The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  Between 1945 and 1975, the American empire provided factory workers with middle-class homes, secure retirements, and inexpensive college educations for their children. While American workers produced for the world, the U.S. government wrote constitutions for governments (beginning with Japan in 1945), toppled and selected governments (especially in Latin America), and sent military expeditions throughout the world.

  Containing Communism

  The most visible international role of the United States was its leadership in the effort to contain what it saw as the expansive forces of global communism. Already in 1945, President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan was motivated partly by the fear of Soviet expansion in Asia. In 1947, the Truman Doctrine pledged support for virtually any government threatened by communist subversion or aggression. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) soon followed, designed to counter any Soviet military threat to western Europe. Further alliances, such as the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization and the Central Treaty Organization, ringed the Soviet Union. By 1970, according to one historian, “the United States had more than 1,000,000 soldiers in 30 countries, was a member of four regional defense alliances and an active participant in a fifth, had mutual defense treaties with 42 nations, was a member of 53 international organizations, and was furnishing military or economic aid to nearly 100 nations across the face of the globe.”6

  Containment also led to prolonged wars in Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1955-1975). These bitter, bloody, and costly conflicts were based on a new official American understanding of the world.7 Communism in this view was a global movement, coordinated from the Soviet Union and China, an infinite peril to free societies and personal liberties everywhere as well as to American economic interests around the world. A significant communist success could well trigger an escalating domino effect of further communist victories throughout Asia and beyond. Communist insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, and the Philippines represented the dominoes waiting to fall. Only unwavering American commitment held the promise of containing that threat. “The aim [of the communists] in Viet-Nam is not simply the conquest of the South, tragic as that would be,” argued President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. “It is to show that the American commitment is worthless. Once that is done, the gates are down, and the road is open to expansion and endless conquest.”8 For American leaders, the failure to oppose an expansionist Hitler in the 1930s had led to World War II; it was a lesson that had to be applied to containing communist expansion in the 1960s.

  Beyond these major wars, a multitude of briefer interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Haiti, Panama, and elsewhere were intended to prevent or remove leftist governments and to provide support for many anticommunist regimes, even though they might be corrupt, undemocratic, and brutal. The shah of Iran, the famously corrupt dictator Sese Seko Mobutu of the Congo (then Zaire), Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and any number of military governments in Latin America were among U.S. client states. They were surely “bastards,” commented one official, but they were “our bastards.” A further American ally was the apartheid state of South Africa, where fear of instability and communist penetration was among the factors that inhibited American willingness to strongly confront that country’s racist policies.

  Aid, both military and economic, was a further weapon in the Cold War. Beginning with the program to assist Greece and Turkey in combating communism in 1947, the United States funneled substantial sums of money and equipment to almost 100 countries in far larger amounts than the Soviet Union could afford. Its Peace Corps program, begun in the early 1960s, scattered tens of thousands of young Americans all across the Third World to assist in education and development projects and to win friends for the United States. Furthermore, private corporations and banks fostered trade and investment in many Third World countries, strengthening their ties to the West. All this was useful, many leading Americans believed, in enabling Third World countries to make the difficult and often destabilizing transition to modernity without succumbing to the “disease” of communism. Aid, trade, and investment in this view represented a kind of inoculation against that disease.

  When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States was the world’s only military superpower. Its wars in the Persian Gulf (1991), Afghanistan (2002), and Iraq (2003) confirmed the military and political dominance of the United States.

  An Empire of Culture

  In the wake of American political, economic, and military power came heavy doses of American culture as well. American movies attracted and influenced millions. The works of American authors were translated into dozens of languages. American music, particularly jazz and, much more extensively, rock and roll, became a major form of entertainment the world over. And the brand names of American products like Ford, Spam, Kleenex, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola became part of the consumer culture of many countries. An ideology of consumerism, pioneered in the United States and driven by mass advertising, penetrated much of the world.

  Resisting the American Empire

  American dominance has not gone unchallenged. From the communist point of view, the Cold War was largely an effort to resist American global domination and to bring the blessings of socialism to those oppressed by capitalism. Mexico nationalized foreignowned railroads and oil companies in the late 1930s, while Cuba escaped American domination and nationalized U.S. corporations during its revolution beginning in 1959.

