Europe's Glorious Years of Peace and Prosperity - The New York Times - 0 views
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In synthesizing this period in European history in a long but very readable volume
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Kershaw reminds us that the Continent has faced other large challenges in the postwar era and survived; that some long-term trends of peace, prosperity and democracy are both robust and remarkable; and that individuals have agency, and can alter the course of events — they are not mere expressions of those events.
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Today’s Europe, thankfully, is not haunted by the specter of nuclear war. The probability of a Russian invasion of a NATO member is low.
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During this “golden age” for Europe, imperial powers had to navigate decolonization. The French wars in Indochina and Algeria and the Portuguese wars in Angola and Mozambique were difficult, regime-threatening challenge
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Europe endured domestic violence during this golden age, be it from the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Group in West Germany, nationalists in Northern Ireland or separatists in the Basque region.
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war, sometimes in the form of ethnic cleansing, erupted in the Balkans in the 1990s. Brexit, immigration, populism and even Jihadist-inspired terrorism seem like much smaller challenges than genocide.
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Kershaw traces several positive, long-term trends in European history from 1950 to 2017 that are downright miraculous. Most important, most of the Continent lived in peace during the Global Age, a sharp contrast to the horrific atrocities chronicled in Kershaw’s previous volume in this series, “To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949.”
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Europeans on average became richer than at any time before. In Kershaw’s estimation, the period between 1950 and 1973 was especially prosperous — a “golden age” or an “economic miracle” for the western part of the Continent, and even a “silver age” for the Communist bloc
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As Kershaw sums up, “Europe is more peaceful, more prosperous and more free than at any time in its long history.” Alongside these three positive trends of peace, prosperity and democracy, cooperation among European countries expanded dramatically, culminating in the creation of the European Union and the euro.
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It would be premature, however, to predict a new negative trajectory. Peace, prosperity and democracy in Europe still have serious momentum.
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Kershaw allows for the possibility that individuals — not just innate structural forces — can shape history
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Kershaw ascribes the greatest agency of all to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “The magnitude of Gorbachev’s personal contributions to the dramatic change, not just in the Soviet Union itself but throughout Eastern Europe, can scarcely be exaggerated.
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European leaders should read “The Global Age” to be reminded of the incredible progress of the last 70 years — and told that such progress is something they have the power to sustain through their individual actions