Cold War, Decolonization, and Chinese Communism (Strayer Chapter 13 - Unit 8) (Not Done ALN)
Why did the "fatal flaw" talked about in the last flashcard lead to decolonization NOW? Why not earlier, or later?
1. "Conjucture:" The coming together of several seperate development at a paticular time. 2. At the international level, the world wars had weakened Europe while discrediting any sense of European moral superiority. Both the US and the USSR, the new superpowers, generally opposed the old European colonial empires, even as they created empire like international relationships of their own. 3. The UN provided a platform from which to conduct anticolonial agitation. 4. Within teh oclonies, the dependence of European rulers on teh cooperation of local elites, and increasingly on Western-educated men, rendered those empires vulnerable to the withdrawal of that support. 5. All fo this contributed to the global illegitimacy of empire, a novel and stunning transformation of social values that was enormously encouraging to anticolonial movements everywhere
What triggered the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?
1. A brief and unsuccessful attempt to restore the old order through a military coup in August 1991 triggered the end of the USSR and its communist regime. 2. From the wreckage there emerged 15 new states, following the itnerenal political divisions of the USSR. 3. The USSR collapsed less because of its multiple oriblems and more from the unexpected consequences of Gorbachev's efforts to address them. The USSRcollapse represented a unique phenomenon in teh world of the late 20th century. Simulataneously, the world's largest state and its last territorial empire vanished; the world's first communist party disintegratedl a powerful command economy broke down; an official socialist ideolgy was repudiated; and a fort-five year global struggle between the East and West ended, at least temporarily. 4. In Europe, Germany, was reuinited, and a number of former communist states joined NATO and the EU, ending division in the continent. 5. At least for the moment, capitalism and democracy seemed to triumph socialism. In many places, teh end of communism allowed simmering ethnic tensions to explode into open conflict. 6. Yugoslavia and Czhechslovakia fragmented, Chechens in Russia, Abkhazians in Georgia, Russians in the Baltic states and Ukraine, Tibetan and Uyghurs in China found themselves in opposition to teh states in which they lived.
What demands did the new freedoms in the USSR provoke?
1. A democraacy movement of unofficial groups and parties now sprang into life, amny of them seeking a full multiparty democracy and a market-based economy. They were joined by independent labor unions, which actually went on strike, soemthing unheard of in the "workers' state." 2. Most corrosively, a multitude of nationalist movements used the new freedoms to insist on greater autonomy, or even indepenedence, from the USSR. 3. In the face of these demands, Gorbachev refused to crush teh protesters, contrasting China.
Who was the leader of the USSR during its collapse? How does he compare to China's counterpart?
1. A parallel reform process to that of China's occurred under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-80s, but it unfolded quite differently. 2. Like Deng Xiaoping in China, he was committed to aggressively tackling the country's many problems: economic stagnatiom, a flourishing black market, public apathy, and cynicism about his party. 3. His economic program launched in 1987 was called perestroika, or restructuring, and it paralleled aspects of the CHinese approach by freeing state enterprsies from the heavy hand of govt regulation, permitting small-scale private business called cooperatives, offering opportunities for private farming, and cautiously welcoming foreign investment in joint enterprises.
What was military intervention like in Latin America?
1. A similar wave of military interventon occurred in L. America during teh 60s-70s, leaving Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, and other countries governed at times by their military officers. 2. However, the circumstances in Latin America were quite different from those in Africa. While military rule was something new and unexpected in Africa, it wasnt in Latin America. The region had also largely escaped the bitter ethnic conflicts that afflicted so many African statesm though its class antagonism were more clearly defined and expressed. 3. Latin American socieites were more modernized and urbanized than those of Africa. 4. While the newly independent African states remained linked to their former European rulers, long-independent Latin American states lived in teh shadow of a dominant USA.
China, just like Russia, began its task of building socialism. How was their environment different when doing this?
1. A very different international environment than the USSR. 2. In 1917, the Bolsheviks were alone in a capitalist sea, while the Chiense had an established USSR as a friendly Northern neighbor and ally. 3. Furthermore, Chiense revolutionaries had actually governed parts of their country for dcades, gaining experience that the new Soviet rulers had altogether lacked as they had come to power so quickly. 4. The Chinese communists were firmly rooted in the rural areas and among the country's vast peasant population, while the Russians found support in the cities.
What was the third major military conflict of the cold war?
1. Afghanistan. A Marxist party had taken power in 1978. USSR leaders were delighted at this extension of communism on their southern border, but radical land reforms and efforts to liberate Afhan women soon alienated much of this conservative Muslim country and led to a mounting opposition movement. 2. Fearing the overthrow of a new communist state and its replacement by Islamic radicals, USSR forces intervened miltarily and were soon bogged down in a war they couldn't win. 3. For a full decade, that war was a 'bleeding wound,' sustained in part by US aid to Afghan guerrillas. 4. Under widespread international pressure, USSR forces withdrew in 1989, and the Afghan communist regime soon collapsed. 4. What you need to understand: In Vietnam and Afghanistan, both superpowers painfully experienced the limits of their power.
How does global military spending reflect all of these tensions?
1. After a brief droup during the 1990s, global military spending rose during the early 21st century to exceed cold war levels by 2010. 2. The US led this global pattern with sharp sending increases after the attacks of 2001 as the war on terror took shape. 3. Although the US accounted for 35-40% of this spending in the 21s century, China has steadily increased its budget during this time and is now second only to the US. 4. All in all, no long prolonged period of international stabolity and no lasting peace dividend was accompanied by the end of the cold war.
What were the negative affects of the reform in China?
1. Also generated massive corruption among Chinese officials, sharp inequalities between teh coast and the interior, and a huge problem of urban overcrowding, terrible pollution in major cities, and periodic infaltion as the state loosened its controls over the economy. Urban vices such as street crime, prositution, gambling, drug addiction, and a criminal underworld, whihc had been largely eliminated after 1949, surfaced again in China's booming cities. Nontheless, something remarkable had occurred in China: a largely capitalist economy had been restored by the CCP itself.
What was China's industrialization program like?
1. Also modeled on the earlier USSR experience 2. Emphasis on large scale heavy industries, urban based factories, centralized planning by statea and party authorities, and the mobilization of women for the task of development. 3. As in the USSR, impressive economic growth followed, as did substantial migration to the cities and th emergence of a bureacratic elite of planners, managers, scientists, and engineers. 4. Both favored urban over rural areas, and privileged an educated, technically trained elite over workers and peasants. 5. Stalin and his successors accepted these inequalities. Mao didn't. He launchhed recurrent efforts to comba these tendecies and to revive and preserve the revolutionary spirit that had animated the CCP during its struggle for power.
What ended the cold war?
1. As new nations emerged from colonial rule reshaped thhe international political landscape during the second half of the 20th century, so too did the demise of world communism during the last quarter of 20th C. 2. This ended the cold war, diminished the threat of nuclear holocaust, and marked the birth of another 20 nations (around that)
How does the nuclear arms race help explain why there was no direct shooting war between the two powers?
