largely peasant society for three decades. Many
millions perished in the terror he unleashed, the
class war and as a result of experiments designed
to create an abundant communist society. In
Asia, too, the regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia
provided a more recent example of inhumanity
in the pursuit of ideological theories amounting to
genocide.
By the close of the century the tide finally
turned against communist autocracy and dicta-
torship. The suffering and oppression all over the
world in the twentieth century was much greater
than it had been in the nineteenth. Only the
minority whose standards of living improved, who
lived in freedom in countries where representative
government remained an unbroken tradition, had
the promise of progress fulfilled through greater
abundance of wealth. But even in these fortunate
societies few families were untouched by the
casualties of the wars of the twentieth century.
Western societies were spared the nightmare after
1945 of a third world war, which more than once
seemed possible, though they were not spared
war itself. These wars, however, involved far
greater suffering to the peoples living in Asia,
Africa and the Middle East than to the West.
The Cold War had divided the most powerful
nations in the world into opposing camps. The
West saw itself as the ‘free world’ and the East as
the society of the future, the people’s alliance of
the communist world. They were competing for
dominance in the rest of the world, in Africa,
Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, where
the West’s overwhelming influence was chal-
lenged by the East. That struggle dominated the
second half of the twentieth century. Regional
conflicts in the world came to be seen through
the prism of the Cold War. Within the two blocs
differences also arose, of which the most serious
was the quarrel between the Soviet Union and
China, which further complicated developments
in Asia. That the Cold War never turned to a real
war between its protagonists was largely due to
MAD, the doctrine of mutual assured destruc-
tion. Both sides had piled up nuclear arsenals
capable of destroying each other and much of the
world, and there was no sure defence against all
the incoming missiles. Mutual assured destruc-
tion kept the dangerous peace between them. The
battle for supremacy was fought by other means,
including proxy wars between nations not
possessing the ‘bomb’ but armed and supported
by the nuclear powers.
The abiding strength of nationalism from the
nineteenth century right through the twentieth
has generally been underestimated by Western
historians. Hopes of peace for mankind and a
lessening of national strife were aroused by the
formation of the League of Nations after the
Great War of 1914–18. But long before the out-
break of the Second World War the principle of
‘collective security’ had broken down when the
undertakings to the League by its member states
clashed with perceived national interests. The
United Nations began with a burst of renewed
hope after the Second World War but could not
bridge the antagonisms of the Cold War. Both
the League and the UN performed useful inter-
national functions but their effectiveness was
limited whenever powerful nations refused their
cooperation.
Despite growing global interdependence on
many issues, including trade, the environment
and health, national interests were narrowly inter-
preted rather than seen as secondary to the inter-
ests of the international community. Nationalism
was not diminished in the twentieth century by a
shrinking world of mass travel and mass com-
munication, by the universal possession of cheap
transistor radios and the widespread availability
of television, nor by any ideology claiming to
embrace mankind. To cite one obvious example,
the belief that the common acceptance of a com-
munist society would obliterate national and
ethnic conflict was exploded at the end of the
century, and nationalism was and still is repressed
by force all over the world. Remove coercion, and
nationalism re-emerges in destructive forms.
But the world since 1945 has seen some posi-
tive changes too. Nationalism in Western Europe
at least has been transformed by the experiences
of the Second World War and the success of
cooperation. A sign of better times is the spread
of the undefended frontier. Before the Second
World War the only undefended frontier between
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PROLOGUE 9
