Please completely paraphrase the following chapter outline
I.
Postwar Europe and the Origins of the Cold War
A. The Legacies of the Second World War
1.
In the summer of 1945 Europe lay in ruins: fighting had destroyed cities and landscapes and had obliterated buildings, factories, farms, rail tracks, roads, and bridges.
2.
About 50 million human beings perished in the Second World War: 20 million Soviet soldiers and civilians were killed; 9–11 million noncombatants died in Nazi concentration camps, including 6 million Jews; one out of every five Poles died; and more than 400,000 U.S. soldiers died in the European and Pacific campaigns.
3.
Tens of millions were left homeless—25 million in the Soviet Union and 20 million in Germany alone, joined by countless French, Czechs, Poles, Italians, and others.
4.
These displaced persons or DPs—their numbers increased by concentration camp survivors, released prisoners of war, and hundreds of thousands of orphaned children—searched for food and shelter.
5.
Because going home was not always the best option for DPs, the newly established United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) opened over 760 DP camps and spent $10 billion to house, feed, clothe, and repatriate the refugees between 1945 and 1947.
6.
Postwar authorities were also left to deal with the crimes committed by the Nazis; almost 100,000 Germans and Austrians were convicted for wartime crimes, and many more were investigated or indicted.
7.
Collaborators, those non-Germans who had assisted the occupying forces, were also punished.
8.
In Germany, Allied occupation governments set up denazification procedures meant to identify former Nazi Party members and punish those responsible for the worst crimes of the National Socialist state.
9.
At the Nuremberg trials (1945–1946), an international military tribunal organized by the four Allied powers—the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, and France—tried and sentenced twenty-two high-ranking Nazi military and civilian leaders.
10.
In the Western zone of occupation, the huge numbers of individuals implicated in Nazi crimes, West German opposition to the proceedings, and the need for stability in the looming Cold War made thorough denazification impractical.
11.
In the Soviet zone, about 45,000 former party officials, upper-class industrialists, and large landowners were identified as Nazis and sentenced to prison or death.
12.
The revelation of Nazi barbarism, the destruction of so many lives, and the great disruptions of the postwar years had deeply shaken European confidence.
B. The Peace Accords and Cold War Origins
1.
Hostility between the Eastern and Western superpowers, which began when the threat of Nazi Germany disappeared, was the sad but logical outgrowth of military developments, wartime agreements, and long-standing political and ideological differences.
2.
In the early phases of the Second World War, the Americans and the British made military victory their highest priority and focused on the policy of unconditional surrender to solidify their alliance with the Soviet Union.
3.
The Americans and the British avoided discussion of Stalin’s war aims and the shape of the postwar world until a conference at Teheran in November 1943 between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, when such a discussion could no longer be postponed.
4.
Stalin, concerned that the Soviet Union was bearing the brunt of the fighting, asked his allies to relieve his armies by opening a second front in France.
5.
Roosevelt’s consent to an American-British frontal assault through France meant that the Soviet and the American-British armies would come together in defeated Germany along a north-south line and that only Soviet troops would liberate eastern Europe.
6.
When the Big Three met again in February 1945 at Yalta, advancing Soviet armies were within a hundred miles of Berlin, while the temporarily stalled American-British forces had yet to cross the Rhine into Germany.
7.
Given the strong Soviet position and the weak American position at the time, an increasingly sick and apprehensive Roosevelt could do nothing but double his bet on Stalin’s peaceful intentions.
8.
The Allies agreed at the Yalta Conference that each of the victorious powers would occupy a separate zone of Germany, and that the Germans would pay heavy reparations to the Soviet Union.
9.
They also agreed in an ambiguous compromise that eastern European governments were to be freely elected but pro-Russian.
10.
The Yalta compromise over elections in eastern Europe broke down almost immediately, as the advancing Soviets formed coalition governments that included Social Democrats and other leftist parties, but reserved key government posts for Moscow-trained communists.
