Self-help or self-improvement is a self-guided improvement—economically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis.
When engaged in self-improvement, people often utilize publicly available information or support groups, on the Internet as well as in person, where people in similar situations join together. From early examples in self-driven legal practice and home-spun advice, the connotations of the word have spread and often apply particularly to education, business, psychology and psychotherapy, commonly distributed through the popular genre of self-help books. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology,
potential benefits of self-help groups that professionals may not be
able to provide include friendship, emotional support, experiential
knowledge, identity, meaningful roles, and a sense of belonging.
Many different self-help group programs exist, each with its own
focus, techniques, associated beliefs, proponents and in some cases, leaders. Concepts and terms originating in self-help culture and Twelve-Step culture, such as recovery, dysfunctional families, and codependency have become firmly integrated in mainstream language.
Groups associated with health conditions may consist of patients and caregivers. As well as featuring long-time members sharing experiences, these health groups can become support groups
and clearing-houses for educational material. Those who help themselves
by learning and identifying about health problems can be said to
exemplify self-help, while self-help groups can be seen more as
peer-to-peer support.
History
Within classical antiquity, Hesiod's Works and Days "opens with moral remonstrances, hammered home in every way that Hesiod can think of." The Stoics offered ethical advice "on the notion of eudaimonia—of well-being, welfare, flourishing." The genre of mirror-of-princes writings, which has a long history in Greco-Roman and Western Renaissance literature, represents a secular cognate of Biblical wisdom-literature. Proverbs from many periods, collected and uncollected, embody traditional moral and practical advice of diverse cultures.
The hyphenated compound
word "self-help" often appeared in the 1800s in a legal context,
referring to the doctrine that a party in a dispute has the right to use
lawful means on their own initiative to remedy a wrong.
For some, George Combe's "Constitution" [1828], in the way that it advocated personal responsibility
and the possibility of naturally sanctioned self-improvement through
education or proper self-control, largely inaugurated the self-help
movement;" In 1841, an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, entitled Compensation, was published suggesting "every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults" and "acquire habits of self-help" as "our strength grows out of our weakness." Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) published the first self-consciously personal-development "self-help" book—entitled Self-Help—in
1859. Its opening sentence: "Heaven helps those who help themselves",
provides a variation of "God helps them that help themselves", the
oft-quoted maxim that had also appeared previously in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac (1733–1758).
Early 20th century
In 1902, James Allen published As a Man Thinketh,
which proceeds from the conviction that "a man is literally what he
thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts." Noble
thoughts, the book maintains, make for a noble person, whilst lowly
thoughts make for a miserable person. Several decades later, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937) described the use of repeated positive thoughts to attract happiness and wealth by tapping into an "Infinite Intelligence".
Around the same time, in 1936, Dale Carnegie further developed the genre with How to Win Friends and Influence People. Having failed in several careers, Carnegie became fascinated with success and its link to self-confidence, and his books have since sold over 50 million copies.
Late 20th century
In the final third of the 20th century, "the tremendous growth in self-help publishing...in self-improvement culture" really took off—something which must be linked to postmodernism itself—to the way "postmodern subjectivity constructs self-reflexive subjects-in-process."
Arguably at least, "in the literature of self-improvement...that crisis
of subject hood is not articulated but enacted—demonstrated in
ever-expanding self-help book sales."
The conservative turn of the neoliberal
decades also meant a decline in traditional political activism, and
increasing "social isolation; Twelve-Step recovery groups were one
context in which individuals sought a sense of community...yet another
symptom of the psychological of the personal" to more radical critics. Indeed, "some social theorist [sic]
have argued that the late-20th century preoccupation with the self
serves as a tool of social control: soothing political unrest...[for]
one's own pursuit of self-invention."'
The market
Within
the context of the market, group and corporate attempts to aid the
"seeker" have moved into the "self-help" marketplace, with Large Group Awareness Trainings, LGATs
and psychotherapy systems represented. These offer more-or-less prepackaged solutions to instruct people seeking their own individual betterment, just as "the literature of self-improvement directs the reader to familiar frameworks...what the French fin de siècle social theorist Gabriel Tarde called 'the grooves of borrowed thought'."
At
the start of the 21st century, "the self-improvement industry,
inclusive of books, seminars, audio and video products, and personal
coaching, [was] said to constitute a 2.48-billion dollars-a-year
industry"
in the United States alone. By 2006, research firm Marketdata estimated
the "self-improvement" market in the U.S. as worth more than $9
billion—including infomercials, mail-order catalogs, holistic institutes, books, audio cassettes, motivation-speaker seminars, the personal coaching market, weight-loss and stress-management programs. Marketdata projected that the total market size would grow to over $11 billion by 2008.
In 2012 Laura Vanderkam wrote of a turnover of 12 billion dollars.
In 2013 Kathryn Schulz examined "an $11 billion industry".
Self-help and professional service delivery
Self-help and mutual-help are very different from—though they may complement—service delivery by professionals: note, for example, the interface between local self-help and International Aid's service delivery model.
Conflicts can and do arise on that interface, however, with some
professionals considering that "the twelve-step approach encourages a
kind of contemporary version of 19th-century amateurism or enthusiasm in
which self-examination and very general social observations are enough
to draw rather large conclusions."
Research
The
rise of self-help culture has inevitably led to boundary disputes with
other approaches and disciplines. Some would object to their
classification as "self-help" literature, as with "Deborah Tannen's
denial of the self-help role of her books" so as to maintain her
academic credibility, aware of the danger that "writing a book that
becomes a popular success...all but ensures that one's work will lose
its long-term legitimacy."
Placebo
effects can never be wholly discounted. Thus careful studies of "the
power of subliminal self-help tapes...showed that their content had no
real effect...But that's not what the participants thought."
"If they thought they'd listened to a self-esteem tape (even though
half the labels were wrong), they felt that their self-esteem had gone
up. No wonder people keep buying subliminal tape: even though the tapes
don't work, people think they do."
One might then see much of the self-help industry as part of the "skin
trades. People need haircuts, massage, dentistry, wigs and glasses,
sociology and surgery, as well as love and advice."—a skin trade, "not a profession and a science"
Its practitioners would thus be functioning as "part of the personal
service industry rather than as mental health professionals."
While "there is no proof that twelve-step programs 'are superior to any
other intervention in reducing alcohol dependence or alcohol-related
problems'," at the same time it is clear that "there is something about 'roguishness' itself which is curative."
Thus for example "smoking increases mortality risk by a factor of just
1.6, while social isolation does so by a factor of 2.0...suggest[ING] an
added value to self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous as surrogate communities."
Some psychologists advocate a positive psychology,
and explicitly embrace an empirical self-help philosophy; "the role of
positive psychology is to become a bridge between the ivory tower and
the main street—between the rigor of academe and the fun of the
self-help movement."
They aim to refine the self-improvement field by way of an intentional
increase in scientifically sound research and well-engineered models.
The division of focus and methodologies has produced several sub fields,
in particular: general positive psychology, focusing primarily on the
study of psychological phenomenon and effects; and personal effectiveness,
focusing primarily on analysis, design and implementation of
qualitative personal growth. This includes the intentional training of
new patterns of thought and feeling. As business strategy communicator Don Tapscott
puts it, "The design industry is something done to us. I'm proposing we
each become designers. But I suppose 'I love the way she thinks' could
take on new meaning."
Both self-talk, the propensity to engage in verbal or mental
self-directed conversation and thought, and social support can be used
as instruments of self-improvement, often by empowering,
action-promoting messages. Psychologists have designed a series of
experiments that are intended to shed light into how self-talk can
result in self-improvement. In general, research has shown that people
prefer to use second-person pronouns over first-person pronouns when
engaging in self-talk to achieve goals, regulate one’s own behavior,
thoughts, or emotions, and facilitate performance.
