The Year 1975

Podcast Transcript

From 1950 to 1975, the world had seen 25 years of radical change. The changes seen in the first half of the 20th century accelerated even faster.

Energy, inflation, and civil rights, which had always been issues, were now front and center.

Empires ended, there were social and technical revolutions, new nations were created, humans landed on the moon, and the world was in the midst of the Cold War.

Learn more about the world in the year 1975 on the 1,975th episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

We last took an assessment of the state of the world 25 episodes ago in the year 1950. Since then, a great deal has changed.

In 1950, the world was only five years removed from the Second World War and just beginning the Cold War. Western Europe and Japan were still physically and economically scarred, colonial empires in Asia and Africa were largely intact, the global population was about two and a half billion, and most people on Earth lived in poor, rural societies with short life expectancies, limited education, and little access to modern technology.

By 1975, a quarter of a century later, the map of power, wealth, and daily life had been transformed. The period from 1950 to 1975 is a story of decolonization, Cold War rivalry, economic growth, technological revolutions, and sweeping social and demographic change.

Politically, the world of 1975 was dominated by the Cold War and the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, but that rivalry had evolved.

In 1950, the Cold War was still in its early, hard-edged phase, with the Berlin Blockade freshly resolved and the Korean War about to erupt. Over the following decades, both superpowers built globe-spanning alliances.

NATO and the U.S. security system extended from Western Europe to Japan, South Korea, and various anti communist regimes. The Soviets consolidated control in Eastern Europe, forged the Warsaw Pact, and supported revolutionary movements from Vietnam to Angola.

Crises like the Berlin standoffs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the war in Vietnam showed how dangerous this confrontation could be, with nuclear weapons always in the background.

By the early 1970s, the tone had shifted toward détente. The 1972 SALT I agreement put the first limits on nuclear weapons proliferation, and the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 ratified Europe’s postwar borders and established a framework for security, cooperation, and human rights.

At the same time, the rigid two-camp structure of the early Cold War had fractured. One of the most important political changes since 1950 was the emergence of a large bloc of newly independent states in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.

In 1950, most of Africa was still under European rule, the Middle East was a patchwork of recent and older mandates, and European influence remained strong in South and Southeast Asia.

India, Pakistan, and Indonesia were already independent by 1950. Over the next 25 years, decolonization swept the world. Ghana, Nigeria, Algeria, Kenya, and dozens of other countries went from colonies to fully independent nations.

Violent struggles, like the wars in Algeria, Vietnam, and the Portuguese colonies, often accompanied the decolonization process.

By 1975, European colonial empires in Africa and Asia had been largely dismantled, with the notable exception of the white minority regime in Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. Newly independent countries sought to assert autonomy through the Non-Aligned Movement, trying to avoid strict alignment with either Washington or Moscow.

However, in practice, the superpowers still competed vigorously for influence in the Third World.

The Soviet Union saw the death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent denunciation of Stalinism by Nikita Kruschev.

Khruschev was subsequently removed from power in 1964 and was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, who was the Soviet leader as of 1975.

The United States suffered its own political turmoil. After eight years of President Dwight Eisenhower, his successor, John Kennedy, was assassinated in 1963.

His Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, was elected in 1964, but then declined to run in 1968, given the struggles he was having in Vietnam.

The presidency then passed to Richard Nixon, who became the first and only president in history to resign from office. His vice president, Gerald Ford, advanced to the job when Nixon’s original vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned.

When Ford became president, he was the first and only person to serve as president who was never elected on a presidential ticket.

China also had significant changes between 1950 and 1975.

In 1950, the People’s Republic of China had just been proclaimed following the communist victory in the civil war. It was aligned with the Soviet Union and isolated from Western institutions.

Over the next several decades, it went through dramatic and often catastrophic domestic upheavals, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which reshaped Chinese society and cost millions of lives. Internationally, the Sino-Soviet alliance deteriorated into a bitter rivalry, creating a triangular balance among Washington, Moscow, and Beijing.

By the early 1970s, the United States began a rapprochement with China, symbolized by Nixon’s 1972 visit, and in 1971, the PRC took China’s seat at the United Nations.

In Europe, the political landscape also changed significantly. Western Europe in 1950 was a set of recovering nation-states dependent on American aid. Over the next twenty-five years, European integration advanced through the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community, the Common Market, and eventually the European Economic Community, which by 1975 included not just the original six but also Britain, Ireland, and Denmark.

In Eastern Europe, communist regimes backed by the Soviet Union were consolidated, and efforts to reform or liberalize, such as Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, were crushed by Soviet military intervention.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the collapse of colonial rule and the Arab Israeli conflict rearranged the political landscape. The creation of Israel in 1948, followed by wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, produced cycles of refugees, border changes, and superpower involvement.

Egypt moved from monarchy to nationalist republic, flirted with the Soviet Union, then, under Anwar Sadat, shifted toward the United States after the 1973 war. The oil-producing monarchies of the Persian Gulf, relatively marginal in 1950, had by 1975 become central to world politics and economics due to the power of OPEC and the 1973 oil embargo.

Latin America in 1950 was already nominally independent, but the political story from then to 1975 was one of recurrent coups, revolutions, and U.S. influence.

The Cuban Revolution in 1959 created the first communist state in the Americas outside of the Soviet orbit. It became a focal point of Cold War tensions, including the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis.