11.
At the postwar Potsdam Conference of July 1945, the long-avoided differences over eastern Europe finally blew open when Roosevelt’s successor, the more determined Harry Truman, demanded immediate free elections throughout eastern Europe and Stalin refused point-blank.
12.
Mutual distrust, anxious security concerns, and antagonistic desires for economic and territorial control now destroyed the Allies’ former partnership.
13.
Stalin, who had lived through two enormously destructive German invasions, was determined to establish a defensive buffer zone of sympathetic states around the Soviet Union and at the same time expand the reach of communism and the Soviet state.
14.
The United States, for its part, wished to maintain liberal democracy and free-market capitalism in western Europe and quickly showed it was willing to use its vast political, economic, and military power to maintain predominance in its own sphere of influence.
C. West Versus East
1.
In May 1945, as the fighting ended, Truman abruptly cut off all aid to the ailing Soviet Union, and in October he declared that the United States would never recognize any government established by force against the free will of its people.
2.
In March 1946 former British prime minister Churchill ominously informed an American audience that an “iron curtain” had fallen across the continent, dividing Germany and all of Europe into two antagonistic camps.
3.
Recognizing that communists could not take power in free elections, Stalin purged noncommunist elements from the coalition governments set up after the war and established Soviet-style one-party communist dictatorships.
4.
Stalin’s seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 was particularly antidemocratic and greatly strengthened Western fears of limitless communist expansion.
5.
The large, well-organized Communist Parties of France and Italy returned to what they called the “struggle against capitalist imperialism” at the same time that communist revolutionaries were waging bitter civil wars in Greece and China.
6.
In the spring of 1947, when it appeared to many Americans that the Soviet Union was determined to export communism by subversion around the world, the United States responded with the Truman Doctrine, aimed at “containing” communism to areas already occupied by the Red Army.
7.
The United States, President Truman promised, would use diplomatic, economic, and even military means to resist the expansion of communism anywhere on the globe.
8.
The U.S. government restructured its military to meet the Soviet threat, pouring money into defense spending and testing nuclear weapons.
9.
The American determination to enforce containment hardened when the Soviets exploded their own atomic bomb in 1949.
10.
In 1947, recognizing that an economically and politically stable western Europe could be an effective block against the popular appeal of communism, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall offered Europe economic aid—the Marshall Plan—to help it rebuild.
11.
The Marshall Plan was one of the most successful foreign aid programs in history, giving about $13 billion in aid (over $200 billion in today’s dollars) to fifteen western European nations, thus setting the European economy on the path to recovery.
12.
In 1949 the Soviets established the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) to rebuild the East Bloc independently of the West.
13.
In June 1948 the Western allies replaced the currency in West Germany and West Berlin, a first move in plans to establish a separate West German state and a violation of the peace accords.
14.
In response, Stalin blocked all traffic through the Soviet zone of Germany to Berlin.
15.
The Western allies coordinated around-the-clock flights of hundreds of planes over the Soviet roadblocks, supplying provisions to West Berliners and thwarting Soviet efforts to swallow up the western half of the city, and the Soviets backed down after 324 days.
16.
Breaking the Berlin blockade paved the way for the creation, in 1949, of two separate German states: the Federal Republic of West Germany, aligned with the United States, and the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany), aligned with the Soviet Union.
17.
In 1949 the United States formed NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), an anti-Soviet military alliance of Western governments.
18.
The Soviets countered by organizing the Warsaw Pact, a military alliance among the satellite nations of eastern Europe, dividing Europe politically and militarily into two hostile blocs.
19.
The Cold War spread when the Soviet-backed communist army of North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950; President Truman swiftly intervened with U.S. troops, but it was not until 1953 that a fragile truce was negotiated and the fighting stopped.
20.
In the decade after World War II, the Soviet-American confrontation became institutionalized and formed the bedrock of the long Cold War era, which lasted until the mid-1980s, despite intermittent periods of relaxation.
