History of Civilization

In the eye of the hurricane, one force for continuity seemed clear. The pope, based in the Vatican City, in the heart of Rome, began to assert bold new initiatives in the political sphere, while holding to traditional positions on doctrinal church affairs.

The feeling that Pope Pius XII (r. 1939-1958) had not done enough forestall World War II or to assist beleaguered Jews within the Nazi controlled nations persisted, and after the war he and his successors sought to take clear positions on world affairs.

These positions were defined in the context of substantial changes within the church itself. The most extensive changes were initiated by Pope John XXIII (r. 1958– 1963), who in 1959 called the twenty-first Ecumenical Council of the church, in a tradition begun by Constantine the Great in the fourth century. Known as Vatican II, this council continued to meet under his successor, Pope Paul VI (r. 1963-1978). The council made many changes in the liturgy, encouraged celebration of Mass in vernacular languages, and opened up relations with many other denominations.

While the church continued to be identified in many parts of the world with the forces of conservatism— especially in its opposition to women clergy, in its emphasis on the child-bearing responsibilities of women, and in its support of Catholic dictators in South America— elsewhere the church was increasingly associated with the forces of reform.

Radical priests in Central America, innovative church leaders in North America, and activist bishops in the non-Western world were urging the church to face the statistical fact that most Catholics apparently practiced some form of birth control, argued that the church should be a force for land reforms that would benefit the peasants, and held that the nature of the church service needed to be changed even further if the younger generation were to be retained.

These trends, marked by a concern for public affairs, continued under a dynamic new pope, John Paul II, elected in 1978 as the youngest pope since 1846 and the first non-Italian pope since the sixteenth century. A Pole, Karol Wojtyla (1920– ), former archbishop of Kracow, worked to expand the role of the church in the non-Western world.

He made extensive overseas visits, including to the United States, where church doctrine was frequently questioned by younger priests, and took strong positions against military aggression, political terrorism, and abortion. Of particular concern to this pope was the government suppression of the Polish Solidarity movement in 1981-1982.

John Paul was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in Rome in 1981, but he recovered and was able to pay an official visit to his native Poland in 1983 and thereafter to many other nations, including a triumphant trip to the Philippines in 1995.

Unlike Germany, Italy was in turmoil for much of its postwar period. In 1946 a plebiscite showed 54 percent of the voters in favor of a republic, which was therefore established. Some monarchists and fascists remained, but neither group influenced parliamentary politics to any great extent.

A strong Christian Democratic party (a Catholic party with a relatively liberal program) held power under a succession of leaders, with support from other groups. The government broke up large landed estates in the south to redistribute the land. A very strong Communist party, with which the larger faction of the Socialists was allied, offered a persistent challenge. In the early 1960s a series of complicated negotiations began a process called the apertura a sinistra the “opening to the left,” in which the Christian Democrats won over some Socialist support.

Italy’s economic growth between 1953 and 1966 was so remarkable that the Italians, too, spoke of an economic miracle. As In France, this growth was achieved with some government ownership and with much government regulation and planning. Membership in the Common Market gave Italian enterprise opportunities that it had never had before.

The grave problems of southern Italy, Sardinia, and Sicily were attacked by programs of investments, by providing jobs in the north or in Germany or Switzerland for the surplus workers of the south, and by old-age pensions. In the Italian balance of payments, an income of about $1 billion annually from tourists proved enormously important.

Italian fashions became popular throughout the world, further bolstering both the economy and the national sense of wellbeing. The Italian motion picture industry began to rival that of France and ultimately overtook the immediate postwar leader, Britain.

By the late 1960s Italian political stability began to crumble, in part due to severe internal political strains within the Christian Democratic party, and in part due to the uncertainty of the party’s relationship with its supposed partners, the Socialists. In part it was also due to the inflation that Italy was perhaps less able to bear than were the advanced industrial nations. Strikes occurred sporadically and unpredictably, and 1969 was marked by mass strikes.

