin — the regime encouraged intellectuals to take a more critical view of life in the East Bloc, as long as they did not directly oppose communism.

Cultural openness only went so far, however. The most outspoken dissidents were harassed and often forced to emigrate to the West; others went underground, creating books, periodicals, newspapers, and pamphlets that were printed secretly and passed hand to hand by dissident readers. This samizdat (“self-published”) literature emerged in Russia, Poland, and other countries in the mid-1950s and blossomed in the 1960s. These unofficial networks of communication kept critical thought alive and built contacts among dissidents, creating the foundation for the reform movements of the 1970s and 1980s.

The citizens of East Bloc countries sought political liberty as well, and the limits on reform were sharply revealed in Czechoslovakia during the 1968 “Prague Spring” (named for the country’s capital city). In January 1968 reform elements in the Czechoslovak Communist Party gained a majority and voted out the long-time Stalinist leader in favor of Alexander Dubček (1921–1992), whose new government launched dramatic reforms. Educated in Moscow, Dubček (DOOB-chehk) was a dedicated Communist, but he and his allies believed that they could reconcile genuine socialism with personal freedom and party democracy. They called for relaxed state censorship and replaced rigid bureaucratic planning with local decision making by trade unions, workers’ councils, and consumers. The reform program — labeled “Socialism with a Human Face” — proved enormously popular.

Remembering that the Hungarian revolution had revealed the difficulty of reforming communism from within, Dubček constantly proclaimed his loyalty to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. But his reforms nevertheless threatened hard-line Communists, particularly in Poland and East Germany, where leaders knew full well that they lacked popular support. Moreover, Soviet authorities feared that a liberalized Czechoslovakia would eventually be drawn to neutrality or even to NATO. Thus the East Bloc leadership launched a concerted campaign of intimidation against the reformers. Finally, in August 1968, five hundred thousand Soviet and East Bloc troops occupied Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovaks made no attempt to resist militarily, and the arrested leaders surrendered to Soviet demands. The Czechoslovak experiment in humanizing communism from within came to an end.

The Invasion of Czechoslovakia Armed with Czechoslovakian flags and Molotov cocktails, courageous Czechs in downtown Prague in August 1968 try to stop a Soviet tank and repel the invasion and occupation of their country by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. Realizing that military resistance would be suicidal, the Czechs capitulated to Soviet control.

Shortly after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) announced that the U.S.S.R. would now follow the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, under which the Soviet Union and its allies had the right to intervene militarily in any East Bloc country whenever they thought doing so was necessary to preserve Communist rule. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia was the crucial event of the Brezhnev era: it demonstrated the determination of the Communist elite to maintain the status quo throughout the Soviet bloc, which would last for another twenty years. At the same time, the Soviet crackdown encouraged dissidents to change their focus from “reforming” Communist regimes from within to building a civil society that might bring internal freedoms independent of Communist repression. The New Conservatism

The transition to a postindustrial society was led to a great extent by a new generation of conservative political leaders, who believed they had viable solutions for restructuring the relations between the state and the economy. During the thirty years following World War II, both Social Democrats and the more conservative Christian Democrats had usually agreed that economic growth and social stability were best achieved through full employment and high wages, some government regulation, and generous social benefit programs. In the late 1970s, however, with a weakened economy and increased global competition, this consensus began to unravel. Whether politics turned to the right, as in Great Britain, the United States, and West Germany, or to the left, as in France and Spain, leaders moved to cut government spending and regulation in attempts to improve economic performance.

The new conservatives of the 1980s followed a philosophy that came to be known as neoliberalism because of its roots in the free market, laissez-faire policies favored by eighteenth-century liberal economists such as Adam Smith (see “Adam Smith and Economic Liberalism” in Chapter 17). Neoliberal theorists like U.S. economist Milton Friedman argued that governments should cut support for social services, including housing, education, and health insurance; limit business subsidies; and retreat from regulation of all kinds. (Neoliberalism should be distinguished from modern American liberalism, which generally supports social programs and some state regulation of the economy.) Neoliberals also called for privatization — the sale of state-managed industries to private owners. Placing government-owned industries such as transportation and communication networks and heavy industry in private hands, they argued, would both reduce government spending and lead to greater workplace efficiency. A central goal was to increase private profits, which neoliberals believed were the real engine of economic growth.

The effects of neoliberal policies are best illustrated by events in Great Britain. The broad shift toward greater conservatism, coupled with growing voter dissatisfaction with high taxes and runaway state budgets, helped elect Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) prime minister in 1979. A member of the Conservative Party and a convinced neoliberal, Thatcher was determined to scale back the role of government, and in the 1980s — the “Thatcher years” — she pushed through a series of controversial free-market policies that transformed Britain. Thatcher’s government cut spending on health care, education, and public housing; reduced taxes; and privatized or sold off governmentrun enterprises. In one of her most popular actions, Thatcher encouraged low- and moderate-income renters in state-owned housing projects to buy their apartments at rock-bottom prices. This initiative, part of Thatcher’s broader privatization campaign, created a whole new class of property owners, thereby eroding the electoral base of Britain’s socialist Labour Party. (See “Individuals in Society: Margaret Thatcher.”)

The Social Consequences of Thatcherism During the National Miners Strike of 1984, this group of about forty miners’ wives took part in a sponsored demonstration to raise cash to help the strikers’ families. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher broke the strike, weakening the power of Britain’s trade unions and easing the turn to free-market economic reforms. Thatcher’s neoliberal policies revived economic growth but cut state subsidies for welfare benefits and heavy industries, leading to lower living standards for many working-class Britons and, as this image attests, to popular protest.

Though Thatcher never eliminated all social programs, her policies helped replace the interventionist ethos of the welfare state with a greater reliance on private enterprise and the free market. This transition involved significant human costs. In the first three years of her government, heavy industries such as steel, coal mining, and textiles shut down, and unemployment rates in Britain doubled to over 12 percent. The gap between rich and poor widened, and increasing poverty led to discontent and crime. Strikes and working-class protests sometimes led to violent riots. Street violence often had racial overtones: immigrants from former British colonies in Africa, India, and the Caribbean, dismayed with poor jobs and racial discrimination, clashed repeatedly with police. Thatcher successfully rallied support by leading a British victory over Argentina in the brief Falklands War (1982), but over time her position weakened. By 1990 Thatcher’s popularity had fallen to record lows, and she was replaced by Conservative Party leader John Major.

In the United States, two-term president Ronald Reagan (U.S. pres. 1981–1989) followed a similar path, though his success in cutting government was more limited. Reagan’s campaign slogan — “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” — summed up a movement in line with Thatcher’s ideas, which was labeled the conservative movement in the United States. With widespread popular support and the agreement of most congressional Democrats as well as Republicans, Reagan pushed through major across-the-board cuts in income taxes in 1981. But Reagan and Congress failed to limit government spending, which increased as a percentage of national income in the course of his presidency. A massive military buildup was partly responsible, but spending on social programs — despite Reagan’s pledges to rein it in — also grew rapidly. The harsh recession of the early 1980s required the government to spend more on unemployment benefits, welfare benefits, and medical treatment for the poor. Moreover, Reagan’s antiwelfare rhetoric mobilized the liberal opposition and eventually turned many moderates against him. The budget deficit soared, and U.S. government debt tripled in a decade.

