The Penguin History of the World

2 The Cold War World

By 1950, a period had begun during which the central characteristics of the world political order seemed increasingly to be frozen and irremovable, whatever might be going on elsewhere. Then, after a quarter of a century or so, came a quickening of the pace of change, reaching its climax in the 1980s. By 1990, landmarks taken for granted for thirty years and more had disappeared (sometimes almost overnight) while others were already called into question. But this happened after a long time during most of which a prolonged and bitter Soviet–American antagonism overshadowed almost every other part of international life, casting a blight over most of the world, and constituting a source of crime, corruption and suffering for thirty years. The Cold War was far from the only force shaping history, and perhaps not the most fundamental in those years, but it was central to them.

Its first serious struggles took place in Europe, where the initial phase of post-war history was brief and may be thought to have ended with the Communist takeover of government in Czechoslovakia. At that moment, the continent’s economic recovery had hardly begun. But there were some grounds for hope about other, older problems. The familiar German threat had gone away; there was now no menace from her once-great power. Instead, her former opponents now had to grapple with the vacuum of power in the centre of Europe. Further east, boundary changes, ethnic cleansing and wartime atrocity had left Poland and Czechoslovakia without the problems of ethnic heterogeneity they had lived with before 1939. Yet in a new way Europe was divided as never before and that fact was embedded in the worldwide Soviet–American hostility whose exact origins have been and can still be much debated.

In one sense, after all, the Cold War was a late and spectacular manifestation of the rupture of ideological and diplomatic history in 1917, even though some seek its origins further back in time, to when the United States and Russia were expanding across their continents in the nineteenth century, forming states that both in size and in messianic content were unlike anything seen in Europe before. But even if that was so, it was Communist Russia that from the start approached international affairs in a new and uniquely troublesome way. For it, diplomacy was not just a convenient way of doing business, but a weapon for the advancement of a revolution. Even that, though, would have mattered much less if history had not produced by 1945 a new world power, the long-awaited modernized Russia, far better placed than any tsarist empire to have its own way in eastern Europe, and to advance its ambitions in other parts of the world.

Soviet diplomacy after Stalin’s accession to power often paralleled Russia’s historic ambitions, and Soviet state interest, shaped by geography and history, was to prove inseparable from the ideological struggle. Communists and those who sympathized with them everywhere believed they must safeguard the Soviet Union, the champion of the international working class and, indeed (true believers affirmed), the guardian of the destinies of the whole human race. However they qualified it in practice, when Bolsheviks had said their aim was to overthrow the non-Communist societies, they meant it, so far as the long run was concerned. After 1945, other Communist states had come into existence whose rulers agreed, at least formally, and thereby helped impose an ideological division on Europe and the world.

But if the Soviet Union was a new kind of state, so was the United States. Its concepts of individual and religious freedoms, property rights, free markets, consumer opportunities and sense of the equity of quality among men were – even though not always practised at home – revolutionary in a European or Asian setting. Most Americans believed that these concepts were universal in their application and that other countries ought to implement them in order to succeed. In spite of the wish to get the soldiers who had been fighting overseas back home, there was also a profound sense in America that the United States had now fought and sacrificed twice in the twentieth century in order to set the world right, and that other countries, which had benefited from American altruism, now had a duty to prevent any recurrence by following American prescriptions for development and progress. In contrast to after the First World War, this time there would be no American turning away from the world, in part because the new president, Harry Truman, had begun to equate Stalin’s Communism with Hitler’s Nazism, as a dangerous, expansionist ideology intended to keep the world away from the blessings of American ideas.

Events in eastern Europe troubled the Americans much. By 1948, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Czechoslovakia had all ceased to have any non-Communists in their governments, while Communists dominated that of Bulgaria. Then, the opening of the Marshall Aid programme was almost at once followed by what was to prove to be the first battle of the Cold War, over the fate of Berlin. It was decisive in that it apparently established a point at which, in Europe, the United States was prepared to fight. It does not seem that this outcome had been anticipated by the Soviets, though they had provoked it by seeking to prevent the emergence of an economically powerful western Germany under American and British control. Their action conflicted with the western powers’ interest – to reanimate the German economy, at the very least in their own occupation zones, and to do this before Germany’s future political shape was settled, in the certainty that it was vital for the recovery of western Europe as a whole.

In 1948, without Soviet agreement, the western powers introduced a currency reform in their own sectors. It had a galvanizing effect, kick-starting the process of economic recovery in western Germany. Following on from Marshall Aid, available (thanks to Soviet decisions) only to the western-occupied zones, this reform more than any other step cut Germany in two. Since the recovery of the eastern half could not be integrated with that of western Europe, a revived western Germany might now emerge by itself. That the western powers should get on with the business of putting their zones on their feet was undoubtedly economic sense, but eastern Germany was thenceforth decisively on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Currency reform divided Berlin, too, and thereby prejudiced Communist chances of staging a popular putsch in the city, isolated though it was within the Soviet occupation zone.

The Soviet response was to disrupt communication between the western occupied zones of Germany and Berlin. Whatever the original motives, the dispute escalated. Some western officials had already had it in mind before this crisis that a severance of western Berlin from the three western zones might be attempted; the word ‘blockade’ had been used and Soviet actions were now interpreted in this sense. The Soviet authorities did not question the rights of the western allies to have access to their own forces in their own sectors of Berlin, but they disrupted the traffic that ensured supply to the Berliners in those sectors. To supply them, the British and Americans organized an airlift to the city. The Soviets wanted to demonstrate to the West Berliners that the western powers could not stay there if they did not want them to; they hoped thus to remove the obstacle that the presence of elected non-Communist municipal authorities presented to Soviet control of Berlin. So, a trial of strength was underway. The western powers, in spite of the enormous cost of maintaining such a flow of food, fuel and medicines to keep West Berlin going, announced they were prepared to keep it up indefinitely. The implication was that they could be stopped only by force. American strategic bombers moved back to their wartime bases in England. Neither side wanted to fight, but all hope of co-operation over Germany on the basis of wartime agreement was dead.

The blockade lasted over a year and defeating it was a remarkable logistical achievement. For much of the time, over 1,000 aircraft a day achieved an average daily delivery of 5,000 tons of coal alone. Yet its real significance was political. Allied supply was not interrupted, and nor were the West Berliners intimidated. The Soviet authorities made the best of defeat by deliberately splitting the city and refusing the mayor access to his office. Meanwhile the western powers had signed a treaty setting up a new alliance, the first Cold War creation to transcend Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came into existence in April 1949, a few weeks before the blockade was ended by agreement. The United States and Canada were members, as well as most western European states (only Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal and Spain did not join). It was explicitly defensive, providing for the mutual defence of any member attacked, and thus yet another break with the now almost-vanished isolationist traditions of American foreign policy. In May, a new German state, the Federal Republic, emerged from the three western zones of occupation and, in the following October, a German Democratic Republic (the GDR) was set up in the east. Henceforth, there were to be two Germanys, it seemed, and the Cold War ran along an Iron Curtain dividing them, and not, as Churchill had suggested in 1946, further east, from Trieste to Stettin. But a particularly dangerous phase in Europe was over.

That as well as two Europes there might also be two worlds divided by Cold War soon seemed likely. In 1945 Korea had been divided along the 38th parallel, its industrial north being occupied by the Soviets and the agricultural south by the Americans. Korean leaders wanted a quick reunification, but only on their own terms, and the Communists taking power in the north did not see eye to eye with the nationalists whom the Americans supported in the south. With reunification on hold, in 1948 the Americans and the Soviets respectively recognized the governments in their zone as having authority for the whole country. Soviet and American forces both withdrew, but North Korean forces invaded the south in June 1950 with Stalin’s foreknowledge and approval. Within two days President Truman had sent American forces to fight them, acting in the name of the United Nations. The Security Council had voted to resist aggression, and as the Soviets were at that moment boycotting the Council, they could not veto United Nations action.

The Americans always provided the bulk of the UN forces in Korea, but other nations soon fielded contingents. Within a few months they were operating well north of the 38th parallel. It seemed likely that North Korea would be overthrown. When fighting drew near the Manchurian border, however, Chinese Communist forces intervened. There was now a danger of a much bigger conflict. China was the second largest Communist state in the world, and the largest in terms of population. Behind it stood the USSR; a man could (in theory, at least) walk from Helsinki to Hong Kong without once leaving Communist territory. The threat emerged of direct conflict, possibly with nuclear weapons, between the United States and China.

Prudently, Truman insisted that the United States must not become involved in a greater war on the Asian mainland. That much settled, further fighting showed that although the Chinese might be able to keep the North Koreans in the field, they could not overturn South Korea against American wishes. Armistice talks were started. The new American administration, which came into office in 1953, was Republican and unequivocally anti-Communist, but knew its predecessor had sufficiently demonstrated its will and capacity to uphold an independent South Korea and felt that the real centre of the Cold War was in Europe rather than in Asia. An armistice was signed in July 1953. Subsequent efforts to turn this into a formal peace have as yet failed; sixty years later, the potential for conflict remained high between the two Koreas. But in East Asia as well as in Europe the Americans had prevented Communist victories in the first battles of the Cold War. In Korea these had been real battles; estimates suggest the war cost 3 million dead, most of them Korean civilians.

The Korean War ended because Stalin had died in early 1953. The Soviet leader had believed that keeping the fighting going in Korea was not a bad deal for the Soviets – it kept the Americans fighting an increasingly unpopular war against the Chinese. The Soviet Union could only benefit from that, Stalin had thought. His successors thought differently. They feared that the war in Korea could lead to an all-out war that the Soviet Union was not prepared to fight, and wanted a reduction of tension with the West. The new American president, Eisenhower, remained distrustful of Soviet intentions, however, and in the middle of the 1950s the Cold War was as intense as ever. Shortly after Stalin’s death his successors had revealed that they too had the improved nuclear weapon known as the hydrogen bomb. This was Stalin’s final memorial, guaranteeing (if it had been in doubt) the USSR’s status in the post-war world.

Stalin had carried to their logical conclusions the repressive policies of Lenin, but he had done much more than his predecessor. He had rebuilt most of the tsarist empire and had given Russia the strength to survive (just, and with the help of powerful allies) its gravest hour of trial. But his miscalculations had also led to the outbreak of the war, and the wasteful and inefficient system he put in place – and the terror he promoted – meant that the Soviets had to pay the highest possible price for their victory. The Soviet Union was a great power but, among the elements that made it up, it can hardly be doubted that one day Russia at least would have become one again without Communism. Yet in 1945 her peoples had been rewarded for their sufferings with precious little but an assurance of international strength. Domestic life after the war was harsher than ever; consumption was for years still held down and both the propaganda to which Soviet citizens were subjected and the brutalities of the police system seem, if anything, to have been intensified after the war.

The division of Europe, another of Stalin’s monuments, was more apparent than ever at his death. The western half was by 1953 substantially rebuilt, thanks to American economic support, and was carrying a larger share of its own defence costs. The Federal Republic and the GDR moved further and further apart. On successive days in March 1954 the Soviets announced that the eastern republic now possessed full sovereignty and the West German president signed the constitutional amendment permitting the rearmament of his country. In 1955 West Germany entered NATO; the Soviet riposte was the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of its satellites. Berlin’s future was still in doubt, but it was clear that the NATO powers would fight to resist changes in its status except by agreement. In the east, the GDR agreed to settle with old enemies: the line of the Oder–Neisse was to be the frontier with Poland. Hitler’s dream of realizing the greater Germany of the nineteenth-century nationalists had ended in the obliteration of Bismarckian Germany. Historic Prussia was now ruled by revolutionary Communists while the new West Germany was federal in structure, non-militarist in sentiment and dominated by Catholic and Social Democratic politicians, whom Bismarck would have seen as ‘enemies of the Reich’. So, without a peace treaty, the problem of containing the German power that had twice devastated Europe by war was settled at last. Also in 1955 came the final definition of land frontiers between the European blocs, when Austria re-emerged as an independent state and the occupying allied forces were withdrawn, as were the last American and British troops from Trieste, with a settlement of the Italian–Yugoslav border dispute there.

After the establishment of Communism in China, a division appearing worldwide was that between what we may call capitalist and command (or would-be command) economies. Commercial relations between the Soviet Union and other countries had been encumbered by politics from the October revolution onwards. In the huge disruption of world trade after 1931 the capitalist economies had plunged into recession and sought salvation in protection (or even autarky). After 1945, though, all earlier divisions of the world economy were transcended; two methods of organizing the distribution of resources increasingly divided first the developed world and then most other areas. The essential determinant of the capitalist system was the market – though a market very different from that envisaged by the old liberal free trade ideology and in many ways a very imperfect one, tolerating both a substantial degree of intervention and of financial oligarchies. In the Communist-controlled group of nations (and quite a few others, such as India and in Scandinavia) political authority was intended to be the decisive economic factor. Trade continued and expanded, even between the two Cold War systems, but on a cramped basis.

