consequences of the war

consequences of the war. The Second World War ended in both major theatres in acts of total and undeniable capitulation. Victors and vanquished were plain for all to see. The chief aggressors, Germany and Japan, were devastated, numbed, and occupied. The conventional cruelties of war, including the massive problem of refugees, were compounded by the peculiar horrors of the German concentration camps and the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, which now became public knowledge. The aggressor states were condemned for starting war and vilified for what they did in war. Their power and their good name were destroyed. But not for long. The war in the west was won by Allies who had so little in common that their alliance was precarious at the moment of victory and turned rapidly into open and armed hostility. Germany (or most of it) and Japan were quickly restored to the good graces of their western conquerors and to positions of power in the world.

The Cold War was not a foregone conclusion of the World War. There were on both sides hopes of an enduring alliance between the western democracies and the Soviet Union and co-operative ventures in wartime—in, for example, the field of intelligence—which made those hopes not ridiculous. But there were also deep distrusts and myths. The Grand Alliance was made by Hitler when in June 1941 he invaded the USSR (see BARBAROSSA) and six months later declared war on the USA in fulfilment of a promise to Japan. This adventitious alliance, although crucial for the defeat of Germany, was less than wholehearted and neither the exigencies of war not its camaraderie brought much mutual knowledge or understanding. The Allies' armed forces and their states of mind operated in disconnected spheres and at the war's end they confronted one another across a divided continent and with largely mythical ideas about one another's capabilities, intentions, and ambitions. In the USSR, which had suffered even more than Germany and was the one major state to be ruled after the war by an unregenerate pre-war figure, Stalin gave the first importance to securing his battered and enfeebled country by turning central and eastern Europe and as much of Germany as he could get hold of into an exclusive zone, a satellite empire. He was right to think that the capitalist West hated his communist system but wrong to suppose that, even with a monopoly of nuclear weapons, the USA intended to attack it. Even more preposterously wrong was the American fear that the Soviet Union, whose overpowering military successes against Germany were better advertised than its post-war prostration, intended to advance further into western Europe or towards the Mediterranean, or possessed in satellite communist parties instruments capable of subverting western democracies. The USA, besides misinterpreting Stalin's capabilities (as in wartime it had exaggerated his bonhomous sagacity), adopted anti-communism as a political principle. Since communists were not confined to Europe, this ideological stance was potentially global, more so than the World War which engendered it.

Europe, the first department of the Cold War, was sharply sundered by the Second World War. Those parts of the continent reached by Stalin's armies, whether wartime enemies or allied with the USSR—roughly, old Mitteleuropa and the northern Balkans—became parts of a new Soviet empire, but an empire virtually isolated in the world economically as well as politically. Since Stalin was left with no allies and made no friends, his international scene consisted only of satellites and enemies, and he treated the former with the harshness of a beleaguered, ageing, and suspicious tyrant. His experience in war, when victory had been won after the closest shave with total defeat, confirmed his authoritarianism, his ingrained urge to assert his personal dictatorship over opponents and supposed opponents, and his imperviousness to any criticism of an economic and administrative system in which incompetence and corruption proliferated. The war prolonged this system in the Soviet Union and extended it to half of Europe, ruled by Stalin until his death in 1953 and by successors of his stamp until 1985. Within this empire endemic conflicts were smothered but not resolved.

In western Europe fear of Germans was replaced by fear of the Soviets but not extinguished. Hence two separate developments: against the Soviet Union a Euro-American alliance, against a German resurgence radically new political and constitutional ideas. Both these developments marked the ending of the old European states system—the first by enlisting the USA into that system as a quasi-European power, and the second by abrogating the sovereignty of the state as an overriding political principle. The USA became in effect a European power, reversing the American retreat from Europe after the First World War and belying Roosevelt's dictum at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 (see ARGONAUT) that all American forces would quit Europe within two years. Within a short space US dominance of the new alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), coupled with the extension of the Cold War to Asia and the consequent strain on American resources in Europe, precipitated the rehabilitation of (western) Germany. Unlike the Soviet Union, the USA had friends and allies; but they were weak. They were suffering from post-war exhaustion and, to American eyes, the perennial European inability to make common cause. Through the Marshall Aid Plan—started in 1947 by General Marshall who was now US secretary of state—the USA furnished them with massive economic aid for the restoration of their battered but nevertheless resourceful economies, accompanied by hints about the virtues of union or federation.

