two sovereign nations was the long continental
border between Canada and the US. By the
closing years of the century all the frontiers
between the nations of the European Union were
undefended. Today the notion of a war between
France and Germany or between Germany and
any of its immediate neighbours has become
unthinkable; a conflict over the territories they
possess is inconceivable, as is a war prompted by
the belief that coexistence will not be possible. To
that extent the international climate has greatly
changed for the better. But the possibility of such
wars in the Balkans, in Eastern Europe, in Asia,
Africa and the Middle East remains ever present.
No year goes by without one or more wars
occurring somewhere in the world, many of them
savage civil wars. What is new in the 1990s is that
these wars no longer bring the most powerful
nations of the world into indirect conflict with
each other. The decision of Russia and the US to
cease arming and supplying opposing contest-
ants in the Afghan civil wars marked the end of
an indirect conflict that had been waged between
the Soviet Union and the US since the Second
World War in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and
Latin America. But this understanding will not
banish wars. Intervention, whether by a group
of nations acting under UN sponsorship or by a
major country acting as policeman, is costly. UN
resources are stretched to the limits by peace-
keeping efforts in Cyprus, Cambodia, and former
Yugoslavia and other trouble spots. No universal
peacekeeping force exists. Intervention would
therefore be likely only when the national
interests of powerful countries became involved.
It would be less likely, where the need was purely
humanitarian.
The world’s history is interwoven with migra-
tions. The poor and the persecuted have left their
homeland for other countries. The great move-
ment of peoples from Eastern to Western Europe
and further west across the Atlantic to the US,
Canada, the Argentine, Australasia and South
Africa continued throughout the nineteenth
century, most of the emigrants being unskilled
workers from rural areas. But this free movement
of peoples, interrupted by the First World War,
was halted soon after its close. In countries con-
trolled by Europeans and their descendants
quotas were imposed, for example by the US
Immigration Act of 1924, denying free access to
further immigrants from Europe. These countries
so arranged their immigration policies that they
slowed down to a trickle or excluded altogether
the entry of Asians and Africans. In the US the
exclusion of Asians from China and Japan had
begun well before 1914. They had been welcome
only when their labour was needed. The same
attitude became clear in Britain where immigra-
tion of West Indians was at first encouraged after
1945, only to be restricted in 1962. The demand
for labour, fluctuating according to the needs
of a country’s economy, and the strength of
racial prejudice have been the main underlying
reasons for immigration policies. While the West
restricted intercontinental migrations after the
First World War, within Asia the movement con-
tinued, with large population transfers from
India, Japan and Korea to Burma, Malaya, Cey-
lon, Borneo and Manchuria. Overseas Chinese in
Asia play a crucial role, as do Indian traders in
sub-Saharan Africa.
After the Second World War there were huge
migrations once more in Asia, Europe and the
Middle East. Millions of Japanese returned to
their homeland. The partition of the Indian sub-
continent led to the largest sudden and forced
migration in history of some 25 million from
east to west and west to east. At the close of the
war in Europe, West Germany absorbed 20
million refugees and guest-workers from the East.
Two million from Europe migrated to Canada
and to Australia; 3 million North Koreans fled to
the South.
The US experienced a changing pattern of
immigration after the Second World War. More
than 11 million people were registered as enter-
ing the country between 1941 and 1980. The
great majority of immigrants had once been of
European origin. After 1945 increasing numbers
of Puerto Ricans and Filipinos took advantage of
their rights of entry. There was a large influx
of Hispanics from the Caribbean; in addition
probably as many as 5 million illegal immigrants
crossed the Mexican border to find low-paid work