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THE IMPLECATION OF WORLD WAR I & II

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Gunshot
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PostGunshot Sun 16 Mar 2014, 10:36 pm


War is as ancient as humanity. War is an enigma. For the many human activities, though, war is politics of self preservation by destructive military means. War is a continuing reality as has come to occupy a significant place in international relations, particularly in the areas of policy, defence and security. War establishes the closest link between life and death; politics and means of security. The history of wars is traced down to the ancient military (5000BC-1600AD).

The focus of this work is mainly on the world wars of (1914 – 1918) world war II of (1939 – 1945) and not all wars in the world. The wars took place between the allied and axis power. This work is looking at; holistically on the implications or effects of the world wars on the international system

AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR I

The fighting in world war I ended in western Europe when the Armistice took effect at 11; 00am GMT on November 11, 1918 and in the eastern Europe by the early 1920s.Dduriing and in the aftermath of the war the political, cultural, and social order was drastically changed in Europe, Asia and Africa, even outside the areas directly involved in the war. New countries were formed, old ones were abolished, international organizations were established, and many new and old ideologies took a film hold in people’s mind. The following are the implications of the World War 1:


BLOCKADE OF GERMANY

Throughout the period from the armistice on 11 November 1918 until the signing of the peace treaty with Germany on 28 June 1919, the Allies maintained the naval blockade of Germany that had begun during the war. As German was depending on imports, it is estimated that 523,000 civilians had lost their lives during the war, and a quarter million more died from disease or starvation. The continuation of the blockade after the fighting ended, as Robert Leckie wrote in Delivered from Evil, did much to “torment the German’s … driving them with the fury of despair into the arms of the devil”. The terms of the Armistice did allow Food to be shipped into Germany but the Allies required that Germany provides the ships. The blockade was not lifted until early July 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles was signed by most of the combatant nations.

TREATY OF VERSAILLES
One of the greatest implications of World War I was the introduction of an end to the war through the sign of treaty of Versailles. After the Paris conference of 1919, the signing of the treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, between Germany on the one side and France, Italy, Britain and other minor allied powers on the other side officially ended war between those countries; other treaties ended the belligerent relationships of the United States and other central powers. Included in the 440 articles of the treaty of Versailles were the demands that German Officially accept responsibility for starting the war and pay heavy economics reparations. This treaty drastically limited the German military machine; the German troops were reduced to 100,000 and the country was prevented from possessing major military armament such as tanks, warships and submarine.

INFLUENZA EPIDDEMIC
A separate but related event was the great 1918 Flu pandemic. A virulent new strain of the Flu First observed in the United States but misleadingly known as the Spanish Flu ; was accidentally carried to Europe by an infected American Force Personnel. The disease spread rapidly through the continental U.S, Canada, and Europe, eventually reaching around the globe, partially because many were weakened and exhausted by the famines of the world war.

In 2005, a study found out that, “The 1918 virus strain developed in birds and was similar to the “bird Flu” that today has spurred Fears of another world wide pandemic, yes proved to be a normal treatable virus that did not produce a heavy impact on the world health.

ECONOMIC AND GEOPOLITICAL CONSEQUENCES
The dissolution of the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and a little earlier ottoman empire created a large number of new small states in Eastern Europe. Internally these new states tended to have substantial ethnic minorities, which wished to unite with neighboring states where their ethnicity dominated. For example Czechoslovakia had Germans, Poles, Ruthenians and ukrain and Slovaks and Hungarians. The League of Nations sponsored various minority Treaties in an attempt to deal with the problem, but with the decline of league in the1930s these treaties became increasingly unenforceable. One consequence of the massive redrawing of borders and the political changes in the aftermath of World War I was the large numbers of European refugees. These and the refugees of the Russian civil war led to the creation of the Nansen passport. Since 1918, there has often been the expulsion of an ethnic group, such as the sudedten German. Economic and military co-operation amongst these small states was minimal ensuring that the defeated powers of Germany and the Soviet Union retained a talent capacity to dominate the reign. In the immediate aftermath of the war, defeat drove co-operation between Germany and the Soviet Union but ultimately these two powers would compete to dominate Eastern Europe.

