Global Europe from WWII to 9/11.

Catalog description

This course starts out with a look at the physical, economic, political and moral impacts of World War II on Europe and the world. The challenges of reconstruction led to a bipolar global order and a Cold War world of espionage and nuclear deterrence. We will analyze the politics and cultures of the new postwar societies in Europe that were divided by the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. While nuclear war could be averted, violence accompanied the break-up of European empires in Asia and Africa. By the 1960s, a global youth movement rebelled against consumerism, gender norms, and traditional politics. In Eastern Europe, political oppression, economic stagnation, and environmental disasters, such as the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, triggered a civil rights movement that brought down the Berlin Wall. At the beginning of the 21st the new European Union faced the global impacts of migration and integration as well as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the wars in the Middle East. ( GE1C , GEND , GEWE )