The Twentieth Century: World Wars, Decolonisation, Cold War, and Globalisation

The twentieth century opened with European empires at their territorial peak and closed with almost all of them dissolved, a transformation driven substantially by two catastrophic world wars that exhausted the imperial powers and legitimised anti-colonial claims to self-determination. The First World War (1914-1918), triggered by alliance systems and imperial rivalries in Europe but fought with soldiers and resources drawn from colonies worldwide — including over a million Indian soldiers who served under British command — exposed the contradictions of empires demanding sacrifice from colonised subjects while denying them political rights, fuelling nationalist movements from Ireland to Egypt to India in its aftermath.

The Second World War (1939-1945) was even more directly a story of global reordering: Japan's conquest of Southeast Asia shattered the myth of European invincibility in Asia (dramatised by the fall of Singapore in 1942), the war's end saw the United States and Soviet Union emerge as the two dominant powers, and the Holocaust's genocide of six million Jews became a defining moral reference point for international human rights instruments, including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the establishment of the United Nations. Wartime exhaustion of Britain and France, combined with the moral and financial costs of holding empires against increasingly organised nationalist movements, accelerated decolonisation across Asia and Africa between 1945 and the 1960s.

India's independence in 1947, achieved alongside the traumatic Partition that displaced an estimated fifteen million people and killed hundreds of thousands to over a million, was both a landmark of decolonisation and a case study in the violent aftermath of hastily drawn colonial-era boundaries, a pattern later repeated in the partition of Palestine (1947-48) and post-colonial African borders inherited from the Berlin Conference. Jawaharlal Nehru's subsequent leadership in founding the Non-Aligned Movement (1961), alongside figures like Josip Broz Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Sukarno, offered postcolonial states a third path between the American and Soviet blocs, reflecting a broader Global South assertion of agency within Cold War bipolarity, most visibly articulated at the 1955 Bandung Conference.

The Cold War (roughly 1947-1991) structured global politics through the ideological and military rivalry of the United States and Soviet Union, producing proxy conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, a nuclear arms race that brought the world to the brink of catastrophe during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and competing development models offered to newly independent states. India's own Cold War-era foreign policy, balancing non-alignment with practical tilts (notably the 1971 Indo-Soviet Treaty during the Bangladesh Liberation War), illustrates how even ostensibly neutral postcolonial states had to navigate real strategic pressures rather than standing wholly outside the bipolar order.

The Cold War's end in 1989-1991, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet dissolution, opened a period of accelerated economic globalisation: trade liberalisation, the rise of multinational supply chains, digital communication technologies, and the expansion of institutions like the World Trade Organization (1995) integrated economies, including India's own post-1991 liberalisation, into a genuinely interconnected global market. This process has been accompanied by persistent debate over whether globalisation reduces or reproduces the core-periphery inequalities established in the colonial era, a question that continues to shape twenty-first-century development policy in India and across the Global South.