Two world wars and a new order
See how thirty years of industrial war remade the map, ended empires and produced the rules and institutions we still live under, and learn to tell the trigger of an event from its causes.
BEFORE
The world of 1914
A handful of European states, plus the United States and Japan, ruled or controlled most of the planet. They had the industry of lesson 8, the electricity, chemicals and mass production of lesson 10, and the mass national loyalty of lesson 9. Put those together and you can arm, feed, move and replace soldiers by the million.
Almost everyone expected that if a war came it would be short and decided by a few battles, as recent European wars had been. Railways, machine guns and artillery had quietly made that impossible, and nobody had noticed.
Total war
A war in which a state mobilises its whole society, not just its army: factories, farms, railways, scientists, money and the labour of civilians. Because everything feeds the front, everything becomes a target, and the line between soldier and civilian stops meaning much.
This is why the wars of the twentieth century killed so many people who never held a weapon. In the Second World War, most of the dead were civilians.
Check yourself
In June 1914 a single assassination in Sarajevo was followed within weeks by a war across most of Europe. Mina says the assassination caused the First World War. What is the sharper way to put it?
- The assassination was irrelevant, since that exact war would have begun that month regardless
- It was the sole cause, because without it absolutely nothing would have happened
- It was the trigger; the alliances, arms race and imperial rivalry were the loaded conditions
- Causes cannot really be identified in history, so the question is not worth asking
Show the answer
It was the trigger; the alliances, arms race and imperial rivalry were the loaded conditions
Yes. Keep the two words apart: the trigger is the spark, the causes are the powder. Without armed blocs, rigid mobilisation plans and the belief that a war would be short, one murder is a crime, not a burning continent.
THE FIRST WAR
Four years, four empires gone
From 1914 to 1918 the industrial machine of lesson 10 was pointed at human beings. Artillery, machine guns and barbed wire made attacking almost suicidal, and armies dug in for years. Around fifteen to twenty million people died. An influenza pandemic in 1918 and 1919 then killed, by most estimates, even more than the war had.
Four empires collapsed: Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman. New states were drawn out of the pieces, often with borders decided far away. The peace of 1919 settled little, and the economic disorder that followed fed the depression of the 1930s.
THE SECOND WAR
The worst of it
The second war, from the late 1930s to 1945, was genuinely global and far deadlier: somewhere between sixty and eighty million people, most of them civilians. Cities were bombed deliberately. Whole populations were starved, deported and worked to death.
At the centre of it, the German state carried out the planned murder of about six million Jews, along with Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners and others. This was not a by-product of fighting; it was an aim, organised with railways, records and factories. It ends in August 1945 with two cities destroyed by single atomic bombs.
Check yourself
Which kind of war does each belong to?
- Two armies meet on ground chosen for the purpose
- Factories, railways and ports are military targets
- Women move into industrial jobs in huge numbers
- Fighting pauses for the winter
- A whole region's harvest is taken for the army
- Scientists are put on the state payroll to build weapons
Show the answer
War between armies: Two armies meet on ground chosen for the purpose, Fighting pauses for the winter
Total war: Factories, railways and ports are military targets, Women move into industrial jobs in huge numbers, A whole region's harvest is taken for the army, Scientists are put on the state payroll to build weapons
WHAT FOLLOWED
The empires let go
In 1939 a few European states ruled most of Africa and much of Asia. By 1975 almost none of that was left. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, Indonesia in 1949, Ghana in 1957. In 1960 alone seventeen African countries became independent, and the last Portuguese colonies followed in 1975.
Some of it was negotiated and some of it took long wars, in Algeria, Vietnam, Kenya and elsewhere. Borders drawn by outsiders stayed where they were, and the partition of India alone displaced millions and cost enormous numbers of lives.
Check yourself
Between 1945 and 1975 nearly every European colony became independent, after decades in which little had shifted. Behnam asks why it happened so suddenly. Which answer is strongest?
- Colonised peoples only started wanting independence after the Second World War ended
- The war exhausted the imperial powers, broke their claim of invincibility and armed an old demand
- The European powers decided of their own accord that empire was wrong and let go peacefully
- The United Nations issued an order that all empires must dissolve, and they obeyed it
Show the answer
The war exhausted the imperial powers, broke their claim of invincibility and armed an old demand
Yes, and notice the shape: an old demand plus new conditions. Independence movements were decades old. What 1945 added was bankrupt empires, the sight of European armies beaten in Asia, millions of colonial soldiers who had fought a war waged in the name of freedom, and a new international language of self-determination.
Built out of the wreckage
| When | What | Meant to prevent |
|---|---|---|
| 1944 | IMF and World Bank | Financial collapse spreading country to country |
| 1945 | The United Nations | Great powers with nowhere to talk to each other |
| 1945–48 | War crimes trials | Officials who said they were only following orders |
| 1948 | Universal Declaration of Human Rights | No agreed list of what a state may not do |
| 1949 | The Geneva Conventions | Civilians and prisoners left to a captor's mood |
Check yourself
Match the problem of 1914 to 1945 with the institution built to answer it
Show the answer
- Rival powers with no permanent place to talk → The United Nations, from 1945
- A bank failure spreading from country to country → The IMF and World Bank, from 1944
- Officials who said they were only following orders → War crimes trials, from 1945
- No agreed list of what a state may never do → The Universal Declaration of 1948
Check yourself
The major powers have not fought each other directly since 1945, and there have still been many wars in that time.
Show the answer
True
True, and both halves matter. No great power has fought another head-on since 1945, the longest such stretch in modern history, and no nuclear weapon has been used in war since August of that year. But there have been many wars since, some of them enormous, and several were fought by smaller states with great-power backing. 'No world war' and 'peace' are not the same sentence, and mixing them up is how people talk themselves into complacency.
Where you still live in it
- The map. The UN opened with 51 members and now has close to 200. Most of those states won their independence in the thirty years after 1945.
- The rules. Limits on what may be done to prisoners, civilians and neighbours are written down and can be quoted even when they are broken. That is the lesson-2 and lesson-9 pattern once again: a written rule is not a guarantee, but it is a handle.
- The shadow. Nuclear weapons still exist, and the arrangement that keeps them unused was designed in a hurry by frightened people in the 1940s and 1950s.
- How we know. This is the most documented period in human history: film, photographs, state archives opened decades later, and recorded testimony from survivors. That does not make it simple. It means you can check what you are told, and you should.
Lesson recap
- Industry, chemistry and mass national loyalty turned war into total war, in which the whole society fights and the whole society is a target.
- Separate the trigger from the causes: one assassination set off 1914, but the powder had been laid for years.
- Two wars killed on a scale with no precedent, destroyed four empires and then, within thirty years, ended almost every European colony.
- The survivors built institutions and written rules aimed squarely at the failures that had produced the catastrophe.
- The great powers have avoided direct war since 1945 under the threat of nuclear weapons. That is not the same thing as peace.