West Germany also turned to the right. After more than a decade in power, the Social Democrats foundered, and in 1982 Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl (1930–2017) became the new chancellor. Like Thatcher, Kohl cut taxes and government spending. His policies led to increasing unemployment in heavy industry but also to solid economic growth. By the mid-1980s West Germany was one of the most prosperous countries in the world. In foreign policy, Kohl drew close to President Reagan. The chancellor agreed to deploy U.S. cruise missiles and nuclear-armed Pershing missiles on West German territory, a decision that contributed to renewed superpower tensions. In power for sixteen years, Kohl and the Christian Democrats governed during the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, and the end of the Cold War.

From Détente Back to Cold War

The Soviet War in Afghanistan, 1979–1989

“The map highlights Afghanistan with Iran on its western border and Pakistan on its eastern border. On the north, the nation shares the border Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. The Soviet Union, to the north of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan also included Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kirghizia.

Starting from Mary in Turkmenistan, the Soviet invasion route proceeded southward and then eastward to Kandahar via Herat while in an alternate route, the Soviets proceeded southward from Dushanbe in Tajikistan to Kandahar via Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif. A short deflection to Peshawar from Kabul and toward the east from Mazar-e-Sharif is also given in the map. The regions following the routes were controlled by the Soviet forces. The map also shows India, the Indus River, and Kirghizia. A map in the inset highlights the same region.”

Soviet and East Bloc leaders faced challenges from abroad as optimistic hopes for détente in international relations faded in the late 1970s. Brezhnev’s Soviet Union ignored the human rights provisions of the Helsinki agreement, and East-West political competition remained very much alive outside Europe. Many Americans became convinced that the Soviet Union was taking advantage of détente, steadily building up its military might and pushing for political gains and revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, designed to save an increasingly unpopular Marxist regime, alarmed the West. Many Americans feared that the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf would be next, and once again they looked to the NATO alliance and military might to thwart Communist expansion.

President Jimmy Carter (U.S. pres. 1977–1981) tried to lead NATO beyond verbal condemnation of the Soviet Union and urged economic sanctions against it, but only Great Britain among the European allies supported the American initiative. The alliance showed the same lack of concerted action when the Solidarity movement rose in Poland. Some observers concluded that NATO had lost the will to act decisively in dealing with the Soviet bloc.

The Atlantic alliance endured, however, and the U.S. military buildup launched by Carter in his last years in office was greatly accelerated by President Reagan, who was swept into office in 1980 by a wave of patriotism and economic discontent. The new American leadership acted as if the military balance had tipped in favor of the Soviet Union, which Reagan anathematized as the “evil empire.” Increasing defense spending enormously, the Reagan administration deployed short-range nuclear missiles in western Europe and built up the navy to preserve American power in the post-Vietnam age. The broad shift toward greater conservatism in the 1980s gave Reagan invaluable allies in western Europe. Margaret Thatcher worked well with Reagan and was a forceful advocate for a revitalized Atlantic alliance, and under Helmut Kohl West Germany likewise worked with the United States to coordinate military and political policy toward the Soviet bloc. Gorbachev’s Reforms in the Soviet Union

Cold War tensions aside, the Soviet Union’s Communist elite seemed safe from any challenge from below in the early 1980s. A well-established system of administrative controls stretched downward from the central ministries and state committees to provincial cities and from there to factories, neighborhoods, and villages. At each level of this massive state bureaucracy, the overlapping hierarchy of the 17.5-million-member Communist Party maintained tight state control. Organized opposition was impossible, and average people left politics to the bosses.

Although the massive state and party bureaucracy safeguarded the elite, it promoted widespread apathy and stagnation. When the ailing Brezhnev finally died in 1982, his successor, the long-time chief of the secret police, Yuri Andropov (1914–1984), tried to invigorate the system. Relatively little came of his efforts, but they combined with a sharply worsening economic situation to set the stage for the emergence in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931), the most vigorous Soviet leader in a generation.

Mikhail Gorbachev Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev (center, with red tie) walks with a crowd of delegates to the twenty-eighth and last congress of the Soviet Communist Party in July 1990. Gorbachev took office in 1985 with the goal of reforming communism from within. His plans spiraled out of control. By 1991 the Soviet Union and the East Bloc had disintegrated into independent, noncommunist states.

A lawyer and experienced Communist Party official, Gorbachev believed in communism but realized that the Soviet Union was failing to keep up with the West and was losing its superpower status. Thus he tried to revitalize the Soviet system with fundamental reforms. An idealist who wanted to improve conditions for ordinary citizens, Gorbachev understood that the enormous expense of the Cold War arms race had had a disastrous impact on living conditions in the Soviet Union; improvement at home, he realized, required better relations with the West.

In his first year in office, Gorbachev consolidated his power, attacked corruption and incompetence in the bureaucracy, and tried to reduce alcoholism, which was widespread and lethal in Soviet society. He worked out an ambitious reform program designed to restructure the economy to provide for the real needs of the Soviet population. To accomplish this economic restructuring, or perestroika (pehr-uh-STROY-kuh), Gorbachev and his supporters eased government price controls on some goods, gave more independence to state enterprises, and created profit-seeking private cooperatives to provide personal services. These small-scale reforms initially produced improvements, but shortages grew as the economy stalled at an intermediate point between central planning and free-market mechanisms. By late 1988 widespread consumer dissatisfaction posed a serious threat to Gorbachev’s leadership and the entire reform program.

Gorbachev’s bold and far-reaching campaign for greater freedom of expression was much more successful. Very popular in a country where censorship, dull uniformity, and outright lies had long characterized public discourse, the newfound openness, or glasnost (GLAZ-nohst), of the government and the media marked an astonishing break with the past. Long-banned émigré writers sold millions of copies of their works in new editions, while denunciations of Stalin and his terror became standard fare in plays and movies. In another example of glasnost in action, after several days of hesitation the usually secretive Soviet government issued daily reports on the 1986 nuclear plant accident at Chernobyl, one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Indeed, the initial openness in government pronouncements quickly went much further than Gorbachev intended and led to something approaching free speech, a veritable cultural revolution.

Democratization was another element of reform. Beginning as an attack on corruption in the Communist Party, it led to the expansion of the ballot, with candidates outside the Communist Party for the first time in the Soviet Union since 1917. Gorbachev and the party remained in control, but a minority of critical independents was elected in April 1989 to a revitalized Congress of People’s Deputies. Millions of Soviets then watched the new congress for hours on television as Gorbachev and his ministers saw their proposals debated and even rejected. An active civil society was emerging — a new political culture at odds with the Communist Party’s monopoly of power and control.

Democratization also ignited demands for greater political and cultural autonomy and even national independence among non-Russian minorities living in the fifteen Soviet republics. The Soviet population numbered about 145 million ethnic Russians and 140.6 million non-Russians, including 55 million Muslims in the Central Asian republics and over 44 million Ukrainians. Once Gorbachev opened the doors to greater public expression, tensions flared between central Soviet control and national separatist movements. Independence groups were particularly active in the Baltic Soviet socialist republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia; in western Ukraine; and in the Transcaucasian republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

Finally, Gorbachev brought reforms to the field of foreign affairs. He withdrew Soviet troops from Afghanistan in February 1989 and sought to reduce East-West tensions. Of enormous importance, the Soviet leader sought to halt the arms race with the United States and convinced President Reagan of his sincerity. In a Washington summit in December 1987, the two leaders agreed to eliminate all land-based intermediate-range missiles in Europe, setting the stage for more arms reductions. Gorbachev pledged to respect the political choices of the peoples of East Bloc countries, repudiating the Brezhnev Doctrine and giving encouragement to reform movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. By early 1989 it seemed that if Gorbachev held to his word, the tragic Soviet occupation of eastern Europe might wither away, taking the long Cold War with it once and for all. (See “Viewpoints: ‘Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall.’”)The Disintegration of the Soviet Union

As 1990 began, the tough work of dismantling some forty-five years of Communist rule had begun in all but two East Bloc states — tiny Albania and the vast Soviet Union. The great question now became whether the Soviet Union would follow its former satellites.

