World War I: the real “beginning” of the 20th century
Certain authors say that, despite the common calendar, the 20th century it actually started in 1914. This statement explains the historical impact of First World War.Until 1914, the world still lived an echo of the "Belle Époque" (Bela Época), that is, the phase of progress and optimism experienced in the Europe of the great Empires since the end of the 1870s. The “inauguration” of the 20th century with a war of catastrophic proportions (called by many of his contemporaries of “apocalyptic”) seemed to be a harbinger of the succession of bloody wars that would spread throughout the century.
However, even before the first world conflict broke out, some sectoral wars broke out. Two are worth mentioning: the Russian-Japanese War(1904-1905) and the Balkan War(1912-1913). These wars, especially the Balkans, outlined a little of what would happen in 1914, given that it was in Bosnia (one of the countries of the Balkan Peninsula) that the Austrian archduke
Francisco Ferdinandwas murdered. As we know, his death was seen as the trigger for the war.The great war machine of the First World War belonged to the then II Reich(Second Empire) German, which had modernized its infrastructure and its military framework after the unification, which took place in 1870. The II Reich, commanded by William II, was one of the most powerful nations of the time and, like others, had expansionist pretensions. The dimensions of the war soon became evident with the amount of soldiers, weapons, ammunition, bombs and vehicles used in just the first year. The use of chemical weapons, such as toxic gasesthat killed instantly, also revealed a terrible face of war.
The German Empire, even having entered the war with the most modern army, ended up losing and being forced to submit to the sanctions instituted by its enemies, especially by France, prescribed at the Treaty of Versailles.It is noteworthy that one of the direct consequences of the war was the Bolshevik Revolution, carried out in Russia in October 1917. The Russian revolutionaries, led by Lenin, took advantage of the weakening that the Empire of Tsar Nicholas II suffered during the First War to undertake revolutionary action.
English soldiers entrenched during World War I
the interwar period
The 1920s and 1930s were marked by attempts to restructure European countries affected by the devastation of war. The most affected of them, the Germany, saw his empire dismantled and the republican regime known as Weimar Republicbe installed.
The political and economic situation of the Germans was so chaotic in this period that many radical political movements gained popular support, such as the Spartacist movement – communist faction of Germany –, which attempted a revolutionary coup in 1919, and the national socialist movement of german workers, who founded the National Socialist German Workers Party, which would become known asNazi Party. adolf hitlerjoined that party in 1921, giving it a new format.
At the same time, Italy, in the early 1920s, saw the seizure of power by the fascists, led by Benito Mussolini.Russia, which had suffered the Bolshevik revolutionary action, incorporated into its domain other Slavic nations, creating the Soviet Union.with the death of Lenin,the first Soviet leader, in 1924, Stalin he became the commander of the Soviet empire. This entire scenario is known in History as the “Interwar period", since it was the totalitarianismdeveloped by the states described above that set the stage for the Second World War.
If the wars between Japan and Russia and in the Balkans introduced the First World War, a Second Sino-Japanese War(started in 1937 and only completed in 1945) and the Spanish Civil War(1936-1939) were the preface to the Second. The second conflict between China and Japan ended up being incorporated, in 1939, into the Second European War, when the Japanese allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Francisco Franco, Spanish general, in turn, commanded the nationalist revolution with a fascist bias in Spain, having received strong help from the Nazis. when the Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the war scenario was already set.
Unleashing of World War II
The Second World War, as some historians postulate, was, in a way, a continuation of the First World War., given that some of the motives were similar, such as the desire for imperialist expansion of Germany, which, under Hitler's rule, declared itself as theIII Reich(third empire). However, the devastation and slaughter of that war were unparalleled, not counting the atrocities that were committed outside the combat zone, such as the burnt offeringNazi and the gulagsSoviets, since both Nazis and Communists want to carry out the construction of a global empire, as the historian says. Timothy Snider, in your book Lands of Blood – Europe between Hitler and Stalin:
“Stalin, no less than Hitler, spoke of eliminations and cleanups. Even so, the Stalinist reasoning for elimination was always related to the defense of the Soviet state or the advance of socialism. In Stalinism, mass extermination would never be more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in the history of progress towards socialism; never political victory itself. Stalinism was a project of self-colonization, expanding when circumstances permitted. Nazi colonization, by contrast, depended entirely on the immediate and absolute conquest of a vast new empire in the East, which would have impeded the development of prewar Germany. He understood the destruction of tens of millions of civilians as a prerequisite for their impoverishment. In practice, the Germans generally killed people who were Soviet citizens.”[1]
The Soviet Union, which since 1939 had signed a non-aggression pactwith the Nazis, it broke with them in 1941, becoming the enemy of the “axis” on the Eastern Front. In the following years, the Western Allies articulated with the USSR in order to fight the common enemy. The entry of the United States into the war, which also took place in 1941, due to theJapanese attack on Pearl Harbor naval base, caused the war to accelerate and that it had two big poles: O continental (European) and the Pacific (battles fought in the Pacific Ocean, especially on the Japanese islands). From this event on, there was the beginning of the formation of an alliance between England, the United States and other countries associated with them against the so-called “Axis Powers” (Germany, Italy and Japan).
