Ian Kershaw - The Global Age: Europe 1950-2017

To Hell and Back, I wrote in the Preface, was the hardest book I had ever attempted. That was until this book. This second volume on the history of Europe from 1914 to our own times posed still greater problems in both interpretation and composition. This is in no small measure because Europes history between 1950 and the present day has no single overriding theme comparable to the obvious centrality of world war which dominates the predecessor volume that covers the period 1914 to 1949. Europe in the Global Age was no longer in charge of its own destiny. European countries, driven by national interest and aggrandisement of power, had taken the continent into two global wars in 191418 and 193945. The first undermined, and the second sealed, the end of Europes world dominance. Europe after 1945 was rebuilt under the aegis of the new superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, both with global interests. Their influence political, military, economic and cultural in shaping the two halves of the new Europe was massive. At the same time immense impersonal global forces were transforming Europe. Global economic growth underpinned unprecedented levels of prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. During the same period a sweeping process of decolonisation ended Europes long imperial past. Turmoil in the Middle East led to the oil crises of the 1970s that then drastically reshaped the economy, while the end of the Cold War in 198991 brought huge political transformation and new global challenges for Europe. Not least, the astonishing communications revolution of the 1990s and 2000s dramatically accelerated globalisation. The extent of Europes exposure to global forces was in recent years fully revealed through the impact of 9/11, the finance crash of 2008 and the refugee crisis of 201516 that emanated from the Syrian war.

The complexity of Europes history in this era poses significant problems for the architecture of the book. These are compounded by the division of Europe for over forty years by the Iron Curtain. Other than as an idea of shared cultural identity (though one fragmented through religious, national, ethnic and class differences), Europe in these decades did not exist. Its two halves western and eastern Europe were themselves purely political constructs. The internal development of each half of the continent over that period is so different that it is impossible to integrate them in any coherent fashion until the fall of communism between 1989 and 1991. Although Eastern and Western Europe also thereafter remain profoundly different, the impact of rapidly accelerating globalization a key theme of the volume then makes it feasible to deal with them together, rather than separately.