A Short History of Europe: From Charlemagne to the Treaty of Europe (17 page)

One of the most significant changes in society was the increasing role that women played. Throughout the twentieth century the position of women in society had gradually evolved – war work had brought them out from behind
the cooker in both world wars and courageous campaigns had finally brought them the vote. Now they demanded equal rights as citizens, both in the workplace and in their private lives. Feminist movements were founded which campaigned for the right to abortion and divorce. The contraceptive pill created a sexual revolution and gave women control of their sexual lives for the first time.

The Catholic
Church reeled in the face of the moral revolution that was sweeping Europe and the rest of the developed world. The Second Vatican Council met from 1962 to 1965, dealing with many issues including a familiar one – the celibacy of priests. It determined that the vernacular could be introduced into the liturgy, instead of Latin, and that national or local customs could also be incorporated. However,
it failed to stem the decline in church attendance and religious observation in an increasingly secular world.

All good things must come to an end and they did in the 1970s when Europe’s consistent growth was brought to an abrupt conclusion by several factors. The first was the 1971 collapse of the international financial system devised by the Bretton
Woods Conference in 1944, destabilising world trade and financial dealings. The second was the increase in the price of oil in 1973 after an Arab-Israeli war and the nationalisation of Western companies’ oil installations in OPEC countries. Further oil price rises occurred in 1979. Industry suffered and European industry in particular, long reliant on cheap energy sources, was exposed as outdated
and uncompetitive. The result was inflation and recession in many sectors of industry such as car production. There was a serious increase in unemployment and conditions were ripe for the rise once more of extreme far-right political parties as immigration was blamed in many cases for the lack of jobs.

In mainstream politics there was also change. In Britain, the governing Labour Party was replaced
by the Conservatives in 1979, led by Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925). The socialists also lost in Germany when Helmut Kohl’s (b. 1930) Christian Democrats defeated the Social Democrats. In France, however, the socialist, François Mitterrand (1916–96) bucked the trend by becoming President in 1981.

Meanwhile, a number of dictatorships passed quietly into history.
In Greece the Colonels, who had ruled since 1967, relinquished power; in Portugal, Antonio Salazar died in 1970 and the dictatorial regime that had replaced him was ended by the Carnation Revolution led by a left-leaning military junta in 1974, which brought democracy within two years. In Spain, the dictatorship of General Franco finally came to an end with his death in 1975 and the restoration
of the monarchy.

Political radicalism erupted around this time in several parts of Europe, often in response to the harsh economic climate and as a blow against the capitalist system. The Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy perpetrated outrages against society – taking hostages, kidnapping and murdering. In Britain and Spain, the
IRA and ETA, respectively, waged war on government. In Northern Ireland, the Troubles that had erupted in the late 1960s continued, spreading to the rest of the United Kingdom with a bombing campaign that killed or maimed many people while ETA mounted a campaign in Spain.

The EEC continued with its development, despite a six-month period when President de Gaulle
refused to attend meetings (the so-called ‘policy of the empty chair’) in protest at efforts at integration. In 1967, the ECSC, EEC and Euratom were merged into one body and the customs union was achieved earlier than anticipated. On 1 January 1973, it finally accepted new members – Britain, Denmark and Ireland. The oil crisis provoked an immediate challenge for the newly enlarged organisation and
the British asked to renegotiate its terms of membership in 1974, following the election of a Labour government. A 1975 referendum confirmed Britain’s membership with two-thirds of voters opting to remain part of the Community.

The European Monetary System (EMS) was established in 1979 but Britain opted out and, a few years later, Margaret Thatcher obtained compensation for a budget contribution
she considered too high. The European Council, a meeting of heads of state and governments, was established in 1974 and, in 1976, it was decided that the European Parliament should be elected by universal suffrage. In 1985, the Schengen Agreement created open borders with no passport controls between some member states. In 1986, the Single European Act was signed, establishing the Single European
Market. Six years later, the European Union was created by the Maastricht Treaty.

Willy Brandt (1913–92), former Mayor of West Berlin, was elected Chancellor of West Germany in 1969. As Chancellor, he developed
Ostpolitik
, a policy with the objective of improving relations with his neighbours, East Germany and Poland, as well as with the Soviet
Union. It became part of a series of conciliatory acts. In 1971, the USA, USSR, France and Britain agreed to make contact between East and West Berlin easier. Brandt also devised a treaty by which a number of Western states recognised East Germany, with the result that both East and West Germany became members of the United Nations in 1973. Then, Cold War tensions were further reduced in 1975
by the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe which arrived at an important consensus on a number of issues, such as the recognition of European borders as decided at the end of the Second World War.