But the NATO alliance created in 1949 seemed inadequate without a German component and the USA brought about in two steps a major reversal of alliances: first, tacitly abrogating the alliance with the Soviet Union (its collapse was dramatized by the Berlin blockade and the allied relief by airlift in 1948–9) and then pressing the NATO allies to accept western Germany as a partner in arms. Quickly revived by American aid and by its own exertions, western Germany was more transformed by post-war economic and psychological recovery than it had been cast down by military defeat and destruction. The ensuing years of plenitude and widespread international acceptance made the new Federal German Republic what the Weimar Republic had never been after the 1914–18 war: a success. The Federal Republic escaped Weimar's political and economic instability and its pariah status and became, unlike all previous German regimes, a functioning civilian and parliamentary democracy, feared by few. The war had wrecked German power only temporarily. Perhaps it had done more for the German mood or temper, rendering a new Germany no longer as menacing as the Third Reich or the Second.

Even before the end of the war and the impact of a more preoccupying Soviet threat, some among Germany's neighbours were reflecting on the German problem. German economic strength, soundly based in resources, education, and skills, would revive. This revival was not only inevitable but, for those who traded with Germany, highly desirable, even essential. But how could a prosperous German state be prevented from dominating other nations, or making war on them? The aftermath of the First World War had shown the inadequacy of the conventional answer to this question. After 1919 Germany had been hamstrung by limitations on its armed strength and by massively punitive reparations. But these measures served only so long as Germany remained weak; they did not keep it weak, and their failure led to the policy of appeasement which, by making the wrong concessions at the wrong time to the wrong people, failed to buy goodwill or to prevent another war. For Europeans this second war was the Second German War, and although Germany lost it there was little reason in 1945 to suppose that Germany would not one day be capable of fighting yet again. A new antidote to German power had to be found. One war had evoked a commonplace response. Two wars in a single generation stimulated a bolder one.

A system of individual sovereign states invited competition, including armed competition, between the states; in Europe such a system would be dominated by the German state. So the system must be changed. This, in the minds of its first authors, was the germ of the European Community. The state as supreme authority would be replaced by an association of states, in which the several states' adversarial proclivities would be muted, the self-interest of the strongest would tend to coincide with the interests of its less powerful associates, and Germany's will and capacity to economic power would be gratified by co-operation rather than domination: the capacity to dominate would be tempered and countered by the benefits of co-operation. Given the simultaneous division of Europe into two parts by the Cold War this experiment—the most astonishing change in Europe for a thousand years—came to be pursued in a restricted and so more manageable area. Stalin therefore, by occupying central and eastern Europe and taking them out of political circulation, contributed as much as Hitler to the conception and inauguration of the European Community. It was a war baby.

The consequences of the defeat of Japan were less complex than the reordering of Europe. Uniquely among major combatants Japan fought alone, while against Japan the USA fought the Pacific war with relatively minor, if nevertheless significant, aid from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. The war begun by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 developed into a duel in which the mastery of the Pacific passed to the USA. In China war (see China incident) did not restore the rule of Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists over the entire country but widened the rift between it and the Chinese Communist Party which became in 1949 the government of China. Yet chaos, the ruling condition of China since the previous century, was only moderately and briefly abated. The USSR, pledged at American insistence and impelled by self-interest to enter the war against Japan on the Asian mainland, was deprived of any substantial gain by the abrupt ending of the war by American air and nuclear power (see atomic bomb). It acquired four Kurile islands and southern Sakhalin from Japan and ensured the bisection of Korea by a joint occupation which turned the country into two separate states—an uncovenanted consequence of the war which, in a remote quarter, assumed unexpected importance when the invasion of south Korea from the north became the first stroke in the extension of the Cold War to Asia. In South-East Asia the Japanese conquests of 1941–2 were undone, but European imperialism was not restored in spite of attempts of varying intensity by the Netherlands, France and the UK to resume their sway. The principal consequence of the French attempt in French Indo-China was the involvement of the USA, first by financing the French war and then by deploying American forces of all arms at sea and on the Asian mainland in vain support of anti-communist regimes in south Vietnam.

