THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Human Growth/Development
The theme that marks this period is growth--incredible growth or development in the human picture. During the second half of the 20th century the world was treated to a period of peace that permitted both the rapid rise in the size of the human population and in the equally rapid growth in its accumulated wealth. And along with this numeric growth went an incredible growth in the quality of life--particularly in terms of the individual's ability to live in a vastly wider realm of personal freedom and personal economic opportunity.
The Developmental Dynamics of the Cold War
To be sure, the dark clouds of Cold War hung over the world for most of this "peaceful" period. But the Cold War between Russia and America remained stalemated in terms of direct confrontation between the "superpowers" for all but the last ten years of this period (when in the late 1980s the Russian political/economic system built under Stalin collapsed).
Living within the American sphere of influence and receiving vital industrial encouragement from America as a buffer to an expansionistic Russia, West Europe during this half-century enjoyed a wonderful peace under which it could rebuild itself. Indeed, without the incentive of the Cold War, it is unlikely that (West) Germany [as well as Japan in East Asia] would have seen such a quick post-war return to both national freedom and prosperity.

Even East Europe, though under Russian dominance and industrial exploitation during most of this period, also experienced a measurable amount of growth and stability, though much less extensively than in the West. In the end the slowness of the Eastern growth in comparison to the West's growth proved to be the undoing of Stalinism in the East--even within Russia itself.

Yes, there were wars in and around the rest of the world--as for instance in Vietnam, in which the Cold War mentality drew America into an ill-fated intervention which ravaged Vietnam and backfired on America. But these conflicts generally remained quite limited in scope, in part because the superpowers would intervene to create a stalemate that served to prevent the conflict from escalating into a larger direct Russian-American confrontation. The stalemate, of course, also served to force peace upon the local combatants.

Certainly the superpowers were at times blamed for being the cause, or at least the worsening, of local conflicts. But in fact, a fair appraisal of history reveals that the actual level of conflict in our world during this era was greatly reduced from what it might have been because of the Cold War diplomatic stalemate (with the important exception of Vietnam, where America's president Johnson determined to involve his country in direct, unilateral military action). Indeed, in those conflicts in which the superpowers showed little interest in controlling the outcomes, violence achieved historically high levels. And when the Cold War ended in the late 1980s, violence returned even to Europe itself when there were no longer competing superpower interests to force management of local conflicts.

Overall, the Cold War was responsible for much of the positive development in and around the rest of the world. Most importantly, the competition to show off the respective American and Russian social systems caused these two countries to busy themselves in "developmental" work which aided enormously in the creation of important industrial infrastructure in the industrially "emergent" world of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The Material Basis of an Emerging World Order
The secret to the might of the superpowers was their well organized industrial societies--geared to create enormous wealth in mining and manufacture, commercial building and private housing, roads and highways, naval ports and airports, mechanized farming, medical care, schooling and higher educational facilities.
In Russia, this was oriented toward the support of an enormous military establishment, in conformity to an agenda in which all economic life was subordinate to the needs of the "democratic working-class struggle against bourgeois capitalism." In America this was certainly an important factor as well, the military build-up necessary to defend the "democratic Free World against Soviet (Russian) communism."

But in America even more of the thrust was in support of the build-up of personal wealth and economic power. Thus while Russia's industrial economy was heavily oriented toward military ends, the American industrial economy was heavily oriented toward family and individual consumer goals: single-family homes, family automobiles, home furnishings, refrigerators, televisions, washers and dryers, dishwashers, kitchen gadgets. By the 1960s it also pointed to the fast-rising industry of leisure services (professional sports, vacation sites, restaurants and fast-food servers, skiing and water sports, etc.).

In the competition between the superpowers they put their respective accomplishments before the world as a choice: the rapid rags-to-riches rise of the Russians after World War Two through its tightly organized social system--versus the quite apparent wealth-for-everyone accomplishments of the American free-consumer system. Though the Soviet system was quite attractive at first (the 1960s) to those Asian, African and Latin American societies which hoped to duplicate the Russian rapid rise to power, in the end it was the consumer society projected by America that won the day--even in Russia itself. By 1990, America had clearly won the Cold War through its sheer ability to create greater wealth. It literally spent the Russian system to death.

