Chapter 21

With Europeans in control of most parts of the world, the balance of power in Europe was split between two rival alliances: Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria, Italy) and Triple Entente (Russia, France, Britain) when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a heir to the Austrian throne. Austria was determined to destroy the nationalism movement and Serbia had Russia along with Russia’s allies behind it. A war broke out by August of 1914. Causes of the war were industrialized militarism, Europe’s colonial empires, popular nationalism which resulted in over ten million deaths and twenty million people wounded. Germany was defeated in 1918. The women began working in factories to replace the men, labor unions were sacrificed, questioning of Enlightenment values and the superiority of the West and its science. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 resulted in Germany losing its colonial empire and 15 percent of its European territory, required to pay heavy reparations, suffered restriction of its military forces, accept sole responsibility for the outbreak of the war and resented the treaty immensely. During this time, Woodrow Wilson’s ideas Fourteen Points and League of Nations became popular by the Europeans. Wilson's vision largely failed, and the U.S. Senate refused to join the league. In 1929, the great depression happened. The great depression when contracting stock prices wiped out paper fortunes, and many lost their life’s savings. The world trade dropped 62 percent within a few years businesses contracted and unemployment soared; reached 30 percent in Germany and the United States in 1932. The causes of the the great depression were factories and farms produced more goods than could be sold, Europe was impoverished by WWI and didn’t purchase many American products and started producing more of its own goods. Capitalist governments had thought that the economy would regulate itself, some states turned to “democratic socialism,” with greater regulation of the economy and more equal distribution of wealth. President Franklin Roosevelt came up with the New Deal. The New Deal idea of public spending programs permanently changed the relationship between government, the private economy, and individual citizens which efforts to “prime the pump” of the economy, Social Security, minimum wage, and welfare as an economic safety net for the poor, creation of permanent agribusiness through farm subsidies and a vast array of new government agencies to supervise the economy. As far as democracy goes, fascism was big in Europe, the Nazi power ruled Germany and Authoritarianism was important in Japan. In 1931, Japanese military units seized control of Manchuria. In 1937, an attack started WWII and the Japanese felt threated. The United States imposed an oil embargo on Japan and the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred in December 1941. The results of WWII were 60 million people died in WWII, 40% of those deaths were from the USSR, the holocaust where Nazi's killed millions and left the United States the only country not impacted by WWII.