Contemporary history
Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from about 1945 to the present. In the social sciences, contemporary history is also continuous with, and related to, the rise of postmodernity.
Contemporary history is politically dominated by the Cold War between the Western Bloc, led by the United States, and the Eastern Bloc, led by the Soviet Union. The confrontation spurred fears of a nuclear war. An all-out "hot" war was avoided, but both sides intervened in the internal politics of smaller nations in their bid for global influence and via proxy wars. The Cold War ultimately ended with the Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The latter stages and aftermath of the Cold War enabled the democratization of much of Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Decolonization was another important trend in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa as new states gained independence from European colonial empires during the period from 1945-1975. The Middle East also saw a conflict involving the new state of Israel, the rise of petroleum politics, the continuing prominence but later decline of Arab nationalism, and the growth of Islamism. The first supranational organizations of government, such as the United Nations and European Union, emerged during the period after 1945.
Countercultures rose and the sexual revolution transformed social relations in western countries between the 1960s and 1980s, as seen in the protests of 1968. Living standards rose sharply across the developed world because of the post-war economic boom. Japan and West Germany both emerged as exceptionally strong economies. The culture of the United States spread widely, with American television and movies spreading across the world. Some Western countries began a slow process of deindustrializing in the 1970s; globalization led to the emergence of new financial and industrial centers in Asia. The Japanese economic miracle was later followed by the Four Asian Tigers of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. China launched major economic reforms termed the reform and opening up from 1978 onward, becoming a major exporter of consumer goods around the world.
Science made new advances after 1945, which included spaceflight, nuclear technology, lasers, semiconductors, molecular biology, genetics, particle physics, and the Standard Model of quantum field theory. The first commercial computers were created, followed by the Internet, beginning the Information Age.
Political history
1945–1991
In 1945 the Allies of World War II had defeated all significant opposition to them. They established the United Nations to govern international relations and disputes. A looming question was how to handle the defeated Axis nations and the shattered nations that the Axis had conquered. Following the Yalta Conference, territory was divided into zones for which Allied country would have responsibility and manage rebuilding. While these zones were theoretically temporary, growing tensions between the Western Bloc, led by the United States, with the Eastern Bloc, led by the Soviet Union, meant that many calcified into place. Countries in Soviet zones of Eastern Europe had communist regimes installed as satellite states. The Berlin Blockade of 1948 led to a Western Airlift to preserve West Berlin and signified a cooling of East-West relations. Germany split into two countries in 1949, liberal-democratic West Germany and communist East Germany. The conflict as a whole would become known as the Cold War. The Western Bloc formed NATO in 1949 while the Eastern Bloc formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Direct combat between the new Great Powers was generally avoided, although proxy wars fought in other countries by factions equipped by one side against the other side's faction occurred. An arms race to develop and build nuclear weapons happened as policymakers wanted to ensure their side had more if it came to a war.In East Asia Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China was overthrown in the Chinese Communist Revolution from 1945-1949. His government retreated to Taiwan, but both the nationalist KMT government and the new communist mainland government under Mao Zedong continued to claim authority over all of China. Korea was divided similarly to Germany, with the Soviet Union occupying the North and the United States occupying the South. Unlike Germany, the conflict there turned hot, as the Korean War erupted from 1950-1953. Korea was not reunified under either government, however, due to strong support from both the US and China for their favored side; it became a frozen conflict instead. Japan was given a new constitution foreswearing aggressive war in 1947, and the American occupation ended in 1952, although a treaty of mutual aid with the US was soon signed. The US also granted the Philippines their independence in 1946 while keeping close relations.
The Middle East became a hotbed of instability. The new Jewish state of Israel declared its independence, recognized by both the United States and the Soviet Union, after which followed the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Egypt's weak and ineffective king Farouk was overthrown in the 1952 Egyptian revolution, and replaced by General Nasser; the 1953 Iran coup saw the American-friendly shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi remove the democratic constraints on his government and take power directly; and Iraq's Western-friendly monarchy was overthrown in 1958. Nasser's Egypt would go on to face the Suez Crisis in 1956, briefly unify with Syria as the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961, and expensively intervene in the North Yemen civil war from 1962 to 1970.
