countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Spain had lost its overseas possessions, but its legacy was vast – with Latin culture remaining throughout South and Central America. Along with Portugal and France, Spain had made Catholicism a global religion. Of Europe's empires, only the Russian Empire remained a significant geo-political force into the late 20th century, having morphed into the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, which, drawing on the writings of the German Karl Marx, established a socialist economic model under Communist dictatorship, which ultimately collapsed in the early 1990s. Adaptations of Marxism continued as the stated inspiration for Governments in Central America and Asia into the 21st century – though only a handful survived the end of the Cold War. The end of the Western Empires greatly changed the world. Although many newly independent nations attempted to become democracies, many slipped into military and autocratic rule. Amid power vacuums and newly determined national borders, civil war also became a problem, especially in Africa, where the introduction of firearms to ancient tribal rivalries exacerbated problems. The loss of overseas colonies partly also led many Western nations, particularly in continental Europe, to focus more on European, rather than global, politics as the European Union rose as an important entity. Though gone, the colonial empires left a formidable cultural and political legacy, with English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch being spoken by peoples across far flung corners of the globe. European technologies were now global technologies – religions like Catholicism and Anglicanism, founded in the West, were booming in post colonial Africa and Asia. Parliamentary (or presidential) democracies, as well as rival Communist style one party states invented in the West had replaced traditional monarchies and tribal government models across the globe. Modernity, for many, was equated with Westernisation. Cold War: 1945–1991 From the end of World War II almost until the start of the 21st century, Western and world politics were dominated by the state of tensions and conflict between the world's two Superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In the years following World War II, the Soviets established satellite states throughout Central and Eastern Europe, including historically and culturally Western nations like Poland and Hungary. Following the division of Germany, the East Germans constructed the Berlin Wall, to prevent East Berliners from escaping to the "freedom" of West Berlin. The Berlin Wall would come to represent