REVOLUTIION
The single most important event precipitated by the privations of World War I was the Russian Revolution of 1917. A socialist and often explicitly communist revolutionary wave occurred in many other European countries from 1917 onwards in Germany and Hungary. As a result of the Russian Provisional Governments failure to cede territory, German and Austrian Forces defeated the Russian armies and the new communist government signed the Treaty of Brest – Litovsk in March 1918. In that treaty, Russia renounced all claims top Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and the territory of congress Poland and it was left to Germany and Austria –Hungary to determine. However, the Treaty of Brest – Litovsk was rendered obsolete when Germany was defeated later in 1918, leaving the status of much of Eastern Europe in an uncertain position.

GERMANY
In Germany, there was a socialist revolution which led to the brief establishment of a number of communist political systems in parts of the country, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the creation of the Weimar Republic.
On 28 June 1919, Germany which was not allowed representation was not present to sign the treaty of Versailles. The one-sided treaty by the victors placed blame for the entire war upon Germany (a view never accepted by German nationalist but argued by inter alias, German historian Fritz Fisher) Germany was forced to pay 132 billion marks ($31.5 billion, 6.6 million pounds) in reparations (a very large amount of its day which was finally paid off in October 2010). It was followed by the inflation in the western Republic, a period of hyperinflation in Germany between 1921 and 1923. In this period the work of that paper marks with respect to the earlier commodity Gold marks was reduced to the trillionth of its value. On December 1922 the Reparation Commission declared German in default.
Because Germany could mobilize the single strongest army in Europe – a possibility seen as an on going threat by France, blaming Germany for the war created a justification to force Germany to permanent reduce the size of its army to100,000 men, renounce tanks and have no air force. Germany saw relatively small amount of territory transferred to Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium, a larger amount to France and the greatest portion as part of re-established Poland. Germany s over sea’s colonies were divided amongst a number of Allied countries, many Germans never accepted the treaty as legitimate and later gave their political support to Adolf Hitler, who was arguably the first national politician to both speak out and take action against the treaty condition.

RUSSSIAN EMPIRE
Russia, already suffering socially and economically, was torn by deadly civil war that left more than 5.5 million people dead and large areas of the country devastated. During the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequence Russia Civil War, many non –Russian nations gained brief or longer lasting periods of independence. Finland, Latvia and Estonia gained relatively permanent independence, although the Baltic States were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940. Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan were established as independent states in the Caucasus region. In 1922 these countries were proclaimed as soviet Republics, and eventually absorbed into the Soviet Union. After World War I, the Soviet Union was fortunate that German had lost the war as it was able to reject the Treaty of Brest – Litovsk.
OTTOMAN EMPIRE
At the end of the war, the Allies occupied Constantinople and the Ottoman government collapsed. The treaty of Sevres, a plan designed by the Allies to dismember the remaining Ottoman territories, was signed in 1920. The Lausanne Treat Formally acknowledged the new League of Nations mandate in the Middle East, the cession of their territories on the Arabian Peninsula, and the British sovereignties over Cyprus. The league of Nation, granted class a mandates for the French mandate of Syria and Lebanon and British mandate of Mesopotamia and Palestine, parts of the Ottoman Empire on the Arabia peninsula became part of what is today know as Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire became a pivotal milestone in the creation of the modern Middle East, the result of which bore witness to the creation of new conflicts and hostilities in the region.

