CHAPTER 21: The Collapse and Recovery of Europe, 1914–1970sdisappointment that it wasn’t the “war to end all wars”, but now the major European states have ended centuries of hostility.
“a European civil war with a global reach”
between 1914 and the end of WWII, Western Europe largely self-destructed.
Europe recovered surprisingly well between 1950 and 2000, but without its overseas empires and without its position as the core of Western civilization.
+ The First World War: European Civilization in Crisis, 1914–1918
• An Accident Waiting to Happen - by around 1900, the balance of power in Europe was shaped by two rival alliances:
a. Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria, Italy)
b. Triple Entente (Russia, France, Britain)
c. these alliances turned a minor incident into WWI
June 28, 1914: a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne
a. Austria was determined to crush the nationalism movement
b. Serbia had Russia (and Russia’s allies) behind it
c. general war broke out by August 1914
Factors that contributed to the outbreak and character of the war:
a. popular nationalism
b. industrialized militarism
=large number of new weapons had been invented (tanks, submarines, airplanes, poison gas, machine guns, barbed wire)
=result: some 10 million people died in WWI, perhaps 20 million wounded
c. Europe’s colonial empires
=battles in Africa and South Pacific
=Japan (allied with Britain) took German possessions
=Ottoman Empire (allied with Germany) suffered intense military operations and an Arab revolt
=the United States joined the war in 1917 when German submarines harmed U.S. shipping
• Legacies of the Great War
=Germany was finally defeated November 1918
=became a war of attrition (“trench warfare”)
=became “total war”—each country’s whole population was mobilized
=women replaced men in factories
=labor unions accepted sacrifices
=rearrangement of the map of Central Europe
=creation of independent Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia
=created new problems of ethnic minorities
= triggered the Russian Bolshevik revolution (1917)
=the Treaty of Versailles (1919) made the conditions that caused WWII
a. Germany lost its colonial empire and 15 percent of its European territory
b. Germany was required to pay heavy reparations
c. Germany suffered restriction of its military forces
d. Germany had to accept sole responsibility for the outbreak of the war
e. Germans resented the treaty immensely
=dissolution of the Ottoman Empire
a. the Armenian genocide
b. creation of new Arab states
c. British promises to both Arabs and Jews created a new problem in Palestine
=in Asia and Africa, many gained military skills and political awareness
=the United States appeared as a global power
+ Capitalism Unraveling: The Great Depression
+ Democracy Denied: Comparing Italy, Germany, and Japan
• The Fascist Alternative in Europe
• Hitler and the Nazis
• Japanese Authoritarianism
+ A Second World War
• The Road to War in Asia
• The Road to War in Europe - 1939: attack on Poland—triggered WWII in Europe, Germans were finally defeated in May 1945
• World War II: The Outcomes of Global Conflict
=an estimated 60 million people died in WWII
a. more than half the casualties were civilians
b. the line between civilian and military targets was blurred
= the USSR suffered more than 40 percent of the total number of deaths
= China also suffered massive attacks against civilians
a. in many villages, every person and animal was killed
b. the Rape of Nanjing (1937–1938): 200,000–300,000 Chinese civilians were killed; countless women were raped
=bombing raids on Britain, Japan, and Germany showed the new attitude toward total war
=governments’ mobilization of economies, people, and propaganda reached further than ever before
=the Holocaust: some 6 million Jews were killed in genocide
a. millions of others considered undesirable were also killed by the Nazis
=WWII left Europe impoverished, with its industrial infrastructure in ruins and millions of people homeless or displaced
a. Europe soon was divided into U.S. and Soviet spheres of influence
=weakened Europe could not hold onto its Asian and African colonies
=WWII consolidated and expanded the communist world
=growing internationalism
=the new dominance of the United States as a global superpower
+ The Recovery of Europe
CHAPTER 22: The Rise and Fall of World Communism, 1917–Present+ Global Communism
+ Comparing Revolutions as a Path to Communism
• Russia: Revolution in a Single Year
• China: A Prolonged Revolutionary Struggle
+ Building Socialism in Two Countries
• Communist Feminism
• Socialism in the Countryside
• Communism and Industrial Development
• The Search for Enemies
+ East Versus West: A Global Divide and a Cold War
• Military Conflict and the Cold War
• Nuclear Standoff and Third World Rivalry
• The United States: Superpower of the West, 1945–1975
• The Communist World, 1950s–1970s
+ Comparing Paths to the End of Communism
• China: Abandoning Communism and Maintaining the Party
• The Soviet Union: The Collapse of Communism and Country
Note: Info comes from The Ways of the World, A brief Global History textbook by Robert W. Strayer, website, http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/strayer1e/default.asp?s=&n=&i=&v=&o=&ns=0&uid=0&rau=0