If self-talk has the expected effect, then writing about personal
problems using language from their friends’ perspective should result in
greater amount of motivational and emotional benefits comparing to
using language from their own perspective. When you need to finish a
difficult task and you are not willing to do something to finish this
task, trying to write a few sentence or goals imaging what your friends
have told you gives you more motivational resources comparing to you
write to yourself. Research done by Ireland and others have revealed
that, as expected, when people are writing using many physical and
mental words or even typing a standard prompt with these kinds of words,
adopting a friend’s perspective while freely writing about a personal
challenge can help increase people’s intention to improve self-control
by promoting the positivity of emotions such as pride and satisfaction,
which can motivate people to reach their goal.
The use of self-talk goes beyond the scope of self-improvement
for performing certain activities, self-talk as a linguistic form of
self-help also plays a very important role in regulating people’s
emotions under social stress. First of all, people using
non-first-person language tend to exhibit higher level of visual
self-distancing during the process of introspection, indicating that
using non-first-person pronouns and one’s own name may result in
enhanced self-distancing.
More importantly, this specific form of self-help also has been found
can enhance people’s ability to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and
behavior under social stress, which would lead them to appraise
social-anxiety-provoking events in more challenging and less threatening
terms. Additionally, these self-help behaviors also demonstrate
noticeable self-regulatory effects through the process of social
interactions, regardless of their dispositional vulnerability to social
anxiety.
Criticism
Scholars have targeted self-help claims as misleading and incorrect. In 2005 Steve Salerno portrayed the American self-help movement—he uses the acronym SHAM: the Self-Help and Actualization Movement—not only as ineffective in achieving its goals, but also as socially harmful.
"Salerno says that 80 percent of self-help and motivational customers
are repeat customers and they keep coming back 'whether the program
worked for them or not'." Others similarly point out that with self-help books
"supply increases the demand... The more people read them, the more
they think they need them... more like an addiction than an alliance."
Self-help writers have been described as working "in the area of
the ideological, the imagined, the narrativized.... although a veneer of
scientism permeates the[ir] work, there is also an underlying armature
of moralizing."
In 1987 Gerald M. Rosen reported that people do not gain as much
from reading self-help material as people would from the same material
received in therapy. In general, he was critical of proliferation of
self-help books.
In the media
Kathryn Schulz suggests that "the underlying theory of the self-help industry is contradicted by the self-help industry’s existence".
Parodies and fictional analogies
The self-help world has become the target of parodies. Walker Percy's odd genre-busting Lost in the Cosmos
has been described as "a parody of self-help books, a philosophy
textbook, and a collection of short stories, quizzes, diagrams, thought
experiments, mathematical formulas, made-up dialogue". In their 2006 book Secrets of The Super optimist,
authors W.R. Morton and Nathaniel Whiten revealed the concept of "super
optimism" as a humorous antidote to the overblown self-help book
category. In his comedy special Complaints and Grievances (2001), George Carlin
observes that there is "no such thing" as self-help: anyone looking for
help from someone else does not technically get "self" help; and one
who accomplishes something without help, did not need help to begin
with. In Margaret Atwood's semi-satiric dystopia Oryx and Crake,
university literary studies have declined to the point that the
protagonist, Snowman, is instructed to write his thesis on self-help
books as literature; more revealing of the authors and of the society
that produced them than genuinely helpful.
The "Me" generation (also called Generation W) in the United States is a term referring to the baby boomer generation and the self-involved qualities that some people associate with it. The 1970s were dubbed the "Me decade" by writer Tom Wolfe; Christopher Lasch was another writer who commented on the rise of a culture of narcissism among the younger generation of that era.
The phrase caught on with the general public, at a time when
"self-realization" and "self-fulfillment" were becoming cultural
aspirations to which young people supposedly ascribed higher importance
than social responsibility.
Origins
Jogging and other health and diet trends went mainstream with the Me generation.
The cultural change in the United States during the 1970s that was
experienced by the baby boomers is complex. The 1960s are remembered as a
time of political protests, radical experimentation with new cultural
experiences (the Sexual Revolution, happenings, mainstream awareness of Eastern religions). The Civil Rights Movement
gave rebellious young people serious goals to work towards. Cultural
experimentation was justified as being directed toward spiritual or
intellectual enlightenment. The mid to late 1970s, in contrast, were a
time of increased economic crisis and disillusionment with idealistic
politics among the young, particularly after the resignation of Richard Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War. Unapologetic hedonism became acceptable among the young.
The new introspectiveness announced
the demise of an established set of traditional faiths centred on work
and the postponement of gratification, and the emergence of a
consumption-oriented lifestyle ethic centred on lived experience and the
immediacy of daily lifestyle choices.
By the mid-1970s, Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lasch were speaking out critically against the culture of narcissism. These criticisms were widely repeated throughout American popular media.
The development of a youth culture focusing so heavily on
self-fulfillment was also perhaps a reaction against the traits that
characterized the older generation, which had grown up during the Great Depression.
That generation had learned values associated with self-sacrifice. The
deprivations of the Depression had taught that generation to work hard,
save money and not spend it, and to cherish family and community ties.
Loyalty to institutions, traditional religious faiths, and other common
bonds were what that generation considered to be the cultural
foundations of their country. Baby boomers gradually abandoned those values in large numbers, a development that was entrenched during the 1970s.
The 1970s have been described as a transitional era when the self-help of the 1960s became self-gratification, and eventually devolved into the selfishness of the 1980s.
Characteristics
Discos and nightclubbing became popular with Me generation singles during the 1970s.
Health and exercise fads, New Age spirituality such as Scientology and hot tub parties, self-help programs such as EST (Erhard Seminars Training),
and the growth of the self-help book industry became identified with
the baby boomers during 1970s. Human potential, emotional honesty,
"finding yourself', and new therapies became hallmarks of the culture. The marketing of lifestyle products, eagerly consumed by baby boomers with disposable income
during the 1970s, became an inescapable part of the culture. Revlon's
marketing staff did research into young women's cultural values during
the 1970s, and the research revealed that young women were striving to
compete with men in the workplace and to express themselves as
independent individuals. Revlon launched the "lifestyle" perfume Charlie, with marketing aimed at glamorizing the values of the new 1970s woman, and it became the world's best-selling perfume.
The introspection of the baby boomers and their focus on
self-fulfillment has been examined in a serious light in pop culture.
Films such as An Unmarried Woman (1978), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Ordinary People (1980) and The Big Chill
(1983) brought the inner struggles of baby boomers to a wide audience.
The self-absorbed side of 1970s life was given a sharp and sometimes
poignant satirization in Manhattan (1979). More acerbic lampooning came in Shampoo (1975) and Private Benjamin (1980). The Me generation has also been satirized in retrospect, as the generation called "Generation X" reached adulthood, for example, in Parenthood (1989). Forrest Gump (1994) summed up the decade with Gump's cross-country jogging quest for meaning during the 1970s, complete with a tracksuit, which was worn as much as a fashion statement as an athletic necessity during the era.
The satirization of the Me generation's 'me-first' attitude perhaps reached its peak with the television sitcom Seinfeld,
which did not include conscious moral development for its baby boomer
characters, but rather the opposite. Its plots did not have teaching
lessons for its audience and its creators deliberately held the position
that it was a "show about nothing."
Persistence of the label
The Me generation, for the most part, embraced entertainment and consumer culture.
The term "Me generation" has persisted over the decades and is connected to the baby boomers generation. Some writers, however, have also named the Millennials "the Me Generation" or "Generation Me", while Elspeth Reeve in The Atlantic noted that narcissism is a symptom of youth in most generations.