United Kingdom
In United Kingdom, funding the war had severe economic costs, from being the world largest overseas investors; it became one of its biggest debtors with interest payments forming around 40% of all government spending. Inflation more than doubled between 1914 and its peak in 1920, while the value of the pound sterling fell by 61.2%. Reparations in the form of free German coal depressed the local industry, precipitating the 1926 German strike. British private investments abroad were sold.
The military historian correli Barnett has argued that “in objective truth the great war in no way inflicted crippling economic damage on Britain “but that the war crippled British psychologically but in no other way” less concrete changes include the growing assertiveness of commonwealth nations. battles such as Gallipoli for Australia and New Zealand, and vimy Rigde of Canada lead to increased national pride and a greater reluctance to remain subordinate to Britain, leading to the growth of diplomatic autonomy in the 1920ss. Traditionally loyal dominions such as New found land were deeply disillusioned by Britain’s apparent disregard for their soldiers, eventually leading to the unification of Newfoundland into the confederations of Canada. Colonies such as India and Nigeria also became increasingly assertive because of their participation in the war.
In Ireland the delay in finding a resolution to home rule issue, partly Caused by the war, as well as the 1916 Easter Rising and a failed attempt to introduce conscription in Ireland, increased support for separatists radicals, and led indirectly to the outbreak of the lrish free state of independence of 1919. The creation of the Irish Free State that followed this conflict in effect represented a territorial loss for the United Kingdom that was all but equal to the loss sustained by Germany.

UNITED STATES
The Espionage Act of 1917 stayed on the law books; over the years it is used against hundreds of spies, but also leaders and whistle blowers, such as Ellsberg and Russo in the 1970s. Disillusioned by the Failure of the war to achieve the high ideals promised by President Woodrow Wilson, however, American commercial interests did Finance Europe’s rebuilding and reparations effort in German, at least until the order of the Great Depression.

FRANCE
France annexed the Independent Republic of Alsace – Lorraine, the country which had been established in the wake of Kaiser Wilhelm its abdication, corresponding to the region which had been ceded to the German Empire during the 1870 Franco – Prussian War. At the 1919 piece conference, Prime Minister Clemenceau’s aim was to ensure that Germany would not seek revenge in the following years. The destruction brought upon the French territory was to be indemnified by the reparations negotiated at Versailles. This Financial Imperative dominated France’s Foreign Policy through out the 1920s, leading to the 1923 occupation of the Ruler in order to force Germany to pay. Also extremely important in the war was the participation of French colonial troops, including the Senegalese tirailleurs, from Indochina, North Africa and Madagascar. When these soldiers returned to their homelands and continued to be treated as second class citizens, many became nuclei of pro-Independence groups.

ITALY
After the war, Italy failed to annex Dalmatian (which had been promised by Britain in the treaty of London to induce Italy to join the war) and had to fight some more years to annex the city of Flume, which had an Italian population and this led several Italian politicians to speak of a mutilated victory. Indeed, it should not have been difficult to see bow among the Allied Powers, Italy had been the one which benefited the most from the outcome of war with the annexation of Istria, Trentrno – Alto Adige Isudtiro, Triestle, Zara and some Dalmatian Islands, Italy had a substantial territorial expansion.
The Italian politicians failed to perceive the positive elements of peace treaties and stressed the negative ones and so the myth of the “mutilated victory” spread fuelling the Fascist propaganda and helping Benito Mussolion size power. During the war, Italy had suffered more casualties than Britain and fewer than France and the social problems she was facing afterward.

CHINA
The Republic of China had been one of the Allies, during the war, it had sent thousands of laborers to France. At the Paris peace conference in 1919, the Chinese delegation called for an end to western imperialistic institutions in China, but was rebuffed. China requested at least the formal restoration of its territory of Jiao Zhou Bay, under German colonial control since 1898. But the western Allies rejected china’s request, instead granting transfer to Japan of all of Germany’s pre-war territory and right in China. Subsequently, China did not sign the treaty of Versailles, instead signing a separate peace treaty with Germany in 1921.
The western Allies substantial accession to Japan’s territorial ambitions at China’s expense led to man fourth movement in China, a social and political movement that had profound influence over subsequent Chinese history. The may fourth movement is often cited as the birth of Chinese nationalism, and both the Kuomintang and Chinese communist party consider the movement kto be an important period in their own histories.

