The following annotated chapter outline will help you review the major topics covered in this chapter.
Instructions: Review the outline to recall events and their relationships as presented in the chapter. Return to skim any sections that seem unfamiliar.
I. Opening Vignette | |||||||
A. The last veterans of World War I are dying. | |||||||
1. disappointment that it wasn’t the “war to end all wars” | |||||||
2. but now the major European states have ended centuries of hostility | |||||||
B. The “Great War” (World War I) of 1914–1918 launched a new phase of world history. | |||||||
1. it was “a European civil war with a global reach” | |||||||
2. between 1914 and the end of WWII, Western Europe largely self-destructed | |||||||
3. but Europe recovered surprisingly well between 1950 and 2000 | |||||||
a. but without its overseas empires | |||||||
b. and without its position as the core of Western civilization | |||||||
II. The First World War: European Civilization in Crisis, 1914–1918 | |||||||
A. By 1900, Europeans, or people of European ancestry, controlled most other peoples of the world. | |||||||
B. An Accident Waiting to Happen | |||||||
1. modernization and Europe ’s rise to global ascendancy had sharpened traditional rivalries between European states | |||||||
2. both Italy and Germany unified ca. 1870 | |||||||
a. Germany ’s unification in the context of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) had embittered French-German relations | |||||||
b. rise of a powerful new Germany was a disruptive new element | |||||||
3. by around 1900, the balance of power in Europe was shaped by two rival alliances | |||||||
a. Triple Alliance ( Germany , Austria , Italy ) | |||||||
b. Triple Entente ( Russia , France, Britain ) | |||||||
c. these alliances turned a minor incident into World War I | |||||||
4. June 28, 1914: a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne | |||||||
a. Austria was determined to crush the nationalism movement | |||||||
b. Serbia had Russia (and Russia ’s allies) behind it | |||||||
c. general war broke out by August 1914 | |||||||
5. factors that contributed to the outbreak and character of the war: | |||||||
a. popular nationalism | |||||||
b. industrialized militarism | |||||||
c. Europe ’s colonial empires | |||||||
C. Legacies of the Great War | |||||||
1. most had expected WWI to be a quick war | |||||||
a. Germany was finally defeated in November 1918 | |||||||
2. became a war of attrition (“trench warfare”) | |||||||
3. became “total war”—each country’s whole population was mobilized | |||||||
a. enormous expansion of government authority | |||||||
b. massive propaganda campaigns to arouse citizens | |||||||
c. women replaced men in factories | |||||||
d. labor unions accepted sacrifices | |||||||
4. the war left widespread disillusionment among intellectuals in its wake | |||||||
a. led to questioning of Enlightenment values | |||||||
b. led to questioning of the superiority of the West and its science | |||||||
5. rearrangement of the map of Central Europe | |||||||
a. creation of independent Poland , Czechoslovakia , Yugoslavia | |||||||
b. created new problems of ethnic minorities | |||||||
c. triggered the Russian Bolshevik revolution (1917) | |||||||
6. the Treaty of Versailles (1919) made the conditions that caused World War II | |||||||
a. Germany lost its colonial empire and 15 percent of its European territory | |||||||
b. Germany was required to pay heavy reparations | |||||||
c. Germany suffered restriction of its military forces | |||||||
d. Germany had to accept sole responsibility for the outbreak of the war | |||||||
e. Germans resented the treaty immensely | |||||||
7. dissolution of the Ottoman Empire | |||||||
a. the Armenian genocide | |||||||
b. creation of new Arab states | |||||||
c. British promises to both Arabs and Jews created a new problem in Palestine | |||||||
8. in Asia and Africa , many gained military skills and political awareness | |||||||
a. Britain promised to start the process of creating self-government in India in return for war help | |||||||
b. Japan was strengthened by the war | |||||||
c. Japan ’s assumption of German privileges and territory in China inspired some Chinese to adopt Soviet-style communism | |||||||
9. the United States appeared as a global power | |||||||
a. U.S. manpower had been important in the defeat of Germany | |||||||
b. the United States became Europe ’s creditor | |||||||
c. many Europeans were fascinated by Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic vision (Fourteen Points, League of Nations ), but it largely failed | |||||||
