Lesson 6: The 20th Century & Globalization (1914–today)

The 20th century compressed more world-changing events into a hundred years than any previous century: two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, the end of European empires, the splitting of the atom, and the wiring of the planet. The historian Eric Hobsbawm called 1914–1991 the "short twentieth century" — an age of extremes bounded by the First World War and the Soviet collapse. This lesson maps the whole terrain; Lessons 8, 9, 10, and 18 then explore its parts in depth.

War, revolution, and a poisoned peace (1914–1939)

World War I (1914–1918), ignited by nationalism, alliance systems, militarism, and imperial rivalry, killed roughly 16–20 million people and shattered four empires (German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian). The Russian Revolution (1917) replaced one of them with the world's first communist state, the Soviet Union. The Treaty of Versailles (1919) punished Germany and redrew maps, but satisfied almost nobody. The Great Depression (from 1929) spread from the United States through the world economy, mass unemployment discrediting democracies; in Germany it helped carry Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to power (1933). The road ran to World War II (1939–1945) — over 60 million dead, the Holocaust (the Nazi murder of six million Jews, alongside Roma, people with disabilities, and millions of others), and a war ended in Europe by Soviet and Western Allied armies and in Asia after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Cold War and decolonization (1945–1991)

Victory produced a new order: the United Nations (1945), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and a Cold War between the US-led West and the Soviet-led East — fought with alliances, arms races, espionage, and proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan rather than direct superpower battle. At the same time, decolonization dismantled the European empires: India and Pakistan in 1947, Ghana in 1957, most of Africa by the mid-1960s, and finally the Portuguese colonies in 1975. New nations often inherited arbitrary borders, export-dependent economies, and Cold War patrons who propped up dictators.

The Cold War ended with startling speed: the fall of the Berlin Wall (November 1989), German reunification (1990), and the dissolution of the USSR (December 1991). The United States stood as the sole superpower.

Globalization and shared dangers (1991–today)

Since 1991, globalization — the integration of markets, technology, and culture — has accelerated through container shipping, the internet, and global supply chains (Lesson 10). Europe integrated through the European Union; China and India emerged as economic giants, lifting hundreds of millions from poverty. But integration also transmits shocks — the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic — and generates backlash: nationalist movements questioning open borders and global rules. Humanity now shares problems no state can solve alone: climate change, pandemics, and the governance of powerful new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Working with a source: a universal promise

Source A — Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1, adopted by the UN General Assembly, 10 December 1948:

"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

Content: the claim is universal — no exceptions by nation, race, religion, or sex. Provenance: drafted by an international committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt in the shadow of the Holocaust and adopted 48 votes to none (with 8 abstentions). It was a deliberate founding promise for the postwar order. Corroboration and context: in 1948 most of Africa and Asia still lived under colonial rule, women in many countries could not vote, and segregation was law in the American South. The Declaration was not a description of 1948; it was a standard against which 1948 — and every year since — could be judged. Anti-colonial movements noticed, and quoted it back at the empires.

Global connections

The century's deepest pattern is diffusion: ideas born in one place — nationalism, communism, liberal democracy, human rights, feminism — were adopted, adapted, and turned to local purposes everywhere. The 20th century was provincial in its violence and universal in its vocabulary.

Common mistakes

• Dating the century's wars from Europe only. For Asia, the Second World War began in 1937 (or 1931 in Manchuria); many historians treat 1914–1945 as one crisis with a truce.
• Reducing the Cold War to two capitals. Its deadliest battles were fought by and in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, and Afghanistan (Lessons 9 and 18).
• Assuming outcomes were inevitable. Versailles did not make Hitler unavoidable; choices by governments and voters filled the space between 1919 and 1939.
• Treating 1991 as "the end of history." The phrase was a famous 1989 argument, not a fact — Lesson 19 shows what happened next.

