Contemporary history

• 1. Introduction

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  Contemporary history is the slice of the past that runs from about 1945 to the present, the era still close enough to touch. In English-language historiography it sits as a subset of modern history, and in the social sciences it runs alongside the rise of postmodernity. It opens with the Allies of World War II having defeated all significant opposition, then sliding almost at once into a new standoff. That standoff would be called the Cold War, a confrontation between a Western Bloc led by the United States and an Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union. It spurred fears of nuclear war, yet an all-out hot war never came. How did a half-century of dread end not with a bomb but with a peaceful chain reaction in 1989? Why did old colonial empires fall apart from 1945 to 1975, and why did living standards in the developed world climb so sharply at the same time? This is the story of an era that built the United Nations, split Germany in two, put a man on the Moon, and wired the planet together with the Internet.

• 2. The Long Standoff

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  In 1945 the Allies faced a looming question: how to handle the defeated Axis nations and the shattered nations the Axis had conquered. Following the Yalta Conference, territory was carved into zones, each assigned to an Allied country responsible for rebuilding. These zones were meant to be temporary, and occupied Austria was eventually released to independence as a neutral country. But as tensions grew, many zones calcified into place, and countries in the Soviet zones of Eastern Europe had communist regimes installed as satellite states.

  The Berlin Blockade of 1948 brought a Western Airlift to preserve West Berlin and signaled a cooling of East-West relations. Germany split into two countries in 1949, liberal-democratic West Germany and communist East Germany. The Western Bloc formed NATO that same year, while the Eastern Bloc answered with the Warsaw Pact in 1955. Direct combat between the new Great Powers was generally avoided, though proxy wars flared in other countries, one side's faction armed against the other's.

  An arms race to build nuclear weapons followed, as each side wanted more in case war came. The 1980s brought a general retreat for the communist bloc. The Soviet-Afghan War from 1979 to 1989 is often called the Soviet Union's Vietnam War, an expensive and ultimately unsuccessful occupation. More decisive was economics: Eastern Europe could not compete with Western Europe, and matching the American defense budget strained limited resources. The Pan-European Picnic in 1989 set a peaceful chain reaction in motion, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Revolutions of 1989 toppled communist governments across Eastern Europe, and the USSR declined to invade to restore them. The Malta Summit on the 3rd of December 1989, the failure of the August Coup by Soviet hardliners, and the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union on the 26th of December 1991 sealed the end of the Cold War.

• 3. Empires Unraveling

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  Decolonization was the most important development across Southeast Asia and Africa from 1946 to 1975, as the old British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese colonial empires were dismantled. Many new states won independence, then faced a hard choice: ally with the Western Bloc, the Eastern Bloc, or stay neutral as members of the Non-Aligned Movement. British India was granted independence in 1947 without an outright war, and was partitioned into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Indo-Pakistani wars were fought in 1947, 1965, and 1971.

  Sukarno took control of an independent Indonesia in 1950 after attempts to reinstate Dutch rule had largely failed, and he leaned toward the East. He was later overthrown by Suharto in 1968, who took a pro-Western stance. The Federation of Malaya gained independence in 1957, alongside the fighting of the Malayan Emergency against communist forces from 1948 to 1960. The French unsuccessfully fought the First Indochina War to hold French Indochina, and the 1954 Geneva Conference created Cambodia, Laos, and two Vietnamese states. That division led to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s, which ended when communist North Vietnam unified the country in 1975.

  In Africa, France fought the grinding Algerian War from 1954 to 1962, ending French Algeria. Portugal held on fiercely, leading to the Portuguese Colonial War from 1961 to 1974 in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique, until the Estado Novo government fell. Apartheid-era South Africa stayed fiercely anti-communist and withdrew from the British Commonwealth in 1961. Many newly independent African governments struggled with a narrow balance, weak enough to be overthrown by coup-plotters, or strong enough to harden into dictatorships.