In February 1990, as competing Russian politicians noisily presented their programs and nationalists in the non-Russian republics demanded autonomy or independence from the Soviet Union, the Communist Party suffered a stunning defeat in local elections throughout the country. As in East Bloc countries, democrats and anticommunists won clear majorities in the leading cities of the Russian Soviet Republic, by far the largest republic in the Soviet Union. Moreover, in Lithuania the people elected an uncompromising nationalist as president, and the newly chosen parliament declared Lithuania an independent state.

Gorbachev responded by placing an economic embargo on Lithuania, but he refused to use the army to crush the separatist government. The result was a tense political standoff that undermined popular support for Gorbachev. Separating himself further from Communist hardliners, Gorbachev asked Soviet citizens to ratify a new constitution that formally abolished the Communist Party’s monopoly of political power and expanded the power of the Congress of People’s Deputies. While retaining his post as party secretary, Gorbachev then convinced a majority of deputies to elect him president of the Soviet Union.

Despite his victory, Gorbachev’s power continued to erode, and his unwillingness to risk a universal suffrage election for the presidency strengthened his archrival, Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007). A radical reform Communist, Yeltsin embraced the democratic movement, and in May 1990 he was elected parliamentary leader of the Russian Soviet Republic. He boldly announced that Russia would put its interests first and declare its independence from the Soviet Union, broadening the base of the anticommunist movement by joining the patriotism of ordinary Russians with the democratic aspirations of big-city intellectuals. Gorbachev tried to save the Soviet Union with a new treaty that would link the member republics in a looser, freely accepted confederation, but six of the fifteen Soviet republics rejected his plan.

Opposed by democrats and nationalists, Gorbachev was also challenged by the Communist old guard. In August 1991 a gang of hardliners kidnapped him and his family in the Caucasus and tried to seize the Soviet government. The attempted coup collapsed in the face of massive popular resistance that rallied around Yeltsin. As a spellbound world watched on television, Yeltsin defiantly denounced the rebels from atop a stalled tank in central Moscow and declared the “rebirth of Russia.” The army supported Yeltsin, and Gorbachev was rescued and returned to power as head of the Soviet Union.

The leaders of the coup had wanted to preserve Communist power, state ownership, and the multinational Soviet Union; they succeeded in destroying all three. An anticommunist revolution swept Russia as Yeltsin and his supporters outlawed the Communist Party and confiscated its property. Locked in a personal and political duel with Gorbachev, Yeltsin and his democratic allies declared Russia independent, withdrew from the Soviet Union, and changed the country’s name from the Russian Soviet Republic to the Russian Federation. All the other Soviet republics also withdrew. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, 1991, and the next day the Supreme Soviet dissolved itself, marking the end of the Soviet Union. The independent republics of the old Soviet Union then established a loose confederation, the Commonwealth of Independent States, which played only a minor role in the 1990s.Economic Shock Therapy in Russia

Politics and economics were closely intertwined in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. President Boris Yeltsin (r. 1991–1999), his democratic supporters, and his economic ministers wanted to create conditions that would prevent a return to communism and right the faltering economy. Adopting the model of economic reform already implemented in Poland in 1990 (see “Economic and Political Transformations in the Former East Bloc” ahead), and agreeing with neoliberal Western advisers who argued that a quick turn to free markets would speed economic growth, Russian reformers opted in January 1992 for liberalization at breakneck speed — so-called shock therapy, a set of economic policies also adopted by other former Communist countries.

Rich and Poor in Postcommunist Russia A woman sells knitted scarves in front of a department store window in Moscow in September 2005. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the use of shock therapy to reform the Russian economy created new poverty as well as new wealth.

To implement the plan, the Russians abolished price controls on most consumer goods, with the exception of bread, vodka, oil, and public transportation. The government also launched a rapid privatization program, selling formerly state-owned industries and agricultural concerns to private investors. Thousands of factories and mines were turned over to new private companies. In an attempt to share the wealth privatization was expected to generate, each citizen received a voucher worth 10,000 rubles (about $22) to buy stock in these private companies. Ownership of these assets, however, usually remained in the hands of the old bosses — the managers and government officials from the Communist era — undermining the reformers’ goal of worker participation.

Instead of reviving production and bringing widespread prosperity through shock therapy, prices immediately soared, increasing by a factor of twenty-six in the course of 1992. At the same time, production fell a staggering 20 percent. Nor did the situation stabilize quickly. After 1995 inflation still raged, though at slower rates, and output continued to fall. According to most estimates, Russia produced from one-third to one-half less in 1996 than it had in 1991. The Russian economy crashed again in 1998 in the wake of Asia’s financial crisis.

Shock therapy worked poorly for several reasons. Soviet industry had been highly monopolized and strongly tilted toward military goods. Production of many items had been concentrated in one or two gigantic factories or in interconnected combines. With privatization, these powerful state monopolies became powerful private monopolies that cut production and raised prices in order to maximize profits. Moreover, Yeltsin’s government handed out enormous subsidies to corporate managers and bureaucrats, ostensibly to reinforce faltering firms and avoid bankruptcies, but also to buy political allegiance. New corporate leaders included criminals who intimidated would-be rivals in attempts to prevent the formation of competing businesses.

Runaway inflation and poorly executed privatization brought a profound social revolution to Russia. The new capitalist elite — the so-called Oligarchs — acquired great wealth and power, while large numbers of people struggled to make ends meet. The Oligarchs, Yeltsin’s main supporters, maintained control with corrupt business practices and rampant cronyism.

At the other extreme, the vast majority of people saw their savings become practically worthless. Pensions lost much of their value, living standards drastically declined, and many people sold their personal goods to survive. Under these conditions, effective representative government failed to develop, and many Russians came to equate democracy with the corruption, poverty, and national decline they experienced throughout the 1990s. Yeltsin became increasingly unpopular; only the backing of the Oligarchs kept him in power.Civil War in Yugoslavia

Postcommunism turned tragic in Yugoslavia, which under Josip Broz Tito had been a federation of republics under centralized Communist rule. After Tito’s death in 1980, power passed increasingly to the sister republics. This process encouraged a revival of regional, religious, and ethnic conflicts that were exacerbated by charges of ethnically inspired massacres during World War II and a dramatic economic decline in the mid-1980s.

The revolutions of 1989 accelerated the breakup of Yugoslavia. Serbian president Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006), a former Communist bureaucrat, wished to strengthen the federation’s centralized government under Serbian control. In 1989 Milošević (mee-LOH-sheh-veech) severely limited the right of self-rule in the territory of Kosovo, an Autonomous Province established in the Republic of Serbia after the Second World War. In Kosovo ethnic Albanians constituted the overwhelming majority of residents, but the province included a medieval battleground that nationalists like Milošević claimed was sacred to Serbian identity. Religious differences reinforced ethnic and regional tensions: most Albanians were Muslims, while the vast majority of Serbs were Eastern Orthodox Christians.

In 1990 Milošević called for the unification of all Serbs in a “Greater Serbia,” regardless of where they lived in the weakening Yugoslavian federation. This aggressive move strengthened the cause of national separatism, and in June 1991 the relatively wealthy federal republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. Milošević ordered the Yugoslavian federal army to invade both areas to assert Serbian control. The Serbs were quickly repulsed in Slovenia, but they managed to conquer about 30 percent of Croatia.