Neither system remained unchanged. Contacts between them multiplied as the years passed. None the less, they long appeared to offer the world alternative models for economic growth. Their competition was inflamed by the military strategies of the Cold War and actually helped to spread its antagonisms. Yet, this could not be a static situation. Before long one system was much less completely dominated politically by the United States, and the other somewhat less completely dominated by the Soviet Union than was the case in 1950. Both shared (though in far different degree) in continuing economic growth in the 1950s and the 1960s, but were later to diverge as the market economies moved ahead more rapidly. The distinction between the two economic systems nevertheless remained a fundamental of world history from 1945 to the 1980s, not least because of the choices many new states in Africa and Asia had to make about their economies.

The entry of China to the world of what were called socialist economic systems was at first seen almost purely in Cold War terms, and as a shift in strategic balances. Yet by the time of Stalin’s death there were many other signs that the prophecy made by the South African statesman Jan Smuts more than a quarter of a century before, that ‘the scene had shifted away from Europe to the East and the Pacific’, had been realized. Although Germany continued to be the focus of Cold War strategy, Korea was dramatic evidence that the centre of gravity of world history was moving once again, this time from Europe to the Orient.

The collapse of European power in Asia was bound to be followed by further changes as new Asian states came to be aware of their interests and power (or lack of it). Shapes and unities given them by their former masters often did not long outlast the empires; in 1947 the subcontinent of India turned its back on less than a century of political cohesion, while Malaya and Indochina were already by 1950 beginning to undergo important and not always comfortable changes in their governmental arrangements. Internal strains troubled some new nations; Indonesia’s large Chinese communities had disproportionate weight and economic power and anything that happened in the new China might disturb them. Whatever their political circumstances, moreover, all these countries had fast-growing populations and were economically weak. For many Asians, therefore, the formal end of European domination was less important than the gradual overcoming of poverty (although for some the two are of course connected).

Europe’s control of Asian destinies had for the most part been fitful. Although Europeans had swayed the fate of millions of Asians, and had influenced their lives for centuries, their culture had touched the hearts and minds of few even among the dominant élites. In Asia, European civilization had to contend with deeper-rooted and more powerful traditions than anywhere else in the world. Asian cultures had not been (because they could not be) swept aside like those of pre-Columbian America. As in the Middle Eastern world, both the direct efforts of Europeans and the indirect diffusion of European culture through self-imposed modernization faced formidable obstacles. The deepest layers of thought and behaviour often remained undisturbed even in some who believed themselves most emancipated from their past: horoscopes are still cast in educated Hindu families when children are born and marriages contracted, and Chinese Marxists were to draw on an unassailable sense of moral superiority grounded in age-old Chinese attitudes to the non-Chinese world.

For the purpose of understanding Asia’s recent role in world history, two zones of Asian civilization remain as distinct and significant as they have been for centuries. A western Asian sphere is bounded by the mountain ranges of northern India, the Burmese and Thai highlands and the huge archipelago of which Indonesia is the major component. Its centre is the Indian Ocean and in its history the major cultural influences have been three: Hindu civilization spreading from India to the south-east; Islam (which also spread eastward across it); and the European impact, felt at first through commerce and missionary Christianity, and then for a much shorter era of political domination. The other sphere is East Asian, and it is dominated by China. In large measure this is a function of the simple geographical fact of that country’s huge mass, but the numbers and, sometimes, the migration of its people and, more indirectly and variably, China’s cultural influence on the East Asian periphery – above all, Japan, Korea and Indochina – all form part of the explanation. In this zone, direct European political domination of Asia had never meant as much as it did further west and south, in either extent or duration.

It was easy to lose sight of such important differences, as of much else imposed by history, in the Cold War world after 1945. In both zones there were countries that seemed to follow the same road of angry rejection of the West, using western nationalist and democratic concepts and appealing to world opinion on long-familiar lines. India absorbed within a few years both the princely states, which had survived the British Raj, and the subcontinent’s remaining French and Portuguese enclaves in the name of a truculent nationalism that owed little to domestic tradition. Soon, the Indian security forces were energetically suppressing any threat of separatism or regional autonomy within the new republic.

Perhaps this should not have been surprising. Indian independence was, on the Indian side, the work of a western-educated élite, which had imported ideas of nationhood, equality and liberty from the West even if it had at first only sought equality and partnership with the Raj. A threat to that élite’s position after 1947 could often be most easily (and sincerely) understood as a threat to an Indian nationality that had in fact still to be created.

This was all the more true because the rulers of independent India had inherited many of the aspirations and institutions of the British Raj. Ministerial structures, constitutional conventions, division of powers between central and provincial authorities, the apparatus of public order and security were all taken over, stamped with republican insignia, and continued to operate much as before 1947. The dominant and explicit ideology of government was a moderate and bureaucratic socialism not too far from the then current British mode, and not very far removed in spirit from the public-works-and-enlightened-despotism-by-delegation of the Raj in its last years. The realities that faced India’s rulers included a deep conservative reluctance among local notables who controlled votes to disturb traditional privilege at any level below that of the former princes. Yet profound problems faced India – population growth, economic backwardness, poverty (the average annual per capita income of Indians in 1950 was $55), illiteracy, social, tribal and religious division, and great expectations of what independence ought to bring. It was clear that major change was needed.

The new constitution of 1950 did nothing to change these facts, some of which would not begin to exercise their full weight until at least the second decade of the new India’s existence. Even today, much of life in rural India still goes on virtually as it did in the past, when war, natural disaster and the banditry of the powerful allowed it to do so. This implies gross poverty for some. In 1960, over a third of the rural poor were still living on less than a dollar a week (and at the same time, half the urban population earned less than enough to maintain the accepted minimum daily calorie intake required for health). Economic progress was swallowed by inequity and population growth. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that the rulers of India should have incorporated into the constitution provisions for emergency powers as drastic as any ever enjoyed by a British viceroy, providing as they did for preventative detention and the suspension of individual rights, to say nothing of the suspension of state government and the submission of states to Union control under what was called ‘President’s Rule’.

The weaknesses and uneasiness of a ‘new nation’ made things worse when India quarrelled with its neighbour Pakistan over Kashmir, where a Hindu prince ruled a majority of Muslim subjects. Fighting began there as early as 1947, when the Kashmiri Muslims tried to bring about union with Pakistan; the Maharajah asked for Indian help and joined the Indian republic. To complicate things further, the Muslim spokesmen of Kashmir were themselves divided. India refused to hold the plebiscite recommended by the United Nations Security Council; two-thirds of Kashmir then remained in Indian hands as a running sore in Indo-Pakistan relations. Fighting stopped in 1949, only to break out again in 1965–6 and 1969–70, with conflict gradually more infected by the Cold War. In 1971 there was a new round of fighting between the two states when East Pakistan, a Muslim but Bengali-speaking region, broke away to form a new state, Bangladesh, under Indian patronage (thus showing that Islam alone was not enough to constitute a viable state). It soon faced economic problems even worse than those of India or Pakistan.

In these troubled passages, India’s leaders showed great ambitions (perhaps going at times so far as a wish to reunite the subcontinent) and sometimes blatant disregard of the interests of other peoples (such as the Nagas). The irritation aroused by Indian aspirations was, moreover, further complicated by the Cold War. India’s leader, Nehru, had quickly insisted that India would not take sides. In the 1950s, this meant that India had warmer relations with the USSR and Communist China than with the United States; indeed, Nehru appeared to relish opportunities to criticize American action, which helped to convince some sympathizers of India’s credentials as a progressive, peaceful, ‘non-aligned’ democracy. It came as all the greater a shock, therefore, to them and to the Indian public, to learn in 1959 that Nehru’s government had been quarrelling with the Chinese about the northern borders for the previous three years without saying so. At the end of 1962, large-scale fighting began. Nehru took the improbable step of asking the Americans for military aid and, even more improbably, received it, at the same time as he also took assistance both in military and diplomatic terms from the Soviet Union. His prestige, at its height in the mid-1950s, was seriously diminished.

Logically, the young Pakistan had not courted the same friends as India. In 1947 the country was much weaker than its neighbour, with only a tiny trained civil service (Hindus had joined the old Indian Civil Service in much larger numbers than Muslims), divided geographically in two from the start, and almost at once it had lost its ablest leader, Jinnah. Even under the Raj, Muslim leaders had always (perhaps realistically) shown less confidence in democratic forms than the Congress Party; usually, Pakistan has been ruled by authoritarian soldiers who have sought to ensure military survival against India, economic development (including land reform) and the safeguarding of Islamic ways. But the experiment has not been a success. By the 1970s, well before the wars in Afghanistan started, Pakistan was a country deeply uncertain about its identity as well as its development pattern.

It always helped to distance Pakistan from India that she was formally Muslim while her neighbour was constitutionally secular and non-confessional (at first sight a seemingly ‘western’ stance, but one not hard to reconcile with India’s syncretic cultural tradition). This was to lead Pakistan towards increasing Islamic regulation of its internal affairs. Religious difference, though, was to affect Pakistan’s foreign relations less than the Cold War.

The Cold War brought further confusion to Asian politics when an association of professedly neutralist or ‘non-aligned’ nations emerged after a meeting of representatives of twenty-nine African and Asian states at Bandung in Indonesia in 1955. Most delegations other than China’s were from lands that had been part of the colonial empires. From Europe they were soon to be joined by Yugoslavia, a Communist country seeking a new identity after it broke with the Soviets in 1948. Most of these nations were also poor and needy, and suspicious both of the United States and the USSR, though less in conflict with the latter. They came to be called the ‘Third World’ nations, a term apparently coined by a French journalist in a conscious reminiscence of the legally underprivileged French ‘Third Estate’ of 1789, which had provided much of the driving force of the French Revolution.

The implication of the term ‘Third World’ was that this was more a political project than a geographic one. These were the countries that were disregarded by the great powers and excluded from the economic privileges of the developed countries. Plausible though this combination might sound, the expression ‘Third World’ actually masked important differences between the members of the group from the beginning, not least in terms of plans for economic progress. In the 1950s and 1960s the principles of mutual solidarity, development and non-alignment made the Third World concept viable, though, and it was not until economic demands took the upper hand in the 1970s that the grouping split apart.

The coherence of the Third World was therefore not to prove very enduring, and by the twenty-first century many more people had been killed in wars and civil wars within that world than in conflicts external to it. Nevertheless, ten years after the end of the Second World War, the Bandung meeting forced the great powers to recognize that the weak had power if they could mobilize it. They bore this in mind as they looked for allies in the Cold War and courted votes in the UN.

By 1960 there were already clear signs that Soviet and Chinese interests might diverge as each sought the leadership of the under-developed and uncommitted. It was in the end to be a worldwide contest. One early result was the paradox that, as time passed, Pakistan drew closer to China (in spite of a treaty with the United States) and the USSR closer to India. When the United States declined to supply arms during its 1965 war with India, Pakistan asked for Chinese help. It got much less than it hoped for, but this was early evidence of a new fluidity that was beginning to mark international affairs in the 1960s. No more than the USSR or China could the United States ignore it. Indeed, the Cold War was to produce an ironic change in the Americans’ role in Asia; from being enthusiastic patrons of anti-colonialism and demolishers of their allies’ empires, they began sometimes to look rather like their successors, though in the East Asian rather than in the Indian Ocean sphere (where long and unrewarded efforts were made to placate a suspicious India; before 1960 it received more economic aid from the United States than any other country).

A very specific example of the new difficulties facing great powers was provided by Indonesia. Its vast sprawl encompassed many peoples, often with widely diverging interests. Although Buddhism had been the first of the world religions to establish itself there, Indonesia has the largest Muslim population under one government in the world, while other religions are now a small minority. But Indonesia also has a well-entrenched Chinese community, which had in the colonial period enjoyed a preponderant share of wealth and administrative jobs, and differences even among Muslim groups can be very large. The new post-colonial state wanted to create one integrated Indonesia, but was always under pressure from poverty and an under-developed economy. In the 1950s the central government of the new republic was increasingly resented; by 1957 it faced armed rebellion in Sumatra and elsewhere. The time-honoured device of distracting opposition with nationalist excitement (directed against a continued Dutch presence in west New Guinea) did not work any more; popular support for President Sukarno was not rebuilt. His government had already moved away from the liberal forms adopted at the birth of the new state and he leant more and more towards authoritarian rule, in alliance with a strong local Communist party. In 1960 parliament was dismissed, and in 1963 Sukarno was named president for life.

American attempts at winning him over enabled Sukarno to swallow up (to the irritation of the Dutch) a would-be independent state that had emerged from west New Guinea (West Irian). He then turned on the new federation of Malaysia, put together in 1957 from fragments of British South-East Asia. With British help, Malaysia mastered Indonesian attacks on Borneo, Sarawak and the Malaysian mainland. This setback seems to have been the turning-point for Sukarno. Exactly what happened is still obscure, but when food shortages and inflation went out of control, a coup was attempted (it failed) behind which, said the leaders of the army, were the Communists. The generals turned on the Communist party, which was at one time alleged to be the third largest in the world. Estimates of the number killed vary between a quarter and half a million, quite a few of them Chinese or of Chinese extraction, most of whom had no connection with the Communists. Sukarno himself was gradually set aside during the following years. A solidly anti-Communist regime was in power and broke off diplomatic relations with China (they were not to be renewed until 1990). The dictatorship was to last until 1998.

