War & Society Part 3: 1945-1989

This article is the third in a series exploring the history of war and examining the impact of war on society, and how warfare has evolved over time.

War and society have always been linked. We see evidence of this around the world recorded on cave walls, stone buildings, papyrus and more recently, on paper.

Indeed, City Lit rose from the ashes of war. Established after the First World War to offer learning opportunities in the humanities. Veterans were amongst our first leaners. Our courses also ran in air raid shelters during the Second World War. For City Lit, like the rest of the world, war has been part of our journey.

To understand the link between war and society, we need to brace ourselves and review the past, examine the present, and try to gauge the future. This one is both long and tough.

From European imperial wars to the Cold War

Often, the Cold War is understood as a long conflict between the two superpower blocs led by the US and the Soviet Union that did not turn into nuclear war. In this framework, the imperial histories of both the Europeans and the superpowers fade into the background. This is to simplify matters, however.

Several of the early Cold War conflicts were born out of empire and the process of decolonisation, which saw desperate European attempts to keep one imperial and colonial possession after the other.

• India & Palestine
  • For example, the contestation and eventual collapse of British imperial rule in the Raj (India) and Palestine ended in violence that killed several hundreds of thousands of people, if not more, and caused intergenerational traumas for millions of people, remembered as Partition and Al Nakba.
• Mau Mau Rebelion & Vietnam War
  • In other cases, the struggles for land or independence shifted to larger conflicts, as was the case in the Mau Mau rebellion and the Vietnam War, which followed on from the war of independence against the French.
• Northern Ireland
  • The ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland is yet another example of violent suppression linked to empire which attempted to normalised in terms like ‘emergency’, ‘crisis’, and ‘police operation’ when other terms would be more fitting. 

Imperial legacy in the USSR

As noted, the imperial histories of the USSR and the US are also important. 

In many ways, the Soviet Union was built on the Russian Empire. Certainly, the USSR secured control of the former imperial territories and ruthlessly subjugated their populations to the political will and economic plans of Moscow as had the empire before it. 

The genocides by way of forced hunger in Ukraine or forced displacement of the Kalmyks are just two examples of the state fighting the peoples within its borders. The vast Gulag labour camp empire with camps dotted across the USSR is another example.

In the same vein, older imperial notions of race did not fade. Racist imperial deals of Muscovites being superior to people from, for example, Uzbekistan, were still lived experience by the time the Soviet Union collapsed.

Imperial legacy in the US

The imperial history of the United States of America is also worth recalling.

In 1898, the US moved beyond its continental genocidal expansion, wars against Mexico and gunboat diplomacy against Haiti and several South American republics into the rivalry of acquiring downright overseas colonial and imperial territories.

Defeating first the Hawaiian kingdom and later the Spanish Empire, the US thus came to control Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, although a war against US control in the Philippines lasted until 1902.

Building on its national state-building process, established ideas of racial hierarchies remained central to governance. Yet, what the US wishes to remember is more along the lines of the liberty narrative on the poster here below.

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Although neither the US nor the USSR came to hold colonial territories in the European sense of territorial control with a colonial state and an extractive economy, the deeper imperial histories of both superpowers, and the international system, did certainly not end in 1945. 

With significant differences, both superpowers secured influence through patron-client networks comprising of economic, diplomatic, military and cultural ties with nominally sovereign nation states.

The Soviet Union sat heavily on Eastern and Central Europe while the US dominated Japan and what became US in South Korea.

The impact of this approach played out in regional wars, civil wars and genocides from Korea across Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East, which both cost an estimated 20 million lives and turned millions of people into refugees between 1945 and 1989.

This, historians have calculated, amounts to the deaths of nearly 1200 people every day from 1945 to 1989, an aspect that the binary ‘East/West’ narrative of ‘the Cold War’ fails to capture.