In 1992 the civil war spread to Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had also declared its independence. Serbs — about 30 percent of that region’s population — refused to live under the more numerous Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks (Map 30.2). Yugoslavia had once been a tolerant and largely successful multiethnic state with different groups living side by side and often intermarrying. But the new goal of the armed factions in the Bosnian civil war was ethnic cleansing: the attempt to establish ethnically homogeneous territories by intimidation, forced deportation, and killing. The Yugoslavian army and irregular militias attempted to “cleanse” the territory of its non-Serb residents, unleashing ruthless brutality, with murder, rape, destruction, and the herding of refugees into concentration camps. Before the fighting in Bosnia ended, some three hundred thousand people were dead, and millions had been forced to flee their homes.

MAP 30.2 The Breakup of Yugoslavia, 1991–2006 Yugoslavia had the most ethnically diverse population in eastern Europe. The Republic of Croatia had substantial Serbian and Muslim minorities, while Bosnia-Herzegovina had large Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian populations, none of which had a majority. In June 1991 Serbia’s brutal effort to seize territory and unite all Serbs in a single state brought a tragic civil war.

“The map shows the following.

Yogoslavia in 1991 included the following states which won their independence: Macedonia (1991), Croatia (1991), Slovenia (1991), Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992), and Montenegro (2006), Serbia (2006), and Kosovo (2008). A note on the map reads, Macedonia changed its name to North Macedonia in 2019.

Albania (Tiranë) and Kosovo (Pristina) had a largely Albanian population, while Bulgaria (Sofia), Romania, Hungary (Budapest), Slovenia (Ljubljana), Serbia (Belgrade, Novi Sad), Macedonia (Skopje), and Montenegro (Podgorica) had their own indigenous population. Bosnia-Herzegovina, on the other hand, had a mix of Bosnians or Sandzak Muslims, Serbs, and Croatians and regions excluding Sarajevo and Banja Luka were identified as the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1994. Banja Luka and Sarajevo and surrounding regions comprised the Bosnian Serb Republic of 1992. The autonomous region boundaries ran from the eastern border of Bosnia-Herzegovina to the eastern border of Serbia, separating Novi Sad in Serbia from Belgrade. A small region in Croatia and Macedonia, a region to the south of Hungary and to the northwest of Serbia, and the northern and eastern regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina did not show any majority.

The map also shows Austria (Vienna), Slovakia (Bratislava), Italy, (Rome), Greece, Turkey, the Danube River, and the Adriatic Sea.

A map in the inset highlights the same region. ”

While appalling scenes of horror not seen in Europe since the Holocaust shocked the world, the Western nations had difficulty formulating an effective, unified response. The turning point came in July 1995 when Bosnian Serbs overran Srebrenica (sreb-reh-NEET-suh) — a Muslim city previously declared a United Nations safe area. Serb forces killed about eight thousand of the city’s Bosniak civilians, primarily men and boys. Public outrage prompted NATO to bomb Bosnian Serb military targets intensively, and the Croatian army drove all the Serbs from Croatia. In November 1995 President Bill Clinton helped the warring sides hammer out a complicated accord that gave Bosnian Serbs about 49 percent of Bosnia and gave Bosniaks and the Roman Catholic Bosnian Croats the rest. About seven thousand troops from NATO and then after 2004 from the European Union were stationed in Bosnia to keep the peace; by 2012 only about six hundred remained, suggesting that while ethnic and religious tensions remained, the situation had improved.

Srebrenica Refugees More than 2,300 Bosnian Muslims packed into NATO trucks to flee the Serbian encirclement of Srebrenica in the spring of 1995. That July, the Serbian army massacred approximately 8,000 civilians in the city, and outraged public opinion in western Europe and North America finally led to decisive intervention against Serbia. In early 2016 twelve of the Serbian military leaders believed responsible were still on trial for crimes against humanity at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal; eighty had been sentenced by the international court.

The Kosovo Albanians, who hoped to establish self-rule, gained nothing from the Bosnian agreement. Frustrated Kosovar militants formed the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and began to fight for independence. Serbian repression of the Kosovars increased, and in 1998 Serbian forces attacked both KLA guerrillas and unarmed villagers, displacing 250,000 people.

When Milošević refused to withdraw Serbian militias from Kosovo and accept self-government (but not independence) for Kosovo, NATO began bombing Serbia in March 1999. Serbian paramilitary forces responded by driving about 865,000 Albanian Kosovars into exile. NATO redoubled its destructive bombing campaign, which eventually forced Milošević to withdraw and allowed the Kosovars to regain their homeland. A United Nations and NATO peacekeeping force occupied Kosovo, ending ten years of Yugoslavian civil wars. Although U.S.-led NATO intervention finally brought an end to the conflict, the failure to take a stronger stand in the early years led to widespread and unnecessary suffering in the former Yugoslavia.

The war-weary and impoverished Serbs eventually voted the still-defiant Milošević out of office, and in July 2001 a new pro-Western Serbian government turned him over to a war crimes tribunal in the Netherlands to stand trial for crimes against humanity. After blustering his way through the initial stages of his trial, Milošević died in 2006 before the proceedings were complete. In 2008, after eight years of administration by the United Nations and NATO peacekeeping forces, the Republic of Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia. The United States and most states of the European Union recognized the declaration. Serbia and Russia did not, and the long-term status of this troubled emerging state remained uncertain.The Global Economy

Though large business interests had long profited from international trade and investment, multinational corporations grew and flourished in a world economy increasingly organized around free-market neoliberalism, which relaxed barriers to international trade. Multinational corporations built global systems of production and distribution that generated unprecedented wealth and generally escaped the control of regulators and politicians acting on the national level.

Conglomerates such as Siemens and Vivendi exemplified this business model. Siemens, with international headquarters in Berlin and Munich and offices around the globe, is one of the world’s largest engineering companies, with vast holdings in energy, construction, health care, financial services, and industrial production. Vivendi, an extensive media and telecommunications company headquartered in Paris, controls a vast international network of producers and products, including music and film, publishing, television broadcasting, pay-TV, Internet services, and video games.

The development of sophisticated personal computer technologies and the Internet at the end of the twentieth century, coupled with the deregulation of national and international financial systems, further encouraged the growth of international trade. The ability to rapidly exchange information and capital meant that economic activity was no longer centered on national banks or stock exchanges, but rather flowed quickly across international borders. Large cities like London, Moscow, New York, and Hong Kong became global centers of banking, trade, and financial services. The influence of financial and insurance companies, communications conglomerates, and energy and legal firms headquartered in these global cities extended far beyond the borders of the traditional nation-state.

At the same time, the close connections between national economies also made the entire world vulnerable to economic panics and downturns. In 1997 a banking crisis in Thailand spread to Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan and then echoed around the world. The resulting slump in oil and gas prices hit Russia especially hard, leading to high inflation, bank failures, and the collapse of the Russian stock market. The crisis then spread to Latin America, plunging most countries there into a severe economic downturn. A decade later, a global recession triggered by a crisis in the U.S. housing market and financial system created the worst worldwide economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s (see “The Global Recession and the Viability of the European Union” ahead).The New European Union

Global economic pressures encouraged the expansion and consolidation of the European Common Market, which in 1993 proudly rechristened itself the European Union (EU) (Map 30.3). The EU added the free movement of capital and services and eventually individuals across national borders to the existing free trade in goods. In addition, member states sought to create a monetary union in which all EU countries would share a single currency. Membership in the monetary union required states to meet strict financial criteria defined in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, which also set legal standards and anticipated the development of common policies on defense and foreign affairs.

