Balkans (1991 – present)

Since 1991 the region of the Balkans has been a place of dynamic change. The region (excluding Greece) has been divided into two subregions: the Western Balkans, consisting of Albania and the entities that emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia—Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, and Montenegro, and Bulgaria and Romania. The division of the Balkans into two subregions reflects the distinct dynamics in the two sets of states.

For instance, the Western Balkans were subjected post-1991 to the dynamics of building nation-states, while Bulgaria and Romania embarked on the path of postcommunist consolidation of democracy, marked by free elections, market liberalization, and the strengthening of civil society.

However, the underlying feature characterizing the developments in all Balkan countries was the uncertainty of their transition process. This may be the main reason why Slovenia, which emerged from the dissolution of Yugoslavia, not only managed to distance itself from the Balkans with its domestic and foreign policy objectives but also ultimately “left” the region altogether.


Ambiguity dominated the Balkan states for the better part of the 1990s. This pattern changed as a result of the Kosovo crisis of 1999 for two reasons. First, and perhaps tragically, by that time the nation-state-building projects in the western Balkans had reached a plateau of stability, which allowed the countries from that subregion to focus on their democratization. The uneven transition processes in Bulgaria and Romania had led to the establishment of the first reformist governments in those countries.

Second, in the aftermath of the Kosovo crisis the two dominant international institutions in Europe—the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—altered their perceptions of the Balkans.

After 1999 they recognized the candidate status of Bulgaria and Romania and outlined the prospect of membership for the countries of the Western Balkans. Such twin alteration of the intraregional and extraregional trends in the Balkans informed the 21st-century processes in the region.

Bulgaria

Despite their being lumped together, the postcommunist development trajectories of Bulgaria and Romania were characterized by quite different dynamics. The transition in Bulgaria, which began on November 10, 1989, with the removal of Todor Zhivkov as head of state, was in effect an internal coup within the Bulgarian Communist Party.

These developments set up the background for a rather unpredictable transformation process, one that was initiated from “above” and did not reflect a significant social anxiety with the communist status quo. The pattern of power up to 1997 was marked by governments that came, tried their policies, and were ousted by either the corrective of popular unrest or a change of allegiance of coalition partners.

After 1997, however, governments followed the road of democratization and market reforms fairly consistently and pursued the objectives of EU and NATO integration. As a result, on March 29, 2004, Bulgaria became a member of NATO and joined the EU on January 1, 2007.

Romania

In Romania, the transition process began with a series of violent protests across the country in December 1989, which culminated with the execution of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaus¸escu on Christmas night, 1989. During the winter of 1989–90 a new political formation emerged, which called itself the National Salvation Front (NSF). It established itself as the vanguard of the revolution and ruled in Romania until 1996.

During this period the government was afflicted by internal dissent as a result of the authoritarian tendencies of the NSF leader Ion Iliescu and domestic unrest caused by both the interethnic tensions with the substantial Hungarian minority located in Transylvania and the social disorder caused by the miners’ uprising during 1991. Another set of problems was associated with the NSF’s wavering foreign policy.

Bucharest, Romania, nowdays

After the elections in 1996, however, consecutive governments did away with the uncertainty characterizing the country’s initial transition process. Thus, like Bulgaria, Romania joined NATO on March 29, 2004, and joined the EU on January 1, 2007.

Albania

The post-1991 period in the subregion of the western Balkans was in many respects even more heterogeneous than the one in Bulgaria and Romania. Although all countries in the subregion experienced violent upheavals of one sort or another, they dealt with their effects differently. Albania was the only country from the western Balkans that did not emerge from the dissolution of former Yugoslavia.

Yet internal conflict beleaguered its postcommunist development. The period up to the 1992 elections was generally characterized by chaos, which led to an exacerbation of the division between the north and the south of the country, rapid growth of organized crime, and the beginning of large-scale emigration fueled by the economic deterioration.

Subsequent governments failed to address these problems, which led to a severe crisis in the country during 1997. It was spurred by the collapse of several financial pyramid schemes, which wiped out the savings of the majority of the Albanian population. During the unrest, military depots were raided and scores of weapons were looted.

Order was restored only after the international community dispatched a military force to the country during Operation Alba. Albania did not fully recover from this crisis, and in 2006 continued to be the poorest country in Europe.

Republic of Macedonia

The transition of the other countries from the western Balkans was marked by the wars of Yugoslav dissolution. Unlike the other republics of former Yugoslavia, however, Macedonia succeeded to gain its independence peacefully after a referendum on September 8, 1991. The country’s transition, however, was hampered by the embargo on former Yugoslavia imposed by the international community.

At the same time the country faced an embargo from Greece, which refused to recognize the country by its constitutional name and continued to refer to it as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Concurrently the existence of the Macedonian nation and language was challenged by Bulgaria. Furthermore the ecumenical independence of the Macedonian Orthodox Church continued to be challenged by the Serbian Orthodox Church.

None of these challenges threatened the existence of the Macedonian state as much as the tension caused by the conflict with the substantial Albanian minority in the country. In the wake of the Kosovo conflict the nearly 25 percent of Albanians living in Macedonia demanded greater recognition of their cultural and political rights. This led to violence during 2001.

The conflict was settled under pressure from the international community with the signing of the Ohrid Peace Accords in August 2001. As a result of the implementation of these accords the EU recognized Macedonia as a candidate country in December 2005. It became a member of NATO’s Partnership for Peace program in 1995.

Croatia

The beginning of the democratic transition in Croatia is usually dated to the electoral victory of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) in the first multiparty elections in April 1990. The vote for the HDZ, led by Franjo Tudjman, was also a vote for independence from Yugoslavia.