The Italian bureaucracy was marked by no-show jobs, scandal, corruption, and pettiness. Economic mismanagement became evident in the 1970s. The Italian inflation rate soared; nearly 2 million Italians were unemployed. By 1974 Italy had a huge trade deficit and had to turn to the International Monetary Fund and to West Germany for credit.

The government was unable to restrain demands for wage increases, which ran at 30 percent annually, spurring further inflation in prices and overburdening the middle class. The Mafia, a centuries old alliance of secret criminal societies organized along feudal lines and particularly powerful in Sicily, began to show itself overtly in southern Italy. Terrorists openly attacked judges, teachers, journalists, and police officers in the streets.

In 1978 one group, the Red Brigade, kidnapped former premier Aldo Moro (1916-1978) and murdered him after the Italian government refused to negotiate his release. The universities were in chaos; students throughout the nation went on frequent and prolonged strikes, so that the ablest sought their education in other countries. Of all the nations of western Europe, Italy’s experiment with liberal democracy seemed most clearly on trial.

During this time the large Italian Communist party increased in size and organizing skills. In 1976 the communists polled 35 percent of the popular vote for the Chamber of Deputies. Led by Enrico Berlinguer (1922– 1984), the Communists declared their desire to enter into a coalition government with their former enemies and promised to abide by the constitution and to keep Italy in NATO.

The United States doubted the sincerity of these promises and supported those Italian leaders best able to block Berlinguer’s move toward power. But by entering into what it called a “historic compromise,” the Communist party won a new middle-class following. In 1978 the Communist party was granted equality with other parties in shaping government policies when it promised to support a national unity government.

Ministries continued to change hands with bewildering rapidity in Italy, the entire cabinet resigning in 1981 when it was revealed that many officials were members of an illegal and secret Masonic lodge. Scandals in banking and politics, the kidnapping of public officials, instability in leadership, and recurrent social unrest continued to plague Italy throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The West German postwar recovery was the most remarkable of all. The wartime destruction of much of Germany’s industrial plant had paradoxically proved beneficial; the new plant was built with the latest technological equipment.

The Allied High Commission gradually abolished controls over German industry, save for atomic energy and certain military restrictions. It provided economic aid and scaled down prewar German debts. By the early 1950s West Germany had a favorable balance of trade and a rate of industrial growth as high as 10 percent a year.

The West German gross national product rose from $23 billion in 1950 to $103 billion in 1964, with no serious monetary inflation. This prosperity was spread through all classes of society. The working class in West Germany had begun to enjoy affluence; new buildings rose everywhere, while superhighways grew overcrowded and had to be widened and extended.

The economic miracle attracted population into West Germany from southern Europe and drew other Germans out of East Germany into the Federal Republic. East Germany thus had a net loss in population as West Germany boomed. By the late 1960s the German birth rate had fallen, however, and in the 1980s the population had stabilized at 62 million. This made for a highly industrialized, close-knit, urban nation.

The independent West German state had a constitution that provided for a legislature whose lower house represented the people directly and whose upper house represented the states (Lander). The president, elected by a special assembly for a five-year term, was largely a ceremonial figure. Real executive leadership was vested in the chancellor, a prime minister dependent on a parliamentary majority.

Under the firm leadership of Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967), the Christian Democrats held power until 1961. A Rhineland Catholic, former mayor of Cologne, conservative, pro-French, and democratic, Adenauer was forced to retire only because of age and continued to wield enough influence to weaken his successor, Ludwig Erhard (1897-1977), a Protestant and professional economist, who remained in office for five more years.

Germany had been rather successfully “deNazified”—a requirement stipulated by the Allied High Commission. As a result of the Nuremburg trials in 1946, seventy-four major Nazi leaders were convicted of war crimes. In general, lower-level Nazis were required only to demonstrate that they fully accepted the new democratic government; to have dismissed all civil servants who had held posts under the Nazi regime would have utterly crippled any administrative recovery. Some Nazis who had escaped to other parts of the world, notably South America, continued to be hunted out, and if captured, were tried for war crimes.