D. Big Science and New Technologies
1.
With the advent of the Second World War, most leading university scientists went to work on top-secret projects to help their governments fight the war.
2.
Radar used to detect enemy aircraft, the development of rocketry and jet aircraft that spurred further work on electronic computers, and the atomic bomb all showed the world both the awesome power and the heavy moral responsibilities of modern science.
3.
By combining theoretical work with sophisticated engineering in a large organization, Big Science could tackle extremely difficult problems, from new and improved weapons for the military to better products for consumers.
4.
In both the capitalist United States and the socialist Soviet Union, the government stepped in to provide generous funding for scientific activity.
5.
A large portion of all postwar scientific research supported the growing Cold War arms race.
6.
After 1945 roughly one-quarter of all men and women trained in science and engineering in the West—and perhaps more in the Soviet Union—were employed full-time in the production of weapons to kill other humans.
7.
In 1957 the Soviets used long-range rockets developed in their nuclear weapons program to put a satellite in orbit, and they sent the world’s first cosmonaut circling the globe in 1961.
8.
Embarrassed by Soviet triumphs, the United States made an all-out commitment to catch up with the Soviets and landed a crewed spacecraft on the moon in 1969, with four more moon landings by 1972.
9.
The search for better weaponry in World War II had boosted the development of sophisticated data-processing machines, including the electronic Colossus computer used by the British to break German military codes.
10.
The invention of the transistor in 1947 further hastened the spread of computers, and by the 1960s sophisticated computers were indispensable tools for a variety of military, commercial, and scientific uses.
11.
During the postwar green revolution, directed research into agriculture greatly increased the world’s food supplies, as farming became more industrialized and more productive per acre.
12.
The application of scientific techniques to industrial processes also made consumer goods less expensive and more readily available, creating new sources of material well-being and entertainment.
II.
The Western Renaissance
A. The Search for Political and Social Consensus
1.
After the war, infrastructure of all kinds barely functioned, and runaway inflation and a thriving black market testified to severe shortages and hardships, but the battered economies of western Europe began to turn the corner in 1948 as Marshall Plan dollars poured in.
2.
Determined to avoid a return to the dangerous and demoralizing stagnation of the 1930s, postwar governments in western Europe embraced new political and economic policies that led to a remarkably lasting social consensus.
3.
They turned to liberal democracy and generally adopted Keynesian economics, applying an imaginative mixture of government planning and free-market capitalism to promote economic growth.
4.
Across the west, the Christian Democrats offered voters tired of radical politics a center-right vision of reconciliation and recovery.
5.
The socialists and the communists, active in the resistance against Hitler, also provided fresh leadership and pushed for social change and economic reform after the war, especially in France and Italy.
6.
The Christian Democrats, steadfast cold warriors, drew inspiration from a common Christian and European heritage, rejecting authoritarianism and narrow nationalism while championing a return to traditional family values.
7.
In postwar West Germany, the Christian Democrats promoted a “social-market economy” based on a combination of free-market liberalism, some state intervention, and an extensive social welfare network.
8.
In Great Britain, the social-democratic Labour Party took power after the war and made a remarkably ambitious effort to establish a “cradle to grave” welfare state.
9.
In eastern and western Europe alike, state-sponsored welfare measures meant that, by the early 1960s, Europeans had more food, better homes, and longer lives than ever before.
10.
Robust economic growth in the late 1950s and 1960s complemented political transformation and social reform, creating solid foundations for a new European stability.
B. Toward European Unity
1.
A number of new financial arrangements and institutions encouraged slow but steady moves toward European unity, as did cooperation with the United States.
2.
The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 had already linked Western currencies to the U.S. dollar and established the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to facilitate free markets and world trade.
3.
The close cooperation among European states required by the Americans for Marshall Plan aid led to the creation of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) and the Council of Europe in 1948, both of which promoted international commerce and cooperation.
4.
