Modern World: Cold War, Decolonisation and Contemporary Global Developments
Modern World: Cold War, Decolonisation and Contemporary Global Developments. The questions test sequence: which bloc, which crisis, which year - and India's position outside both blocs.
Origins and crises of the Cold War
- Post-war division at Yalta and Potsdam (1945); the Truman Doctrine (March 1947) and the Marshall Plan (1947) on one side, the Cominform on the other.
- Berlin Blockade (1948–49); NATO (1949) answered by the Warsaw Pact (1955); the Korean War (1950–53).
- The Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) brought the world closest to nuclear war; the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 and came down in 1989.
- Détente produced SALT I and the ABM Treaty (1972); the Afghan intervention (1979) revived tension until Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika.
- The USSR dissolved in December 1991, ending the bipolar order.
Non-alignment and decolonisation
- Bandung (1955) prepared the ground; the first NAM summit met at Belgrade in 1961, with Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Sukarno and Nkrumah prominent.
- Decolonisation: India 1947, Ceylon and Burma 1948, Indonesia 1949, Ghana 1957, Nigeria 1960, Algeria 1962 (Evian Accords), Kenya 1963, Zimbabwe 1980, Namibia 1990, apartheid ending in South Africa in 1994.
Contemporary developments
- The UN was founded in 1945 with 51 members; the WTO replaced the GATT framework in 1995; SAARC dates from 1985 and ASEAN from 1967.
- India's 1991 reforms integrated the economy into global markets; the Paris Agreement and the SDGs both belong to 2015.
Worked example
Explain the Cuban Missile Crisis. Discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba → US naval quarantine → thirteen days of brinkmanship → a public Soviet withdrawal in exchange for a secret US pledge on Turkey → the 1963 hotline and Test Ban Treaty. The reasoning shows that Cold War crises were managed by bargaining, not by war.
Traps
- NATO (1949) precedes the Warsaw Pact (1955).
- Bandung 1955 is not the first NAM summit; Belgrade 1961 is.
- The USSR ended in December 1991, not with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.