• 4. The Restless Middle East

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  The new Jewish state of Israel declared its independence, recognized by both the United States and the Soviet Union, after which followed the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Egypt's weak king Farouk was overthrown in the 1952 Egyptian revolution and replaced by General Nasser. The 1953 Iran coup saw the American-friendly shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi seize power directly, and Iraq's Western-friendly monarchy was overthrown in 1958.

  Nasser's Egypt faced the Suez Crisis in 1956, briefly unified with Syria as the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961, and intervened expensively in the North Yemen civil war from 1962 to 1970. A few years after that union dissolved, Syria's government fell in the 1966 coup and was replaced by the Neo-Baathist Party, eventually leading to the Al-Assad family. Israel and its neighbors fought the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

  Under Anwar Sadat and later Hosni Mubarak, Egypt switched from Nasserism to favoring the Western Bloc and signed a peace treaty with Israel. Lebanon, once among the most prosperous countries in the region, collapsed into the decade-long Lebanese Civil War from 1975 to 1990. Iran's unpopular pro-American government fell in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and was replaced by an Islamic Republic headed by Ruhollah Khomeini. Iran and Baathist Iraq under Saddam Hussein then fought the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988, which ended inconclusively. These tensions presaged later conflicts that would draw in outside powers for decades to come.

• 5. A New World Order

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  The end of the Cold War left the United States the world's sole superpower, and communism seemed discredited. China remained officially communist, yet Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up allowed a capitalist private sector to grow. In Russia, President Boris Yeltsin pursued privatization, spinning off former government agencies into private corporations. Many Western commentators were optimistic, believing the world was steadily progressing toward free, liberal democracies. South Africa, no longer able to win Western support by claiming to be anti-communist, ended apartheid in the early 1990s.

  The European Economic Community evolved into the European Union with the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, integrating Europe across borders to a new degree. The Gulf War saw a large international coalition undo Baathist Iraq's annexation of Kuwait, but other police-style actions failed. Somalia and Afghanistan descended into long civil wars, Russia fought a brutal war in Chechnya from 1994 to 1996, and the breakup of Yugoslavia led to the Yugoslav Wars and eventual NATO intervention in the Kosovo War. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, seemed to offer a roadmap to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, but those hopes were dashed in 2000 and 2001 after negotiations broke down and the Second Intifada began.

  In 2001 the September 11 attacks, the deadliest terrorist attacks in human history, were carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States. In response, the United States declared the war on terror. US-led coalitions launched a war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021 and the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011, which deposed Saddam Hussein. The US killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 and withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021, after which the Taliban retook control.

  China has sought to challenge American hegemony, with relations deteriorating under Xi Jinping and Donald Trump and a trade war between them. A series of anti-government uprisings known as the Arab Spring began from 2010 to 2012 after a revolution in Tunisia. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By 2024-11 more countries had joined NATO and 13 had joined the EU, while the United Kingdom left the EU in 2020.

• 6. The Glorious Thirty

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  The end of World War II in 1945 saw a surge in international trade and a web of treaties to ease its flow, with the United States and the dollar displacing the UK at the center of the world economy. The era is sometimes called Pax Americana, a comparison to the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire. New York's Wall Street was the center of the financial world from 1945 to 1970 in a way unlikely to be seen again. Unlike after World War I, the US strongly aided Europe's rebuilding, including the defeated Axis nations, and the Marshall Plan sent billions of dollars to Western Europe.

  The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference established a system that governed world trade and currencies from 1945 to 1971, along with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. France called these years Les Trente Glorieuses, the Glorious Thirty. West Germany bounced back to economic powerhouse status by the 1950s with the wirtschaftswunder, and Japan followed, becoming the second largest economy in the world in 1968 in the Japanese economic miracle.

  The 1970s brought economic headwinds as oil prices climbed, the easiest wells already pumped dry. Political tensions over the Yom Kippur War and the Iranian Revolution led to the 1973 oil crisis and the 1979 oil crisis. The Four Asian Tigers, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, emulated Japan's route to prosperity. In China, the Gang of Four were overthrown in 1976, and Deng Xiaoping opened the economy to capitalist innovations through the 1980s. China's economy, tiny in 1976, eventually took the spot of second largest from Japan in 2010.