JAPAN
Because of the treaty that Japan has signed with Great Britain in 1902. Japan was one of the Allies during the war with British assistance; Japanese Forces attacks Germany’s territories in Shandong province in China, including the East Asian coaling bar of the imperial German navy. The German Forces were defeated and surrendered to Japan in November of 1914. The Japanese navy also succeeded in seizing several Germany’s Island possessions in the western pacific, the marines, Caroline’s and Marshall’s.
At the Paris peace conference in 1919. Japan was granted all of Germany’s pre-war rights in shading province in China (despite China also being one of the Allies during the war). Also Japan was granted a permanent seat on the council of League of Nations.



SOCIAL TRAUMA
The experiences of the war in the west are common assumed to have led to a sort of collective national trauma afterward for all the participating countries. The optimism of 1900 was entirely gone and those who fought in the war became what is known as “the Lost Generation” because they never fully recovered from their experience. On the other hand some people argue that it is not at all clear that any society was traumatized. Not that the human losses were heavily mourned. This was the later rain in the west, during the 1930s because by then the great Depressions and the rise of Nazism made the sacrifices of the First World War seen meaningless. This was not clear in the 1920s. Neither Hitler’s German nor the Soviet Union displayed any evidence that the First World War was at all traumatic. One give some reminder of the sacrifices of the generation was one of the first times in warfare whereby more men had died in battles than to disease, which had been the cause of deaths in most previous wars. The Russo – Japanese war was the first war where battle deaths outnumbered disease deaths, but it had been fought on a much smaller scale between first two nations.
This social trauma made itself manifest in, many different ways. Some people were revolved by nationalism and what it had caused; so, they began to work toward a more internationalist world through organization, such as the League of Nations.

LEAGUE OF NATIONS
The League of Nations was established at the end of the First World War by the victor powers meeting at the Paris peace conference. Its strongest advocated was US President Woodrow Wilson. It was established with the aim of solving the attempt of another world war as help in settling the aftermath of the First World War. It is one of the most prominent implications of the World War I. Despite all attempt to curtail any other war, it could not stop the outbreak of the second world war in 1939.

EFFECTS OF WORLD WAR II
The effect of World War II had far reaching implications for most of the world. Many millions of lives had been lost as a result of the war. Germany was divided into four quadrants, which were controlled by the Allied Powers – The United States, United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union – and itself was one of the survivors. The war can be identified to varying degrees as the catalyst for many continental, national land local phenomena, such as the redrawing of European borders, the birth of the United Kingdom’s welfare state, the communist revolution in china and Eastern Europe, the creation of Israel and the division of Germany and Korea and later of Vietnam. In addition, many organizations have roots in the second world war; for example the United Nations, the World Bank, the world Trade Organization and international monetary Fund. Technologies such as nuclear Fission, the electronic computer and the Jet engine, also appeared during this period.
A multipolar world was replaced by a bipolar one dominated by the two most powerful victors, the United States and Soviet Union, which became known as the superpowers. The following were the implication of the world war II.

EUROPE IN RUINS
At the end of the war, millions of refugees were homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and most of the European industrial infrastructure was destroyed.



A BORDER REVISION AND POPULATLION TRANSFER
As a result of the new borders drawn by the victorious nations, large population suddenly found themselves in hostile territory. The main beneficiary of this revision was the Soviet Nation which expanded its borders at the expense of Germany, Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romans and Japan. The Soviet Union also acquired the three independent States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which had declared their neutrality before the outbreak of WW II. A minor temporary beneficiary was France, Which in 1947 annexed the German State of Saar as a nominally independent protectorate under French economic control? Poland was compensated for its losses to the Soviet Union by most of Germany east. In total, Germany lost roughly a quarter of its territory. Numerous Germans were expelled, mostly from the cede German territories and from the Sudetenland. Many died and historians debate to this day the death rate, several hundreds of thousands of poles, and Japanese where also expelled.