President Kennedy’s weakness for Sukarno had reflected the belief that strong, prosperous national states were the best bulwarks against Communism. The history of eastern and south-eastern Asia in the last forty years can indeed be read so as to offer support for that principle, but it had always to be applied specifically in difficult and complex contexts. In any case, by 1960, the dominant strategic fact east of Singapore was the re-creation of Chinese power. South Korea and Japan had successfully resisted Communism, but they too benefited from the Chinese revolution; it gave them leverage with the West. Just as East Asians had always held off Europeans more successfully than the Indian Ocean countries, they showed after 1947 an ability to buttress their independence in both Communist and non-Communist forms, and not to succumb to direct manipulation, even by the Chinese. Some have linked this to the deep and many-faceted conservatism of societies that had for centuries drawn on Chinese example. In their disciplined, complex social networks, capacity for constructive social effort, disregard for the individual, respect for authority and hierarchy, and deep self-awareness as members of civilizations and cultures proudly distinct from the West, the East Asians had more to draw on than many peoples who had come up against the West and its expansionism. The rise of East Asia in the late twentieth century is only comprehensible against a background dominated by something itself immensely varied in its expressions and far from adequately summed up by the cant phrase ‘Asian values’.

With the Chinese Communists’ victory and installation in power in 1949, Beijing was once more the capital of a formally reunited China. Mao Zedong and his party wanted to build a socialist society patterned on the Soviet Union, and Mao himself went on his first foreign trip, to Moscow of course, just a couple of months after his new People’s Republic of China had been founded. There he signed an alliance with Stalin, in spite of the latter’s uncertainties both about the dedication and the capacity of his Chinese Communist comrades. Given Cold War preoccupations elsewhere and the circumstances of the Guomindang collapse, the new China in fact did not need the alliance against an outside threat. Mao wanted Soviet assistance in beginning the difficult task of modernization even more than he wanted a guarantee against the Americans or the Japanese. The followers of Chiang Kai-shek, cooped up in Taiwan, could be disregarded, even if for the moment they were under American protection and irremovable. When a major threat appeared, as the United Nations’ forces approached the Yalu river frontier of Manchuria in 1950, the Chinese reaction was strong and immediate: they sent a large army to Korea. But the main preoccupation of China’s new rulers was the internal state of the country.

China had been in a state of flux ever since the Qing dynasty had been overthrown thirty-eight years before. Even though it had not lost much in terms of territory (except Outer Mongolia, which is – of course – quite a chunk), political stability and social progress were lacking. The economic progress that had been made during the Republican era (1911–49) had mostly been destroyed by the war with Japan. Poverty was universal. Disease and malnutrition were widespread. Material and physical construction and reconstruction were overdue, population pressure on land was as serious as ever, and the moral and ideological void presented by the collapse of the ancien régime over the preceding century had to be filled.

The peasants were the starting-point. Since the 1920s the Chinese Communists had experimented with land reform in the areas they dominated, and they had gained the loyalty of many of the poorest peasants by doing so. By 1956 China’s farms were collectivized in a social transformation of the villages that was said to give control of the new units to their inhabitants, but actually handed them over to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The overthrow of local village leaders and landlords was often brutal; they must have made up a large number of the 800,000 Chinese later reported by Mao to have been ‘liquidated’ in the first five years of the People’s Republic. Meanwhile, industrialization was also pressed forward, with Soviet help, the only source from which China could draw. The model chosen for this, too, was the Soviet one: a Five-Year Plan was announced and launched in 1953 and opened a brief period during which Stalinist ideas dominated Chinese economic management.

The new China was soon a major international influence. Yet her real independence was long masked by the superficial unity of the Communist bloc and her continued exclusion from the United Nations at the insistence of the United States. The Sino-Soviet treaty in 1950 was interpreted – especially in the United States – as further evidence that China was entering the Cold War. Certainly, the regime was Communist and talked revolution and anti-colonialism, and its choices were bound to be confined by the parameters of the Cold War. Yet in a longer perspective much broader concerns now seem evident in Chinese Communist policy from the start. At a very early point, there was visible a primary concern to re-establish Chinese power within the area it had always tended to fill in past centuries.

The security of Manchuria and the long-standing links with Korean Communists are by themselves enough to explain Chinese military intervention in Korea, but that peninsula had also long been an area of dispute between imperial China and Japan. A Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1951 melted an area that had for centuries been under Chinese suzerainty into a new national state that was taking shape. But from the start the most vociferous demand made for gaining control of the Chinese periphery was for the eviction of the Guomindang government from Taiwan. The island had been occupied by the Qing in the seventeenth century, seized in 1895 by the Japanese and then only briefly restored in 1945 to control by the mainland; the control of Taiwan became a signal issue for the CCP. By 1955, the United States’ government was so deeply committed to the support of the Guomindang regime there that the president announced that the United States would protect not merely the island itself but also the smaller islands near the Chinese coast thought essential to its defence. About this issue, and against a psychological background provided by a sense of inexplicable rebuff from a China long patronized by American philanthropy and missionary effort, the views of Americans on Chinese affairs tended to crystallize for over a decade so obsessively that the Guomindang tail seemed at times to wag the American dog. Conversely, during the 1950s, both India and the USSR supported Beijing over Taiwan, insisting that the matter was one of Chinese internal affairs; it cost them nothing to do so. Astonishment was therefore all the greater when China was revealed to be in armed struggle with both countries.

The quarrel with India grew out of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. When the Chinese further tightened their grasp on that country in 1959, Indian policy still seemed basically sympathetic to China. An attempt by Tibetan exiles to set up a government on Indian soil was stifled. But territorial disputes had already begun and had led to clashes. The Chinese announced that they did not recognize a border with India along lines drawn by British-Tibetan negotiations in 1914 and never formally accepted by any Chinese government. Forty odd years’ usage was hardly significant in China’s millennial historical memory. As a result, there was much heavier fighting in the autumn of 1962 when Nehru sent in troops and demanded a Chinese withdrawal from the disputed zone. The Indians did badly, though fighting ceased at the end of the year on the initiative of the Chinese.

Almost at once, early in 1963, a startled world suddenly heard the Soviet Union bitterly denounced by the Chinese Communists, who alleged it had helped India, and had, in a hostile gesture, cut off economic and military aid to China three years earlier. The second charge suggested complex origins to this quarrel, and by no means went to the root of the matter. In reality the confrontation had begun years before, though few in the outside world had grasped its significance. There were Chinese Communists (Mao among them) who remembered all too well what had happened when Chinese interests had been subordinated to the international interest of Communism, as interpreted by Moscow, in the 1920s. Since that time there had always been a tension in the leadership of the Chinese party between Soviet and native forces. Mao himself admired the Soviet Union, and wanted to emulate it, but not to be controlled by the Soviets. But by the late 1950s Mao’s own policies had begun to drift to the Left. Disappointed with what he saw as the slow pace of China’s industrialization, Mao began a number of campaigns that intended to catapult China into the modernity he so desired. He feared that the Soviets would stand in the way of such radical initiatives.

Because Chinese resentment of Soviet policy had to be presented to the rest of the world in Marxist jargon, it was often difficult to see what the quarrel was about. But at the heart of it were Mao’s radicalism, and his need to make his own decisions, independent of the Soviet Union. He also resented what he saw as patronizing Soviet attitudes to China – a remnant of both Mao’s and China’s past, no doubt. In 1963, non-Chinese observers should also have recalled an even more remote past. Long before the foundation of the CCP, Chinese revolutionaries had formed a movement of national regeneration. One of its primary aims had been the recovery from the foreigners of China’s control over her own destiny. Now the Soviets too took their place among the foreigners who had sought to exploit China. To his amazement, given what the Soviets had done for China in the 1950s, the Soviet leader Khrushchev was reminded of the Soviet land-gains of the tsarist era. With something like 4,000 miles of shared frontier (if Mongolia is included), the potential for friction along its huge length was immense.

The Soviet authorities complained of 5,000 Chinese border violations in 1960. An area about one-fifth of the size of Canada was formally in dispute, and by 1969 (a year in which there was much fighting and scores were killed) the Chinese were talking of a ‘Fascist’ dictatorship in Moscow and ostentatiously making preparation for war. The Sino-Soviet quarrel that came in the end to entangle the whole Communist world was inflamed by Soviet tactlessness, too. Soviet leaders seem to have been as careless as any western imperialists of the feelings of Asian allies: one Soviet leader once revealingly remarked that, when touring in China, he and other Soviets ‘used to laugh at their primitive forms of organization’. The withdrawal of Soviet economic and technical help in 1960 had been a grave affront and one all the more wounding because of the moment at which it came, when China faced the first major domestic crisis of the new regime after the disastrous effects of Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’.

Mao Zedong’s personal experience must have counted for much in making this crisis. Although his main intellectual formation had been Marxist and although he found its categories helpful in explaining his country’s predicament, he appears always to have diluted them with pragmatism and sheer power-seeking. Mao was ruthless, but with a profound understanding of what constituted power in China; his judgment of political possibilities appears to have faltered only in the years of success, when megalomania, vanity and eventually age took their toll. Even as a young man, he had advocated a Sinicized Marxism, rejecting European dogma that had cost the CCP dear. The basis of Mao’s world view seems to have been a vision of society and politics as an arena of contending forces in which human willpower and brute force could be deployed to bring about morally desirable and creative change – defined, of course, by an all-knowing leader. His relations with his party had not always been untroubled, but his policy towards the peasantry provided a way ahead for it after disaster had overtaken urban Communism. After a temporary setback in the early 1930s he was from about 1935 virtually supreme within the party. Rural influences predominated. A new way also seemed to be open for Mao to sway international events; the notion of a protracted revolutionary war, waged from the countryside and carried into the towns, looked promising in other parts of the world where orthodox Marxist belief that industrial development was needed to create a revolutionary proletariat did not look persuasive.

After benefiting from the violent expropriations and the release of energy that marked the early 1950s, rural China had in fact been subjected in 1958 to a new upheaval. Hundreds of millions of country-dwellers were reorganized into ‘communes’, whose aim was the total collectivization of life. Private property was swallowed into them, new goals were set centrally for production and new agricultural methods were imposed. Some of the new methods did positive damage (campaigns for the extermination of birds that fed on crops, for example, released population explosions of insect predators, which the birds had kept in check), others merely stimulated inefficiency. The party cadres that ran the communes became more and more concerned with window-dressing to show that targets had been achieved rather than with simple food production. The outcome was disastrous; production fell catastrophically.

The Great Leap Forward, as this campaign was called, was the biggest man-made catastrophe ever, if the two world wars are excepted. By 1960, large areas were experiencing famine or near-famine conditions. The facts were suppressed; they were not known even to many of the ruling élite. Meanwhile, some estimates now say, as many as 40 million Chinese may have died in a few years. Mao stubbornly refused to acknowledge the failure of the Great Leap Forward, with which he was closely and personally identified, and a hunt for scapegoats commenced within the party. In 1961, senior officials began, none the less, to gather irrefutable evidence of what had occurred. Mao’s standing suffered as his adjutants slowly put the economy back on the road to modernization without letting the true facts emerge.

In 1964, a striking symbol of one kind of success was the explosion of a Chinese nuclear weapon. Thus China acquired the expensive admission card to a very exclusive club. The ultimate basis of her international influence, none the less, was bound to be her huge population. Even after the setbacks of the famine, it continued to rise. Five hundred and ninety million has been thought a reasonable estimate for 1950; twenty-five years later, it was 835 million. Now it is 1,338 million. Although China’s share of world population may have been higher at certain points in the past – perhaps she contained nearly 40 per cent of mankind on the eve of the Taiping rebellion – in the 1960s she was more in opposition to the rest of the world than ever before. Her leaders talked as if they were unmoved even by the possibility of nuclear war; the Chinese would survive in greater numbers than the peoples of other countries. There were signs that the presence of such a demographic mass on the border of her most thinly populated regions alarmed the USSR. The ideological confrontation of course made this worse.

Some of those in the outside world who were most unfriendly to the Communist regime were heartened by such information, as they had been in the early 1960s about the true state of affairs (Chiang Kai-shek is said to have wished to have launched an invasion from Taiwan but to have been restrained by the Americans), but the damage was for the most part successfully concealed by censorship and propaganda. Soon, too, Mao began again to seek to regain his ascendancy. He was obsessed with the wish to justify the Great Leap Forward and to punish those whom he saw as having thwarted it, and thus to have betrayed him. One weapon he deployed against them was criticizing events in the USSR since Stalin’s death. Mao thought that a loosening of the iron grip of dictatorship there, modest though it was, had opened the path for corruption and compromise in bureaucracy and party alike. The fear that something similar might happen if discipline were relaxed in China helped Mao to promote the ‘Cultural Revolution’, which tore asunder country and party between 1966 and 1969. Millions were imprisoned, deprived of their jobs or purged. Close to a million died.

The Cultural Revolution was another setback for those who wanted to modernize China. During these years, the cult of Mao and his personal prestige were revitalized and reasserted, but senior party members, bureaucrats and intellectuals were harried; universities were closed and physical labour was demanded of all citizens in order to change traditional attitudes. The young were the main instruments of persecution. The country was turned upside-down by ‘Red Guards’, who terrorized their seniors in every walk of life. Opportunists struggled to join them before themselves being destroyed by the young. At last even Mao himself began to show signs that he thought things had gone too far. New party cadres were installed and a congress confirmed his leadership, but he had again failed. The army in the end restored order, often at the cost, this time, of the students.

