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I always saw it as a way to maximize soft power gains after the allied victory in ww2. It wasn't enough that their victory was a sign that the allies were stronger, it had to become a symbol of how virtuous they are/were. The nazis practiced eugenics and were race obsessed, the nazis were evil. The allies are post-racial and blank slatist, the allies are good. That sort of thing.
It was probably important given the rise of the USSR as well. The US and other western countries iirc Britain needed to put distance between themselves and their own eugenics programs to maximize soft power gains after the war. Didn't the nazis even argue that western countries had similar programs to try and get off the hook for crimes? I don't remember tbh.
I think the other posters are right about other trends, industrialization, nation states etc. already at work, but when it comes to the bump after ww2 specifically this makes more sense to me. Might makes right was a hard sell after a war as ugly as ww2 so to continue with the aggressive expansion and feed the military-industrial devil they'd made a pact with in the west they needed to paint themselves as the good guys righting the world's wrongs.
It being mostly virtue signalling also fits with the large gaps in stated and revealed preferences when it comes to interracial marriage, school and neighborhood choice etc.
It's a common left wing historian talking point that government support for civil rights wasn't pure benevolence but part of a propaganda war to win over African and Asian countries during the cold war. America became the global hegemon but its allies in Europe have all these colonial empires. Instead of strong arming Europe into giving up their colonies we'll just advance an ideology of racially egalitarian national determination where the emerging third world should be free to partake in a rules based international trade system that conveniently enough, we get to make the rules for.
If you read a left wing historian like Judith Stein her account of American deindustrialization is that foreign policy elites fucked over the American working class in order to build up allied economies so that they could resist communism. We let Japan and Korea dump steel in the American market while having massive tariff barriers so that they could build their own economies to ward off China. The seminal 'The Deindustrialization of America' by Bluestone and Harrison is full of examples of how tax and trade policy encouraged American companies to build factories in Europe rather than build them in America and export to Europe.
It's not just virtue signaling it was part of a broader strategy to win the cold war.
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