Decolonization and the beginnings of the Cold War

After World War II the world divided into two tight blocs, one dominated by the United States and one by the Soviet Union, with a fragile nonaligned movement (mostly of newly independent countries) lying precariously in between. The Cold War took place under the threat of nuclear catastrophe and gave rise to two major alliances—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, led by the United States, and the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union—along with a conventional and nuclear arms race, endless disarmament negotiations, much conference diplomacy, many summits, and periodic crisis management, a form of negotiation aimed at living with a problem, not solving it. As a result, a premium was placed on the diplomatic art of continuing to talk until a crisis ceased to boil.

World War I had produced a few new states as eastern European empires crumbled. World War II sounded the death knell for global empires. The immediate postwar period saw the reemergence into full independence of several great civilizations that the age of imperialism had placed under generations of European tutelage. These reborn countries had taken to heart the doctrines of European diplomacy. With the zeal of new converts, they were, in many ways, more insistent on the concepts of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and noninterference in internal affairs than their former colonial masters now were.

After a long struggle for independence, Indians formed two proudly assertive but mutually antagonistic states, India and Pakistan. China's century-long humiliation at the hands of the West exploded in a series of violent revolutions seeking to restore the country to wealth, power, and a place of dignity internationally. In 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed that, with the founding of his People's Republic of China, the Chinese people had once again “stood up”; but, with U.S. support, Mao's defeated rival in the Chinese civil war, Chiang Kai-shek, continued for two decades to speak for China in the United Nations (UN). The question of China's international representation became one of the great diplomatic issues of the 1950s and '60s. The states and principalities of the Arab world resumed their independence and then insisted, over the objections of their former colonial masters, on exercising full sovereignty throughout their own territories, as Egypt did with respect to the Suez Canal. Anti-imperialist sentiment soon made colonialism globally unacceptable. By the late 1950s and '60s, new states, mainly in Africa, were being established on an almost monthly basis.

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