1. Awareness of the power of nuclear weapons is the main rerason that no shooting war of any kind occurred between the two superpowers, for leaders on both sides knew beyond any doubt that a nuclear war would produce only losers and chaos. 2. Stalin: "Atomic weapoons can hardly be used without spelling in the end of the world." 3. Particularly after the scary Cubam Missile Crisis of 1962, both sides carefully avoided further nuclear provocation, even while continuing the buildup of their respective arsenals. 4. Moreover, because they feared that a conventional war would escalated to the nuclear level, they silently agreed to sidestep any diirect military confrontation.
What other conflicts occur on the world stage?
1. Between India and Pakistan, North Korea and its neighbors, China and Taiwan --> roil waters of international life. 2. All of these countries except Taiwan possess nuclear weapons --> increased dangers. 3. East-West struggles of the cold war era gave way to tension between the wealthy countries of the Global North and the developing countries of the Global South led by emergin powers as India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa. 4. Any number of civil wars or ethnically based spseratist movements took shape in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Russia, Ukraine, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, among other places.
What was different about the cold war in Asia?
1. By contrast, the extension of communism into Asia, namely China, Korea, and Vietnam, globalized the cold war and occasioned its most destructive an dprolonged 'hot wars.' 2. A North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 led to both Chinese and American involvement in a three year conflict. This ended in an essential standoff that left the Korean peninsula still divided in the early 201st century. 3. In Vietnam, military efforts by South Vietnamese communists and the already communist regime in North Vietnam to unify their country resulted in MASSIVE American intervention in the 60s. To American authorities, a communist victory would open the door to furhter communist expansion in Asia and beyond. Armed and support by USSR and Chinese, the communists who were willing to endure large losses bested the Americans who returned home facing protest. The Vietnamese unified their country under communist control by 1975.
What social and economic processes within teh colonies generated human raw material for anticolonial movements?
1. By the early 20th century in Asia and the mid 20th c. in Africa, a second or third generation of Western-educated elites, largely male, had arisen throughout the colonial world. These young men were familiar with European culture, they were deeply aware of the gap between its values and its practices, they no longer viewed colonial rule as a vehicle for their people's progress as their fathers had, and they increasingly insisted on immediate independence. 2. Growing numbers of ordinaries were receptive to this message. Veterans of the world wars, young people with some education but few jobs to commensurate with their expectations, a small class or urban workers who were increasingly aware of their exploitation, small scale female traders resentful of Euro privileges, rural dwellers who had lost land or suffered from forced labor, impoverished and insecure newcomers to the cities --> ALL of these groups had reason to belive the independence held great promise. 3. As populations grew across the colonial world, the pressure of numbers enhanced these grievances.
How did China move away from the Soviety model of industrialization?
1. By the mid 50s, Mao and some followers were convinced that the Soviet model of industrialization was leading China away from socialism and toward new forms of inequality, toward individualistic and careerist values, and toward an urban bias that favored the cities at the expense of the countryside. 2. The Great Leap Forward of 58-60 marked Mao's first response to these distortions of Chinese socialism. It promoted small-scale industrailziation in the rural areas rather than focusing on large enterprises in the cities. 3. It tried to faster widespread and pratical technological education for all rather than relyinf on a small elite of highly trained technical experts, and it envisaged an immediate transition to full communism in the people's communes rahter than waiting for industrial development to procide the material basis for that transition. 4. The Great Leap generatetd a national catastrophee though, and an unprecedent human tragedy that temporarily discrerdited Mao's radicalism. Admin. chaos, disruption of marketing networks, and bad weather combined with produce a massive famine , the worse in human history, killing some 30M~
How did the CCP try to recruit women?
1. Cemmunists frew on a theoretical commitment to their liberation and in areas under their control established a Marriage Law that outlawed arranged or purchased marriages, made divorce easier, and gave women the right to vote and own property. 2. Women's associations enrolled hundreds of thousands of women and promoted literacy, fostered discussions of women's issues and encouraged handicraft production such as making clothing, blankets, and shoes, so essential for the revolutionary forces. 3. Resistance to these radical measures from traditional rural villagers, especially the male peasants and soldiers on whom the communists depended, persuaded the party leaders to modify these measures. 4. Women were not permitted to seek divorce from men on active miltiary duty. Women's land deeds were often given to male family heads and were regarded as family property. Female party mmebers found themselves limited to work with women or children.
How did China begin buildung it's modern society.
1. China initially sought to follow the USSR modern of socialist modernization, though with variations. The collectivation of agriculture in China during the 1950s was a peaceful process unlike Russia's, owing much to the close relationship between the CCP and the peasantry that had been established during the three decades of struggle. 2. China pushed collectivization farther than the USSR, particularly in huge "people's communes" during the Great Leap Forward in the late 50s. It was an effort to mobilize China's enormous population for rapid development and at the same time to move toward a more fully communist society with an even greater degree of social equality and collective living.
How did Mao Zendong deal with enemies?
1. China under Mao just as the USSR under Stalin found istelf caught up in a search for enemies in the 50s. 2. In the USSR, this was under the clear control of state authorities, but in China it became more public, escaping leadership especially during the most intense phase of the Cultural Revolution. 3. Mao called for rebellion agains tthe CCP itself as he was convinced many within it had been drawn to capitalist values. 4. Millions of youngsters responded and organized the Red Guards. They set out to rid China of those who were on the capitalist road. 5. Following huge rallies in Beijing, they fanned out across the country and attacked local party and govt officials, teachers, intellectuals, factory managers, and others they defined as enemies. Many of them were sent to the countryside of physical labor and to learen from the peasants. Others were humiliated, beaten, or even killed. 6. Rival revolutionary groups soon began fighting --> civil war threatened China. Mao had to call military to restore order CCP control. The Terro and the Cultural Rev both discredited socialism and contributed to collapse of communism.
Who was the audience of the CCP, which is different from the Bolsheviks?
1. Chinese communists interestingly looked to country's peasant vilalges for support. But Chinese peasants did not rise up against their landlords as Russian peasants had. 2. Instead, years of guerilla warfare, experiments with land reform in areas under communist control, and the creation of a communist military force to protect liberated areas slowly gained for the CCP a growing measure of respect and support among China's peasants, espcially during the 1930s. 3. In the process, Mao Zendong, the son of a prosperous peasant family and a professional revolutionary since the early 20s emerged as the party's leader. 4. A central event in Mao's rise --> Long March of 1934-35, when beleagured communist forces in southern China made a harrowing but successful retreat to a new base in the northwest of the country. This was an epic journey of some 5,600 miles that soon acquired mythical dimensions in communist lore.
While Europe, Japan, and the USSR were emerging from choas of WWII, what was China doing? (Start of Ch 13 for Chinese communism.)
1. Chinese recovering from decades of civil war and from its struggle against Japanese imperialism. It was doing so under the direction of the CCP and its leader Mao Zendong. 2. In a longer term perspective, China's revolution represented the real beginning of that country's emergence from a centyry of imperialist humiliation and semi-colonial rule, the development of a distinctive Chinese approach to modern development, and its return to a position of prominence on the global stage.