REPARATIONS
The eastern victors demanded payment of war reparation from the defeated nations, and in the Paris Peace Treaty, the Soviet Unions enemies – Hungary, Finland and Romania were required to pay $ 300,000,000 each to the Soviet Union. Italy was required to pay $360,000,000, share chiefly between Greece, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. The much larger reparations from occupied Germany to Russia were to be paid not by goods or money but by the transfer of capital goods, such as dismantled manufacturing plants. Germany and Italy also paid in the form of POW – provided Forced labor, 100,000 in Britain and 700,000 in France. The US settled for appropriating German patents as soon as all German Company assets in the US. The “intellectual reparations” such as patents and blueprints, taken by the US and the UK amounted close to $10 billion, equivalent of around $100 billion in 2006. The program of also acquiring German scientist and technicians for the U.S was also used to deny the German scientist to the Soviet Union. The U.S eventually stopped the shipment of dismantled Factories from the US zone of occupation easy because of increasing friction with Russia.

PLANS FOR GERMANY
The initial plans proposed by the United States were harsh. The morgenthau plan of 1944 called for stripping Germany of the industrial areas of the resources required for war. The main industrial areas of the Rubr and Silesia were to be removed from Germany, Germany’s main source pf coal and iron. While the morgenthan plan was never implemented in its original form, it did end up greatly influencing events. In occupied Germany, the morgenthan plan lived on in the US occupation directive JCs 1067 and in the Allied ”industrial disarmament” plans, designed to reduce German economic might and to destroy German’s capability to wage war by complete or partial de-industrialization and restriction imposed on utilization of Remaining production population. The first industrial plan for Germany, signed in 1946, required the destruction of 1,500 manufacturing plants. The purpose of this was to lower German heavy industry output to roughly 50% of its 1938 level.
The western powers worst fear was that the poverty and hunger would drive the Germans to communism. Generally stated “There is no choice between a communist on 1,500 calories a day and a believer in a democracy on a thousand”.

MARSHALL PLAN
In view of the continued poverty and famine in Europe and with the unset of the cold war it’s important to bring as much of German as possible into the western camp. It became apparent that a change of policy was reassured. The most notable of this change was a plan established by the United States secretary of State George marshal, the “European Recovery Program”, better know as marshal plan.
For Western Germany, the psychological impact of the marshal plan was large. In monetary terms, Germany received only half of what Britain received; in addition, German was eventually forced to repay the majority of the money. In the Netherlands the Bakker-schur plan to demand a huge monetary compensation and even to annex a part of Germany that would have doubled the countries size was dropped. But many Germans living in the Netherlands were declared hostile subjects and put into a concentration camp in an operation cases Black Tulip. A total of 3, 621 Germans were ultimately deported.

END OF EUROPEAN IMPERIALISM
The destruction of Europe and the destruction of a signified portion of the United Kingdom’s cities(via aerial bombing) also ruined the reputation of the imperial nations in the eyes of their colonies coupled with the enormous expenses incurred in the war, an empire was perceived to be an unnecessarily expensive possession. This has provoked the rapid decolonization process that saw the empire of the United Kingdom and others swept away.
These tendencies helped India and Pakistan become independent from the British Empire in August 1947. Soon Malaysia and other south East Asian colonies also became independent. The Netherlands lost Dutch East Indies and France lost Indochina. In just a few decades, most Asia and African colonies where independent.

SUPER POWERS
The immense destruction wrought over the course of the war caused a sharp decline in the influence of the great powers. After the war, the Union of Soviet Republics and the United States both became Formidable Forces. The US suffered very little during the war and because of military and industrial exports became a formidable manufacturing power. This led to a period of Wealth and Prosperity for the us in the field, of industry, agriculture and technology,.
While the homeland of the United States was untouched by the war, quite the opposite was true in the Soviet Union. At the height of the Axis advance in 1941, the wehrmach got within 20 kilometers of Moscow. Although the Germans were pushed back from Moscow by Soviet winter counter thrusts in early summer 1942, the wehrmachts operation Blue in summer 1942 pushed Russian Forces north east of the Black sea to Stalingrad.
The Soviet Union also suffered unprecedented casualties. From 1941 to 1945 the Red Army lost over 10 million killed and more than 18 million wounded. Civilian losses were also immense; most estimates range from 14 to 17 million civilians killed. Most civilians in the occupied lands in the western USSR were either shot or left to starve or freeze to death by the Germans. The total deaths resulting from the war amounted to roughly fourteen percent of the USSR’S and sixteen percent of Poland’s total pre-war population. By comparison, the United States lost about 0.30% of its total pre-war population.
Because of the immense loss of life and the destruction of land and industrial capacity, the USSR was as an economic and strategic disadvantage relative to the United States. The USSR was, however in a better economic and strategic position than any other continental European power.




