Cold War and Decolonization (1900-Present)

The end of the Second World War framed both superpower rivalry and decolonization. At Yalta in February 1945 and later at Potsdam, the Allies divided Germany and argued over Eastern Europe, where Soviet armies remained. The United Nations was founded in 1945, and the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944 created the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Churchill warned in 1946 that an iron curtain had descended, while exhausted Britain and France faced nationalist demands in their empires.

The United States and the Soviet Union competed globally without fighting each other directly. The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan of 1947 committed American aid to containing communism, and the Berlin airlift of 1948 and 1949 supplied the city's western sectors during a Soviet blockade. Rival alliances formed with NATO in 1949 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955, and both sides built nuclear arsenals. The space race ran from Sputnik in 1957 to the American moon landing in 1969.

Superpower rivalry played out through proxy wars, coups, and crises in the decolonizing world. The Korean War from 1950 to 1953 ended with the peninsula still divided near the thirty-eighth parallel, and American involvement in Vietnam deepened until withdrawal and northern victory in the 1970s. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 brought the two powers close to nuclear war. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 produced a long insurgency, and both sides armed clients in Angola.

Communist movements gained power where war, land inequality, and foreign domination discredited existing regimes. Mao Zedong's Communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949 and pursued collectivization, the Great Leap Forward from 1958, and the Cultural Revolution from 1966. Ho Chi Minh led a communist and nationalist struggle against France and then the United States in Vietnam. Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, while Soviet influence installed governments across Eastern Europe.

Colonial empires dissolved rapidly after 1945 through negotiation and armed struggle. Mohandas Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns and the Indian National Congress helped end British rule in 1947, though partition into India and Pakistan brought massive violence and displacement. Ghana became independent under Kwame Nkrumah in 1957, and Algeria won independence from France in 1962 after a brutal war. The Bandung Conference of 1955 drew Asian and African leaders toward nonalignment and Pan-Africanism.

New states faced the work of building nations inside borders drawn by colonizers. Ethnic and regional divisions produced conflicts such as the Biafran war in Nigeria from 1967 to 1970, and many governments turned to one-party or military rule. Leaders pursued state-led development, as when Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and built the Aswan High Dam. Reliance on commodity exports and foreign loans left many economies dependent on former rulers and Cold War patrons.

Movements challenged entrenched hierarchies of race, gender, and political authority. In the United States, campaigns led by figures including Martin Luther King Jr. dismantled legal segregation. In South Africa, the African National Congress, the Soweto uprising of 1976, and international boycotts eroded apartheid until Nelson Mandela's release in 1990. Feminist movements pressed for legal equality, and students occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989 before the government crushed the protests.

Economic stagnation and reform pressure brought the Cold War to an end. Mikhail Gorbachev, who took power in 1985, introduced glasnost and perestroika to open debate and restructure the Soviet economy, and he declined to use force to prop up allied regimes. Solidarity in Poland, led by Lech Walesa, won legal recognition and then elections, and the Berlin Wall opened in November 1989 as communist governments fell across Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union dissolved into independent republics in December 1991.

The Cold War and decolonization unfolded together and shaped each other. Superpower rivalry gave new states aid and leverage but also drew them into proxy conflicts from Korea and Vietnam to Angola and Afghanistan, while Bandung offered nonalignment as an alternative. Decolonization ended formal empires and expanded the United Nations, yet colonial borders, export economies, and authoritarian rule persisted. The Soviet collapse in 1991 left a world order dominated by market economies.