For Japan itself the war was a calamitous but brief setback in a rise to power which, after the Meiji restoration in 1868 and by way of wars against China in Korea in 1894 and Manchuria in 1931 (see Manchukuo), had become progressively militaristic as the chiefs of the modernized armed services arrogated to themselves the authority and prestige once enjoyed by the shoguns. Their defeat entailed, besides occupation and virtual dictatorship by the USA, deeper constitutional and psychological changes. These included shedding militarism and the divine colouring of the monarchy and their replacement by a vigorous and aggressive commercialism which made Japan the economic wonder of the second half of the century and ensured that defeat did not entail demotion or the renunciation of a world role. Unlike the proverbial leopard, Japan changed its spots. But a change of integument is by definition not deep and although Japan was quickly reconciled with the USA it remained uneasy in its relations with China, the USSR, and South East-Asian states. Japan's pre-war schemes for a Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere had been perverted by militarism from beneficial co- operation to self-regarding domination; and although Japan's defeat changed the nature of its thrust in international affairs from guns to yen the war in Asia—unlike the Pacific war against the USA—left a legacy of mistrust which Japan's Asian neighbours found it more difficult to forget than did the inviolate and only briefly humiliated Americans.

The war which began in 1914 had been called simply the Great War, but when a second came along both were designated World Wars. Both were world-wide or nearly so in the sense that men and (in the later case) women came from all quarters to fight in it. But in another sense the sobriquet was misleading, for the involvement of most of the world—most of Asia and virtually all Africa—came about through the domination of alien rulers and at their orders: British, French, German, Turkish, Dutch, and more. The people of Asia and Africa fought, not on their own initiative, but because they belonged to somebody: on the outbreak of the Second World War the viceroy of India declared the country at war without consulting any Indian. This state of affairs was destroyed by the war, which greatly accelerated the dissolution of alien empires outside Europe. The Japanese ousted European rulers from South-East Asia and post-war attempts to reverse this verdict failed. In India, Burma, and Ceylon the British felt impelled actually to do what they had been talking of doing for generations: resign. The mandate system in the Middle East—a see-through imperialism invented after the First World War—was abrogated, in the case of France during the war, in the British case soon after it and in spite of victory (see nationalism). Most surprisingly the wave of decolonization spread into Africa. In that continent the direct impact was as volcanic as anything in the history of the continent. Within 20 years of the war's end most of Africa—and within 30 years all of it—consisted of independent sovereign states where, before the war, there had been only three. The speed of this conversion was entirely unexpected. It was a consequence of the dissolution of the British and other empires in Asia which turned the sluggish tide of decolonization into a flash flood (see anti-imperialism). The example of Asia was picked up by Africans, while on the European side empire ceased to seem a natural and indefeasible fact. The happier aspect of this rush to liberation was a considerable, if not universal, atmosphere of mutual goodwill. The less cheerful aspect was the unpreparedness of the new states in terms of economic independence, professional services, political institutions, a ruling class, and a governing ethic. This huge transfer of authority and responsibility was not only gratifying to the liberated peoples and their well-wishers. It also transformed the nature of international politics.