In general, where in Asia did communism rise? (Besides China)
1. Communism also took root in Asia after WWII 2. Following Japan's defeat, its Korean colony was partitioned, with the Northern half coming under USSR/communist control. 3. Vietnam --> locally based communist movement, active since the mid-1920s, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. He embodied both a socialist vision and Vietnamese nationalism as it battled Japanese, French, and later American invaders and established communist control first in the Northern Half of the country and after 1975 throughout the whole contry. The victory of the communists spilled over into Laos and Cambodia where communist parties took power.
Who led the reform process in China?
1. Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as China's paramount leader in 1976 after the death of Mao Zendong. 2. Espeically dramatic were Deng's dismantling of the country's system of collectivized farming and a return to somehthing close to small scale private agriculture. Impoverished Chiense peasants eagerly embrced these new opportunities and pushed them even further than governments had intended. 3. Industrial reform proceeded more gradually. Managers of state enterprises were given greater authority and encouraged to act like private owners, making many of teir own deveisions and seeking profits. 4. China opened itself to the world economy and welcome foreign investment in 'special enterprise zones' along the coast, where foreign capitalists received tax breaks and other inducements. 5. Local governments and private entrepeneurs joined forces in thousands of flourishing 'township and village enterprises' that producded food, clothing, building materials, and much more.
In what ways did world communiism remain a powerful global presence?
1. Despite its internal conflicts this was true during the 1970s, and it achieved its greatest terriotrial reach during that time. 2. China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution while the USSR had matched the US military might. 3. Despite American hostility, Cuba remained a communist outpost in the Western hemisphere, with impressive achievements in education and health care for its people and commitment to supporting revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America. 4. Communism triumphed in Vietnam dealing a major setback to the USA. A number of African countries also affirmed their commitment to Marxism.
In Africa, what provided the context for military takeover?
1. Economic dissapointments, class resentments, and ethnic conflicts provided the context for numerous military takeovers. 2. By the early 1980s, the military had intervened in at least 30 of Africa's 46 independent states and actively governed more than half of them. Army officers swept aside the old political parties and constitutions and vowed to begin anew, while promising to return power to civilians and restore democracy at some point.
What was the outcome of the Chinese reforms?
1. Economic growth and new prosperity for millions. Better diets, lower mortality rates, declining proverty, massive ubran construction, and surging exports, all of this accompanied China's state directed rejoining of the world economy and contributed to a much improved material life for millions of its citizens. China was the rising economic giant of the 21st century. That economic success provided the foundation for China's emergence as a Great Powers of the new century, able to challenge American dominance in asia.
What were the two failures of communism?
1. Economic: Despite initial success, communist economies by the late 70s showed no signs of catching up to the more advance capitalist countries. The highly regiments USSR economy was especially stagnant, as its citizens were forced to stand in long lines for consumer goods and complained about their poor quuality and declining avaliability. 2. This was especially embarrasing, for it had been the proud boast of communist leaders everywhere that they had found a better route to propserity. These comparisions were more well known thanks to teh global information revolutuon. They had political and national security implications as well, for economic growth, even more than military, was increasingly the measure of state power. 3. Moral: Horrors of Stalin's Terror, Mao's Cultural Revolutuion, somethin near genocide in Cambodia, all o fhtis wore away at communist claims at moral superiority over capitalism. Moreoever, this occurred as global political culture more widely embraced democracy and human rights
What is the second factor that helps explain Europe's recovery? (Hint: Cooperation.)
1. Europe's ability to integrate their individual recovering economies, putting nationalism aside for peace and propserity. 2. This took place during the 50s --> European Economic Community (EEC) was established in 1957, whose members reduced theor taroffs amd developed common trade policies. 3. Over the next half century, the EEC expanded its membership to include almost all of Europe, including many former communist states. 4. In 1994, the EEC was renamed to the European Union, and in 2002, twelve of its members, later increased to 17, adopted a common currency, the Euro. 5. This sustained their recovery but also expressed a larger European identity.
What is perhaps the most important internal factor favoring a revival of democracy?
1. Failure of authoritarian governments to remedy disastrous economic situations, to raise standards of living, to provide jobs for the young, and to curb pervasive corruption. 2. Thte opressive and sometimes brutal behavior of repressive governments humiliated and outraged many. 3. Furthermore the growth of civil society with its numerous voluntary groups provided a social foundation, independent of the state, for demanding change. 4. Disaffected students, professionals, urban workers, religious organizations, women's groups, and more joined in a variety of grassroot movements, some of them mobilized through social media, to insist on democratic change as a means to a better life. 5. Such movements found encouragement in teh demands for democracy that accompanied the South African struggle against apartheid and the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern European communism. And the end of the cold war reduced the willingness of the major industrial powers to underwite their authoritarian clinet states.
How did Gorbachev's policies work against him?
1. Far from strengthening socialism and reviving a stagnant USSR, the reforms led to its further weakening and collapse. 2. In contrast with China's boomin economy, the USSR spun into a sharp decline as its planned economy was dismantled before a functioning market-based system could emerge. 3. Infaltion mounted; consumer goods were short in suplly, and ration coupons reappeared; many feared the loss of their jobs. 4. Unlike Chinese peasants, few USSR farmers were willing to risk jumping into private farming, and few foreign investors fount interest in USSR.
What happened in 1949?
1. Four years after the war's end, the Chinese communists swept to victory over the Guomindang, many of whose followers fled to Taiwan. Mao Zendong: "the Chinese people have stood up."
What is the context for decolonization? (How does it fit within this period?)
1. From an American or USSR perspective, cold war struggles dominated the world stage from teh 40s- early 90s. 2. From teh world of Asia and Africa, a different global struggle was unfolding, focusing on colonial rule, subordination, poverty, and racism. 3. Variously called the struggle for independence or decolonization, that process maked a dramatic change in the world's political architecture, as nation-states triumphed over empires that had structured much of the world's political life in teh 19th and early 20th centuries. 4. This mobilized millions of people, thrusting them into political activity and sometimes into violence and warfare. 5. Decolonization signaled the declining legitimacy of both empire and race as a credible basis for political or social life. It promised not only national freedom but also personal dignity, opportunity, and prosperity.
In what way did Gorbachev move far beyond Chinese reforms when it comes to cultural and political affairs?
1. Glasnost policy: "openness" --> permitted an unprecedented range of cultural and intellectual freedoms. 2. In late 80s, glasnost hit the USSR like a bomb. Newspapers and TV exposed social pathologies, these being crime, prostitution, child abuse, suicide, elite corruption, and homlessness, that previoisly had been presented solely as the product of capitalism. 3. Plays, poems, films, and novels that had long been censored were now released to a public that virutall devoured them. Films broke the ban on nudity and explicit sex. 4. USSR history was reexamined as revelations of Stalin's crimes poured out of the media. 5. Bible and Qur'an became more widely avalible. atheistic propaganda largely ceased, and thousands of churches and mosuqes were returned. 6. Beyond glasnost --> democratization and a new parliament with real powers, chosen in compettive elections. When those elections occurred in 1989, dozens of leading communists were rejected at the polls. 7. Foreign affairs: Gorbachev ,oved to end the cold war by making unilateral cuts in USSR military forces, engaging in arms control negotiations with the US< and refusing to intervene as communist governments in Eastern Europe were overthrown.