The Victory of Individualism: The Rise of the "Professional"
But there was more to this growth and development than mere material growth. This was the age of a "coming out" of the individual, a time in which the will of the individual was sovereign, was "king." This was particularly the case in America--though it was an idea that was destined to spread throughout the world--even to Russia where "working-class patriotism" rather than "bourgeois individualism" was supposed to be paramount.
One of the biggest reason for this development was that in America the basic goods that make for life were no longer tied to property and the family system that protected and passed on that property--as had been the case since time immemorial. Access to the vast wealth of the nation was through a very fluid money economy. This was, to be sure still built heavily on accumulated (family) capital. But it was also built on an entrepreneurial spirit which invited individuals to cultivate their own ability to offer goods and services as their leverage into the economic system. And it also rewarded labor services quite heavily--at least for a while.

It was this entrepreneurial spirit that eventually became the hallmark of emergent America. And it was an entrepreneurial spirit built on educational advancement, in which the most important source of capital development was in this cultivation of the expertise of the "professional" careerist through years of university education--and on-going continuing professional development after that. It was a system offering wide-open economic opportunity for those willing to play the game.

This became true particularly as blue-collar industry began to dry up in America in the 1970s--as it became cheaper for corporations, even American corporations, to produce most material goods in the rising industrial societies of East and South Asia. This shift of industrialism out of America only speeded up in America the development of the economy built on the exchange of professional services--as industrial goods became relatively cheap and as professional services became more important to the strength of the overall American economy.

Rapidly Changing Cultural Norms in the Post-Industrial West
None of this happened by accident.

Won the War / Lost the Peace?
By 1950 America was confused--and increasingly bitter about these developments. The "great lie" of the War that Stalin was really one of "us" was now coming to haunt American politics. With the new nuclear arms at the disposal of Soviet Russia--then Communist China--paranoia ran high. Americans began to ask who it was that had put that deception over us ("What traitor gave these Communists the secret of producing the atomic bomb anyway?").

Korea
Then in mid-1950, all the way to the other side of the world in East Asia, Communists from North Korea invaded South Korea, where America had supposedly made similar commitments (though the withdrawal of American troops from Korea just prior to the invasion sent confusing signals to everyone). Truman knew he needed to act in order to keep the integrity of American promises alive. The United States was again involved in war.

The Nuclear Arms Race
The McCarthy Era
With the unexpected outbreak of the Korean War and the rapid growth in Soviet nuclear power, the frustration and anger of Americans mounted rapidly. Indeed, the mood of trying to fix responsibility for the breakdown of the expected new world order of (American-directed) international peace soon degenerated into a witch-hunt. This mood was aided and abeted to a great degree by Senator Joe McCarthy, who capitalized on this mood to promote himself as the foremost anti-Communist American--the measure of true blue Americanism. By the early 1950s, no one was safe from anti-Communist suspicion--least of all "slick" government professionals.
These were perilous times psychologically in mid-century America. Americans have always liked their challenges to have neat Dark-Light distinctions about them. Certainly what was becoming known as the "Cold War" by the onset of the 1950s had those qualities. But the problem with the Cold War was that it was not easy to tell where the Dark was and where the Light was.

Was the darkness enemy nations such as Russia--or China (which fell to the Communists in 1949)--or North Korea? Or was it "Communism," that secretive international conspiracy that threatened to swallow up free people and nations everywhere with its authoritarianism? Was the enemy a "foreigner"--or was it even some of "our own" who had been helping the enemy. Who could even be trusted any more?

Economic Wealth
Despite the emotional strains of the times, this was a very good time to be an American. The material payoff was astonishing. America was the only country to have escaped World War Two with its industry intact. Europe was now rebuilding--rapidly--and needed heavy-industrial goods to get back on its feet. We were the only country producing those goods--and the orders flowed in. We consequently experienced prosperity such as had never been known in the world before. The average American working-class family lived like royalty.

Move from Blue Collar Status to the Middle Class
Democracy Vindicated
But our good fortune was never understood in these economic terms. Rather, our good fortunes were attributed to our national culture that we were making so much ado about. We were supposedly so successful because we were the most Liberal, democratic and free-thinking people in the world. The "American Way" seemed to be the model of human political, economic, social, cultural and intellectual perfection--which we celebrated in every American institution: in our homes, schools, public assemblies, civic clubs--and even churches. It was our true religion.

American Christianity as Part of the Amalgam
The Experiment with the Boomer Generation
This was also the age of George Orwell, Ayn Rand and Dr. Spock. It was not merely Communism we were up against. The greatest danger to human life seemed to many Americans to be public and personal authority of any kind. The consensus on this theme was amazingly wide in America of the 1950s.
Thus to protect against the great evil of our times--authoritarianism--we set out to instruct our own "Baby Boomer" children in the techniques of questioning--nay, challenging--any and all authority. This would be our "first line of defense" in the Cold War. This would be our strongest guarantee against the danger of the takeover of our nation by authoritarian Communism.

