The European Experience: Ideas and the Modern State

Catalog description

This course examines intellectual, political, social and economic issues concerning the transformation to modernity in Europe and its consequences to the present day. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nationalism, Fascism and Communism challenged freedom and equality and justified violence in new ways. Modern industrial techniques revolutionized warfare in "The Great War" from 1914-1918 and even more destructively, in World War II from 1939-1945. Since World War II, both domestic and international conditions - the Cold War, decolonization, immigration, the decline of Communism and economic globalization have provoked fresh debates among Europeans about the character of the modern State.