MAPPING THE PAST

MAP 30.3 The European Union, 2019

No longer divided by ideological competition and the Cold War, much of today’s Europe has banded together in a European Union that facilitates the open movement of people, jobs, and currency across national borders.

ANALYZING THE MAP Trace the expansion of membership from its initial founding as the European Economic Union to today. How would you characterize the most recent members? Whose membership is still pending?

CONNECTIONS Which countries are and are not part of the Eurozone, and what does this suggest about how successful the European Union has been in adopting the euro?

“The map shows the following.

Founding members, 1951: Italy, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, the western part of Germany, and the Netherlands.

New members, 1973: Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. A note on the map reads, The United Kingdom voted in June 2016 to leave the E. U.

New members, 1981: Greece.

New members, 1986: Spain and Portugal.

German reuni¬fication, 1990: East Germany.

New members, 1995: Finland, Sweden, and Austria.

New members, 2004: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Malta, Cyprus, Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary.

New members, 2007: Romania and Bulgaria.

New members, 2013: Croatia.

Candidate countries, 2019: Turkey, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Albania.

Eurozone countries, 2019: Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy, Austria, Slovenia, Malta, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Cyprus.

The map also shows Switzerland, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Baltic Sea, North Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean.

A map in the inset highlights the same region. ”

Western European elites and opinion makers generally supported the economic integration embodied in the Maastricht Treaty. They felt that membership requirements, which imposed financial discipline on national governments, would combat Europe’s ongoing economic problems and viewed the establishment of a single European currency as an irreversible historic step toward basic political unity. This unity would allow Europe as a whole to regain its place in world politics and to deal with the United States as an equal.

Support for the Maastricht Treaty, however, was hardly universal. Ordinary people, leftist political parties, and right-wing nationalists expressed considerable opposition to the new rules. Many people resented the EU’s ever-growing bureaucracy in Brussels, which imposed common standards on everything from cheese production to day care, supposedly undermining national customs and local traditions. Moreover, increased unity meant yielding still more power to distant “Eurocrats” and political insiders, which limited national sovereignty and democratic control.

Above all, many citizens feared that the European Union would operate at their expense. Joining the monetary union required national governments to meet stringent fiscal standards, impose budget cuts, and contribute to the EU operating budget. The resulting reductions in health care and social benefits hit ordinary citizens and did little to reduce high unemployment. When put to the public for a vote, ratification of the Maastricht Treaty was usually very close. In France, for example, the treaty passed with just 50.1 percent of the vote. Even after the treaty was ratified, battles over budgets, benefits, and high unemployment continued throughout the EU in the 1990s.

Then in 2002, brand-new euros finally replaced the national currencies of all Eurozone countries. The establishment of the European monetary union built confidence in member nations and increased their willingness to accept new members. On May 1, 2004, the European Union began admitting its former East Bloc neighbors. This rapid expansion underscored the need to reform the EU’s unwieldy governing structure, and in 2007 the member nations signed the Treaty of Lisbon, which streamlined the EU bureaucracy and reformed its political structure. When the Treaty of Lisbon went into effect on December 1, 2009, it capped a remarkable fifty-year effort to unify what had been a deeply divided and war-torn continent. By 2019, with the recent admission of Croatia in 2013, the EU was home to about 500 million citizens in twenty-eight countries. It included most of the former East Bloc and, with the Baltic nations, three republics of the former Soviet Union. Yet profound questions about the meaning of European unity and identity remained. How would the European Union deal with disruptive membership issues, maintain its democratic ethos in the face of growing right-wing populism, and manage general economic and political crises? We return to these issues later in the chapter.The Costs and Consequences of Globalization

Globalization transformed the lives of millions of people, as the technological changes associated with postindustrial society remade workplaces and lifestyles around the world. Widespread adoption of neoliberal free-trade policies and low labor costs in developing countries, including the former East Bloc, Latin America, and East Asia, made it less expensive to manufacture steel, automotive parts, computer components, and all manner of consumer goods in developing countries and then import them for sale in the West.

In the 1990s China, with its low wages and rapidly growing industrial infrastructure, emerged as an economic powerhouse that supplied goods across the world — even as the West’s industrial heartlands continued to decline. Under these conditions, a car made by Volkswagen could still be sold as a product of high-quality German engineering despite being assembled in Chattanooga, Tennessee, using steel imported from South Korea and computer chips made in Taiwan.

The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs also dramatically changed the nature of work in western Europe and North America. In France in 1973, for example, some 40 percent of the employed population worked in industry — in mining, construction, manufacturing, and utilities. About 49 percent worked in services, including retail, hotels and restaurants, transportation, communications, financial and business services, and social and personal services. In 2004 only 24 percent of the French worked in industry, and a whopping 72 percent worked in services. The numbers varied country by country, yet across Europe the general trend was clear: by 2016 only about 15 percent of employed workers were still working in the once-booming manufacturing sector; in the United States, less than 9 percent of workers held such jobs.4

The deindustrialization of the West established a multitiered society with winners and losers. At the top was a small, affluent group of experts, executives, and professionals — about one-quarter of the total population — who managed the new global enterprises. In the second, larger tier, the middle class struggled with stagnating incomes and a declining standard of living as once-well-paid industrial workers faced stubborn unemployment and cuts in both welfare and workplace benefits. Many were forced to take low-paying jobs in the retail service sector.

In the bottom tier — in some areas as much as a quarter of the population — a poorly paid underclass performed the unskilled jobs of a postindustrial economy or were chronically unemployed. In western Europe and North America, inclusion in this lowest segment of society was often linked to race, ethnicity, and a lack of educational opportunity. Recently arrived immigrants had trouble finding jobs and often lived in unpleasant, hastily built housing, teetering on the edge of poverty. In London, unemployment rates among youths and particularly young black men soared above those of their white compatriots. Frustration over these conditions, coupled with anger at a police shooting, boiled over in immigrant neighborhoods across the city in August 2011, when angry youths rioted in the streets, burning buildings and looting stores.

Antiglobalization Activism French protesters carry the figure of Ronald McDonald through the streets to protest the trial of José Bové, a prominent leader in campaigns against the human and environmental costs associated with globalization. Bové was accused of demolishing a McDonald’s franchise in a small town in southern France. With its worldwide fast-food restaurants that pay little attention to local traditions, McDonald’s has often been the target of antiglobalization protests.

A similar wave of riots broke out in the multiethnic immigrant suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden, in May 2013, spurred by growing economic inequality and discrimination, and in late 2018 protests by so-called Yellow Vests brought street violence to cities across France over economic problems facing the working and middle classes. Police powers generally brought such unrest under control, and while parliamentarians recognized that poverty, unemployment, and perceived racism inspired unrest, they struggled to find solutions to problems generated by large-scale economic trends.

Geographic contrasts further revealed the unequal aspects of globalization. Urban redevelopment turned the downtown cores of major Western cities into consumerist playgrounds and work centers that only the wealthy could afford to live in, while poorer residents were pushed far out into the suburbs. Regions in the United States and Europe that had successfully shifted to a postindustrial economy, such as Silicon Valley or northern Italy and southern Germany and Austria, enjoyed prosperity. Lagging behind were regions historically dependent on heavy industry, such as the former East Bloc countries and the factory districts north of London, or underdeveloped areas, such as rural sections of southern Italy, Spain, and Greece. In addition, a global north-south divide increasingly separated Europe and North America — both still affluent despite their economic problems — from the industrializing nations of Africa and Latin America. Though India, China, and other East Asian nations experienced solid growth, other industrializing nations struggled to overcome decades of underdevelopment.Changing Immigration Flows

As European demographic vitality waned in the 1990s, a new surge of migrants from the former Soviet bloc, Africa, and most recently the Middle East headed for western Europe. Some migrants entered the European Union legally, with proper documentation, but undocumented or irregular immigration into the European Union also exploded, as increasing numbers of people were smuggled in despite beefed-up border patrols. Large-scale immigration, both documented and undocumented, emerged as a critical and controversial issue.