The major political question remained that of an eventual reunion with communist-dominated East Germany. Neither Germany recognized the other diplomatically. After years during which the East Germans, attracted by better living conditions in West Germany, crossed the border by the tens of thousands, the East German government in August 1961 began building a wall between the two parts of Berlin. Though on special holidays families in West Berlin were allowed to cross into East Berlin briefly to visit relatives and friends, the wall stood as the visible symbol of a divided Germany.

As a consequence of the cold war, the Americans, British, and French permitted the West Germans to rearm early in the 1950s and to join NATO. Military conscription was introduced in 1955, and by 1970 West Germany had developed a sizable modern military. Access to the atom bomb was not included in this rearmament. Even so, and despite low-key political leadership, the spectacle of a rearmed Germany caused much concern—in the Soviet bloc, in Britain, and among Jewish voters in all nations.

Chancellor Erhard’s government fell in 1966, when a small disciplined party, the Free Democrats, in coalition with which the Christian Democrats were ruling, refused to support his proposals for higher taxes. The Christian Democrats now proposed a “grand coalition” with their chief opponents, the Social Democrats. The very popular mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt (1913— ), became vice-chancellor and foreign minister. This grand coalition commanded popular support, and it lasted until the elections of 1969.

In these elections Brandt, a Social Democrat, became chancellor and formed a coalition in his turn with the Free Democrats. Brandt moved slowly and cautiously to open discussions with the East Germans. The chief stumbling block was Soviet fear of West Germany. It gradually became apparent that a treaty between West Germany and the Soviet Union in which both renounced the use of force would be one of the necessary preliminaries. In the summer of 1970 Brandt reached agreement with the Soviets on the text of such a treaty.

It recognized all existing European frontiers, which Germans and Soviets agreed never to try to alter by force, leaving open future negotiations. The second step was an agreement with Poland, which Brandt concluded during 1970. Brandt’s Ostpolitik, or Eastern policy, culminated in a treaty with Czechoslovakia and in the entry of both Germanies into the United Nations in 1973. A form of detente with the Soviet bloc was nearly achieved, when in 1974 Brandt resigned upon the discovery that one of his closest assistants had been an East German spy, a discovery that renewed German fears of the designs of the Soviet bloc.

The 1970s also dimmed the West German economic miracle. While the German inflation rate, roughly 6 percent in 1975, was mild compared to the rest of Europe, and the growth rate continued at over 5 percent, unemployment began to climb. German social services were not among the best in the world, and German per capita income had surpassed that of the nations that had defeated Germany in Europe in World Word II, but a deep-seated memory of the inflation that had destroyed the democratic hopes of Weimar made the Germans cautious and insecure.

Waves of terrorism further disconcerted the German leadership. Only Brandt, and after 1974 Helmut Schmidt (1918— ), had seemed to provide the vigorous leadership the Germans had enjoyed under Adenauer. Together with other nations in the West, Germany often appeared to lack able new leaders with dramatic solutions to the nation’s problems.

Although the electorate recognized that the range of dramatic new solutions was severely limited by the constraints of superpower confrontation and an eroding economy, they nonetheless hoped for a renewal of vigor at the top. Politics in the Federal Republic became fragmented when the grand coalition broke up, with powerful leaders emerging on the basis of strong local support. In 1982 the Christian Democrats, led by Helmut Kohl (1930— ), won a landslide victory.

West Germany’s economic growth, though slowed, remained prodigious, and chancellor Kohl felt emboldened to pursue a more independent course in international affairs. While he kept West Germany in NATO, he forced the removal of nuclear missiles that were deployed on German soil and intended for Soviet targets, and he called for negotiations with the Soviet Union on reducing short-range missiles, causing a rift with both Britain and the United States.