Before decolonization vast areas of the world had been the private property of a few foreign states. The politics of these areas, in so far as they were allowed any, were either adjuncts of the politics of the metropolitan proprietors or strictly limited affairs. After decolonization these areas became sovereign states whose numbers exceeded the number of existing sovereign states and whose peoples made demands on the rest of the world. In the time of the League of Nations and in the first years of the United Nations (UN) international affairs had been preponderantly about war and peace. In the new world created by the dissolution of empires a majority of members of the UN was less concerned about world order than about terms of trade, economic development, and the transfer of economic resources; and, complementarily, large areas once private preserves became fields of opportunity for all who were minded to go up and down in the world, make money in it, or seek strategic vantage points. The proliferation of sovereign states, promoted by the Second World War, turned the world into an open world, all the more accessible owing to the contemporary revolution in the technologies of communication from aircraft to the fax machine.

For the Middle East both world wars were European wars which spilled over into western Asia. The first caused the collapse of Ottoman Turkish rule, raised hopes of an Arabia for the Arabs, but ended with the implantation of British and French rule in choice areas. Where, between the wars, Arabs ruled, their rule was fragmented among new states and fostered a secular particularism at odds with the traditional Arab aspiration for a unified Arab realm within the House of Islam (Darul-Islam). In the second war the French were removed (mainly by the British), German and Italian plans were thwarted (also by the British), and the British themselves departed soon afterwards, their war-weariness constituting a large part of the abandonment of their attempts to keep Palestine peaceful and British. But the second war, like the first, introduced a new obstacle to Arab ambitions in the shape of the state of Israel. Hitler's barbarous treatment of the Jews within his grasp (see Final Solution) had turned the comparatively marginal Zionist movement into an unstoppable Jewish migration which succeeded by force of arms in evicting all the British and half the Arabs from Palestine. This affront to Arab emotions, coupled with Israel's militancy—in self-defence or in fulfilment of Zionism's biblical fundamentalism—made the Middle East more unsettled after the war than it had been between the wars, while it became also more important for outsiders than ever before owing to the wartime and post-war discovery of new oilfields and the failure of other sources of energy to challenge oil's leading role in satisfying the world's rocketing demands for energy.

Every great war in modern times (and some in ancient) has stimulated attempts to reinforce and extend international law and to improve international mechanisms for the settlement of disputes without resorting to hostilities. After the Second World War eminent surviving German and Japanese civilian and military figures were arraigned on criminal charges before international tribunals (see Far East war crimes trials, Nuremberg trials, and war crimes). The purpose of these proceedings was to apply established law on war crimes, to probe the state of the law on military aggression by states and statesmen, to establish the criminality of certain crimes against humanity (in the context of war), and in all these matters to assert the personal accountability of responsible individuals. A by- product of the trials was the production of copious official documentation on recent history. Separately, but complementarily, statesmen addressed the questions of creating an international organization capable of preventing war or at least some wars, and of devising improved mechanisms and rules for the resolution of disputes by means other than war and for the management of change peacefully instead of by violence or not all.

Inevitably each new venture in international regulation has been devised on the basis that previous attempts have been inadequate. The League of Nations created after the First World War was by 1939 widely discredited, and yet a few years later the UN was created in its place (see San Francisco conference) and very much in its image. The reasoning of the founders of the UN was that the League had failed on account of flaws in its constitution which were identifiable and corrigible. These were believed to be, in the main, two: the League's limited membership and its limited corporate powers. The principal members and guardians had been the surviving European Great Powers—the UK and France—which were expected to carry the burden of maintaining order in the world at a time when their powers were in decline: the USA, already the world's greatest power, was never a member of the League. The Covenant of the League did not forbid members to have recourse to war; members engaged themselves merely to certain preliminary moves designed to obviate the resolution of a dispute by war but, provided these moves were made, hostilities remained a legitimate instrument of state power. Attempts in the 1920s to make the rules more stringent were defeated by those members which preferred the powers they knew (and possessed) to new and untried international machinery.

