The decades after the Second World War were an era of rebuilding. In Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan rebuilding literally meant clearing the rubble from wartime devastation and building back what had been destroyed. In Germany and Japan in particular, rebuilding meant charting a new political and economic path that would lead both countries away from the kinds of global conflicts that nationalist fervor had fueled.

For the United States and the Soviet Union, rebuilding had other meanings. For both countries, it meant building a military and ideological complex with which to confront each other in the Cold War. This involved building rival networks of military and economic alliances, participating in a nuclear arms race, and making a renewed investment in military industry and technology instead of undertaking the sustained demobilization following the Second World War. In each country individually, rebuilding took other forms: in the Soviet Union it meant seeking the means to reform the system of political terror and coercion through which Stalin had ruled; in the United States it meant struggling to overcome the structures of white supremacism and other forms of racial discrimination that divided society and oppressed millions of citizens — not only African Americans, but other ethnic and racial minorities as well.

In Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, rebuilding meant dismantling European colonialism to reconstitute independent states or to build new independent states. Here the idea of rebuilding took on its deepest meaning: learning how to replace not just colonial institutions but colonial mentalities, patterns of production, forms of education, and ways of relating to each other with new versions that were not dictated by colonizers. Intellectuals and artists strove to decolonize the mind as politicians worked to decolonize the state in a process that proved slow and difficult.

In Latin America rebuilding meant finding the means to overcome patterns of social exclusion — especially of rural workers — that were legacies of its colonial experience, as well as finding a political formula that could integrate long-excluded groups. It also meant finding the means to build industry and develop economically, overcoming the patterns of dependency and underdevelopment diagnosed by Latin American intellectuals and social scientists.

In the end, the decades after 1945 showed how much was possible through mass movements, advancing industrialization, and political self-determination. But the balance of these years also showed how much more work remained to overcome poverty, underdevelopment, and neocolonialism.