  Nor was the United States able to completely dominate its supposed Third World allies in the Cold War. Many sought actively to remain “nonaligned” in the global rivalries of the Cold War or to play off the global superpowers against one another. India routinely took aid from both sides and criticized both while resolutely maintaining its neutrality. Egypt turned decisively against the West in the mid-1950s, developing a close relationship with the Soviet Union, but in 1972 it expelled 21,000 Soviet advisers and aligned more clearly with the United States. Ethiopia, long a close ally of the United States with a large American communications base in its country, underwent a major change of government in the 1970s, becoming for a time a Marxist state and a Soviet ally. Neither side in the Cold War found it easy to impose its will in the Third World.

  Culturally, Americans continued to be very influential in the world, but a vocal minority of intellectuals, writers, and political leaders in Europe and in developing countries strenuously objected to the new “cultural imperialism” or the “Americanization” of their countries. Both the assertion of political Islam and the rise of China as a major world power represented challenges to U.S. hegemony. The economic revival of Japan and western Europe, together with the industrial development in East Asia, eroded American economic dominance and created a massive trade deficit. And the war against Iraq in the early twenty-first century witnessed a global outcry of opposition to this unilateral exercise of American power.

  The emergence of the United States as a global power marked both the end of western European dominance in world affairs and the continuation of Western political power, cultural values, and economic interests on a global level. It contributed to the epic conflict of the Cold War and provoked opposition from some allies in the Western alliance as well as from developing countries intent on preserving their hard-won independence.

  Achieving Independence

  The End of Empire

  The past century was also the end of the age of empires. In 1914, many of the world’s peoples lived not in independent national states but in multinational empires. Today, virtually all of the world’s territorial empires have disintegrated. They have been replaced by dozens of newly independent nation-states. World War I witnessed the disintegration of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires. During World War II, Germany’s and Japan’s empires dissolved in military defeat. The postwar decades saw the collapse of the overseas empires of France, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, and the United States. And in the years between 1989 and
1991, the Soviet empire likewise came apart as both its eastern European dependencies and the various non-Russia nationalities within the Soviet Union asserted their political independence.

  This was a momentous change. It cultivated and authorized an array of new national identities. It mobilized millions of people to enter the political arena in search of independence for their countries and a better life for themselves and their families. It generated enormous conflict and bloodshed as struggles for independence unfolded around the world. And it set the stage for even more conflicts to follow as newly independent states quarreled with one another and sought to maintain a fragile internal unity.

  Two factors underlay this remarkable and rapid transformation of the world’s political architecture. The first was war, either hot or cold. Both world wars and the Cold War that followed smashed or weakened imperial powers and allowed subject peoples an easier exit from colonial dependency than might have been otherwise possible. The second was nationalism, a political ideology nurtured in nineteenth-century Europe and appropriated now on a universal basis by colonized people everywhere. The nationalist idea—a belief that one’s own people share a common and distinct culture and deserve therefore a separate and independent political status—proved to be a powerful solvent of empire.

  Afro-Asian Struggles

  The Foundations of Anticolonialism . European colonies in Africa and Asia were most swept up by the call of national independence. Millions of colonized people had participated in World Wars I and II. They had gained military skills and political exposure, listened to wartime propaganda about freedom and selfdetermination, and had watched Europeans butcher each other in record numbers.

  Western racism also weighed heavily on the colonized. Europeans had promised to accord their Western-educated colonial subjects a degree of equality and privilege. But European racial exclusiveness undermined these promises and alienated the educated elite in the process. Everywhere in the colonial world, these elites took the lead in struggles for independence, seeking to create their own modern societies after being excluded from those of their European rulers. Particularly in Africa, racial consciousness became an important ingredient of nationalist movements and generated a sense of pan-African kinship between Africans and black people in the Americas. Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, the U.S. civil rights movement, and African struggles for independence reinforced one another and created a sense of global solidarity among people of color oppressed by whites.

  Much else stoked the fires of anticolonial nationalism. The very example of European nationalisms had a corrosive effect on empire. In 1913, for example, the Dutch colonial regime in what is now Indonesia organized celebrations to mark the independence of the Netherlands from France 100 years earlier. It did not take long for Indonesian intellectuals to draw the logical conclusion: if the Dutch nation had liberated itself from France, why should not Indonesians do the same from the Netherlands? Furthermore, both the Soviet Union and the United States opposed formal colonial European empires, and the newly established United Nations provided a global forum for the expression of anticolonial demands. Like slavery in the nineteenth century, “imperialism” in the twentieth century lost its international legitimacy and became by the 1950s a term of opprobrium, widely used to insult one’s opponents. The idea of the “nation” as a new, modern, and independent community appealed to peoples uprooted from their traditional societies and often impoverished by colonial economies. In these ways, the logic of nationalism itself undermined the foundations of colonial empires.

