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Period 4: Global Wars to Globalization: (1914-present)
Check this flashcard reviewer of all the important dates in Period 4.
4.1: The First World War
Causes of the War
Political and Social Tensions in Europe
Great Britain and Ireland
Home Rule: A movement that campaigned for self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Nationalists were Catholic; Unionists were Protestant.
Unionism expanded in the northern Protestant regions of Ireland, particularly in the province of Ulster.
France
In 1894, the Dreyfus Affair began when a Jewish officer was falsely accused of giving military secrets to the Germans.
The incident showed the extent of French anti-Semitism and how much many French people hated republicanism.
Russia
In 1904, Russia lost the Russo-Japanese War again, revealing the Tsarist state's bankruptcy.
The Duma that would make Russia a constitutional monarchy was created early in the revolution.
Tsar Nicholas II accepted Duma's rule.
Tsarist rule resumed as an unwieldy autocracy.
Germany and Austria-Hungary
The kaiser and his inner circle feared a Socialist revolution in Germany due to rising worker agitation.
"Magyarization," the mandatory dominance of the Magyar language and culture, infuriated the other nationalities.
Entangling Alliances
In 1879, Bismarck created the Dual Alliance, a military treaty with the Austro-Hungarians.
Bismarck signed the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887 to make it clear that the treaty with Austria-Hungary was purely defensive.
After Kaiser Wilhelm II ousted Bismarck, the Russians began to fear the Germans.
German fears of being encircled increased when Great Britain and France signed an Entente Cordiale in 1904 to settle colonial disputes.
German fears increased when Great Britain signed another entente with the Russians.
This is why during the First World War, Britain, France, and Russia were referred to as the “Entente” powers.
Increased Militarization
High Seas Fleet
For the British, navies were entirely different because they saw their fleet as their only line of defense for their sizable colonial empire.
The Battle of Jutland in 1916 was the only significant naval engagement of the First World War.
Crisis in the Balkans
Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, was the site of the initial crisis on June 28, 1914.
There, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the presumed heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary, was killed.
A Bosnian Serb who desired Bosnia's inclusion in a larger Serbian state killed Ferdinand.
In 1908, the Balkan crisis brought Europe to the verge of war after Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Gavrilo Princip, the Archduke’s assassin, had operated with the full cooperation of the Black Hand.
Black Hand: A secret Serbian nationalist group with strong ties to Serbian officials in both the government and the army.
The Course of the War
On July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia, risking a wider European war.
Russia had promised to protect the Serbs.
Germany, the "blank check," supported Austria-Hungary, which started the war because it was the only power that could have stopped them.
Russia mobilized after the Austro-Hungarian declaration on Serbia.
As Russian mobilization continued, the Germans declared war on August 1.
The Second International parties, which had long opposed capitalist European wars and praised international brotherhood, voted in each nation to support the war effort.
Jean Jaurès: The idealistic French Socialist Party leader that opposed the war.
On the eve of the war, a fanatical French nationalist shot him.
Airplanes were used to spot enemy positions, making surprise offensives harder.
The Germans began the war by trying to implement the Schlieffen Plan.
Schlieffen Plan: Established that, in case of the outbreak of war, Germany would attack France first and then Russia.
Belgium, a nation created in 1830 with the promise of European neutrality, was invaded by Germany.
After the German invasion of Belgium broke this guarantee, Great Britain joined the French and Russians.
By early September, German troops threatened Paris, forcing the French government to flee.
The First Battle of the Marne, led by General Joffre, stopped the Germans after they crossed the river.
The armies on Flanders' northern coast scrambled to outflank each other throughout the fall.
Both sides settled into a longer war by the first winter.
As the stalemate continued, huge networks of defensive fortifications were built from quickly dug ditches.
As the war dragged on, soldiers faced rats eating corpses, artillery noise, and extreme boredom.
Unfortunately, both sides insisted on sending their soldiers "over the top" into no man's land to attack enemy trenches.
The war in the east was rather different from that in the west.
As the fighting in the west stalled, German forces shifted to the east and began to win against the brave but poorly equipped Russians.
Because of its massive size, the eastern front never became bogged down with trenches like the west.
In early 1915, poison gas began to be used by both sides.
Gas masks reduced gas-related casualties, but they also reinforced the inhumanity of modern warfare.
British forces attacked Turkey, a central power ally, to break the east's stalemate.
Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, devised a plan, which nearly ended his political career.
Churchill believed that defeating the Turks would allow the British to supply the beleaguered Russians via the Black Sea.
In April 1915, five divisions landed on the beach of Gallipoli
The Turks were well entrenched, so the attack failed for most Australian and New Zealand soldiers.
After suffering heavy losses, the British withdrew in January.
In 1916, the Germans launched a massive offensive against the French fortress of Verdun, which France had to defend at all costs or risk public opinion disaster.
German artillery included "Big Bertha" guns that fired ton-plus shells.
General Philippe Pétain led a spirited defense of the fortress against the Germans.
After the German victory in 1940, he became the disgraced leader of Vichy France.
In one of the war's costliest battles, the Germans attacked Verdun to bleed France dry, but both sides lost 600,000 troops.
Both Entente powers launched wasteful and ineffective offensives, such as the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Passchendaele, to break the German lines.
4.2: The End of the War
As Russia fell into revolution, the Bolshevik leaders sued Germany for peace in December 1917.
Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram caused the United States to enter the war on April 6, 1917, negating this German advantage.
Zimmermann Telegram: A secret German note to Mexico requesting support if the US entered the war.
In 1915, Germany declared the waters around Great Britain a war zone and threatened to sink any ship that tried to enter British ports.
In May 1915, a German U-boat sank the British passenger ship Lusitania, angering 120 American passengers.
The Germans stopped attacking neutral shipping after an American warning, but in early 1917, they resumed the practice.
In 1918, the Germans decided to move quickly to win before the Americans could send in large numbers of new troops.
Beginning in March, the Germans decided to gamble everything on victory.
For four months, German troops had the same success as in the war's beginning.
By summer, many Americans halted the German advance.
By August, Germany was exhausted and retreating.
The new German government, led by Prince Max von Baden asked American President Woodrow Wilson for an armistice based on Wilson's Fourteen Points.
Wilson's Fourteen Points: An idealistic document that sought to reduce future tensions between nations by maintaining free trade and ending secret negotiations.
In November, soldiers and workers formed soviets, or councils, and demanded that these loosely organized political debating societies rule the state.
Fearing that Germany would follow Russia's Bolshevik Revolution, the Kaiser was convinced to abdicate, creating a republic that was empowered to sign the armistice that ended the war on November 11, 1918.
4.3: The War on the Home Front
World War I was the first total war.
Political leaders realized they would need to mobilize all national resources after people realized their initial expectation of a quick war was wrong.
The war boosted government power in the 20th century.
Price controls, strike bans, rationing, and planned coal use supported the war effort.