The collapse of communism in the East Bloc and savage civil wars in Yugoslavia drove hundreds of thousands of refugees westward in the 1990s, as did equally brutal conflicts in Somalia and Rwanda. More recently, immigration flows have shifted to reflect the dislocation that emerged in North Africa and the Middle East in the wake of the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the “Arab Spring” of 2011, and the war against the Islamic State (see “Turmoil in the Muslim World” later in the chapter). Smugglers with a callous disregard for the well-being of their charges demanded thousands of euros to bring undocumented migrants from these troubled regions across the Mediterranean to Greece, Spain, and Italy.

In the summer of 2015, during the height of the Syrian civil war, the migration issue reached crisis proportions. Counting irregular migrants is always difficult, but estimates suggest that in 2015–2016 more than 2.3 million people, mostly from Syria and Iraq, illegally entered the European Union. Many traveled across Turkey and crossed the Mediterranean Sea to the relatively accessible Greek islands. From there they passed through Serbia into Hungary and then struggled to travel north into more hospitable Austria, Germany, and northern Europe. Others continued to enter the EU from North Africa into Italy or Spain (Map 30.4).

MAP 30.4 Major Migration Routes into Contemporary Europe In the wake of wars and the collapse of the Arab Spring, migration from northern Africa and the Middle East into Europe reached crisis proportions. Aided by smugglers, thousands of migrants traveled two main routes: through Libya and across the Mediterranean Sea into southern Italy, and across Turkey to close-by Greek islands and then north through the Balkans. Countries with relatively lenient refugee regulations, such as Sweden and Germany, were favorite destinations. Under the Schengen Agreement, the EU’s open-border policy made travel through Europe fairly easy. As the number of migrants increased in the fall of 2015 and the spring of 2016, however, European politicians began to close national borders, and many migrants were stranded in quickly built refugee camps.

“The map highlights the following.

Home country: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Eritrea.

Home and/or transit country: Iran, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria.

Transit and/or target destination country: Turkey, Jordan, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece, Crete, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, France, and Denmark.

Target destination country: Austria, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the northeastern corner of Ireland.

Migrants from Somalia, Eritrea, moved northwestward across Sudan to Libya and Tunisia from where they crossed the Mediterranean Sea to enter Sicily and traverse up Italy to reach France in order to arrive at the destination countries Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

Iranian, Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi migrants traversed west via Turkey to enter Europe through Greece and course northward through North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia to arrive at the destination countries Austria and Germany from where they would move to Sweden or France so as to reach the United Kingdom. Two other short migration routes cross the Mediterranean Sea from Algeria and Morocco to reach Spain.

The map also shows Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Portugal, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, U A E, Oman, Yemen, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, and Burkina Faso, and the Indian Ocean, Gulf of Aden, Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean, Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea.

A map in the inset highlights the same region. ”

When in 2015 Germany’s first woman chancellor Angela Merkel (r. 2005–) responded to the crisis by promising homes for 800,000 migrants and encouraged other EU nations to take a share, tens of thousands of migrants trying to reach Germany choked train and bus stations on the Hungarian-Austrian border. Others languished in quickly established refugee camps built in northern Greece and the Hungarian countryside, and Hungary’s anti-immigrant government quickly built a 108-mile razor-wire fence along the border with Serbia to squelch further movement.

Europe’s Refugee Crisis A Kurdish refugee family from northern Iraq seeks shelter in May 2018 in a refugee camp in Thessaloniki, Greece. People in the camp complained about lack of food, water, and a secure place to sleep. At the height of the refugee crisis in the fall and early winter of 2015–2016, about five thousand refugees reached Europe each day. While the number of migrants has declined, the crisis stoked anti-immigrant tensions across Europe and called into question the internal open-border system.

The discovery of seventy-one dead migrants locked in an abandoned truck on an Austrian highway — and the deaths of thousands more who in the last several years attempted to cross the Mediterranean in rudimentary rubber rafts and leaky boats — underscored the venality of the smugglers and the human costs of uncontrolled immigration. However, EU experts estimate that in 2017 the number of irregular migrants entering the EU dropped to 204,719 and would continue to drop. Stricter border controls, the growth of popular anti-immigration sentiment across western Europe, and the election of far-right anti-immigrant governments in Hungary and Italy, which moved to close their national borders, accounted for much of the decline. Nonetheless, European leaders were still struggling to contain the humanitarian crisis and the political fallout caused by the largest movement of peoples across Europe since the end of World War II.8

Why was Europe such an attractive destination for non-European migrants? First, economic opportunity in relatively prosperous western Europe undoubtedly was one attraction. Germans, for example, earned on average three and a half times more than neighboring Poles, who in turn earned much more than people farther east and in North Africa. In 1998 most European Union states abolished all border controls; entrance into one country allowed for unimpeded travel almost anywhere (though Ireland and the United Kingdom opted out of this agreement). This meant that irregular migrants could enter across the relatively lax borders of Greece and south-central Europe and then move north across the continent in search of refuge and jobs. And because Europe was simply closer to the troubled regions of North Africa and the Middle East than other wealthy countries such as the United States or Japan, it was an “easier” and more accessible destination for desperate migrants.

Second, EU immigration policy offered migrants the possibility of acquiring asylum status if they could demonstrate that they faced severe persecution based on race, nationality, religion, political belief, or membership in a specific social group in their home countries. Many migrants turned to Europe as they fled civil wars in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as poverty and political repression in other parts of Africa. The rules for attaining asylum status varied by nation, though Germany and Sweden offered relatively liberal policies, housing for applicants, and relatively high benefit payments — about $425 per month per adult.

Across Europe asylum regulations were nonetheless restrictive. Though numerous migrants applied, after an average fifteen-month wait many were rejected, classified as illegal job seekers, and deported to their home countries. The acceptance rate varied broadly across the different countries in the EU, but the total numbers for 2017 offer some insight into the general plight of the refugees. That year EU countries evaluated about 1 million asylum applications and granted about 538,000 people protected residency status. These numbers reflected a downward trend from the peak crisis in 2015, but were still far above the approximately 200,000 people who sought asylum in the EU in 2006.9Growing Strains in U.S.-European Relations

In the fifty years after World War II, the United States and western Europe generally maintained close diplomatic relations. Although they were never in total agreement, they usually worked together to promote international consensus, typically under U.S. guidance, as in the NATO alliance. For example, a U.S.-led coalition that included thousands of troops from France and the United Kingdom and smaller contributions from other NATO allies attacked Iraqi forces in Kuwait in the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War, freeing the small nation from attempted annexation by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Over time, however, the growing power of the European Union and the new unilateral thrust of Washington’s foreign policy created strains in traditional transatlantic relations.

The growing gap between the United States and Europe had several causes. For one, the European Union was now the world’s largest trading block, challenging the predominance of the United States. Prosperous European businesses invested heavily in the United States, reversing a decades-long economic relationship in which investment dollars had flowed the other way.

