Newly Established Nations in World Wars - Essay Example

At the beginning of the XX century, Asian and African countries were occupied and controlled by European states and the USA. For instance, British Empire controlled population of 458 million people. Belgium had only one colony, the Belgian Congo, but its territory was 76 times larger than Belgium. Germany, France, the USA and Russia controlled countries Asian and African continent. For these colonies World War I opened the door to a revolution in world politics in which several perspectives on international relations competed for attention in the period of intellectual ferment (King 23).

Speaking about the establishment of the new states, historians speak about policy of countries involved in a conflict. For instance, German aggression was fueled by Pan-Slavic policy provided in Sarajevo. Usually, the common sense of war concerns the questions of national safety, and usually accepted and accomplished not on the basis of choice, but on the bases of force connected with the bureaucratic system. The main consequence of the WWI was new division of power and new world order. New states emerged in Eastern Europe and after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and Turkish Revolution.

The large-scale death and destruction exacted by World War 1 destroyed the security that had made current history a comfortable approach to international politics. That catastrophic global war, begun in 1914, was a painful learning experience that stimulated the search for knowledge that could address contemporary policy problems-notably war-in a theoretical context (King 45). After the war, Great Britain became one of the biggest debtors; the USA, and Woodrow Wilson, followed policy of isolationism; France occupied the Republic of Alsace-Lorraine but suffered from destructions caused by the war.

Many of its colonial solders returned to native lands and began anti-imperial movements; Russia suffered from the civil war and the revolution (1917); Germany was subjected with obligations and reparations under the Treaty of Versailles. Bending to French pressure, the Peace of Paris (the Versailles treaty) insisted on the destruction of Germany's armed forces, the loss of territory, and the imposition of heavy reparations to compensate the Allies for the damage that German militarism had exacted (King 76-77).

The World War II created new opportunities for colonies to preserve their self-identity and national spirit. Domestically, nationalism inflamed forceful recovery of lost territory and rationalized the expansion of German borders to regain provinces ceded to others and to absorb Germans living in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland (LaFeber 22). The rise of fascism animated this renewed imperialistic push. German aggression was fueled further by resentment of the punitive terms imposed at the 1919 Paris peace conference by the victorious World War I powers (France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and the United States).

A key cause the WWII was the failure of the British hope for Anglo-American collaboration to maintain world order. That hope vanished when the United States, in a fit of anger, repudiated the Versailles peace treaty and retreated