The British government closed pubs in the afternoon to prevent factory workers from coming to work drunk.
Governments also began to play a larger role in trying to manipulate public opinion.
Censorship became a basic task for all governments. They read and censored soldiers' letters home to hide trench warfare's horrors.
Government propaganda offices produced films and posters to boost morale.
In the US, the First World War emancipated women, and the Second World War paved the way for the Civil Rights movement.
British female suffrage was growing before the war.
The Versailles Treaty and the Costs of the War
It is impossible to determine a precise count of the human costs of the war
Influenza killed 30 million people worldwide, dwarfing war deaths.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace estimated the war's cost at $338 billion.
Paris peace conference reached five settlements.
Treaty of Versailles — signed on June 28, 1919, in the Hall of Mirrors
Woodrow Wilson wanted to reshape the world based on his Fourteen Points, which included national self-determination and the League of Nations to resolve international disputes.
Georges Clemenceau represented a completely different outlook from Wilson’s.
France endured the most suffering of any nation during the war, and Clemenceau had to placate a populace that wanted to ensure that Germany would never again pose a threat.
David Lloyd-George supported punishing Germany as well.
The treaty ultimately represented Clemenceau's position's victory over Wilson's.
Other treaties signed in Paris in 1919 reordered the map of Europe. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the decline of Germany resulted in the birth of new nations in central Europe.
Czechoslovakia
Hungary
Romania
Yugoslavia
Poland
Finland
The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were carved out of parts of the former Russian Empire.
The Russian Revolution
Nicholas II, Russia's last tsar, misguidedly took personal command of the army in the second year of the war to emulate past warrior tsars.
In his absence, Nicholas left his wife Empress Alexandra in charge of the state.
She turned out to be completely ignorant in matters of statecraft.
She was also personally influenced by Gregory Rasputin who she thought possessed the ability to control her son’s hemophilia.
Rasputin persuades the empress to appoint his incompetent friends to important state posts.
False rumors spread that Alexandra and Rasputin were lovers and that the empress was trying to defeat Russia.
Rasputin was killed in 1916 by arch-monarchists who believed he was undermining the throne.
The Provisional Government
Duma: The Russian parliament that arose out of the 1905 revolution
The soviets consisted primarily of assorted Russian Socialists.
The majority belongs to Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary wings.
The minority belonged to the Bolsheviks.
In 1903, Vladimir Lenin proposed that a small group of professional revolutionaries could seize power for the working class, dividing Russian socialism.
His followers became known as the Bolsheviks.
Mensheviks: The group that believed Russia had to follow historical precedent to become a socialist nation.
They dominated the Petrograd Soviet to initially support the Provisional Government because they believed a bourgeois revolution must precede a socialist revolution.
The Provisional Government's refusal to end the First World War was controversial.
The Triumph of the Bolsheviks
In April, the Germans helped Lenin return from Switzerland in a sealed railcar.
Lenin was expected to undermine the Russian war effort so the Germans did this.
Over the next few months, the Bolsheviks gained strength from Petrograd's workers and soldiers.
By the fall of 1917, the Bolsheviks were the largest party in the soviets.
On November 9, new Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky took over key city positions.
The Provisional Government collapsed, ending the revolution peacefully.
Over the next three years, the Bolsheviks fought a bloody civil war to maintain power.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Germany and the new Bolshevik state ended Russia's involvement in the war by 1917.
Germans confiscated vast Russian land under the harsh treaty.
Germany's defeat and the Allies' refusal to let Germany gain eastern territories prevented its full implementation.
4.4: The Interwar Years
The German Weimar Republic
The German Weimar Republic's tragic story should not be surprising given its difficult birth at the end of a disastrous war.
In November 1918, Friedrich Ebert became the republic's first president.
Ebert used the old imperial officer corps to defeat Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg's Marxist rebellion and secure his republican regime.
Ebert approved Free Crops because the army could not put down the rebellion alone.
Free Crops: A voluntary paramilitary group often with extreme right-wing leanings.
The Kapp Putsch, a 1920 attempt by some Free Corps to overthrow the democratic state, was thwarted by a general strike.
Despite the Versailles Treaty penalties, the republic stabilized by 1924.
Gustav Stresemann, leader of the conservative German People's Party, was Chancellor of Germany in 1923.
By 1925, Germany was slowly rebuilding its relations with the other nations of Europe.
Germany accepted France's borders in the Locarno Agreement.
Germany joined the League of Nations the following year after Stresemann's efforts.
By 1929, the republic appeared to be gaining ground in Germany, but the Great Depression would show how little support it had.
The Soviet Experiment
The Communists worked to solidify their control over the vast Russian state.
For three years they had to fight a life-or-death struggle against the White Forces.
Anti-Communist monarchists and republicans are among them.
British and American troops, nominally sent to protect Allies' wartime supplies, supported the Whites.
Lenin and Trotsky justified their "Red Terror" against right-wing extremists and Bolshevik enemies during the Civil War.
By 1920, the Communists had defeated the various White armies and firmly established Bolshevik rule over Russia.
In 1919, the Russian Communists founded the Third International to aid in the cause of revolution.
The Comintern influenced western European Socialist parties as some Marxists looked to the new Soviet state for guidance.
Lenin's repression appalled most Socialists.
This split Europe into Communist and Socialist parties.
The German Communists saw the Social Democratic Party as a bigger threat than the Nazis, so this left-wing split helped the Nazis rise.
By 1920, the Comintern focused on aiding the Soviet Union, which held all leadership positions.
"War communism" tightly controlled the economy during the Civil War.
In 1921, sailors at the Kronstadt Naval Base, a Bolshevik stronghold, rebelled against this program.
Lenin replaced war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP) after the rebellion was brutally crushed.
This policy gave the government the "heights of industry" but allowed private enterprise to flourish.
Trotsky wanted war communism's economic structure back because the NEP was too ideological.
As the leader of the "Left Opposition," Trotsky believed that communism could only survive if it spread to other countries.
Nikolai Bukharin, the "Right Opposition" leader, opposed him in this debate, building communism within the Soviet state.
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin, a Georgian who joined the party in 1902, played a minor role in the November 1917 coup.
He wanted power within the Soviet system.
Stalin and Bukharin cleverly ousted Trotsky.
In 1927, Trotsky and his ally Gregory Zinoviev were expelled from the party.
Stalin waited two years before he also ousted Bukharin.
In 1936, Stalin began a series of show trials in which his former opponents were tortured into confessing to state crimes.
Stalin eliminated the "Old Bolsheviks" who had joined the party before 1917, along with anyone else who’re disloyal.
In 1940, an agent sent by Stalin assassinated Trotsky.
Stalin adopted the Left Opposition's plan to rapidly industrialize Russia after gaining power.
In 1928 Stalin implemented the first Five-Year Plan, a comprehensive, centrally controlled plan for industrial expansion.
Stalin forced agricultural collectivization to pay for this unprecedented economic growth.
