How do you think what Eric Hobsbawn aptly described as the 'short 20th century, 1914-1989' be chiefly remembered? As the century of crazy ideological experments, and mass murder in a scale hitherto unknown in recorded history? What are your views?

That's a really interesting question and I suppose I'd have to go for the conventional answer here. I think the 20th century will chiefly be remembered as the century in which technology became the most powerful global force. It will probably also be remembered as the century in which Europe pretty much lost the cultural and political preeminence it had enjoyed in the 19th century. It's the century of commodities and glablization. It is also the century when European and (certain) non-European peoples were forced to regard each other as equals. I don't know about mass murder. I think our ancestors did ok in that department, they just didn't have the technology or the breadth of vision which comes from technology to operate on such a grand scale. It was an amazing hundred years, when you think about it.

Hi Dobrov. I don't necessarily disagree with you ... Most of the things you mention are really continuations of 19th century trends. Surely, the 20th century *will* be remembered as the Century of Genocide - the Armenians, the Jews and Tutsis ... Also, though it's not genocide, the vast numbers murdered by Stalin and others as alleged 'class' enemies.

Hi to you too, Bloomsby! If you really want to look at this in terms of roots, then you'll have to admit that the things I mentioned that you quite rightly pointed out are continuations of 19th century trends are in reality continuations of philosophic concepts and economic trends that were established in the 18th century (the world's Best Century) that got screwed up in the 19th (the world's Worst Century). Talk about your run-on sentence...

I cannot agree with you more that genocide is something for which the 20th century will be notorious in the future, but I do believe this doesn't have particularly to do with any particularly bloodthirsty 20th century qualities. I think it has a lot more to do with the kind of technology which makes slaughter in the millions a feasible plan. Couple with that a number of 19th century hybrids, including modern nationalism, racial inequity, and historical precedent centred in the dim past.and you've got a problem.

Hi, Dobrov. Obviously, there have been many cases of genocide that pre-date the 20th century. It's equally clear that the Nazis' genocide was speeded up and 'facilitated' by modern technology, but I think it would be a mistake to draw too close a link between technology and 20th century genocide. A couple of more specific points:

1. The Turkish genocide of the Armenians in WWI made very little use of modern technology, unless one includes the use of the telegraph to transmit orders and the use of *some* gassing on a limited scale in 1917. About 1.2 million people were murdered using non-technological means. The same is true of the genocide of the Tutsis.

2. One of the oddest features of the Holocaust was its utter fanaticism, that seems to echo religious persecution in the 16th century. With earlier cases of genocide, surely, the thing stopped once those committing the genocide decided the 'victim race' was no longer a nuisance. One thing that makes the the holocaust so different was the Nazis' determination to exterminate every single Jew.

Ok, I'll buy that. However most of these actions do not seem to me to belong exclusively to the 20th century. Even the Holocaust is very likely some kind of grotesque apotheosis of ideas that go back to Herder and that were warped through Fichte's unbelievably distorted and ugly little prism.

I think the thing that makes 20th century genocide so special is not so much the act itself, because that we can trace back as far as the Assyrians. I think the big difference is that people in the 20th century notice genocide in a way they didn't in previous centuries. 19th century secular liberalism and the concept of tolerance now render genocide morally wrong, and not just either expedient or disasterous depending on your social status and in whose way you are in.
Compared to the situation 200 years ago, so many people now can read, have access to media, and the leisure time to care about abstracts. The slaughter of the Tutsis appalls us today, but our ancestors in 1700 would never have heard about it and had they, would have been too exhausted to care. The Holocaust is staggering not so much because it happened, but because it happened in the heart of what we like to think of as the civilized world - where people read newpapers and drive to work and listen to the radio and do all those 'normal' things. We like to think of ourselves as advanced and reminders that we are not are dismaying. Before the concepts of progress and civilization emerged in the common coin, the horror of genocide was a personal thing. I think that in the 20th century this changed significantly.

Doesn't this question really depend almost exclusively on the perspective of the people who view it? I have seen much mention of genocide, holocaust, etc. within this thread, and the dates 1914-1989 bandied about...but how applicable would these be to the non-Western countries of the world?