The subsequent Homeland War lasted until 1995 and witnessed the territorial consolidation of the country and the exodus of the Serbian minority, as well as the military involvement of Croatia in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The authoritarian rule of President Tudjman, which lasted until his death in 1999, was characterized by nepotism, criminal privatization, and subversion of constitutional practices.

It was only after the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2000 that Croatia began affiliating itself with European institutions. On May 25, 2000, it became a member of NATO’s Partnership for Peace program. In terms of its relations with the EU, Croatia was the most advanced country from the subregion of the western Balkans. On November 13, 2005, it began its accession negotiations, which were the final stage in gaining membership to the Brussels-based bloc.

Bosnia-Herzegovina

The development of Bosnia-Herzegovina after 1991 was marked by war, which ravaged the country until 1995. During this time, over 250,000 people lost their lives and many more were either internally displaced or fled the country altogether.

After the signing of the General Framework Agreement for Peace (Dayton Accords) in 1995, Bosnia-Herzegovina became a virtual protectorate of the international community with a rotating presidency between the representatives of the three dominant ethnic groups—Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs.

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, nowdays

However, decision-making in the country was overseen by a High Representative of the International Community, who could intervene in the domestic affairs of the state and remove elected officials. Bosnia-Herzegovina gradually overcame the division between the three ethnic communities and progressed with the consolidation of its statehood.

Serbia and Montenegro

Until the Kosovo crisis of 1999, the political process in Serbia and Montenegro was driven by the extreme nationalism propagated by Slobodan Miloševic´, which fuelled the breakup of Yugoslavia. As a result Serbia and Montenegro were involved in several wars and subjected to international sanctions.

Miloševic´’s ouster during the elections of 2000 and his subsequent arrest and transfer to the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia in 2001 seemed to suggest that the country was distancing itself from the policies of the 1990s. However the murder of the reformist Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic on March 12, 2003, reflected the continuing legacy of the wars.

Montenegro held a referendum on its independence in May 2006 where its citizens voted to become an independent nation. Montenegro declared its independence on June 3, 2006, followed by Serbia’s declaration of independence on June 5, 2006. A further complication was the status of Kosovo, which after the 1999 conflict remained a protectorate of the UN, although still formally a province of Serbia.

In 2006 representatives of the international community, the Serbs, and the Kosovar Albanians conducted talks however, on the status of the province. The talk yielded little progress, as the Kosovo citizens favored independence, which was formally declared in February 2008, despite Serbia’s objectives.

Germany (post – World War II)

Germany (post – World War II)

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the leaders Winston Churchill of Great Britain, Franklin Roosevelt of the United States, and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union agreed that Germany would be divided into four zones of occupation following its military defeat.

The three countries and the French would each control one zone. In addition the capital city of Berlin, which lay within the Soviet zone, would also be divided into four sectors, one for each ally.

The political leaders did not anticipate that these occupation zones would lead to a formal division of Germany into two separate nations. But in the context of growing tensions between Western and Eastern Allies, which laid the basis for the cold war, Germany became the primary battleground in a new kind of war, one of ideology rather than direct conflict.


The division, formally made in 1949, lasted until reunification on October 3, 1990. The three western zones fused together as the Federal Republic of Germany, a nation reconstituted as a parliamentary democracy; the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic, with a communist-dominated government.

Initially, the Allies endeavored to administer their zones by developing interzonal policies, through the auspices of the Allied Control Council. As part of their reparations the Soviets began to strip their zone of foodstuffs, livestock, transportation networks, and even entire factories.

A major breaking point occurred in early 1948 as the three Western Allies—joined by Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg—called for the western zones of occupation to be eligible for Marshall Plan aid from the United States.

This paved the way for a proposal to fuse the three western zones together economically and to introduce a common currency, the deutschmark, in May 1948. The former Allies were now clearly on opposite sides of a new war, and former enemies, the Germans, had become the respective allies of the two hostile superpowers.

Legacy of the Third Reich

Each of these new German nations had to grapple with the legacy of the Third Reich as they wrote new constitutions, revised legal codes, rebuilt their devastated economies, and struggled to find a new identity. A first step in the process was for occupation authorities to allow the revival or creation of political parties.

Occupation authorities first encouraged politics to resume at the local and regional levels, while the question of national unity remained uncertain. By 1947 each of the regions, or Länder, in the western zones of occupation was led by a minister president, who was chosen by directly elected parliamentary assemblies. A similar process emerged in the Soviet zone, but with much less freedom of choice.

It was apparent that the four occupation zones would not be unified as one political entity. The Western powers began to take steps toward encouraging the fusing of their zones, politically as well as economically. They authorized the West Germans to hold a constitutional assembly, draft a constitution, and secure its ratification by the state parliaments.

This assembly convened in September 1948 and worked for nine months, compromising over issues such as the balance between state and federal powers. West Germany ratified its constitution in May 1949, held its first nationwide elections in August 1949, and narrowly chose Konrad Adenauer as its first chancellor.

In the Soviet zone, the process of encouraging German-style socialism was abandoned in the Soviet drive to secure compliance from its satellite states by 1947. In its stead, political parties on the Left called a People’s Congress into session at the end of 1947.

By October 1948 this congress of about 2,000 delegates had written and approved a constitution for what would become East Germany. On October 7, 1949, the Congress voted unanimously to form the German Democratic Republic.

Economic rebuilding in West Germany received an enormous boost from the United States through Marshall Plan aid. This led to the German Economic Miracle; by the mid-1950s the West German economy was robust. The volume of foreign trade tripled between 1954 and 1964, while unemployment dropped from between 8 and 9 percent in 1952 to less than 1 percent by 1961. In 1957 Germany joined with five other western European nations (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Italy) in the European Economic Community (EEC).