The state declared war on the kulaks (wealthy peasants) and sent party cadres to the countryside to kill those who refused to join the collective farm.
After destroying their crops and livestock, millions of kulaks were shot or starved.
The Soviet Union became a major industrial power by the end of the 1930s, while the West was in a deep economic depression.
The Great Depression
In May 1931, Vienna's most powerful bank, CreditAnstalt, collapsed.
German and eastern European banks failed as citizens questioned their solvency.
Banks stopped lending and people started saving.
Because demand fell, so did the number of jobs.
Maintaining a gold standard, a fixed exchange rate between currencies and gold, worsened these issues for many countries.
The gold standard prevented countries from using controlled inflation to escape the depression.
The gold standard's problems were exacerbated by the belief that the best way to deal with an economic depression was to tighten the money supply until all "bad loans" and "failed companies" went bankrupt.
Inflation allows people to save more while still having money to spend, but it also discourages them from saving too much because they realize their money will be worth less in the future.
John Maynard Keynes was almost a singular voice of dissent.
He believed that deficit spending could fix the problem of private sector demand by temporarily providing jobs and income to boost spending and revive the economy.
"Priming the pump" meant temporarily increasing government spending on public works to unfreeze the economy and get money moving again.
Government missteps like raising tariffs to protect domestic manufacturing worsened the depression.
By 1932, the economies of Europe were performing at only half the 1929 level.
In the US and Germany, almost one-third of the workforce was unemployed due to the depression.
In the US, a stable democracy, those in the depression elected Franklin Roosevelt and supported his New Deal.
In Germany, a weak democracy, republican institutions died and fascism triumphed.
Fascism
Fascism comes from fasces, a Roman symbol of authority and community.
Fascism promoted a nationalist and mystical racial identity.
Fascists despised parliamentary democracy as anarchic and effete.
Il Duce, the Italian Fascist leader, and the Führer, the German leader, represented the nation's hopes and dreams.
Fascist governments in Italy and Germany were elected which makes this anti-democracy stance odd.
Mussolini promised that an Italian fascist state would implement corporatism.
Corporatism: An industry-specific employer-worker association to resolve production and wage disputes.
Anti-Semitism was a key component of Fascist movements throughout Europe, except Italy, because Jews were seen as outside the arch-nationalistic identity so dear to all Fascists.
Fascism in Italy
Italy became the first country to have a fascist government before the Great Depression of 1929.
Fascism in Italy grew out of national dissatisfaction with its First World War participation.
In 1915, Italy joined the Entente powers to gain control over Austria-Hungary's Italian-speaking regions.
Italy's military participation was initially disastrous, leading to the near-collapse of the Italian front in 1917, but Italy stayed in the war and helped the Entente powers win.
In 1919, proportional representation gave parties legislative seats based on their national vote percentages.
In 1919 and 1920, angry workers occupied factories, threatening a Bolshevik state and changing Italian politics.
The founder and leader of the Italian Fascists were Benito Mussolini.
His father was a Socialist who named his son after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez.
Mussolini adopted his father’s Socialist beliefs and became the editor of the party newspaper.
Mussolini wrote, “The national flag is a rag that should be placed in a dunghill.”
National Fascist Party — founded by Mussolini.
The party quickly formed paramilitary squads to fight leftist groups, earning the gratitude of factory owners and landowners who gave the party much-needed cash.
By 1921, the party had begun to elect members of the Italian parliament.
By October 1922, Mussolini demanded that King Victor Emmanuel III appoint him and other Fascists to cabinet posts.
Mussolini ordered his black-shirted thugs to march on Rome and seize power to support his demands.
If the king had declared martial law and called in the army, the Fascists would have been easily defeated.
The Fascist march on Rome was a celebration, not a coup.
Fortunately for Mussolini, his consolidation of political power faced little opposition.
After taking over in 1922, he only played parliamentary leader for a few months.
He then made constitutional changes to remove democratic constraints.
In 1924, Mussolini and the party murdered a Socialist politician, which shattered his early power.
Mussolini struggled to make Italy Fascist, possibly due to the country's nature.
In 1929, he signed the Lateran Pact with the papacy, making peace with established institutions like the Catholic Church.
For the first time, the papacy officially recognized the Italian state.
Mussolini tried to implement the new Italy's corporatist economic program, but it failed.
German Fascism
In March 1930, Hermann Müller resigned over an unemployment insurance crisis that was becoming too much for the German government due to the depression.
This was Germany's last democratic government before WWII.
Paul von Hindenburg's presidency made the Weimar Republic's future uncertain.
Hindenburg selected Heinrich Brüning, the leader of a middle-of-the-road Catholic party.
Brüning's economic program would have increased left-right political opposition without fixing the economy.
Brüning used Article 48, a Weimar Constitution emergency decree, to govern by presidential decree because he could not win a parliamentary majority.
Brüning believed voters would support austerity.
Instead, the Nazis emerged as the big winners.
The Nazis went from 12 Reichstag seats to 102 after the election.
By the spring of 1932, Hindenburg replaced Brüning with wealthy anti-parliamentary conservative Franz von Papen.
In November, the Nazis won 196 Reichstag seats, making them the largest party.
In January 1933, Hindenburg asked Hitler to become chancellor.
It was a remarkable achievement for the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler.
Hitler joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party, one of the early Weimar Republic's extremist groups, in 1919.
By 1923, he believed the party was strong enough to seize power, so he launched the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich which led to failure.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in prison, expressing his extremist views and his desire to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, which many Germans shared.
After the Beer Hall failure in 1923, Hitler decided to use the political system to gain power instead of a coup.
Nazi-armed thugs supported their political rallies and disrupted Mussolini's Fascist meetings.
Street fighting became common in Berlin and other German cities in Weimar.
In 1933, Hitler became chancellor and quickly consolidated his power.
The Reichstag building in Berlin was set on fire on February 27, 1933, but the perpetrator is unknown.
Nazis, who may have started the fire, blamed the Communists.
Hitler convinced the Reichstag to grant him emergency powers, allowing him to abolish nearly all human rights and give the executive branch almost complete power.
Despite ruling Germany, the Nazis received only 44% of the vote in the last election before World War II.
Hitler's Enabling Act gave the party emergency powers to govern the state and merged the chancellor and president's powers into one with a non-republican title, the führer.
By the summer of 1933, Hitler had banned all political parties except the Nazis and attacked the independent trade union movement.
Sturmabteilung (S.A): The Nazi political army that had played such an important role in the party’s rise to power.
Once Hitler was in power, the S.A. was expendable.
In June 1934, Hitler organized the “Night of the Long Knives,” in which he murdered his old ally Ernst Röhm, the leader of the S.A., who had wanted to make it the backbone of a new revolutionary army
The Nazification of the German state soon proceeded apace.
The Nazis worked hard to establish a Ministry of Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels to gain support for such a program.
The Nazis created a brutal police force to silence political opposition and intimidate anyone who might disagree with the party line.