Yet the Red Guards’ enthusiasm had been real, and the ostentatious moral preoccupations that surfaced in this still in some ways mysterious episode remain striking. Mao’s motives in launching it were no doubt mixed. Besides seeking vengeance on those who had brought about the abandonment of the Great Leap Forward, he appears really to have felt a danger that the revolution might congeal and lose the moral élan that had carried it so far. In seeking to protect it, old ideas had to go, and so did the remnants of foreign influence in China. Society, government and economy were to be driven by ideology, in isolation from the rest of the world if necessary. The traditional prestige of intellectuals and scholars still embodied the old order, just as the examination system had done as the century began. The ‘demotion’ and demonization of intellectuals was urged as a necessary consequence of making a new China. Similarly, attacks on family authority were not merely attempts by a suspicious regime to encourage informers and disloyalty, but attempts to break the most conservative of all Chinese institutions. The emancipation of women and propaganda to discourage early marriage had dimensions going beyond ‘progressive’ feminist ideas or population control; they were an assault on the past such as no other revolution had ever made, for in China the past meant a role for women far inferior to anything to be found in pre-revolutionary America, France or even Russia. The attacks on party leaders, which accused them of flirtation with Confucian ideas, were much more than jibes; they could not have been paralleled in the West, where for centuries there was no past so solidly entrenched to reject. Even if the Cultural Revolution had very little to do with modernization, it opened the way for the new by destroying the old.

But rejection of the past is only half the story. More than 2,000 years of continuity stretching back to the Qin and Han, and perhaps further also, shaped Chinese Communism. One clue is the role of authority in it. For all its cost and cruelty, that revolution was a heroic endeavour, matched in scale only by such gigantic upheavals as the spread of Islam, or Europe’s assault on the world in early modern times. Yet it was different from those upheavals because it was at least in intention centrally controlled and directed. It is a paradox of the Chinese revolution that it has rested on popular fervour, but is unimaginable without conscious direction from a state inheriting all the mysterious prestige of the traditional bearers of the Mandate of Heaven. Chinese tradition respects authority and gives it a moral endorsement that has long been hard to find in the West. No more than any other great state could China shake off its history, and as a result Communist government achieved a paradoxically conservative appearance. No great nation had for so long driven home to its peoples the lessons that the individual matters less than the collective whole, that authority could rightfully command the services of millions at any cost to themselves in order to carry out great works for the good of the state, that authority is unquestionable so long as it is exercised for the common good. The notion of opposition is distasteful to many Chinese because it suggests social disruption; that implies the rejection of the kind of revolution involved in the adoption of western individualism, though not of Chinese individualism or collective radicalism.

The regime over which Mao presided benefited from the Chinese past, as well as destroying it, because his role was easily comprehensible within its idea of authority. He was presented as a ruler-sage, as much a teacher as a politician in a country that has always respected teachers; western commentators were amused by the status given to his thoughts by the omnipresence of the Little Red Book (but forgot the Bibliolatry of many European Protestants). Mao was spokesman of a moral doctrine which was presented as the core of society, just as Confucianism had been. There was also something traditional in Mao’s artistic interests; he was admired by the people as a poet and his poems won the respect of qualified judges. But first and foremost the Chairman was a transitional figure (although one of great importance): his attempt at wedding China to Communism and his great campaigns all failed, but he reunified the country and destroyed much of its old society and its old beliefs, thereby clearing the way for the next great turn in the on-going Chinese revolution.

The weight of the past – for good or bad – was evident in Chinese foreign policies, too. Although it came to patronize revolution all over the world, China’s main concern was with East Asia and, in particular, with Korea and Indochina, once tributary countries. In the latter, too, Soviet and Chinese policy had diverged. Even before the Korean War the Chinese had begun to supply arms to the Communist guerrilla forces in Vietnam for what was less a struggle against colonialism – that had been decided already – than about what should follow it. In 1953 the French had given up both Cambodia and Laos. In 1954 they lost at a base called Dien Bien Phu a battle decisive both for French prestige and for the French electorate’s will to fight. After this, it was impossible for the French to maintain themselves in the Red River delta. A conference at Geneva was attended by representatives from China, which thus formally re-entered the arena of international diplomacy, working with the Soviets. It was agreed to partition Vietnam between a South Vietnamese government and the Communists who had come to dominate the north, pending elections that might reunite the country. The elections never took place. Instead, there soon opened in Indochina what was to become the fiercest phase since 1945 of an Asian war against the West begun in 1941.

The western contenders were no longer the former colonial powers, but the Americans; the French had gone home and the British had problems enough elsewhere. On the other side was a mixture of Indochinese Communists, nationalists and reformers, supported by the Chinese and Soviets, who first jointly supported radicals in Indochina and then from 1960 competed for influence there. American anti-colonialism and the belief that the United States should support indigenous governments led it to back the anti-Communist South Vietnamese as it backed South Korean and Filipino governments. Unfortunately, neither in Laos nor in South Vietnam, nor, in the end, in Cambodia, did there emerge regimes of unquestioned legitimacy in the eyes of those they ruled; American patronage merely identified governments with the western enemy so disliked in East Asia. American support also tended to remove the incentive to carry out reforms that would have united people behind these regimes, above all in Vietnam, where de facto partition did not produce good or stable government in the south. While Buddhists and Roman Catholics quarrelled bitterly and the peasants were more and more alienated from the regime by the failure of land reform, an apparently corrupt ruling class seemed able to survive government after government. This benefited the Communists. They sought reunification on their own terms and maintained from the north support for the Communist underground movement in the south, the Vietcong.

By 1960 the Vietcong had won control of much of the south. This was the background to a momentous decision taken by the American president, John Kennedy, in 1962; to send not only financial and material help but also 4,000 American ‘advisers’ to help the South Vietnam government put its military house in order. It was the first step towards what Truman had been determined to avoid, the involvement of the United States in a major war on the mainland of Asia, and in the end led to the loss of more than 50,000 American lives.

Another of Washington’s responses to Cold War in Asia had been to safeguard as long as possible the special position arising from the American occupation of Japan. This was virtually a monopoly, although there was token participation by British Commonwealth forces. It had been possible because of the Soviet delay in declaring war on Japan, for the speed of Japan’s surrender had taken Stalin by surprise. The Americans firmly rejected later Soviet requests for a share in an occupation Soviet power had done nothing to bring about. The outcome was the last great example of western paternalism in Asia and a new demonstration of the Japanese people’s astonishing gift for learning from others only what they wished to learn, while safeguarding their own society against unsettling change.

The events of 1945 forced Japan spiritually into a Europeanizing mode it had already entered economically and technologically. Defeat confronted its people with deep and troubling problems of national identity and purpose. The westernization of the Meiji era had seeded a dream of ‘Asia for the Asians’; this was presented as a kind of Japanese Monroe doctrine, underpinned by the anti-western sentiment so widespread in Asia and cloaking the reality of Japanese imperialism. It had been blown away by defeat, and after 1945 the rolling back of colonialism left Japan with no obvious and credible Asian role. True, at that moment it seemed unlikely for a long time to have the power for one. Moreover, the war’s demonstration of Japan’s vulnerability had been a great shock; like the United Kingdom, its security had rested at bottom upon control of the surface of the sea, and the loss of it had doomed the country. Then there were the other results of defeat; the loss of territory to Russia on Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands and the occupation by the Americans. Finally, there was vast material and human destruction to repair.

On the asset side, the Japanese in 1945 still had a great sense of national cohesion, and even if central institutions were delegitimized through defeat in war, it was the prestige of the emperor that had made an orderly surrender possible. The American commander in the Pacific, General MacArthur, wanted to uphold the monarchy as an instrument of a peaceful occupation and was careful not to compromise the emperor by parading his role in policy-making before 1941. He took care to have a new Japanese constitution (with an electorate doubled in size and now including women) adopted before republican enthusiasts in the United States could interfere; he found it effective to argue that Japan should be helped economically in order to get it more quickly off the back of the American tax-payer.

Those Japanese who in the wake of the defeat wanted a fundamental rearrangement of Japanese society to eradicate militarism and authoritarian rule were at first greatly helped by the reforms the Americans imposed. Some problems must have been eased by a major land reform in which about a third of Japanese farming land passed from landlords’ to cultivators’ ownership. But by 1948 the Cold War had begun to have its effects in Japan as well, both among the Japanese and in the Americans’ occupation policy. In what some call a ‘reverse course’ (though that is an overstatement) the American occupation authorities began dropping their support for trade unions and radical organizations, and moved towards making their peace with the great number of Japanese bureaucrats, businessmen and local leaders who had supported the war but not played a prominent role in it. Gradually, Japanese politics moved back to a conservative political dominance that would last up to today.

In 1951, with the Korean War in full swing, the Americans decided that having Japan as an ally supporting the war was more important than further democratic education and careful demilitarization. They proposed a peace treaty, contingent on an alliance treaty with the United States. The Soviets and the Chinese, of course, refused to sign. Japan regained less than full sovereignty, some believed, since its constitution included for ever renouncing ‘war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes … land, sea, and air forces will never be maintained’. But other Japanese celebrated the anti-militarist constitution, and campaigned to keep it even when both the Americans and many domestic conservatives wanted it changed. Confined to its own islands, and facing a China gradually becoming much better consolidated than for a century, Japan’s position was still not necessarily a disadvantageous one. In less than twenty years its status was, as it turned out, to be transformed again.

The Cold War made Japan important as a base and galvanized its economy. The index of industrial production gradually went back up to the level of the 1930s. The United States promoted Japanese interests abroad through diplomacy. Finally, protected by the American nuclear umbrella, Japan at first had no defence costs, since it was forbidden to have any armed forces. In 1960 protests in the streets against the renewal of the American–Japanese treaty prevented the governing Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP; to begin with neither very liberal nor democratic) from further challenging the Left, the trade unions and the student movement. They got the treaty renewal through, but the LDP prime minister, Kishi, who had been imprisoned after the war as a suspected Class A war criminal, had to resign, and his successors turned away from revision of the constitution and confronting the trade unions towards plans for economic growth. Their mix of state incentives, technology imports, labour co-optation, production efficiency and vast foreign markets (thanks to the Americans) led Japan’s per capita GDP to grow from 16.2 per cent of that of the United States in 1960 to 105.8 per cent in 1990. It was a remarkable transformation.

Japan’s close connection with the United States, its proximity to the Communist world, and its advanced and stable economy and society, all made it natural that it should eventually take its place in the security system built up by the United States in Asia and the Pacific. Its foundations were treaties with Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines (which had become independent in 1946). Others followed with Pakistan and Thailand; these were the Americans’ only Asian allies other than Taiwan. Indonesia and (much more importantly) India remained aloof. These alliances reflected, in part, the new conditions of Pacific and Asian international relations after the British withdrawal from India. For a little longer there would still be British forces east of Suez, but Australia and New Zealand had discovered during the Second World War that the United Kingdom could not defend them and that the United States could. The fall of Singapore in 1942 had been decisive. Although British forces had sustained the Malaysians against the Indonesians in the 1950s and 1960s, the colony of Hong Kong survived, it was clear, only because it suited the Chinese that it should. On the other hand, there was no question of sorting out the complexities of the new Pacific by simply lining up states in the teams of the Cold War. The peace treaty with Japan itself caused great difficulty, because United States policy saw Japan as a potential anti-Communist force while others – notably in Australia and New Zealand – remembered 1941 and feared a revival of Japanese power.

Thus American policy was not created only by ideology. None the less, it was long misled by what was believed to be the disaster of the Communist success in China and by Chinese patronage of revolutionaries as far away as Africa and South America. There had certainly been a transformation in China’s international position and it would go further. Yet the crucial fact was China’s re-emergence as a unified power. In the end this did not reinforce the dualist, Cold War system, but began to make nonsense of it. Although at first only within the former Chinese sphere, it was bound to bring about a big change in relative power relationships; the first sign of this was seen in Korea, where the United Nations’ armies were stopped and it was felt necessary to consider bombing China. But the rise of China was also of crucial importance to the Soviet Union. After being one lead element of a bipolarized system, Moscow from the 1960s always had to look over its shoulder to see what its Chinese rivals were doing.

The Chinese revolution was the rejection and the confirmation of the Europeanization of Asia rolled into one. China was ruled by a Communist party which proclaimed ideas that were all European in origin. But its public confrontations first with the United States and then with the Soviet Union spoke volumes about China’s restless rejection of all forms of western domination. And Chinese society, hammered by the CCP’s political campaigns, sought to find new forms of organization that combined ancient values and forms of thinking with new ideas and perceptions. China, like much of Asia, was breaking with the European-dominated past, but it was doing so influenced by borrowings from the West itself, whether they were those of industrial capitalism, political participation, nationalism or Marxism.

