9.13 Globalization

Each new technology made communication faster and wider. Radio reached almost every home by mid-century. Television spread through Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, and communications satellites, starting with Telstar in 1962, carried live pictures across the Atlantic. Personal computers appeared in offices and homes in the 1980s. In 1989 the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, working at the CERN research center near Geneva, proposed the World Wide Web, which made the internet easy to use; it opened to the public in the early 1990s. Mobile phones spread rapidly in the 1990s, helped by a shared European digital standard, followed by smartphones in the 2000s.

Cheaper air travel, container shipping and the end of the Cold War moved people and goods faster too. Multinational corporations spread production across many countries, the World Trade Organization (1995) replaced GATT, and the EU's single market (9.10) deepened trade among members.

After 1945 the United States was Europe's protector and its cultural model. Hollywood films, jazz and then rock and roll, blue jeans, Coca-Cola, fast food and later American television series became part of European life, especially for young people. American management methods, supermarkets and advertising changed how Europeans worked and shopped.

Many Europeans welcomed this as modern and free. Others feared Americanization, the loss of national cultures to American mass products. French critics coined the mocking term “Coca-colonization,” and France protected its film industry with subsidies and, in the 1990s, required radio stations to play a minimum share of French-language songs. In 1999 French farmers protesting American trade sanctions and fast food wrecked a McDonald's under construction in the town of Millau. Culture also flowed the other way: British bands such as the Beatles conquered American charts in the 1960s, and European fashion, football and films reached global audiences.

Postwar consumerism had environmental costs: polluted rivers, acid rain that damaged forests, and growing piles of waste. In the 1970s environmental and anti-nuclear movements grew, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986, which spread radioactive fallout across Europe, strengthened them.

West Germany's Greens, founded in 1980, entered the federal parliament in 1983 and later shared power in a coalition government from 1998 to 2005. Green parties criticized throwaway consumer culture, nuclear power and unlimited growth. They promoted sustainable development, a term made widely known by the 1987 Brundtland Report: development that meets present needs without harming the ability of future generations to meet theirs. European governments later took leading roles in international climate agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and the Paris Agreement (2015).

Supporters argue that globalization brought cheaper goods, new markets, faster growth and the spread of ideas. Critics point to the loss of factory jobs as production moved to countries with lower wages, growing inequality, the power of multinational corporations, and damage to the environment. Large protests accompanied international summits around 2000, such as the 2001 meeting of leading economic powers in Genoa, Italy. Many Green and left-wing critics, and later some nationalist parties, questioned whether globalization served ordinary Europeans.