In Asia and Africa, the 20th century might be viewed as the century in which old empires and colonial regimes fell. It really was a transition century for so many countries that didn't even exist in their current state in the 19th C. Take southeast Asia for example. Prior to the 20th century, the entities known as 'Thailand', 'Laos', 'Indonesia', etc. did not even exist. These places were ruled by dynastic regimes that have been characterized by some scholars as 'mandalas', a reference to the Hindu-Buddhist figure for the known universe, that expands and contracts in a cyclical manner. Now the mandalas have been shelved and we have modern nation states with often arbitrary political borders. Surprisingly, many of these borders have held (with some notable exceptions) and these nascent nation-states have developed into serious political entities. The story does not seem to be over, as of yet, but one must be forced to admit that for most of the world the 20th century was a period of 'nation creation'.

I would also characterize the 20th century as a century of ideologies, as the leaders of various countries have employed different philosophical and political viewpoints in various experiments in governing. Some of these experiments have led to disaster, i.e. Hitler/Franco/Mussolini with fascism and Lenin/Stalin/Mao with 'communism' (I really think their forms of communism were bastardizations of the real thing). Some experiments have gone relatively well though, for example Gandhi with his Satyagraha movement and the Asian Tigers with their developmental/ export-oriented economies. Dictatorships in places like Taiwan and South Korea have developed into full-fledged democracies, with all the niceties that a democratic system entails.

By the way, any predictions for this century...what will it be known for by future people? Hopefully not the 'century of terrorism' or the 'century of environmental devastation'...maybe something more optimistic?

Hi Jazz. Sorry I've been charactersitically Eurocentric again. Thanks for the comments about the 'mandalas' in Asia. One of the intruiguing thing about much of European colonial rule is that in many cases - especially in Africa and much of Asia, it didn't last long beyond a small but obviously important coastal strip.

I like your reference to ideology, but arguably every age has its belief systems. Perhaps a key feature of the 20th century was the *conflict* of ideolgies and the concomitant demented fanaticism, which has alas re-emerged?

As for predictions about the present century, well it's a shade early. That said, terrorism has been a serious, ongoing problem in some parts of the world since c. 1970

Hard to make a coherent answer, but I have a few ideas flying through my brain.
The formation of Europe, or countries regrouped together now, despite the rise in nationalism and even regionalism seems like one of those dichotomies we won't forget.
The colonized nations as some of you point out, begin to gain recognition, often depending on who colonized them in the first place...
Each place is gaining its own identity, either clinging to its past or else forging a new id, sometimes both.
Family structure changed radically over this past century too in the west. Instead of arranged marriages amongst some social classes, you began to see more and more changes in society because of the "love" marriage becoming the rule rather than the exception. Even amongst nations like India, you began to see the breakdown of the caste system where the arranged marriage was very elaborate in some people's culture such as Benghalis.
Divorce became accepted therefore the structure of the family changed.
We isolated the woman in the home all of a sudden, no matter what social class, as the children were now considered her entire responsibility, this phenomenon began in the nineteenth century and was carried out in the twentieth. In the past, even the workers had family to help them raise children, (siblings, aunts, grandmothers) or the kids went to work with her, even in Africa or Asia, the children were not isolated with just their own mother, then, the model of mother being responsible for them prevailed.
Unfortunately once we needed a scapegoat just call Mom!

Back to colonialism and its remnants, we also saw the problems with immigration and vast waves of South towards North, though this is a simplistic vision at best. As nations pulled out of various countries, the links between the two meant that they attempted to immigrate to the nations who had colonialized them, therefore causing major changes in Western society. In most instances, it is simply for a better future than the one they see in their own land. It's normal they often choose the culture, such as France, that gave them educational advantages and possibilities to have a better lifestyle than remaining in poverty or working in a developing nation.
This polarization is evident in all the countries that colonized different areas of the globe.

I'm seeing that the human tapestry is going to change, the West and East and South and North will blend gradually, for better or worse.