The Second World War gave internationalism, if only briefly, a fresh edge. The founders of the UN hoped to remedy the League's defects by giving its successor more members and more powers. Both the USA and the Soviet Union, the world's emerging superpowers, joined at the start and by the UN Charter all members renounced the right to make war except in very restricted (but loosely defined) circumstances. The Charter transferred the right to make war from the state to the international association of states, a step or stride which, while symptomatic of the emotions induced by war, proved to be at least premature—partly because the Cold War turned the UN into a forum for international dispute rather than conciliation, and partly because opinion at large was unprepared for so drastic an abrogation of the exercise of sovereignty. If the Second World War promoted the creation of a UN of ambitious scope, the Cold War neutered it, opinion in the more powerful states gave little support, and after a few years the tripling of the UN's membership through decolonization distracted its efforts between the management of international disputes and the installation of a more equitable world economic order. While the UN's founders thought of it first and foremost as an embryonic police force, its later recruits required it to give more attention to succouring poor countries in economic distress.

Of attitudes to war itself it is difficult to judge without subjective generalization. Like all modern wars the Second World War was waged by states and endured by individuals. It horrified people but left them sceptical about the chances of preventing more wars. Fifty million dead; as many maimed incurably in limb or mind; uncountable millions flung anonymously from the homes of their fathers, from one country to another, including ten million Germans from lands between the Oder and the Volga where their age-old presence had been an unsettling factor in half Europe; the invention of weapons of horrifying destructiveness applied to indiscriminate mass bombing which culminated in two nuclear bombs dropped on the two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—all these things confirmed popular revulsion against war but, perhaps because this revulsion was no new thing, did little to alter popular assessments of war as an intrinsic element in the human condition. Although the scale might be new, the phenomenon was not.

Yet three items of special significance and some novelty may be pinpointed. On the morrow of the war's end the most encompassing fact, besides peace itself, was the instrument which clinched it—the atomic bomb. This fearful weapon was accepted as something more than the latest step in the science of destruction, for it provided man with a capacity hitherto reserved to God, the power to destroy all life on earth. Yet at the same time the magnitude of the destructiveness of the nuclear weapon, coupled with the moral and theological issues which it raised, obscured the fact that its usefulness for military or political ends was slight. In the half-century after the war a dozen or more states acquired the knowledge and in some cases the resources to make nuclear weapons and some 100,000 warheads were manufactured. Yet none was used, largely because their use would have been profitless. This strange uselessness of the most potent weapons greatly inflated the element of bluff in the conduct of international affairs.

A second item of special significance was the development during the war of photographic reconnaissance and intelligence which, when allied after the war with the ability to put satellites into orbit round the earth, provided states with information about each other's capacities, activities, and deployments of unprecedented scope and detail. The alliance of photography with rocketry neutralized the secretiveness which had been a major factor in preparations for war.

Thirdly, the Second World War gave a boost to a kind of warfare which had existed only in the interstices of international war and on the fringes of international law: war waged by groups which were less than states but more than gangs. Resistance movements in Europe and anti-colonial liberation movements in Asia won an honourable status by operations which in other circumstances would be denounced as criminal. These movements were specially adept at enlisting popular emotions of righteous indignation as well as patriotic fervour and in professionalizing a do-it-yourself approach to warfare which, while it might be welcome to regular commanders and to governments in a crisis, were less welcome when peace returned and states strove to reassert their monopoly of legitimate violence.

The Second World War reformulated an old question in a new context: the question of the uses of power. The punch of the powerful state was hugely enhanced by the introduction of the nuclear weapon, or so it seemed. At the same time the number of such superstates was much reduced, to two by most computations or, on a more rigorous calculation, to one alone. For the USA the experience of war was unique. Americans knew plenty of personal pain and grief, but their country was inviolable and it prospered. The USA, which entered the war as the strongest state in the world, ended the war as a state in a class of its own, raised to a pre-eminence not seen for many centuries. This gift of invincible might carried with it opportunities and temptations, responsibilities, expectations, and hazards, notably in maintaining order in the international community and stability in the international economy. At this level the outcome of the war made the world seem, for a moment, simpler.

Peter Calvocoressi

Bibliography

Gaddis, J. L. , The Long Peace. Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford, 1987). Iriye Akira , The Cold War in Asia (Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974). Mortimer, E. , Faith and Power. The Politics of Islam (London, 1982).