The worldwide conflagration that ended in 1945 soon led to two other massive conflicts, the Cold War, which pitted the two remaining superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, against each other, and the battles against colonialism, which Asian and African colonies raged in their desire for independence.

But preceding these events was the wrenching spectacle of 20 million people roaming through Europe in the summer of 1945. Ten million of these were ethnic Germans expelled from Poland and Czechoslovakia. Added to these were the so-called displaced persons, the millions from all over Europe, once forced to do slave labor in German factories, now homeless, either because there was no home to go to, or because they feared to go home, as was the case with many Russians who knew they would either be killed or sent to the Gulag. Also among the displaced were many Jews who had survived the death camps and now sought a new home in Palestine. The year 1945 also saw the creation of the charter of the United Nations, the attempt to create an international peacekeeping organization. Organizers hoped to avoid the problems of the old League of Nations by giving greater power to an executive body, the Security Council. In the United States, the most significant domestic events were the enactment of the G.I. Bill of Rights, which opened American universities to middle-class and working-class veterans, providing a skilled and educated workforce for the postindustrial age looming on the horizon, and the growth of suburbia which offered veterans a low-cost down payment, low-mortgage version of the American dream.

The most surprising political development of 1945 was the defeat of Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the hands of a British Labour Party that ushered in an ambitious program of "welfare state" measures, notably the National Health Service; however, the new government was unable to restore Britain to economic health, as the privations of wartime persisted. The rest of Europe struggled to reconstruct a world from the psychological as well as physical rubble the war had created. In France, the rebuilding of the nation found its intellectual equivalent in the movement known as Existentialism. Although existentialism had emerged in the 1930s, the war and the Nazi occupation gave the existentialist themes of freedom, choice, and death an immediate reality. Despite its frequently dark and somber representation, the philosophy represented a call to action for a morally engaged commitment to social justice. Human existence might be absurd, but the individual was still capable of meaningful action.

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