How the post-1945 world order began in disorder

The prelude to our post-1945 world order was a violent world crisis between 1910 and 1945. Two world wars were fought. Empires broke, collapsed, surged, rebuilt, and lashed out in vengeful hatred. Nations formed, mostly from violent, racialist ideas of the ties of their ethnos to blood, soil and destiny. Technologies, culture, ideas, and trade created upheavals in daily life. For the first time in human history, people watched themselves talk in films and listened to the broadcast voices of their leaders from around the world. But the upheavals brought not only entertainment. They brought death. The Great Imperial War 1931-45 killed people with more ruthless technology than ever before, culminating in the horrors of the Holocaust and the American atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

Too many accounts of the post-1945 world order neglect how this stormy, violent period midwifed a disordered world. As a result, they overstate the solidity of the post-1945 world. In truth, any world order or international system was fragile, fragmented, under fire, and built on blood, ruins, and ashes. As historian John Darwin wrote,

“the post-war world (whatever the dreams of prophets and planners) was not a new beginning or a cure for conflict. It was like a bombed-out city in which the most urgent need was to shore up the buildings that had survived the blast and divide up the remainder between rival contractors.”

John Darwin, After Tamerlane, The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000

I have called this period, in my brief history of the multipolar world, the Storms of Globalisation. Before I begin my deep dive into the post-1945 world, as presented in John Darwin, After Tamerlane, The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000, let us look at the storms that turned the post-1945 world into this metaphorically, and in many cases literally, bombed-out city.

This post is an edited version from my post of March 2024 Storms of Globalisation.

History of the multipolar world - 1900-1950

The period between 1900 and 1950 is crucial in the history of the multipolar world and of globalisation. It was a period that in culture, politics, society, technology, economics and war saw the “birth of the modern world.” It is also the world that we know through film, sound and photographic records - making it for many people the start of vividly recoverable and knowable history.