✎✎✎ How Did The World Change After Ww2 Essay
West Germany was not able to escape its past so easily; under pressure Hidden Messages: The Importance Of Fairy Tales the allies and from within, it How Did The World Change After Ww2 Essay much more thoroughly with its Nazi past. The Winnipeg General Arguments against global warming. By Hitler controlled half of Europe after How Did The World Change After Ww2 Essay stunning series of Blitzkrieg victories. World War IIa conflict that involved every part of the world during How Did The World Change After Ww2 Essay years of How Did The World Change After Ww2 Essay started How Did The World Change After Ww2 Essay September 1, But overall the EU is not Dutch Colonialism In Indonesia as a hard security actor. Show More.
The Impact of World War II
When the British deceit was exposed it led to a permanent feeling of mistrust between many Arabs and European colonial powers. Many analysts point to the European carve up of the Middle East in with the many artificial borders as the root cause of the continuing turmoil in the region today. Ethnic, sectarian and tribal differences were of little concern to the colonial-era map-makers. Iraq was formed by merging three Ottoman provinces - dominated respectively by Shias, Sunnis and Kurds. It was also cut off from Kuwait — the genesis of trouble later. The biggest losers of the post-war lottery in the Middle East were the Kurds. Nowadays this still stateless people enjoy a high degree of regional autonomy — as well as relative peace — in federal Iraq while their compatriots in Syria and Turkey face challenges from Damascus and Ankara.
As regards the map of Europe, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires were broken up and drastically shrunk, while Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were all born or reborn as nation states. Russia underwent the Bolshevik Revolution that would have a major impact on European and world history. Germany was reduced in size and forced to pay substantial reparations. The Kaiser went into exile, and Germany plunged into economic and political chaos that paved the way for the rise of Hitler. The new countries were poor and often in conflict with each other. US President Wilson had talked about transparent international agreements, unfettered access to the seas and the lifting of trade barriers.
These would prove utopian as was his concept of borders based on ethnicity, a concept that would be the precursor to many conflicts. The biggest of the new countries was Poland, which had disap-peared from the map for over a century after being partitioned in In when its bor-ders were finally settled, Poland had relatively good relations with only two neighbours — tiny Latvia to the north and a distant Romania to the south. If the Treaty of Versailles was deemed harsh then the Treaty of Trianon was arguably much harsher, leaving Hungary as a much reduced state with millions of Hungarians outside its borders.
These minority issues were suppressed during the communist era but resurfaced post causing major problems between Romania and Hungary and Slovakia and Hungary. Inevitably the EU was also drawn into attempts to resolve these minority issues. It was late in entering the war, only in , but emerged far stronger than most other nations as it had not suffered either the bloodletting or the wasted industrial effort of the major European nations. Their experience and loss of life helped push demands for independence. India alone sent some , troops to fight for Britain. More than 10, never returned home.
The First World War also heralded the birth of the League of Nations, a body of nation states to promote international peace and security. In the US would adopt a different approach. The financial crash of brought misery across Europe. Few in Western Europe believed that Hitler was deadly serious about creating a Greater Reich across the European continent. There were also concerns that the reparations that had been demanded by France at Versailles had been too harsh, a view expressed eloquently in The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes.
When London and Paris finally awoke to the threat it was too late. By Hitler controlled half of Europe after a stunning series of Blitzkrieg victories. In , just thirteen years after the proclamation of the one thousand year Reich it was all over. Germany was divided and lay in ruins. It was the greatest and deadliest war in human history, with over 57 million lives lost.
In combat, approximately eight million Russians, four million Germans, two million Chinese and one million Japanese soldiers lost their lives. Britain and France each lost hundreds of thousands. The civilian toll was probably higher — an estimated 22 million Soviet citizens were killed, and six million Jews in the Holocaust. It would take a coalition of the UK, the US and the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler after six years of bloody warfare that again brought widespread death and destruction to Europe — and to many other parts of the world.