Faced with protests at home, with soaring social costs, and signs of a resurgence from the political right, Kohl moved to take advantage of the unexpected and overwhelming changes in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Soon the unthinkable was being thought on both sides of the rapidly crumbling Iron Curtain, and with communist leadership abandoned in East Germany, reunification appeared possible.

While much of western Europe worried about a reunited Germany, which with 80 million people and controlling 40 percent of Europe’s industrial production could well dominate the European Community, Kohl moved quickly, and one of the richest capitalist nations absorbed one of the richest formerly communist countries to create a united Germany in October 1990. In December the first parliament for all of Germany since the end of World War II was elected.

The new nation took the title Federal Republic of Germany, and East Germany acceded to the jurisdiction of West German Basic Law. The newly united nation set about the incredibly complex problem of integrating two economies, two industrial forces with vastly different experiences, two research establishments for science and technology, two armies, two trade policies, and even two Olympic teams. The problem proved daunting, for East Germans were not prepared for a free market economy, and economic problems soon gave rise to neo-Nazi groups and attacks on minorities.

Defeat by the Germans, brutal German occupation and economic exploitation, the spectacle of French collaboration with the enemy—all this was followed by a liberation that, despite the part played in it by the Fighting French and the French Resistance movement, was clearly the work of American, British, and Soviet arms.

Nor had France since the early nineteenth century kept pace with the leading industrial nations in production, finance, or population growth. Only a rising birth rate gave cause for optimism. Hundreds of thousands of French men and women decided to have children—a clear sign of the recovery that lay ahead.

The arrival of nearly a million refugees from the colonial war in Algeria in 1962-1963 and the influx of almost 4 million foreign workers made France, already a cosmopolitan nation, even more so, and assured the nation a labor supply on which to base its rapid industrial expansion.

The French government-in-exile, led by General de Gaulle, had easily reestablished in liberated France the old republican forms of government, called the Fourth Republic. But after de Gaulle temporarily retired from politics in 1946, the Fourth Republic began to look like the Third. Cabinets lasted on an average only a few months; to the old splinter parties was added a Communist party of renewed strength, openly dedicated to revolutionary change. After nine years of war, Indochina was lost in 1954; in the same year an active rebellion against the French in Algeria; Morocco and Tunisia were both lost in 1956, and the crisis deepened.

In 1958 de Gaulle took power again. A plebiscite confirmed a new constitution. The constitution of the new Fifth Republic provided for a president to be elected for a seven-year term by direct popular vote. An absolute majority was required, and, if not achieved in a first election, was to be obtained in a runoff between the two candidates with the most votes.

Elected outright in 1958, de Gaulle was reelected to a second term in 1965 in such a runoff. Under the new constitution the French president appointed the premier, who could dissolve the legislature and order new elections at any time after the first year. Thus the new constitution gave the executive more power, the legislature much less.

De Gaulle’s enemies soon called him a dictator, the personification of French haughtiness and superiority. He was obstinate, opinionated, and authoritarian; yet he was also consistent, clear, capable, and utterly committed to creating a stable and progressive French state. He intended that France be taken seriously in world affairs.

To this end he fought to keep Britain out of the Common Market, worked to prevent American dominance in Europe, and sought to establish a creditable French military presence. He did not want to see France bled by further colonial wars, and though he believed strongly in the unity of all French-speaking peoples (seeking even to establish a separate cultural mission to the French-speaking people of Quebec), he nonetheless worked out a settlement making Algeria independent in 1962.

Starting with Marshall Plan aid in 1947, great economic and social changes began in France. A full-scale reorientation of the economy was undertaken in accordance with the practices of modern industry. Helped by foreign investment, especially American, France began to experience a real boom. Prosperity meant that for the first time the French, by the hundreds of thousands, bought cars, television sets, and record players; that they traveled in ever growing numbers; that they experienced fearful traffic jams; and that those who found the new ways unsettling blamed all the changes on the Americans.