What events in Eastern Europe intersect with those in the USSR?
1. Gorbachev's reforms had lit a fuse in Eastern Europe where communism had been imposed and maintained externally. 2. "Miracle Year" of 1989: Massive demonstrations, last-minute efforts at reforms, the breaching of the Berlin Wall, the surfacing of new political groups --> this and more overwhelmed teh communist regimes of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, which were quickly swept away. 3. This success then emboldened nationalists and democrats in the USSR, If communism can be overthrown there, it could in the USSR too. 4. Conservatives and patriots were outraged. TO them, Gorbachev stood idly by while the political gains of WWII vanished. It was nothing less than treason.
What is the Global South?
1. Having achieved the status of independent nation states, how would these states bee governed? How would they undertake the tasks of nation building and modern development? These were the questions that confronted both the former colonies and those already independent, like China, Thailand, Ethiopia, Iran, Turkey, Central and South America. 2. Together they formed the bloc of nations known as the third world, the developing countries, or the Global South.
In general, where did decolonization occur over time?
1. In 1900, European colonial empires in Asia, Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific Oceania appeared as enduring features of the world, but before the 20th century, they were gone. 2. Firstly --> Asia and Mid East, late 40s: Phillipines, India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel. 3. Secondly --> Decades from teh mid 50s through the mid 70s --> Age of African independence as a colony after colony, more than 50 in total, emerged into freedom. 4. Thirdly --> 1970s, many of the island societies of Pacific Oceania, these being Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Kiribati became independent almost entirely peacefully. Hawaiians sought incorporation as a state within the USA though. 5. Lastly --> A number of Carribbean societies --> The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Tobago achieved independence during the 60s and 70s informed by a growing awareness of a distinctive Carribean culture. 6. Cuba, although formally independent sicne 1902, declared rejection of American control in its upheaval in 1959. By 1983, the Caribbean region hosted 16 seperate independent states
What happened in Yugoslavia, and how did it give credibility to Western perceptions of the cold war?
1. In Eastern Europe, Yugoslav leaders early on had rejected Soviet domination of their internal affairs and charted their own independent road to socialism. 2. Fearing that reform might lead to contagious defections from the communist bloc, Soviet forces actually invaded their allies in Hungary and Czechoslovakia to crush such movements, and they threatened to do so in Poland. 3. These actions gave creditibility to Western perceptions of the cold war as a struggle between tyranny and freedom. It also hurt the image of Soviet communism badly as a reasonable alternative to capitalism.
How did tactics of nationalist movements vary?
1. In many places like West Afriica, nationalist relied on peaceful politiical pressure --> demonstrations, strikes, mass mobilization, and negotations--to achieve independence. 2. Elsehwere, armed struggle was required. 8 years of guerrilla warfare preceded Algerian independence from France in 1962.
How did the nationalist movements seeking independence diiffer from one another?
1. In some palces, that struggle, once begun, produced independence within a few years, 4 years in teh case of the Belgian Congo. 2. Elsewhere --> it was measured in decades. Nationalism had surgaced in Vietnam in the early 1900s, but the country achieved full political independence only in teh mid 70s having fought French colonial rulers, Japanese invaders during WWII, and US military forces in teh 60s-70s, as well as Chinese forces during a brief war in 1979. 3. The struggle in South Africa was distinctive in many ways. It was not waged against a distant colonial power, but against a white settler minority representing about 20% of the population that had already been granted independence from Great Britain in 1910. It took place in a mature industrialized and urbanized nation and in teh face of the world's most rigid and racially repressiive regime, known as apartheid. These factors help to explain why South Africa gained its 'independence' from colonial opression only in 1994.
What was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution?
1. In the mid 60s, Mao launched another campaign, this being the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, in order to combat the capitalist tendencies that he believed had penetrated even the highest ranks of the CCP. 2. The Cultural Revolution also involved new efforts to bring health care and education to the countryside and to reinvigorate earlier attempts to at rural industrialization under local rather than central control. In these ways, Mao struggled, though without great success, to overcome the inequalities associated with China's modern development and to create a mdoel of socialist modernity quite distinct from that of the USSR.
What was the Partition like?
1. India became independent as two countries, a Muslim pakistan which was divided into two wings, and a mostly Hindu India governed by a secular state. 2. Dividing colonial India like this was painful. A million people or more died in the communal violence that accompanied partition, and some 12M refugees moved from one country to the other to join their religious compatriots. 3. Ghandi himself, wanting to stem the violence, refused to attend the independence celebrations. Only a year after independence, he was assassinated by a Hindu extremist The Great triumph of independence, secured from the powerful British Empire, was overshadowed by the Great Tragedy of violent partition.
What was the aftermath of the end of Communism as a whole?
1. It had shrunk considerably from its high point just three decades earlier from the dawn of the 21st century. 2. USSR and Eastern Europe: communism disappeared entirely as the governing authority and dominant ideology. In the immediate aftermath of the USSR collapse, Russia experienced a sharply contracting economy, widespread poverty and inequality, and declining life expectancy. 3. Not until 2006 did its economy recover to the level of 1991. China had largely abadoned its communist economic policies as a market economy took shape, spurring remarkable economic growth. 4. Like China, Vietnam and Laos were officialy communist but pursued Chinese style reforms, though more cautiously. 5. Cuba allowed small businesses, private food markets, tourism to grow, whwile harshly suppressing opposition political groups. Cubans were increasingly engaged in private enterpise, able to buy and sell cars and houses, and enthusiastically embracing mobile phones and computers. 6. 2015: Diplomatic relations with the US were resotred after more than a half century of hostility between teh two countries. An impoverished and highly nationalist North Korea remained the most unreformed and repressive communist countries. 7. Still, communism had effectively ended across the world.
What was the cold war accompanied by on the Communist side?
1. It was accompanied by turmoil within and among the communist states. In the USSR, the superpower of the communist world, the mid 50s witnessed devastating revelations fo Stalin's many crimes, shocking the communist faithful everywhere. 2. In Hungary, Czecehoslovakia, and Poland, various reform movements registered sharp protext against highly repressive and USSR dominated communist governments.
What was India's political system like? What about everywhere else?
1. It was in India where a Western-style democracy had its deepest roots. 2. Regular elections, multiple parties, civil liberties, and peaceful changes in government, has been practiced almost continuosly since independence 3. Elsewhere in the colonial world, democracy proved a far more fragile transplant. AMong the new states of Africa, for instance, few retained their democratic institutions beyond the initial post independence decade. Many of the appararently popular political parties lost mass support and were swept by military coups. 4. When an army took power in Ghana in 1966, no one lifted a ginger to defend the party that had led the country to independence only 9 years earlier. Other states evolved into one-party systems, and still others degenerated into corrupt personal tyrannies or 'Big Man' dictatorships. Freedom from colonial rule certainly did not automatically generate the internal political freedoms associated with democracy.