III. Capitalism Unraveling: The Great Depression | |||||||
A. The war loosened the hold of many traditional values in Europe . | |||||||
1. enormous casualties promoted social mobility | |||||||
2. women increasingly won the right to vote | |||||||
3. flouting of sexual conventions | |||||||
4. rise of a new consumerism | |||||||
B. The Great Depression represented the most influential postwar change. | |||||||
1. suggested that Europe ’s economy was failing | |||||||
2. worries about industrial capitalism | |||||||
a. it had generated individualist materialism | |||||||
b. it had created enormous social inequalities | |||||||
c. its instability caused great anxiety | |||||||
3. the Great Depression hit in 1929 | |||||||
a. contracting stock prices wiped out paper fortunes | |||||||
b. many lost their life’s savings | |||||||
c. world trade dropped 62 percent within a few years; businesses contracted | |||||||
d. unemployment soared; reached 30 percent in Germany and the United States by 1932 | |||||||
C. Causes of the Great Depression: | |||||||
1. the American economy boomed in the 1920s | |||||||
a. by the end of the decade, factories and farms produced more goods than could be sold | |||||||
b. Europe was impoverished by WWI and didn’t purchase many American products | |||||||
c. Europe was recovering and produced more of its own goods | |||||||
2. speculative stock market had driven stock prices up artificially high | |||||||
3. when the stock market crashed, the whole fragile economic network collapsed | |||||||
D. Worldwide empires made the Great Depression a worldwide problem. | |||||||
E. The Depression was a major challenge to governments. | |||||||
1. capitalist governments had thought that the economy would regulate itself | |||||||
2. the Soviet Union ’s economy had grown throughout the 1930s | |||||||
3. | in response, some states turned to “democratic socialism,” with greater regulation of the economy and more equal distribution of wealth | ||||||
4. the New Deal (1933–1942) in the United States | |||||||
a. Franklin Roosevelt’s administration launched a complex series of reforms | |||||||
b. influenced by the British economist John Maynard Keynes | |||||||
c. | Roosevelt ’s public spending programs permanently changed the relationship between government, the private economy, and individual citizens | ||||||
d. didn’t work very well: the U.S. economy only improved with massive government spending because of WWII | |||||||
5. Nazi Germany and Japan coped the best with the Depression | |||||||
IV. Democracy Denied: Comparing Italy , Germany , and Japan | |||||||
A. Democratic political ideals came under attack in the wake of World War I. | |||||||
1. the challenge of communism | |||||||
2. in the 1920s and 1930s, authoritarian, nationalist, anticommunist regimes were a more immediate problem to victors in WWI | |||||||
3. | authoritarian states of Italy , Germany , and Japan allied with each other by 1936–1937, leading to formal military alliance, the Axis Pact, in 1940 | ||||||
B. The Fascist Alternative in Europe | |||||||
1. new political ideology known as fascism became important in much of Europe in period 1919–1945 | |||||||
a. intensely nationalistic | |||||||
b. exalted action over reflection | |||||||
c. looked to charismatic leadership | |||||||
d. against individualism, liberalism, feminism, parliamentary democracy, and communism | |||||||
e. determined to overthrow existing regimes | |||||||
f. conservative/reactionary: celebrated traditional values | |||||||
2. fascism appealed to dissatisfied people in all social classes | |||||||
a. fascist movements grew thanks to the devastation of WWI | |||||||
b. appeared in many Western European lands | |||||||
c. became important in Austria , Hungary , Romania , Spain | |||||||
d. achieved major power in Italy and Germany | |||||||
3. fascism first developed in Italy | |||||||
a. social tensions exacerbated by economic crisis | |||||||
b. Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) put together a private army, the Black Shirts, to use violence as a political tool | |||||||
c. Mussolini’s movement took the ancient Roman fasces as symbol | |||||||
d. once in power, Mussolini built state power | |||||||
C. Hitler and the Nazis | |||||||
1. German fascism was more important than that of Italy | |||||||
2. took shape as the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) | |||||||
3. many similarities to Italian fascism | |||||||
4. grew out of the collapse of the German imperial state after WWI | |||||||
a. a new government, the Weimar Republic , negotiated peace | |||||||
b. traditional elites were disgraced or withdrew from public life | |||||||