  In the early 2000s, a rise in commodity and housing prices fed a global speculative bubble in real estate and equities. The collapse of the American housing bubble caused securities tied to real estate to plummet, and the Great Recession began in the United States in 2007, sparked by the 2008 financial crisis. From late 2009 the European debt crisis took hold, and on the 9th of May 2010 Europe's finance ministers approved a rescue package worth 750 billion euros to ensure financial stability.

• 7. One World, Wired

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  The spread of better recording technology, such as the magnetophon, meant a musical act could be heard on the radio everywhere without loss of sound quality, creating international superstars such as Elvis Presley and The Beatles. Home television sets let people across the globe watch the same show. Hollywood in California produced films that dominated cinema worldwide, backed by large budgets and gathered expertise. The rise of the Internet in the 1990s spread the most popular works even further, while cheap publishing through personal websites, blogs, and YouTube let niche subcultures connect and thrive.

  Language usage saw a rise in English as a lingua franca, learned worldwide as a second language and tied to increased Americanization. During the Cold War, something similar happened with Russian in the Eastern Bloc, though that status mostly reversed after the Soviet collapse. The French and German languages saw their prestige as global languages decline after World War II.

  Religious trends ran in disparate directions. In prosperous industrialized regions there was a loose drift toward secularization, with the decline of Christianity in the Western world the most notable. Poland and Czechoslovakia both endorsed state atheism during the Cold War, yet after 1989 and 1990 these bordering states diverged sharply. Poland was among Europe's most religious, with 96% espousing Catholic belief in 2011, while the Czech Republic was among the most irreligious, with only 15% espousing any religious belief by 2011.

  Urbanization climbed as people moved from rural areas to cities. In Eastern Africa the urban population soared from 11 million in 1920 to 77 million in 2010, and rural Chinese moved to coastal cities such as Shenzhen in the 1990s and 2000s. The sexual revolution brought more tolerant attitudes toward sex, helped by the pill, first approved for use in 1960 in the United States, which made birth control easier and more reliable and contributed to declining birth rates in the industrialized world.

• 8. Atoms, Orbits, And Data

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  Nuclear power for peaceful purposes dawned in the 1950s and 1960s, though hopes that atomic energy would be too cheap to meter proved overly optimistic. It grew large in several nations, especially nuclear power in France, but stayed controversial over its tie to nuclear weapons, financial cost, radioactive waste, and meltdown fears, sharpened by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. With Russian natural gas disrupted in 2022, France looked to reactivate some older decommissioned plants. Solar power, by contrast, reached around 4% of the world's overall energy production in 2021.

  The space race was one of the Cold War's rivalries, with both NASA and the Soviet space program launching satellites and probes. The Soviets put the first human into space with Yuri Gagarin, but the US was first to land on the Moon with Apollo 11 in 1969, followed by five more landings. The Space Shuttle program aimed to cut costs with a reusable orbiter, and the first fully functional one, Columbia, designated OV-102, launched into low Earth orbit in April 1981. The program ran 135 missions before the fleet retired between March and July 2011, after surviving the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

  NASA announced in 2011 that its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured evidence of possible liquid water on Mars. On the 6th of August 2012, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity landed on the planet. The Planck Surveyor estimated the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years, 100 million years older than previously thought, and in 2012 European physicists statistically demonstrated the existence of the Higgs boson.

  Climate change emerged as a defining challenge, the increase in Earth's near-surface air and ocean temperatures since the mid-20th century. A 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tied glacier retreat, ice shelf disruption such as the Larsen Ice Shelf, sea level rise, and more intense extreme weather in part to global warming. The same warming made the Arctic Northwest Passage navigable after 2009, as reduced pack ice opened waterways once blocked most of the year. New diseases now spread faster than in any earlier era, from the HIV/AIDS epidemic that began in 1981 to the COVID-19 pandemic, first documented in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, a reminder that the modern ease of travel carries risks of its own.