What was Japan's recovery from WWII like?
1. Japan was under American occupation between 1945-1952, and a parallel process to that of Europe's revived the country's devestated by already industrial economy. 2. In the 20 years following occupation, Japan's economy grew very well, and the nation was an economic giant on the world stage. 3. The democratic constitution imposed on Japan by American occupation authorities required that land, sea, and air forces as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. 4. This meant that Japan, even more so than Europe, depended on the US for its military security.
What gave the CCP a decisive opening in gaining power in China?
1. Japan's brutal invasion of China gave the CCP a decisive opening. This attack destroyed Guomindang control over much of the country and forced it to retreat to the interior, where it became evenn more dependent on conservative landlords. 2. The CCP grew from just 40K in 1937 to 1.2M in 1945, while the communist-led PLA mushroomed to 900K supported by additional 2M militia troops. 3. Much of this growing support derived from the vigor with which teh CCP waged war against eh Japanese invaders. Using guerrilla warfare techniques learned in teh struggle against the Guomindang, ommunist forces established themselves behind enemy lines and offered a measure of security to many Chinese faced with Japanese atrocities. 4. The Guomindang on the other hand, sometimes seemed to be more interested in eliminatting the communists than fighting the war. Furthermore, in the areas it controlled, the CCP reduced rents, taxes and interest payments for peasants; taught literacy to adults; and mobilized women for the struggle. 5. As the war drew to a close, more radical action followed. Teams of activists encouraged poor peasants to speak bitterness in public meetings, to struggle with landlords, and to settle accounts with them.
How did ideologies differ between nationalist movements?
1. Many in India and Dar al Islam viewed their new nations through the prisms fo religion, while elsewhere more secular outlooks prevailed. 2. In Indonesia an early nationalist organization, the Islamic Union, appealed on the basis of religion, while later groups espoused Marxism. Indonesia's main nationalist leader, Sukarno, sought to embrace and reconcile these various outlooks. Is he "A nationalist? An Islamist? A marxist?" he is a "mixture of all these isms." 3. Nationalsist movements led by communist parties such as those in Vietnam and China sought major social transformations as well as freedom from foreign rule, while those in most of Africa foucsed on ending racial discrimination and achieving political independence with little concern about emerging patterns of domestic class inequality.
Beyond world powers, what conflict was also going on? (Middle East)
1. Middle East emergegd as a vortex of instability and conflict that echoed widely across the world. 2. The struggles between Israel and Palestinian territories generated periodic wars and upheavals that have persisted into the post-cold war era. 3. Both near neighbors, such as Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and egypt, as well as distant powers like teh US and Russia have been drawn into the conflict on both sides. 4. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 established a radically Islamist government in that ancient land, helped to trigger a long and bloody war with neighboring Iraq during the 1980s, posed a serious to Israel, and launched a rivalry with Saudi Arabia for influence in that region. 5. Iran's alleged efforts to acquire nuclear weapons capability generated widespread efforts to forestall that possbility, which came to fruition in a contentiously negotatied international agreement in 2015.
How does India's independence movement give an example of the divisions within such movements?
1. Mohanda Gandhi rejected modern industrialization as a goal for India, while his chief lieutenant, Jawaharal Nehru, embraced science, tech, and industry as essential to India's fture. 2. Nor did everyone accept Ghandi's nonviolent philosophy or his inclusive definition of India as embracing all religions, races, and castes. 3. Some beliveed that Ghandi's efforts to improve the position of women or untouchables were a distraction from the task of gaining independence. Whether to participate in British-sponsored legislative bodies prior to complete independence also became an issue. 4. A number of smaller parties advocated on behalf of partcular regions or castes.
What is the context for the Chinese Revolution of 1949? How was it different from Russia's?
1. Most striking expansion of communism in Asia. 2. CCP took control in 1949. 3. The Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949 which was a struggle of decades rather than a year was different that the Russian one. 4. China's imperial system had collapsed under the pressure of foreign imperialism, its own inadequaciies, and mounting internal opposition. 5. Unlike in Russia, where intellecutual s had been discussing socialiism for half a century before, such ideas weren't well known in China. NNot until 1921 was a small CCP founded, aimed initially at organizing the country's minuscule urban working class.
Did the end of the cold war and discrediting of communism bring international peace?
1. No, as the rivarlies of the Great Powers did not end. 2. The United States emerged as the wrold's sole superpower, but Russia and China continuted to challenge American dominance in world affairs. 3. Russian president Putin deeply resented the loss of his country's international stature as well as what he regarded as US efforts to intrude upon Russia's legitamete itnerests. 4. Issues such as the easterward expansion of NATO, Russia's intervention in Ukraine and its outright annecation of Crimea, rival involvements in Syria's civil war, and Russian meddling in American elections had brought the relationship of Russia and the US by 2016 to something resembling cold war era hostility, though without the sharp ideological antagonism of that earlier conflict. 5. The rising economci adn miltiary power of China generated many tensions in its relationship with the US and Japan as CHina sought to assert its interests and influence in East Asia, South China Sea, and the global economic arena.
What is the context for the Cold War?
1. Not only did communist regimes bring revolutionary changes to the societies they governed, but their very existence launched a global conflict that rerstructured international life and touched the lives of almost everyone, especially in the 20th century's second half. 2. This rift begun soon after the Russian Revolution when the new communist government became the soruce of fear and loating to many in the West. 3. The Nazi threat brought the USSR, Britain, and the USA together, but after WWII ended, that division erupted again in what became known as the cold war. 4. Underlying this conflict were the geopolitical and ideological realities of the postwar world. The USSR and USA were now the world's major powers, replacing Western Europe, but they represented sharply opposing viewws of history, society, poltiical, and international relations.
How was the decolonization period unprecendented?
1. On one hand, this was but the latest case of imperial dissolution, a fate that had overtaken earlier empires, including those of Assyrians, Romans, Arabs, and Mongols. 2. But never before had the end of empire been so associated with the mobilization of the masses around a nationalist ideology. More comparable perhaps was the earlier decolonization of the Americas (Atlantic Revs., Unit 5.) where Americans (continent not the country) thrown off British, French, Spanish, or Portuguese rule during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. 3. Like their earlier counterparts, the new nations of the mid-to-late 20th century claimed an international status equivalent to that of their former rulers. 4. In the Americas, however, many of the colonized people were themselves of European origin, sharing much of their culture with their colonial ruler. 5. In this way, the struggles in the 20th century were different as they not only asserted political independence but also affirmed the vitality of their cultures, which had been submerged an denigrated during the colonial era.
What is one approach that explains the rapid collapse of European colonial empires and the emrgence of a transformed international landscape with new states?
1. One approach focues on fundamental contradicitions in the entire colonial enterprise. 2. The rhetoric of Christianity, Enlightenment thought, and material progress sat wierd next to the reality of colonial racism, exploitation, and poverty, the increasingly democratic values of European states ran against the essential dictatorship of colonial rule. 3. The idea of national self determination was at odds with the possession of colonies that were denied any opportunity to express their own national character. The enormously powerful force of nationalism, having earlier driven the process of European empire building, now played a major role in its disintergration. 4. From this perspective, colonial rulee dug its own grave because its practice ran coutner to established European values of democracy and national self determination.