Western Democracies in Crisis
Great Britain
Labour Party: Supplanted the liberals to become Britain’s second-largest political party.
Liberal Party, which preferred Victorian life to total war, had serious issues after the First World War.
David Lloyd-George's promise to make Britain a "land fit for heroes" after the war inspired British soldiers and civilians to fight hard.
France
France had defeated Germany and retaken Alsace-Lorraine.
In February 1934, several center-left parties formed a "Popular Front" to prevent a Fascist victory in France like in Germany.
In May 1936, the "Popular Front" of Communists, Socialists, and Radicals won a majority in the Chamber of Deputies.
Léon Blum, the Socialist Party leader, became Prime Minister.
In June, they passed the Matignon Agreement:
allowing workers to collectively bargain with employers,
reducing the work week to 40 hours, and
granting fully paid vacations.
However, France had to deal with the Spanish Civil War, which threatened the Popular Front.
Spanish Civil War
In February 1936, a leftist Popular Front coalition defeated Spanish Fascists.
In the summer of 1936, General Francisco Franco's army officers seized control of much of Spain.
Republic loyalists bravely organized to fight nationalist insurgents, disproving their prediction that the republic would collapse.
Spain was swept into an incredibly brutal civil war.
On market day, in the city of Guernica, German and Italian planes bombed and strafed the civilian population.
Picasso’s Guernica: A reflection painted out of his horror over the attack.
In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell recounted how the Communists crushed the anarchist movement in June 1937.
The Road to the Second World War
Hitler always wanted to overturn the Versailles Treaty.
In 1935, he openly began the rearmament of Germany, something that was prohibited by Versailles.
Germany Invades Austria
Hitler wants Austria to join the German Reich in Mein Kampf's first sentence.
In March 1938, this became a reality as German troops moved into Vienna.
Despite Austrian claims that they were the first victims of Nazi aggression, most Austrians celebrated the Anschluss by wildly greeting Hitler on his arrival in the city and attacking their Jewish neighbors.
Germany Invades Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia was eastern Europe's success story, with a strong army, industrial base, and democracy.
It had nationality issues, especially with the 3.5 million Sudeten Germans in the west who hated the state.
France promised to aid Czechoslovakia if Germany attacked. Those assurances came to nothing.
Great Britain Tries to Appease Germany
The British eventually settled on a policy known as appeasement.
In 1937, Neville Chamberlain became British Prime Minister and head of a conservative government.
He recognized that events in 1936 had been detrimental to British interests.
These events included:
the German occupation of the Rhineland,
the creation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, and
the Olympic games that had been held that year in Berlin.
Appeasement began with British recognition of Italy’s annexation of Ethiopia.
The British did nothing when Hitler annexed Austria.
Germany threatened to invade Czechoslovakia unless the Sudetenland, a western region populated by ethnic Germans, was given to the Reich.
In September, Chamberlain flew to Munich to attend a four-power summit with France, Italy, and Germany to discuss Czechoslovakia's future.
The Munich Agreement gave Germany all Sudeten territories at this summit.
Hitler promised to respect Czechoslovakia's sovereignty.
One year later, the Germans ignored the Munich Agreement and took most of Czechoslovakia, destroying it.
Germany and the Soviet Union Invade Poland
Versailles created Poland from German territory.
The new nation was given a strip of territory that split East Prussia from Germany to give Poles sea access.
Chamberlain wanted to stop German aggression. He made a deal with France to defend Poland's borders.
The Soviet Union also asked if the British and French would form a military alliance against the Germans.
After Stalin's purge of the officer corps, the British and French doubted the Soviet military's effectiveness and found little evidence that Stalin was more honest than Hitler.
On August 22, 1939, Stalin announced that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact.
Germany would invade Poland, while the Soviets took eastern Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states, which Russia had lost in the First World War.
4.5: The Second World War (1939–1945)
The war began on September 1, 1939, with an attack on Poland.
Blitzkrieg warfare —fast attacks with tanks and other mobile units supported by warplanes — was learned from the First World War by the Germans.
Over the winter of 1939–1940, little warfare occurred, earning the time period the nickname the “Phony War.”
In April 1940, the Germans attacked Norway and Denmark to get iron ore for Germany, ending the lull.
The Fall of France
French political and military leaders were pessimistic after the eastern blitzkrieg and Scandinavian defeat.
The French built the Maginot Line during the interwar period to protect their soldiers in what they assumed would be another war of stagnant positions.
The Germans simply bypassed the fortifications, which were not extended to the Belgian frontier, and encircled the French armies.
The British, seeing that France was about to fall, staged a heroic retreat from the Belgian beaches at Dunkirk, using every available British ship, to bring the army back to Great Britain to fight another day.
France's new government was led by Marshal Pétain, the hero of the Battle of Verdun.
In the First World War, Pétain was a pessimist, and he used the opportunity to create a more authoritarian French government by pulling France out of the war.
One charismatic general, Charles de Gaulle, arrived in London and called for French forces in the colonies to form a new French army to restore national honor.
The Maquis, or French resistance, fought the Germans and Vichy state in France.
Germany Against Great Britain
The Battle of Britain was not the one-sided struggle that is often portrayed.
It is true that the Luftwaffe, the German air force, had many more planes and trained pilots. But the British had radar, which had been developed at Cambridge University and could detect oncoming German attacks.
The British Spitfires and Hurricanes were better planes than the German Messerschmitts. The British had also cracked the German secret military code.
Hermann Göring, the inept morphine addict in charge of the German air force, ordered the Luftwaffe to attack British cities after a token number of British planes bombed Berlin.
He made the decision to stop the successful raids on British air bases that had been carried out.
The Blitz was a terrible strategy that caused a lot of suffering in the cities, but it gave the Royal Air Force (RAF) time to recover.
Hitler decided to abandon his plan to invade Britain by the end of September 1940 and focus instead on achieving his ultimate goal—defeating the Soviet Union.
The Holocaust
The Holocaust: The slaughter of six million Jews.
Nuremberg Laws: Depriving Jews of citizenship and forcing them to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing whenever they left their homes.
Marriage and sex between Jews and Gentiles were also forbidden.
On November 9, 1938, the Nazis launched Kristallnacht.
That night, several hundred Jews were killed and 30,000 sent to concentration camps, proving the Germans wanted to exterminate them.
The Nazis' obsession with the "Jewish Question" is shown by their decision to use war resources to exterminate European Jewry even though the Russians were resisting.
Hitler ordered his top lieutenants to implement the "Final Solution" to deal with them and the many Jews from other conquered territories.
By 1941, one million Jews had been killed, most in mobile vans poisoned by carbon monoxide gas or machine-gunned by S.S. troops.
In January 1942, the top leaders met in Wannsee, Berlin, to plan a more efficient slaughter.
Auschwitz was the most notorious Nazi concentration and extermination camp in Poland.