Going deeper: 1945, the hinge year

Stand in 1945 and look both ways. In a single year the war ended, the United Nations was founded in San Francisco, atomic weapons were used, and the Bretton Woods institutions agreed the previous year — the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank — began building a managed world economy meant to prevent another Depression. At Nuremberg, Nazi leaders were put on trial for "crimes against humanity," a legal category invented for the occasion that would grow into modern human-rights law, codified in the Universal Declaration of 1948 (Source A). Yet 1945 was also a hinge that swung unevenly: colonial empires emerged formally intact, their Asian and African subjects expected the Atlantic Charter's promises to apply to them, and within two years India was independent and partitioned. The postwar order was therefore born arguing with itself — universal rights and continuing empire, superpower rivalry and new international law — and much of the century after 1945 is that argument working itself out.

Going deeper: arguing about periodization

"When did the 20th century begin and end?" is not pedantry; the answer encodes an argument. Hobsbawm's "short century" (1914–1991) makes the era the age of world war and ideological struggle, bookended by Sarajevo and the Soviet flag coming down. A "long century" from the 1870s to today stresses globalization's first wave and its unfinished business. Asian historians might center 1911 (China's revolution), 1937, or 1949; African historians, 1885 (Berlin) or 1960 (the Year of Africa). Whenever a textbook draws a boundary, ask what the boundary makes visible — and what it hides.

One more angle: counting the new world of nations

The century's transformation can be counted. The United Nations began in 1945 with 51 member states; by 1960 there were 99, and by the mid-1970s more than 140 — the increase is almost entirely decolonization, the paperwork of Lesson 9 rendered as arithmetic. Behind the numbers sit structural facts no single speech captures: the new states were born into a world economy whose rules (trade terms, currencies, shipping, and later the internet's protocols) were written elsewhere, which is why the 1960s–1970s saw them organize — through the Non-Aligned Movement and UN majorities — to demand a New International Economic Order with fairer prices and more say. They mostly failed, a result as instructive as their independence victories: formal sovereignty and effective power are different currencies, and the century's second half is partly the story of new nations discovering the exchange rate.

Exam Experience

Source B — Winston Churchill, speech at Fulton, Missouri, United States, 5 March 1946:

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe... all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow."

(a) What can be inferred from Source B about Western attitudes in 1946? Give two inferences, each supported by a detail. [4]

Model answer. First, suspicion of the Soviet Union had hardened into geography: Churchill divides Europe with a single line from "Stettin" to "Trieste," treating the continent as already split into camps barely a year after the alliance won the war. Second, he is warning, not merely reporting: the speech stresses Moscow's "increasing measure of control" to persuade an American audience — with President Truman present — that wartime cooperation had ended and vigilance must replace it.

(b) How useful is Source B for a historian studying the origins of the Cold War? [8]

Model answer. The speech is prime evidence of the Western case stated in public: a former prime minister, speaking in the American president's home state with Truman on the platform, in effect announced the Cold War to the world. Historians use it to date and dramatize the rupture. Its limits are equally instructive. A speech is advocacy, not a transcript of policy: Churchill held no office in 1946, and both governments were still negotiating over Germany, Iran, and Turkey even as he spoke. It also says nothing of Soviet motives — security after invasion, as Moscow framed them. Corroborated with diplomatic documents and with Stalin's hostile public reply (he compared Churchill to Hitler), the speech shows the Cold War being declared into existence by rhetoric as well as by events.

Marking notes

• Level 1 (1–2): paraphrase or general comment on bias.
• Level 2 (3–5): analyzes speaker, audience, and timing; distinguishes rhetoric from policy.
• Level 3 (6–8): weighs the speech as cause as well as evidence, and corroborates with the Soviet response or diplomatic record.

Structured essay. "To what extent was the 20th century an age of ideology?" [20]

Model opening paragraph. To a large extent — but not completely. Communism, fascism, and liberal democracy organized the century's alliances, wars, and states: 1917, 1933, and 1949 are unintelligible without them, and the Cold War was a contest of systems as much as of armies. Yet ideology shared the stage with older forces it claimed to replace — nationalism older than any ism, decolonization driven by nationhood more than doctrine, and religion, supposedly buried, returning as a political force by 1979. The century was an age of ideology, but ideology usually traveled in national dress.

Marking notes

• Level 1: narrates events under a simple yes.
• Level 2: deploys ideological and non-ideological explanations with specifics across at least two periods.
• Level 3: tests the proposition against hard cases (decolonization, 1979, nationalism's persistence) and issues a measured judgment about extent.