20th Century World

World War I, World War II, Cold War, Post-Cold War

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
• Explainthe historical trajectory
that led to the increase of world
interactions from the classical
antiquity to the 21st Century.
• Determine the most viable “origin”
of the of the highly globalized that
we know today.
• Colonization
brought modernization processes
among the colonies, money replaced the barter
system, labor was paid with wages rather than
in kind.
• Modernmedicine was introduced to the colonies
which allowed more people to live a healthier
and longer life.
• Mass school system was also introduced.
This led the colonized to question the entire
colonial system
 • World War I began in 1914 after the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and
lasted until 1918.
Assassination of Franz
Ferdinand
• Tensions rise across Europe. Franz Ferdinand,
heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, is shot
dead in Sarajevo, capital of the Austrian
province Bosnia.

• Franz Ferdinand’s killer, Gavrilo Princip, is

backed by Serbian terrorist group ‘the Black
Hand’
 CENTRAL POWERS ALLIED POWERS
• Germany • Great Britain
• Austria-Hungary
• Bulgaria vs. • France
• Russia (knocked
• Ottoman Empire out of war in
1917)
➢ Princip and other nationalists were
• Italy
struggling to end Austro-Hungarian • Romania
rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina and
create a unified South Slavic State
• Japan
(Yugoslavia) under Serbian leadership • United States
(joined in 1917)
 World War I Begins
• Convinced that Austria-Hungary was
readying for war, the Serbian government
ordered the Serbian army to mobilize and
appealed to Russia for assistance. On July
28, Austria-Hungary declared war on
Serbia, and the tenuous peace between
Europe’s great powers quickly collapsed.
• Withina week, Russia, Belgium, France,
Great Britain and Serbia had lined up
against Austria-Hungary and Germany,
and World War I had begun.
 Lost and surrendered resulting to the
agreement or Treaty of Versailles (1919)

European leaders sign the treaty to

end World War I in the Hall of
Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.
Treaty of Versailles (1919)
After four years of devastating fighting, the First World War came to an end in
1919 in Versailles. The treaty, which represented “peace” for some and a “diktat”
for others, also sowed the seeds of the Second World War, which would break out
twenty years later.
• Germany accepted responsibility for the war and lost
68,000 km² of territory, including Alsace and Lorraine
(which were returned to France).
• Part of western Prussia was given to Poland, which
gained access to the sea through the famous “Polish
Corridor”
• Germany agreed to pay the crushing sum of 20 billion
gold marks in reparations claimed by France.
• It lost most of its ore and agricultural production.
• Its colonies were confiscated, and its military strength
was crippled.
Effects on Other Central Powers
• Ottoman Empire’s West Asian possessions become League of
Nation Mandates (ex. Syria, Mandatory Palestine, Transjordan,
Lebanon, Iraq).
 Cause of the Middle East conflicts of today

• Jews are promised a national home in Palestine (now Israel

and Palestine).
 Cause of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (which has totally nothing to do
with religion)

• Republic of Turkey replaces Ottoman Empire

 Most of the Greeks in Turkey end up moving to Greece

• Austria becomes a republic.

• Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia become sovereign states
• Hungary keeps its monarchy (no king)
 loses ⅔ of its territory to Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania,
and Yugoslavia
World War II
The biggest and deadliest war in history, involving more than
30 countries. Sparked by the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland, the
war dragged on for six bloody years until the Allies defeated
Nazi Germany and Japan in 1945.

• World War II grew out of issues left unresolved by that earlier

conflict. In particular, political and economic instability in
Germany, and lingering resentment over the harsh terms
imposed by the Versailles Treaty, fueled the rise to power of
Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist (Nazi) Party.
German Election of March 1933 and Enabling Act

• First election after Adolf Hitler becomes Reich Chancellor

• Naziswin 43.91% of all seats in Reichstag (288 seats) so, Hitler
had to form a coalition with the monarchist DNVP (German
Nationalist People's Party) to form a working majority
• However,he got the Reichstag to pass the Enabling Act, which
turned Germany into a Nazi dictatorship
 Enabling Act: Allowed Hitler to make laws without the Reichstag
 Only the SPD/Social Democrats (94 members) were opposed for the
KPD/Communist Party was banned, and the Catholic Centre Party's
silence was bought with a Concordat
 July 1933: All parties except the Nazis were abolished
• WhenPresident Paul von Hindenburg died in 1934, Hitler
merged the Chancellorship and the Presidency.
• Aryan – pure German race (the word
Aryan may mean a noble one.)
• Hitler believed that war was the only way
to gain the necessary “Lebensraum,” or
living space, for that race to expand.

In late August 1939, Hitler and Soviet

leader Joseph Stalin signed the German-
Soviet Nonaggression Pact, which
incited a frenzy of worry in London and
Paris.

Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide

Poland among themselves, and Stalin
would be allowed to annex the Baltic
Republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and
Estonia.
• On
September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland from the
west, Soviets invade from East; two days later, France
and Britain declared war on Germany, beginning
World War II.
On May 10, 1940 German forces swept through
Belgium and the Netherlands in what became
known as “Blitzkrieg,” or lightning war.
With France on the verge of collapse, Benito
Mussolini of Italy put his Pact of Steel with Hitler
into action, and Italy declared war against France
and Britain on June 10.

Let’s have
war!

German planes bombed Britain extensively

throughout the summer of 1940
After failing to
help Norway, UK
Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain
resigned to allow the
formation of a
National Unity
Government (Tories,
Liberals, and Labour).
Winston Churchill
became Prime
Minister.

Labour Party Leader

Clement Attlee
became Deputy Prime
Minister. Attlee and
Labour handled the
economy while
Churchill handled the
war effort
BELGIUM
 LEADERS of WWII

Hirohito(Showa Adolf Benito

)/ Hideki Tojo Hitler Mussolini
World War II Ends (1945)
The Potsdam Conference (July 17-August 2,
1945) was the last of the World War II
meetings held by the “Big Three” heads of
state. Featuring American President Harry S.
Truman, British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill (and his successor, Clement Attlee)
and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin.

• Truman authorized the use of devastating weapon,

they developed during a top-secret operation code-
named The Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb
was unleashed on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
(Little Boy) and Nagasaki (Fat Man) in early August.
World War II Casualties and Legacy

• World War II proved to be the

deadliest international conflict in
history, taking the lives of 60 to 80
million people, including 6 million
Jews who died at the hands of the
Nazis during the Holocaust.
 The Holocaust/Shoah led to a massive
decline in Yiddish (85% of the 6M spoke
it)
 Jews opposed to a Jewish State in
Mandatory Palestine began to change
their minds (ex. Agudat Israel)
 1947: UN agrees to divide Mandatory
Palestine into Jewish and Arab States
 World War II Casualties and Legacy
• The British, French, and Dutch colonial empires were weakened,
which led to the rise of decolonization movements.
• USSR keeps territory gained from Poland, but Poland is compensated
with parts of Eastern Germany (Prussia and Silesia)
 USSR takes Konigsberg and renames it Kaliningrad
• Liberal Democratic Party takes over Japan.
• Italy becomes a republic.
• The United Nations was created to replace the failed League of
Nations.
• League of Nations Mandates became UN Trust Territories under the
supervision of the UN Trusteeship Council
 The trusteeship system was so effective that by 1994, all UN Trust Territories
had become independent
The Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet
Union lasted for decades and resulted in anti-communist
suspicions and international incidents that led the two
superpowers to the brink of nuclear disaster.
 Cold War
• Americans had long been wary of
Soviet communism and concerned
about Russian leader Joseph
Stalin’s tyrannical, blood-thirsty
rule of his own country.
• The Soviets resented the Americans’
decades-long refusal to treat the
USSR as a legitimate part of the
international community as well as
their delayed entry into World War
II, which resulted in the deaths of
tens of millions of Russians.
The Cold War:
The Atomic Age

• The containment strategy also provided the rationale for an

unprecedented arms buildup in the United States.
• American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons
like the ones that had ended World War II. Thus began a deadly
“arms race.”
• In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own. In response,
President Truman announced that the United States would build
an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or
“superbomb.” Stalin followed suit.
The Cold War: Containment
• Bythe time World War II ended,
most American officials agreed
that the best defense against the
Soviet threat was a strategy called
“containment.”

• It
is a policy devised by George
Kennan to prevent the spread of
communism.
Countries who develop
Atomic Bomb
The Cold War Extends to
Space
• Space
exploration served as another
dramatic arena for Cold War competition.
• On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7
intercontinental ballistic missile launched
Sputnik (Russian for “traveling
companion”), the world’s first artificial
satellite and the first man-made object to
be placed into the Earth’s orbit.
• One month later, Sputnik 2 sends the first
living being (Laika the dog) into space.
Sadly, she didn’t make it back.
The Cold War Extends to
Space
• On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin becomes
the first man in space (Vostok 1).
• On June 16, 1964, Valentina Tereshkova
becomes the first woman in space (Vostok
6).
• On March 18, 1965, Alexei Leonov
conducts the first-ever spacewalk (Voskhod
2).
• Soviets take the lead.
 They make plans to land a man (Alexei Leonov)
on the moon with Soyuz, but it didn’t work out.
The Cold War Extends to Space
• In1958, the U.S. launched its own
satellite, Explorer I, designed by the
U.S.
• Alan
Shepard become the first
American man in space.
• July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong of
NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, became
the first man to set foot on the
moon, effectively winning the Space
Race for the Americans.
The Cold War: The Red Scare
• Meanwhile, beginning in 1947, the House
Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) brought the Cold War home in
another way. The committee began a series
of hearings designed to show that
communist subversion in the United States
was alive and well.
• Thousands of federal employees were
investigated, fired and even prosecuted. As
this anticommunist hysteria spread
throughout the 1950s, liberal college
professors lost their jobs, people were
asked to testify against colleagues and
“loyalty oaths” became commonplace.
The Close of the Cold War
• Almost as soon as he took office, President Richard Nixon
(1913-1994) began to implement a new approach to
international relations.
• In 1972, President Richard Nixon and Soviet premier
Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) signed the SALT I.
• Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I)
prohibited the manufacture of nuclear missiles by both
sides and took a step toward reducing the decades-old
threat of nuclear war.
• In 1979, the USSR invaded Afghanistan, and was
defeated by the mujahideen.
• Despite Nixon’s efforts, the Cold War heated
up again under President Ronald Reagan
(1911-2004). Reagan believed that the
spread of communism anywhere threatened
freedom everywhere.