Elsewhere, military governments came to power in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and other countries, often with explicit anti communist justification and varying degrees of U.S. support. Revolutionary movements and guerrilla warfare grew in places like Central America.

Economically, the world experienced unprecedented growth between 1950 and the early 1970s, followed by a shock at the end of the period. In 1950, large parts of Europe and Asia were still in ruins, and many countries relied on agriculture and primary commodity exports.

The subsequent quarter-century saw rapid development in the industrialized world. Western Europe and Japan, aided by American capital and technology, rebuilt and then surpassed prewar output.

Mass production, rising productivity, and expanding welfare states produced high growth rates, low unemployment, and rising living standards. The United States, already an economic giant in 1950, maintained its leadership in technology, finance, and trade, though by the 1970s it faced greater competition from Europe and Japan.

Internationally, the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, created in the 1940s, underpinned the postwar world economic order. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade all facilitated global economic activity between countries.

Over time, however, pressures built up as U.S. inflation rose and other countries accumulated dollars. In the early 1970s, the United States abandoned the convertibility of the dollar into gold, and the fixed exchange rate system effectively collapsed.

A few years later, in a secret deal, Saudi Arabia and the United States agreed to price oil in dollars, ushering in the Petrodollar regime.

The 1973 oil crisis marked a turning point in the global economy. In 1950, oil was important but cheap and controlled mainly by Western firms linked to Western governments. Over the next two decades, producing countries gradually asserted more control, forming OPEC and negotiating better terms. In the aftermath of the 1973 Arab Israeli war, several Arab exporters imposed an oil embargo and raised prices sharply.

The resulting spike in energy costs contributed to inflation, recession, and a sense that the postwar era of effortless growth was ending. For oil producers, especially in the Gulf, the sudden influx of revenue greatly increased their geopolitical weight and funded ambitious state-building and development projects.

Technological change in these twenty-five years was profound.

The space race reshaped both technology and symbolism. Sputnik in 1957, Yuri Gagarin’s flight, and the U.S. Apollo program that culminated in the moon landing in 1969 showcased dramatic advances in rocketry, materials, telecommunications, and control systems.

By 1975, satellites were widely used for weather forecasting, communications, navigation, and reconnaissance, knitting the world together in new ways and enhancing military and commercial capabilities.

The joint Apollo Soyuz mission in 1975 hinted at how space could also become a domain of international cooperation.

Electronics and computing transformed industry and daily life. The invention of the transistor in the late 1940s and the integrated circuit in the late 1950s allowed for smaller, more reliable, and more powerful devices.

By 1975, mainframe computers supported governments, scientific research, and the operations of banks, airlines, and large firms. Minicomputers and early microprocessors were beginning to appear, setting the stage for personal computing later.

Consumer electronics such as transistor radios, stereo systems, calculators, and color televisions became common in wealthier societies. Telecommunications improved through undersea cables and communications satellites, so that international telephone and television links that had been rare or impossible in 1950 were much more routine by the mid-1970s.

Transportation also changed. Jet airliners revolutionized long-distance travel, shrinking travel times between continents from days to hours and facilitating tourism, business travel, and migration on an unprecedented scale.

Containerization in shipping began to transform global trade by drastically reducing loading times and shipping costs. Highways and automobile ownership expanded, especially in North America and Western Europe, reshaping urban life and settlement patterns.

Socially and culturally, the years between 1950 and 1975 saw intense upheaval.

In the United States, the civil rights movement dismantled legal segregation through court decisions and landmark legislation such as the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, even though de facto inequality persisted.

The status of women changed significantly. While women had gained the vote in many countries earlier in the century, the period from the 1960s to the mid-1970s saw a “second wave” of feminism that focused on issues such as workplace discrimination, reproductive rights, sexual norms, and legal equality.

The advent of the birth control pill and more liberal attitudes toward sexuality in many Western societies contributed to what is often called the sexual revolution.

Youth culture and mass media created new forms of identity and protest. Rock and roll in the 1950s set the stage for the explosion of popular music, film, television, and countercultural movements in the 1960s.

Demographically, the world from 1950 to 1975 experienced rapid and uneven growth. In 1950, the global population, which was around two and a half billion, was concentrated in rural areas, and average life expectancy worldwide was under fifty years.

Over the next quarter century, death rates fell sharply due to improved health care and food production, while birth rates declined more slowly, especially in poorer countries. The result was a population explosion, with the world approaching four billion people by the mid-1970s. Much of this growth occurred in Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa, while in Europe and North America, the postwar baby boom was already giving way to lower fertility and aging populations.

Urbanization accelerated dramatically. Millions left the countryside for cities in search of work, education, and services. Megacities such as Mexico City, São Paulo, Tokyo, and Bombay swelled as people crowded into formal and informal settlements.

In 1950, only a minority of the world’s population lived in cities, but by 1975 that share had risen significantly, reshaping cultures, economies, and politics. Urban growth created opportunities for industrialization and service economies, but also brought overcrowding, slums, and social tensions.

The period from 1950 to 1975 saw enormous changes at almost every level of society in nearly every country around the world.

The rapid changes the world saw in the 20th century didn’t end in 1975. They continued for the rest of the century and the world once again seemed completely different just 25 years later in the year 2000.