Quick questions on The postwar world order: QCE Modern History Unit 2 Year 11

The Second World War ended with two decisions that defined the coming era. First, the victorious powers created the United Nations in June 1945, a collective-security institution designed to stop another world war through the Security Council and international law. Its weakness was built in from the start: the five permanent members (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China) each held a veto, which meant the UN could be paralysed whenever the superpowers disagreed. Second, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 opened the nuclear age, giving the rivalry that followed the capacity for total destruction.

For four decades the order was bipolar: two superpowers, each leading an alliance bloc, competing across every continent without fighting each other directly. The rivalry was exported into proxy conflicts: the Korean War (1950-53), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) which brought the world closest to nuclear war, and the Vietnam War, in which the United States was directly involved from 1965 to 1973. Periods of confrontation alternated with periods of detente (1969-79), which produced the SALT arms-control treaties and the Helsinki Accords. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 ended detente, and the early 1980s saw renewed tension before the reforming leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev opened arms-reduction talks with Ronald Reagan from 1985.

The bipolar order collapsed with remarkable speed. The revolutions of 1989 swept communist governments from power across Eastern Europe, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Germany reunified in 1990, and the Soviet Union itself dissolved on 25 December 1991. The defining structure of the postwar world, the contest between two superpowers, simply ended.

The collapse of the USSR left the United States as the sole superpower. This unipolar moment saw the rapid spread of US-led globalisation through new institutions and agreements such as NAFTA (1994) and the World Trade Organization (1995), and the expansion of the European Union. Yet the decade also exposed the limits of a single power: the Gulf War (1990-91) showed US military dominance, but the Rwandan genocide (1994) and the Yugoslav wars (1991-2001) showed that no power could or would police every conflict.

The September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States reoriented the order around terrorism and security. The US-led invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) committed Western powers to long, costly wars, while the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08 damaged confidence in the Western economic model and accelerated the relative rise of China.

Running underneath these phases was decolonisation, the dismantling of the European empires. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, Ghana in 1957, and 1960 was the Year of Africa, when seventeen colonies gained independence. By the mid-1960s most of Africa was independent. Many new states sought non-alignment, refusing to join either Cold War bloc, which reshaped the order by adding dozens of new actors to world affairs.