Exam 20: The Three-World Order, 1940-1975

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World War II differed from World War I in its scale and in the degree to which many of the participating countries and their citizens were affected by the fighting-in both cases, World War II overshadowed the already significant experience of World War I. Whereas World War I was fought primarily in and around Europe, the involvement of the Japanese in World War II gave that war a Pacific theater as well as a European theater. More of World War II was fought in colonized territory than World War I had been. The war led to more noncombatant involvement as producers of goods for the war efforts-but also as victims. World War II was marked by extensive use of bombing, particularly in urban areas, a tactic that did not distinguish between soldiers and civilians. It was used by both Allied and Axis powers, and culminated with the introduction of a new type of weapon, the nuclear bomb. World War II also differed in its ideological component. Although World War I was sparked by the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, it was facilitated by an entangling network of European political alliances stemming from growing rivalry between Great Britain and Germany, both of which sought economic and imperial supremacy. World War II emerged from the expansionism of imperial Japan and Hitler's Germany, both of which married a wish for more land and resources with virulently racist ideologies that justified their subjugation and destruction of conquered peoples. For all of these reasons, the outcome of World War II entailed larger changes than did the outcome of World War I. The states of western and central Europe were decimated by the war, as was Japan. Furthermore, the atrocities of the war, including the Holocaust, belied Europe's traditional claims to a superior culture/society that had previously been used to justify colonization. The world that emerged after World War II was one in which Europe was no longer economically or politically dominant; it had to cede that position to the two large powers left standing after the war, the United States and the USSR. It was a world in which the economic and ideological underpinnings of imperialism had been undermined, paving the way for decolonization. And it was a world in which future European alliances would reflect the needs of the Americans and Soviets, not internal rivalries.