Public education was thus not only a process of learning the 3 "R's"--but also of assimilating the message of heroic individualism. John Dewey was finally being vindicated.

But once again, the very simplicity of our logic was to come to haunt us in the days ahead. We were heading into the turbulent 60s.

In the early part of the 1960s, America was at the height of its glory. But at the same time, the "American Way" was showing signs of defects: 1) in its racism against Blacks and 2) in its heavy-handed policy in Vietnam. While an older generation of Americans (the "Vets") stayed uncritically loyal to the American Way--American youth (the "Boomers"), trained emotionally for just such a moment, became critical--eventually radically so.

The Civil Rights Movement
John F. Kennedy came to office in 1961 with the intention of straightening out the injustices of American racism (which America supposed at the time was essentially Southern phenomenon, largely legal in nature) by pressing for laws which would give Southern Blacks equal voting power with the Whites. Actually, he was not a grand success in getting Congress to move with him.
But his effort was the signal for a massive movement by Southern Blacks, joined by crusading young White Liberals (mostly from the North) to force political change on the South through "civil disobedience," borrowing from Gandhi's tactics which proved effective in driving British rule from India some 15 years earlier.

Key in the leadership of this movement was the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He organized Black boycotts of White businesses that refused to treat Blacks as equals to Whites; he organized "sit-ins" at "Whites-only" eating establishments, and he directed a well-publicized protest march through the South, which brought the wrath of the North down on the South when Southern police turned firehoses and dogs on the marchers.

Kennedy himself did not live to see the outcome of all this. In November of 1963 he was assassinated--and replaced in office by Lyndon Johnson, who not only continued Kennedy's policies, but proved much more effective in getting Congress to back them.

The Civil Rights Movement Turns Surly

By 1964, a stream of civil rights legislation began to pour forth--forcing the South to let go of a "color" social barrier that had long been established in the South, which even the Civil War had not eradicated.

Not surprisingly, these measures were followed by a rush of pent-up Black aggression, registered as the burnings of American inner cities, which came to be an almost regular summer-time occurrence during the 1960s. The Black mood, in the face of rapid loosening of the legal barriers which had long held them "in place," grew increasingly militant. The cities became a small version of a war zone as the legal order began to wear at the edges and then slowly come apart. Throughout the 1960s, urban crime statistics grew uglier and uglier.

Vietnam
The War of the Generations
By the end of the 1960s a full-blown cultural war was on between the two American generations, 1) the older, almost blindly patriotic, World War Two "Vets," and 2) their "Boomer" children who were equally blindly anti-patriotic, blaming this same America for being the cause of most of the ills of the world. Draft cards, American flags, the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) buildings on university campuses became the symbolic centers of the battle--as the youth torched all three in their indignation against the tyranny of the American Establishment.
Anger mounted--until finally in 1971 the country was snapped to its senses with the killing of a number of student protesters by National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University. The event was a dose of icy water on the hot tempers of both sides. It numbed the senses of the country.

The end result of this "numbing" was the "dropping out" of masses of American youth from their American idealism--and their "turning on" to all forms of self-indulgence. In the meantime their parents finally began to ask themselves if the cause of unquestioning patriotism did not have its limits. So begin to question they did.

As we edged into the 1960s, Western Europe was beginning to show signs of new strength.

Germany
Under the kindly paternalism of the aged Konrad Adenauer, Germany was slowly making an economic, political and moral comeback from its near total destruction in 1945. But it made this comeback by playing down its "German-ness" and emphasizing its role as a builder of the "New Europe."

France
For a while after World War Two France also floundered, economically, politically and spiritually, not sure who to blame for the country's war-time humiliation, not sure how France was to get back on track. There was the continually nagging question of the continuance of France's imperial role, even though it was a cultural rather than an economic imperialism.
But this is exactly what made its relations with Arab Algeria (just across the Mediterranean from France) so catastrophic. During the 1950s France pushed ever closer to the brink of a violent civil war over whether to hold Algeria as a French cultural outpost--or let the country go free as an independent Arab state and lose its considerable cultural investment there.

In 1958 Charles de Gaulle militarily seized control of the chaotic and politically deadlocked French 4th Republic. He installed a new 5th Republic in its place, became its first President, and proceeded to overhaul all French government--and the groups and factions which had been behind the old politics. Most importantly, and much to the surprise of many, he decreed Algerian independence from France (1962)--and in one blow (which nearly cost him his life) got rid of France's most destructive issue.