S.S. Doctors, including Dr. Josef Mengele, sorted prisoners into work camps and gas chambers upon arrival.
Roma, homosexuals, gender-nonconformists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Russian POWs, Communists, and other "undesirables" were also imprisoned.
6 million Jews and 7 million such individuals were killed.
Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial, has a row of trees in honor of Gentiles who risked their lives to rescue Jews.
France's Vichy government rounded up Jews and handed them over to the Nazis before the Germans asked for their help.
Locals in Ukraine, Croatia, and other Eastern European countries exterminated their Jewish neighbors on their own.
The Turning of the Tide
Germany Invades the Soviet Union
They caught the Soviet forces completely unprepared.
By 1942, the Germans had reached the outskirts of Stalingrad and Leningrad, but the Russian forces' tenacity and the Soviet people's sacrifices kept them from falling.
The US and USSR formed an unlikely alliance to defeat the Third Reich and shape the postwar world due to their shared enemy.
The War in North Africa
By 1941, the war had become a global conflict.
As France collapsed, Mussolini's Italy joined Germany's war.
The Italians tried to expel the British from Egypt, extending the war to North Africa.
Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox," was one of the Germans' top commanders in this war.
He achieved great success, reaching Alexandria, Egypt, 60 miles away.
At the Battle of El Alamein in November 1942, General Montgomery's British army drove the German and Italian forces to Tunisia.
U.S. Involvement
The US joined the Axis powers after Pearl Harbor and Hitler's 1941 declaration of war.
By 1943, the Allies had defeated the Axis in Africa and sent troops to Italy, the "soft underbelly" of the Axis.
By 1943, Italy was out of the war, but its campaign had little impact on the war's outcome.
In November 1943, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt met in Tehran and agreed to invade western Europe from Great Britain.
On June 6, 1944, the Allies launched the D-Day invasion.
The Allied landing in Europe and the Russian counterattack after Leningrad's siege ended Nazi Germany.
On May 8, 1945, a week after the suicide of Hitler, Germany surrendered unconditionally
Japan entered the Second World War to build a vast empire in the Pacific to exploit the natural resources of conquered lands and sell Japanese goods.
On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, followed by a second on Nagasaki two days later.
On August 14, the Japanese surrendered, ending history's bloodiest war.
The Aftermath
Most of the 50 to 60 million people who died in the conflict were civilians.
The Soviet Union lost 25 million people, though the exact number will never be known.
After the Germans bombed Warsaw in 1939 and followed up in Rotterdam and London, cities across Europe were leveled.
Dresden was firebombed by the Allies, killing 50,000 people and destroying almost every German military, economic, and administrative target.
The Truemmerfrauen, or "rubble ladies," removed wreckage by hand in Berlin and other German cities without men or machinery.
After the First World War, the victors' capitals chanted "Hang the kaiser!" but did nothing to punish the war's perpetrators.
After the liberation of the Nazi death camps and the realization of the unspeakable scale of the slaughter, the Allies agreed to denazify Germany and punish the perpetrators.
The first Nuremberg Trial's defendants were charged with "crimes against humanity" under the new legal concept.
Hermann Göring, who swallowed poison smuggled into his cell to avoid execution while 11 others were executed.
Dr. Josef Mengele and other Nazis fled to the Middle East and South America, but Gestapo officer Adolf Eichmann was caught.
By June 1946, the German legal authorities quietly completed denazification after the Americans handed it over.
West Germans called 1945 "Zero Hour," the darkest moment in their history.
Over the next 20 years, Europe recovered completely, transforming lives and ushering in a period of political and social stability.
4.6: European Stability
In 1941, President Roosevelt proposed the Atlantic Charter to replace the ineffective League of Nations.
In 1945, delegates from 50 nations met in San Francisco to establish the United Nations.
In July 1945, the U.S. Senate ratified the agreement, signaling that the US would continue to support European recovery and stability.
Revanchism destabilized European affairs during the interwar period as many nations sought to reclaim territories lost in the peace treaties after World War I.
Postwar fringe groups chanted it rather than national governments.
The rise of democratic governments that were able to improve their citizens' economic conditions.
A new social contract gave workers full employment, living wages, and social welfare in exchange for their most extreme demands.
4.7: The Beginning of Cold War
There have been three major schools of thought on the causes of the Cold War.
Traditionalists blamed the Soviet Union's brutal dictatorship under Joseph Stalin for East-West hostilities.
Revisionists believed that in 1945, the US was more concerned with protecting American trade than democracy.
Post-Revisionists believed the US was more to blame than Traditionalists, even though the Soviet Union was primarily responsible.
The Yalta Conference on the Future of Germany
At Yalta, the Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin) agreed to divide Germany into four zones after the war, with an Allied Control Council to make decisions.
Yalta gave each Ally the chance to transform their zone, so the Soviet Union transformed its zone differently from the Western Allies.
Walter Ulbricht, the Soviet-appointed leader of the German Communist Party, believed that most Germans didn't want to return to Weimar's capitalist crises and would support the KPD.
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands — KPD.
Mass rape, factory dismantling for the Soviet Union, and land reform failure angered the Soviets and their KPD clients.
In 1946, Ulbricht forced the KPD and the more popular Social Democratic Party to merge, creating a one-party state that the Soviets used to take over Eastern European governments.
Reparations tensions increased during these political developments.
At Yalta, the Americans and British agreed to 20 billion dollars in reparations.
At Potsdam, the occupying powers agreed to collect reparations in their zones, with the Soviets receiving 25% of the total.
In May 1946, General Lucius Clay, the commander of the American zone, stopped collecting reparations, which stopped goods from reaching the Soviet Union.
Increasing Tensions Outside of Europe
In 1941, the Soviets and British divided and occupied Iran, agreeing to leave at the war's end.
In 1945, the British left, but the Soviets refused and demanded oil concessions.
When Truman learned that Soviet tanks were heading to Tehran, the Iranian capital, he sent warships into the Persian Gulf, and Stalin withdrew his troops.
Stalin also tried to intimidate neutral Turkey into giving the Soviets naval bases along the straits to give the Soviet fleet access to the Mediterranean.
George Kennan, a State Department official, also shaped American policy.
In 1947, Kennan wrote the Long Telegram, stating that the Soviets saw us as an ideological enemy and would never seek coexistence.
Kennan developed the policy of containment, which required "long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies," in this and other Foreign Affairs articles under the pseudonym "X."
Containment and the Creation of NATO
Greece's Communist-led insurgency tested containment as a policy.
On March 12, 1947, Truman declared the Truman Doctrine to a joint session of Congress: "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."
He requested $400 million for the Greek and Turkish governments.
In 1949, the United States established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to directly counter the threat posed by millions of Soviet soldiers in Eastern Europe.
In 1952, Great Britain, France, Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Norway joined the US initially, with Greece and Turkey joining.
4.8: Soviet Dominance Over Eastern Europe
In 1944, Winston Churchill met with Stalin in Moscow as Soviet troops advanced through Eastern Europe.
