The 20th-Century World Politics in Brief
The dynamics of world politics explained w/ words and photos
When the world just started in 1900, a lot has happened in the previous century. The UK was under Queen Victoria who has reigned for 60 years and had influenced the Victorian lifestyle, the industrial revolution that shaped automobiles and manufactures, the abolishment of slavery in the US after President Lincoln, the western modernization in Japan, the birth of Marxism ideology, and unifications of great nations such as Germany under Bismarck and Italy under Garibaldi. These major events played a central role in the next century.
The 1900s.
Three kings in Europe were cousins; King George V in the UK, Tsar Nicholas II in Russia, and Emperor Wilhelm II in Germany (also King of Prussia). They were the direct descendants of Queen Victoria. These three monarchies ruled Europe. During the first decade of this century, Europe had been separated into colonies of power. The Triple Entente consisted of France, Britain, and Russia; on the other side was Triple Alliance consisted of Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary. These powerful axes will fight each other in the next decade. While these nations enjoyed monarchism, other nations’ monarchism was on the brink of a collapse, such as the Ottoman Empire and the Qing Dynasty in China.
The 1910s.
New power led by Sun Yat-Sen arose in China and ended the monarchy in 1911. The tension between the two triple of powers from the previous decade broke after the assassination of the Austria-Hungarian crown prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. The First World War broke in the same year and ended in 1918. The war had caused the most number of war casualties in the history of mankind. The consequence of the war was so horrific and massive. With such a huge amount of budget spent on the war, the lost nations faced an economic hardship so seriously that the people felt exhausted from the monarchs.
The most severe dissatisfaction of the people led to a bloody revolution in Russia. The communist revolution led by Vladimir Lenin tore down the government of Tsar Nicholas II, ended the monarchy, and started the Soviet Union in 1917. Outside, the Austrian-Hungarian and Ottoman monarchy ended.
Germany had to face the war sanction as the nation had to be divided after the Versailles Treaty in France ended the war. Kaiser Wilhelm left the divided country and a new form of government, the Weimar Republic, ruled Germany.
The 1920s.
In post-war, Italy obtained its territory over Tyrol and shares of German territories. However, the economic unrest brought Italy worse. A new Fascist movement led by Benito Mussolini had just begun. This movement influenced the public mass under the Italian monarchy governed by King Victor Emmanuel III that made Mussolini his prime minister in 1925. In 1929, his government gave independence to the Vatican through the Lateran Treaty. Hence, Vatican became an independent state de facto and de jure, and the Pope as the head of state. The Mussolini government indirectly had limited the authority of the Pope over Italy and the rest of the world.
Near the end of 1929, the US faced economic bankruptcy, that had actually rooted years before. The Great Depression caused prices to plummet, the stock market prices crashed, and a third of all banks in the US failed. The American people needed a new effective government to solve the disaster, and voted for Franklin Roosevelt to become the president over the next 15 years.
The 1930s.
People had enjoyed peaceful life that lasted only for 20 years in the 1920s and the 1930s. Germany was a desperate nation since its loss in WW1. Although the new Weimar government under a WW1 hero Paul von Hindenburg took form in Germany, the economic situation was not going into betterness.
Adolf Hitler started a new and another fascist movement, the NAZI party, and gained influence over the early 1930s. With his political view of German pride (Chauvinism) and the serious anti-semitism, people voted Hitler for chancellery in 1933, and further to assume office as the leader of Germany (Führer) in 1934 after President Hindenburg died. Many major political decisions made by Hitler; mainly the agreement with Russia and UK not to invade (that later he dismissed) and his alliance with Mussolini in Italy. Germany under Hitler was a golden era that won over the German people, despite the increasing repression of the Jewish community.
Outside, the monarchy of Japan had long planned to conquer larger mainland in Asia. Japan wanted to conquer the Manchuria part of China. The tension between China and Japan that has actually rooted years before then broke as the second Sino-Japanese in 1935.
The 1940s.
After the invasion of NAZI Germany into Poland and Hitler’s plan to invade larger territories in Europe, the continent was automatically into the war as France and the UK declared war with Germany; the Second World War broke. France was defeated shortly after that and occupied by Germany in 1940. Italy sided with Germany and went into the war in the same year. The Soviet Union later went into the war after the invasion of Germany in Operation Barbarossa in 1941.