The 1970s were also an era of rising unemployment among the young,
continuing erosion of faith in conventional social institutions, and
political and ideological aimlessness for many. This was the environment
that precipitated gravitation toward Punk rock among America's disaffected young people. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan
was elected President, a growing number of America's baby boomers had
also begun turning toward conservative political and cultural
priorities.
At the same time, the realities behind the label have not escaped notice. As Eastern religions and rituals such as yoga grew during the 1970s, at least one writer observed a New Age corruption of the popular understanding of "realization" taught by Neo-Vedantic practitioners, away from spiritual realization and towards "self-realization". The leading edge of the baby boomers, who were counter-culture "hippies"
and political activists during the 1960s, have been referred to
sympathetically as the "Now generation", in contrast to the Me
generation.
Baby boomers are the demographiccohort following the Silent Generation and preceding Generation X. The generation is most often defined as individuals born between 1946 and 1964, during the post–World War II baby boom. The baby boom has been described variously as a "shockwave" and as "the pig in the python"; in particular, 76 million Americans were born during this timeframe.
In the 1960s and 1970s, as this relatively large number of young
people entered their teens and young adulthood—the oldest turned 18 in
1964—they, and those around them, created a very specific rhetoric around their cohort and the changes brought about by their size in numbers, such as the counterculture of the 1960s.
This rhetoric had an important impact in the perceptions of the
boomers, as well as society's increasingly common tendency to define the
world in terms of generations, which was a relatively new phenomenon.
As a group, baby boomers were wealthier, more active and more physically
fit than any preceding generation and were the first to grow up
genuinely expecting the world to improve with time. However, this generation also has been criticized often for its increases in consumerism which others saw as excessive.
Etymology
The term baby boom refers to a noticeable increase in the birth rate. The post-World War II
population increase was described as a "boom" by various newspaper
reporters, including Sylvia F. Porter in a column in the May 4, 1951,
edition of the New York Post, based on the increase of 2,357,000 in the population of the U.S. in 1950.
The first recorded use of "baby boomer" is in a January 1963 Daily Press article describing a massive surge of college enrollments approaching as the oldest boomers were coming of age. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern meaning of the term to a January 23, 1970, article in The Washington Post.
Date range and definitions
The Merriam-Webster
Online Dictionary defines "baby boomer" as "a person born during a
period of time in which there is a marked rise in a population's
birthrate", "usually considered to be in the years from 1946 to 1964".
Pew Research Center defines baby boomers as being born between 1946 and 1964. The United States Census Bureau defines baby boomers as "individuals born in the United States between mid-1946 and mid-1964." The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics defines the "post-World War II baby-boom generation" as those born between 1946 and 1964, as does the Federal Reserve Board which uses 1946-1964 to define baby boomers. Gallup defines baby boomers as those born from 1946 through 1964.
United
States birth rate (births per 1,000 population per year). The segment
for the years 1946 to 1964 is highlighted in red, with birth rates
peaking in 1949 and dropping steadily around 1958 reaching pre-war
Depression-era levels in 1963.
In the US, the generation can be segmented into two broadly defined
cohorts: the "Leading-Edge Baby Boomers" are individuals born between
1946 and 1955, those who came of age during the Vietnam War
era. This group represents slightly more than half of the generation,
or roughly 38,002,000 people of all races. The other half of the
generation, called the "Late Boomers" or "Trailing-Edge Boomers", was
born between 1956 and 1964. This second cohort includes about 37,818,000
individuals, according to Live Births by Age and Mother and Race, 1933–98, published by the Centers for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics.
In Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics defines baby boomers as those born between 1946 and 1964, as well as the Australia's Social Research Center which defines baby boomers as born between 1946 and 1964. Bernard Salt places the Australian baby boom between 1946 and 1961.
Various authors have delimited the baby boom period differently. Landon Jones, in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation (1980), defined the span of the baby-boom generation as extending from 1946 through 1964. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their 1991 book Generations,
define the social generation of boomers as that cohort born from 1943
to 1960, who were too young to have any personal memory of World War II,
but old enough to remember the postwar American High before John F. Kennedy's assassination. In Ontario, Canada, David Foot, author of Boom, Bust and Echo: Profiting from the Demographic Shift in the 21st century
(1997), defined a Canadian boomer as someone born from 1947 to 1966,
the years in which more than 400,000 babies were born. However, he
acknowledges that that is a demographic definition, and that culturally,
it may not be as clear-cut.
Doug Owram argues that the Canadian boom took place from 1946 to
1962, but that culturally boomers everywhere were born between the late
war years and about 1955 or 1956. He notes that those born in the years
before the actual boom were often the most influential people among
boomers: for example, musicians such as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and The Rolling Stones, as well as writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg,
who were either slightly or vastly older than the boomer generation.
Those born in the 1960s might feel disconnected from the cultural
identifiers of the earlier boomers.
Generational cuspers
The American term "Generation Jones"
is sometimes used to describe those born roughly between 1954 and 1965.
The term is typically used to refer to the later years of the baby
boomer cohort and the early years of Generation X.
Demographics
The age wave theory suggests an economic slowdown when the boomers started retiring during 2007–2009. Projections for the aging U.S. workforce suggest that by 2020, 25% of employees will be at least 55 years old.
Characteristics
As children and adolescents
The baby boomers found that their music, most notably rock and roll, was another expression of their generational identity. Transistor radios were personal devices that allowed teenagers to listen to The Beatles, the Motown Sound, and other new musical directions and artists.
Boomers grew up at a time of dramatic social change. In the US, that
change marked the generation with a strong cultural cleavage, between
the proponents of change and the more conservative individuals. Some
analysts believe this cleavage played out politically since the time of
the Vietnam War to the mid‑2000s, to some extent defining the political landscape and division in the country.
Boomers are often associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, the civil rights movement, and the "second-wave" feminist cause
of the 1970s. Conversely, many trended in moderate to conservative
directions opposite to the counterculture, especially those making
professional careers in the military (officer and enlisted), law
enforcement, business, blue collar trades, and Republican Party
politics.
Early and mid-boomers experienced events like Beatlemania and Woodstock,
organizing against the Vietnam War, or fighting and dying in the same
war. Politically, early boomers in the United States tend to be Democrats, while later boomers tend to be Republicans.
In midlife
Cohort as an economic power
Steve Gillon has suggested that one thing that sets the baby boomers
apart from other generational groups is the fact that "almost from the
time they were conceived, boomers were dissected, analyzed, and pitched
to by modern marketers, who reinforced a sense of generational distinctiveness."
This is supported by the articles of the late 1940s identifying
the increasing number of babies as an economic boom, such as a 1948 Newsweek article whose title proclaimed "Babies Mean Business", or a 1948 Time magazine article called "Baby Boom."
Conservative uprising
Starting in the 1980s, the boomers became more conservative, many of
them regretting the cultural changes they brought in their youth. The
baby boomers became the largest voting demographic in the early 1980s
and helped to propel President Reagan into power, a period which ushered
in a long running trend of rapidly increasing income inequality.
From 1979-2007, those receiving the highest 1 percentile of
incomes saw their already large incomes increase by 278% while those in
the middle at the 40th-60th percentiles saw a 35% increase. Since 1980,
after the vast majority of baby boomer college goers graduated, the cost
of college has been increased by over 600% (inflation adjusted).
Attitude towards religion
In 1993, Time magazine reported on the religious affiliations of baby boomers. Citing Wade Clark Roof, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara,
the articles stated that about 42% of baby boomers were dropouts from
formal religion, 33% had never strayed from church, and 25% of boomers
were returning to religious practice.
The boomers returning to religion were "usually less tied to
tradition and less dependable as church members than the loyalists. They
are also more liberal, which deepens rifts over issues like abortion and homosexuality."