Percentages Agreement
It divided the various nations of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence based on percentages.
Soviet influence was 90% in Romania and 50% in Hungary.
The agreement was flawed because Poland was excluded.
The USA rejected the agreement.
The British and Americans convinced the Soviets to sign a noble Declaration of Liberated Europe in Yalta.
It ordered "broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population" governments and immediate free elections in Axis or liberated countries.
Poland
Stalin's only concession on Poland was that an unspecified number of London-based anticommunist Poles would join his provisional government.
In 1947, Poland's promised elections were held under intimidation, and the Communists won 80 percent and ended multi party rule.
The Soviets knew they would have to use force to maintain Communist control over Poland because they were hated in that nation—a loathing that grew worse when the Soviets were revealed to have killed 15,000 Polish officers in Katyn at the start of the war.
Elsewhere in Eastern Europe
The interwar economic and social failure of Eastern European states seemed to help the Soviet Union achieve this goal.
The Soviet Union initially tried to establish "People's Democracies" in Eastern Europe, except Poland.
This was a go-slow program for the Communists, with governments that were more proletarian than in the bourgeois West but not ready for a Soviet-style Communist system.
The Marshall Plan's offer of money to all European nations influenced the push for tighter control over Eastern Europe.
Stalin saw the Marshall Plan as a threat to informal Soviet control over countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia because taking the money would lead them to the capitalist West.
In Hungary, Communists used "salami" tactics to isolate non-Communist political leaders.
The Hungarian Communist Party eliminated the Smallholders' Party by 1948 and won a tainted election with 95% of the vote the following year.
Czechoslovakia
President Eduard Benes ruled the postwar government.
Benes, a non-Communist, understood that Czechoslovakia needed a pro-Soviet foreign policy to maintain its independence.
The Czechs saw the Soviet Union as liberators and felt no debt to the West, which had sold them out at Munich in 1938.
Czech Communists formed a "People's Militia" to pressure Benes into forming a Communist government.
This intimidated Benes into forming a new government dominated by Communists.
When Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk's body was found shattered outside his window, it was clear that a multiparty Czechoslovak state was ending.
The Social Democrats were forced into the Communist Party, and in controlled elections in May 1948, the Communists won a complete victory and established a Soviet-style state.
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavian resistance initially united against the German-installed Croatian puppet government.
The Communists, led by Josip Broz Tito, fought the royalist Chetniks in a civil war as the war continued.
Tito's Communists won the civil war, but Stalin never trusted him because of the British and American aid he received and because he didn't like indigenous Communist movements he couldn't control.
By 1948, relations between the two states had deteriorated.
Tito's independent foreign policy made him the West's favorite Communist, but he ran a brutal police state at home.
4.9: The End of Imperialism
On August 15, 1947, India declared independence, starting decolonization across the Empire.
Israel
After the Holocaust, Jewish nationalism and Arabic nationalism increased.
The UN partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab homelands in response.
On May 14, 1948, the Jewish state of Israel was founded, but its Arab neighbors attacked it immediately.
Egypt and Africa
Egypt had been independent since 1922 until Abdul Nasser became president.
He nationalized the British-controlled Suez Canal in 1956.
Britain, France, and Israel planned a surprise attack on Egypt.
The British decolonized sub-Saharan Africa soon after.
Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Kenya followed Ghana's 1957 independence from Great Britain.
In 1965, many British settlers in Rhodesia formed a white supremacist government and declared independence from Britain.
Africans took control of that land, renaming it Zimbabwe, in 1980.
Indonesia, Vietnam and Algeria
The Dutch fought a costly and ultimately losing battle in the East Indies to keep the land they first occupied in the 17th century.
By 1949, the Netherlands reluctantly recognized Indonesian independence.
France nearly disintegrated trying to keep Algeria.
This followed a bitter loss in Indochina, where Ho Chi Minh led a nationalist movement that fought first the Japanese during the Second World War and then the French as they tried to reestablish colonial rule.
By 1954, France realized it was impossible and divided Vietnam into a Communist-led north and a US-dominated south.
Algeria was different from Indochina because it had been a French possession since 1830 and had over a million native French residents.
In 1958, France nearly erupted in a civil war over the Algerian question until de Gaulle became president and used his prestige four years later to grant Algerian independence.
4.10: The Creation of a European Union
Concern over the Soviet Union led to NATO, which promoted European unity.
Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC)
It managed US Marshall Plan funds.
The US insisted that Europeans use the money cooperatively and did not want it used to revive unprofitable industries to restore national pride.
The OEEC started lowering tariffs and removing trade barriers in assisted states.
European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)
The ECSC managed steel and coal resources from France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
Robert Schuman, the ECSC's main architect, said that "any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible."
The ECSC also created models for European unity, such as the European Parliament, a court of justice, and direct tax revenue for the Community.
European Economic Community (EEC)
In 1973, Britain, Ireland, and Denmark joined the EEC, which lifted almost all trade restrictions.
In 1986, the European Single Act allowed capital, labor, and services like banking and insurance to move freely among member nations.
The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 established the Euro, which went into circulation in January 2002, except in Denmark, Sweden, and the UK, which refused to give up the pound.
The EEC became the European Union (EU) after the Maastricht Treaty expanded cooperation into defense, justice, and environmental issues.
Recent and Future Expansion of the European Union
The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, all former Warsaw Pact members, joined the EU.
Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007.
Turkey negotiated membership in 2005.
For many reasons, Turkey's EU bid is controversial.
Some EU officials doubt Turkey's economic or human rights commitment.
European Constitution: The caveat being that all EU members had to approve the constitution for it to go into effect.
In May 2005, France, a leader in European cooperation, voted "no" in a referendum.
4.11: Post-WWII Developments in Western Europe
Great Britain
Sir William Beveridge, a Liberal Party member, proposed in 1942 that all adults pay a weekly contribution to provide benefits to the sick, unemployed, retired, and widowed.
Labour established the National Health Service (NHS), which provided for a comprehensive system of free health care.
In 1945, the government took over the Bank of England, railroads, and electric, iron, and steel industries.
The existing owners received fair compensation, and professional managers—often the same ones—continued to run the company.
The "Age of Austerity" lasted until 1954, when wartime butter and sugar rationing ended.
By the 1951 general election, the Labour Party and the public were tired of change, giving Churchill's Conservatives another chance.
The "Politics of Consensus" emerged because the two major parties agreed on social services and economic management, even though they disagreed on funding.
By the 1950s, Western Europe's economies had grown faster than Britain's.
After the war, Germany rebuilt its factories with the latest technology, while Britain relied on older factories.
Britain also lacked central economic planning and faced aggressive unions that demanded higher wages without productivity gains.
In 1979, Prime Minister James Callaghan's Labour government couldn't handle a wave of strikes that hurt road transport and public services — the “winter of discontent.”
Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first female prime minister, led the Conservative Party to victory.
Thatcherism—her economic policies—included tight money supply control to reduce inflation, sharp cuts in public spending, and tax cuts, especially for higher earners.
Thatcher was a divisive leader, and if not for the 1982 Falkland Islands war, her career might have ended early.
In her third term, Thatcher tried to apply market principles to the NHS and education system, and her party split over her opposition to European integration.
After 18 years in opposition, Tony Blair's Labour Party won in 1997.
Blair, who became party leader in 1994, created "New Labour" by moving Labour away from socialism.
Labour under Blair focused on improving Britain's social services, reforming the House of Lords, and devolving power to Wales and Scotland.
Blair won a second term in 2001 and a third in 2005, but anger over Blair's support for the Iraq War reduced Labour's margin of victory in 2005.
Gordon Brown, Blair's longtime Chancellor of the Exchequer, became Labour Party leader and UK prime minister in May 2007.
Brown served until 2010, when David Cameron became prime minister.
Cameron resigned in June 2016 after Britain voted for Brexit.
Theresa May became the Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister in July 2016.
France
France in 1945 had to deal with the grim aftermath of 1940's "Strange Defeat."
Although it took several years, Marcel Ophuls's powerful 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity opened the door to questioning these national myths.
From 1995 to 2007, President Jacques Chirac addressed France's role in the deportation of 66,000 Jews to Germany and other wartime collaboration issues.
Charles de Gaulle, leader of the French government-in-exile, was expected to rule France after the war.
When the Fourth Republic refused to establish a strong presidency, de Gaulle left politics.
The Fourth Republic dealt with colonial issues like the 1954 Indochina defeat and the 1954 Algerian revolt.
After the Algerian crisis raised fears of a military coup in France, de Gaulle returned to politics and led the 1958 plebiscite that established the Fifth Republic, which included the powerful presidency he now held.
France refused to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty and detonated its first hydrogen bomb in 1968 to defend itself.
France also had an independent foreign policy, withdrawing from NATO's unified command in 1966 and recognizing China's Communist government over the US's objections.
In 1945, five million men returned from Germany and needed jobs, the transport system was shattered by heavy fighting in the last year of the war, and coal and food supplies were low.
This dire situation favored the French Communist Party, which had a good wartime resistance record and appeared to offer economic solutions.
The Soviet Union invasion turned the party against the German occupiers.
Jean Monnet, a European Community founder, designed France's economic program.
The Monnet Plan created the Commissariat Général du Plan (CGP) to run the economy with nonpolitical technocrats.
It also created Americanization.
By 1968, young people were disillusioned with French life and angry about overcrowded classrooms, laboratories, and libraries as more students went to college. Paris was the worst.
Students and workers formed an alliance, but the students' demand for a complete reordering of French society clashed with the workers' more limited demands for wage increases and better working conditions.
Gaullists ruled France until 1981 when Socialist François Mitterrand became the longest-serving president.
In 1995, Paris mayor Jacques Chirac succeeded Mitterrand, who was reelected in 1988.
He was the second-longest serving French president, serving two full terms for 12 years.
He promised tax cuts, job programs, and social reform.
In May 2007, Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy defeated Socialist Segolene Royal in a runoff to succeed Chirac.
He promised to control immigration and modernize the country.
After Sarkozy, François Hollande of the Socialist party took office in 2012.
In May of 2017, Emmanuel Macron was elected president under the banner of En Marche!, a centrist political party he had founded the previous year.
Italy
Christian Democrats ruled Italy until the 1990s.
The Communists remained a significant opposition party.
Antonio Gramscim, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, encouraged political flexibility that was lacking in the French Communist Party.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Italy was known as the "economic miracle."
Italy's early commitment to the Common Market and the 6 million southern Italians who moved north in the 1960s provided cheap labor.
By the 1970s, high unemployment, inflation, and strikes had caused a huge loss of workdays.
Despite their flaws, the Christian Democrats remained in power because there was no other choice.
The southern mafia revived, and extreme left political terrorism targeted politicians, judges, and business leaders.
In 1978, the Red Brigade kidnapped former Prime Minister Aldo Moro and murdered him when the government refused to negotiate his release.
Silvio Berlusconi, a conservative media magnate who controls most of Italy's major media outlets outside government control, was defeated in 2006 over corruption allegations.
In May 2006, Olive Tree leader Romano Prodi became prime minister again.
Germany
Berlin, like the rest of Europe, was divided into four occupation zones, making it a potential flashpoint for Cold War violence.
In June 1948, the US and UK introduced a new currency without Soviet approval, sparking a series of crises over the divided city.
Stalin retaliated by completely blocking Berlin from the west.
The Berlin Airlift lasted ten-and-a-half months until Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949.
In 1949, the US, UK, and France formed the Federal Republic of Germany with Bonn as its capital, capitalizing on the airlift's success.
Several months later, the Soviet Union declared its eastern German zone the Communist-dominated German Democratic Republic.
Berlin remained the Cold War's epicenter in Germany.
In 1958, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave the West six months to leave Berlin and let East Germany control access.
President Eisenhower insisted on another Berlin Airlift if necessary.
On August 13, 1961, East German border police began erecting a barbed-wire barrier between East and West Berlin at 2:00.
Over the next few days, the Berlin Wall was built.
By 1949, over 2.5 million educated East Germans had left for West Germany, causing a brain drain that the Communists considered necessary.
Konrad Adenauer, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) leader and chancellor from 1949 to 1963, shaped the early history of Germany.
Adenauer, an anti-Nazi conservative who had been mayor of Cologne in the Weimar Republic, feared the Soviet Union and preferred a West German state tied to the West to a unified Germany forced into neutrality.
His government paid Holocaust victims and Israel directly to address the Nazis' atrocities.
Gerhard Ritter, Adenauer's minister of economics and chancellor after his 1961 retirement, engineered this economic boom without high inflation.
During the Adenauer/Ritter years, the Social Democrats appeared to be in permanent opposition.
In 1955, the party dropped Marxist class struggle language and elected charismatic Willy Brandt as leader.
Brandt felt it necessary to reach out to the Soviets and their satellite states in Eastern Europe while remaining firmly tied to the West.
Ostpolitik established de facto recognition of the East German state by signing treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
Helmut Schmidt, Brandt's successor as chancellor, led the Social Democrats to victory in 1976 despite the 1973 oil crisis.
As in Great Britain and the United States, the early 1980s seemed to represent a surge in conservative politics, and in 1982, the CDU achieved an electoral comeback under Helmut Kohl.
In 1990, Helmut Kohl moved quickly to reunite Germany.
He promoted the EU-creating Maastricht Treaty with French President François Mitterand.
At 16 years, Kohl was Germany's longest-serving chancellor since Otto von Bismarck.
In 1998, Gerhard Schröder's Social Democrats won again.
In November 2005, the CDU's Angela Merkel became Germany's first female chancellor.
