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Unit 9
10–15% of examAfter 1945, the Iron Curtain split Europe into a democratic, capitalist West tied to the United States and a communist East controlled by the Soviet Union. You'll follow the Cold War to the fall of communism in 1989–1991, along with the end of Europe's colonial empires, the growth of the European Union, new waves of migration, and big changes in women's lives, technology and culture.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
World War II left Europe in ruins and made the United States and the Soviet Union the two strongest powers, with opposite systems: capitalist democracy and one-party communism. Their rivalry, along with the weakening of Europe's colonial empires, shaped almost everything that happened in Europe after 1945.
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Starting in 1948, the U.S. Marshall Plan sent billions of dollars to rebuild Western Europe's industry and infrastructure. Fast growth followed, often called an "economic miracle" (in West Germany, the Wirtschaftswunder), and rising incomes fed a new consumer culture.
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Wartime allies quickly became rivals. Even as the new United Nations tried to keep the peace, Winston Churchill warned in 1946 of an "Iron Curtain" splitting a Soviet-controlled East from the West, and in 1948–1949 the Berlin Airlift beat a Soviet blockade of West Berlin. The Cold War spread worldwide through propaganda, spying and secret operations, a nuclear arms race, and "hot wars" like those in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, where the superpowers backed opposite sides.
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The United States anchored Western Europe through NATO (1949) and a new world money and trade system built on the IMF, World Bank and GATT. The Soviet Union bound Eastern Europe through the Warsaw Pact and COMECON, with planned economies, broad social welfare and tight limits on freedom. After Khrushchev began de-Stalinization in 1956, Hungary's revolt (1956) and Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring reforms (1968) were crushed by Soviet-led forces.
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Nationalist and separatist movements kept disrupting the postwar peace, from violence in Northern Ireland and Chechnya to the Basque group ETA in Spain and Flemish separatism in Belgium. When Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1990s, wars brought ethnic cleansing and genocide, including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims and violence against Albanians in Kosovo.
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Postwar growth let Western European governments build welfare states that covered people "from cradle to grave," with national health care, pensions and unemployment benefits paid for by high taxes. When growth slowed in the 1970s, leaders like Britain's Margaret Thatcher cut back state spending and sold state-owned industries, and how much government should provide is still debated.
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After years of economic stagnation, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the system with perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), but the reforms loosened Moscow's grip. In 1989 Poland's Solidarity movement won partly free elections, the Berlin Wall fell, and communist governments across Eastern Europe collapsed; Germany reunified in 1990, the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Czechoslovakia split peacefully, and Yugoslavia broke apart.
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Over the 1900s, women across Europe won the vote, more education and professional careers: in the West mostly through feminist campaigns, and in the Soviet bloc mostly through government policy, though unequal treatment continued in both. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) helped inspire second-wave feminism, the birth control pill and new ideas about marriage, divorce and family gave women more choices, and women such as Margaret Thatcher (Britain), Mary Robinson (Ireland) and Édith Cresson (France) reached top political office.
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Woodrow Wilson's talk of self-determination after World War I raised hopes in the colonies, but most of Africa and Asia did not win independence until after 1945. Some transitions were negotiated, like India's in 1947 (though partition brought terrible violence), while others came through war, like Algeria's fight against France (1954–1962) and the Viet Minh's defeat of France in 1954, and Cold War rivalries often shaped the outcome.
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To prevent another war and speed recovery, six countries formed the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, which led to the European Economic Community (Common Market) in 1957 and the European Union in 1993. The EU grew to include many former Eastern bloc countries and created the euro and free movement across borders, but members still argue over how much national control to give up, as Britain's 2016 Brexit vote and its exit in 2020 showed.
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Booming economies in the 1950s and 1960s drew workers from southern Europe, Turkey, North Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia to countries like West Germany, France and Britain, some as "guest workers" expected to go home. After the economic slowdown of the 1970s, many stayed with their families and faced hostility, anti-immigration parties like France's National Front gained votes, and growing Muslim communities sparked debate over religion's role in public life.
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Medical advances like antibiotics, vaccines and organ transplants helped people live longer, but some new technologies raised moral questions with no easy answers. Birth control, abortion, fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization (the first "test-tube baby" was born in England in 1978) and genetic engineering set off debates that didn't split neatly by religion or politics.
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Telephones, radio, television, computers, cell phones and the internet linked Europe to the rest of the world faster than ever, and American products, films and music poured in after 1945, winning fans but also critics who feared "Americanization." Green parties, like West Germany's Greens (founded 1980), criticized throwaway consumer culture, called for sustainable development and later questioned the costs of globalization.
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World wars and the Depression shook faith in reason, giving rise to existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre) and later postmodernism, while artists broke the rules with Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, and Bauhaus architects stripped buildings down to simple, useful forms. Churches responded to dictatorship in mixed ways, and the Catholic Church modernized at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). After World War II came a baby boom, a consumer society, the student revolts of 1968, and movements for civil rights, women's rights and gay rights.
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This final wrap-up topic asks you to argue about change and continuity from 1914 to today, such as how Europe moved from total war to a divided Cold War continent to a more united one. Use specific evidence and show complexity, for example by explaining what stayed the same even as borders and governments changed.
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