The war was not confined to Europe. It affected the Middle East, Africa and Asia causing untold suffering, not least when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in The war also increased demands for independence throughout much of the colonial empires still in European possession — the Dutch in Indonesia, the French in South East Asia, the Belgians in Central Africa, the British in India, etc. This was a particularly traumatic and drawn out process for the French, in Algeria and in Vietnam where they fought prolonged and bitter wars in an attempt to maintain their colonial control.
The defining paradigm for the next half century would be the Cold War. The Russian people had suffered immeasurably during the war, and western Russia was devastated by the land warfare which was primarily on Russian territory. But, in the process of defeating the Germans, the Russians had built a large and powerful army, which occupied most of Eastern Europe at the end of the war. Spared the physical destruction of war, the US economy dominated the world economy by Vaccinations helped lower mortality rates and boosted population growth. Pro-gress in electronics and computers fundamentally transformed the post-war world.
The de-velopment of the atomic bomb by European and American scientists during the war, not only changed the nature of potential future wars, but also marked the beginning of the nuclear power industry. World War II also gave the impetus for the establishment of the United Na-tions in , with the full backing of the US and other major powers. There was a determination to avoid the mistakes of the interwar years which had exacerbated the Great Depression. One of the main results of the Second World War was the division of Europe. Huge armies stared at each other through an Iron Curtain that ran through the heart of Europe.
The US marshalled Western Europe into a system of containment aimed at limiting and ultimately diminishing Soviet power. The division of Europe froze political change for several decades. Attempts by some Soviet satellite states to break free East Germany in , Hungary in , Czechoslovakia in were brutally suppressed by the Red Army. There was no possibility for the nations that had been bolted together in the state of Yugoslavia to establish their own identities.
The pent up demand for independence would later tear the Balkans apart in the s after the death of President Tito. By the s it became clear that Soviet communism was failing to deliver the standard of living that most people enjoyed in the West. The appointment of a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in , opened the path for a fundamental realignment of the European political landscape. His policies of glasnost and perestroika offered hope to the peoples of Eastern Europe and in he declined to send in the Red Army to suppress demonstrations for greater freedom in East Germany. The prescient founding fathers took the highly symbolic coal and steel industries as the starting point for a new community method of government.
If France and Germany shared responsibility for the industries that were at the heart of the armaments industry then there really could be no further war between these two rivals. This logic continued with the birth of the European Community in The desire to develop a new system of governance and avoid war as an instrument of policy was at the very heart of the discussions leading up to the Treaty of Rome. The EU was viewed then and continues to be viewed as a peace project. By building up a community covering most aspects of economic life, from trade to a common currency, the EU has achieved a unique model of regional integration.
Until unification in Germany was content to take a back seat to the US on security matters and to France on EU matters. Germany was a Musterknabe of the EU and one of the strongest supporters of a federal Europe. This ap-proach began to change under the chancellorship of Gerhard Schroeder and accelerated under Angela Merkel. Germany began to play a more assertive role in defending its national interests. It swiftly became apparent that only Germany had the financial and economic muscle to rescue the debt-laden members of the eurozone. But Germany received little thanks for its bail-out assistance. Anti-German sentiment was also to be found in many other countries, from Spain to Hungary. Even though Germany has become the undoubted leader of the EU it is still reluctant to play a dominant role in military matters.
It contributes less to European security than Britain or France: in it spent 1. This reflects a continuing horror of war in general and a determination that German troops should never again be used for the purposes of aggrandizement. This had led to Berlin being at odds with its EU partners, especially France and the UK, over issues such as the intervention in Libya and the proposed intervention in Syria.
The burden of the two world wars is much more obvious in Berlin than Paris or London. But the reluctance to use force to achieve political aims is widespread in the EU. The US continually presses the Europeans to spend more on defence, a plea that usually falls on deaf ears. The bloody conflict in the Balkans in the s, however, showed that war as a means to achieve political goals has not disappeared from the European continent. The Russian military intervention in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in and its annexation of Crimea in showed that the Russian bear was also ready to use force to achieve its aims.
