This book brings together world-renowned scholars from all over Europe to analyse how successive Europes have been constructed in the wake of the key conflicts of the period: the Cold War and the two World Wars. By regressively tracing Europe's path back to these pivotal moments as part of a unique methodology, Europe's Postwar Periods - 1989, 1945, 1918 reveals the defining characteristics of these postwar periods and integrates the changes that followed 1989 into a more substantial historical perspective. The author team address the crucial themes in recent European history on a chapter-by-chapter basis that gives comprehensive coverage to the whole of the European region for topics such as borders, states, empires, democracy, justice, markets and futures. The volume highlights the fact that Europe was made less by wars than is commonly thought, and more by the nature of the settlements – international, national, political, economic and social – that followed the two World Wars and the Cold War. It is an important, innovative text for all students and scholars of 20th-century European history.

A major new history of how democracy became the dominant political force in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century What happened in the years following World War II to create a democratic revolution in the western half of Europe? In Western Europe's Democratic Age, Martin Conway provides an innovative new account of how a stable, durable, and remarkably uniform model of parliamentary democracy emerged in Western Europe—and how this democratic ascendancy held fast until the latter decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Conway describes how Western Europe's postwar democratic order was built by elite, intellectual, and popular forces. Much more than the consequence of the defeat of fascism and the rejection of Communism, this democratic order rested on universal male and female suffrage, but also on new forms of state authority and new political forces—primarily Christian and social democratic—that espoused democratic values. Above all, it gained the support of the people, for whom democracy provided a new model of citizenship that reflected the aspirations of a more prosperous society. This democratic order did not, however, endure. Its hierarchies of class, gender, and race, which initially gave it its strength, as well as the strains of decolonization and social change, led to an explosion of demands for greater democratic freedoms in the 1960s, and to the much more contested democratic politics of Europe in the late twentieth century. Western Europe's Democratic Age is a compelling history that sheds new light not only on the past of European democracy but also on the unresolved question of its future.

This book analyses the process of ‘reshaping’ liberated societies in post-1945 Europe. Post-war societies tried to solve three main questions immediately after the dark times of occupation: Who could be considered a patriot and a valuable member of the respective national community? How could relations between men and women be (re-)established? How could the respective society strengthen national cohesion? Violence in rather different forms appeared to be a powerful tool for such a complex reshaping of societies. The chapters are based on present primary research about specific cases and consider the different political, mental, and cultural developments in various nation-states between 1944 and 1948. Examples from Italy, France, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary demonstrate a new comparative and fascinating picture of post-war Europe. This perspective overcomes the notorious East-West dividing line, without covering the manifold differences between individual European countries.

The Common Agricultural Policy was the most important policy for the longest duration of the European Economic Community's existence. Apart from subsidizing and modernizing European agriculture and securing supplies for its consumers, this policy was meant to be the beacon of European integration. However, it also became the most controversial policy of the EU - symbolized by subsidized overproduction, bureaucracy, and burgeoning farmers' protests. This volume provides the first archive-based assessment of its history in the age of the Cold War and beyond. Its chapters deal with the wider context of agricultural integration since the 1920s; with the basic ideas that drove this policy; with the negotiations and controversies that went along with it as well as with its economic effects and global impact. Apart from its empirical findings, this book offers new ways of linking EU history to larger trends of contemporary history. The editor of this volume, Kiran Klaus Patel, is Professor of EU history and transatlantic relations at the European University Institute in Florence.

Modern Europe provides both text and illustrations which draw on a wide range of sources, from state archives, published memoirs and heroic paintings to private letters, oral testimony, picture postcards, cartoons and songs.

This important book addresses topics that may be unfamiliar even to specialists in Slavic or Jewish Studies. You'll find essays, research studies, and extensive bibliographies illustrating the state of Jewish-related publishing ventures in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the post-WWII era. Judaica in the Slavic Realm, Slavica in the Judaic Realm also documents the efforts of Judaic scholars, librarians, and genealogists to provide access to archival collections in those countries.