The 20th century will be remembered for Gagarin's flight into space when humanity took its first step beyond the cradle of the Earth.

Regards,

Tielhard

Genocide (let's not forget Pol Pot!); collapse of the great European empires; rise of the so-called "non-aligned" (generally Third World) states, with their apotheosis at Bandung, and, generally, their subsequent degeneration into despotisms; the bright promise and, in most instances, the horrible actuality of decolonialization; the greatest migration in human history after partition in India/Pakistan.
Medically, the seeming defeat of infectious disease in the 60's, and unfortunately a ferocious and quite unforeseen resurgence of newer and more virulent forms of it in the 80's and 90's.

It would be interesting to imagine some future history exam questions (e.g. 'Discuss the symbolic significance of the first images of planet Earth from space')...

...but I think that one word you can be pretty certain will be in all future histories of the 20th century is 'Hiroshima'.

This is an intriguing question. It seems to me that the 20th century will be remembered as one of the major transitional periods in history. We discovered things that gave the general public oportunities unheard of before this century. As an example, realize that at the start of the century, most people didn't even have a telephone, which sounds ridiculous to us as we talk to each other around the world primarily through phone lines just a century later. Some have adjusted, some haven't, and in some cases, groups are trying desperatly to turn back the clock, lest they lose the power and control that they'd built up over the centuries. Globalization and Nationalism are both on the rise. We have more of everything, whether good, like health care solutions that allow us to live longer and healthier lives, and bad, where people who feel that other people or groups shouldn't exist have found ways to act on those beliefs.
In the end, I suspect figuring out how the 20th century will be remembered will likely be tied into what we transition into during the 21st century.

The 20th century continued the trend of self-determination for different nations which had begun in previous centuries, but at the same time a new process was begun: the process of unification. The United Nations, The European Union, the first steps towards an alliance in Africa, these and others marked the first steps towards an alliance of the world, at a time when Earth truly was becoming a "Global Village", with instant communication between any two points on the face of the planet, as mankind took its first few steps into space.
The century was marked by two World Wars which marked the decline of Western Europe and its centuries-old leadership of the world, and led to the Cold War, a clash between the ideoligies of Capitilism and Communism, from which the United States of America, a nation founded on the principles of freedom, emerged triumphant to lead the world into a new era.
Not everyone immediately embraced these principles, and the century included some of the worst cases of genocide in history, aided by new technologies, as well as destructive ideoligies embraced by dellusional dictators.
But more than anything, the 20th century marked the beginnings of personal freedom, as for the first time mankind began to truly understand the principle of equality: between men and women, between members of different races and religions, and even children gained certain rights.

Hopefully this is how the 20th century will be remembered in about a thousand years.

One thing that hasn’t really been emphasized here is the 'Technological and Information Revolution'. In previous centuries other revolutions have taken place such as the irrigation, agricultural and the industrial which significantly changed society and its progression towards the twentieth century.

Never before have we been able to access information, knowledge and learning so quickly and easily, especially in Westernised countries.

Information technology has advanced the planet to a stage where 'if you can think of it, it can be done'.

Whether or not some of these advances have all been good is questionable and we will have to judge that at some stage into the 21st century.

I was born in the first half of the 20th century and will remember, from my own observations and those of my parents generation, the following, not necessarily in order of importance to humankind, but important, nevertheless.

1. The first flight of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
2. The exploration of both North and South Poles.
3. World War I.
4. The rise and fall of the USSR.
5. The rise and fall of the third reich.
6. Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic and Earhart's doomed flight around the world.
7. The establishment of the United Nations.
8. The development, and use, of the atomic bomb.
9. World War II.
10. Man's first spaceflight.
11. The assassination of President Kennedy.
12. Development of vaccines and eradication of diseases.
13. The technology revolution and the development of the Internet.
14. The development of the European Union.
15. The automobile.
16. The automobile assembly line.
17. The telephone. (Whoops, scratch that)
18. The Bessemer process to make steel.
19. The transistor.
20. Television.
21. The disease new to humans: AIDS.