Nonetheless, agitation grew in the east, perhaps now helped by Helsinki’s bold statements about human rights. Czechoslovakia, slapped down in the 1970s, continued to smoulder with
suppressed dissent and the Charter 77 group continued to protest. It was in Poland, however, that the greatest unrest occurred, perhaps encouraged by the tide of national feeling engendered by the election of Carol Wojtyla (1920–2005) as Pope John Paul II in 1978, the first non-Italian Pope since Adrian VI in 1522. In 1980, the shipyard workers in Gdansk, members of the free trade union,
Solidarnosc
(Solidarity), rebelled under the leadership of Lech Walesa (b.1943), with the support of the Catholic Church in Poland. Within a year, the union had ten million members. Polish authorities, led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski (b.1923), moved to ban it and arrested its leaders.

Mikhail Gorbachev (b.1931) was elected Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985 following the deaths in
rapid succession of Brezhnev and his two successors, Yuri Andropov (1914–84) and Konstantin Chernenko (1911–85). Gorbachev was a reformer and championed the concepts of
glasnost
(openness) and
perestroika
(restructuring) with which he hoped to bring socialism back to life in the east. In 1989, he announced that the Soviet Union would no longer stand in the way of any of its satellite states that
wished to change their way of government and the nations of the east did not stand on ceremony, most dismantling the Communist apparatus and holding elections that same year.

In Poland, Solidarity won the first free elections held in the country since the 1930s and, in 1990, Lech Walesa became president; Hungary became a republic and held free elections; in the ‘Velvet Revolution’, Czechoslovakia
became a democracy under the presidency of the playwright, Vaclav Havel (b. 1936) and Slovakia and the Czech Republic, forcibly brought together at the end of the First World War, soon became separate states; in Romania, the ruthless dictator Nicolae Ceauc¸escu (1918–1989) and his wife were arrested and executed and democracy was introduced; in Bulgaria and Albania, the communists succeeded in
retaining power as members of coalition governments.

Events were most dramatic in East Germany where the Berlin Wall was a concrete symbol of the division of Europe and of the German people. As the reform movement spread throughout Eastern Europe, demonstrations and civil unrest broke out in East Germany. Leader Erich Honecker (1912–94) resigned and his replacements made the decision to throw
open the borders. On 9 November 1989, people began to take sledge-hammers to the Berlin Wall and Germany was united once again.

The twentieth century ended as it had begun, with bloodshed in the Balkans. At the end of the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles had cobbled together a state to house the Southern Slavs, consisting of the Serbs, the Croats and the Slovenes. In
1929, it had become the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and then, after the Second World War, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, made up of a number of Socialist Republics – Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.

The spirit of independence in the air towards the end of the 1980s made the Croats and Slovenes want independence, too. The Serbs tried to stop them
and went to war with their old enemies, the Croats, besieging Zagreb and shelling the ancient port and tourist attraction of Dubrovnik. Then, when Bosnia-Herzegovina also declared independence in 1992, the Serbs, in one of the most shameful and horrific episodes since the Second World War, tried to ethnically cleanse the area of Croats and Muslims. Many thousands of men were rounded up, shot and
buried in mass graves, most notably at Srebreniça where troops of General Ratko Mladic (b. 1942) massacred 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. Eventually, following United Nations intervention, Serbia was forced to accept the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The other republics have since gained their independence, the most recent being Kosovo,which declared independence in February 2008, although Serbia and
a number of other nations have yet to recognise the new nation.

As the twenty-first century dawned, the European Union was well-established, although there was still considerable griping about it, most noticeably from those on the right in Britain. It was made up of 27 member states – Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia,
Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, the Republic of Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. It had its own parliament and the European Commission, its executive branch, with 27 commissioners responsible for legislation, implementation and the day-to-day business of the Union,
effectively acted as an international government. In 2002, another milestone was reached when 12 member states replaced their currencies with the euro, another three following later.

There have been setbacks, however. The European Constitution was rejected in referenda in 2005 by Dutch and French voters and, requiring ratification by all member states before it is adopted, has been abandoned,
to be replaced by a Reform Treaty. The Treaty of Lisbon, designed to streamline the workings of the European Union, was also rejected when the Irish voted against it in a referendum in June 2008. But, the European Union has done the job it was set up for, fostering partnership amongst nations and, let us not forget, helping to prevent Europe from descending into the kind of continent-wide conflagration
that killed so many during the twentieth century.

History, as the twentieth century so adequately proved, is cyclical, and there is some irony in the fact that in this new century we once again look beyond our borders and our own western ideology at a similar threat to the one faced by the Holy Roman Emperors of medieval times. Al-Qaeda and global terrorists, and not the Saracens, the Magyars,
the Vikings or the Mongols are the new threat and although there is little possibility of them invading our territories, the damage they can do is incalculable as proved by the World Trade Center atrocity in New York in 2001 and Europe’s very own experience of terrorist horror in Madrid and London in 2004 and 2007, respectively. In the east, too, the tanks have been rolling again, as Russia crushes
rebellion in Chechnya and South Ossetia.

Plus ça change
, you might say, and you would be right.

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, London: Allen Lane, 1993

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, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988

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David Thomson,
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