In 1950 two far-seeing French statesmen, the planner Jean Monnet and Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, called for a special international organization to control and integrate all European steel and coal production.
5.
West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg accepted the French idea, founded the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, and rapidly realized the immediate economic goal—a single continental steel and coal market without national tariffs or quotas.
6.
In 1957 the six nations of the Coal and Steel Community signed the Treaty of Rome, which created the European Economic Community, generally known as the Common Market.
7.
The first goal of the treaty was a gradual reduction of all tariffs among the six in order to create a single market; its ancillary goals included the free movement of capital and labor and common economic policies and institutions.
8.
Hopes of rapid progress toward political as well as economic union were frustrated by a resurgence of more traditional nationalism in the 1960s.
9.
France took the lead when President Charles de Gaulle withdrew all French military forces from what he called an “American-controlled” NATO, developed France’s own nuclear weapons, and vetoed the scheduled advent of majority rule within the Common Market.
10.
Thus the 1950s and 1960s established a lasting pattern: Europeans would establish ever-closer economic ties, but the Common Market remained a union of independent sovereign states.
C. The Consumer Revolution
1.
In the late 1950s western Europe’s rapidly expanding economy led to a rising standard of living and a veritable consumer revolution, as near full employment and high wages meant that more Europeans could buy more things than ever before.
2.
The purchase of consumer goods was greatly facilitated by the increased use of installment purchasing, which allowed people to buy on credit; ordinary people were increasingly willing to take on debt, and banks offered loans for consumer purchases on easy terms.
3.
Politicians in both the East and the West claimed that their respective systems could best provide citizens with ample consumer goods.
4.
Western free markets clearly surpassed Eastern planned economies in the production and distribution of inexpensive products, as Western leaders championed the arrival of prosperity and promised new forms of social equality based on equal access to consumer goods rather than forced class leveling.
5.
The race to provide ordinary people with higher living standards would be a central if often overlooked aspect of the Cold War.
III.
Soviet Eastern Europe
A. Postwar Life Under Stalin
1.
The Soviet Union tightened its grip on the “liberated” nations of eastern Europe under Stalin and then refused to let go, as postwar recovery in eastern Europe proceeded along Soviet lines.
2.
World War II had fostered Russian nationalism and a relaxation of dictatorial terror and had produced a rare but real unity between Soviet rulers and most Russian people.
3.
Even before the war ended, however, Stalin was moving the Soviet Union back toward rigid dictatorship, using the foe in the West and its capitalism as an excuse for doing so.
4.
After the war Stalin instituted rigid ideological indoctrination, attacks on religion, and a lack of civil liberties in the Soviet Union, and millions of supposed political enemies were sent to prison, exile, or forced labor camps.
5.
The new satellite states in Soviet-controlled east-central Europe, including Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, and East Germany, were remade on the Soviet model; only Yugoslavia, under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), was able to proclaim independence and successfully resist Soviet domination.
6.
East Germany, Hungary, and Romania—countries that had fought against Russia in World War II—were forced to pay substantial war reparations to the Soviet Union.
7.
In East Germany, the Russians seized factories and equipment, even tearing up railroad tracks and sending the rails to the Soviet Union.
8.
Most industries and businesses across the East Bloc were nationalized or turned over to state ownership, recasting economic life in the Stalinist mold and creating great disruptions in everyday life.
9.
Communist planners placed top priority on heavy industry and the military and neglected consumer goods and housing; they believed an overabundance of consumer goods created waste and encouraged rampant individualism and social inequality.
10.
Communist regimes also moved aggressively to collectivize agriculture, and by the early 1950s independent farmers had virtually disappeared in most of the East Bloc, with only Poland as the exception.
11.
Throughout the 1950s, socialist planned economies often led to production problems and persistent shortages of basic household items.
12.
Popular discontent with this situation led in June 1953 to demonstrations throughout East Germany that were put down with Soviet troops and tanks, though the East German government did subsequently institute reforms to meet the most pressing demands of the demonstrators.