c. creation of myth that Germany had not really lost the war but had been betrayed by civilian socialists, communists, and Jews | |||||||
d. 1920s: vigilante groups (the Freikorps) assassinated hundreds of supporters of the Weimar government | |||||||
e. widespread economic suffering: massive inflation in 1923, then the Great Depression | |||||||
f. everyone wanted decisive government action | |||||||
g. the National Socialist (Nazi) Party won growing public support | |||||||
5. the Nazis had only 2.6 percent of the vote in 1928; 37 percent in 1932 | |||||||
6. after becoming chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler outlawed other political parties, arrested opponents, censured the press, and assumed police power | |||||||
a. successfully brought Germany out of the Depression | |||||||
b. by the late 1930s, had majority support | |||||||
c. invoked rural and traditional values | |||||||
7. used Jews as the ultimate scapegoat for the ills of society | |||||||
a. emphasis on a racial revolution | |||||||
b. Jews were increasingly excluded from public life | |||||||
8. celebration of the superiority of the German race | |||||||
a. Hitler as mystical Führer | |||||||
b. rule by intuition and force, not reason | |||||||
9. the rise of Nazism represents a moral collapse within the West | |||||||
a. highly selective use of earlier strands of European culture | |||||||
b. made use of modern science | |||||||
D. Japanese Authoritarianism | |||||||
1. Japan was also a newcomer to “great power” status | |||||||
2. like Germany and Italy , moved to authoritarian government and territorial expansion | |||||||
3. important differences: | |||||||
a. Japan played only a minimal role in WWI | |||||||
b. at Versailles , Japan was an equal participant on the winning side | |||||||
4. 1920s: Japan was apparently moving toward democracy | |||||||
a. expansion of education | |||||||
b. creation of an urban consumer society | |||||||
c. greater individual freedoms, including for women | |||||||
d. lower-class movements worked for greater equality | |||||||
5. elite reaction | |||||||
6. the Great Depression hit Japan hard | |||||||
a. led many to doubt that parliamentary democracy and capitalism could help resolve “national emergency” | |||||||
b. development of Radical Nationalism (the Revolutionary Right) | |||||||
7. shift in Japanese public life in the 1930s | |||||||
a. major government posts went to prominent bureaucrats or military figures, not to party leaders | |||||||
b. the military became more dominant | |||||||
c. free expression was increasingly limited | |||||||
d. the government adopted many themes from the Radical Right | |||||||
e. major public works spending pulled Japan out of Depression rapidly | |||||||
f. increasing government oversight of economic matters | |||||||
8. Japan was less repressive than Germany or Italy | |||||||
V. A Second World War | |||||||
A. World War II was even more global than World War I. | |||||||
1. independent origins in Asia and Europe | |||||||
2. dissatisfied states in both continents wanted to rearrange international relations | |||||||
B. The Road to War in Asia | |||||||
1. Japanese imperial ambitions rose in the 1920s and 1930s | |||||||
2. Japan had acquired influence in Manchuria after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 | |||||||
a. 1931: Japanese military units seized control of Manchuria | |||||||
b. Western criticism led Japan to withdraw from League of Nations | |||||||
c. by 1936, Japan was more closely aligned with Germany and Italy | |||||||
3. 1937: major attack on the Chinese heartland started WWII in Asia | |||||||
4. international opinion was against Japan ; the Japanese felt threatened | |||||||
a. growing belief that Western racism was in the way of Japan being accepted as an equal power | |||||||
b. Japan was heavily dependent on foreign strategic goods, especially from the Unites States | |||||||
c. imperialist powers controlled the resources of Southeast Asia | |||||||
5. 1940–1941: Japan launched conquest of European colonies (Indochina, Malaya , Burma , Indonesia , and the Philippines ) | |||||||
a. presented themselves as liberators of their fellow Asians | |||||||
b. the reality was highly brutal rule by the Japanese | |||||||
c. July 1941: U.S. imposes oil embargo on Japan | |||||||
d. December 1941: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor | |||||||
6. Pearl Harbor joined the Asian and European theaters of war into a single global struggle | |||||||
C. The Road to War in Europe | |||||||
1. Nazis promised to rectify the injustices of Versailles | |||||||