From "D" day to atomic bombs
The articulation of the allies had its peak in the call Day D, that is, a gigantic military operation carried out on June 6, 1944 which consisted of a project to liberate Europe from the French coast. The objective of this operation was to liberate France, Holland, Belgium and the other countries of Western Europe occupied by the Nazis and reach Germany.
On the eastern side, the Soviets also made a process of advancing into Nazi space until they reached Germany. Gradually, the German forces were dwindling and, in April 1945, the suicide of adolf hitler. In August of that same year, the war ended on European soil, but continued in the Pacific against Japan. It was in this country that both were releasedatomic bombs, in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on August 6th and 9th, respectively, by a bomber of the United States, causing the instant death of tens of thousands of people. After this nuclear catastrophe, the war finally came to an end with Japan's surrender on September 2, 1945.
Cold War
With the end of World War II, divergences between the winning powers began to appear due to different worldviews and different political projects. In the Western world, the model of the market economy and the democratic system of law prevailed. In Eastern Europe and much of Asia, the planned state economy, governed by the communist system, prevailed.
There was, therefore, gradually, a geopolitical delineation between a zone of influence headed by the United States, which encompassed the Western Europe, the American continent and Oceania, and a zone of Soviet influence, which took over Eastern Europe and almost all of it. to Asia. In the early 1950s, these divergences became explicit and fearful with the explosion of Korean War– in which there was a nucleus supported by the Soviets (the North Korean) and another supported by the Westerners (the South side of Korea). This atmosphere of rivalry between superpowers became known as WarCold, which lasted until the late 1980s.
Conflicts in Asia and the Middle East
In addition to the Korean War, other wars that broke out in Asia, such as the Vietnam War, had their sources in these ideological differences between Westerners and Soviets. In addition to these sectoral conflicts with political-ideological motivations, others were also prominent in the early years of the Cold War. It was the case of the ConflictsArab-Israelis, who were politically-religious.
These conflicts started after the recognition of the State of Israel, for the UN, in 1948. Muslim-oriented countries, such as Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, did not recognize the legitimacy of the State of Israel's existence and went to war against that country. Many other conflicts occurred during the Cold War period in the Middle East region involving the Israeli state, such as the so-called Yom Kippur War, which took place in October 1973. Many others occurred among Muslims themselves, such as the Iran-Iraq War.
B-52 plane dropping bombs during the Vietnam War
At the African continent, in this same Cold War period, there was the wars for decolonization. Many countries that were still colonies of European powers began to claim their independence, such as Algeria, which was a colony of France. In the Western world, however, conflicts did not have the intensity experienced in the regions described above, but consisted, roughly, andm coups d'etat, especially in Latin America.
Those coups d'etat, contrary to what many think, were less coordinated by “US imperialism” than undertaken by highly nationalist and anti-communist civil-military institutions. The justifications for these coups (such as the one that took place in Brazil in 1964) had, in short, the argument of curbing the possible communist revolutions that could start, stimulated and fomented by the Cubans (who had made their revolution in 1959) and by the Soviets. These revolutionary attempts were coordinated by foci of guerrilla urban and rural armed forces. THE Araguaia Guerrillait was an example of rural guerrilla warfare.
Space race and arms race
In spite of the whole range of regional conflicts described above, the Cold War was also characterized by other forms of “war” besides the conventional one. The rivalry extended to other domains, such as the war for information, counterinformation and espionage, carried out by the US and Soviet secret agencies, CIAand KGB, respectively; the "arms race", in which the two superpowers sought to develop the best weapons technologies and the best weapons, including nuclear weapons; and, finally, the "space race", which consisted of the fierce search for the development of technology aerospace, such as artificial satellites and spacecraft, aiming to conquer space outside the atmosphere terrestrial. The period of greatest tension of the Cold War occurred in October 1962, when there was the so-called “Missile Crisis”, as a result of the discovery of a base for Soviet nuclear warhead installations in Cuba.
Situation at the end of the century
With the breakup of the USSR, in 1991, the Cold War was definitely over. However, as a result of this end, new sectoral conflicts broke out in the 1990s, such as the wars in the Balkan region - the Yugoslav Civil War, for example – and in the Caucasus region, whose most significant example was the conflict between Russians and Chechens at First Chechnya War. It is also worth noting that it was in the last decade of the 20th century that the Gulf Waragainst the Iraqi presence (led by dictator Saddan Hussein) in Kuwait. This war marked the attempt to establish US hegemony in the Middle East.
GRADES
[1] SNIDER, Timothy. Lands of Blood – Europe between Hitler and Stalin. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2012. P. 468.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