13.
Communist censors purged culture and art in aggressive campaigns that reimposed rigid anti-Western ideological conformity, and artists and writers were required to obey the dictates of socialist realism, which idealized the working classes and the Soviet Union.
B. Reform and De-Stalinization
1.
After Stalin died in 1953, his successors realized that reforms were necessary because of the widespread fear and hatred of Stalin’s political terrorism.
2.
Changes included curbing the power of the secret police, closing forced-labor camps, spurring economic growth, and reconsidering Stalin’s belligerent foreign policy, which had so isolated the Soviet Union.
3.
The Communist leadership was badly split over just how much change to permit; conservatives were opposed by reformers led by Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), who emerged as the new Soviet premier in 1955.
4.
To strengthen his position and that of his fellow reformers within the party, Khrushchev launched a surprising attack on Stalin and his crimes in a famous “secret speech” at a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956.
5.
The liberalization, or de-Stalinization, of the Soviet Union strengthened the reform movement; the Communist Party jealously maintained its monopoly on political power, but Khrushchev shook up the party and brought in new members.
6.
After the shifting of some resources from heavy industry and the military toward consumer goods and agriculture, the Soviet Union’s standard of living began to improve and continued to rise substantially throughout the booming 1960s.
7.
De-Stalinization also created great ferment among writers and intellectuals who hungered for cultural freedom.
8.
In 1956 the poet Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) finished his great novel Doctor Zhivago, a literary masterpiece and a powerful challenge to communism that was published in the West but not in Russia.
9.
Other talented writers followed Pasternak’s lead, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), who created a sensation when his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a damning indictment of the Stalinist past, was published in the Soviet Union in 1962.
10.
Although Khrushchev liked to boast that living standards and access to consumer goods in the East Bloc would soon surpass the West, socialist citizens in fact experienced a limited consumer revolution.
C. Foreign Policy and Domestic Rebellion
1.
Khrushchev also de-Stalinized Soviet foreign policy, arguing that “peaceful coexistence” with capitalism was possible, and even making concessions by agreeing in 1955 to real independence for a neutral Austria after ten long years of Allied occupation.
2.
At the same time, Khrushchev began wooing the new nations of Asia and Africa—even those that were not communist—with promises and aid.
3.
In the eastern European satellites, de-Stalinization stimulated rebelliousness.
4.
In 1956 extensive rioting in Poland brought a new government that argued there were “many roads to socialism” to power and managed to win greater autonomy from Soviet control.
5.
A student- and worker-led uprising in Budapest installed Imre Nagy, a liberal communist reformer, as the new Hungarian prime minister in October 1956.
6.
Although Nagy forced Soviet troops to leave the country, promised free elections, and renounced Hungary’s military alliance with Moscow, Russian leaders ordered an invasion and crushed the national and democratic revolution.
7.
Around 2,700 Hungarians died in the revolt.
8.
The re-established Communist regime executed the revolt’s leaders and sent another 22,000 to prison.
9.
The outcome of the Hungarian uprising weakened support for Soviet-style communism in Western Europe—for those who still believed in socialist equality, the brutal repression was deeply discouraging.
10.
At the same time, Western leaders saw that the Soviets would use military force to defend their control over the Communist bloc, and realized that only open war between East and West—a price they felt was too high—had the potential to overturn authoritarian Communist rule.
D. The Limits of Reform
1.
By late 1962 opposition to Khrushchev’s reformist policies had gained momentum, as his Communist colleagues began to see de-Stalinization as a dangerous threat to the dictatorial authority of the party.
2.
Moreover, Khrushchev’s policy toward the West was erratic and ultimately unsuccessful.
3.
In 1961 Khrushchev ordered the East Germans to build a wall between East and West Berlin, thereby sealing off West Berlin in clear violation of existing access agreements between the Great Powers.
4.