• Reagan doctrine - provide financial

and military aid to anticommunist
governments and insurgencies around the
world.
 Unfortunately, this meant backing
anticommunist authoritarian regimes.
(ex. Stroessner in Paraguay, Pinochet in Chile,
Duvalier in Haiti, and Marcos Sr. in the
Philippines)
• Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) took
office in 1985 as CPSU General
Secretary (President of the USSR in
1990) and introduced two policies that
redefined the USSR's relationship to
the rest of the world:
• “glasnost,” or political openness,
• “perestroika,” or economic reform.
• Gorbachev also withdrew Soviet forces
from Afghanistan.
Soviet influence in Eastern Europe
waned. In 1989, every other
communist state in the region
replaced its government with a
noncommunist one.
 The communist parties of these states
recast themselves as social democratic or
democratic socialist parties

• InNovember of that year, the Berlin

Wall–the most visible symbol of the
decades-long Cold War–was finally
destroyed.
 In 1990, West Germany absorbed East
Germany.
 The Socialist Unity Party (ruling party of
East Germany) evolved into The Left/Die
Linke
• By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen
apart. The Cold War was over.
 December 1: Ukrainian SSR votes to leave the
USSR (including Crimea and Donbass)
 December 12: After the other SSRs declare
independence, Soviet Russia withdraws
deputies from the Supreme Soviet (USSR
parliament)
 December 16: Kazakh SSR declares
independence as Kazakhstan
 December 25: Gorbachev resigns as president
 December 26: Soviet of the Republics (upper
house) officially dissolves the USSR.
• The Russian Federation took over the
USSR's assets and UN Seat.
 Including the Soviet nuclear arsenal
• Unfortunately, Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first
noncommunist president, would be
replaced by Vladimir Putin.
 Putin would invade Ukraine in 2014 and 2022
POST WAR
3 things defined the post-Cold War world
• 1. US Power
• 2.Rise of China as the center
of global industrial growth
based on low wages
• 3.
Re-emergence of Europe as
a massive, integrated
economic power
The initial phase of the post-Cold War
world was built on two assumptions
• (1)
The United States was the dominant political
and military power but that such power was less
significant than before, since economics was the
new focus.
• (2)
Revolved around the three Great Powers — the
United States, China and Europe.
 United States assumed that pre-eminence included the
power to reshape the Islamic world through military
action.
 China and Europe single-mindedly focused on economic
matters
…then GLOBALIZATION
officially emerged
 Seatwork: Choose the correct
answer from the box.
_____1. His assassination led to the declaration of
World War I.
a. WWI
_____2. An agreement signed to end the WWII b. WWII
which imposed harsh penalty to Germany. c. Sputnik
d. Apollo 11
_____3. It is the world’s first artificial satellite and e. SALT
the first man-made object to be placed into the f. Treaty of Versailles
Earth’s orbit. g. Reagan doctrine
h. Franz Ferdinand
_____4. It provide financial and military aid to i. Mikhail Gorbachev
anticommunist governments and insurgencies
around the world.
_____5. It is also called the Great War.
Give the following information:
• Name of the atomic bomb dropped in:
1.Nagasaki
2. Hiroshima

• Leaders of the Axis power during WWII:

3. Japan
4. Italy
5. Germany
 Seatwork: Choose the correct
answer from the box.
H His assassination led to the declaration of
_____1.
World War I.
a. WWI
F An agreement signed to end the WWI which
_____2. b. WWII
imposed harsh penalty to Germany. c. Sputnik
C It is the world’s first artificial satellite and
_____3.
d.
e.
Apollo 11
SALT
the first man-made object to be placed into the f. Treaty of Versailles
Earth’s orbit. g. Reagan doctrine
G It provide financial and military aid to
_____4.
h.
i.
Franz Ferdinand
Mikhail Gorbachev
anticommunist governments and insurgencies
around the world.
A It is also called the Great War.
_____5.
Give the following information:
• Name of the atomic bomb dropped in:
1.Nagasaki Fat Man
2. Hiroshima Little Boy

• Leaders of the Axis power during WWII:

3. Japan Hideki Tojo / Emperor Hirohito

4. Italy Benito Mussolini

5. Germany Adolf Hitler
• https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/world-war-ii-history

• https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/world-war-i-history

• https://www.slideshare.net/MrsBrownMEH/causes-of-world-war-ii-
presentation-a-e-embed-version

• https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cold-war-history

• https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/beyond-post-cold-war-world