Decolonization was the most important development across Southeast Asia and Africa from 1946-1975, as the old British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese colonial empires were dismantled. Many new states were given their independence, but soon found themselves having to choose between allying with the Western Bloc, Eastern Bloc, or attempting to stay neutral as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement. British India was granted independence in 1947 without an outright war of independence being required. It was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan ; Indo-Pakistani wars were fought in 1947, 1965, and 1971. Sukarno took control of an independent Indonesia in 1950, as attempts to reinstate Dutch rule in 1945-1949 had largely failed, and took an independent-to-Eastern leaning stance. He would later be overthrown by Suharto in 1968, who took a pro-Western stance. The Federation of Malaya was granted independence in 1957, with the concurrent fighting of the Malayan Emergency against communist forces from 1948-1960. The French unsuccessfully fought the First Indochina War in an attempt to hold on to French Indochina; at the 1954 Geneva Conference, the new states of Cambodia, Laos, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the eventual Republic of Vietnam were created. The division of Indochina eventually led to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s, which ended in communist North Vietnam unifying the country in 1975.
In Africa, France fought the grinding Algerian War from 1954-1962 that saw the end of French Algeria and the rise of a new independent Algeria. The British and French both slowly released their vast holdings, leading to the creation of states such as First Nigerian Republic in 1963. Portugal, on the other hand, fiercely held onto their Empire, leading to the Portuguese Colonial War from 1961-1974 in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique until the Estado Novo government fell. Meanwhile, apartheid-era South Africa remained fiercely anti-communist, but withdrew from the British Commonwealth in 1961, and supported various pro-colonial factions across Africa that had lost support from their "home" governments in Europe. Many of the newly independent African governments struggled with the balance between being too weak and overthrown by ambitious coup-plotters, and too strong and becoming dictatorships.
Latin America saw gradual economic growth but also instability in many countries, as the threat of coups and military regimes were a major threat. The most famous was the Cuban Revolution that overthrew Fulgencio Batista's American-friendly government for Fidel Castro's Soviet-aligned government. This led to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963, generally considered one of the incidents most dangerously close to turning the Cold War into a direct military conflict. The 1968 Peruvian coup d'état and also installed a Soviet-friendly government. Despite this, the region ultimately leaned toward the US in this period, with the CIA supporting American-friendly factions in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état, the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, and others. Nicaragua suffered the most, with the Nicaraguan Revolution seeing major military aid from both great powers to their favored factions that extended a civil war in the country for decades. Mexico escaped this unrest, although functioned largely as a one-party state dominated by the PRI. Argentina had a succession of idiosyncratic governments that courted both the US and USSR, but generally mismanaged the economy.
The Middle East saw events that presaged later conflicts in the 70s and 80s. A few years after the end of the UAR's union between Egypt and Syria, Syria's government was overthrown in the 1966 Syrian coup d'état and replaced with the Neo-Baathist Party, eventually leading to the leadership of the Al-Assad family. Israel and its neighbors fought the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Under Anwar Sadat and later Hosni Mubarak, Egypt switched from Nasserism to favoring the Western Bloc, and signed a peace treaty with Israel. Lebanon, once among the most prosperous countries in the region and a cultural center, collapsed into the decade-long Lebanese Civil War from 1975-1990. Iran's unpopular pro-American government was overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and was replaced by a new Islamic Republic headed by Ruhollah Khomeini. Iran and Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussein then fought each other in the Iran–Iraq War from 1980-1988, which ended inconclusively.
In East Asia, China underwent the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, a major internal struggle that saw an intense program of Maoism and persecution of perceived internal enemies. China's relations with the Soviets deteriorated in the 1960s and 70s, resulting in the Sino-Soviet split, although the two were able to cooperate on some matters. "Ping-pong diplomacy" led to a rapprochement between the US and China and American recognition of the Chinese communist government in the 1970s. China's pro-democracy movement was suppressed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and China's government survived the tensions that would roil the Soviet-aligned bloc during the 1980s. South Korea and Taiwan would take major steps toward liberalization in 1987-1988, shifting from Western-aligned one-party states to more fully participatory democracies.
The 1980s saw a general retreat for the communist bloc. The Soviet–Afghan War is often called the "Soviet Union's Vietnam War" in comparison to the American defeat, being an expensive and ultimately unsuccessful war and occupation. More importantly, the intervening decades had seen that Eastern Europe was unable to compete economically with Western Europe, which undermined the promise of communist abundance compared to capitalist poverty. The Western capitalist economies had proven wealthier and stronger, which made matching the Soviet defense budget to the American one strain limited resources. The Pan-European Picnic in 1989 then set in motion a peaceful chain reaction with the subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall. The Revolutions of 1989 saw many countries of Eastern Europe throw off their communist governments, and the USSR declined to invade to re-establish them. East and West Germany were reunified. Client state status for many states ended, as there was no conflict left to fund. The Malta Summit on 3 December 1989, the failure of the August Coup by Soviet hardliners, and the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991 sealed the end of the Cold War.