A values gap between the United States and Europe likewise contributed to cooler relations. Ever more secular Europeans had a hard time understanding the intense religiosity of many Americans; in a 2017 survey 76 percent of people identifying as Christians in the United States “believe[d] in God with absolute certainty,” compared to 23 percent in western Europe.14 Relatively lax gun control laws and the use of capital punishment in the United States were viewed with dismay in Europe, where most countries had outlawed private handgun ownership and abolished the death penalty. Despite U.S. president Barack Obama’s health-care reforms — which evoked controversy among Americans — U.S. reluctance to establish a single-payer, state-funded program surprised Europeans, who saw their own programs as highly advantageous.

In addition, under Presidents George W. Bush (U.S. pres. 2001–2009), Barack Obama (U.S. pres. 2009–2017), and Donald Trump (U.S. pres. 2017–), the United States often ignored international opinion and policy in pursuit of its own interests. This trend had been escalating at least since 1997, when, citing the economic impact, Washington refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol intended to limit global warming; nearly two hundred countries had already signed off. Nor did the United States join the International Criminal Court, a global tribunal founded in 2002 that prosecutes individuals accused of crimes against humanity, and which nearly 140 states agreed to join. These positions troubled EU leaders, as did unflagging U.S. support for Israel in the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli crisis.

President Trump’s policies of “America First” opened further rifts in U.S.-European relations. Trump announced in June 2017 that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, intended to control climate change, and his willingness to set tariffs on European imports upset familiar patterns of international trade. When criticized, the American president tweeted blistering attacks on European politicians, including German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron (r. 2017–), which only served to further widen the rift.

Military considerations also undermined the close relationship between the United States and Europe. American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, undertaken in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States, were a source of strain. On the morning of September 11, 2001, passenger planes hijacked by terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York City and crashed into the Pentagon. Perpetrated by the radical Islamist group al-Qaeda, the attacks took the lives of more than three thousand people from many countries and put the personal safety of ordinary citizens at the top of the West’s agenda.

Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the peoples and governments of Europe and the world joined Americans in heartfelt solidarity. Over time, however, tensions between Europe and the United States re-emerged and deepened markedly, particularly after President Bush declared a unilateral U.S. war on terror — a determined effort to fight terrorism in all its forms around the world. The main acts in Bush’s war on terror were a U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, which started in 2001 and continues today, and another in Iraq, which lasted from 2003 to 2011. Both succeeded in quickly bringing down dictatorial regimes, but the wars fomented anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world and failed to stop regional violence driven by ethnic and religious differences.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq and subsequent events caused some European leaders, notably in France and Germany, to question the rationale for and indeed the very effectiveness of a “war” on terror. Military victory, even over rogue states, would hardly end terrorism, since terrorist groups easily moved across national borders. Terrorism, they concluded, was better fought through police and intelligence measures. Europeans certainly shared U.S. worries about stability in the Middle East, and they faced their own problems with Islamist terrorist attacks. But European leaders worried that the tactics used in the Iraq War, exemplified by Washington’s readiness to use its military without international agreements or UN backing, violated international law.

The presidency of Barack Obama brought some improvement to U.S.-European foreign relations. Upon election, Obama announced that he would halt deployment of missiles in central Europe and reduce nuclear arms, easing tensions with Russia. He pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011 and quietly shelved the language of the “war on terror.”

Tensions over military issues renewed under President Trump, however, as he repeatedly derided NATO as an obsolete alliance and pressured European members to do more to support NATO budgets. As the EU expanded and U.S. support appeared increasingly tentative, some argued that Europe should determine its own military and defense policy without U.S. or NATO guidance. Although transatlantic ties remained firm, the United States and Europe seemed poised to move further apart, especially during the Trump presidency. Turmoil in the Muslim World

Over the past decade, civil wars, sectarian terrorist attacks, civilian dislocation and misery, and flagging political and economic stability have shaken much of the Muslim world in North Africa and the Middle East. In many ways, these problems were the results of recent historical events. Yet the turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East had a deeper history that included the legacies of European colonialism, Cold War power plays, and the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Radical political Islam, a mixture of traditional religious beliefs and innovative social and political reform ideas, emerged in the 1920s, in part as an expression of resentment against the foreign control associated with the mandate system established in the Middle East after World War I (see Chapter 25). Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, gained support in the following decades. While the broad spectrum of Islamist ideas is difficult to summarize, adherents tended to fall into two main groups: a moderate or centrist group that worked peacefully to reform society within existing institutions, and a much smaller, more militant minority willing to use violence to achieve its goals.

Decolonization, the Cold War, and the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict sharpened anti-Western and particularly anti-U.S. sentiments among radical Islamists. As the western European powers loosened their ties to the Middle East, the Americans stepped in. Applying containment policy to limit the spread of communism and eager to preserve steady supplies of oil, the United States supported secular, authoritarian regimes friendly to U.S. interests in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere. Such regimes were generally unpopular with faithful Muslims.

U.S. policies in the Middle East produced “blowback,” or unforeseen and unintended consequences. One example was the Iranian revolution of 1979, when Islamist radicals antagonized by Western intervention, state corruption, and secularization overthrew the U.S.-supported shah and established an Islamic republic. The successful revolution encouraged militant Islamists elsewhere, as did the example of the mujahideen, the Muslim guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan who successfully fought off the Soviet army from 1979 to 1989. During that conflict, the United States supplied the mujahideen with military aid as part of Cold War containment policies, but this support also generated blowback. Many of the U.S.-armed mujahideen would go on to support the Taliban, a militant Islamist faction that came to rule Afghanistan in 1996. The Taliban established a strict Islamist state based on shari’a law. They denied women’s right to education, banned Western movies and music, and provided a safe haven for the Saudi-born millionaire Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

During the 1990s the United States, along with western Europe, became the main target for Islamist militants angered by Western intervention in the Middle East; al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center was one tragic result. Afterwards President Bush declared with some justification that bin Laden and the terrorists “hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote.”15 In public calls for jihad (or struggle) against the United States and the West, however, bin Laden offered a more pragmatic list of grievances, including U.S. support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the sanctions on Iraq that followed the Persian Gulf War, and the presence of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia — seen as an insult to the Muslim holy sites in Mecca and Medina.16

The Bush administration hoped that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq would end the terrorist attacks and bring peace and democracy to the Middle East, but both brought chaos instead. The military campaign in Afghanistan quickly achieved one of its goals, bringing down the Taliban, and the United States installed a friendly government. But U.S. troops failed to disable al-Qaeda, and Taliban insurgents mounted a determined and lasting guerrilla war. Although U.S. commandos killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, the apparently unwinnable guerrilla war in Afghanistan became increasingly unpopular in the United States and among NATO allies in Europe.

With heavy fighting still under way in Afghanistan in late 2001, the Bush administration turned its attention to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, arguing that it was necessary to expand the war on terror to other hostile regimes in the Middle East. U.S. leaders justified their attack with charges that Saddam Hussein was still developing weapons of mass destruction in flagrant disregard of his 1991 promise to end all such programs. Some Americans shared the widespread doubts held by Europeans about the legality — and wisdom — of an American attack on Iraq, especially after UN inspectors found no weapons of mass destruction in the country. Even though they failed to win UN approval, in March 2003 the United States and Britain, with token support from a handful of other European states, invaded Iraq.

Iraq, ca. 2010

“The map shows predominant Sunni population (circa 36 percent) in the western regions bordering Syria and in the northern part of Iraq, and Shi’ite population (circa 60 percent) occupy the southeastern part of Iraq predominantly. The southern and central regions of Iraq, including Baghdad and Fallujah, show mixed occupation. The northeastern regions bordering Turkey, Iran, and Syria have a predominant Kurdish as well as Shi’ite population. The map also shows Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.