Those who feared that France would adopt the new British-American culture emphasized the continuity, unity, complexity, and alleged purity of the French language, and looked for their own cultural influences to offset Americanization and “Coca-Colanization.”

De Gaulle retained a strong personal dislike of les Anglo-Saxons. The thought of such supranational bodies as the Common Market and NATO that could rob France of sovereignty even to a small degree was uncomfortable, and talk of a United States of Europe was totally unacceptable. He spoke instead of Europe des patries, a “Europe of fatherlands,” in which France would take the lead.

But to do this France must have its own atomic weapons. Therefore de Gaulle refused to join the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union in a treaty barring atomic tests, and France continued to test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, exploding its first hydrogen bomb in 1968. Vigorously opposed to communism at home, de Gaulle nonetheless came to terms with the Soviet Union; the Soviets, he argued, no longer represented the threat to the general peace that they had represented in the 1950s. In balancing the scales against the industrial and military power of the United States and Britain, France needed friends. To South America, to Canada, to Poland, and to Romania, de Gaulle carried his message that France would be the leader of Europe.

In the spring of 1968, however, while de Gaulle was in Romania, Paris erupted. The French universities had been ignored by the regime in a period when the young throughout western Europe were bursting with resentment against “the machine civilization” of the cold war society. Students in Paris occupied university buildings, fought the police, and eventually drew a reluctant Communist party into the battle in order that it not lose the support of the French workers, who had already begun to strike in sympathy with the students.

De Gaulle returned to Paris, assured himself of army support, proposed a referendum, which he was obliged to abandon in favor of new elections, and then won a great victory at the polls, obtaining larger majority in the legislature than before. His new minister of education, acknowledging the legitimacy of many of the grievances of the students, pushed through the legislature a reform bill decentralizing the educational system. De Gaulle now staked his political future on the issue of regional reform in a public referendum—and lost. As he had done before, he withdrew into private life. In the 1969 elections the Gaullists were returned to office with a substantial majority, and Georges Pompidou (1911-1974) became president of France.

France now entered more readily into competition rather than confrontation with its former allies. To make the French more competitive, the franc was devalued. The veto against Britain’s entry into the Common Market was abandoned, and, without rejoining NATO, France began more formal cooperation with it. An economic recession began in 1973, however, and public confidence wavered.

France returned to governments that could administer programs only with the help of complex coalitions, as the aristocratic Valery Giscard d’ Estaing (1926– became president. Fearful of the left, and ultimately beset by political scandal, Giscard did not press the social reform his platform had promised. From 1972 to 1977 the Socialist and Communist parties formed a common front to oppose the right and center parties, but the communists withdrew in 1977.

In 1981 an able Socialist party regular who had worked to broaden the socialist base by weakening the communists, their traditional enemies, won the presidential election. This man, Francois Mitterrand (1916– ), brought four communists into his cabinet and announced plans to nationalize certain sectors of industry. At the same time, Mitterrand took a strongly anti-Soviet stance over the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, which had begun in December 1979.

He declared himself committed to a mixed-enterprise economy and to cooperation with the Americans in their efforts to renew disarmament talks while seeking to base a nuclear missile force within Europe. In 1986 France began a graduated process of industrial privatization, achieved by 1993, and in 1995, Mitterand retired.

France was one of the first countries to face the problem of large-scale immigration from former colonies, followed by substantial new immigration from politically unstable, repressive, or poverty-stricken states. At first France accepted Muslim immigrants from North Africa and French-speaking blacks from sub-Saharan Africa, but by the 1990s public opinion was turning against the influx of immigrants, many of whom were in fact refugees.

In 1993 France restricted entry and passed laws making it possible to expel foreigners more easily. In the meantime the same problem—that of international “boat people”—became serious in the United States, to which thousands of Cubans and Haitians were fleeing. Germans% attractive to workers from the Balkans and Turkey, experienced anti-immigrant rioting.

Britain had long since closed its doors to much Commonwealth immigration, especially South Asian and West Indian. France thus joined other Western nations in turning to more restrictive policies in the face of a worldwide problem that no one nation could solve and that calls for action from the United Nations barely seemed to touch.

