ABSTRACT
We are dividing the period 1945 to 1989/91 into two sections with the period around 1968 as a turning point. The three dates have significance not only in the West but globally. The defeat of the Axis in 1945 marked the end of the attempts of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to establish their domination over Europe and Asia respectively. It ushered in a new high point of American as well as of Soviet power, the dependence of Western Europe and Japan on the United States, the direct control of much of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union. In the years that followed, the United States experienced an unprecedented prosperity that, unlike during the interwar period, was not interrupted by economic crises. This prosperity was later shared by Western Europe and by Japan as these areas, with American aid, arose from the destruction of war. At the same time the prewar great powers, France, Great Britain, Germany, and Japan lost their influence on international politics. These years were marked by the dissolution of the old empires as India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka attained independence from Great Britain in 1947, Indonesia in 1949 from the Netherlands after a brief military conflict, and the Congo in 1960 from Belgium. The French tenaciously sought to maintain their hold on Algeria and Indochina. By the mid-sixties most of the former colonies in Africa, South and East Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Oceania had gained self-determination. China was unified politically with the establishment of the communist People’s Republic in 1949. International relations were overshadowed by the Cold War, which was a conflict not merely between two sets of alliances, as had existed before 1914, but between two social systems, each seeking to define itself ideologically. China emerged as a second major communist power. It is striking that, notwithstanding the enmity between the two systems, no armed conflicts occurred in Europe, in part undoubtedly prevented by the fear of nuclear war. Instead, proxy wars took place in the former colonies in Africa and Asia. The relative stability in Western Europe and North America, as well as in the Soviet Union and the countries dominated by the Soviet Union, was undermined by increasing challenges to the status quo in the Western as
well as the Soviet spheres with the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the opposition to Western involvement in the Vietnam War, and the growing disenchantment of a younger generation throughout Europe, Japan, and North America with the culture of a highly industrialized, commercialized culture and in Eastern Europe with resistance to the rigid dictatorship imposed by the Soviet Union. This discomfort manifested itself in the mass student protests of 1968 throughout the West, with high points in Berkeley, Paris, West Berlin, Mexico City, and Tokyo, as well as the Prague Spring. This student activism was predated by the notable role played by the Red Guards, or radical college students, in China’s so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, following Maoist ideology, which incidentally also had a widespread influence outside China. These uprisings were put down everywhere and yet left their impact on the general mood in the years that followed.
