I distinctly remember the winter of 1989. All my life, to that time, the world had been divided between two world powers, two vast networks: Us and Them. The Communists were the big threat, and we were divided from them partly by a wall that ran through the city of Berlin, Germany. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and the world changed. I was 15.

Two months later, another huge change happened. For decades, my parents had been involved in the struggle for democracy in South Africa. As colonies around the world became independent countries, South Africa’s large, Black population had remained under the control of a small, white minority. In February 1990, the government recognized that the movement towards democracy was the inevitable end result of global decolonization. The principal leader of the movement towards democracy, Nelson Mandela, was freed from jail in February 1990, changing the world. Again.

Of course, at 15 (and not having taken a world history course yet) my attitude about these big changes was a resounding, “Whatever.” Only later would I come to learn that the Cold War and decolonization were two massive trends that had been shaping my entire life to that point.

Shifting global power

By 1945, the major European states had been devastated by six years of conflict and massive death tolls due to both war and genocide. So maybe it’s no surprise that the two great powers that emerged from the conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union, were both located outside of the region (or, in the case of the Soviet Union, mostly outside). China, a rising power, was even further away. And if European leaders were hoping to use the profits from their colonies to buy their way back to power, as some had done after the First World War, they would be disappointed. The people living in their colonies throughout Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Pacific were now ready and able to end colonial rule in their own lands.

Historians typically describe the events of the half- century or so after the Second World War ended in 1945 through two separate processes. The first was the Cold War, in which the United States and the Soviet Union led rival coalitions—politically active alliances— that confronted each other on every continent and ocean of the planet. The second was decolonization, as the people of colonies everywhere sought to gain independence and create their own nation-states. To some degree, we can see that these were different trends with different motives. The Cold War was a fight over military and economic supremacy, whereas decolonization was a struggle for political independence and sovereignty. Then again, bees and flowers are also two different things, but it’s pretty hard to study one while ignoring the other.

It turns out that many of the events of this period could be described through both of these conflicts, depending on your perspective. If you had been a colonial subject in Africa, for example, your attempts to create your own country would feel like a decolonization struggle. From this perspective, calling for US or Soviet help was just a way to get the support you needed. The same events, viewed from the United States or the Soviet Union, could look quite different. For the leaders of these superpowers, supporting an independence movement, or opposing it, could feel more like a strategic move in their Cold War rivalry.

So even though the Cold War and decolonization are often studied separately, we’re going to take an opportunity in this unit to ask how studying them together gives us a different—and possibly better— understanding of this era.

Understanding the Cold War

In the first half of this unit, we look closely at the Cold War. Through the communities frame, the conflict looks like just any other clash of titans: two rising, immense superpowers confronting each other in the hope of dominating global politics for their own interests. Fun, right? But at the same time, the Cold War was a real struggle in terms of systems of production and distribution. The United States said it championed both the political freedom that democracy promised and economic freedom in the form of the capitalist system. The Soviet Union said it was fighting for the rights of workers and for economic equality, in the form of communism and socialism. Both countries felt that they had the better system, and both found allies and supporters in many places.

The Cold War soon linked up countries in networks of alliance and aid. Of course, not everyone picked sides in the struggle. Some countries and people tried to be neutral. But because groups around the world found that they agreed with one side more, much of the world was drawn into this conflict. With two superpowers at odds, smaller countries and groups found it convenient—even prudent—to ally with one side. That’s why the Cold War timeline seems to jump from crisis to crisis around the world, from Central Europe in the 1940s, to Korea and then Cuba in the 1950s, to Vietnam in the 1960s, and then Latin America and Africa soon after. Finally, in 1989, the communist side of the struggle began to break up for a variety of reasons. Communism ended in the Soviet Union shortly after, bringing the Cold War to an end.

To understand these events, and how they are connected in a bigger story, we consider the perspectives of people who saw them as one long struggle, especially in the United States and the Soviet Union. But we also try to look at many events from the perspectives of those who experienced and participated in them as individual episodes. People in East Asia probably lived a very different Cold War than those in the Caribbean or any other part of the world, for example. Looking at these different perspectives helps us to understand better what was really going on.

Understanding decolonization

After looking closely at the Cold War, we investigate decolonization. Seen through the communities frame, decolonization is a term that describes the process by which colonies became independent nation-states and by which great global empires came to an end. Of course, it’s not like everything changed. We can still see some legacies of empire in the world today. But political independence did bring about changes in the way the world was organized—in global economies, in migration patterns, and in daily life.

If we were to study each one of the dozens and dozens of struggles for independence, finishing this unit would take longer than the Cold War. So instead, we’ll begin by describing the broader global pattern of decolonization and the networks that connected these struggles. We look at India, where decades of resistance to British rule suddenly came together in a massive movement for independence in 1947–1948. The result was not one but several newly independent countries. We also focus on the Middle East, where competing interests after the war led to tensions that continue to shape the region today. In addition, we explore events in South Africa, where the descendants of European settlers held on to political power—and the overtly racist system called apartheid—decades after other parts of Africa became independent. We look at the role of women in independence movements around the world, and how their role and experience in these movements differed from men. Finally, we explore whether the Civil Rights movement in the United States was connected to the decolonization struggle elsewhere.¹

Understanding how they were entangled

Throughout each of these two parts of this unit, the stories we explore are never strictly decolonization stories or strictly Cold War stories. Whether it’s China, Iran, Cuba, or elsewhere, the events we study are almost always, simultaneously, struggles for independence and Cold War conflicts. It’s up to you to use the evidence in the unit to work out for yourself how these two big trends were tangled together both in the complicated stories of different regions, and in the global story for this era.

You may also begin a journey like the one I began at 15 years old and am still on today. You may consider how these events, so many of which took place in your grandparents’ and parents’ lifetimes, have impacted the world you live in today. We will make some of those connections clearer in the last unit of the course, as well.

1 Just as with decolonization, many people argue that the Civil Rights movement is not over!