In the Pacific, Japan had conquered the Pacific; the Manchuria part of China in the previous decade, Southeast Asia (the French-controlled Indochina and Dutch-controlled East Indies), and New Guinea. The aggression reached a tipping point when the Japanese attack the US military territory in Pearl Harbor (Hawaii) in 1941. The US declared war in the Pacific with Japan.
From 1942–1945, nations fought each other and gradually ended with lots of casualties as Italy lost the war, then Germany lost in 1945 after the Soviet attack. Not only war casualties, but the innocent Jewish community during the horrific Holocaust by NAZI. The US ended the war in the Pacific after they bombed twice in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Some nations automatically became liberated. In 1947, two nations in Asia; Pakistan and India, declared independence. The next year, David Ben-Gurion declared the independence of Israel. Since Israel became an independent nation, a flock of Jewish people in Europe moved there. Some nations in Eastern Europe gathered into the Soviet Union. Poland moved into Soviet control. In China, the communist leader Mao Zedong took over the nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek government and started the communist republic in 1949.
The 1950s.
The half-century world was known as the post-war world. Two nations enjoyed their WW2 triumph; the US and Soviet Union, despite their political tension and the start of the Cold War. The race for nuclear power was a tag of this decade. Not only the nuclear bomb based on the fission reaction but also the fusion-based hydrogen bomb. In 1954, the US tested its first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Atoll. Both nations were also involved in the space race started by the Soviet Union which sent the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1, to space in 1957.
Nations were already divided among them; North Korea and South Korea (1948), East Germany and opposing West Germany (1949), and North Vietnam and South Vietnam as a result of the Geneva convention (1954). There were wars between the two Korean nations which broke in 1950. The Vietnam war began in 1955.
More revolutions were driven by people and civilians against imperialism. In Cuba, Fidel Castro led a revolution against the government dictatorship and was able to topple down the government in 1953. In the Arabs, a rebellion led by Gamal Abdel Nasser broke at a tipping point when he nationalized the Suez Canal from the British and French authority in 1956. The UK under Prime Minister Anthony Eden sided with Israel (that also attacked the Sinai Peninsula) and France to attack and invade Egypt, however, the invasion was failed.
The 1960s.
During this decade, the Cold War played by the US and the Soviet Union heightened. In Vietnam, the war between the South and the communist North became more serious as it also went on the headlines of every news. War escalation provoked by the communist South has caused the US to get involved in this war.
Cuba under Fidel Castro became the opponent of the US and the western, therefore sided with the Soviet Union. The fear of the western nations of the spread of communism intensified not only in Southeast Asia but also in the Americas. In 1962, the US government unleashed a secret deployment of missiles carried out on the island of Cuba. The government translated it as a proliferation of nuclear war provoked by the Soviet Union, therefore the Cuban Missile Crisis broke. It was not long after both US and the Soviet Union ceased the crisis.
The involvement of the Catholic Church under Pope John XXIII has played a central role in campaigning peace between both sides. The Church conducted a radical change to its whole authority in making progress towards peace through the Second Vatican Council in the same year.
In the US, another new movement from the black civilians mainly led by Martin Luther King, Jr. intensified. The movement urged the government to protect the equal civil rights of the black civilians, then approved by President Lyndon Johnson approved by signing the Civil Rights Act in 1968.
In the previous decade, tension has broken in the Arabs between Egypt and Israel. In 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, then Syria and Jordan declared war with Egypt, started the war that was fought for six days. Israel won the Six-Day War and captured the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
In Africa, more states became independent; Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, and more. The spirit of self-determination against western imperialism toppled down the decolonization in Africa that has lasted for decades.
The 1970s.
The nuclear war escalations had ended in this decade. The US and the Soviet Union went into a more peaceful decade, despite the continuously raging war not only in Vietnam but also in Cambodia. The US under Richard Nixon’s presidency positioned into a more open relationship with the communist Republic of China after the presidential visit in 1972. However, the Watergate Scandal collapsed Nixon’s government. The misconduct of the government was released from wiretapped recordings and the scandal caused the president to resign in 197
The Vietnam War finally ended in 1975. The US lost the war and Vietnam unified both South and North under the communist government. The Red Khmer communist movement soon after took the government in Cambodia.
