The Top 10 for the 20th Century: International Affairs.

• Author: HOWELL, LLEWELLYN D.
• Position: Brief Article

The critical international events of the 20th century all can be seen as outcomes of conflict and struggle--with other human beings, nature, and social and economic structures. The defining events of the century that come to mind first are the wars, which seem cataclysmic because of the centrality of human-generated violence. But other creative events have been responses to challenges that are even greater than dictators and exploitative systems. And even armed conflicts have their elements of creativity and post-war benefits. The unordered top 10:

World War I (1914-18). This began as a local European engagement and eventually encompassed 32 nations, resulting in 47,500,000 fatalities. The aggregate direct costs of all the belligerents amounted to about $186,000,000,000, a tremendous amount in early-20th-century dollars. The nature of warfare was dramatically and forever changed with the introduction of the use of gas, trench warfare, and the inclusion of tanks, submarines, and aircraft. A critical by-product was the defeat of Russian czarist forces and the consequent rise of the Bolsheviks as the governing force in one of the world's largest countries.

World War II (1939-45). More encompassing than World War I, it eventually involved 61 nations with 1,700,000,000 people. Roughly 110,000,000 people were mobilized for military service. It is estimated that 60,000,000 died, of which 25,000,000 were in military services and 35,000,000 were civilians, including more than 5,000,000 Jews killed in the Holocaust. The methods of fighting advanced and atomic bombs and rockets were added. A significant casualty of this war was the international balance of power. England, France, Germany, and Japan were no longer great powers in the traditional sense, leaving only the U.S. and the Soviet Union in a bipolar structure that lasted until 1989.

The discovery of penicillin and antibiotics. During the 1918 influenza epidemic, about 30,000,000 died worldwide. The ability of Penicillium to control such threats was first observed in 1928 by British bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming. American bacteriologist Rene Dubos first used an antibiotic, tyrothricin, successfully in the treatment of human disease in 1939. The lives saved in World War II and beyond resulted in both a rapid growth in the world's population and change in human thinking about length of life, the nature of labor, the uses of the planet's resources, and the global balance of power.

The rise...