What is one factor that explains the globalization of democracy in the Global South?
1. One factor was the untethering of ideas of democrarcy and human rights from their Western origins. 2. By teh final quarter of the 20th century, democracy increasingly was viewed as a universal political principle to which all could aspire rather an alien and imposed system deriving from the West. 3. Democracy, like communism, feminism, modern science, and Christianity, was a Western import that took root in a globalizing world and partly lost its association with the West. 4. It was therefore more avaliable as a vehicle for social protest for the rest of the world.
In what ways was the Cold War conflict global? In what ways did the powers fail to dominate their allies? Give examples.
1. Opportunities for conflict still existed as the US-USSR rivalry spanned the globe. 2. Using military and economic aid, educational opportunitiies, political pressure, and covert action, both sides courted countries emerging from colonial rule. 3. The USSR aided antiicolonial and revolutionary movements in many places, including South Afriica, Mozambique, Vietnam, and Cuba. 4. Cold war fears of communist penetration prompted US intervention, sometimes openyl and often secretly, in Iran, the Phillipines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chole, the Congo, and other places. 5. In the process, the USA often supported anticommunist but corrupt and authoritarian regimes. 6. However, neither superpower was able to completely dominate their allies, many of whom resisted the role of pawns in superpower rivalries. Some countries like India, took a psoture for nonalignment in the cold war, while others tried to play off the superpowers against each other. Indonesia received lots of USSR+Eastern Europe aid, but that did not prevent it from destroying the Indonesian Communist Party, which killed half a miillion. 7. When the Americans refused to assist Egypt in building Aswan Dam, Egypt developed relations with USSR, but later in 1972, Egypt expelled 21,000 USSR soldiers followiing disagreements over the extent of USSR military aid, and aligned more clearly with the USA.
Who did the CCP have to contend with to rise to power?
1. Over the next 28 years, the CCP which initially had 60 people grew largely, transformed its strategy, found a charismatic leader in Mao Zendong, engaged in an epic struggle with its opponents, fought the Japanese heroiically, and in 1949 emerged victorious as the rulers of the world's most populous country. 2. This victory was more suprising because the CCP faced a far more powerful foe than the Russian Provisional Government. This was the Guomindang, or the Nationalist Party. They had governed China after 1928. Led by military officer Chiang Kai-shek, this party promoted a measure of modern development (railroads, light industry, banking, airline services) in the decade that followed. 3. However, the impact of this was limited largely to cities, leaving the majority of people who live in rural areas, impoverished. The Guamindangs base of support was narrow, deriving from urban elites, rural landlords, and Western powers.
What was the Cuban Missile Crisis?
1. Perhaps the scariest part of the entire Cold War, and yet it was a battle that did not occur. 2. The setting was... well, Cuba. A communist regime under the leadership of Fidel Castro had emerged by the early 60s. 3. Intense American hostility to this nearby outpost of communism prompted Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev, who had risen to power after Stalin's death, to secretly deploy nuclear-tipped Soviet missiles to Cuba, believing that this would deter further US action against Castro. 4. When the missiles were discovered in October 1962, the world watched for 13 days as American forces blockaded the island and prepared for an invasion. 5. A nuclear exchange between teh superpowers seemed imminent, but that catastrophe was avoided by a compromise between Khrushchev and JFK. --> Soviets removed the missiles from Cuba, America promises to not invade Cuba. This was kept, and the communist regime persisted in Cuba.
What disadvantages compared to Russia did China have?
1. Population was far greater, its industrial base was far smaller, and the avaliability of new agricultural land was far more limited than in the USSR. 2. China's literacy and modern education as well as its transportation network, were likewise much less developed. Even more than the Soviets, Chinese communists had to build a modern society from the ground up.
What common conditions did efforts to create a new political order have to face?
1. Populations were growing, and expectations for independence were high, often exceeding the avaliable resources. 2. Many developing countries were culturally very diverse with little loyalty to a central state. Nontheless, public employemnt mushroomed as the state assumed greater responsibility for economic development. 3. In conditions of widepsread poverty and weak private economies, groups and individuals sought to capture the statem or parts of it, both the salaries, and status it offerred and for the opportunities for private enrichment that public office provided.
What was the USSR recovery from WWII like? How was it different from that of Western Europe and Japan's?
1. Recovery in the USSR which was badly damaged occurred under different conditions from Japan and Western Europe. 2. The last years of Stalin's rule were especially harsh with no tolerance for dissent of any kind. 3. One result was a huge and growiing convict labor force --> 3-4M people, who provided a major source of cheap labor for the recovery effort 4. The program was a wholly state-planned effort that favored heavy industry, agricultural production, and military expenditure at the expense of basic consumer goods, like shoes and clothing. 5. Stalin's regime still did gain some popular support by lowering the price of bread and other essentials a lot. 6. The USSR benefited greatly from its seizure of industrial complexes, agricultural goods, raw materials, gold, and European art from Germany, Poland, and elsewhere. 7. This was viewed as plundering in the West, but the USSR saw this as taking spoils of war, and justified it by the massive damage to life and material the Nazi invasion caused. By mid-50s, economic recovery was well under way.
What was another task of the nationalist leadership?
1. Recruiting a mass following, and to varying degrees, they did. 2. Millions of ordinaries joined Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns in India; tens of thousands of freedom fighters wageed guerilla warfare in Algeria, Kenya, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe; in West Africa workers went on strike and market women joined political parties, as did students, farmers, and the unemployed.
How was the consolidation of democratic practice a very variable and uncertain practice?
1. Some elected leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Putin in Russia, and Edrogan in Turkey, turned Authoritarian once in office/ 2. Even where parliaments existed, they were often quite limite in their powers. 3. Electoral fraud tainted democratic institutions in many places, while established elites and oligarchies found it possible to exercise considerable influence even in formal democraciies, and not only in the Global South. 4. Chinese authorities brutally crushed a democratic movement in 1989. The Algerian military sponsored elections in 1992, and then abruptly canceld them when an Islamic party seemed poised to win. 5. And the political future of the Arab Spring reimained uncertain as a military strongman became a civilian politician and returned to power in Egypt in 2014 and Syria degenerated into brutal civil war. 6. Nonetheless, this worldwide revival of democracy represented the globalization of what had been a Western idea and the continuation of the political experiments that had begun with independence.
What idea gave fuel to decolonization in this period?
1. The 20th century witnessed the demise of amny empires. Austrian and Ottomans collapsed following WWI, giving rise to a number of new states in Europe and the Middle East. 2. The Russian Empire also unraveled although it was soon reassembled under the auspicies of the USSR. 3. WWII ended the German and Japanese Empires. 4. African and Asian movements for indepndence shared with these other end-of-empire sotries the ideal of national self-determination --> humankind was naturally divided into its distinct people or nations, each of which deserved an independent states of its own. This was loudly proclaimed by the winning side of both World Wars. 5. It gained global acceptance, especially in the colonial world during the 20th century and rendered empire illegitimate in teh eyes of growing numbers of people.
