(a) Europe was at war with itself in the first half of the twentieth century with a long cease-fire. Comment. (20 marks) (b) The…

The twentieth century witnessed profound structural shifts in global governance, evolving from a self-destructive European balance-of-power system into American unipolarity and a contested multilateral architecture under the United Nations.

The European Civil War and the Long Cease-Fire (1914–1945)

Historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, in The Age of Extremes, and Ernst Nolte characterize the period between 1914 and 1945 as a single European civil war, with the interwar years functioning merely as a twenty-year armed truce. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles failed to build a durable equilibrium; its punitive indemnities and territorial amputations fostered deep revanchism in Germany and alienation in Italy.

This period was marked by stark structural continuities. The Great Depression of 1929 destroyed fragile economic stability, accelerating the collapse of parliamentary democracies and fueling totalitarian ideologies—Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism. Concurrently, the League of Nations lacked an independent enforcement mechanism and suffered from American absence, rendering its collective security framework impotent against aggression in Manchuria (1931) and Abyssinia (1935). These unresolved geopolitical and ideological fractures directly propelled the resumption of total war in 1939.

The Post-Cold War Unipolarity: A Dual Legacy

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 inaugurated a unipolar global order centered on the United States, producing mixed outcomes.

On the positive side, unipolarity facilitated democratic enlargement and the spread of liberal norms, captured in Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis. It deepened economic interdependence through institutions like the World Trade Organization (1995), allowing developing economies, notably India following its 1991 balance-of-payments crisis and subsequent economic liberalization, to integrate into global markets. It also elevated multilateral norms around humanitarian intervention and arms control.

Conversely, unipolarity bred unrestrained unilateralism, most visibly in the 2003 invasion of Iraq without UN Security Council authorization. The steady eastward expansion of NATO created long-term security dilemmas that fueled contemporary Russian revanchism. The subsequent Global War on Terror destabilized West Asia, while the dogmatic application of the Washington Consensus through structural adjustment programmes imposed severe socioeconomic costs across the Global South.

The United Nations: Peacekeeping, Paralysis, and Reform

The United Nations Organisation has played a vital yet structurally constrained role in conflict resolution. It successfully facilitated twentieth-century decolonization, mediated the 1953 Korean armistice, authorized collective security during the 1991 Gulf War, and stabilized complex crises through peacekeeping missions such as the UN Operation in the Congo (ONUC).

However, systemic weaknesses have repeatedly undermined its core mission. Institutional inertia led to catastrophic failures to halt genocides in Rwanda (1994) and Srebrenica (1995). Today, great-power rivalry has paralyzed the Security Council through the exercise of the veto over conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, exposing the selective application of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. Sustaining UN relevance requires urgent institutional adaptation, primarily through expanding permanent Security Council membership to reflect contemporary realities—as advocated by the G4 nations, including India—and curbing unilateral vetoes in cases of mass atrocities.

Way Forward

While the post-1945 order successfully prevented another intra-European conflagration, navigating twenty-first-century multipolarity demands moving beyond the unilateral tendencies of the post-Cold War era. Lasting global stability requires reforming global institutions to ensure equitable representation for the Global South, thereby creating a resilient, rules-based multilateralism capable of reconciling major power rivalries.