Decolonization

The idea of decolonization refers to when a nation becomes independent from an empire. This happened during the twentieth century when race, as a creditable basis for political or social life declined. The idea of becoming part of a nation gives people the promise of freedom, personal dignity, abundance, and opportunity. The first decolonization happened in the Americas in which indigenous people claimed that everybody deserved an equal place in the world of national states, so they got rid of the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. But this event was not easy to achieve because the new nation had some challenges like their own and deep division of language, not everybody had a common language some acquired the language of the Europeans while others keep their own native language, ethnicity, as a consequence of mixing between indigenous and Europeans, religion, and class. In the Americas many colonies besides sharing an European origin, they also shared the same culture as the colonial rules so those events made the process of colonization difficult because now the natives have to find their own identity. This process did not happen with the African or Asian people because their culture was still there, it just was submerged because it was denigrate during the colonial era. Something interesting happened with the young educated men in Europe, they had the novel idea that humankind was naturally divided into distinct people or nations but all deserved to live in an independent nation of its own. They did not see the colony with the same eyes that their fathers had in which the idea of Christianity, Enlightenment thought, and material progress were reasons enough to keep their colonies. They saw those events with real eyes because there were colonial racism, exploitation, and poverty. Something else that helped to the European colonial rule to disintegrate was the decades after World War II. Historians refer to this time as “conjuncture” because the coming together of several separate developments at particular time weakened Europe. United States and the Soviet Union, the new global superpowers, generally opposed to the old European colonial empires provided the platform to conduct anti colonial agitation. After the Americans obtained its independence, Europeans could not imagine how to keep their other profitable colonies in Asia and Africa. They saw the expense and the trouble of formal colonial government that could include political reform, investments in railroads, ports, and telegraph lines, the holding of election and the writing of constitution. Eventually their independence from the European rule happened, those new nations now had to work together for a common goal in which they struggled with one another over questions of leadership, power, strategy, ideology, and the distribution of material benefits.  

World War

Apparently after Europe lost some of their colonies because they reached their independence, people realized that the only thing they have left, was their own work to reach wealth. Some countries made some alliances like Germany, Italy, and Austro-Hungarian Empire to keep national security. Also, Russia, France, and Britain get together for the same concept but those alliances were not strong enough because a minor incident happened on June 28, 1914 that transformed almost all Europe. Serbian nationalist assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and the system of alliances tried to keep peace in Europe but it did not work because of been week so on August 1914 the war started in almost everywhere in Europe. At the beginning there was a popular support to go to war and even governments saw the war as a national unity from the class and gender conflicts in European societies. Industrialization contributed in the building of war weapons like guns submarines, tanks, airplane poison gas, and barbed wire. Labor union agreed to stop the strikes and did sacrifices for the common good, while women replace the men jobs at factories. When the war ended, the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919 in which Germany lost 15 percent of its territory in Europe, it was required to pay reparations to the winners and had military forces restricted. All of that left a German people with resentment besides the social and cultural changes in the rest of Europe. The integration of veterans into the civil life was not easy after they experienced horrible moments as part of been in war. Because of the casualties, there was easy to access the upper class. In some countries women receive the right to vote; new idea like consumerism came as a way to get access to the new and sophisticated products, and movies and radio appear as popular culture. Finally the war created a new united states in which it changed from debtor to creditor of Europe what make it to the center of the global power.