  Independence Achieved . As the colonial powers of Europe rebuilt after the wars—Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Belgium in particular—they had neither the will nor the means to contest these movements indefinitely. Furthermore, world opinion, reflected in the newly formed United Nations, had turned decisively against imperialism. The moral legitimacy of empire now came under ferocious assault. In these circumstances, political leaders all across Asia and Africa created political parties and mobilized support from landless or exploited peasants, from impoverished or unemployed urban workers, and from enthusiastic young people eager for change. In rallies, marches, strikes, demonstrations, and sometimes guerrilla warfare operations, they made the colonies increasingly ungovernable. And so colony after colony—some 90 of them—emerged into what seemed then like the bright and optimistic light of freedom and political independence. India led the way in 1947, followed by Indonesia in 1949 and much of Africa from the late 1950s. By the 1970s, only scattered remnants of Europe’s global empires remained. From the ashes of these empires emerged one of the novel features of twentieth-century political life: dozens of “new nations,” each eager to assert its sovereignty in a world of equal states, to develop its economy in a modern and industrial direction, and to secure the position of its dominant elite. The world of European empires was over.

  Variations on a Theme

  Anticolonial revolts took various forms. Some African states achieved independence peacefully, as did India eventually. The independence struggles of Vietnam and of Africans in Portuguese colonies were particularly violent. Algerians fought bitterly for some eight years before achieving independence from France in 1962. Some countries achieved independence almost overnight, as in the case of the Belgian Congo, where the struggle began only in 1956 with independence coming in 1960. The longer struggles, like that of India, may have provided a more experienced political leadership for the newly independent states. Some anticolonial struggles were associated with revolutionary social movements, such as those in Vietnam and China, while most African nationalist movements were rather more conservative in their social goals, seeking political independence but not socialism. Some, especially in the Islamic world, defined themselves in terms of religion, while most others maintained a secular focus. Where the people of a colony shared a common language or culture that was different from that of the colonial power, such as in the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union and in Vietnam, China, Egypt, and elsewhere, new nations had a more solid cultural foundation and identity. But in much of Asia and Africa—India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Congo, for example—no common language or culture existed. In some of these cases, India most notably, the language of the colonial power, English, was the language that most educated Indians knew, complicating the struggle for independence. But even where colonial powers had trained a colonial elite in European universities, the experience often served to create a common hostility to colonialism and helped forge a new national identity.

  Whatever their distinctive features, the outcome of these anti-imperial nationalisms was the proliferation of dozens of new independent nation-states. Each of them, no matter how small, claimed sovereignty and legal equality with all the others and a rightful place in various international organizations, such as the United Nations. Their leaders and elites were committed to modernizing and catching up with the more advanced countries of the world. Collectively, they represented the triumph of the national ideal over discredited imperial ideologies. By the middle of the twentieth century and certainly by its end, traditional notions of empire had lost credibility in global discourse, while that of the nation reigned supreme.

  New Nations on

  the Global Stage

  Between 1900 and 2000, the number of independent countries in the world almost quadrupled, from 57 to 192. Many of these new states were former colonies that achieved political independence without economic development. Along with previously independent states like China and most of Latin America, these countries became known as the Third World, developing countries, or the global South. They made up the vast majority of humankind, some 75 percent of world population, and accounted for almost all the enormous increase in human numbers that the world experienced in that century. They also represented the locus of massive and pervasive poverty, punctuated by pockets of prosperity.

  These countries adopted various strategies to generate economic development, ranging from tot
al state control to free market capitalism. Politically, they tried single-party states, military regimes, communist governments, and variations on parliamentary democracy. For these and other reasons, many became pawns in the Cold War. In Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, the Middle East, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the superpowers took sides in local conflicts and projected them onto a global stage.

  The experience of developing countries also raised questions about the meaning and significance of political independence. Although direct imperial control was a thing of the past, the optimistic expectation that independence would mean prosperity was often deeply disappointed. Continuing or even deepening poverty in many former colonies suggested that the unequal ties of the world economy—reflected in massive indebtedness, frequently declining terms of trade, intrusive foreign investment, export of raw materials, and dependence on foreign manufactured goods—survived intact even after independence. Nor did old-style colonialism disappear completely. France intervened militarily on many occasions in its former African colonies. The United States did the same in the independent states of the Caribbean and Central America. These realities gave rise to the notion of “neocolonialism,” which suggested that only the political trappings, not the real substance, of Western dominance had really changed. The sharp division between the rich and poor countries in the contemporary world was a reminder that the global inequalities associated with the rise of the West still persisted into the twenty-first century.