What a difference one lifetime can make
One of the key wartime leaders of WWII was Marshal Petain of Vichy France.
When he was a young child , Europe had four times as many people as all of the Americas - when he died, almost a century later , the Americas were well on their way to having as many people as all of Europe .
They will soon have twice as many people as all Europe.
So when Petain was young , Europe had the population numbers to produce the wealth, the science, the education, the culture and the self confidence needed to present an all-powerful hegemonic face to the rest of the world.
But that hard and soft power hegemony shifted across the water to the USA , over the course of his lifetime.
What happened ?
I believe, for a start , that European mass emigration outbound to overseas and the loss of life and wealth caused by two world wars and endless smaller regional and civil wars (wars that barely scratched the Americas) really helped to do Europe in.
In other words, Europe fell --- as much as the USA rose.
But I also think we must avoid offering single cause explanations (like the one I just gave or crediting the American A-Bomb monopoly) to account for the rise of Pax Americana.
I am just as suspicious about claims - widely stated as a fact in 1945 and proposed just as wrongheadedly now - that 1945 saw the emergence of two Superpowers : Russia and America.
Over-rating the Soviet Army
I do not think Russia ever has had one tenth the globally hegemonic force that Western Europe had from the 1840s to the 1940s - or that the USA still has.
Even in terms of its military , Russia has always been vastly vastly overrated.
Yes , helped by neutrality from Japan, together with massive amounts of material aid from the Allies and with years of western wars of slow attrition against Germany in the Mediterranean region , on the North Atlantic and over the air over Germany , the Soviet army finally did make its way into Berlin.
But even then , only because the Germans were heavily tied down in Western Europe as well as Italy , after D-Day.
The Allies ignored all this and credited the Soviet army far too much.
Yes it took very heavy casualties indeed against the Nazis but mostly because it was willing to let its ordinary troops be slaughtered in record numbers , all to achieve quicker victories.
In 1945, Russia had no means - no overseas bases, no aircraft carrier cum amphibious task forces , no long range bombers and submarines - to project power beyond its borders.
No one in the world admired either its cultural products or its manufactured goods.
Basically it had the intellectual promise of the untested new concept of Communism to exert influence beyond Russia and for decades this was powerful stuff , but as it turns out, a wasting resource.
I think what 1945 really saw was the world's current and sole Superpower, Western Europe, replaced by another sole superpower, the USA.
WWII's inner war : between Britain and the Americans
Still I think key hegemonic battles did happen during the war, but they happened bloodlessly, within the western Allied camp.
It consisted of the English-speaking Americans working to reduce English-speaking Britain's high status among others in the world who spoke English as a first or second language.
Global hegemony usually arrives behind either a sword or a textbook and Pax America choose the latter --- mostly.
There were only three globe-spanning languages in the world in 1945 : English and French for sure and perhaps Spanish.
Sure other languages had many more native speakers but all their second language speakers were huddled around their borders.
English was the biggest globe-spanning language because it combined the awesome cultural, financial and military powers of two huge global empires - the British Commonwealth's physical and cultural empire and the American commercial empire.
America had no hopes of immediate direct traction over the French or Spanish cultural worlds - these were not languages very many influential Americans spoke as first or even second languages.
And in any case, as individual countries , nations like Spain, France, Italy, etc were all too small and too war-weakened to offer real competition to America.
But combined , all of "Europe" ( including outliers like North Africa, Palestine and Western Russia) still far out-numbered Americans in population and peacetime GNP.
Loosely bound around one large cultural, commercial and military power (like the proposed Nazi New Order) Europe could all resolve to learn German as their second language and come to prefer German engineering and style over American choices.
Their direct and colonies and indirect client states overseas might follow suit.
Resulting in a new global hegemonic power - a Germanic Europe.
Don't doubt for a minute that this was much behind FDR's European-war focus as much as his genuine dislike for Nazi values - he could see a possibility of a softer, gentler, kinder Germany in a few decades ruling Europe with velvet fingers.
But the deep hatreds against Germans ,produced by WWII, had seemingly remove that fear forever .
It didn't seem likely that France , let alone Spain or Italy could unite all Europeans culturally - they all had once - but that was centuries ago.
And who believed that, even if under some future Russian military occupation, that many Europeans would suddenly develop a hankering for the style and precision of Russian-made cameras ?
(Insider joke - I used to have to deal with those monsters while working in a camera store.)
But the 1945 British weren't dead yet.
The BBC for instance had extremely high cultural prestige throughout all of Europe - even if the American GIs' gum ,pop, music and movies were more popular with the young and the working class.
And the British could easily lay claim to have bested both America and Germany for the most 'wonder inventions' in science and technology thrown up by the war.
Now we're talking - because it was never British military or commercial power that wartime America's leadership was truly afraid of.
Many Americans genuinely liked Britain and most of its values.
But they also loathed its class structure and its imperialism and this they were idealistically determined to remove for the sake of a more peaceful and prosperous free trading, free thinking world.
And they recognized that much of that imperialistic power was really "soft power" , cultural prestige rather than a matter of counting up battleships and picking a winner.
They chose not to set Will Rogers against Will Shakespeare ( a closer contest than one might imagine) but chose to fight for global Anglo cultural superiority in an easier arena for Americans to win: where science shades into technology and engineering.
Grant the British even the ability to invent and discover better than America - but prove to everyone that only American can 'follow through' and make them work cheaply and reliably.
Enter , stage left , penicillin and atomic energy - though one can add jet planes and radar as well ....
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