Global Conflicts

Key Concept 6.2 Global Conflicts and Their Consequences

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a European-dominated global political order existed, which also included the United States, Russia, and Japan. Over the course of the century, peoples and states around the world challenged this order in ways that sought to redistribute power within the existing order and to restructure empires, while those peoples and states in power attempted to maintain the status quo. Other peoples and states sought to overturn the political order itself. These challenges to, and the attempts to maintain, the political order manifested themselves in an unprecedented level of conflict with high human casualties. In the context of these conflicts, many regimes in both older and newer states struggled with maintaining political stability and were challenged by internal and external factors, including ethnic and religious conflicts, secessionist movements, territorial partitions, economic dependency, and the legacies of colonialism.

1. Europe dominated the global political order at the beginning of the twentieth century, but both land-based and transoceanic empires gave way to new forms of transregional political organization by the century’s end.

Some colonies achieved independence through armed struggle (Algeria and Vietnam from France, Angola from the Portuguese Empire).

2. Emerging ideologies of anti-imperialism contributed to the dissolution of empires and the restructuring of states.

Movements to redistribute land and resources developed within states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, sometimes advocating communism and socialism.

3. Political changes were accompanied by major demographic and social consequences.

The migration of former colonial subjects to imperial metropoles (South Asians to Britain, Algerians to France, Filipinos to the United States)maintained cultural and economic ties between the colony and the metropole even after the dissolution of empires.

• • The proliferation of conflicts led to various forms of ethnic violence (Armenia, Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia) and the displacement of peoples resulting in refugee populations (Palestinians, Darfurians).

4. Military conflicts occurred on an unprecedented global scale.

• • World War I and World War II were the first “total wars.” Governments used ideologies, including fascism, nationalism and communism, to mobilize all of their state’s resources (Gurkha soldiers in India, ANZAC troops in Australia, Military conscription), including peoples, both in the home countries and the colonies or former colonies, for the purpose of waging war.

  • Governments also used a variety of strategies, including political speeches, art, media, and intensified forms of nationalism, to mobilize these populations.

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The dissolution of the Soviet Union effectively ended the Cold War.

5. Although conflict dominated much of the twentieth century, many individuals and groups — including states — opposed this trend. Some individuals and groups, however, intensified the conflicts.

• • Groups and individuals challenged the many wars (Picasso in Guernica, Anti-nuclear movement during the Cold War, Thich Quang Duc by self immolation) of the century, and some promoted the practice of nonviolence (Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.)as a way to bring about political change.