The Middle East was also breaking free of European control, but in ways very few had predicted a generation earlier. The survival of Israel, the coming of the Cold War and a huge rise in the demand for oil revolutionized the politics of the Middle East after 1948. Israel focused Arab feeling more sharply than Great Britain had ever done. It made pan-Arabism look plausible. On the injustice of the seizure of what were regarded as Arab lands, the plight of the Palestine refugees and the obligations of the great powers and the United Nations to act on their behalf, the Arab masses could brood bitterly and Arab rulers were able to agree as on nothing else.

None the less, after the defeat of 1948–9, the Arab states were not for some time disposed again to commit their own forces openly. A formal state of war persisted, but a series of armistices established for Israel de facto borders with Jordan, Syria and Egypt that lasted until 1967. There were continuing border incidents in the early 1950s, and raids were carried out upon Israel from Egyptian and Syrian territory by bands of young guerrilla soldiers recruited from the refugee camps, but immigration, hard work and money from the United States steadily consolidated the new Israel. A siege psychology helped to stabilize Israel’s politics; the prestige of the party that had brought about the very existence of the new state was scarcely troubled while the Jews transformed their new country. Within a few years they could show massive progress in bringing barren land under cultivation and establishing new industries. The gap between Israel’s per capita income and that of the more populous among the Arab states steadily widened.

Here was another irritant for the Arabs. Foreign aid to their countries produced nothing like such dramatic change. Egypt, the most populous of them, faced particularly grave problems of poverty and population growth. While the oil-producing states were to benefit in the 1950s and 1960s from growing revenue and a higher GDP, this often led to further strains and divisions within them. Contrasts deepened both between different Arab states and within them between different classes. Most of the oil-producing countries were ruled by small, wealthy, sometimes traditional and conservative, occasionally nationalist and westernized élites, usually uninterested in the poverty-stricken peasants and slum-dwellers of more populous neighbours. The contrast was exploited by a new Arab political movement founded during the war, the Ba’ath party. It attempted to synthesize Marxism and pan-Arabism, but the Syrian and Iraqi wings of the movement (it was always strongest in those two countries) had fallen out with one another almost from the start.

Pan-Arabism had too much to overcome, for all the impulse to united action stemming from anti-Israeli and anti-western feeling. The Hashemite kingdoms, the Arabian sheikhdoms and the Europeanized and urbanized states of North Africa and the Levant all had widely divergent interests and very different historical traditions. Some of them, like Iraq and Jordan, were artificial creations whose shape had been dictated by the needs and wishes of European powers after 1918; some were social and political fossils. Even Arabic was in many places a common language only within the mosque (and not all Arabic-speakers were Muslims). Although Islam was a tie between many Arabs, for a long time it seemed of small account; in 1950 few Muslims talked of it as a militant, aggressive faith. It was only Israel that provided a common enemy and thus a common cause.

Hopes were first awoken among Arabs in many countries by a revolution in Egypt, from which there eventually emerged a young soldier, Gamal Abdel Nasser. For a time he seemed likely both to unite the Arab world against Israel and to open the way to social change. In 1954 he became the leader of the military junta that had overthrown the Egyptian monarchy two years previously. Egyptian nationalist feeling had for decades found its main focus and scapegoat in the British, still garrisoning the Suez Canal zone, and now blamed for their part in the establishment of Israel. The British government, for its part, did its best to co-operate with Arab rulers because of its fears of Soviet influence in an area still thought crucial to British communications and oil supplies. The Middle East (ironically, given the motives that had taken the British there in the first place) had not lost its strategic fascination for the British, even after their withdrawal from India.

It was a time of strong anti-western currents elsewhere in the Arab world, too. In 1951 the king of Jordan had been assassinated; in order to survive, his successor had to make it clear that he had severed the old special tie with Great Britain. Further west, the French, who had been forced to recognize the complete independence of Morocco and Tunisia soon after the war, faced troubles that by 1954 had grown into an Algerian national rebellion, which was soon to become a full-scale war; no French government could easily abandon a country where there were over a million settlers of European stock. Moreover, oil had just been discovered in the Sahara. In the context of this stirring Arab world, Nasser’s rhetoric of social reform and nationalism had wide appeal. His anti-Israeli feelings were not in doubt and he quickly had to his credit the success of an agreement with Great Britain for the evacuation of the Suez base. The Americans, increasingly aware of Soviet menace in the Middle East, meanwhile looked on him for a time with favour as an anti-colonialist and potential client.

He soon came to appeal to them far less. The guerrilla raids on Israel from Egyptian territory, where the most important Palestinian refugee camps lay, provoked irritation in Washington. In 1950, the British, French and Americans had already said they would provide only limited supplies of arms to Middle East states and only on such terms as would keep a balance between Israel and the Arabs. When Nasser carried off an arms deal with Czechoslovakia on the security of the cotton crop, and Egypt recognized Communist China, thoughts about him hardened. By way of showing displeasure, an American and British offer to finance a cherished project of internal development, a high dam on the Nile, was withdrawn. As a riposte, Nasser seized the assets of the private company that owned and ran the Suez Canal, saying its profits should finance the dam; this touched an old nerve of British sensibility. Instincts only half-disciplined by imperial withdrawal seemed for once to be coherent both with anti-Communism and with friendship towards more traditional Arab states, whose rulers were beginning to look askance at Nasser as a revolutionary radical. The British prime minister Anthony Eden, too, was obsessed with a false analogy, which led him to see Nasser as a new Hitler, to be checked before he embarked upon a career of successful aggression. As for the French, they were aggrieved by Nasser’s support for the Algerian insurrection. Both nations formally protested over the canal’s seizure and, in collusion with Israel, began to plan his overthrow.

In October 1956, the Israelis suddenly invaded Egypt to destroy, they announced, bases from which guerrillas had harassed their settlements. The British and French governments at once said freedom of movement through the canal was in danger. They called for a ceasefire; when Nasser rejected this they launched first an air attack and then a seaborne assault on Egypt. Collusion with Israel was denied, but the denial was preposterous. It was a lie and, worse still, from the first incredible. Soon the Americans were thoroughly alarmed; they feared advantage for the USSR in this renewal of imperialism, and they used financial pressure to force a British acceptance of a ceasefire negotiated by the United Nations. The Anglo-French adventure collapsed in humiliation.

The Suez affair looked (and was) a British/French disaster, but in the long run its main importance was psychological. The British suffered most; it cost them much goodwill, particularly within the Commonwealth, and squandered confidence in the sincerity of their retreat from empire. It confirmed the Arabs’ hatred of Israel; the suspicion that it was indissolubly linked to the West made them yet more receptive to Soviet blandishments. Nasser’s prestige soared still higher. Some were bitter, too, that Suez had at a crucial moment distracted the West from eastern Europe (where a revolution in Hungary against its Soviet satellite government had been crushed by the Soviet army while the western powers fell out). Nevertheless, the essentials of the region’s affairs were left by the crisis much as before, animated by a new wave of pan-Arab enthusiasm though they might be. Suez did not change the balance of the Cold War, or of the Middle East.

In 1958 an attempt was made by Ba’ath sympathizers to unite Syria and Egypt in a United Arab Republic that briefly bore fruit in 1961. The pro-western government of the Lebanon was overthrown and the monarchy of Iraq swept aside by revolution that year, too. These facts heartened pan-Arabists, but differences between Arab countries soon reasserted themselves. The world watched curiously when American forces were summoned to the Lebanon and British forces to Jordan to help maintain their governments against pro-Nasser forces. Meanwhile, fighting went on sporadically on the Syrian–Israeli border, although the guerrillas were for a time held in check.

However, from Suez until 1967 the most important development in the Arab world was not there, but in Algeria. The intransigence of the pieds noirs (the French settlers) and the bitterness of many soldiers, who felt they were asked to do an impossible job there, nearly brought about a coup d’état in France itself. The government of General de Gaulle nevertheless opened secret negotiations with the Algerian rebels and in July 1962, after a referendum, France formally granted independence to a new Algeria. Angrily, a million pieds noirs migrated to France, to embitter her politics. Ironically, within twenty years France was to benefit from over a million Algerian immigrant workers, whose remittances home were essential to the Algerian economy. As Libya had emerged from United Nations trusteeship to independence in 1951, the entire North African coast outside the tiny Spanish enclaves was now clear of European supremacy. Yet external influences still bedevilled the history of the Arab lands as they had done ever since the Ottoman conquests centuries before, although they now did so indirectly, through aid and diplomacy, as the United States and the Soviets sought to buy friends.

The United States laboured under a disadvantage: no American president or Congress could seriously pressure Israel to make peace. American public perceptions of the plight of the Jewish people and the influence of Jewish communities there were too great to overcome, although President Eisenhower had been brave enough to face them down over Suez, even in an election year. Egyptian and Syrian policy continued to sound anti-American and prove irritating. The USSR, on the other hand, had dropped its early support of Israel as soon as it ceased to be a useful weapon with which to embarrass the British. Soviet policy now took a steady pro-Arab line and assiduously fanned Arab resentment over survivals of British imperialism in the Arab world. Marginally, too, the Soviets earned a cheap bonus of Arab approval in the later 1960s by harassing their own Jewish dissidents.

Meanwhile, the context of the Middle East’s problems was slowly changing. In the 1950s there were two important developments concerning oil. One was a much greater rate of its discovery than hitherto, particularly on the southern side of the Persian Gulf, in the small sheikhdoms then still under British influence, and in Saudi Arabia. The second was a huge acceleration of energy consumption in western countries, especially in the United States. The prime beneficiaries of the oil boom were Saudi Arabia, Libya, Kuwait and, some way behind, Iran and Iraq, the established major producers. This had two important consequences. Countries dependent upon Middle Eastern oil – the United States, Great Britain, West Germany and, soon, Japan – had to give greater weight to Arab views in their diplomacy. It also meant big changes in the relative wealth and standing of Arab states. None of the three leading oil producers was either heavily populated or traditionally very weighty in international affairs.

The bearing of these changes was still not very evident in the last Middle East crisis of the 1960s, which began when a much more extreme government took power in Syria in 1966, and obtained Soviet support for its aims. The king of Jordan was threatened if he did not support the Palestinian guerrillas (organized since 1964 as the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO). Jordanian forces therefore began to prepare to join in an attack on Israel with Egypt and Syria. But in 1967, provoked by an attempt to blockade their Red Sea port, the Israelis struck first. In a brilliant campaign they destroyed the Egyptian air force and army in Sinai and hurled back the Jordanians, winning in six days’ fighting new borders on the Suez Canal, the Golan Heights and the Jordan. For defence, these were far superior to their former boundaries and the Israelis announced that they would keep them. This was not all. Defeat had ensured the eclipse of the glamorous Nasser, the first plausible leader of pan-Arabism. He was left visibly dependent on Soviet power (a Soviet naval squadron arrived at Alexandria as the Israeli advance guards reached the Suez Canal), and on subsidies from the oil states. Both demanded more prudence from him, and that meant difficulties with the radical leaders of the Arab masses.

Yet the Six Day War of 1967 solved nothing. There were new waves of Palestinian refugees; by 1973 about 1,400,000 Palestinians were said to be dispersed in Arab countries, while a similar number remained in Israel and Israeli-occupied territory. When the Israelis began to plant settlements in their newly won conquests, Arab resentment grew even stronger. Even if time, oil and birth rates seemed to be on the Arab side, not much else was clear. In the United Nations, a ‘Group of 77’ supposedly non-aligned countries achieved the suspension of Israel (like South Africa) from certain international organizations and, perhaps more important, a unanimous resolution condemning the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem. Another called for Israel’s withdrawal from Arab lands in exchange for recognition by its neighbours. Meanwhile, the PLO turned to terrorism outside the disputed lands to promote their cause. Like the Zionists of the 1890s, they had decided that the western myth of nationality was the answer to their plight: a new state should be the expression of their nationhood, and like Jewish militants in the 1940s, they chose terrorism – assassination and indiscriminate murder – as their weapons. It was clear that in time there would be another war, and therefore a danger that, because of the identification of American and Soviet interests with opposing sides, a world war might suddenly blow up out of a local conflict, as in 1914.

The danger became imminent when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur in October 1973. The Israelis for the first time faced the possibility of military defeat by the greatly improved and Soviet-armed forces of their opponents. The Egyptians advanced into Sinai, and their opponents had great difficulties forcing them back. But by 20 October Israeli forces had advanced to within 60 miles of Cairo and less than 25 miles of the Syrian capital Damascus. Once again the Israelis won, though only after the Soviets were reported to have sent nuclear weapons to Egypt and the Americans had put their forces on the alert around the world. This grim background, like the obvious chance that the Israelis themselves had nuclear weapons they would be prepared to use in extremity, was not fully discernible to the public at the time.

This, however, was not the only way in which the crisis transcended the region. The problems of the Ottoman succession left behind in 1919, of which Israel’s emergence was only a part, had been successively further poisoned, first by the inter-war policies of Great Britain and France, and then by the Cold War. But it was now to become clear that there had been a much more fundamental change in the Middle East’s world role. In 1945 the world’s largest oil exporter had been Venezuela; twenty years later this was no longer so and most developed economies depended for much of their oil on the Middle East. In the 1950s and for most of the 1960s the British and Americans had been confident of cheap and assured supplies from the region. They had managed what once had looked to be a possible threat to their access to Iranian oil in 1953 by overthrowing a nationalist Iranian government, exercised an informal controlling influence in Iraq until 1963 (when a Ba’ath regime seized power there) and had no difficulty in retaining Saudi Arabian goodwill.