The EEC created a common market, which allowed for the free movement of goods and people, facilitated stronger economic growth in a collective sense, and eliminated taxes and tariffs among its members. Amid considerable internal controversy and over strong French protest, West Germany also rearmed itself and joined NATO in 1955.

East Germany’s economy was closely tied to that of the Soviet Union, as it instituted centralized economic planning, reduced private ownership of property, and seized and either collectivized or redistributed farmlands. In 1950 it joined Comecon, and in 1955, the Warsaw Pact.

Relations between the East Germans and the Soviets were strained during the first decade of West German existence, exacerbated by the Soviets’ stripping of the eastern zone in the immediate aftermath of the war; the brutal treatment of German civilians, particularly women, at the hands of the Soviet military; and the economic hardships created by the transition to state-centralized economic planning. It also led to a serious drain of workers; by 1952 more than 700,000 East Germans had fled to the West.

Tensions between West and East Germany increased again in the late 1950s, sparked by the steady stream of young, productive, educated workers from East Germany to West Germany. In the summer of 1961, by which time more than 3 million East Germans had fled to the west since 1949, Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union, spoke out against the infiltration of Western saboteurs and imperialists into the East and the necessity of “protecting” the people of East Germany from Western propaganda.

This war of words culminated on August 13, 1961, when the citizens of the divided city of Berlin awoke to the sounds of construction. East German soldiers began to build a wall, one that eventually stretched for more than 100 miles, completely encircling the city of West Berlin, with minimal access through military checkpoints. The wall cut across streets and through subway and train stations, and separated families, religious congregations, and friends, dividing them for 28 years and 4 months, until it fell on November 9, 1989.

The 1960s in West Germany were marked by generational conflict and the resurgence of the political left. Student movements in the 1960s in West Germany grew in response to a host of causes: nuclear disarmament, outdated curriculum and inadequate resources at universities, and Bonn’s support for U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In 1966 the West German economy, which had boomed for more than 15 years, suffered a depression, leading to increased unemployment and stagnation in industrial production.

In addition, the political dominance of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) came to end, as the parties were forced to build a coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to formulate policy in November 1966. This marked the first incursion of the SPD into the postwar West German cabinet

The power of the SPD continued to rise, culminating with its electoral victory in 1969, which gave it the majority of seats within the parliament and propelled Willy Brandt into the position of chancellor, which he held until May 1974.

Within East Germany, the economy stabilized. The government, under the control of Walter Ulbricht, ensured higher production of consumer goods, built limited flexibility into centralized economic planning, and achieved an average annual increase in industrial production of 7 percent by 1967. Greater choices among clothing, food, and leisure activities also grew. But by the late 1960s, the climate turned harsher; under a new constitution, basic freedoms, such as the rights to emigrate, were stripped away. Ulbricht resigned in 1971.

During the late 1960s the development of Ostpolitik, a thawing of relations between East and West, mediated the strict foreign policy of the Hallstein doctrine, established in 1955. This doctrine stated that the Federal Republic of Germany was the sole authoritative government of the German people and as such demanded that diplomatic recognition never be extended to East Germany.

Among the practical implications of this policy was the fact that West Germany did not extend diplomatic relations to any of the Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe. Given the economic downturn and the need for expansion of export markets, the new coalition government first extended trade relations, and then diplomatic relations, with states in eastern Europe.

Negotiations culminated in December 1972, when the governments of West and East Germany signed the Basic Treaty, which guaranteed respect for the borders, officially recognized each other’s independence, and promised to renounce the use of force.

Reunification

German reunification

Since October 3, 1990, Germany has been a unified country again. Germany was first unified and subsequently became a nation-state in 1871. The date October 3, 1990, marks the day West Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or BRD) integrated East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR) under one political system: the democracy (Rechtsstaat) of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Five new states were added to the existing 11, and the population grew by about 18 million, making Germany, with over 80 million inhabitants, the most populous country of the European Union. In 2000 Berlin again became the capital of Germany.

By 1989 the two states had established themselves firmly as separate players on the world stage, with West Germany never having given up on the possibility of reunification. In January of that year, however, Erich Honecker—the GDR head of state and general secretary of the communist SED Party—confidently declared that the Berlin Wall would still stand in 50 or 100 years.


Nonetheless, reform movements had begun to ripple through a few communist countries, beginning with the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s, and in September 1989 Hungary opened its borders to Austria, allowing thousands of East Germans to escape via Hungary and Austria to West Germany.

The festivities for the 40th anniversary of East Germany, on October 7, 1989, were accompanied by demonstrations demanding democracy and freedom of expression. Moreover, the vast majority of East Germans could monitor the wealth of West Germany via radio and television, and the contrast was too stark to be tolerated any longer.

Even the “big brother,” the Soviet Union, talked of reforms, and in 1989 its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, famously admonished the East German government to engage in change. By mid- October Honecker, who had been in power since 1971, was forced to resign and Egon Krenz took over. October continued to be marked by numerous sizable demonstrations.

On November 7 the East German government resigned while the demonstrations continued. On the evening of November 9 the East German leadership suddenly opened the borders to West Germany and to West Berlin, permitting thousands of East Germans to visit the West for the first time in their lives.

The remaining months brought rapid change for East Germans and their country. On November 10 East German soldiers began to take down the wall, and Hans Modrow became the new head of state. In December the Brandenburg Gate opened up to two-way traffic. Early 1990 saw more demonstrations.

In February Helmut Kohl, chancellor of West Germany, met with Gorbachev, who granted Germany the right to unify and to do so at its own pace. In East Germany free elections were held in March for the first time, and in April, Lothar de Maizière became head of state; his coalition decided to unify East and West Germany according to Article 23 of West Germany’s constitution.