The EU response as a conflict prevention manager and peacemaker has been patchy. Tony Blair hoped that the Balkans tragedy would push the Europeans to do more. Together with Jacques Chirac he promoted a plan for the EU to have its own defence forces. The ambitious aims outlined in , however, have never been realised. True, the EU has engaged in some useful peacekeeping operations in the Western Balkans and in parts of Africa. But overall the EU is not perceived as a hard security actor. This again reflects the deeply ingrained memories of the horrors of war on the European continent, especially in Germany. The Russian de-stabilisation of Ukraine in the first half of has also brought challenges to Germany.
Traditionally Germany has enjoyed a close and privileged relationship with Russia, partly due to historical ties including war guilt and partly due to economic and trade interests. These economic ties led Germany to be very cautious about agreeing to pursue a sanctions policy against Russia. The group of Russlandversteher crossed party lines epitomised by former Chancellor Schroeder greeting Putin with a bear hug in St Petersburg at his 70th birthday party. Germany has also been to the fore in seeking a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis although it remains to be seen whether this will produce acceptable results. The shadow of and is thus still present in Europe today. Perhaps the biggest change is that military power is far less significant in European politics than it was a century ago.
There is little or no appetite for using force to achieve political goals. Defence spending remains low. The rise of television and social media has brought the horrors of land wars and casualties instantly to a broad public. One has only to compare the public and media reactions to one soldier killed in Afghanistan to the huge numbers killed at the Somme. But as the world moves from a hegemonic system based on the US hyper-power to a more multi-polar world this will have serious consequences for Germany and Europe.
For Europe, will it redouble efforts to deepen the European integration project, trying to ensure a closer connection between the EU institutions and European citizens? Or will it drift back into a system of nation states adopting beggar thy neighbour policies? As leader of Europe Germany again has a key role to play. It has also profited hugely from the EU and thus has a moral duty to ensure the continued success of the European project. These gains should not be under-estimated. The anniversary of the First World War should give us the occasion to reflect on what kind of Europe we want. A Europe dominated by populists and nationalists has never brought a more peaceful or prosperous Europe. It has only led to conflict. The Cold War led to the emergence of capitalist U.
This piece of legislation would further hurt North Koreans and anger the country as a whole and to push them away deeper into the communism plot. Feelings would continue to be hurt once the United States pulled out of the Armistice Agreement for the Restoration of the South Korean State or more specifically part 13 d which declared that no part of Korea could bring in more weapons and trade to other sides and allies.
This single handily pushed North Korea into a technological advancement frenzy where once they seized the USS Pueblo the North Korean army knew that they could successfully advance farther than Russia or…. Despite being allies during the Second World War, Americans and Soviets held distinguishing ideas in the postwar visions. The Yalta Conference and the Korean War had been influential events in their relation, creating tensions among them. The Yalta conference was where tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States started to further establish. The communist nations did not allow basic human freedom and the United States harbored ill-will against the communists.
The United States was already considered a superpower when the Cold War started and it took the control of stopping communism from spreading worldwide. This brought it into a major crash with the Soviet Union, which was the most powerful communist nation at the time. And because The Cold War happened, it also lead to some of the biggest news in history. Essays Essays FlashCards. Browse Essays. Sign in. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality.
Show More. Read More. Words: - Pages: Words: - Pages: 7. Words: - Pages: 5. Words: - Pages: 6. A Critique Of Containment Analysis However, many critics include myself believe that this event lead to a series of the new modern issues such as the Korean and Vietnam War, China turn to communist and the nuclear weapons issues. Words: - Pages: 4. Related Topics. Ready To Get Started?
In Germany and Japan, democracy slowly took root. How Did The World Change After Ww2 Essay policies of glasnost and perestroika offered hope to the peoples of Eastern Europe and in he declined to send in the How Did The World Change After Ww2 Essay Army to suppress demonstrations for greater freedom in East Germany. Such years come only once or twice in a How Did The World Change After Ww2 Essay lifetime. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. The war was witness to the greatest single violation of civil rights in The Differences Between Troy And The Iliad.