But the Yom Kippur War ended this era. Led by Saudi Arabia, the Arab states announced they would cut supplies of oil to Europe, Japan and the United States. Israel had to face the frightening possibility that it might not always be able to rely on the diplomatic support it had always found outside the region. It might not be able to go on counting on guilt about the Holocaust, sympathy and admiration for a progressive state in a backward region, and the influence of Jewish communities in the United States. It was not a good moment for the United States and its allies. In 1974, with 138 states members of the United Nations, there were for the first time majorities in the General Assembly against the western powers (over both Israel and South Africa). Though for the moment the United Nations agreed to put a force into Sinai to separate the Israelis and the Egyptians, none of the region’s fundamental problems was solved.

The impact of ‘oil diplomacy’ went far beyond the region, however. Overnight, economic problems that had been developing since the late 1960s became acute. World oil prices shot up. Dependence on oil imports everywhere played havoc with balance-of-payments problems. The United States, floundering in what had become an Indochinese morass, was badly shaken; Japan and Europe appeared to face full-scale recessions. Perhaps, it seemed, a new 1930s was on its way; at any rate, the golden age of assured economic growth seemed over. Meanwhile, it was the poorest countries among the oil importers that suffered most from the oil crisis. Many of them were soon having to face rocketing price inflation and some a virtual obliteration of the earnings they needed in order to pay interest on their large debts to foreign creditors.

The impact of higher oil prices was great in much of Africa. In the 1950s and early 1960s that continent had undergone a startlingly rapid process of decolonization. It had been exhilarating, but had left behind some fragile new states, especially south of the Sahara. France, Belgium and Great Britain were the major imperial powers concerned with what was on the whole a perhaps surprisingly peaceful process. Italy had lost her last African territories in 1943, and only in Algeria and the Portuguese colonies was there much blood spilled in the process of liberation, the Portuguese finally giving up after domestic revolution in 1974; thus the Iberians who had led the European adventure of overseas dominion were almost the last to abandon it. There was plenty of bloodshed to come after the roll-up of empire, it is true, when African set about African, but troubles tended to arise for the French and British only when there were significant white settler communities to consider. Elsewhere, both French and British politicians proved anxious to retain influence, if they could, by showing benevolent interest in their former subjects.

The outcome was an Africa that owes its present form in the main to decisions of nineteenth-century Europeans (just as much of the Middle East owes its political framework to the Europeans in the twentieth century). New African ‘nations’ were usually defined by the boundaries of former colonies and those boundaries have proved remarkably enduring. They often enclosed peoples of many languages, stocks and customs, over whom colonial administrations had provided little more than a formal unity. As Africa lacked the unifying influence of great indigenous civilizations, such as those of Asia, to offset the colonial fragmentation of the continent, imperial withdrawal was followed by its Balkanization. The doctrine of nationalism that appealed to the westernized African élites (Senegal, a Muslim country, had a president who wrote poetry in French and was an expert on Goethe) confirmed a continent’s fragmentation, often ignoring important realities that colonialism had contained or manipulated. The sometimes strident nationalist rhetoric of new rulers was often a response to the dangers of centrifugal forces. West Africans combed the historical record of ancient Mali and Ghana, and East Africans brooded over the past that might be hidden in relics, such as the ruins of Zimbabwe, in order to forge national mythologies like those of earlier nation-makers in Europe. Nationalism was as much the product of decolonization in black Africa as the cause.

New internal divisions were not Africa’s only or its worst problem. In spite of the continent’s great potential, the economic and social foundations for a prosperous future were shaky. Once again, the imperial legacy mattered supremely. Colonial regimes in Africa left behind feebler cultural and economic infrastructures than in Asia. Rates of literacy were low and trained cadres of administrators and technical experts were small. Africa’s important economic resources (especially in minerals) required skills, capital and marketing facilities for their exploitation, which could only come in the near future from the world outside (and apartheid South Africa counted as ‘outside’ to most black politicians). What was more, some African economies had recently undergone particular disruption and diversion because of European needs and in European interests. During the war of 1939–45, agriculture in some of the British colonies had shifted towards the growing of cash crops on a large scale for export. Whether this was or was not in the long-term interests of peasants who had previously raised crops and livestock only for their own consumption is debatable, but what is certain is that the immediate consequences were rapid and profound. One was an inflow of cash in payment for produce the British and Americans needed. Some of this was felt in higher wages, but the spread of a cash economy often had disturbing local effects. Unanticipated urban growth and regional development took place, and corruption increased.

Many African countries were thus tied to patterns of development that were soon to show their vulnerabilities and limitations in the post-war world. Even the benevolent intentions of a programme like the British Colonial Development and Welfare Fund, or many international aid programmes, objectively helped to shackle African producers to a world market they were not prepared to enter as decision-makers. Such handicaps were the more grievous when they were compounded, as was often the case, by mistaken economic policy after independence. A drive for industrialization through import-substitution often led to disastrous agrarian consequences as the prices of cash crops were kept artificially low in relation to those of locally manufactured goods. Almost always, farmers were sacrificed to townspeople and low prices left them with no incentive to raise production. Given that populations had begun to rise in the 1930s and did so even more rapidly after 1960, discontent was inevitable as disappointment with the reality of ‘freedom’ from the colonial powers set in.

None the less, in spite of its difficulties, the process of decolonization in black Africa was hardly interrupted. In 1945 the only truly independent countries in Africa had been Ethiopia (which had itself, from 1935 to 1943, been briefly under colonial rule) and Liberia, though in reality and law the Union of South Africa was a self-governing Dominion of the British Commonwealth and is therefore only formally excluded from that category (a slightly vaguer status also cloaked the virtual practical independence of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia). By 1961 (when South Africa became a fully independent republic and left the Commonwealth) twenty-four new African states had come into existence. There are now over fifty.

In 1957 Ghana had been the first ex-colonial new nation to emerge in sub-Saharan Africa. As Africans shook off colonialism, their problems quickly surfaced. Over the next fifty-five years, twenty-five major wars or civil wars were to be fought in Africa and thirty heads of state or prime ministers would be assassinated. There were some especially bad outbreaks of strife. In the former Belgian Congo, an attempt by the mineral-rich region of Katanga to break away provoked a civil war in which rival Soviet and American influences quickly became entangled, while the United Nations strove to restore peace. Then, at the end of the 1960s, came an even more distressing episode, a civil war in Nigeria, hitherto one of the most stable and promising of the new African states. This, too, drew non-Africans to dabble in the bloodbath (one reason was that Nigeria had joined the ranks of the oil producers). In other countries there were less bloody, but still fierce struggles between factions, regions and tribes, which distracted the small westernized élites of politicians and encouraged them to abandon the democratic and liberal principles much talked of in the heady days when the colonial system was in retreat.

The wars that happened at the end of the Cold War era were particularly devastating to Africa. The wars against apartheid South Africa and its supporters created much human misery, as did the civil wars, which the South Africans fomented, in nearby countries. The Rwandan civil war in 1990–93, where demagogues drew on past ethnic conflict to incite genocide against the Tutsi population, led to the deaths of at least half a million people, nearly 20 per cent of the population. In Congo (named Zaire during the thirty-two-year rule of the western-supported dictator Mobutu), civil strife with foreign involvement in the late 1990s soon developed into the most devastating war the continent had ever known, with at least 5 million killed. The end of colonialism did not mean an end to Africa’s suffering.

In many of the new nations, the need, real or imaginary, to prevent disintegration, suppress open dissent and strengthen central authority, had led by the 1970s to one-party, authoritarian government or to the exercise of political authority by soldiers (it was not unlike the history of the new nations of South America after the Wars of Liberation). Often, opposition to the ‘national’ party that had emerged in the run-up to independence in a particular country would be stigmatized as treason once independence was achieved. Nor did the surviving regimes of an older independent Africa escape. Impatience with an ancien régime seemingly incapable of providing peaceful political and social change led in 1974 to revolution in Ethiopia. The setting aside of the ‘Lion of Judah’ was almost incidentally the end of the oldest Christian monarchy in the world (and of a line of kings supposed in one version of the story to run back to the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba). A year later, the soldiers who had taken power seemed just as discredited as their predecessors. From similar changes elsewhere in Africa there sometimes emerged tyrant-like political leaders who reminded Europeans of earlier dictators, but this comparison may be misleading. Africanists have gently suggested that many of the ‘strong men’ of the new nations can be seen as the inheritors of the mantle of pre-colonial African kingship, rather than in western terms. Some were simply bandits, however.

Their own troubles did not diminish the frequent irritation with which many Africans reacted to the outside world. Some of the roots of this may not lie very deep. The mythological drama built on the old European slave trade, which Africans were encouraged to see as a supreme example of racial exploitation, had been a European and North American creation. A sense of political inferiority, too, lay near the surface in a continent of relatively powerless states (some with populations of less than a million). In political and military terms, a disunited Africa could not expect to have much weight in international affairs, although attempts were made to overcome the weakness that arose from division. One abortive example was that of 1958 to found a United States of Africa; it opened an era of alliances, partial unions and essays in federation which culminated in the emergence in 1963 of the Organization for African Unity (the OAU), largely thanks to the Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie. Politically, though, the OAU has had little success, even in its present incarnation as the African Union, although in 1975 it did conclude a beneficial trade negotiation with Europe in defence of African producers.

The very disappointment of much of the early political history of independent Africa directed some politicians towards co-operation in economic development, above all in relation to Europe, which remained Africa’s most important foreign source of capital. But memories of the exploitation of the colonial era created a barrier to such developments, as did the unfair deal many African countries felt that they got overall in export prices for their raw materials. Many countries turned inward and introduced command economies of various sorts. Some began co-operating with the Soviet Union and the east European countries. But very few of these schemes had any success in terms of development. The economic record of independent Africa has, up until recently, been dreadful. In 1960, food production was still roughly keeping pace with population growth, but by 1982 in all but seven of the thirty-nine sub-Saharan countries it was lower per head than it had been in 1970. Corruption, misconceived policies and a preoccupation with showy prestige investment projects squandered the countries’ output, as well as some of the development aid they received.

In 1965, the GDP of the entire continent had been less than that of Illinois and in more than half of African countries manufacturing output went down in the 1980s. On these feeble economies there had fallen first the blow of the oil crisis of the early 1970s and then the trade recession that followed. The shattering effects for Africa were made even worse soon after by the onset of repeated drought. In 1960 Africa’s GDP had been growing at the unexciting, but still positive annual rate of about 1.6 per cent; the trend soon turned downward and in the first half of the 1980s was falling at a rate of 1.7 per cent a year. It hardly seems a surprise that in 1983 the UN Economic Commission for Africa described the picture of the continent’s economy emerging from the historical trends as ‘almost a nightmare’.

Since the late 1990s most African economies have begun to grow, and the picture looked more hopeful, at least until the economic crisis of 2008. Raw material prices increased and governance improved, at least in some countries. The end to long-standing civil wars also helped markedly, as did improvements in banking systems and in communications and infrastructure. But there are still major problems to be solved before Africa will emerge from poverty and inequity. The terrible toll that HIV/AIDS has taken on the continent will take a long time to overcome (more than 10 per cent of the young population is infected in some countries, and the disease continues to spread). There are also far too many countries that are dependent on a single crop or mineral for almost all of their national income, and education levels are low. Most of Africa seems in desperate need for political stability under representative governments in order to move from chaos and conflict to sustainable levels of growth.

The fact that the most powerful of African states, the Union of South Africa, was for years a white-ruled country cut off from relations with the rest of the continent, did not help Africa’s development. The Afrikaans-speaking Boers, who by 1945 dominated that country, cherished against the British grievances that went back to the Great Trek and which had been intensified by defeat in the Boer War. They had led to the progressive destruction of ties with the British Commonwealth after the First World War, a process made easier by the concentration of voters of Anglo-Saxon origin in the provinces of Cape Town and Natal; the Boers were entrenched in the Transvaal and the major industrial areas as well as the rural hinterland. South Africa, it is true, entered the war in 1939 on the British side and supplied important forces to fight in it, but even then intransigent ‘Afrikaners’, as they increasingly called themselves, supported a movement favouring co-operation with the Nazis.

Its leader became prime minister in 1948, after defeating South Africa’s senior statesman, Jan Smuts, in a general election. As the Afrikaners had steadily engrossed power inside the Union, and had built up their economic position in the industrial and financial sectors, the prospect of imposing a policy towards the black Africans that diverged from their deep prejudices was already inconceivable. The result was the construction of a system of separation of the races: apartheid. It systematically embodied and reinforced the legal reduction of the black African to the inferior status he occupied in Boer ideology. Its aim was to guarantee the position of the whites in a land where industrialism and market economies had done much to break down the regulation and distribution of the growing black population by the old tribal divisions.