Negotiations began between East Berlin and Bonn and between the Allied forces, who still had soldiers in both Germanies. In June another symbol of the divided states, the border crossing at Checkpoint Charlie, was demolished. In July the West German mark was designated as the common currency for both Germanies.

In late August East German leaders decided that East Germany would join West Germany on October 3, 1990, and on September 12, 1990, the four Allied powers, the foreign minister of West Germany, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and de Maizière signed the reunification contract in Moscow.

Germany regained its sovereignty on October 1, and the four Allied powers suspended their rights. On October 3, 1990, Germany, after 45 years of separation, was once again one country. The date became an official holiday in Germany.

1991 to the Present

Following political reunification with the former German Democratic Republic on October 3, 1990, the Federal Republic of Germany grappled with how to merge its economic structures, legal codes, educational institutions, and most important, population into one unified nation; arguably the larger process is not yet complete. In addition, the stunningly quick reunification, not even one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, brought with it unintended and unforeseen consequences.

Germany struggled with an economic downturn, the pressure of larger political integration with the European Union, spikes in both anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and the growth of splinter political parties on the far Right and far Left, while still facing the fundamental question of whether or not the Germans truly stand as one people.

One of the first steps after signing the official treaty to reunify the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic under article 23 of the Basic Law was to make provisions for including the former East German lands in the parliamentary system.

In the first post-unification election, in December 1990, Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) won the most seats in four of the five former eastern states; the only state where the CDU polled the second-largest number of votes was in Brandenburg, where the Social Democratic Party (SPD) won more votes.

The CDU continued to hold control of the government until the national elections of 1998 brought the SPD, under the leadership of Gerhard Schröder, into power. However, its inability to garner a clear majority of votes ushered in the so-called Red-Green coalition, building an alliance between the SPD and the Green Party.

The CDU regained control over the government in the elections of May 2005, resulting in the election of Germany’s first female chancellor, Angela Merkel, who is also the first chancellor of reunified Germany to have come from the former eastern lands.

In June 1991 the capital of Germany was transferred to Berlin. By 1994 a plan for moving the institutions of government had been drafted, and the process was complete by 1999. This vote had important implications, economic as well as symbolic.

Undertaking this massive transfer of labor, offices, and institutions from Bonn to Berlin was extremely expensive; some estimates of costs ranged as high as $70 billion. This was fiercely debated given the shaky economic ground of Germany in the early 1990s.

However, moving the capital to its historic place had another set of meanings. Placing the seat of government within former eastern lands indicated the state’s commitment to full integration of the two portions of Germany and shifted the orientation of the government further to the east.

As a unified state, Germany is the most populous in western and central Europe at more than 80 million inhabitants. It is the third-largest state in terms of land and also one of the most industrialized and prosperous nations in Europe. But despite these advantages in population and industrial capability, the economic recession of 1992 had devastating effects on the newly unified German nation.

The integration process proved to be ruinous for the eastern region; as demand for their products dropped off precipitously, hundreds of factories closed and millions of workers lost their jobs. Despite some optimistic projections, deindustrialization was the immediate effect, not economic growth. Between 1990 and 1991 the Gross National Product (GNP) of the East declined by 33.4 percent.

Industrial production fell by 67 percent in 1990–92, while the prices of goods increased by 12 percent. A total of 3 million jobs were lost, amounting to close to 50 percent of its total workforce. The agricultural sector was particularly hard hit, losing 800,000 jobs from a total of about 1 million.

Older workers were at a serious disadvantage, lacking the education and skills necessary in the transition economy. Of the workers aged 52 to 63 who were employed before the fall of the wall, 90 percent were unemployed following unification.

Economic development in the East would rebound slowly. Any waste was slashed at those entities that did manage to stay afloat. A complicating factor was that the “natural” market for their goods and services was floundering.

Another difficulty encountered in the process was dealing with the claims (more than 1.5 million) of those who had lost property under the establishment of the communist state in 1949. When the Treuhand concluded its operations in 1994, it was running a deficit of 300 billion marks, a debt that had to be assumed by the unified German government.

When the economic recession of 1992 hit, its impact was even more severe in the East. By 1993 more than 10 percent of the German workforce was unemployed, the highest level in the West in more than three decades, and an unheard-of phenomenon in the east, where chronic unemployment underneath communism did not exist. Although unemployment reached its nadir in late 1994, it continued at rates higher than before unification.

As of 1997 eastern unemployment stood at 18.3 percent, whereas in the West it was 9.7 percent. By the end of 2005 unemployment rates overall stood at just over 11 percent. The German government, under the leadership of Helmut Kohl, remedied this drain on economic resources in part through an increase in taxes.

This tension between “Wessis” and “Ossis” persists, with many in the East feeling as if their entire former way of life has been discredited and devalued, and many in the West blaming the East for difficult economic times. A common expression is that a wall remains in the heads of many, still separating West and East.

One of the most visible, public reactions against the economic downturn and the dislocations caused by reunification was the backlash against foreigners. With the fall of communism across eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the regional conflict in the Balkans, the number of people seeking asylum in Germany jumped dramatically in the 1990s, at precisely the same time that the country was struggling to provide jobs, housing, and basic welfare to its own citizens.

One aspect of the fallout from this development was an increase in the membership of right-wing political parties that emphasize “Germany for the Germans. Although the public reaction against “foreigners” was even more negative in the former eastern lands than in the West, across Germany violence reached a height in 1992, with more than 2,600 violent acts taken against immigrants, their neighborhoods, and their businesses.

