Home > History of Europe
Main article: Cold War
World War I and especially World War II ended the pre-eminent position of western Europe. The map of Europe was redrawn at the Yalta Conference and divided as it became the principal zone of contention in the Cold War between the two newly emergent world powers, the capitalistic United States and the communist Soviet Union. The USA. placed western Europe ( Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, Spain etc.) under their sphere of influence, establishing the NATO alliance as a protection against a possible Soviet invasion; the Soviet Union claimed eastern ( Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, Transcaucasia) and central Europe ( Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany), claiming the first directly and installing puppet governments in the second, and formed the Warsaw Pact. Europe was divided by a " Iron Curtain". This situation lasted until 1989, when the weakening of the Soviet Union led to glasnost and the ending of the division of Europe - Soviet satellites were free to remove Communist regimes (and the two Germanies were able to re-unify). In 1991 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, splitting into several states (the main one remaining the Russian Federation) and removing communists from most governments. The most violent breakup happened in Yugoslavia, in south central Europe. Four ( Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia) out of six republics rushed into independence, causing a violent war which lasted until 1995. Soon after the war a new Yugoslavia was created, with Slobodan Milosevic as dictator. He led the country into a civil war in Kosovo, and was overthrown in massive demonstrations in Belgrade in 2000. Following the change in government, the country changed its name to Serbia and Montenegro and instituted democracy.
After the end of World War II, western Europe slowly began a process of political and economic integration, desiring to unite Europe and prevent another war. This process resulted eventually in the development of organisations such as the Eurozone and the European Union. After the end of the Cold War, these organizations began to include nations within central Europe as well.
14 Early 21st century: the European Union
Main article: History of the European Union
The process of integrating Europe was slow due to the reluctance of most nation states to give up their sovereignty. However, the process began to accelerate in the early 21st century. Whereas the European Union started out as a loose economic alliance among European nations, the European Union took further steps to more closely integrate the member states, and make the EU into a more supranational organisation in the early 21st century.
At the turn of the century, nations within the European Union had created a free trade zone and eliminated most travel barriers across their borders. A new common currency for Europe, the Euro, was established electronically in 1999, officially tying all of the currencies of each participating nation to each other. The new currency was put into circulation in 2002 and the old currencies were phased out.
As of 2004, the European Union is in the process of ratifying a new constitution, inducting additional member states (most of them in central Europe) and to consolidate various treaties. However, the creation of the constitution has been controversial, it is seen by many eurosceptics as a step towards a single EU state. There has been disagreement as member states wrangle over how much voting power each will have in EU, taxes, and the standards to which new member states must be held before they are admitted.
