Causes, course, and consequences of World War I and II

by

Humanities

Europe in 1900 seemed to have achieved the pinnacle of world power, almost all the world’s landmass and its oceans were under the control pf a continent that once seemed on the periphery of the world!

Is not the rise of nationalism (with its ability to harness and direct the human energies of millions via schools, factories, laboratories, and militaries) when fused with the Industrial Revolution dramatically increased the lethality of war from the roughly 20 million killed in WWI (still most soldier) to over 50 million in WWII (mostly civilians).

World War I demonstrated the power of a centralized state to organize the full powers of a society to total war. After World War I, the laissez faire ideology that had guided economic growth seemed “old fashioned” especially in the light of the Great Depression in the West Europe and the USA as compared to the dramatic growth of in the new USSR (and later Nazi Germany).

The USA under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, created a synthesis of a capitalist economy with a strong state. In the cauldron of WWII the USA would shine and by 1945 it was producing half of all the world’s goods and had produced and used the atomic bomb.

Fearing that it might have to fight yet another war in Europe, the USA in the late 1940s formed NATO as a military alliance (along with the Marshall Plan to inject billions of dollars into the devastated European economies).

The result would be the emergence of a Cold War between the USA and the USSR. Note that after 1945 just as the USA consolidated its power over Western European and the Western Hemisphere, China went communist and the USSR and Mao’s China represented the largest nation in terms of territory and the largest nation in terms of population.

At the same time the term “Third World” was coined to describe those parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America that really fit in neither camp but which would be wooed in the coming decades to join one ideology or another.

Questions for Discussion:

1) Why did WWI and WWII see both the zenith and decline of Europe?

2) Ironically, how did European ideologies such as capitalism, nationalism, socialism, and communism become vital tools in vast parts of the world that wished to throw off the yoke of European imperialism?