In the longer run, where the western powers saw a democratic and liberal world, he dreamed of a communist one. The aftermath of World War II was the beginning of a new era, defined by the decline of all European colonial empires and simultaneous rise of two superpowers: the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (USA). Let us remember the war, but let us not remember it simplistically but in all its complexity. The Western Allies, committed to the protection of democratic states from the perceived threat of Communist invasion (see the section on the Cold War and European integration), began to establish a set of international organizations so that national governments could work together to resolve common problems on issues ranging from defense and security to improving trade in order to rebuild European nations physically and economically shattered by the Second World War. Americans wanted free trade not only so that it was easier for American companies to do business with each but also to speed up the process of economic recovery and stabilize Western Europe. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images. The United States was both a military power and an economic one; the Soviet Union had only brute force and the intangible attraction of Marxist ideology to keep its own people down and manage its newly acquired empire in the heart of Europe. The second world war, especially in the light of what came after, seems to be the last morally unambiguous war. Germany had suffered heavy losses during the war, both in lives and industrial power.

A new word, genocide, entered the language to deal with the murder of 6 million of Europe's Jews by the Nazis.
In Germany, it has been estimated, 70% of housing had gone and, in the Soviet Union, 1,700 towns and 70,000 villages.

The Second World War severely damaged the economies of Europe, leaving many in a parlous state: cities and factories had been bombed, transport links had been severed and agricultural production disrupted. Interview with Professor Jeffrey Diefendorf Jeffrey Diefendorf has written several books about the reconstruction of both Germany and Japan after World War II. It's not an exaggeration to say the continent was a wreck. The Marshall Plan - Rebuilding Western Europe After WWII.

In Germany and Japan, democracy slowly took root. The sign says: We want coal, we want bread. That the cold war did not in the end turn into a hot one was thanks to that fact. Stalin again gave grudging support. The grand alliance held together uneasily for the first months of the peace, but the strains were evident in their shared occupation of Germany, where increasingly the Soviet zone of occupation was moving in a communist direction and the western zones, under Britain, France and the United States, in a more capitalist and democratic one. This boom helped push communist groups away from power and created an economic divide between the rich west and poor communist east as clear as the political one. West Germany was not able to escape its past so easily; under pressure from the allies and from within, it dealt much more thoroughly with its Nazi past. Western Europe Winston Churchill described the plan as “the most unselfish act by any great power in history” and many have been happy to stay with this altruistic impression. It has not necessarily been easier among the nations on the winning side. The trials, inconclusive though they were, formed part of a larger attempt to root out the militaristic and chauvinistic attitudes that had helped to produce the war, and to build a new world order that would prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again. The once great powers of Japan and Germany looked as though they would never rise again. These countries had to agree where the money was going to be distributed. While much of what Roosevelt hoped for did not come about, it was surely a step forward for international relations that such institutions were created and largely accepted and, equally important, that they were underpinned by notions of a common humanity possessing the same universal rights. Profile of General George Marshall, US Army Chief of Staff in WWII, What Is Imperialism?

They were struggling to look after their own peoples and deal with reincorporating their military into civilian society. In France and Italy, women finally got the vote. It had already become clear at the top-level conferences of Teheran (1943), Yalta (February 1945) and Potsdam (July-August 1945) that there was a gulf in what constituted universal values and goals between the United States and its fellow democracies and the Soviet Union. It is impossible to know how many women in Europe were raped by the Red Army soldiers, who saw them as part of the spoils of war, but in Germany alone some 2 million women had abortions every year between 1945 and 1948.

[text box, there were sixteen countries]. Much of the revenge was to gain advantage in the postwar world. In 1949, the American government began advocating economic integration between the OEEC countries and promised to give additional aid if the OEEC countries began to remove trade restrictions between themselves. However, as plans for the ERP were being formalized, Russian leader Stalin, afraid of US economic domination, refused the initiative and pressured the nations under his control into refusing aid despite a desperate need. East Germany, by contrast, took no responsibility, instead blaming the Nazis on capitalism. In the east, the new communist regimes that were imposed by the triumphant Soviet Union were at first welcomed by many as the agents of change. Britain and France may have been fighting for liberty, but they were not prepared to extend it to their empires. Politically, the impact of the war was also great. Instead there were a number of separate agreements or ad hoc decisions. The shared suffering and sacrifice of the war years strengthened the belief in most democracies that governments had an obligation to provide basic care for all citizens. Britain, France, and the Netherlands all saw their imperial possessions disappear in the years immediately after the war. In western Europe, voters turned to social democratic parties such as the Labour party in Britain.
Extension: Of Blind Men, Elephants and International Integration, Extension: Of Blind Men, Elephants and International Integration (2), Extension: Regional Integration and the EU. For a long time, schools did not teach any history after the first world war. Extension: What are International Organizations? In both Germany and Japan, the victors set up special tribunals to try those responsible for crimes against peace, war crimes, and the catalogue of horrors that came increasingly to be known as "crimes against humanity". The end of the war inevitably also brought a settling of scores.

In addition, the success of the plan has been questioned. In cooperation with the American government, the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) was created to distribute American aid money.

It was started in 1948 and was officially known as the European Recovery Program, or ERP, but is more commonly known as the Marshall Plan, after the man who announced it, US Secretary of State George C. Marshall. Furthermore, their own Marxist-Leninist analysis of history told them that sooner or later the capitalist powers would turn on the Soviet Union. Apart from the United States and allies such as Canada and Australia, who were largely unscathed by the war's destruction, the European powers such as Britain and France had precious little to spare.