The tension between the Arab nations (mainly Egypt) and Israel decreased gradually as some leaders including President Anwar Sadat (Egypt) and PM Menachem Begin (Israel) made an effort to start sustaining peace in the conflicted region. The effort succeeded in 1976 after their friendly meeting with US President Jimmy Carter in Camp David and resulted in a Peace Accord.
On the other side of the Arab nations, chaos happened in Iran as a new radical movement led by Ayatollah Khomeini shattered the imperialist monarchy of Shah Reza Pahlevi and toppled it down in 1979. The whole nation was immediately transformed into a conservative and radical religious country, that impacted the disastrous Oil Crisis in the same year. Iran started the nuclear weapon program shortly after.
The 1980s.
In this decade, peace between the western allies represented by the US, and the Soviet Union became more evident. The influence of Pope John Paul II represented the world perspective towards anti-communism, mainly in Poland. As a former Polish-born priest, he had seen Poland under communism, therefore influenced a Polish revolutionary leader, Lech Walesa, to exit Poland from communism. The Pope was also a symbol of peace in the next decades.
In South America in the 1980s, the military junta was a common government style. In 1982, Argentina claimed and invaded British overseas territory in the South Atlantic Ocean called the Falklands Island (or Islas Malvinas). The government in the UK under PM Margaret Thatcher reacted by conflicting in a war with Argentina. The UK won the war and was able to save Malvinas.
In Asia, a lot had happened. A woman leader Corazon Aquino led a campaign to defeat the dictatorship presidency of Ferdinand Marcos in the Phillippines in 1986. Another woman leader Aung San Suu Kyi led a student movement to replace the military junta government with a democratic government in Myanmar in 1988. Another tipping point in this decade happened in China when students marched in Tiananmen Square to call for democracy in the communist republic in 1989. Unfortunately, this demonstration turned into a civilian massacre by the armed force.
The Soviet Union was under a more open and democratic government of Mikhail Gorbachev. A reformation of the Soviet Union was designed by Gorbachev, with his Perestroika (restructuration) and Glasnost (transparency) policy reform. This made the Soviet Union became western democratic communism. Shortly after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine in 1986, the influence of the Soviet Union gradually diminished. There was no longer need of racing towards a nuclear superpower. A close relationship was retained between Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan. In 1989, Reagan’s successor, President George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev declared the end of the Cold War.
This decade was gracefully ended by the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the reunification of South and North Germany. People had predicted next would be the Soviet Union.
The 1990s.
As the Cold War ended, the Soviet Union ended in 1991 and was replaced by the Republic of Russia under the new president, Boris Yeltsin. The former Soviet states were disintegrated and 15 states achieved their independence. There was no longer communism in the European continent.
However, in the Arabs, tension grew among the nations. Actually began in the previous decade as the Iran-Iraq war broke in 1980, Iraq under the government of Saddam Hussein provoked several military actions until a tipping point when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. The US was involved in the war, won the war, and ended the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
In the Balkans, Human right violation in a form of a civilian massacre by the armed forces happened in Srebrenica in Bosnia in 1995. This incident has started in 1992 when Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (the former states of the Communist Republic of Yugoslavia also after its dissolution in 1991) were involved in an armed conflict. President Slobodan Milosevic was accused later on of leading the genocide.
In South Africa, apartheid or racial segregation had become the opponent of people and democracy. Anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela had been people’s inspiration for many years before. Four years after he was released from prison, in 1994, he became the country’s first black president of South Africa.
What is left for the next 21st-century?
New problems appeared in the next century. Violent extremism grew in some states and had posed global terrors. New revolutions broke to topple down the old dictatorship and military junta governments. Clashes between nations in the Middle East were still eminent, although global leaders progressed towards peace. Also, the Coronavirus pandemic had disrupted many aspects of life. Meanwhile, there is always a promising future in this century, we hope!
