From Ruins to Union: Europe's Second Half-Century

The idea

The exam's last band runs from nineteen forty-five to the present, and the anchor's line through it is that Europe lost the world and found itself. In forty-five two outside powers held the continent, and their rivalry, named at Fulton and organized by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, cut it in two along a curtain, with Berlin's four sectors the picture of the cut. The West rebuilt on a compromise, social democracy and a welfare state that the right accepted and the left stopped trying to overthrow, and thirty glorious years followed. The East stagnated under a system whose failure the anchor leaves to three theories. The empires went in sixteen years, negotiated where no settlers lived and fought for where they did, and Suez in fifty-six showed that the old powers could act only by America's leave. What Europe built instead began with coal and steel in fifty-one and became a union in ninety-three and a currency in two thousand two. The Cold War it did not end; Gorbachev ended it, by letting go, and the Wall came down in eighty-nine without a shot in Berlin. The culture ran the other way, from existentialism's freedom to postmodernism's suspicion, through sixty-eight's streets to a second wave of feminism that won in law what the first had won at the ballot. The threads the capstone gathers: the state that promised order, the nation that promised belonging, the market that promised peace, and the individual who kept asking what any of them was for.