31. Decolonization, Revolution, and the Cold War, 1945–1968

The triumphant victory of the Allies in 1945 soon revealed a startling reality: war-torn nations were in shambles, entire economies were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced. Physical rebuilding took place in the main battleground areas of Europe and Asia, but the war profoundly changed the entire world. Hopes of world peace quickly faded when the differences in economic and political ideologies that the Allies had set aside during wartime reasserted themselves and developed into a tense but nonviolent conflict known as the Cold War, which lasted more than four decades.

As people in Asia and Africa pushed back against centuries of Western expansion and demanded national self-determination and racial equality, new nations emerged and nearly every colonial territory gained formal independence between 1945 and the early 1960s. A revolution in China consolidated Communist rule and initially followed the Soviet model, but then veered in new directions. Rather than form an allied Communist front, China and the Soviet Union became economic and political rivals.

Amid the growing tensions of the global Cold War, remarkable growth and economic prosperity occurred in the postwar era. Europe once again dug itself out from under the rubble of war and, with U.S. aid, experienced an amazing recovery. The United States converted its wartime economy to peacetime production. The Soviet Union sought to protect itself from future attacks from the west by occupying eastern Europe and establishing Communist dictatorships there. In eastern European countries forced to ally with and follow the Soviet political and economic model, citizens who rose up to demand reforms faced repeated repression by Soviet forces.