The end of the Second World War was, and indeed still is, a prime caesura in the new and recent history of Europe and the world. There are many reasons to recall this turning point, especially as the 80th anniversary of its end approaches in 2025. One of the most pressing reasons is the current fragility of the world order, which took shape during three decades of violent and tragic upheavals – spanning the First and Second World Wars (1914–45) – and is now once again beginning to crumble before our eyes. Seeing this makes us anxiously wonder what the future world order will look like and what will happen before it emerges.
The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945 with the surrender of Germany and the war in the Far East on 2 September 1945 with that of Japan. The significance of the end of the Second World War varies according to which perspective is taken, geographically, but also socially and politically.
From the point of view of ‘ordinary’ Europeans living at the time, the dominant feeling was one of relief. Mass deaths had ended, the Holocaust had ceased, the last concentration camps still in the hands of the SS had been liberated, the bombings had stopped and soldiers no longer died at the front. Although it should be mentioned that the last clashes with German troops still took place on 12 May 1945, and the last German unit capitulated on 4 September 1945 on Spitsbergen. For the liberated in Germany, the surviving prisoners, prisoners of war and forced labourers, a new phase of their lives was beginning. Citizens of the countries of the victorious coalition celebrated the end of the war nightmare and the victory on city streets, rejoicing in the hope of the return of loved ones who had been scattered by the war and an improvement in their living conditions. Though mostly overwhelmed by the sense of defeat and humiliation, the Germans were also relieved by the end of hostilities. Significantly, the behaviour of the Nazi authorities in the final days of the war, combining senseless cruelty with cowardice, meant that hardly anyone felt any regret at the fall of the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’.
However, when one looks at the end of the war from the perspective of politicians of the time, it is clear that the situation in Europe at the end of the war was far from a simple black-and-white scenario. Winston Churchill was tormented at the time by the vision of an isolated Britain, which alone – in the event of an American withdrawal across the Atlantic – would have to face the threat of Stalin’s vast Soviet army, buoyed by its victories, ready to move from the Elbe to conquer Western Europe. It was because of these concerns that Churchill insisted on another summit conference to work out a modus vivendi of the powers in post-war Europe and the world. This took place at Potsdam in late July and early August 1945. Contrary to Churchill’s fears, Stalin was aware of the scale of the Soviet Union’s losses, destruction and exhaustion, so he did not plan a march of communism for the time being. At the same time, the Soviet dictator demanded the establishment of Moscow’s full control over the states that the Soviet army had occupied as a result of the war (and with the acquiescence of the Anglo-American powers expressed at Tehran and Yalta). This led to a brutal crackdown on democratic forces in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Even in Czechoslovakia, whose democratic authorities had been demonstrating loyalty to Moscow for several years, there was a communist putsch. Thus, at the turn of 1947 and 1948, highly repressive Stalinist communist governments were installed in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, as well as in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. This created a compact political-military bloc with the Soviet Union at the head. Only Yugoslavia, under Marshal Josip Tito, broke away from Moscow’s hegemony, but retained its communist system, which over time was considerably liberalised.
In the first months after the end of the war, the United States succumbed to illusions of the possibility of allied cooperation with the Soviet Union. However, the growing difficulties in that regard and the rise in outbreaks of conflict, such as in Greece, Turkey, Iran, occupied Germany and China, led Washington to change its policy towards the Soviets. It was all the easier for the Americans to make this change as they had a sense of their own power, stemming from their possession, as the only country, of nuclear weapons (the so-called American nuclear monopoly lasted until 1949), which were used in the first days of August 1945 destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moreover, as a result of the war, the US gained an incredible economic advantage over any potential competitor, consolidated as early as 1944 with the creation of the so-called Bretton Woods system, in which the US dollar was recognised as the world currency and guarantor of the stability and development of the capitalist economy. Although not intending to start a new war to destroy the power of the Soviets, President Harry Truman decided to put the brakes on the expansion of their influence. This concept, known as the containment doctrine or the Truman Doctrine (1947), contributed to the development of a comprehensive plan to support the post-war economic reconstruction of Western Europe, which was making very slow progress. This was the origin of the European Recovery Program, widely known as the Marshall Plan (1948). A year later, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was established, a defence alliance of the countries of Western Europe, the USA and Canada, which owed its power above all to the American armed forces and their nuclear arsenal. Thus, just three to four years after the end of the Second World War, a second political-military bloc was created and the world political order took on a bipolar form. Although the two blocs were hostile to each other, they had comparable military potentials with nuclear arsenals at their core, resulting in mutual deterrence. Their relations were characterised by permanent tension and repeated attempts to weaken the opposing side, including through wars waged on the periphery of both spheres of influence, while avoiding direct confrontation between the superpowers, which could lead to the use of nuclear weapons with fatal consequences for each side. This state of affairs led to what is known as the ‘Cold War’. It began soon after the final shots of the Second World War had been fired and ended 40 years later with the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the fall of the Soviet Union (1989–91). The United States became the sole superpower for a time, and the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama could hopefully spin a vision of the ‘end of history’ – the reign of liberal democracy throughout the world.