In retirement
Aging and inheritance planning
A survey found that nearly a third of baby boomer multimillionaires polled in the US would prefer to pass on their inheritance to charities
rather than pass it down to their children. Of these boomers, 57%
believed it was important for each generation to earn their own money;
54% believed it was more important to invest in their children while
they were growing up.
As of 1998, it was reported that, as a generation, boomers had tended to avoid discussions and long-term planning for their demise.
However, since 1998 or earlier, there has been a growing dialogue on
how to manage aging and end-of-life issues as the generation ages.
In particular, a number of commentators have argued that baby
boomers are in a state of denial regarding their own aging and death and
are leaving an undue economic burden on their children for their
retirement and care. According to the 2011 Associated Press and
LifeGoesStrong.com surveys:
60% lost value in investments because of the economic crisis
42% are delaying retirement
25% claim they will never retire (currently still working)
People often take it for granted that each succeeding generation will be "better off" than the one before it. When Generation X
came along just after the boomers, they would be the first generation
to enjoy a lower quality of life than the generation preceding it.
Aging and Medicare
The density of baby boomers can put a strain on Medicare. According to the American Medical Student Association,
the population of individuals over the age of 65 will increase by 73
percent between 2010 and 2030, meaning one in five Americans will be a
senior citizen.
Aging and online consumption
In 2019, advertising platform Criteo conducted a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers which showed baby boomers are less likely than millennials
to purchase groceries online. Of the baby boomers surveyed, 30 percent
said they used some form of online grocery delivery service.
Key generation milestones
In the 1985 study of U.S. generational cohorts by Schuman and Scott, a
broad sample of adults was asked, "What world events over the past 50
years were especially important to them?" For the baby boomers the results were:
Baby Boomer cohort number one (born 1946–55), the cohort who epitomized the cultural change of the 1960s
Key characteristics: experimental, individualism, free spirited, social cause oriented.
Baby Boomer cohort number two (born 1956–64), the cohort who came of age in the "malaise" years of the 1970s
Memorable events: the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., for those born in the first couple of years of this generation, the Vietnam War, walk on the moon, Watergate and Nixon's
resignation, lowered drinking age to 18 in many states 1970–1976
(followed by raising back to 21 in the mid-1980s as a result of
congressional lobbying by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD)), the oil embargo,
raging inflation, gasoline shortages, economic recession and lack of
viable career opportunities upon graduation from high school or college,
Jimmy Carter's reimposition of registration for the draft, the Iran
hostage crisis, Ronald Reagan, Live Aid
Legacy
An indication of the importance put on the impact of the boomer was the selection by TIME magazine of the Baby Boom Generation as its 1966 "Man of the Year." As Claire Raines points out in Beyond Generation X, "never before in history had youth been so idealized as they were at this moment." When Generation X came along it had much to live up to according to Raines.
As a consequence of the war, the Allies created the United Nations, an organization for international cooperation and diplomacy, similar to the League of Nations. Members of the United Nations agreed to outlaw wars of aggression in an attempt to avoid a third world war. The devastated great powers of Western Europe formed the European Coal and Steel Community, which later evolved into the European Economic Community and ultimately into the current European Union. This effort primarily began as an attempt to avoid another war between Germany and France by economic cooperation and integration, and a common market for important natural resources.
At the end of the war, millions of people were dead and millions more
homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and much of the European
industrial infrastructure had been destroyed. The Soviet Union, too, had been heavily affected. In response, in 1947, U.S. Secretary of StateGeorge Marshall devised the "European Recovery Program", which became known as the Marshall Plan. Under the plan, during 1948–1952 the United States government allocated US$13 billion (US$149 billion in 2019 dollars) for the reconstruction of Western Europe.
United Kingdom
By the end of the war, the economy of the United Kingdom was one of severe privation. More than a quarter of its national wealth had been consumed. Until the introduction in 1941 of Lend-Lease
aid from the US, the UK had been spending its assets to purchase
American equipment including aircraft and ships—over £437 million on
aircraft alone. Lend-lease came just before its reserves were exhausted.
Britain had placed 55% of its total labour force into war production.
In spring 1945, the Labour Party withdrew from the wartime coalition government, in an effort to oust Winston Churchill, forcing a general election. Following a landslide victory, Labour held more than 60% of the seats in the House of Commons and formed a new government on 26 July 1945 under Clement Attlee.
Britain's war debt was described by some in the American
administration as a "millstone round the neck of the British economy".
Although there were suggestions for an international conference to
tackle the issue, in August 1945 the U.S. announced unexpectedly that
the Lend-Lease programme was to end immediately.
The abrupt withdrawal of American Lend-Lease support to Britain
on 2 September 1945 dealt a severe blow to the plans of the new
government. It was only with the completion of the Anglo-American loan
by the United States to Great Britain on 15 July 1946 that some measure
of economic stability was restored. However, the loan was made
primarily to support British overseas expenditure in the immediate
post-war years and not to implement the Labour government's policies for
domestic welfare reforms and the nationalisation
of key industries. Although the loan was agreed on reasonable terms,
its conditions included what proved to be damaging fiscal conditions for
Sterling. From 1946-1948, the UK introduced bread rationing, which it had never done during the war.
Soviet Union
Ruins in Stalingrad, typical of the destruction in many Soviet cities.
The Soviet Union suffered enormous losses in the war against Germany. The Soviet population decreased by about 27 million
during the war; of these, 8.7 million were combat deaths. The 19
million non-combat deaths had a variety of causes: starvation in the siege of Leningrad;
conditions in German prisons and concentration camps; mass shootings of
civilians; harsh labour in German industry; famine and disease;
conditions in Soviet camps; and service in German or German-controlled
military units fighting the Soviet Union. The population would not return to its pre-war level for 30 years.
Soviet ex-POWs
and civilians repatriated from abroad were suspected of having been
Nazi collaborators, and 226,127 of them were sent to forced labour camps
after scrutiny by Soviet intelligence, NKVD.
Many ex-POWs and young civilians were also conscripted to serve in the
Red Army. Others worked in labour battalions to rebuild infrastructure
destroyed during the war.
The economy had been devastated. Roughly a quarter of the Soviet
Union's capital resources were destroyed, and industrial and
agricultural output in 1945 fell far short of pre-war levels. To help
rebuild the country, the Soviet government obtained limited credits from
Britain and Sweden; it refused assistance offered by the United States
under the Marshall Plan. Instead, the Soviet Union coerced
Soviet-occupied Central and Eastern Europe to supply machinery and raw
materials. Germany and former Nazi satellites made reparations to the
Soviet Union. The reconstruction programme emphasised heavy industry to
the detriment of agriculture and consumer goods. By 1953, steel
production was twice its 1940 level, but the production of many consumer
goods and foodstuffs was lower than it had been in the late 1920s.
Post-WWII occupation zones of Germany, in its 1937 borders, with territories east of the Oder-Neisse line shown as annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union, plus the Saar protectorate and divided Berlin. East Germany
was formed by the Soviet Zone, while West Germany was formed by the
American, British, and French zones in 1949 and the Saar in 1957.
In Germany,
In the west, Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France. In the east, the Sudetenland reverted to Czechoslovakia following the European Advisory Commission's
decision to delimit German territory to be the territory it held on 31
December 1937. Close to one-quarter of pre-war (1937) Germany was de facto
annexed by the Allies; roughly 10 million Germans were either expelled
from this territory or not permitted to return to it if they had fled
during the war. The remainder of Germany was partitioned into four zones
of occupation, coordinated by the Allied Control Council. The Saar was detached and put in economic union with France in 1947. In 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was created out of the Western zones. The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic.
Germany paid reparations to the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union, mainly in the form of dismantled factories, forced labour, and coal. The German standard of living was to be reduced to its 1932 level.
Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for the
next two years, the US and Britain pursued an "intellectual
reparations" programme to harvest all technological and scientific
know-how as well as all patents in Germany. The value of these amounted
to around US$10 billion (US$131 billion in 2019 dollars). In accordance with the Paris Peace Treaties, 1947, reparations were also assessed from the countries of Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland.
The
hunger-winter of 1947. Thousands protest against the disastrous food
situation. Sign says "we want coal. we want bread." (31 March 1947).
US policy in post-war Germany from April 1945 until July 1947 had
been that no help should be given to the Germans in rebuilding their
nation, save for the minimum required to mitigate starvation. The
Allies' immediate post-war "industrial disarmament" plan for Germany had
been to destroy Germany's capability to wage war by complete or partial
de-industrialization. The first industrial plan for Germany, signed in
1946, required the destruction of 1,500 manufacturing plants to lower
German heavy industry output to roughly 50% of its 1938 level.
Dismantling of West German industry ended in 1951. By 1950, equipment
had been removed from 706 manufacturing plants, and steel production capacity had been reduced by 6.7 million tons. After lobbying by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Generals Lucius D. Clay and George Marshall, the Truman administration accepted that economic recovery in Europe could not go forward without the reconstruction of the German industrial base on which it had previously been dependent. In July 1947, President Truman rescinded on "national security grounds"
the directive that had ordered the US occupation forces to "take no
steps looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany." A new
directive recognised that "[a]n orderly, prosperous Europe requires the
economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany." From mid-1946 onwards Germany received US government aid through the GARIOA
programme. From 1948 onwards West Germany also became a minor
beneficiary of the Marshall Plan. Volunteer organisations had initially
been forbidden to send food, but in early 1946 the Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany was founded. The prohibition against sending CARE Packages to individuals in Germany was rescinded on 5 June 1946.
After the German surrender, the International Red Cross
was prohibited from providing aid such as food or visiting POW camps
for Germans inside Germany. However, after making approaches to the
Allies in the autumn of 1945 it was allowed to investigate the camps in
the UK and French occupation zones of Germany, as well as to provide
relief to the prisoners held there. On 4 February 1946, the Red Cross
was also permitted to visit and assist prisoners in the U.S. occupation
zone of Germany, although only with very small quantities of food. The
Red Cross petitioned successfully for improvements to be made in the
living conditions of German POWs.
France
As France was liberated from German occupation, an épuration
(purge) of real and suspected Nazi collaborators began. At first this
was undertaken in an extralegal manner by the French Resistance (called
the épuration sauvage, "wild purge"). French women who had had
romantic liaisons with German soldiers were publicly humiliated and had
their heads shaved. There were also a wave of summary executions
estimated to have killed about 10,000 people.
When the Provisional Government of the French Republic established control, the Épuration légale
("legal purge") began. There were no international war crimes trials
for French collaborators, who were tried in the domestic courts.
Approximately 300,000 cases were investigated; 120,000 people were given
various sentences including 6,763 death sentences (of which only 791
were carried out). Most convicts were given amnesty a few years later.
Unlike in Germany and Japan, no war crimes tribunals were held against Italian military and political leaders, though the Italian resistancesummarily executed some of them (such as Mussolini) at the end of the war; the Togliatti amnesty, taking its name from the Communist Party secretary at the time, pardoned all wartime common and political crimes in 1946.
Silent film footage taken in Hiroshima in March 1946 showing survivors with severe burns and keloid scars.
After the war, the Allies rescinded Japanese pre-war annexations such as Manchuria, and Korea became independent. The Philippines and Guam
were returned to the United States. Burma, Malaya, and Singapore were
returned to Britain and French Indo-China back to France. The Dutch East
Indies was to be handed back to the Dutch but was resisted leading to
the Indonesian war for independence. At the Yalta Conference, US PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt
had secretly traded the Japanese Kurils and south Sakhalin to the
Soviet Union in return for Soviet entry in the war with Japan. The Soviet Union annexed the Kuril Islands, provoking the Kuril Islands dispute, which is ongoing, as Russia continues to occupy the islands.
Hundreds of thousands of Japanese were forced to relocate to the
Japanese main islands. Okinawa became a main US staging point. The US
covered large areas of it with military bases and continued to occupy it
until 1972, years after the end of the occupation of the main islands.
The bases still remain. To skirt the Geneva Convention, the Allies classified many Japanese soldiers as Japanese Surrendered Personnel
instead of POWs and used them as forced labour until 1947. The UK,
France, and the Netherlands conscripted some Japanese troops to fight
colonial resistances elsewhere in Asia. General Douglas MacArthur established the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. The Allies collected reparations from Japan.
To further remove Japan as a potential future military threat, the Far Eastern Commission
decided to de-industrialise Japan, with the goal of reducing Japanese
standard of living to what prevailed between 1930 and 1934. In the end, the de-industrialisation programme in Japan was implemented to a lesser degree than the one in Germany. Japan received emergency aid from GARIOA, as did Germany. In early 1946, the Licensed Agencies for Relief in Asia
were formed and permitted to supply Japanese with food and clothes. In
April 1948 the Johnston Committee Report recommended that the economy of
Japan should be reconstructed due to the high cost to US taxpayers of
continuous emergency aid.
Survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as hibakusha (被爆者), were ostracized by Japanese society. Japan provided no special assistance to these people until 1952.
By the 65th anniversary of the bombings, total casualties from the
initial attack and later deaths reached about 270,000 in Hiroshima and 150,000 in Nagasaki. About 230,000 hibakusha were still alive as of 2010, and about 2,200 were suffering from radiation-caused illnesses as of 2007.
Finland
In the Winter War of 1939–1940, the Soviet Union invaded neutral Finland and annexed some of its territory. From 1941 until 1944,
Finland aligned itself with Nazi Germany in a failed effort to regain
lost territories from the Soviets. Finland retained its independence
following the war but remained subject to Soviet-imposed constraints in its domestic affairs.
The Baltic states
In 1940 the Soviet Union invaded and annexed the neutral Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In June 1941, the Soviet governments of the Baltic states carried out mass deportations of "enemies of the people"; as a result, many treated the invading Nazis as liberators when they invaded only a week later.
The Atlantic Charter promised self-determination to people deprived of it during the war. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, argued for a weaker interpretation of the Charter to permit the Soviet Union to continue to control the Baltic states. In March 1944 the U.S. accepted Churchill's view that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to the Baltic states.
With the return of Soviet troops at the end of the war, the Forest Brothers mounted a guerrilla war. This continued until the mid-1950s.
The Philippines
An estimated one million military and civilian Filipinos were killed
from all causes; of these 131,028 were listed as killed in seventy-two war crime
events. According to a United States analysis released years after the
war, U.S. casualties were 10,380 dead and 36,550 wounded; Japanese dead
were 255,795.
As a result of the new borders drawn by the victorious nations, large
populations suddenly found themselves in hostile territory. The Soviet
Union took over areas formerly controlled by Germany, Finland, Poland,
and Japan. Poland lost the Kresy region (about half of its pre-War territory) and received most of Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line, including the industrial regions of Silesia.
The German state of the Saar was temporarily a protectorate of France
but later returned to German administration. As set forth at Potsdam,
approximately 12 million people were expelled from Germany, including
seven million from Germany proper, and three million from the Sudetenland.
During the war, the United States government interned approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese who lived along the Pacific coast of the United States in the wake of Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Canada interned
approximately 22,000 Japanese Canadians, 14,000 of whom were born in
Canada. After the war, some internees chose to return to Japan, while
most remained in North America.
Poland
The Soviet Union expelled at least 2 million Poles from east of the new border approximating the Curzon Line.