Apartheid had some appeal – on even less excusable grounds than the primitive superstitions or supposed economic necessities of the Afrikaners – to white people elsewhere in Africa. The only country where a similar balance of black and white population to that of South Africa and a similar concentration of wealth existed was Southern Rhodesia, where the settlers, to the great embarrassment of the British government, seceded from the Commonwealth in 1965 in order to avoid full decolonization. The aim of the secessionists, it was feared, was to move towards a society more and more like South Africa’s. The British government dithered and missed its chance. There was nothing that the black African states could do immediately about Rhodesia, and not much that the United Nations could do either, though ‘sanctions’ were invoked in the form of an embargo on trade with the former colony; many black African states ignored them and the British government winked at the steps taken by major oil companies to ensure their product reached the rebels. In one of the most shameful episodes in the history of a feeble ministry, Great Britain’s stock sank in the eyes of Africans, who, understandably, did not see why a British government could not intervene militarily to suppress a colonial rebellion as flagrant as that of 1776. Many British reflected that it was precisely that remote precedent which made the outlook for intervention, by a remote and militarily weak imperial sovereign, discouraging.

Though South Africa (the richest and strongest state in Africa, and growing richer and stronger all the time) seemed secure, it was, together with Rhodesia and Portugal, the object of mounting black African anger as the 1970s began. The drawing of the racial battle lines was hardly offset by minor concessions to South Africa’s blacks and its growing economic ties with some black states. There was a danger, too, that other outside powers might soon be involved. In 1975, after the collapse of the Portuguese empire, a Marxist regime took power in Angola. When civil war followed, foreign Communist soldiers arrived from Cuba to support the government, while South African and American support was soon given to rebels against it.

The South African government had showed that it could take action. It sought to detach itself from the embarrassment of association with an unyielding independent Rhodesia (whose prospects had sharply worsened when Portuguese rule came to an end in Mozambique in 1974 and a guerrilla campaign was launched from that country against it). The American government contemplated the outcome if Rhodesia collapsed at the hands of black nationalists depending on Communist support. It applied pressure to the South Africans who, in turn, applied it to the Rhodesians. In September 1976 the Rhodesian prime minister dejectedly told his countrymen that they had to accept the principle of votes for all. The last attempt to found an African country dominated by whites had failed. It was also another landmark in the recession of European imperial power. Yet the guerrilla war continued, as white Rhodesians dragged their feet on implementing full majority rule. At last, in 1980, Rhodesia briefly returned to British rule before re-emerging into independence, this time as the new nation of Zimbabwe, with an African prime minister.

This left South Africa alone as the sole white-dominated state, the richest in the continent and the focus of increasing resentment around the world. Although world opinion had been split by the civil war in Angola, world leaders could usually find common ground against racial discrimination in South Africa. In 1974 the General Assembly of the United Nations forbade South Africa to attend its sessions because of apartheid. The Soviet Union and its allies became increasingly active in supporting the so-called ‘frontline states’ (against South Africa) with weapons, and Cuban troops remained in Angola. From Pretoria, the view northwards looked more and more menacing, and the inside situation was also deteriorating in security terms: more and more young South Africans were joining the opposition to apartheid. In 1976 176 people were shot dead in demonstrations against the government in Soweto, a black township in Johannesburg.

By the early 1980s there was little doubt that white South Africa was facing a crisis. The country’s trade was hit by sanctions, but even more devastating was the sense among white South Africans that they had no foreign support for their views on racial segregation; even the United States introduced sanctions in 1985. But the sheer sense of oppression was also taking its toll: all its inhabitants were suffering as the country increasingly became a police state because of fear of militant black resistance. More and more non-white groups started to coalesce around the leadership of the banned African National Congress (ANC), with Nelson Mandela – imprisoned since 1962 – as its main symbol. Even some young whites began to vocally oppose the system they had inherited, and the wars in Namibia and Angola were especially unpopular.

Among growing divisions on the Afrikaner side, the government was forced to withdraw from Angola and agree to a settlement for Namibia, which gave that country its independence under majority rule in 1988. Unpopular both among liberals and conservatives, President P. W. Botha had to step down in 1989. The man who replaced him, F. W. de Klerk, soon made it clear that he wanted reforms that would abolish apartheid for good. Political protest and opposition were allowed much more freedom. Meetings and marches were permitted; imprisoned black nationalist leaders were released. The end of the Cold War made these changes even more urgent; even conservative Afrikaner leaders feared images of South African police firing on protesters going around the world at exactly the same time as Communism was giving way peacefully in eastern Europe.

Suddenly, the way ahead opened up dramatically. In February 1990 de Klerk announced ‘a new South Africa’. Nine days later, the symbolic figure of Nelson Mandela, the leader of the ANC, emerged at last from gaol. Before long he was engaged in discussion with the government about what might come next. For all the firmness of his language, there were hopeful signs of a new realism that the task of reassuring the white minority about a future under a black majority must be attempted, even if the Afrikaners themselves at times made such a realism difficult. Just such signs, of course, also prompted some black politicians to greater impatience. Nelson Mandela had a very difficult course to steer, especially for a man who had just been freed from twenty-seven years in prison.

The transition to democratic rule in South Africa was not a simple one. Even though de Klerk, acting with speed and bravery, had rescinded most of the apartheid legislation by the end of 1991, there were many among the white élite who in various ways resisted change. But neither the 1993 assassination of Chris Hani, a prominent left-wing leader of the ANC, nor ethnic strife in the black townships (often fuelled by rogue elements inside the apartheid state), could unmake the road to majority rule. Increasingly, the great majority of South Africans of all races came to view Nelson Mandela – reverently referred to by his clan-name, ‘Madiba’ – as the guarantor of political stability and economic progress in a new multi-racial state. When he was elected president in 1994, Mandela spoke of a country reborn and a pride regained for all South Africans. But it was in the following year, when President Mandela put on the jersey of the all-white South African national rugby team – the Springboks – to celebrate their victory in the World Cup that he became the symbol of national unity for whites as well as blacks. ‘Madiba magic worked for us,’ said the white captain of the team. In 1999, as Mandela stepped down from the presidency, all of South Africa had reason to say the same.

In South America changes were also afoot at the end of the century. For much of its population, the preceding decades had turned out to be disappointing in terms of their welfare and living standards. From a hopeful beginning of the twentieth century, Latin America seemed to have got itself stuck in unresolved problems left over from history, and in international constellations that were not to its favour.

In 1900, some Latin American countries had begun to settle down, not only to stability but to some form of prosperity. Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. To the original colonial implantations in the continent had been added the cultural influence of nineteenth-century Europe, especially of France, to which Latin American élites had been drawn in the post-colonial period. Their upper classes were highly Europeanized and the modernity of many of the continent’s great cities reflected this, as they also reflected recent European immigration, which was beginning to swamp the old colonial élites. As for the descendants of the aboriginal Americans, they had been pushed entirely aside almost everywhere. In one or two countries, their suppression had been so complete as to produce near-extinction.

Almost all Latin American states were primary producers of agricultural or mineral exports. Some were relatively highly urbanized, but their manufacturing sectors were inconsiderable, and for a long time they did not seem to be troubled by the social and political problems of nineteenth-century Europe. Capital had flowed into the continent, only briefly and occasionally checked by financial disasters and disillusionments. The only social revolution in a Latin American state before 1914 (as opposed to countless changes in governmental personnel) began with the overthrow of the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, in 1911. It opened the way to nearly ten years of fighting and a million deaths, but the primary role was played by a middle class that felt excluded from the benefits of the regime, not by an industrial or rural proletariat, and that class was the main gainer, along with the politicians of the party which emerged to monopolize power until the 1990s. Although most Latin American countries could display class conflict aplenty in their countrysides, they did not appear to suffer from the social bitterness of industrialized and urbanized Europe.

These promising-looking societies survived the First World War prosperously. It brought important changes in their relations with Europe and North America. Before 1914, although it was the predominant political influence in the Caribbean, the United States did not exercise much economic weight to the south. In 1914 it supplied only 17 per cent of all foreign investment south of the Rio Grande – Great Britain provided much more. The liquidation of British holdings in the Great War changed that; by 1919 the United States was the largest single foreign source of investment in South America, providing about 40 per cent of the continent’s foreign capital. Then came the world economic crisis; 1929 was the doorway to a new and unpleasant era for the Latin American states, the true beginning of their twentieth century and the end of the nineteenth. Many defaulted on their payments to foreign investors and it became almost impossible to borrow further capital abroad. The collapse of prosperity led to growing nationalist assertiveness, sometimes against other Latin American states, sometimes against the North Americans and Europeans; foreign oil companies were expropriated in Mexico and Bolivia. The traditional Europeanized oligarchies were compromised by their failure to meet the problems posed by falling national incomes. From 1930 onwards there were more military coups, risings and abortive rebellions than at any time since the Wars of Independence.

The year 1939 again brought prosperity as commodity prices rose because of wartime demand (in 1950 the Korean War prolonged this trend). In spite of the notorious admiration of Argentina’s rulers for Nazi Germany and evidence of German interests in some other republics, most of them were either sympathetic to the Allies who courted them, or subservient to the United States. Most of them formally joined the United Nations’ side before the war ended and one, Brazil, sent a small expeditionary force to Europe, a striking gesture. The most important effects of the war on Latin America, however, were economic. One, of great significance, was that the old dependence on the United States and Europe for manufactured goods now became apparent in shortages; an intensive drive to industrialize gathered speed in several countries. On the urban workforces that industrialization had built up was founded a new form of political power that entered the lists as a competitor with the military and the traditional élites in the post-war era. Authoritarian, semi-Fascist but popular mass movements brought to power a new kind of strong man. Perón in Argentina was the most famous, but Colombia in 1953 and Venezuela in 1954 produced similar rulers. Communism had no such conspicuous success among the masses.

A significant change had also come about (though not as a result of war) in the way the United States used its preponderant power in the Caribbean. Twenty times in the first twenty years of the century American armed forces had intervened directly in neighbouring republics, twice going so far as to establish protectorates. Between 1920 and 1939 there were only two such interventions, in Honduras in 1924 and Nicaragua two years later. By 1936, there were no US forces anywhere in the territory of a Latin American state except by agreement (at the Guantanamo base, in Cuba). Indirect pressure also declined. In large measure this was a sensible recognition of changed circumstances. There was nothing to be got by direct intervention in the 1930s and President Roosevelt made a virtue of this by proclaiming a ‘Good Neighbour’ policy (he used the phrase for the first time, significantly, in his first inaugural address) that stressed non-intervention by all American states in one another’s affairs. (Roosevelt was also the first president of the United States ever to visit a Latin American country on official business.)

With some encouragement from Washington, this new policy opened a period of diplomatic and institutional co-operation across the continent (which was encouraged, too, by the worsening international situation and growing awareness of German interests at work there). It succeeded in bringing an end to the bloody ‘Chaco War’ between Bolivia and Paraguay, which raged from 1932 to 1935, and it culminated in a declaration of Latin American neutrality in 1939 which proclaimed a 300-mile neutrality zone in its waters. When, in the following year, a United States cruiser was sent to Montevideo to stiffen the resistance of the Uruguayan government to a feared Nazi coup, it was more evident than ever that the Monroe doctrine and its ‘Roosevelt corollary’ had evolved almost silently into something more like a mutual security system.

After 1945, Latin America was again to reflect a changing international situation. While United States policy was dominated by European concerns in the early phase of the Cold War, after Korea it began slowly to look southwards again. Washington was not unduly alarmed by occasional manifestations of Latin American nationalism, for all its anti-Yanqui flavour, but became increasingly concerned lest the hemisphere provide a lodgement for Soviet influence. With the Cold War came greater selectivity in United States support to Latin American governments. It also led, at times, to covert operations: for example, to the overthrow in 1954 of a government in Guatemala that had Communist support.

At the same time United States policy-makers were anxious that the footholds provided for Communism by poverty and discontent should be removed. They provided more economic aid (Latin America had only a tiny fraction of what went to Europe and Asia in the 1950s, but much more in the next decade) and applauded governments that said they sought social reform. Unfortunately, whenever the programmes of such governments moved towards the eradication of American control of capital by nationalization, Washington tended to veer away again, demanding compensation on such a scale as to make reform very difficult. On the whole, therefore, while it might deplore the excesses of an individual authoritarian regime, such as that of Cuba before 1958, the American government tended to find itself, as in Asia, supporting conservative interests in Latin America. This was not invariably so; some governments acted effectively, notably that of Bolivia, which carried out land reform in 1952. But it remained true that, as for most of the previous century, the worst-off Latin Americans had virtually no hearing from either populist or conservative rulers, in that both listened only to the towns – the worst-off, of course, were the peasants, for the most part American Indians by origin.

Yet, for all the nervousness in Washington, there was little revolutionary activity in Latin America. This was in spite of the victorious revolution in Cuba, of which much was hoped and feared at the time. It was in a number of respects a very exceptional problem. Cuba’s location within a relatively short distance of the United States gave it special significance. The approaches to the Panama Canal had often been shown to have even more importance in American strategic thinking than Suez had in the British. Secondly, Cuba had been especially badly hit in the Depression; it was virtually dependent on one crop, sugar, and that crop had only one outlet, the United States. This economic tie, moreover, was only one of several that gave Cuba a closer and more irksome ‘special relationship’ with the United States than had any other Latin American state. There were historic connections that went back before 1898 and the winning of independence from Spain. Until 1934 the Cuban constitution had included special provisions restricting Cuba’s diplomatic freedom. The Americans still kept their naval base on the island. There was heavy American investment in urban property and utilities, and Cuba’s poverty and low prices made it attractive to Americans looking for gambling and girls. All in all, it should not have been surprising that Cuba produced, as it did, a strongly anti-American movement with much popular support.

