Western Europe
Britain and France were on the side of the victors, but they were exhausted and bankrupted by the war, and Britain never recovered its status as a superpower. With Germany and Japan in ruins as well, the world was left with two dominant powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Economic and political reality in Western Europe would soon force the dismantling of the European colonial empires, especially in Africa and Asia.
One of the most important political consequences of the Nazi experience in Western Europe was the establishment of new, human rights-based political alliances which eventually became the European Union and an international military alliance of democratic European countries known as NATO to counterbalance the Soviets' Warsaw Pact and Comintern until communist rule in Eastern Europe ended in the late 1980s.
The Communists emerged from the war sharing the vast prestige of the victorious Soviet armed forces, and for a while it looked as though they might take power in France, Italy and Greece. The West quickly acted to prevent this from happening, hence the Cold War.
Read more about this topic: Consequences Of Nazism
Famous quotes containing the words western and/or europe:
“We hold on to hopes for next year every year in western Dakota: hoping that droughts will end; hoping that our crops won’t be hailed out in the few rainstorms that come; hoping that it won’t be too windy on the day we harvest, blowing away five bushels an acre; hoping ... that if we get a fair crop, we’ll be able to get a fair price for it. Sometimes survival is the only blessing that the terrifying angel of the Plains bestows.”
—Kathleen Norris (b. 1947)
“Positively I sit here, and look at Europe sink, first one deck disappearing, then another, and the whole ship slowly plunging bow-down into the abyss; until the nightmare gets to be howling. The Roman Empire was a trifle to it.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)