While during the Cold War relations between the blocs described here were generally balanced in terms of military power and deterrence, the paths of their internal development went in different directions. Western states became liberal democracies with market economies, building welfare states and consumer societies. The extinction of conflicts between the constituent states became characteristic for Western Europe, which initiated a process in which interests were in practice harmonised. These trends developed rather quickly into progressive integration, the key stages of which were the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, the establishment of the European Economic Community in 1957, the introduction of the Common Agricultural Policy in 1962, the adoption of the Schengen Agreement in 1985 and finally the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, which brought the European Union into being.
Meanwhile, the development of the countries of the Soviet sphere of influence followed completely different vectors. Indivisible rule was exercised there by communist parties by means of the tight ideological supervision of societies thanks to their almost total control over the circulation of information. Questioning any element of this system of power was met with repression by an extensive and specialised political police apparatus. The economies of these countries were described as planned, or more accurately as command and control. In the absence of free market competition, a ‘deficit society’ developed, in which, for example, having a telephone (a landline, of course) was a rare privilege, and the quality of goods and the level of services, and also labour productivity, left much to be desired. In the 1970s and 1980s, the planned economies of the communist countries, by nature not very receptive to innovation, definitely lost touch with the advanced technologies of the third industrial revolution. They were unable to keep pace with the West even in the hitherto much-honoured field of arms production. Their failure to win this competition became an indirect cause of the collapse of communist rule and of the Soviet Union.
Another consequence of the Second World War was decolonisation, or, as it used to be called, the end of world domination by the white man. In 1947, the British, carrying out their wartime promises, left India and, shortly afterwards, their remaining colonies in Asia (with the exception of Hong Kong). The Japanese, who had pursued their conquests during the war under the slogan ‘Asia for Asians’, rekindled the unstoppable aspirations for independence of the Dutch and French possessions in Asia. At the same time, Arab countries gained real sovereignty and the State of Israel was established in the Middle East. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, almost all African colonies gained independence. The situation in China was peculiar, where in 1949, after eight years of ferocious war with Japan and three years of equally bloody civil war, the Communists took power under Mao Zedong. With them came the eradication of Western influence, and also Moscow’s influence proved relatively short-lived and superficial. However, as a result of the regime’s ideological follies and its adventurous foreign policy, leading to the isolation of the country, China’s enormous potential remained dormant until Mao’s death in 1976. Shortly thereafter, China experienced four decades of rapid economic growth and civilisational progress, with Beijing’s international clout expanding rapidly, thanks to opening up its economy to the world. These results were achieved without depleting Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly of power, using extreme methods to maintain it. Today, in terms of economic and military potential China competes with the United States and, together with Russia and India, and many African and Latin American countries, aspires to co-determine the new world order.
When considering the caesura that marked the end of the Second World War in the spring and summer of 1945, it is important to remember the events that preceded this historic turning point: both the massive struggles of the warring parties and the victims of war and genocide committed by the totalitarian regimes of the time, including the unprecedented crime of the Holocaust. The number of victims of the Second World War is estimated at around 60 million people. It is also worth remembering the short-, medium- and long-term consequences of this calamity, which to a large extent shaped the world in which we have lived up until now, and which is only just becoming a thing of the past and undergoing a fundamental transformation.