In September of that year, no party won a majority of Bundestag seats, prompting this deal.
4.12: The Collapse of the Communist Bloc
East Germany and the Berlin Wall
In 1953, East German workers protested the government's productivity plan and later demanded political freedom.
By 1961, millions of East Germans fled to the West, prompting the Soviets to build the Berlin Wall.
Power Struggles in the Soviet Union
After Stalin's 1953 death, the USSR changed.
Nikita Khrushchev, the power struggle winner, did not execute the losers.
Khrushchev claimed that Stalin's government had deviated from Marxism-Leninism's political program, rather than being a natural outgrowth of it, and that only Marxist-Leninist reforms would be acceptable.
By October 1962, the two nuclear superpowers nearly went to war when the Soviets placed missiles in Cuba.
However, U.S. President Kennedy's crisis management prevented a nuclear disaster.
Leonid Brezhnev, Stalin’s successor, did not restore Stalinist terror, but he did strengthen the party bureaucracy and KGB and restrict reform in satellite states.
Dissatisfaction with this step backward sparked a Czechoslovakian reform movement by 1968. The "Prague Spring” sought a more humanistic socialism within the Soviet Bloc.
Brezhnev declared the "Brezhnev Doctrine," stating that the Soviet Union would support any Eastern European communist state threatened by internal strife.
Reform in Poland and Eastern Europe
Poland's 1978 election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II was the Brezhnev Doctrine's biggest challenge.
In 1980, Lech Walesa led a massive strike at the Gdansk Lenin shipyard,demanding the right to form an independent trade union. an independent trade union.
Solidarity survived martial law and being outlawed by going underground with the Catholic Church's help.
By 1989, the Polish economy was so bad that the government had to negotiate with Walesa and his union.
The negotiations led to multiparty elections, which in that year defeated all Communist candidates.
Mikhail Gorbachev, a reformer, opposed the "Brezhnev Doctrine" when he became Kremlin leader.
As Communist-led regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Albania collapsed peacefully, 1989 was one of the most remarkable years of the century.
In East Germany, the collapse of the regime in that same year was followed in 1990 by the reunification of East and West Germany and the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
As Nicolae Ceausescu desperately clung to power in Romania, this peaceful transformation failed.
On Christmas Day 1989, his government collapsed and he and Elena, his wife, were executed.
The Collapse of the Soviet Union
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Chernobyl nuclear accident showed how bad the nation was.
Gorbachev wanted to limit the extent of this change.
He accepted:
Glasnost: Openness in debate.
Perestroika: An economic restructuring of the state.
By 1990, Gorbachev appointed hard-liners to government positions, making reform unlikely and bringing the system down.
The rivalry between Gorbachev and Russian Parliament chairman Boris Yeltsin contributed to this.
In August 1991, hard-line communists staged a coup in Gorbachev's Crimean home, arresting him for threatening the Communist Party. The coup failed, ending Communist control.
By 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed as various republics left. After that, Gorbachev resigned.
A New Russian Republic
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federation with 57% of the vote in 1991.
Yeltsin began his first term by rapidly transitioning the economy from state control to free-market capitalism, a policy supported by many foreign economists, including IMF advisors.
The new Russian state's official corruption and massive mafia-style criminal organizations also hurt Yeltsin's popularity.
In October 1993, the Congress of People's Deputies began impeachment proceedings against Yeltsin after a series of conflicts with Parliament over his economic policies.
Yeltsin ordered tanks to shell Congress and dissolved the legislature.
He established the Duma — a new constitution with increased presidential power.
Despite several strokes and public drunkenness, Yeltsin ran for reelection in 1996, surprising Kremlin observers.
Yeltsin easily won reelection, but his second term was notable only for negotiating a Chechnya peace treaty.
Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin as prime minister before resigning in December 1999.
Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, immediately shielded Yeltsin and his family from corruption charges.
Putin's rapid rise and Yeltsin's resignation surprised other presidential candidates, giving him a huge political advantage. He was easily elected in 2000.
Putin would have been easily reelected in 2004 even without his media monopoly.
His popularity was boosted by rising oil prices, which boosted the Russian economy, but Russia is in danger of repeating the Soviet mistake of the 1970s by becoming too dependent on this one commodity.
Ethnic Warfare in former Yugoslavia
After the war, Josip Tito helped found a Yugoslav state independent of the Soviet Bloc.
After his death in 1980, Slovenia and Croatia split from Yugoslavia.
In 1992, most Bosnian Muslims and Croats wanted to follow suit.
Bosnia's Serbs refused to join a minority Bosnian state.
With the help of Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević, they carried out "ethnic cleansing," the forced removal and sometimes genocidal murder of Muslims and ethnic Bosnians in regions under their control.
The Serb shelling of Sarajevo, especially on market days when more people were out, was one of the century's final atrocities.
The 1995 American-brokered Dayton Accords brought temporary peace after such horrors.
The Serbs saw Kosovo, a Yugoslav province, as the cradle of their national identity after their defeat in the Battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Turks in 1389.
In 1998, Milošević justified his invasion of Kosovo by citing KLA attacks on Serbs.
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA): A small militant group that wanted to see the creation of an independent Kosovo.
In March 1999, NATO bombed Serbia for 74 days after the Serbs refused to sign a treaty giving the Kosovars more autonomy.
NATO's first offensive action against a sovereign nation forced Serbian troops to leave Kosovo.
In 2000, he was forced to call new elections, which he lost to Vojislav Kostunica.
Milošević reluctantly handed over power to Kostunica after hundreds of thousands of Serbs took to the streets to demand he accept the election results.
In 2001, President Kostunica changed his mind and turned Milošević over to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague to receive badly needed economic aid from the West, but he died of a heart attack while his trial was still underway in 2006.
In February 2007, the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) found no evidence linking Serbia under Slobodan Milošević to Bosnian War genocide and war crimes.
In January 2009, the European Parliament declared July 11 a day of remembrance and mourning for the 1995 Srebrenica genocide.
In July 1995, more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed and nearly 25,000 women, children, and elderly were forcibly deported.
The Rise of Far-Right Reactionaries and Brexit
In the first two decades of the 21st century, Europe found itself gripped by a rise in the popularity of far-right nationalism.
Conservative social values, exacerbated by minority slights, define this movement.
Ultra-nationalism, especially against Middle Eastern immigration, and explicit racism are also present.
These ultra-conservative parties have advanced in European parliamentary elections:
Marine Le Pen’s French Front National (FN)
Geert Wilder’s Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV)
Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)
These groups openly support EU dismantlement.
In the 2016 Brexit vote, the British Isles voted 53–47 to leave the EU.
Granted, the U.K. had always been a bit of an outlier in the EU.
As an island nation, it has maintained a distinct national identity and never adopted the euro.
UK leaders rejected the EU's withdrawal terms three times, making withdrawal agreement negotiations tense.
In January 2020, the UK officially withdrew from the European Union.