In Britain a general election in July 1945—after the war had ended in Europe—ousted Churchill and the Conservative party and for the first time gave the Labour party an absolute majority in the House of Commons.

The Liberal party was practically extinguished. The new prime minister was Clement Attlee (1883-1967), a middle-class lawyer of quiet intellect who was committed to major social reform at home and the decolonization of much of the British Empire abroad.

The new government—with a mandate for social change—proceeded to take over, with compensation to the owners, the coal industry, railroads, and parts of commercial road transportation, and began to nationalize the steel industry. Britain already had a well-developed system of social insurance; this was now capped by a system of socialized medical care for all who wished it. The educational system was partly reformed to make it more democratic and to lengthen the period of compulsory education.

When the Conservatives, with Churchill still at their head, were returned to power in 1951 and remained there for twelve years, they halted the nationalization of steel but otherwise kept intact the socialism of their opponents, including the national health plan. Thus a social revolution was achieved without bitter divisiveness between the parties.

In the postwar years the British were not able to keep up with the extraordinary pace of technological innovation. The British automobile industry, for example, which immediately after the war gained a large share of the world market, yielded the lead in the 1950s to the Germans, with their inexpensive, standardized light car, the Volkswagen.

Furthermore, Britain was one of the last countries in Europe to develop a system of super highways, completing its first modern highway only in 1969. The British were falling behind because they had been the first to industrialize and now their plants were the first to become outdated and inefficient. While British management and labor remained bound to traditional ways, the West Germans, buoyed by vast sums of money provided for their economic recovery by their former enemies, and especially by the United States, embarked on new paths.

Even in apparent prosperity, Britain remained in economic trouble. Continued pressure on the pound in the 1960s repeatedly required help from Britain’s allies to maintain its value. This weakness of the pound signaled an unfavorable balance of trade in which the British were buying more from the rest of the world than they could sell. In the 1950s and 1960s, in what came to be called the “brain drain,” some of Britain’s most distinguished scientists and engineers left home to find higher pay and more modern laboratories in the United States, Canada, or Australia.

Under Harold Wilson (1916– ), a shrewd politician often criticized for opportunism, the Labour party came to power in 1964 and governed until 1970. In 1966 Wilson froze wages and prices in an effort to restore the balance between what the British spent and what they produced. In his own party, such measures were deeply unpopular and were regarded as exploiting the poor to support the rich.

Wilson had to devalue the pound after heavy foreign pressure against it. Despite the unpopularity of his policies, by 1969 the deficits had disappeared and general prosperity continued, along with high taxes and rapid inflation. Prices were rising so fast that the gains from rising wages were largely illusory. The national health plan and education for working-class mothers had freed more women for an increasingly technical work force.

But a spiral continued with only momentary breaks, regardless of the party in office, and except for a period of prosperity and relative confidence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Britain’s decline in relation to its competitors continued. By the 1980s, when the Conservative Margaret Thatcher (1925— ) was prime minister, British inflation had been lessened but still remained dangerously high, unemployment stood at depression levels, and the British standard of living had been surpassed by most nations in western Europe.

Even so, conditions of life improved for most people. The Labour government had imposed heavy income taxes on the well-to-do and burdensome death duties on the rich, using the income thus obtained to redistribute goods and services to the poor. An increasing number of new universities offered young people of all classes educational opportunities that had previously been available only to the upper and upper-middle classes.

In the postwar years race became serious issue in Britain for the first time. Indians, Pakistanis, West Indians, and Africans—Commonwealth subjects with British passports—left poor conditions at home and migrated freely to Britain in large numbers to take jobs in factories, public transportation, and hospitals. Despite its liberal and antiracist protestations, the Wilson government was forced to curtail immigration sharply. Some Conservative politicians predicted bloody race riots (which, in fact, occurred in 1981) unless black immigration was halted, and some extremists proposed that nonwhites already in Britain be deported.