The recently elected U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, insisted publicly that the United States would never abandon Berlin; hoping that the Berlin Wall would lessen Cold War tensions, Kennedy nonetheless allowed its construction.
5.
Seeing a chance to change the balance of military power decisively, Premier Khrushchev next ordered missiles with nuclear warheads installed in Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba in 1962.
6.
President Kennedy countered with a naval blockade of Cuba, creating a tense diplomatic crisis until Khrushchev agreed to remove the Soviet missiles in return for American pledges not to disturb Castro’s regime.
7.
Khrushchev’s influence, already slipping, declined rapidly after the Cuban missile crisis, and he was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) in a bloodless coup in 1964.
8.
Soviet leaders, determined never to suffer Khrushchev’s humiliation in the face of American nuclear superiority, launched a massive arms buildup, yet proceeded cautiously in the mid-1960s and avoided direct confrontation with the United States.
9.
Despite popular protests and changes in leadership, the Soviet Union and its satellite countries had achieved lasting stability by the late 1950s, as Communist regimes addressed dissent and uprisings with an effective combination of military force, political repression, and limited economic reform.
10.
East and West traded propaganda threats, but both sides basically accepted the division of Europe into spheres of influence.
IV.
Hitler and Nazism in Germany
A. Decolonization and the Cold War
1.
In the postwar era, Europe’s long-standing overseas expansion was dramatically reversed in a process that Europeans called decolonization; the retreat from imperial control remade the world map, as some one hundred new nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East joined the global community.
2.
The most basic cause of imperial collapse was the rising demand of non-Western peoples for national self-determination, racial equality, and personal dignity.
3.
European empires had been based on an enormous power differential between the rulers and the ruled, a difference that had greatly declined by 1945.
4.
During the war in the Pacific, the Japanese had driven imperial rulers from large parts of East Asia, shattering the myth of European superiority and invincibility.
5.
Before 1939 empire had rested on self-confidence and self-righteousness; Europeans had believed their superiority to be not only technical and military but also spiritual and moral.
6.
The horrors of the Second World War destroyed such complacent arrogance, and the economically weakened imperial powers could hardly afford to engage in bloody colonial wars.
7.
The Soviets and Red Chinese advocated rebellion in the developing world and promised native peoples an end to colonial exploitation followed by freedom and equality in a socialist state; they supported communist independence movements with economic and military aid.
8.
Western Europe, and the United States in particular, offered a competing vision of independence based on free-market economics and liberal democracy, and they promoted cautious moves toward self-determination while attempting to limit the influence of communism in newly liberated states.
9.
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.
9.
Nasser advocated nonalignment and expertly played the superpowers against each other, securing loans from the United States and purchasing Soviet arms.
10.
In July 1956 Nasser abruptly nationalized the foreign-owned Suez Canal Company, and the resulting Suez Crisis marked a watershed in the history of European imperialism.
11.
The Israeli army invaded the Sinai Peninsula bordering the canal, and British and French bombers attacked Egyptian airfields, but the United States—fearing that such a blatant show of imperialism would propel the Arab states into the Soviet bloc—joined with the Soviets to force the British, French, and Israelis to back down.
D. The African Awakening
1.
In less than a decade, most African states had won independence from European imperialism, yet decolonization all too often left a lasting legacy of economic decline and political instability.
2.
Starting in 1957 most of Britain’s African colonies—including Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania—achieved independence with little or no bloodshed and then entered a very loose association with Britain as members of the British Commonwealth.
3.
In Kenya in the early 1950s, British forces brutally crushed the Mau Mau rebellion, but nonetheless had to grant Kenyan independence in 1963.
4.
In the former British colony of South Africa, white settlers left the Commonwealth in 1961 and declared an independent republic in order to preserve the unequal advantages of apartheid—an exploitative system of racial segregation enforced by law.
5.
An anticolonial movement in the Belgian Congo grew increasingly aggressive in the late 1950s under the leadership of Patrice Lumumba.
6.