This led to stricter asylum legislation in 1993 as well as widespread public demonstrations against the acts and the attitudes that lay behind them. A more recent development was a strong immigration stream of Jews, particularly from the former Soviet Union, which led to some spikes in anti-Semitism.

One of the largest groups suffering dislocations following unification was working women. In West Germany, women were not encouraged to hold full-time jobs and develop careers; in East Germany women were an integral part of the workforce. In 1989 at the time of the fall of the wall, only 51 percent of women were working in West Germany while 91 percent were employed in the East.

After unification, as unemployment skyrocketed in the East, women were disproportionately represented among those who lost their jobs. Marriage and birth rates in the former eastern lands dropped drastically in the years immediately following unification, and divorce rates surged.

Germany’s position within Europe also shifted after unification, with important debates about the country’s role within larger institutions—such as NATO and the emerging European Union—garnering public attention both in Germany and in the larger international arena. Although the German government strongly supported moves toward greater integration and common action, the German population was less certain.

For example, when the European Union was trying to launch its common currency, the euro, in 1998, six out of 10 Germans did not want to give up the deutschmark in exchange for the euro. In 2005 an attempt to adopt a political constitution for the European Union was defeated in both Germany and France.

Although economic unification clearly had its benefits for the German economy, its people remained wary. However, the German public still strongly supported the military alliance, NATO, as a means of providing for security and coordinated international efforts to combat crime and terrorism.

Counterculture in the United States and Europe

Counterculture is a sociological term that describes the radical values and models of a group of people clashing with those of the majority, or cultural mainstream. The term entered common usage during the 1960s and 1970s when movements of youth rebellion against conservative social standards swept the United States and western Europe.

The countercultural movement represented a reaction against the conformist values embodied by 1950s society, the repressive principles of the cold war, and the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Young people throughout the world advocated peace and fairer race relations.

They challenged conventional gender and sexual role—ideas spawned by the revival of feminism—and pushed legal boundaries to the limit by the recreational use of drugs such as marijuana and LSD. The political and social aspects of counterculture are inseparable from the unconventional postures and appearances of its members.

The 1960s counterculture originated on U.S. college campuses and later arrived in European universities. The University of California at Berkeley was a particularly important center, and its 1964 free speech movement became one of the first occasions of tension between youth and the authorities. To scholars of counterculture, the free speech movement was the point of departure for the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s.


The movement demanded that campus administrators suspend the ban on university political activities and recognize the students’ right to free speech and academic freedom. On October 1, 1964, former student Jack Weinberg refused to leave the table where he was campaigning for the civil rights association Congress for Racial Equality (CORE).

His arrest by the police led to a spontaneous demonstration by fellow students, who blocked the police car containing Weinberg for 36 hours. The following month the university decided to bring charges against those who organized the sit-in.

This led to imposing demonstrations and the arrest in early December of 800 students in front of Sproul Hall, the university’s administrative center. After more protest parades the University of California started reconsidering its rules on political activities on campus, permitting tables and discussions on the steps of Sproul Hall at certain times of the day.

The decade continued in the United States with the outbreak of more tensions, often along generational lines, concerning the Vietnam War, sexual behavior, the role of women in society, African-American civil rights, and drug experimentation. Vietnam became a specific target of criticism, which was also heightened by the imposition of a compulsory military draft.

A veritable revolution took place in sexual mores with the spread of contraception and the legalization of abortion in 1973 with the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade. The Summer of Love drew thousands of people from around the world to San Francisco in 1967, particularly to the Haight-Ashbury district.

The end of the 1960s also witnessed the organization of gays and lesbians in groups to acquire visibility and to have their identities recognized. Drug taking stopped being a social phenomena linked to urban ghettos and became part of middle-class life. Feminist thinkers asked for comprehensive social change, pointing out that economic structures are at the base of women’s subordination.

The United States shifted from the family-oriented society of the 1950s to one that had individual rights at its core. It was in the 1960s that women started to challenge the cultural expectation that they would take primary responsibility for child rearing.

Most feminists demanded the alleviation of the social burdens of motherhood through paternal involvement in parenting, quality child care, flexible work arrangements, and a system of social and financial welfare that did not leave them to rely completely on their husbands.

At the beginning of the 1960s few Americans were aware of the struggle of African Americans for civil rights. The Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in public schools dates back to 1954, but progress in the implementation of integration had been slow.


The 1960s witnessed renewed activism of young African Americans, who refused to leave lunch counters when they were denied service or to travel on segregated buses. In 1962 the admission of African American James Meredith to the state university in Mississippi caused a sensation and an outburst of violence from white supremacists.

Martin Luther King, Jr., became the leader of the Civil Rights movement, and in August 1963 he managed to draw together hundreds of thousands of African Americans and white Americans in his March on Washington to call attention to the fact that a century after emancipation many African Americans were still unable to exercise basic citizens’ rights.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were important achievements of the Civil Rights movement. The acts outlawed segregation in public facilities and authorized federal examiners to register black voters, thus ending disenfranchisement.

The counterculture soon arrived in European capitals, with devastating effects for the established power. As in the United States, the young people taking part in the countercultural movements were well educated, often at the university level. As riots became widespread throughout European streets, this provoked heated debates within the left.

Who were the true proletarians? The students or the policemen who had to battle with them in the streets? Left-wing groups independent from the communist and socialist parties were formed in Italy, France, and Germany. These groups—such as Potere Operaio and Lotta Continua in Italy—did not have parliamentary representation, but still became the avant-garde of the movement because of their capacity to attract young people.

Cultural Forms

During the 1960s and 1970s new cultural forms emerged in all artistic fields from cinema to music, from fashion to media. The music of the Beatles came to embody the need for change and the experimentation of younger generations. The Old Hollywood of dated melodramas controlled by studio moguls was replaced by the New Hollywood.