Closely related to the race issue at home was the question of official British relations with southern Africa, to which the Labour government refused to sell arms because of the apartheid policies of the South African regime from the late 1940s. Brought gradually into place from 1948 to the late 1960s, apartheid laws (the term means “apartness”) led to separate tracks of development for whites, blacks, coloureds, and Asians: a complex and highly expensive system of segregation by race.

Relations deteriorated quickly after South African police fired upon a mass demonstration at Sharpeville in 1960, killing many black Africans. In 1961, under pressure from the prime ministers of Canada and India and with Britain’s approval, the rigidly racist government of South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth.

To this strain was added a major challenge to British authority when the white-dominated government in Southern Rhodesia, unwilling to accept a constitution that provided for full black participation in legislation, unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent of Great Britain, citing the American colonies in 1776 as a precedent. This move led to the imposition of sanctions by the United Nations and years of delicate negotiations punctuated by civil war, until a cease-fire, a constitution, and elections were ultimately accepted by all parties, and the Thatcher government declared Rhodesia independent, as Zimbabwe, in 1980.

Perhaps most persistently debilitating to British security, however, was the Irish problem, long quiescent, which arose again in the late 1960s. In Ulster (the northern counties that were still part of the United Kingdom), the Catholics generally formed a depressed class and were the first to lose their jobs in bad times.

They were inflamed by the insistence of Protestant extremists (the Orangemen) on publicly celebrating the anniversaries of victories of William III in the 1690s that had ensured English domination over the region. Marching provocatively through Catholic districts, the Orangemen in the summer of 1969 precipitated disorders that began in Londonderry and spread to Belfast and other areas. The regular police were accused by Catholics of being mere tools of the Protestant oppressor and had to be disarmed. The British army then intervened to keep order.

The government of Eire suggested that the United Nations be given responsibility for the problem, a suggestion unacceptable to both the Northern Irish and British governments. Extremists of the south, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who had always claimed the northern counties as part of a united Ireland, now revived their terroristic activities. But the IRA itself was split between a relatively moderate wing and the Provisionals (Provos), anarchists dedicated to nearly indiscriminate bombing.

The level of fighting steadily escalated in Northern Ireland. In 1972 the British suspended the Northern Irish parliament and governed the province directly. In 1981 a group of prisoners, insisting that they not be treated as common criminals but as political prisoners, resorted to hunger strikes; although ten prisoners died, the British government continued to refuse political status to people they viewed as terrorists. In early 1995 there at last appeared the prospect of an enduring cease-fire.

Yet Britain was by no means wholly gloomy or depressed. Many British products continued to set the world’s standards, especially for the upper classes. Beginning with the enormous popularity and stylistic innovations of the Beatles in the early 1960s, England for a time set the style for young people in other countries. Long hair for men, the unisex phenomenon in dress, the popularity of theatrical and eccentric clothes, the whole “mod” fashion syndrome that spread across the Atlantic and across the Channel started in England.

Carnaby Street, Mick Jagger (1943– ), and the Rolling Stones all had their imitators elsewhere, but the originals were English. Thus Britain continued to play a major role in fashion, music, social attitudes, and in tourism, through a tourist boom that brought millions of visitors to Britain, making it the front-ranking tourist nation in the world.

Most evident was the gradual erosion of rigid class distinctions in England, traditional bastion of political freedom and social inequality. The Beatles were all working-class in origin; lower class, too, were most leading English pacesetters of the new styles in song, dress, and behavior. These styles spread not only abroad, but among the middle and upper classes of the young in Britain as well, who were increasingly impatient to have done with the class sentiment that had so long pervaded English thought. By the 1990s even the monarchy, once revered, came under increasing criticism.

This impatience reflected the growing fragmentation of British social and economic life. The Labour party suffered from chronic disunity. In 1980 some of its members founded the Social Democratic party, hoping to take up the middle ground politically through an alliance with the remnant of the Liberals, but by the end of the decade this effort was dead.