This estimate is uncertain as both the Polish Communist government and
the Soviet government did not keep track of the number of expelled. The
number of Polish citizens inhabiting Polish borderlands (Kresy region) was about 13 million before World War II
broke out according to official Polish statistics. Polish citizens
killed in the war that originated from the Polish borderlands territory
(killed by both German Nazi regime and the Soviet regime or expelled to
distant parts of Siberia)
were accounted as Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian casualties of war in
official Soviet historiography. This fact imposes additional
difficulties in making the correct estimation of the number of Polish
citizens forcibly transferred after the war. The border change also reversed the results of the 1919-1920 Polish-Soviet War. Former Polish cities such as Lwów came under control of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Additionally, the Soviet Union transferred more than two million people
within their own borders; these included Germans, Finns, Crimean Tatars, and Chechens.
Rape during occupation
In Europe
As Soviet troops marched across the Balkans, they committed rapes and robberies in Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia
and Yugoslavia.
The population of Bulgaria was largely spared this treatment, due
possibly to a sense of ethnic kinship or to the leadership of Marshal Fyodor Tolbukhin. The population of Germany was treated significantly worse. Rape and murder of German civilians was as bad as, and sometimes worse than, Nazi propaganda had anticipated. Political officers encouraged Soviet troops to seek revenge and terrorise the German population. On "the basis of Hochrechnungen (projections or estimations)", "1.9 million German women altogether were raped at the end of the war by Red Army soldiers." About one-third of all German women in Berlin were raped by Soviet forces. A substantial minority was raped multiple times. In Berlin, contemporary hospital records indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 women were raped by Soviet troops. About 10,000 of these women died, mostly by suicide. Over 4.5 million Germans fled towards the West.
The Soviets initially had no rules against their troops "fraternising"
with German women, but by 1947 they started to isolate their troops from
the German population in an attempt to stop rape and robbery by the
troops. Not all Soviet soldiers participated in these activities.
Foreign reports of Soviet brutality were denounced as false. Rape, robbery, and murder were blamed on German bandits impersonating Soviet soldiers. Some justified Soviet brutality towards German civilians based on previous brutality of German troops toward Russian civilians.
Until the reunification of Germany, East German histories virtually
ignored the actions of Soviet troops, and Russian histories still tend
to do so. Reports of mass rapes by Soviet troops were often dismissed as anti-Communist propaganda or the normal byproduct of war.
Rapes also occurred under other occupation forces, though the majority were committed by Soviet troops. French Moroccan troops matched the behaviour of Soviet troops when it came to rape, especially in the early occupations of Baden and Württemberg. In a letter to the editor of TIME published in September 1945, an American armysergeant
wrote, "Our own Army and the British Army along with ours have done
their share of looting and raping... This offensive attitude among our
troops is not at all general, but the percentage is large enough to have
given our Army a pretty black name, and we too are considered an army
of rapists."
Robert Lilly's analysis of military records led him to conclude about
14,000 rapes occurred in Britain, France, and Germany at the hands of US
soldiers between 1942 and 1945.
Lilly assumed that only 5% of rapes by American soldiers were reported,
making 17,000 GI rapes a possibility, while analysts estimate that 50%
of (ordinary peacetime) rapes are reported.
Supporting Lilly's lower figure is the "crucial difference" that for
World War II military rapes "it was the commanding officer, not the
victim, who brought charges". According to German historian Miriam Gebhardt, as many as 190,000 women were raped by U.S. soldiers in Germany.
German soldiers left many war children
behind in nations such as France and Denmark, which were occupied for
an extended period. After the war, the children and their mothers often
suffered recriminations. In Norway, the "Tyskerunger" (German-kids)
suffered greatly.
During the Italian campaign, the Goumiers,
French Moroccan colonial troops attached to the French Expeditionary
Forces, have been accused of committing rape and murder against the
Italian peasant communities, mostly targeting civilian women and girls,
as well as a few men and boys. In Italy the victims of these acts were described as Marocchinate
meaning literally "Moroccaned" (or people who have been subjected to
acts committed by Moroccans). According to Italian victims associations,
a total of more than 7,000 civilians, including children, were raped by
Goumiers.
In Japan
In the first few weeks of the American military occupation of Japan,
rape and other violent crime was widespread in naval ports like Yokohama
and Yokosuka but declined shortly afterward. There were 1,336 reported
rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture.
Historian Toshiyuki Tanaka relates that in Yokohama, the capital of the
prefecture, there were 119 known rapes in September 1945.
Historians Eiji Takemae and Robert Ricketts state that "When US
paratroopers landed in Sapporo, an orgy of looting, sexual violence, and
drunken brawling ensued. Gang rapes and other sex atrocities were not
infrequent" and some of the rape victims committed suicide.
General Robert L. Eichelberger,
the commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, recorded that in the one
instance when the Japanese formed a self-help vigilante guard to protect
women from off-duty GIs, the Eighth Army ordered armored vehicles in
battle array into the streets and arrested the leaders, and the leaders
received long prison terms.
According to Takemae and Ricketts, members of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) were also involved in rapes:
A former prostitute recalled that
as soon as Australian troops arrived in Kure in early 1946, they
"dragged young women into their jeeps, took them to the mountain, and
then raped them. I heard them screaming for help nearly every night'.
Such behavior was commonplace, but news of criminal activity by
Occupation forces was quickly suppressed.
Rape committed by U.S. soldiers occupying Okinawa was also a notable
phenomenon. Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the
Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes:
Soon after the U.S. marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula
fell into the hands of American soldiers. At the time, there were only
women, children and old people in the village, as all the young men had
been mobilized for the war. Soon after landing, the marines "mopped up"
the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking
advantage of the situation, they started "hunting for women" in broad
daylight and those who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid
shelters were dragged out one after another.
According to Toshiyuki Tanaka, 76 cases of rape or rape-murder were
reported during the first five years of the American occupation of
Okinawa. However, he claims this is probably not the true figure, as
most cases were unreported.
Brief Overview of Post-war Latin America
One
of the largest changes post-war was the global shift in those nations
of authority. European influence in the Americas, Africa, and Asia
diminished significantly, and only some of them managed to hold onto
their colonial outposts, such as; Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands.
While the United States was considered one of two of the largest
military and political powers after World War II, it did not show
interest in colonizing with the exception of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
However, it did not hesitate to enforce its military strength; if
there were protests from local governments asking for higher wages and
better working conditions from US firms that have bases in Latin
America, Washington would step in and destabilize the current government
in order to establish one that was more compliant to its desires.
The increased industrialization in Latin America led to a need
for a more educated workforce who knew how to operate the new machinery.
This led to a previously unprecedented number of people attending
schools for higher education when previously citizens rarely completed secondary school.
Large numbers of women went on to pursue higher education for the first
time, and this gave more opportunity for women in professions and
employment in general outside of the home.
Universities also grew, and this led to a more progressive and
left-leaning institutional setting; a larger number of people going to
higher education led to a larger amount of the population being aware of
and willing to challenge inequalities in society and were preoccupied
with social justice and improving the infrastructure
and government bureaucracy so it would serve all instead of a select
privileged few.
These progressions managed to bring to light that while the middle class
population was increasing, prosperity was absent from poor areas, both
urban and rural, and this led to subsistence living or crowding into
makeshift settlements on the outskirts of cities and towns. Often, such
as in the Rocinha favela near Rio de Janeiro's South Zone,
these poor settlements were placed directly adjacent to more wealthy
residences, which emphasizes even more clearly how disproportionate
these two class groups were, and still are today.
The alliance between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union began to deteriorate even before the war was over, when Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill exchanged a heated correspondence over whether the Polish government-in-exile, backed by Roosevelt and Churchill, or the Provisional Government, backed by Stalin, should be recognised. Stalin won.
A number of allied leaders felt that war between the United
States and the Soviet Union was likely. On 19 May 1945, American
Under-Secretary of State Joseph Grew went so far as to say that it was inevitable.