2. at first, Britain , France , and the USSR were unwilling to confront German aggression | |||||||
3. war was perhaps actually desired by the Nazi leadership | |||||||
a. Hitler stressed the need for “living space” in Eastern Europe | |||||||
b. began rearmament in 1935 | |||||||
c. 1938: annexation of Austria and the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia | |||||||
d. 1939: attack on Poland —triggered WWII in Europe | |||||||
4. Germany quickly gained control of most of Europe | |||||||
a. rapid defeat of France | |||||||
b. air war against Britain | |||||||
c. invasion of the USSR | |||||||
5. Germany ’s new tactic of blitzkrieg was initially very successful | |||||||
a. but was stopped by Soviet counterattack in 1942 | |||||||
b. Germans were finally defeated in May 1945 | |||||||
D. World War II: The Outcomes of Global Conflict | |||||||
1. an estimated 60 million people died in WWII | |||||||
a. more than half the casualties were civilians | |||||||
b. the line between civilian and military targets was blurred | |||||||
2. the USSR suffered more than 40 percent of the total number of deaths | |||||||
3. China also suffered massive attacks on civilians | |||||||
a. in many villages, every person and animal was killed | |||||||
b. the Rape of Nanjing (1937–1938): 200,000–300,000 Chinese civilians were killed; countless women were raped | |||||||
4. bombing raids on British, Japanese, and German cities showed the new attitude toward total war | |||||||
5. governments’ mobilization of economies, people, and propaganda reached further than ever before | |||||||
6. the Holocaust: some 6 million Jews were killed in genocide | |||||||
7. WWII left Europe impoverished, its industrial infrastructure in ruins, and millions of people homeless or displaced | |||||||
8. weakened Europe could not hold onto its Asian and African colonies | |||||||
9. WWII consolidated and expanded the communist world | |||||||
a. Soviet victory over Germany gave new credibility to the communist regime | |||||||
b. Soviet authorities played up a virtual cult of WWII | |||||||
c. communist parties took power across Eastern Europe | |||||||
d. communist takeover of China by 1949 | |||||||
10. growing internationalism | |||||||
a. creation of the United Nations (1945) as a means for peaceful conflict resolution | |||||||
b. establishment of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (1945) | |||||||
11. the new dominance of the United States as a global superpower | |||||||
VI. The Recovery of Europe | |||||||
A. Europe recovered in the second half of the twentieth century. | |||||||
1. rebuilt industrial economies and revived democratic systems | |||||||
2. the United States assumed a dominant role within Western civilization and in the world at large | |||||||
B. How Europe recovered: | |||||||
1. industrial societies are very resilient | |||||||
2. the major states of Western Europe integrated their recovering economies | |||||||
3. an extension of European civilization existed: the United States | |||||||
a. the United States was a reservoir of resources for the whole West | |||||||
b. by 1945, the center of gravity of Western civ. was the United States | |||||||
c. the United States was the only major country not physically touched by WWII | |||||||
d. by 1945, the United States accounted for 50 percent of all world production | |||||||
4. the United States took the initiative to rebuild Europe : the Marshall Plan | |||||||
a. magnificently successful | |||||||
b. required the European recipients to cooperate with each other | |||||||
c. 1951: creation of the European Coal and Steel Community | |||||||
d. 1957: creation of the European Economic Community (Common Market) | |||||||
e. 1994: transformation of EEC into the European Union | |||||||
f. U.S. offered political and military security against the Soviet threat | |||||||
C. Japan underwent a parallel recovery process. | |||||||
1. U.S. occupation between 1945 and 1952 | |||||||
2. remarkable economic growth for two decades after WWII | |||||||
3. Japan depended on the United States for security, since it was forbidden to maintain military forces | |||||||
VII. Reflections: War and Remembrance: Learning from History | |||||||
A. Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” | |||||||
1. but most historians are cautious about drawing particular lessons from the past | |||||||
2. history is complex enough to allow different people to learn different lessons | |||||||
B. Historians are skeptical of the notion that “history repeats itself.” | |||||||
C. The wars of the twentieth century led to unexpected consequences. |