In January 1960 the Belgians announced that the Congo would become independent six months later; Lumumba was chosen prime minister in democratic elections, but when the Belgians pulled out on schedule, the new government was entirely unprepared.
7.
Chaos broke out when the Congolese army rioted against the Belgian military officers who remained in the country.
8.
Worried that the new nation might fall into Soviet hands, U.S. leaders cast Lumumba as a Soviet proxy; the CIA helped implement a military coup against him and set up a U.S.-backed dictatorship under the corrupt general Joseph Mobutu, who ruled until 1997.
9.
Like the British, the French offered most of their African colonies the choice of a total break with France or independence within a kind of French commonwealth.
10.
Things were more difficult in the French colony of Algeria, a large Muslim state on the Mediterranean Sea, where some 500,000 French and Europeans had taken up permanent residency by the 1950s.
11.
These pied noirs (people with black feet) pressured the French government to help ensure their privileged positions when Muslim rebels, inspired by Islamic fundamentalism and communist ideals, formed the National Liberation Front (FLN) and revolted against French colonialism in the early 1950s.
12.
In response, the French army sent some 400,000 troops to crush the FLN and put down the revolt, resulting in a long, bloody, and dirty war that lasted from 1954 to 1962.
13.
News reports of systematic torture and attacks on civilians by the French army turned French public opinion and indeed the government against the Algerian war.
14.
In 1958 the immensely popular General Charles de Gaulle was reinstated as French prime minister as part of the movement to keep Algeria French, and his appointment calmed the army, the pied noirs, and the French public.
15.
Yet de Gaulle pragmatically accepted the principle of Algerian self-determination, and in 1962 he ended the conflict by granting Algeria independence.
16.
By the mid-1960s most African states had won independence, some through bloody insurrections, although exceptions included South African blacks, who still faced apartheid, and the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique.
17.
African leaders may have expressed support for socialist or democratic principles, but in practice corrupt African leaders often established lasting authoritarian dictatorships and enriched themselves at the expense of their populations.
18.
Even after decolonization, western European countries managed to increase their economic and cultural ties with their former African colonies, in what some called a system of neocolonialism.
V.
Postwar Social Transformations
A. Changing Class Structures
1.
Rapid economic growth went a long way toward creating a new society in Europe after the Second World War.
2.
A new breed of managers and experts—so-called white-collar workers—replaced traditional property owners as the leaders of the middle class.
3.
Rapid industrial and technological expansion created in large corporations and government agencies a powerful demand for technologists and managers.
4.
In the communist states of the East Bloc, the forced nationalization of industry, the expropriation of property, and aggressive attempts to open employment opportunities to workers and equalize wage structures effectively reduced class differences.
5.
The structure of the lower classes also became more flexible and open, as the population of one of the most traditional and least mobile groups in European society—the farmer—drastically declined.
6.
A decline in the number of industrial workers in western Europe, just as new jobs for white-collar and service employees grew rapidly, marked a significant transition in the world of labor.
7.
In general, better-educated and more-specialized European workers bore a greater resemblance to the growing middle class of salaried specialists than to traditional industrial workers.
B. Patterns of Postwar Migration
1.
From the 1850s to the 1930s countless European immigrants left the continent seeking economic opportunity or freedom from political or religious persecution, but the migration pattern reversed in the 1950s and 1960s, when Europeans began to experience an influx of migrants.
2.
Some migration was intranational, as declining job prospects in Europe’s rural areas encouraged many peasants and small farmers to seek better prospects in the city.
3.
In the Soviet bloc, the forced collectivization of agriculture and state subsidies for heavy industry opened opportunities in urban areas.
4.
Many other Europeans moved across national borders seeking work; the general pattern was south to north, as workers from less developed countries like Italy, Spain, and socialist Yugoslavia moved to the industrialized nations of the north.
5.
In the 1950s and 1960s West Germany and other prosperous countries implemented a series of guest worker programs that were designed to recruit much-needed labor for the booming economy.