Young directors such as Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese reflected in their movies the rise of the counterculture and expressed the longing for freedom shared by thousands of young Americans. In Europe the French and British New Waves and the New German Cinema rejected the classic norms of filmmaking, experimenting with photography and editing.

They also focused their films on the ordinary lives of the working classes and on those outside of the social mainstream. Underground newspapers spread throughout the United States and Europe, constituting a network of resistance to the establishment.

One of the most visible icons of the counterculture movements was the figure of the hippie, who often expressed the distaste for social conventions by renouncing consumerism and living in communes guided by forms of spiritualism outside the Christian tradition.

The figure of the hippie encapsulates a major contradiction in the countercultural movement. The communal thrust of the movement is countered by an equally strong emphasis on individual choices, which tends to prevent any form of cooperation.

The more fascinating and controversial aspects of the counterculture should not overshadow the contributions of the movement outside the arts. The counterculture influence reached less spectacular and more stable fields such as economics, business, and law. Many of today’s nongovernmental organizations, for example, have their roots in the 1960s search for a fairer and more environmentally minded development.

In general, as the counterculture evolved in the 1970s and its icons began to lead more moderate lives, the movement started to be absorbed to a certain degree within the mainstream. As such it left its mark on various fields like philosophy, morality, music, art, lifestyle, and fashion.

Yet, especially in the European context, there were those who refused to be absorbed, and pushed their refusal to dangerous extremes. The late 1970s and the 1980s were characterized by the rise of terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades in Italy, Action Directe in France, and the Red Army in Germany.

The most apparent features of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture were unconventional appearance, music, drugs, communitarian experiments, and sexual liberation—mostly practiced by white, middle-class young Americans and Europeans.

To some the counterculture represented the longing of young people for free speech, equality, and a more inclusive and less exploitative world. Others denounced the counterculture as hedonistic, meaninglessly rebellious, unpatriotic, and destructive of the Western world’s moral order.

Collapse of the Eastern Bloc

Collapse of the Eastern Bloc

The end of the cold war was the collapse of the binary international power structure instigated by the military and political rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union in the wake of World War II.

It was also a consequence of the reforms initiated by the first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in the years 1985–91, Mikhail Gorbachev; the result was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of communist systems in the countries of eastern Europe.

East Germany

One of the symbolic moments announcing the end of the cold war was the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1990. The Berlin Wall was built in August 1961 in order to prevent refugee migration from the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) to the Western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).


During the era of the leadership of Erich Honecker, the first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany from 1971, the GDR remained an orthodox socialist and highly repressive state. The GDR leadership maintained its dictatorial and conservative character.

In fact, a diplomatic discord developed between reform-oriented Gorbachev and Honecker in the late 1980s. In the summer of 1989 Hungary decided to open its boundaries with Austria. A number of GDR residents moved to West Germany though Hungary and Austria.

In connection with Gorbachev’s visit at the 40th anniversary of the establishment of GDR, pro-reformist and pro-democratic demonstrations were organized in Leipzig and Berlin, which subsequently spread through the whole GDR. The protesters demanded government guarantees that human rights and civic rights would be respected, as well as that democratic restructuring be initiated.

On November 9, 1989, the vehement civic protests and the confusion of the party leadership resulted in an unanticipated decision to annul the requirement for exit visas of East German residents who were crossing the border between the GDR and FRG.

On November 10, five crossing points in the Berlin Wall were opened and approximately 40,000 East Berliners crossed into West Berlin. The atmosphere of festivity and celebration prevailed among the crowds, and people on both sides of the Berlin Wall started to make openings in the wall and bring parts of it down.

On December 22 the Brandenburg Gate officially opened. The image of East and West Berliners jointly destroying the Berlin Wall became a powerful symbol of the collapse of the cold war and of the termination of the division of Europe.

Honecker resigned from his post as the first secretary of the party and as the chairman of the Council of State of the GDR on October 18, 1989, and was temporarily replaced by another Communist politician, Egon Krenz.

Honecker later fled to Moscow and was extradited in 1992, but avoided trial for health reasons. In March 1990 the first postcommunist democratic elections took place, and the Christian Democratic Union of Germany achieved victory. The collapse of the Berlin Wall also paved the path for the reunification of Germany.

On October 3, 1990, the GDR ceased to exist, and its territory became absorbed by the state of Germany. In 1990 the Socialist Unity Party of Germany transformed itself into the Party of Democratic Socialism.

Poland

In Poland, an indication of increased political relaxation took place between 1986 and 1987 with a general amnesty of political prisoners. A series of strikes in 1988 pressured the communist authorities to re-legalize the independent trade union Solidarity, which had been made illegal after martial law was instituted in Poland in 1981.

At that time the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party and the head of state was General Wojciech Jaruzelski. In spring 1989 the reform-oriented factions of the Polish Communist Party decided to enter talks with the dissident groups associated with the Solidarity movement.

The negotiations were chaired both by Lech Wałesa, leader of the Solidarity movement and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and by Czesław Kiszczak, a chief of the Polish secret services and the minister of internal affairs beginning in 1981. The negotiators agreed that Solidarity would be re-legalized and that partially free parliamentary elections would be organized.

The parliamentary elections on June 4, 1989, brought an overwhelming majority of representatives from Solidarity, which had transformed into the Solidarity Citizens’ Committee. It received 161 of 460 total seats in the Sejm and 99 of 100 total seats in the Senate.

A coalition government was formed with a Catholic dissident, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as prime minister. Jaruzelski served as the president of Poland from 1989 to 1990, when Wałesa was elected to that post in presidential elections.

