World War II Outcomes

The Allied powers resolved WWII with a number of measures. They punished the main political and military criminals at trials held in Germany and Japan. They also promoted economic aid to the war-damaged economies through the Marshall Plan which helped Western Europe's economies get back on track. This plan was so successful that West Germany's economy soon became the largest in Europe. Likewise in Japan, the establishment of a democratic government and a capitalist economy led the country to re-emerge as the dominant power in Asia. Japan's military power, however, had been diminished as the country was restricted from maintaining offensive military capabilities by its post-war constitution.

The Allied powers occupied the nations which lost the war and installed democratic governments with capitalist economies that mirrored their own political and economic structures. After initially being divided into four territories by the Allied powers, Germany ended up as two separate nations, East and West Germany. The city of Berlin was also divided into two halves under the control of these separate nations. West Germany had a democratically-elected government and a capitalist economy while East Germany was a communist dictatorship under the control of the Soviet Union.

As a devastated Europe emerged from war, the continent became an ideological battleground between the Soviet-controlled communist Eastern Europe ruled by dictatorships, and the democratically-elected governments that were in control of most of Western Europe. These two foes were separated by the Iron Curtain which ran through the middle of the continent with the NATO allies on the western side, and the countries of the Warsaw Pact on the east. As the unofficial leaders of these two competing alliances, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. became the two dominant world powers. Competition between these two powers would come to influence world history over the coming decades during the Cold War.

The Allied powers established the United Nations as an organization devoted to peacekeeping and other humanitarian causes. As one of its first actions, this organization issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in hopes that it would serve as a barrier against the recurrence of the atrocities that had occurred during the war.

Finally, as Europe's power and influenced waned, its empires disintegrated as well. Over the next thirty years, many of the colonies of Europe's imperialist powers would gain independence. Some of these struggles would be peaceful, and others would be bloody battles that drew in the world's major powers. We'll look at how these struggles were influenced by the Cold War next.