Describe the nuclear arms race in the Cold War?
1. The Cuban Missile Crisis gave concrete expression to the most nbnovel and dangerous dimension of the cold war, the arms race in nukes. 2. America first had a monopoly, and the USSR tried to acquire them, succeeding in 1949. Over the next fourty years, the world moved froma mere handful of nukes to a global arsenal of close to 60K warheads. 3. Delivery systems included submarines, bomber aircraft, and missiles that could rapidly propel numerous warheads across whole continents and oceans with accuracies measured in hundreds of feet.
What is the third factor that explains Europe's recovery? (Hint: Americaaaa) What were the motives of the Marshall Plan?
1. The USA emerged after 1945 as the dominant center of Western civilization and a global superpower. 2. An early indication of the US intention to exercise global leadership --> took shape in its efffort to rebuild and reshape shattered European economies. 3. This was known as the *Marshall Plan,* and it funneled some 12 billion, or 121 billion in 2017 dollars, into Europe, together with numerous advisers and technicians. 4. Motives: Genuine humanitarian concern, desire to prevent a new depression by creating overseas customers for American industrial goods, and an interest in undermining communist parties.
What happened between the USSR and China, which also shows divides within world communism?
1. The USSR and China found themselves opposed to each other owing to territorial disputes, ideological differences, and rivalry for communist leadership. 2. In 1960, the USSR backed away from an earlier promise to provide China with the prototype of an atomic bomb and abruptly withdrew all Soviet advisers and technicians who had been assisting Chinese development. 3. By the late 1960s, China on its own hahd developed a modest nuclear capability, and the two countries were at the brink of war. The USSR hinted a possible nuclear strike on Chinese military targets. 4. Beyond this cnetral conflict, communist China went to war against communist Vietnam in 1979, even as Vietnam invaded communist Cambodia. 5. Nationalism proved more powerful than communist solidarity, even in the faace of cold war hostilities with the capitalist West.
What was the intial arena of the Cold War, Eastern Europe, like?
1. The USSR insisted on security and control there which clashed with American and British wants for open and democratic societies with ties to the capitalist world economy. 2. This brought rival miltiary alliances. NATO brought the USA and various Western European countries together to defend themselves against the threat of USSR agression. 3. Then in 1955, the Warsaw Pact joined the USSR and Eastern European communist countries in an alliance intended to counter NATO and to prevent the West from influencing the communist bloc. 4. These alliances createed a largely cooluntary American sphere of influenc ein Western Europe and an imposed USSR sphere in Eastern Europe. 5. The border between Eastern and Western Europe came to be known as the Iron curtain as it was heavily fortified. 6. With this, Europe was very divided. Although tensions flared across this dividing line, especially in Berlin, no shooting war occurred between the two sides.
In what wayys did the communist era end more peacefully than it begun?
1. The ending may be viewed in 3 Acts (Macbeth vibes without the blood.) 2. Act One: China, late 70s, following the death of Mao Zendong in '76. Over the next several decades, teh CCP gradually abadoned almost everything that had been associated with Maoist communism, even as the party retained its political control of the country. 3. Act Two: Eastern Europe, miracle year of 1989, when popular movements toppled despised communist goovernments one after another all across the region. 4. Act 3: End of communism. 1991. USSR, under Gorbachev --> he wanted to revive and save USSR socialism from its accumulated dysfunctions. These efforts however only enhanced the country's difficulties and led to the political disintegration of the USSR on Christmas Day, 1991.
What was another outcome of WWII? (Communism, Eastern Europe.)
1. The extension of the communist world. 2. USSR victory over the Nazis gave credibility to that communist regime and to its leader, Joseph Stalin. Whatever atrocities he had committed, many in teh USSR credited him with leading the country's struggle against the Nazi agression. 3. Stalin also presided over a major extension of communist control in Eastern Europe, much of which was occupied by USSR forces as the war ended. He insisted that the Soviet security required 'friendly' govts in the region to end future threats. 4. Stalin also feared large scale American aid for Europe's economic recovery, which began in 1948, sought to incorporate Eastern Europe into a Western and capitalist economic network. 5. So, he acted to install fully communist govts in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Backed by pressure and presence of the USSR army, communism in Eastern Europe was largely imposed from the outside rather growing out of a domestic revolution. 6. Yugoslavia is a special case. There was genuinely popular communist movement which played a role against Nazi occupation. Its leader openly defied USSR efforts to control Yugoslav communism.
What was the Globilization of Democracy?
1. The late 20th century witnessed a remarkable political reversal, a globalization of democracy that brought popular movemetns, multiparty elections, and new constitutions to many ocuntries all around the world. 2. This included the end of military and autocratic rule in Spain, Portugal, and greece as well as the rise of democratic movements, parties, institutions amid the collapse of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe. 3. But the most extensive expression of this global reemergence of democracy lay in the Global South. By 2000, almost all L. American countries had abadoned their militayr regimes and returned to democracy. So too ddi dmost African states previously ruled by soldiers, dictators, or single parties. In Asia, authoritarian regimes, slong long estalbished, gave way to more pluralistic annd participatory paolitical systems, in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Phillipines, Iraq and Indonesia. 4. In 2011, mass movements in various Arab countries, these being Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, challenged or ended the hold of entrenched, corrupt, and autocratic rulers, while proclaiming their commitment to democracy, human dignity, and honest govt.
What stayed the same in China?
1. The party never relinquished its monopoly on politics, and did not promote democracy on a national level. 2. Deng believed that democracy would bring chaos to China. These attitudes associated democracy with the choas and uncontrolled mass action of the Cultural Revolution. 3. Thus, when a democracy movement spearheaded by university and secondary school students surfaced in teh late '80s, Deng ordered the brutual crushing of its brazen demonstration in Beijing's Tiananmen Square before the television cameras of the world.
How was Europe affected by the Cold War? What is the first factor that helps explain it's great recovery? (Hint: Industrialization.)
1. The war itself, economic collapse, and the Holocaust were self-inflicted, and yet Europe had not completely collapsed. 2. In the 20th Century's second half, Europeans rebuilt their industrial econimies and revived their democratic political systems. 3. The first of three factors that helps explain this is that industrial society is resilient once it is first established. The knowledge, skills, etc. that enabled industrial societies to operate effectively were still existing, even if the physical factories were gone. 4. With this, even the most terribly damaged countries of Germany, USSR, and Japan recovered by 1960 amid an economic boom in the 50s.
What has caused a flood of refugees in the post cold war world?
1. These come from war torn and economically desperate societies in the Middle East and adjacent African states, many headed to Europe. 2. The Syrian civil war beginning in 2011 generated over 12M refugees by mid-2016 with about 1M seeking asylum in Europe, almost 5M relocated to Turkey and other neighboring countries, and another 6.5M displaced within Syria. 3. This conflict became internationalized as Russia, the US, and Muslim govts and radical groups took sides. It also sharpeend the regional rivalry between Iran and KSA, which contained both an ethnic Persian-Arab dimension and religious Shia/Sunni element.