In 1991 free parliamentary elections were organized, and a coalition government of anti-communist groups emerged. The party Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland was formed in 1990 with no official ideological ties, but with evident personal ones, to its communist predecessor.

Hungary

In Hungary, the deteriorating economic situation, due to increasing foreign debt, spurred public debates on the possibility of introducing radical reform policies. They facilitated the creation of the opposition movement, the Hungarian Democratic Forum, on September 27, 1987.

The leader was József Antall, a historian who was known for his engagement in the Hungarian revolt in 1956. In May 1988 the first secretary of the party, János Kádár, was removed from his post and replaced by Károly Grósz.

Grósz was inclined to introduce moderate economic reforms within the systemic socialist framework, but was opposed to the idea of organizing a roundtable discussion between the party and the anticommunists At the congress in October 1989, the power within the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party was seized by soft-liners such as Gyula Horn and Imre Pozsgay.

In March 1989, the Hungarian Democratic Forum held a national meeting at which it demanded democratic reforms and agreed to enter negotiations with the party representatives at the elite level.

On March 22, 1989, the National Roundtable Talks were organized, and their results were a series of reformatory events: The power monopoly of the party was abandoned, the constitution was amended, and multiparty democracy was reconstituted in 1989.

In October 1989 the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party renounced its Marxist-Leninist legacy and endorsed a social-democratic political direction, changing its name to the Hungarian Socialist Party. In April 1990 democratic parliamentary elections took place. The result was the victory of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, and its leader, József Antall, became prime minister of the coalition government.

Czechoslovakia

In Czechoslovakia in January 1989, students organized a peaceful rally to commemorate the anniversary of the suicide of Jan Palach, a student who committed self-immolation as an act of demonstration against the Warsaw Pact invasion of the country in 1968 during the Prague Spring. The student demonstrations were brutally broken down by the riot police. Another student demonstration was organized by the Socialist Youth Union on November 17, 1989, in Prague and Bratislava.

More than 30,000 participating students commemorated the anniversary of the murder of another Czech student figure, Jan Opletal, who was killed in 1939 by pro-Nazi forces. On November 19, different opposition and human rights groups created Civic Forum. Its spokesman became Václav Havel.

Together with its Slovak counterpart, the Public Against Violence, Civic Forum demanded the resignation of the first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Miloš Jakeš, holding him responsible for the maltreatment of the demonstrating students.

On November 24 Jakeš resigned from his post. On the same day Alexander Dubcˇek, the architect of the Prague Spring events, made a public speech. On November 28 Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec declared abandonment of the power monopoly of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

On December 17 there was an official spectacle of cutting through the wire border between Czechoslovakia and Austria. The first postcommunist democratic parliamentary elections took place in June 1990. Two anticommunist blocs, the Civic Forum and the Public against Violence, emerged victorious, with over 50 percent of the votes.

The Czechoslovak transformation was called the Velvet Revolution, because in spite of the deeply orthodox and dictatorial character of the Czechoslovak communist regime, the collapse of the system and the initiation of democratic change were accomplished without violence.

Bulgaria

In Bulgaria the late 1980s witnessed the emergence of discriminatory nationalistic policies authored by the president of Bulgaria and the first secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Todor Zhivkov. These were directed against Bulgaria’s large Turkish minority.

The result was a massive emigration of the Bulgarian Turks and a rapidly deteriorating economic situation in the country. This increased opposition against Zhivkov among reform-oriented members of the party.

During the Central Committee meeting on November 10, 1989, the foreign minister, Patur Mladenov, condemned Zhivkov’s hard-line economic policies and authoritarianism and managed to secure Zhivkov’s removal from his leadership position.

Mladenov consequently took over Zhivkov’s secretarial and presidential posts. Famously, he publicly pledged a turn toward political democratization, far-reaching economic reforms, and amnesty for political prisoners.

In January 1990 pro-democracy demonstrations involving 40,000 people took place in Sofia. As a consequence the Bulgarian National Assembly made a number of path-paving decisions: The power monopoly of the Bulgarian Communist Party was revoked, the Bulgarian secret police was dismantled, and Zhivkov was charged with fraud and corruption. In April 1990 the Bulgarian National Assembly elected Mladenov as president and subsequently dissolved itself.

The Bulgarian Communist Party renounced its ideological attachment to Leninism and transformed itself into the Bulgarian Socialist Party, with Alexander Lilov as its chairman. In June 1990 postcommunist democratic elections were organized and the Bulgarian Socialist Party achieved a narrow victory.

Later Mladenov was forced to resign from his presidential post after it was made public that he had considered the possibility of using force against the pro-democratic demonstrators in Sofia earlier that year.

On August 1, 1990, he was replaced by Zhelyu Mitev Zhelev, a former oppositionist, professor of philosophy, and founder of the dissident Club for the Support of Glasnost and Restructuring. He was reelected in 1992 and remained in the presidential post until 1997. Zhelev represented the Union of Democratic Forces, a party that consisted of various anticommunist groups formed in December 1989.

In November 1990 a series of general strikes was organized, which instigated a sense of political and economic crisis in the country and which brought about the complete discrediting of the Bulgarian Socialist Party. In 1991 a new democratic constitution was adopted, and in 1992 the Union of Democratic Forces took over power in the national elections and embarked on a series of radical economic and political reforms.

Romania

In Romania the Communist dictatorship of President Nicolae Ceausescu was particularly oppressive. Although in other East European countries popular demonstrations and negotiations took place throughout 1989, it seemed that Ceausescu’s position would remain unchallenged. On December 17 street protests were organized in the city of Timisoara against the decision by the Romanian Secret Police (Securitate) to deport local bishop László Tokés.