POLITICAL EFFECTS

European Union
The European Union grew and of the European coal and steel community (ECSC), which was founded in 1951 by the six founding members; Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Its purpose was to pool the steel and coal resources of the member states, and support the economies of the participating countries. It also helped to defuse tensions between countries which had recently been enemies in war. In time, the economic merger grew to adding members and broadening in scope, to become the European Economic Community, and later the European Union.

United Nations
Because the League of Nations had failed to actively prevent the war in 1945 a new international alliance was considered and then created, the United Nations (UN). The UN also was responsible for the initial recognition of the establishment kof the modern state of Israel in 1948, in part as a response to the holocaust.
The UN operates within the parameters of the United Nations charter, and the reason for the UN’s Formation is outlined in the preamble to the United Nations charter. Unlike its predecessor, the United Nations has taken a more active role in the world, such as fighting disease and providing humanitarian aid to nations in distress. The biggest advantage the United Nations has are the League of Nations is the presence of world superpowers such as the United States and Russia, for the League had little actual international power because of the absence of these nations



Cold War
The end of World War II is seen by many as marking the end of the United Kingdom’s position as a global superpower and the catalyst for the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as the dominant powers, in the world. Friction had been building up between the two before the end of the war, and with the collapse of Nazi Germany relations spiraled downward. Germany was partitioned into four zones of occupation. The American, British and French zones were grouped a few years later into West Germany and the Soviet zones because East Germany. These partitions were initially informed, but as the relationship between the victors deteriorated the military lines of demarcation became the defacto country boundaries. The cold war had begun and soon two blows emerged; NATO and the Warsaw pact. This continued until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Technology
The massive research and development involved in the Manhattan project in order to quickly achieve a working nuclear weapon design greatly impacted the scientific community, among other things creating a network of national laboratories in the United States. In addition, the pressing for numerous calculations for various things like code breaking and ballistics tables kick – started the development of electronic computer technology.

SOCIAL EFFECTS
One of the social effects which affected almost all participants to a certain degree was the increased participation of women in the work-force (where they took the place of many men during the war years), though this was some what reduced in the decades following the war.
According to historian Anthony Beevor, amongst others, in his book Berlin – The Downfall 1945 the advancing Red Army had left a massive trail of raped women and girls of all ages behind them. As a result of this trauma East German women’s attitude towards s*x was affected for a long time and it caused a social problem between men and women.

Military effects
In the military sphere, WWII marked the coming of age of airpower. Advanced aircraft and guided missiles made the battleship, once the queen of the worlds oceans and fixed fortification such as coastal artillery obsolete.

The war was the high water mark for mass armies while huge conscript armies were seen again, after this victory the major powers relied upon small highly-trained and well – equipped militaries, most important of all, world war II ushered in the nuclear era, with the dropping of the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 by US.

Trials for war crimes
After the war, many high-ranking Germans were hanged for war crimes, as dwell as the mass murder of the Jews in the Holocaust committed mainly on the area of General Government in the Nuremberg trials. Similarly Japanese leaders were prosecuted in the Tokyo war crime. Although the deliberate targeting of civilians was already defined as a war crime and lit had been used extensive by both sides, most notably in Poland, Britain, Germany and Japan.

Defeat of Japan
The defeat of Japan and its occupation by Allied Forces, led to a westernization of Japan that was more far reaching than might otherwise have occurred.
Japan quickly modernized into a strong western – style market and industrial economy.

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