In 1982 a successful war with Argentina, occasioned by that country’s attempt to occupy the Falkland Islands, buoyed national spirits, but Prime Minister Thatcher’s popularity fell as unemployment continued to rise, even though she won her third election victory in 1987.

On October 19, Black Friday, the stock market came down with a bump, and thereafter her popularity waned. An unpopular poll tax imposed in 1990 led to street riots. In November she resigned, having been in office for eleven and a half years.

After 1945 the nations of western Europe successfully preserved the forms of the sovereign state and the politics of nationalism, while also making real attempts to organize a “free Europe” on a level beyond the national state.

In 1952, as a first step, France, West Germany, and Italy joined with Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg in setting up a European Coal and Steel Community. It created for their coal and iron industries a free market area of all six nations, in which a joint administrative body could make certain final and binding decisions without the participation of any government officials. Each nation had given up some part of its sovereignty, and the plan was a success.

By the Treaty of Rome in 1957, these same six countries established the European Economic Community (EEC), better known as the Common Market, with headquarters in Brussels. This was the beginning of closer economic union under a central administration of delegates from each partner nation.

The treaty also provided for increasing powers over trade, production, immigration, currency, and the transport of goods for the Common Market, according to a carefully worked out schedule. Each nation moved toward mixed economy—free enterprise under government regulation. By the late 1970s the success of the Common Market had made western Europe competitive with the United States.

In 1973 Britain joined the Common Market; tariffs between member nations, now including Greece, Eire, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany, were eliminated; labor migration among members grew. Visas were abolished, so that citizens of member countries could pass from one country to another with ease.

Common policies on railway and highway construction, on the adoption of the metric system, and on the relative value of national currencies were adopted. Power relations shifted further in 1973 as the United States withdrew from Vietnam and the oil producing nations joined together to affect oil prices and supplies. By the 1980s serious discussion of a common currency, the Eurodollar, made it clear that, despite disagreement and disappointments, the basic idea of the Common Market was sound.

Although dominated by the cold war, the history of the past five decades also speaks of many triumphs. Despite wars, political intimidation, and terror, both population and longevity have increased.

Diseases that devastated populations in the Middle Ages have been virtually eradicated, and modern vaccines and medicines promise longer life and better health to millions. In all the Western democracies, concern for the rights of the individual has been heightened. Many societies have questioned their former values and conventional wisdoms, while reaffirming national pride and cohesion, just as others have begun to fragment into smaller units.

Inventions in one part of the globe are quickly known in another part, and technology continues to grow faster than humanity can comprehend: The microchip transforms storage of and access to knowledge; the jet plane shrinks time and distance; and new frontiers are discovered when humans walk in outer space and reach the moon. Also for the first time societies and governments systematically concern themselves with the conservation of resources, with the provision of a wide array of services for mind and body, and with the grim possibility of mutual and near-total destruction.

Against the very substantial gains in health, productivity, and freedom—experienced by the majority of humankind must be set ever-deepening worries. The same technology that has created millions of new jobs, that has contributed to the recognition of equality between the races and between men and women, and that made possible a precarious peace based on the mutual ability of the major powers to destroy each other, also caused vast dislocations in populations, widespread damage to the environment, and the capacity through nuclear warfare to destroy vast portions of the globe.

Greater longevity and better health in general terms must be set off against the rise, in the 1980s, of a deeply disturbing new disease, AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), which was sweeping across North America, Western Europe, and parts of Africa. In 1990 doctors estimated that perhaps 2 million Americans alone had the disease, and there was frightened talk of a new plague such as the world has not seen for decades if not centuries.

Without necessarily infringing upon political sovereignty, the world has become very small. All of humanity must be concerned with defining moral, ethical, and legal bases for life, though from different perspectives and out of different historical experiences. The long search for stability and security continues. New players on the stage join the nations of Western civilization in this search.