This summer marks the 80th anniversary of the "official" end of World War II, but in "The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives," published in April by Cornell University Press, the war's timeline is extended back to 1931 and into the mid-1950s. The book, edited by Ruth Lawlor, assistant professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Andrew N. Buchanan of the University of Vermont, also expands the scope of the war to include regional conflicts and revolutions from around the world.
Lawlor spoke with the Chronicle about the book.
Question: The essays in this book challenge many conventional notions about WWII. Why reframe the war in this way?
Answer: The book puts forward the idea of a "greater Second World War" which unfolded in three phases. First was the eruption of an overlapping series of regional wars and conflicts (1931-1941), all driven either by autarkic-imperialist responses to the crisis of the Great Depression (Japan's invasion of China, Italy's assault on Ethiopia, Nazi Germany's colonial project in central Europe) or - as in Spain - by popular rebellions. These discrete struggles coalesced into the second phase, a generalized world war (1941-1945), which was given coherence and shape by the unique capacity and political will of the United States to wage a genuinely offensive, global war. In the third phase, the global war unwound into a series of "ragged endings" characterized by further regional conflicts, revolutions and anti-colonial struggles, many of which escaped the control of the war's victors. The 1945 end date signifies the defeat of the Axis powers - but this could not, by itself, resolve the structural crises which led to the outbreak of these diverse wars across the world in the first place. That struggle to reshape the global order ended much later.
Q: What were some of the smaller countries and groups that were previously perceived to be peripheral to WWII but play a more significant role in this global context, and why they are relevant?
A: Not smaller, but definitely marginalized, is Latin America; after all, the only Latin American troops to fight in the war were the 25,000 men of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force in Italy. But once the war itself is reconceptualized as a series of autarkic-imperial responses to the Great Depression, Latin America assumes greater importance because of its critical role within the U.S. autarkic sphere, inaugurated by the Good Neighbor Policy in 1933. Access to Latin American resources and markets was critical to the U.S. capacity to wage global war in the first place. And the political backing of sovereign Latin American countries lent legitimacy to the international order of nation-states constructed at Bretton Woods in 1944 and at the United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945.
As for groups of people, there are many, including the women who played important roles in the partisan and revolutionary armies of China, the Philippines, Greece and Yugoslavia. Then there are the workers and soldiers who mutinied around the world in the winter of 1945-46: American GIs, Royal Indian Navy sailors, African troops in the British imperial armed forces, dockworkers in Australia and Britain, railway workers in Nigeria. Their protests were animated by diverse factors, including unequal pay and a desire for demobilization, but in them can also be discerned threads of anti-imperial opposition to ongoing war, especially wars of colonial reconquest, and resistance to neocolonial dependency. Their vision of what the war was actually about sits uneasily within triumphant nationalist histories - which is why their stories have been erased from popular memory.
Q: If you could single-handedly correct one public misperception of WWII, what would it be?
A: That the war ended imperialism, a framing that owes a lot to the related claim that it was fought in the name of democracy against tyranny. The United States was (and remains) an imperialist power and its intervention into the war smashed odious regimes like Nazi Germany. But in so doing the U.S. also made accommodations with many unsavory figures, including restoring colonial rule in North Africa under Nazi collaborator and former Vichy prime minister François Darlan, backing European wars of colonial reconquest in Indochina and Indonesia (to say nothing of Washington's own counterinsurgency in the Philippines and antirevolutionary intervention in the Greek civil war), reestablishing diplomatic relations with Spain's Franco in 1951 and installing rightist dictator Syngman Rhee as the first president of the Republic of Korea. I say this not to engage in moral relativism, but merely to point out that U.S. motivations to wage this kind of global war to secure a world order granting Washington alone police power over the rest of the world cannot be described as purely democratic or selfless. This is obvious to those in other parts of the world who did not experience the war as a great anti-fascist struggle. But it remains controversial to say so in the U.S. today.
Q: What happened to the role of the U.S. and its use of power in the years after 1945?
A: The ultimate outcome of the Second World War was contradictory. On the one hand, the U.S. emerged as the most powerful empire in world history, with military, political and economic influence reaching deep into formerly isolated or colonized territories and organized at the global level by the new institutions of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and, later, NATO. On the other hand, that order was never fully global; it was checked by Soviet military power in Europe, by the passions of colonized people who struggled for, and in many cases won, national liberation, and by the outcome of the Chinese Civil War, which upended American plans for a world order structured by four regional "policemen," one of which was hoped to be Nationalist China.
In an attempt to resolve these "ragged ends," the United States plunged into new rounds of counterinsurgency and anti-revolutionary war in the years after 1945, including taking over European colonial commitments in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and waging smaller-scale covert operations in Indonesia, Iran, Guatemala and elsewhere from the 1950s onwards. This new orientation toward perpetual war figured as global "policing" completely altered American life - including via the permanence of the new national security establishment - and, ultimately, meant that the much-vaunted "American century" of unrivaled U.S. global predominance was short-lived.
Q: What lessons can we glean from this new global view of WWII that might be applied to today?
A: As I was writing these answers, all around me was talk of a third world war. I agree we are in a moment of geopolitical crisis, but we should think carefully about the reasons great power conflicts might be on the horizon again as well as the work analogies to World War II do for nationalist politics in the present. The latter is obvious in Vladimir Putin's mendacious use of World War II comparisons to justify his war in Ukraine, but similar narratives persist closer to home as well - whether to make the case for rearmament, as in Britain, or to cast a Panglossian cloak over the character of U.S. foreign policy in the past. It is not surprising that the 80th anniversary of the German and Japanese surrenders - not an especially meaningful milestone - has seen such ostentatious displays of nationalism and militarism almost everywhere at precisely the moment the world order inaugurated at that time is suddenly up for grabs.