Due to the rising tension in Europe and concerns over further
Soviet expansion, American planners came up with a contingency plan
code-named Operation Dropshot
in 1949. It considered possible nuclear and conventional war with the
Soviet Union and its allies in order to counter a Soviet takeover of
Western Europe, the Near East and parts of Eastern Asia that they
anticipated would begin around 1957. In response, the US would saturate
the Soviet Union with atomic and high-explosive bombs, and then invade
and occupy the country. In later years, to reduce military expenditures while countering Soviet conventional strength, President Dwight Eisenhower would adopt a strategy of massive retaliation,
relying on the threat of a US nuclear strike to prevent non-nuclear
incursions by the Soviet Union in Europe and elsewhere. The approach
entailed a major buildup of US nuclear forces and a corresponding
reduction in America's non-nuclear ground and naval strength. The Soviet Union viewed these developments as "atomic blackmail".
In Greece, civil war broke out in 1946 between Anglo-American-supported royalist forces and communist-led forces, with the royalist forces emerging as the victors. The US launched a massive programme of military and economic aid to Greece and to neighbouring Turkey, arising from a fear that the Soviet Union stood on the verge of breaking through the NATO defence line to the oil-rich Middle East. On 12 March 1947, to gain Congressional support for the aid, President Truman described the aid as promoting democracy in defence of the "free world", a principle that became known as the Truman Doctrine.
The US sought to promote an economically strong and politically
united Western Europe to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union.
This was done openly using tools such as the European Recovery Program, which encouraged European economic integration. The International Authority for the Ruhr, designed to keep German industry down and controlled, evolved into the European Coal and Steel Community, a founding pillar of the European Union. The United States also worked covertly to promote European integration, for example using the American Committee on United Europe
to funnel funds to European federalist movements. In order to ensure
that Western Europe could withstand the Soviet military threat, the Western European Union was founded in 1948 and NATO in 1949. The first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay,
famously stated the organisation's goal was "to keep the Russians out,
the Americans in, and the Germans down". However, without the manpower
and industrial output of West Germany no conventional defence of Western Europe had any hope of succeeding. To remedy this, in 1950 the US sought to promote the European Defence Community, which would have included a rearmed West Germany. The attempt was dashed when the French Parliament rejected it. On 9 May 1955, West Germany was instead admitted to NATO; the immediate result was the creation of the Warsaw Pact five days later.
World map of colonization at the end of the Second World War in 1945
In Asia, the surrender of Japanese forces was complicated by the
split between East and West as well as by the movement toward national
self-determination in European colonial territories.
China
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang
As agreed at the Yalta Conference, the Soviet Union went to war against Japan three months after the defeat of Germany. The Soviet forces invaded Manchuria. This was the end of the Manchukuo puppet state and all Japanese settlers were forced to leave China.
The Soviet Union dismantled the industrial base in Manchuria built up
by the Japanese in the preceding years. Manchuria also became a base for
the Communist Chinese forces because of the Soviet presence.
After the war, the Kuomintang (KMT) party (led by generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek) and the Communist Chinese forces resumed their civil war,
which had been temporarily suspended when they fought together against
Japan. The fight against the Japanese occupiers had strengthened popular
support among the Chinese for the Communist guerrilla
forces while it weakened the KMT, who depleted their strength fighting a
conventional war. Full-scale war between the opposing forces broke out
in June 1946. Despite U.S. support to the Kuomintang, Communist forces
were ultimately victorious and established the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland. The KMT forces retreated to the island of Taiwan in 1949. Hostilities had largely ceased in 1950.
With the Communist victory in the civil war, the Soviet Union
gave up its claim to military bases in China that it had been promised
by the Western Allies during World War II. The defeat of the US-backed
KMT led to a debate in the United States about who in the US government
was responsible for this.
The outbreak of the Korean War
diverted the attention of the PRC at the same time as it bolstered US
support for Chiang Kai-shek, the two main factors that prevented the PRC
from invading Taiwan. Intermittent military clashes occurred between
the PRC and Taiwan from 1950-1979. Taiwan unilaterally declared the
civil war over in 1991, but no formal peace treaty or truce exists and
the PRC officially sees Taiwan as a breakaway province that rightfully
belongs to it and has expressed its opposition to Taiwanese independence. Even so, tensions between the two states has decreased over time for example with the Chen-Chiang summits (2008-2011).
Sino-American relations (between the PRC and the US) continued to be mostly hostile up until US president Nixon visited China
in 1972. From this point, the relations between them have improved over
time although some tension and rivalry remain even with the end of the Cold War and the PRC's distancing from the Communist ideology.
Korea
Evolution of the border between the two Koreas, from the Yalta
Soviet-American 38th parallel division to the stalemate of 1953 that
was officially ended in 2018 by North Korean Kim Jong-Un and South
Korean Moon Jae-In
At the Yalta Conference,
the Allies agreed that an undivided post-war Korea would be placed
under four-power multinational trusteeship. After Japan's surrender,
this agreement was modified to a joint Soviet-American occupation of Korea. The agreement was that Korea would be divided and occupied by the Soviets from the north and the Americans from the south.
Korea, formerly under Japanese rule,
and which had been partially occupied by the Red Army following the
Soviet Union's entry into the war against Japan, was divided at the 38th
parallel on the orders of the US War Department. A US military government in southern Korea was established in the capital city of Seoul. The American military commander, Lt. Gen.John R. Hodge, enlisted many former Japanese administrative officials to serve in this government.
North of the military line, the Soviets administered the disarming and
demobilisation of repatriated Korean nationalist guerrillas who had
fought on the side of Chinese nationalists against the Japanese in
Manchuria during World War II. Simultaneously, the Soviets enabled a
build-up of heavy armaments to pro-communist forces in the north.
The military line became a political line in 1948, when separate
republics emerged on both sides of the 38th parallel, each republic
claiming to be the legitimate government of Korea. It culminated in the
north invading the south, start of the Korean War two years later.
Malaya
Labour and civil unrest broke out in the British colony of Malaya
in 1946. A state of emergency was declared by the colonial authorities
in 1948 with the outbreak of acts of terrorism. The situation
deteriorated into a full-scale anti-colonial insurgency, or Anti-British
National Liberation War as the insurgents referred to it, led by the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), the military wing of the Malayan Communist Party. The Malayan Emergency would endure for the next 12 years, ending in 1960. In 1967, communist leader Chin Peng reopened hostilities, culminating in a second emergency that lasted until 1989.
During World War II, the Vichy French aligned colonial
authorities cooperated with the Japanese invaders. The
communist-controlled common frontViet Minh
(supported by the Allies) was formed among the Vietnamese in the colony
in 1941 to fight for the independence of Vietnam, against both the
Japanese and prewar French powers. After the Vietnamese Famine of 1945
support for the Viet Minh was bolstered as the front launched a
rebellion, sacking rice warehouses and urging the Vietnamese to refuse
to pay taxes. Because the French colonial authorities started to hold
secret talks with the Free French, the Japanese interned them 9 March
1945. When Japan surrendered in August, this created a power vacuum, and
the Viet Minh took power in the August Revolution, declaring the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
However, the Allies (including the Soviet Union) all agreed that the
area belonged to the French. Nationalist Chinese forces moved in from
the north and British from the south (as the French were unable to do so
immediately themselves) and then handed power to the French, a process
completed by March 1946. Attempts to integrate the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam with French rule failed and the Viet Minh launched their
rebellion against the French rule starting the First Indochina War that
same year (the Viet Minh organized common fronts to fight the French in
Laos and Cambodia).