A map in the inset highlights the same region. ”

The invasion quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi army, and Saddam’s dictatorship collapsed in April. Yet America’s subsequent efforts to establish a stable pro-American Iraq proved difficult. Poor postwar planning and management by administration officials was one factor, but there were others. Iraq, a creation of Western imperialism after the First World War, was a fragile state with three distinct groups: non-Arab Kurds, Arab Sunni Muslims, and Arab Shi’ite Muslims. Sectarian conflicts among these groups led to a protracted civil war. Although the Obama administration felt confident enough to withdraw U.S. forces in 2011, the shaky Iraqi government continued to struggle with ethnic divisions and terrorist violence.

In early 2011 an unexpected chain of events that came to be called the Arab Spring further destabilized the Middle East and North Africa. In a provincial town in Tunisia, a poor fruit vendor set himself on fire to protest official harassment. His death eighteen days later unleashed a series of spontaneous mass protests that brought violence and regime change; six weeks later, Tunisia’s authoritarian president fled the country, opening the way for reform. Massive popular demonstrations calling for democratic government and social tolerance broke out across the Middle East. In Egypt, demonstrators forced the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S.-friendly leader who had ruled for thirty years. An armed uprising in Libya, supported by NATO air strikes, brought down the dictatorial government of Muammar Gaddafi that October. A civil war broke out in Syria in July 2011 as Libyan president Bashar al-Assad (elected 2000), with Russian support, hurled his army at the rebels and Western powers disagreed about what to do. Protests arose in other countries in the region as well, evoking a mixed response of repression and piecemeal reform.

As the popular movements inspired by the Arab Spring faltered, the emergence of the Islamic State (sometimes called IS or ISIS) brought insurgent violence to new heights. The Islamic State, an extremist Islamist militia dedicated to the establishment of a new caliphate to unify Muslims around the world, grew out of al-Qaeda and the various other insurgent groups fighting in Iraq and the Syrian civil war. By summer 2015 IS soldiers had taken control of substantial parts of central Syria and Iraq. Over 4 million Syrians and Iraqis lost their homes during the fighting, and hundreds of thousands streamed north in attempts to find asylum in Europe.

In the territories under their control, IS militants set up a terroristic government based on an extremist reading of shari’a law. Islamic State terror tactics included the violent persecution of sectarian religious groups; mass executions and beheadings of military, political, or sectarian enemies; and the “cultural cleansing” (destruction and looting) of ancient cultural monuments and shrines that failed to meet its stringent religious ideals. All these actions were documented in widespread Internet propaganda campaigns intended to demonstrate IS power and entice recruits.

By early 2019, as this was being written, the U.S. military and its allies had defeated the Islamic State in the field, yet the militant group could still mount isolated terrorist attacks across the globe, and much of the Middle East was still struggling to find peace and stability. The Arab Spring seemed, for the most part, a dismal failure. The young activists who sought greater political and social liberties from authoritarian regimes quickly lost control of the changes they unleashed. Multiple players now vied for power: military leaders and old elites, local chieftains representing ethnic or sectarian interests, and moderate and radical Islamists. In Egypt, the first open elections in decades brought to power representatives of the moderate wing of the Muslim Brotherhood; a year later, military leaders overthrew this elected government. In Libya, Syria, and especially Yemen, persistent civil wars undermined the search for stability. Western policymakers grappled in vain for clear and effective ways to help bring order to the region. Their efforts were especially freighted because problems in the Muslim world were at the center of many of Europe’s problems. These included the immigration emergency of 2015–2016, ongoing Islamist terrorist attacks, and the disastrous human rights crisis faced by millions of Middle East residents.The New Populism

As the material presented throughout this chapter suggests, one of the most significant aspects of Western politics after the turn of the century was the emergence of new forms of political populism in Europe and the United States. Populism, currently identified in the United States with President Donald Trump, is typically based on an appeal to the needs and virtues of ordinary people, who stand in determined opposition to a corrupt or exploitative elite and the broad effects of globalization.

In the 2000s powerful populist voices and political parties emerged on both sides of the political spectrum. On the left, the Greek Syriza Party, with its challenge to EU austerity policies, calls for increased public investment, and celebration of the ordinary worker, exemplified left-populism in Europe. In the United States leftist populism found expression in the Occupy movement, which began in the United States in 2011 and quickly spread to over eighty countries. Although the Occupy movement fizzled out, its condemnation of a tiny wealthy elite (the “1 percent”) who supposedly exploited the vast majority of ordinary people inspired the surprisingly successful 2016 U.S. presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders.

The new populism has had a greater impact on the politics of the far right. In the United States, New York businessman Donald Trump rode a wave of populist sentiment to win the presidency in 2016, surprising pollsters and complacent Democrats alike. Drawing on themes articulated by the Tea Party, which emerged in 2009, Trump’s winning platform called for an end to oppressive taxation, strong immigration controls, the relaxation of government regulation of the economy and environment, support for fading rustbelt industries and jobs, and a foreign policy that put “America First.”

In Europe, although far-right populist parties, including the French Popular Front and the Austrian Freedom Party, had already enjoyed electoral success in the 1990s, right-wing populism has grown dramatically in recent decades. European populists typically oppose membership in the European Union and the Eurozone. They champion nationalism, demand an end to immigration and tolerant refugee policies, and decry the growth of Islam in Europe. Whatever the cause, the number of Europeans voting for populists on the left and the right swelled from 7 percent in 2000 to over 25 percent in 2018.17

In Germany, for example, tens of thousands of people joined the anti-immigrant movement called Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) or the Alternative for Germany, a far-right political party that won impressive electoral gains in 2018. In Britain, an upstart populist movement including far-right members of the Tory Party successfully campaigned for Brexit. In both Italy and Austria, government coalitions in 2019 included populist parties. In the former East Bloc, right-wing populism has been especially strong: in 2018, populist, authoritarian governments ruled Poland and Hungary, where they worked to undermine freedom of the press and judicial independence.

Far-right populist success has been aided by bigotry and widespread misconceptions about immigration and the nature of Muslim faith. For example, recent polls show that Europeans routinely overestimate the number of Muslims in Europe. In France the public believes that 31 percent of the population is Muslim, when the actual number is about 8 percent; the British believe that 21 percent of the population is Muslim, when the actual number is only 5 percent.18 Immigration and the supposed “Islamization” of Europe, along with fundamentalist terrorism, have become highly charged political issues, and conservative and far-right pundits and politicians across Europe offer a variety of diagnoses and solutions to these perceived problems. (See “Thinking Like a Historian: The Conservative Reaction to Immigration and Islamist Terrorism.”)

As the political fringe grows in power, support for traditional centrist parties has shrunk, remaking the political structures that emerged in the post–World War II decade. Center-right parties certainly suffered, but the real losers have been Europe’s social democratic parties. In fall 2018, center-left social democrats were included in only six governments in the twenty-eight EU member states. In 2017 the center-left French Socialist Party received just 7.4 percent in national elections, and the Dutch Labour Party won 5.7 percent. That same year Germany’s once-mighty Social Democrats received just over 20 percent of the vote in the national elections, only one-half of what they won in 1998.19 The outcome of these trends remains unclear. Yet the consensus politics shaped around neoliberal socioeconomic policies, state-sponsored benefits, multiculturalism and (relatively) open borders, and the EU project itself — embraced by center-left and center-right parties alike — no longer had much appeal to voters shaken by sweeping social change, economic stagnation, and mass migration.