6.
Most guest workers were young, unskilled single men who worked for low wages in entry-level jobs and sent much of their pay to their families at home.
7.
Governments had planned for these guest workers to return to their home countries after a specified period, but many chose to live permanently in their adoptive countries.
8.
Europe was also changed by postcolonial migration, in which migrants, who could often claim citizenship rights from their former colonizers, moved spontaneously to the former imperial powers.
9.
Though immigrant labor fueled economic recovery, and growing ethnic diversity changed the face of Europe and enriched the cultural life of the continent, the new immigrants were not always welcome.
10.
Migrants found adaptation to European lifestyles difficult, and they often held on to their own languages and lived in separate communities, even as they faced employment and housing discrimination and were targeted by the anti-immigration policies of xenophobic politicians.
C. New Roles for Women
1.
The postwar culmination of a one-hundred-year-long trend toward early marriage, early childbearing, and small family size in wealthy urban societies had revolutionary implications for women.
2.
Pregnancy and child care occupied a much smaller portion of a woman’s life than in earlier times; by the early 1970s about half of Western women were having their last baby by the age of twenty-six or twenty-seven.
3.
Women’s roles in the workforce also changed after World War II, as the ever-greater complexity of the modern economy meant that many women had to go outside the home to find cash income.
4.
The economy boomed from about 1950 to 1973, creating a strong demand for labor even as it gradually shifted away from male-dominated heavy industries to more dynamic white-collar service industries such as government, education, trade, and health care.
5.
Young Western women also shared fully in the postwar education revolution and could take advantage of the growing need for office workers and well-trained professionals.
6.
Communist leaders asserted that they had opened up numerous jobs to women, and in large part they were correct, as many women made their way into previously male professions, such as medicine and engineering.
7.
In western Europe and North America, the percentage of married women in the workforce rose from roughly 20–25 percent in 1950 to 30–60 percent in the 1970s.
8.
Married women entering (or re-entering) the labor force faced widespread and long-established discrimination in pay, advancement, and occupational choice in comparison to men.
9.
Even in the best of circumstances, married working women still bore most of the child-raising and housekeeping responsibilities; women working full-time exhausted themselves trying to live up to society’s seemingly contradictory ideals.
10.
When in the 1960s a powerful feminist movement arose in the United States and western Europe to challenge sexism and discrimination in the workplace, it found widespread support among working women.
D. Youth Culture and the Generation Gap
1.
In the 1950s young people across western Europe and the United States created unique subcultures rooted in fashion and musical taste that set them apart from their elders and fueled a sense of a growing “generation gap.”
2.
Youth styles in the United States often provided inspiration for movements in Europe; groups of youths in Great Britain, France, and West Germany modeled their rebellious clothing and cynical attitudes on the bad-boy characters played by U.S. film stars such as James Dean and Marlon Brando.
3.
American jazz and rock ’n’ roll spread rapidly in Western Europe, aided by the invention of the long-playing record album (or LP) and the 45 rpm “single” and by the growth of the corporate music industry.
4.
Postwar prosperity gave young people more purchasing power than ever before, and marketing experts and manufacturers quickly and consciously targeted the youth market with an array of advertisements and products.
5.
Baby boomers entering their late teens eagerly purchased trendy clothing and the latest pop music hits, as well as record players, transistor radios, magazines, hairstyles, and makeup, all marketed for the “young generation.”
6.
A rapid expansion of higher education, particularly in Europe, opened new opportunities for the middle and lower classes, but it also meant that classrooms were badly overcrowded.
7.
Many students felt that they were not getting the kind of education they needed for jobs in the modern world.
8.
At the same time, some reflective students feared that universities would soon do nothing but turn out docile technocrats both to stock and to serve “the establishment.”
9.
Thus it was no coincidence that students became leaders in a counterculture that attacked the ideals of the affluent society and shocked the West in the late 1960s.