The United States was long blamed as the real power behind the conservative post-war Cuban regime, although after the dictator Batista came to power in 1952 this in fact ceased to be so; the State Department disapproved of him and cut off help to him in 1957. By then, a young nationalist lawyer, Fidel Castro, had already begun a guerrilla campaign against a very corrupt government. In two years he was successful. In 1959, as prime minister of a new, revolutionary, Cuba, he described his regime as ‘humanistic’ and, specifically, not Communist.

Castro’s original aims are still not known. Perhaps he was not clear himself what he thought. From the start he worked with a wide spectrum of people who wanted to overthrow Batista, from liberals to Marxists. This helped to reassure the United States, which briefly patronized him as a Caribbean Sukarno; American public opinion idolized him as a romantic figure and beards became fashionable among American radicals. The relationship quickly soured once Castro began to interfere with American business interests, starting with agrarian reform and the nationalization of sugar concerns. He also denounced publicly those Americanized elements in Cuban society that had supported the old regime. Anti-Americanism was a logical means – perhaps the only one – open to Castro for uniting Cubans behind the revolution, and there was little doubt that he shared some of these attitudes himself.

Soon the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba and began to impose other kinds of pressure as well. The American government became convinced that the island was likely to fall into the hands of the Communists upon whom Castro increasingly relied. It did not help when the Soviet leader Khrushchev warned the United States of the danger of retaliation from Soviet rockets if it acted militarily against Cuba and declared the Monroe doctrine dead; the State Department quickly announced that reports of its demise were greatly exaggerated. Finally, the American government decided to promote Castro’s overthrow by force.

It was agreed that this should be done by Cuban exiles. When the presidency changed hands in 1961, John Kennedy inherited this decision. Exiles were already training with American support in Guatemala, and diplomatic relations with Cuba had been broken off. Kennedy had not initiated these activities, but he was neither cautious nor thoughtful enough to impede them. This was the more regrettable because there was much else that boded well in the new president’s attitude to Latin America, where it had been obvious for some time that the United States needed to cultivate goodwill. As it was, the possibilities of a more positive approach were almost at once blown to pieces by the fiasco known as the ‘Bay of Pigs’ operation, when an expedition of Cuban exiles, supported by American money and arms, came to a miserable end in April 1961. Castro now turned in earnest towards the Soviets, and at the end of the year declared himself a Marxist-Leninist.

A new and much more explicit phase of the Cold War then began in the western hemisphere, and began badly for the United States. The American initiative incurred disapproval everywhere because it was an attack on a popular, solidly based regime. Henceforth, Cuba was a magnet for Latin American revolutionaries. Castro’s regime turned increasingly towards the Soviet model and his government pressed forward with policies that, together with American pressure, badly damaged the economy, but embodied egalitarianism and social reform (already in the 1970s, Cuba claimed to have the lowest child mortality rates in Latin America).

As a by-product of the Cuban revolution, there soon took place the most serious great power confrontation of the whole Cold War and perhaps its turning-point. In early 1962 Khrushchev decided to install Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, in part to defend the Cuban revolution and in part to gain a strategic advantage against the United States. The Americans already had their missiles in countries bordering the Soviet Union, Khrushchev told his colleagues; now the impulsive Soviet leader would cock a snook at the Americans while reassuring his revolutionary friends around the world that the USSR was the real friend of revolution, whatever their Chinese detractors said. Thus began a dangerous game, which by October 1962 saw Soviet nuclear warheads secretly placed in Cuba, along with medium-range missiles that could deliver them anywhere in the continental United States.

American photographic reconnaissance confirmed in October 1962 that the Soviets were building missile sites in Cuba. President Kennedy waited until this could be shown to be incontrovertible and then announced that the United States Navy would stop any ship delivering further missiles to Cuba and that those already in Cuba would have to be withdrawn. One Lebanese ship was boarded and searched in the days that followed; Soviet ships were only observed. The American nuclear strike force was prepared for war. After a few days and some exchanges of personal letters between Kennedy and Khrushchev, the latter agreed that the missiles should be removed.

This crisis by far transcended the history of the hemisphere, and its repercussions outside it are best discussed elsewhere. So far as Latin American history is concerned, even though the United States promised not to invade Cuba, it went on trying to isolate it as much as possible from its neighbours. Unsurprisingly, the appeal of Cuba’s revolution nevertheless seemed for a while to gain ground among the young of other Latin American countries. This did not make their governments more sympathetic towards Castro, especially when he began to talk of Cuba as a revolutionary centre for the rest of the continent. In the event, as an unsuccessful attempt in Bolivia showed, revolution was not likely to prove easy. Cuban circumstances had been very atypical. The hopes entertained of mounting peasant rebellion elsewhere proved illusory. Local Communists in other countries deplored Castro’s efforts. Potential recruits and materials for revolution turned out to be on the whole urban rather than rural, and middle class rather than peasants; it was in the major cities that guerrilla movements were within a few years making the headlines. Despite being spectacular and dangerous, it is not clear that they enjoyed wide popular support, even if the brutalities practised in dealing with them alienated support from authoritarian governments in some countries.

Anti-Americanism meanwhile continued to run high. Kennedy’s hopes for a new American initiative, based on social reform – an ‘Alliance for Progress’ as he termed it – made no headway against the animosity aroused by American treatment of Cuba. His successor as president, Lyndon Johnson, did no better, perhaps because he was less interested in Latin America than in domestic reform. The initiative was never recaptured after the initial flagging of the Alliance. Worse still, it was overtaken in 1965 by a fresh example of the old Adam of intervention, this time in the Dominican Republic, where, four years before, American help had assisted the overthrow and assassination of a corrupt and tyrannical dictator and his replacement by a reforming democratic government. When this was pushed aside by soldiers acting in defence of the privileged, who felt threatened by reform, the Americans cut off aid; it looked as if, after all, the Alliance for Progress might be used discriminately. But aid was soon restored – as it was to other right-wing regimes. A rebellion against the soldiers in 1965 resulted in the arrival of 20,000 American troops to put it down.

By the end of the decade the Alliance had virtually been forgotten, in part because of the persistent fears of Communism, which led American policy to put its weight behind conservatives everywhere in Latin America, and in part because the United States had plenty of other pressing problems. One ironic result was a new wave of attacks on United States property interests by governments that did not have to fear the loss of American support while the Communist threat seemed to endure. Chile nationalized the largest American copper company; the Bolivians took over oil concerns and the Peruvians American-owned plantations. In 1969 there was a historic meeting of Latin American governments at which no United States representative was present and Yanqui behaviour was explicitly and implicitly condemned. A tour undertaken by a representative of the president of the United States that year led to protest, riots, the blowing up of American property and requests to stay away from some countries. It was rather like the end of the previous decade, when a ‘goodwill’ tour by Eisenhower’s vice-president ended in his being mobbed and spat upon. All in all, it looked by 1970 as if Latin American nationalism was entering a new and vigorous period. If Cuba-inspired guerrillas had ever presented a danger, they appeared to do so no longer. Once the spur of an internal fear was gone there was little reason for governments not to try to capitalize on anti-American feeling.

Yet the real problems of Latin America were not being met. The 1970s and, still more, the 1980s revealed chronic economic troubles and by 1985 observers would speak of an apparently insoluble crisis. There were several sources for this. For all its rapid industrialization, the continent was threatened by the deadly combination of population growth and social inequity, which began to reach its worst effects just as the difficulties of the Latin American economies were again beginning to show their intractability. The aid programme of the Alliance for Progress patently failed to cope with them, and failure spawned quarrels over the use of American funds. Mismanagement produced huge foreign debts, which crippled attempts to sustain investment and achieve better trade balances. Social divisions remained menacing. Even the most advanced Latin American countries displayed extraordinary discrepancies of wealth and education. Constitutional and democratic processes, where they existed, seemed increasingly impotent in the face of such problems. In the 1960s and 1970s, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay all underwent prolonged authoritarian rule by soldiers and there were plenty of people willing to believe that only authoritarianism could bring about changes of which democratic and civilian government had proved incapable.

In the 1970s, the world began to hear more of torture and violent repression from countries like Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, once regarded as civilized and constitutional states. Chile had enjoyed a longer and more continuous history of constitutional government than most of its neighbours, which lasted until, in the 1970 election, a divided Right let in a minority socialist coalition. When the new government under Salvador Allende embarked upon what it called ‘the Chilean way to socialism’ – nationalization of the copper mines, land redistribution and mandatory wage increases for the poor – the pressures on the economy led to severe inflation and shortages of consumer goods. The Chilean Right mobilized its support in the streets, and the outcome was, in 1973, a military coup that had United States approval. Many middle-class Chileans, frightened by what looked like a worsening situation, went along with it too, in the belief that the overthrown government had been under Communist control, and thereby ended South America’s longest experiment in constitutional rule.

Chile’s new and authoritarian military government soon showed it had no qualms in mounting a brutal and wide-ranging persecution of its opponents and critics, using the most savage methods to do so. In the end it rebuilt the economy and even, in the late 1980s, began to look as if it might be able to restrain itself. But it drove ideological division deeper into Chilean society than the country had ever hitherto known, and that country became the outstanding symbol of dangers undoubtedly latent in other Latin American countries. Nor were all of these of the same kind. By the 1970s Colombia was already engaged in a civil war (still raging as the next century began) fed by struggles to control the country’s huge production of cocaine, which virtually partitioned the country.

On a troubled and distracted continent there had fallen, to cap its troubles, the oil crisis of the early 1970s. It sent the foreign debt problems of its oil-importing countries (that is, most of them other than Mexico and Venezuela) out of control. In the next two decades, many economic remedies were to be tried in one country or another, but all turned out to be unworkable or unenforceable. It seemed impossible to deal with runaway inflation, interest charges on external debt, the distortion in resource allocation arising from past bad government, and administrative and cultural shortcomings which nourished corruption. In 1979, the Argentinian government was overthrown by popular unrest, and in the next decade the Argentinians experienced an inflation rate of 20,000 per cent.

Latin America still appeared to be, and perhaps more than ever, an explosive, disturbed continent of nations growing less and less like one another, for all their shared roots, except in their distress. To the layers of differentiation laid down by Indian, slave, colonial and post-colonial experiences, all strongly reflected in differences of economic well-being, had now been added new divisions brought by the arrival in the 1950s and 1960s of the assumptions of developed, high-technology societies, whose benefits were available to the better-off, but not to the poor. Just as in Asia, though it has been less obvious, the strains of the impact of modern civilization on historically deep-rooted societies are now more visible than ever before, even if Latin America has been undergoing some of them since the sixteenth century. But in the 1980s they were expressed additionally through the terrorism displayed by radicals and authoritarians alike, and they continued to threaten civilized and constitutional standards achieved earlier.

In the 1990s, however, there took place what looked like a major restoration of constitutional and democratic government and economic recovery in the major Latin American states. In all of them, military government was formally set aside. Eventually only Cuba was left as an overtly non-democratic regime. This helped to produce better hemisphere relations. Argentina and Brazil both agreed to close their nuclear weapons programmes, while in 1991 they, together with Paraguay and Uruguay, agreed to set up a common market, Mercosur, which at once launched a major tariff-cutting exercise. In 1996, Chile adhered to it. This promising atmosphere was troubled only by a few attempted coups, while economic conditions held up. Unhappily those conditions began to falter continent-wide in the middle of the decade and by the end of it the International Monetary Fund had to mount new operations to rescue both Argentina and Brazil from severe troubles. Ominously, although the former had tied its currency to the United States dollar (itself a source of some of its difficulties), Brazil was again beginning to show the effects of inflation, while Argentina’s debt to foreigners had risen out of control. The international community braced itself to face a repudiation of unprecedented size. As 2001 came to an end, the population of Buenos Aires again took to the streets, and after some bloodshed and the casting out of three presidents in ten days, faced a renewal of deflation and hard times.

The early 2000s showed clearly the winners and losers in the economic growth that was beginning to take hold in most Latin American countries. While the economies of many countries grew more rapidly than they had done since the 1950s, the domestic returns of these advances were unevenly divided among the population. Brazil, for instance, is by most standards the most unequal society on earth. While the most advanced 10 per cent of its 170 million population has a living standard that equals the EU average, the poorest 50 per cent has seen little progress during the 1990s. The elections in many Latin American countries of left-wing governments in the early 2000s reflect a preoccupation with this growing inequality. But even the radical leaders – who spanned from the Venezuelan firebrand populist Hugo Chavez to the moderate socialist presidents Michelle Bachelet in Chile (elected 2006) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil (elected 2003) – are unwilling to touch the market-oriented reforms of the previous decade, which are widely held to have produced the first economic progress these countries have experienced for more than a generation. It is therefore likely that the contradiction between economic growth and abject poverty will remain the key issue in Latin America’s development for years to come.