Shattered World 4 : Global War

On December 6, , Due to this crash, many countries declared martial law. Riots proceeded to break out across the world, know as the Riots. The riots continued for the next 14 days. Parts of countries proceeded to declare independence. The first one to ever declared independence was Kurdistan, on December 12, By the time Christmas was over, the old countries that were going to fall apart did. In December 24, , the UN had collapsed. On December 29, , the Reform was done. The Reform has change the balance of power severely.

Now, you are in charge of country, whether it be new or survived the Reform. The world got atomic weapons but it also got atomic power. Under the stimulus of war, governments poured resources into developing new medicines and technologies. In many countries, social change also speeded up. The shared suffering and sacrifice of the war years strengthened the belief in most democracies that governments had an obligation to provide basic care for all citizens.

When it was elected in the summer of , for example, the Labour government in Britain moved rapidly to establish the welfare state. The rights of women also took a huge step forward as their contribution to the war effort, and their share in the suffering, were recognised. In France and Italy, women finally got the vote. If class divisions in Europe and Asia did not disappear, the moral authority and prestige of the ruling classes had been severely undermined by their failure to prevent the war or the crimes that they had condoned before and during it.

Established political orders — fascist, conservative, even democratic — came under challenge as peoples looked for new ideas and leaders. In Germany and Japan, democracy slowly took root. In China, people turned increasingly from the corrupt and incompetent nationalists to the communists. While many Europeans, wearied by years of war and privation, gave up on politics altogether and faced the future with glum pessimism, others hoped that, at last, the time had come to build a new and better society.

World War I

In western Europe, voters turned to social democratic parties such as the Labour party in Britain. In the east, the new communist regimes that were imposed by the triumphant Soviet Union were at first welcomed by many as the agents of change. The end of the war inevitably also brought a settling of scores.

In many parts people took measures into their own hands. Collaborators were beaten, lynched or shot. Women who had fraternised with German soldiers had their heads shaved or worse. Governments sometimes followed suit, setting up special courts for those who had worked with the enemy and purging such bodies as the civil service and the police. The Soviets also tried to exact reparations from Germany and Japan; whole factories were dismantled down to the window frames and were carted off to the Soviet Union, where they frequently rotted away.

Much of the revenge was to gain advantage in the postwar world. In China and eastern Europe the communists used the accusation of collaboration with the Japanese or the Nazis to eliminate their political and class enemies. The allies instituted an ambitious programme of de-Nazification in Germany, later quietly abandoned as it became clear that German society would be unworkable if all former Nazis were forbidden to work.

In both Germany and Japan, the victors set up special tribunals to try those responsible for crimes against peace, war crimes, and the catalogue of horrors that came increasingly to be known as "crimes against humanity". In Tokyo, leading Japanese generals and politicians, and at Nuremberg, senior Nazis those that had not committed suicide or escaped , stood in the dock before allied judges. Not a few people then and since wondered if the trials were merely victors' justice, their moral authority undercut by the presence, in Nuremberg, of judges and prosecutors from Stalin's murderous regime, and by the fact that in Tokyo, the emperor, in whose name the crimes had been committed, was shielded from blame.

The trials, inconclusive though they were, formed part of a larger attempt to root out the militaristic and chauvinistic attitudes that had helped to produce the war, and to build a new world order that would prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again.

Well before the war had ended, the allies had started planning for the peace. Among the western powers, the United States, by very much the dominant partner in the alliance, took the lead. In his Four Freedoms speech of January , President Roosevelt talked of a new and more just world, with freedom of speech and expression and of religion, and freedom from want and fear. In the Atlantic charter later that year, he and Churchill sketched out a world order based on such liberal principles as collective security, national self-determination, and free trade among nations.

A host of other allies, some of them represented by governments in exile, signed on. The Soviet Union gave a qualified assent, although its leader Stalin had no intention of following what were to him alien principles. Roosevelt intended that the American vision should take solid institutional form. This time, Roosevelt was determined, the United States should join.

The Impact of the First World War and Its Implications for Europe Today

The idea that there were universal standards to be upheld was present, no matter how imperfectly, in the war crimes trials, and was later reinforced by the establishment of the United Nations itself in , the International Court of Justice in and Universal Declaration of Human Rights of Stalin was interested above all in security for his regime and for the Soviet Union, and that to him meant taking territory, from Poland and other neighbours, and establishing a ring of buffer states around Soviet borders. The grand alliance held together uneasily for the first months of the peace, but the strains were evident in their shared occupation of Germany, where increasingly the Soviet zone of occupation was moving in a communist direction and the western zones, under Britain, France and the United States, in a more capitalist and democratic one.

By , two very different German societies were emerging. In addition, the western powers watched with growing consternation and alarm the elimination of non-communist political forces in eastern Europe and the establishment of Peoples' Republics under the thumb of the Soviet Union.

Soviet pressure on its neighbours, from Norway in the north to Turkey and Iran in the south, along with Soviet spy rings and Soviet-inspired sabotage in western countries, further deepened western concerns. For their part, Soviet leaders looked on western talk of such democratic procedures as free elections in eastern Europe as Trojan horses designed to undermine their control of their buffer states, and regarded the Marshall plan, which funnelled American aid into Europe, as a cover for extending the grip of capitalism.

Furthermore, their own Marxist-Leninist analysis of history told them that sooner or later the capitalist powers would turn on the Soviet Union. Within two years of second world war's end, the cold war was an established fact. Both sides built military alliances and prepared for the new shooting war that many feared was bound to come. In , the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, giving it parity, at least in that area, with the United States.

That the cold war did not in the end turn into a hot one was thanks to that fact. 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.

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India alone sent some , troops to fight for Britain. More than 10, never returned home.

Historical Context: The Global Effect of World War I | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

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.

Table of Contents

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.

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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: 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.