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:
“In everyone’s youthful dreams, philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the East, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the Western world. In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I believe that the fundamental proposition is that we must recognize that the hostilities in Europe, in Africa, and in Asia are all parts of a single world conflict. We must, consequently, recognize that our interests are menaced both in Europe and in the Far East.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)