He then attempted to re-focus French (and European) political instincts around a revitalized spirit of "nationalism," a philosophy which had understandably been on the decline since World War One. He did so principally by creating the specter of an Anglo-American cultural "imperialism" threatening the life of a New Europe.

This seemed to stir the patriotic fervor of a surprisingly large number of the French. Needless to say, America was extremely put off by it all. But mostly the rest of Europe "tolerated" de Gaulle--as they knew how vital he was to France, and how vital France was to the rest of Western Europe.

De Gaulle's Downfall
Eventually de Gaulle's ego got him in trouble even with his own French. He had not handled well the "events of May" of 1968--when it seemed that all of French youth went on the rampage, especially in Paris where they erected the barricades, the symbols of revolution, and proceeded to fight the police when they came to remove them.
The issues that had the youth so agitated were never clear. There was much idealistic revolutionary rhetoric thrown around by the youth--but no real agenda. Possibly the students were venting their anger that their university degrees no longer were leading inevitably to placement in the economic and social order as "elite." How could it when de Gaulle had vastly expanded the number of French universities--and the number of young people who were now university graduates?

But this was more than a French phenomenon. German youth were heavily involved--contributing the more violent instincts behind this rebellion. Much as American educators had been building an "anti-communist" educational strategy in America by creating a young generation of Americans guaranteed to see any and all authority as a red flag--American educators in occupied post-war Germany had also seen to it that German youth would be treated to the same curriculum. This was a deliberate part of the de-Nazification of the German spirit. They succeeded--brilliantly--in creating a new breed of Germans guaranteed to defy any and all authority.

In any case, the late spring/early summer of 1968 was a wild time in Europe--but especially in France. In many ways it looked as if de Gaulle had lost control over French life. He was so distressed that he put his presidency to the test of a referendum on the issue--threatening to resign if the French did not vote him full confidence. They did not. He stepped down. The era of Charles de Gaulle was over. But France moved on ahead nonetheless--now quite able to manage its political affairs without him.

Britain
England struggled on for a while in the feeble attempt to continue to act like a major world power. But the war had left England depleted--and unable to keep together the great Empire that once fed the British economy. So England floundered in its comeback, confused and uncertain of what it was to "comeback" to.
Gandhi had never really let up on the British in his demand for Indian independence from the British. With a Laborite government (led by Clement Atlee) replacing the Conservative government of Winston Churchill (even before War's end) the British government showed little interest in resisting his demand. In 1947 the British turned over the rule of the "gem" of the Empire to national rule. Unfortunately in India, that was the signal for ancient Muslim-Hindu hatred to have free play, resulting in a horrible display of murderous instincts on the part of both groups. Gandhi himself was a victim of the violence, assassinated by a Hindu fanatic who resented Gandhi's preachings to his own people about religious tolerance. It was a shock to India to loose its own national "father" even as the dream of independence was just starting to be fulfilled. The shock served to bring some order to India as Gandhi's friend Jawaharlal Nehru took over the political leadership of the country.

England--with the heart of its Empire gone, now could feel its greatly diminished importance and power, not only political but also economic. Hard times set in upon England. Economic recovery from the war was slow--and sometimes even seeming stalled out in comparison to the rate of growth of some of the continental European economies. Great Britain was not feeling so Great.

A chance came for Britain to move on to new things, to become part of a "post-national" Europe, where Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg were moving to unite vital parts of their economies in order to try to gain economic strength through unity--and through such unity an economic hammerlock on the German coal and steel industries, which it was hoped would never again be used for German aggression against its European neighbors.

Britain, invited to join this program, remained ambiguous about getting into the "New Europe." It still had a sense of its independent glory as a off-shore "balancer" of European power politics and diplomacy--and seemed unwilling to give up this last part of its self-image of greatness. Britishers with residual imperial instincts were hoping that the "Commonwealth" that had replaced the Empire would prove adequate in stimulating British economic growth. But in fact, its economic relations with its former African and Asian colonies had long ceased to be profitable to Britain. But Britain just could not let go of the past.

Then when in the early 1960s Britain finally realized that it was going to have to let go of a dead past and get with a rising future in closer cooperation with the continental powers of Europe--it found its way blocked by a vindictive France, a country governed by a militantly anti-Anglo president, Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle vetoed Britain's entry, vowing never to allow the "Anglo-Saxons" a foothold in European affairs as long as he had a say.

And that was that. England huddled offshore while continental Europe began to forge ahead with its European Common Market.