The leaders of many of the new nations followed a policy of nonalignment and attempted to remain neutral in the Cold War, playing both sides for what they could get.
B. The Struggle for Power in Asia
1.
During the Second World War, the Japanese had overrun the archipelago of the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia) and encouraged hopes for independence from Western control.
2.
When the Dutch returned in 1945, they faced a determined group of rebels inspired by a powerful combination of nationalism, Marxism, and Islam.
3.
A similar combination of communism and anticolonialism inspired the independence movement in French Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos).
4.
France desperately wished to maintain control over these prized colonies, but the French army was defeated in 1954 by forces under the guerrilla leader Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969); a shaky truce divided Indochina and established the states of North and South Vietnam.
5.
Nationalist opposition to British rule in India coalesced after the First World War under the leadership of British-educated lawyer Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869–1948).
6.
In the 1920s and 1930s Gandhi built a mass movement by preaching nonviolent “noncooperation” with the British, and in 1935 he wrested from the frustrated and unnerved British a new, liberal constitution that was practically a blueprint for independence.
7.
The Second World War interrupted progress toward Indian self-rule, but when the Labour Party came to power in Britain in 1945, it was ready to relinquish sovereignty.
8.
Britain withdrew peacefully, but conflict between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority in India’s population posed a lasting dilemma for the South Asian subcontinent.
9.
Muslim leaders called for partition and the British agreed, and so when independence was made official on August 15, 1947, predominantly Muslim territories on India’s eastern and western borders became East Pakistan (today Bangladesh) and West Pakistan.
10.
A wave of massive migration and violence accompanied the partition of India: some 10 million Muslim and Hindu refugees fled across the new borders, and an estimated 500,000 lost their lives in the riots that ensued.
11.
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, India successfully established a liberal, if socialist-friendly, democratic state, and maintained a policy of nonalignment, dealing with both the United States and the Soviet Union.
12.
After the withdrawal of the occupying Japanese army in 1945, China erupted into open civil war between Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), the leader of the conservative Guomindang (Kuomintang, or National People’s Party), and the Chinese communists, headed by Mao Zedong.
13.
Winning the support of the peasantry by promising to expropriate the holdings of the big landowners, the tougher, better-organized communists forced the Guomindang to withdraw to the island of Taiwan in 1949.
14.
Mao and the communists united China’s 550 million inhabitants in a strong centralized state, expelled foreigners, and began building a new society that adapted Marxism to Chinese conditions and brought Stalinist-style repression to the Chinese people.
C. Independence and Conflict in the Middle East
1.
The French League of Nations mandates in Syria and Lebanon had collapsed during the Second World War.
2.
Saudi Arabia and Transjordan had already achieved independence from Britain.
3.
The tenuous compromise that had established a Jewish homeland alongside the Arab population in the British mandate of Palestine unraveled after World War II, with neither Jews nor Arabs happy with British rule.
4.
In 1947 the frustrated British decided to leave Palestine, and the United Nations voted in a nonbinding resolution to divide the territory into two states—one Arab and one Jewish.
5.
The Jews accepted the plan and founded the state of Israel in 1948.
6.
The Palestinians and the surrounding Arab nations viewed Jewish independence as a betrayal of their own interests, and they attacked the Jewish state as soon as it was proclaimed.
7.
The Israelis drove off the invaders and conquered more territory, and roughly 900,000 Arab Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes, creating a persistent refugee problem.
8.
The Arab defeat in 1948 triggered a powerful nationalist revolution in Egypt in 1952, led by the young army officer Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970), who became president of an independent Egyptian republic after revolutionaries drove out the pro-Western king.