![]() Political transitions were not always peaceful for example, violence broke out in Anglophone Southern Cameroons due to an unpopular union with Francophone Cameroon following independence from those respective nations. Īs pressure for decolonization mounted, the departing colonial regimes attempted to transfer power to moderate and stable local governments committed to continued economic and political ties with the West. This provided ammunition for Western propaganda which denounced many anti-colonial movements as being communist proxies. The great disparities of wealth in many of the colonies between the colonized indigenous population and the colonizers provided fertile ground for the adoption of socialist ideology among many anti-colonial parties. Western fears of a conventional war with the communist bloc over the colonies soon shifted into fears of communist subversion and infiltration by proxy. Both nations promoted global decolonization as an opportunity to redress the balance of the world against Western Europe and the United States, and claimed that the political and economic problems of colonized peoples made them naturally inclined towards socialism. Eager to build its own global constituency, the People's Republic of China attempted to assume a leadership role among the decolonizing territories as well, appealing to its image as a non-white, non-European agrarian nation which too had suffered from the depredations of Western imperialism. The Soviet leadership took a keen interest in the affairs of the fledgling ex-colonies because it hoped the cultivation of socialist clients there would deny their economic and strategic resources to the West. The era was characterized by a proliferation of anti-colonial national liberation movements, backed predominantly by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The economic needs of emerging Third World states made them vulnerable to foreign influence and pressure. Third World and non-alignment in the 1960s and 1970s Part of a series onĬold War politics were affected by decolonization in Africa, Asia, and to a limited extent, Latin America as well. Worldwide inflation occurred following the 1973 oil crisis. The Soviet and other Eastern Bloc economies began to stagnate. ![]() In the 1960s and 1970s, the Third World was increasingly divided between governments backed by the Soviets (such as Libya, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and South Yemen), governments backed by NATO (such as Saudi Arabia), and a growing camp of non-aligned nations. ![]() While communists gained power in some South East Asian countries, they were divided by the Sino-Soviet Split, with China moving closer to the Western camp, following US President Richard Nixon's visit to China. By 1973, the US had withdrawn from the Vietnam War. In 1968, Eastern Bloc member Czechoslovakia attempted the reforms of the Prague Spring and was subsequently invaded by the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact members, who reinstated the Soviet model. Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement and the opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War. The United States maintained its Cold War engagement with the Soviet Union during the period, despite internal preoccupations with the assassination of John F. The Cold War (1962–1979) refers to the phase within the Cold War that spanned the period between the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis in late October 1962, through the détente period beginning in 1969, to the end of détente in the late 1970s. The 1975 Apollo-Soyuz space rendez-vous, one of the attempts at cooperation between the US and the USSR during the détente
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