Chapter 27 Chapter Summary

The chaos and confusion of the postwar world created new political trends and new levels of cooperation, but it also created an unprecedented threat to world peace. As the United States and the Soviet Union squared off as new superpowers in the Cold War, their influence was both accepted and contested. Through all of their posturing, however, the two powers were unwilling to confront one another directly, so they fought proxy wars while amassing stockpiles of nuclear weapons that could annihilate the world. At the same time, the declining power of Europe opened the door for many colonial peoples to push for independence, and achieve it, and the world underwent an unprecedented recovery in the decades following World War II. While the Cold War was the dominant ideas impacting cultural life and thought, decolonization also brought new thinkers and ideas more prominence on the world’s stage. While the superpowers waged their Cold War, newly developed nations attempted to bring new issues to light, such as those illustrated in the Counterpoint of this chapter from the Bandung Conference in 1955.