How were other regions affected during the decolonization period? (Hints: Empire without territory, USSR, China)
1. These empires like the powerful influence that the USA had in Latin America also came under attack from highly nationalist governments. 2. An intrusive US presence was certainly one factor stimulation the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910. 3. One of the outcomes of this upheaval was the nationalization in 1937 of Mexico's oil industry, much of which was owned by American and British investors. 4. Similar actions accompanied Cuba's revolution of 1959-60 and also occurred in other palces through L. America and elsewhere. 5. National self determination and freedom from USSR control also lay behind the Eastern European revolutuons of 1989. The disintegration of the USSR in 1991 brought an end to one of the last major territorial empires of the 20th century and the birth of 15 new states. 6. China's Central Asian empires remained intact despite resistance in Tibet and elsewhere. Although the winning of polticial independence for Europe's Asian and African colonies was perhaps the most difficult challenge of the 20th century, it was a process part of a larger patter in modern world history/
How did political systems vary in the Global South?
1. These new countries had to hammer out new political systems under these conditions. 2. The range of this was immense --> Communist Party control in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Multiparty democracy in india and South Africa, one-party democracy in Mexico, Tanzania, and Senegal; military regimes for a time in much of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East; personal dictatorships in Iraq, Uganda, the Phillipines. 3. In many places, one kind of political system followed another.
How did colonial rulers react to pressure from their subjects?
1. These pressures increasingly placed colonial rulers on the defensive. 2, As the 20th century wore on, these colonial rulers began to plan, slowly at first, for a new political relationship with their Asian and African subjects. The colonies had been integrated into a global economic network, and local elites were largely commited to maintaining those links. 3. In these circumstances, Europeans could imagine retaining profitable economic interests in Asia, Africa, and Oceania without the expense and trouble of formal colonial govts. 4. Deliberate planning for declonization included gradual political reforms, investments in railroads, ports, and telegraph lines, the holding of elections, and the writing of constitutions. 5. To some observers, it seemed as if independence was granted by colonial rulers rather than gained or siezed by anticolonial initiatives.
How did leaders create anticolonial and nationalist movements?
1. These regorms occurred only under lots of pressure from nationalist movements. Creating these movements was not easy. 2. Leaders were drawn everywhere from the ranks of the educated few and almost always male, and they organized political parties, recruited members, plotted strategy, developed an ideology, and negotiated with one another and with the colonial state. 3. The most prominent among them became the fathers of their new countries as independence dawned --> Gandhi and Nehru in India, Sukarno in Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Nkrumah in Ghana, Mandela in South Africa. 4. In places where colonial rule was especially intransigent, these being settler dominated colonies like Algeria, Kenya, and Rhodesia and Portugese territories, for instance, leaders also directed military operatuons and administered liberated areas. While such movements drew on memories of earlier, more localized forms of resistance, nationalist leaders did not seek to resotre a vanished past. Rather, they looked forward to joining teh world of independent nation states, to membership in teh UN, and to teh wealth and power ethat modern tech promised.
What did WWII and the Cold War allow for the USA?
1. These wars provided the context for the emergence of the USA as a global superpower. 2. Much of this effort was driven by the demands of the cold war, where the USA spearheaded the Western effort to contain worldwide communist movements that seemd to be advancing. 3. Lots of troops, treaties, relations, economic aid, to many countries. 4. Sustaining this effort was a large US economy and an increasingly middle class society. 5. USA was only major industrial country to escape the physical devestation of the war on its own soil. As WWII ended with Europe, USSR, and Japan in ruins, the USA was clearly the world's most productive economy.
What did Euroopean authorities attempt to do as colonial rule drew to a close?
1. They attempted to transplant democratic institutions to colonies they had long governed with such heavy and authoritariand hand. 2. They established legislatures, permitted elections, allowed political parties to operate, and in general anticipated the development of consititutional, parliamentary, multiparty democracies similar to their own.
How did those in the West view world communism?
1. They viewed world communism as a united force whose disciplined followers meekly followed Soviet dictates in cold war solidarity against the West. 2. Marxists everywhere contended that revolutionary sociialism would erode national loyalitiies as the workers of the world united in common opposition to global capitalism. Nonetheless, the communist world experienced far more bitter and diviseice conflict than did the Western alliance, which was composed of supposedly warlike, greedy, and competitive nations.
In what ways were struggles for independence rarely unified/cohesive movements?
1. They were rarely cohesive movements of uniformly opressed people. 2. More often, they were fragile alliances representing different classes, ethnic corups, religions, or regions. Beneath the common goal of independence, they struggled with one another over questions of leadership, power, strategy, ideology, and the distributiuon of material benefits, even as they foguth and negotiated with their colonial rulers. 3. Sometimes the relationship between nationalist leaders and their followers had tensions --> one such Indonesian leader, educated in Holland, said that he couldnt relate to his own people. 4. In colonial Nigeria, the independence movement took shape as three major political parties, each of their indentified primarily with a particular ethnic group, Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa. 5. What group of people constituted the "nation" that deserved to rule itself? Who should speaj for it?
What was the most serious threat to a unified movement in India?
1. This was derived between the country's Hindu and Muslim populations. 2. As a distinct miniority within India, some Muslims feared that their voice could be swamped by the larger amount of Hindus, despite Ghandi's inclusive sensibility. 3. Some Hindu populations confirmed those fears when they cast the nationalist struggle in Hindu religious terms, hailing their country as a goddess, Bande Mataram (Mother India,) 4. This approach, as well as Hindu efforts to protect cows from slaughter, antagonized Muslims. Their growing skepticism about the possibility of a single state found expression in the Muslim League --> Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who argued that those parts of India that had a Muslim majority should have a seperate political status. --> Pakistan, land of the pure. 5. With great reluctance and amid violence, Gandhi and the Congress Party finally agreed to partition as the British declared their intention to leave India after WWII
How successful was the Marshall Plan? What did NATO commit the US to do?
1. This was successful beyond all expectations. 2. Between 1948- early 70s, Western European economies grew rapidly, generating a widespread prsoperity and improving living standards. 3. America also brought political and military security against the distant possibility of more German agression, but more improtantly against the communist threat from the USSR. ---> North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO in 1949. 4. NATO commited the USA and it's nuclear weapons to the defense of Europe against the USSR, and it firmly anchored West Germany within the Western alliance. It also allowed Western Eurppe to avoid heavy military expenditures.
Describe the rise of terrorism in the post cold war world.
1. Undertaken by radical Islamist groups: Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and the IS. 2. The random character of their attacks and their targeting of civilians have generated immense fear and insecurity in many places. In terms of their international consequneces, the most significant if these attacks was 9/11 as it prompted large scale US military intervention and porlonged wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, 3. In both places old regimes were replaced by new ones amid enormous and continuing conflict and carnage 4. US has not been the only target of terrorist violence. Many European and Russian cities have experienced sich attacks in the 21st century and terrorism has claimed more victims in the Islamic world itself as Islamic radicals have sought to oust what they view as corrupt and un-Islamic governemnts. Thus terrorism and the so-called war on terrorism have become global issues in the post-cold war era.