The war ended
in 1954 with French withdrawal and a partition of Vietnam that was
intended to be temporary until elections could be held. The Democratic
Republic of Vietnam held the north while South Vietnam formed into a separate republic in control of Ngo Dinh Diem
who was backed in his refusal to hold elections by the US. The
communist party of the south eventually organized the common front NLF to fight to unite south and north under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and thus began the Vietnam War, which ended with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam conquering the South in 1975.
Dutch East Indies
A
soldier of an Indian armoured regiment examines a light tank used by
Indonesian nationalists and captured by British forces during the
fighting in Surabaya.
Japan invaded and occupiedIndonesia during the war and replaced much of the Dutch
colonial state. Although the top positions were held by Japanese, the
internment of all Dutch citizens meant that Indonesians filled many
leadership and administrative positions. Following the Japanese
surrender in August 1945, nationalist leaders Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta
declared Indonesian independence. A four and a half-year struggle
followed as the Dutch tried to re-establish their colony, using a
significant portion of their Marshall Plan aid to this end.
The Dutch were directly helped by UK forces who sought to re-establish
the colonial dominions in Asia. The UK also kept 35,000 Japanese Surrendered Personnel under arms to fight the Indonesians.
Although Dutch forces re-occupied most of Indonesia's territory, a guerrilla
struggle ensued, and the majority of Indonesians, and ultimately
international opinion, favoured Indonesian independence. In December
1949, the Netherlands formally recognised Indonesian sovereignty.
British covert operations in the Baltic States, which began in 1944 against the Nazis, escalated after the war. In Operation Jungle, the Secret Intelligence Service
(known as MI6) recruited and trained Estonians, Latvians, and
Lithuanians for the clandestine work in the Baltic states between 1948
and 1955. Leaders of the operation included Alfons Rebane,
Stasys Žymantas, and Rūdolfs Silarājs. The agents were transported
under the cover of the "British Baltic Fishery Protection Service". They
launched from British-occupied Germany, using a converted World War II E-boat captained and crewed by former members of the wartime German navy.
British intelligence also trained and infiltrated anti-communist agents
into Russia from across the Finnish border, with orders to assassinate
Soviet officials. In the end, counter-intelligence supplied to the KGB by Kim Philby allowed the KGB to penetrate and ultimately gain control of MI6's entire intelligence network in the Baltic states.
Vietnam and the Middle East would later damage the reputation gained by the US during its successes in Europe.
The KGB believed that the Third World rather than Europe was the arena in which it could win the Cold War. Moscow would in later years fuel an arms buildup in Africa. In later years, African countries used as proxies in the Cold War would often become "failed states" of their own.
Recruitment of former enemy scientists
V-2 rocket launching at Peenemünde, on the Baltic German coast (1943).
When the divisions of postwar Europe began to emerge, the war crimes
programmes and denazification policies of Britain and the United States
were relaxed in favour of recruiting German scientists, especially
nuclear and long-range rocket scientists.
Many of these, prior to their capture, had worked on developing the
German V-2 long-range rocket at the Baltic coast German Army Research
Center Peenemünde.
Western Allied occupation force officers in Germany were ordered to
refuse to cooperate with the Soviets in sharing captured wartime secret
weapons, the recovery for which, specifically in regards to advanced German aviation technology and personnel, the British had sent the Fedden Mission into Germany to contact its aviation technology centers and key personnel, paralleled by the United States with its own Operation Lusty aviation technology personnel and knowledge recovery program.
In Operation Paperclip,
beginning in 1945, the United States imported 1,600 German scientists
and technicians, as part of the intellectual reparations owed to the US
and the UK, including about $10 billion (US$131 billion in 2019 dollars)
in patents and industrial processes. In late 1945, three German rocket-scientist groups arrived in the U.S. for duty at Fort Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, as "War Department Special Employees".
The wartime activities of some Operation Paperclip scientists would later be investigated. Arthur Rudolph left the United States in 1984, in order to not be prosecuted.
Similarly, Georg Rickhey, who came to the United States under Operation
Paperclip in 1946, was returned to Germany to stand trial at the Mittelbau-Dora war crimes trial in 1947. Following his acquittal, he returned to the United States in 1948 and eventually became a US citizen.
The Soviets began Operation Osoaviakhim in 1946. NKVD and Soviet army units effectively deported thousands of military-related technical specialists from the Soviet occupation zone of post-war Germany to the Soviet Union. The Soviets used 92 trains to transport the specialists and their families, an estimated 10,000-15,000 people.
Much related equipment was also moved, the aim being to virtually
transplant research and production centres, such as the relocated V-2 rocket centre at MittelwerkNordhausen, from Germany to the Soviet Union. Among the people moved were Helmut Gröttrup and about two hundred scientists and technicians from Mittelwerk. Personnel were also taken from AEG, BMW's Stassfurt jet propulsion group, IG Farben's Leuna chemical works, Junkers, Schott AG, Siebel, Telefunken, and Carl Zeiss AG.
The operation was commanded by NKVD deputy Colonel General Serov, outside the control of the local Soviet Military Administration. The major reason for the operation was the Soviet fear of being condemned for noncompliance with Allied Control Council agreements on the liquidation of German military installations. Some Western observers thought Operation Osoaviakhim was a retaliation for the failure of the Socialist Unity Party in elections, though Osoaviakhim was clearly planned before that.
Demise of the League of Nations and the founding of the United Nations
As a general consequence of the war and in an effort to maintain international peace, the Allies formed the United Nations (UN), which officially came into existence on 24 October 1945. The UN replaced the defunct League of Nations
(LN) as an intergovernmental organization. The LN was formally
dissolved on 20 April 1946 but had in practice ceased to function in
1939, being unable to stop the outbreak of World War II. The UN
inherited some of the bodies of the LN, such as the International Labour Organization.
The five major Allied powers were given permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council. The permanent members can veto any United Nations Security Council resolution, the only UN decisions that are binding according to international law.
The five powers at the time of founding were: the United States of
America, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. The Republic of China lost the Chinese Civil War and retreated to the island of Taiwan by 1950 but continued to be a permanent member of the Council even though the de facto state in control of mainland China was the People's Republic of China (PRC). This was changed in 1971 when the PRC was given the permanent membership previously held by the Republic of China. Russia inherited the permanent membership of the Soviet Union in 1991 after the dissolution of that state.
By the end of the war, the European economy had collapsed with some 70% of its industrial infrastructure destroyed.
The property damage in the Soviet Union consisted of complete or
partial destruction of 1,710 cities and towns, 70,000 villages/hamlets,
and 31,850 industrial establishments.
The strength of the economic recovery following the war varied
throughout the world, though in general, it was quite robust,
particularly in the United States.
In Europe, West Germany, after having continued to decline economically during the first years of the Allied occupation, later experienced a remarkable recovery, and had by the end of the 1950s doubled production from its pre-war levels. Italy came out of the war in poor economic condition, but by the 1950s, the Italian economy was marked by stability and high growth. France rebounded quickly and enjoyed rapid economic growth and modernisation under the Monnet Plan. The UK, by contrast, was in a state of economic ruin after the war and continued to experience relative economic decline for decades to follow.
The Soviet Union also experienced a rapid increase in production in the immediate post-war era. Japan experienced rapid economic growth, becoming one of the most powerful economies in the world by the 1980s.
China, following the conclusion of its civil war, was essentially
bankrupt. By 1953, economic restoration seemed fairly successful as
production had resumed pre-war levels. This growth rate mostly persisted, though it was interrupted by economic experiments during the disastrous Great Leap Forward.
At the end of the war, the United States produced roughly half of
the world's industrial output. The US, of course, had been spared
industrial and civilian devastation. Further, much of its pre-war
industry had been converted to wartime usage. As a result, with its
industrial and civilian base in much better shape than most of the
world, the US embarked on an economic expansion unseen in human history.
US Gross Domestic Product increased from $228 billion in 1945 to just under $1.7 trillion in 1975.
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