The protests against Tokés’s eviction were transformed into anticommunist and anti-Ceausescu demonstrations. Hundreds of demonstrators who gathered on the streets of Timisoara were attacked by military forces. Nearly 100 of them were killed, and many more were injured.

Beginning on December 20 the antiregime demonstrations and a wave of strikes took place in Romania’s other large cities. Ceausescu condemned the protests in Timisoara and ordered the organization of a pro-regime gathering in the center of Bucharest on December 21.

Mass mobilization and civic unrest continued throughout the country, and the regime made extensive use of violence to put down the revolutionary occurrences. On December 22 the National Salvation Front was formed in a national TV studio.

It was led by Communist politician Ion Iliescu, and its other members were Silviu Brucan, a former diplomat and an opponent of Ceausescu; and Mircea Dinescu, a dissident poet. Subsequently, the National Salvation Front restored peace and formed a temporary government with Iliescu as a provisional president, following Ceausescu’s execution on December 25, 1989.

Later the National Salvation Front was transformed into a political party and achieved the majority of votes in the democratic elections in May 1990. The important difference between the postcommunist elections in Romania and in other East European countries was that in Romania, the victorious National Salvation Front comprised former socialist officials. In 1992 it was divided into two leftist Romanian parties: the Democratic Party and the Social Democratic Party.

European Economic Community/Common Market

European Economic Community/Common Market

The European Economic Community (EEC), also known as the Common Market, was established by the Treaty of Rome among France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. It was the core of what would become the European Community in 1967 and the European Union after the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty (1992).

The EEC aimed to create a single economy among its members. Its acts were devised to achieve free labor and capital mobility; the abolition of trusts; and the implementation of common policies on labor, welfare, agriculture, transport, and foreign trade.

The idea of a united European market has its roots in the aftermath of World War II. After Europe had been divided and ravaged by two brutal world wars, politicians such as German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi, and French foreign minister Robert Schuman agreed on the necessity of securing a lasting peace among previous enemies.


They believed that European nations should cooperate as equals and should not humiliate one another. In 1950 Schuman proposed the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which was established the following year with the Treaty of Paris.

France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands consented to have their production of coal and steel monitored by a High Authority. This was a practical and a symbolic act at the same time: Steel and coal, the raw materials of war, became the tools for reconciliation and common growth.

These first years of cooperation proved fruitful, and ECSC members started to plan an expansion of their mutual aid. Negotiations between the six countries making up the ECSC led to the Treaty of Rome (1957), which created the European Economic Community, a common market for a wide range of services and goods.

European Economic Community map

The process of integration continued during the 1960s, with the lifting of trade barriers between the six nations and the establishment of common policies on agriculture and trade. Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom joined the EEC.

As the EEC grew, its leaders realized that European economies needed to be brought in line with one another. This persuasion, reached during the 1970s, was the starting point of the tortuous path that would finally lead to monetary union in 2002 with the circulation of the euro.

To stabilize the fluctuations of European currencies caused by the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, the European Monetary System (EMS) was created in 1979. The EMS helped to make exchange rates more stable and promoted tighter policies of economic solidarity and mutual aid between EEC members. It also encouraged them to monitor their economies.

The monitoring of the members’ economies became vital during the 1980s, when membership in the EEC rose to 12, with the entries of Greece in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986. The first Integrated Mediterranean Programme (IMP) was launched with the aim of making structural economic reforms and thus reducing the gap among the economies of the 12 member states. With the enlargement of its membership the EEC also started to play a more relevant role on the international stage, signing treaties and conventions with African, Caribbean, and Pacific countries.

The worldwide economic recession of the early 1980s seemed to endanger the process of market integration. However, the commission, led by the French socialist Jacques Delors, gave new impetus to European incorporation.

It was under Delors’s leadership that the Single European Act, the first major revision of the Treaty of Rome, was signed, setting a precise schedule for the removal of all remaining barriers between member states by 1993. The Delors Commission also worked to create a single currency for the European Common Market.

The single currency option was chosen with the creation of a Central European Bank aiming to unify monetary policies and create a common currency. The choice was made explicit in the Treaty of Maastricht (1992), which set up a timetable for the adoption of a single currency.

With the Maastricht Treaty, the European Economic Community was simply renamed the European Community, and the process of European integration was completed with the creation of the EU. Austria, Finland, and Sweden joined the union in 1995.

Ten more countries (Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia) joined in 2004, making the EU the world’s largest trading power. Bulgaria and Romania joined in 2007.

In some countries the introduction of the euro was marked by controversies and heated debates. Yet economists have shown that the European Common Market has much to benefit from the euro. Frankel and Rose suggest that being part of a single currency tends to triple the country’s trade with other members of the single currency zone, leading to increases in the country’s per capita income.

European Union

European Union

The European Union (EU), founded with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, represents a large project of economic and political integration between an evergrowing group of European countries. The EU quickly became the world’s major trading power and enjoyed fast economic growth.

Free internal trade and common customs duties, which member countries enjoyed since the beginning of the union, led to significant trade development among the different members. The EU, by 2006, included 25 member states.

Bulgaria and Romania became members in January 2007. Croatia and Turkey were negotiating their membership, which was prevented by concerns over human rights violations in both countries. Of the 25 members, 12 adopted a single currency—the euro—for financial transaction in 1999. The euro entered circulation in January 2002.


As the union expanded, however, it increasingly found resistance and obstacles on its way. A powerful movement of Euro-skeptics emerged throughout the EU in the late 1990s, pointing to a supposed lack of democracy in the EU institutions and to the danger of losing national sovereignty to a centralized body.

Some politicians in those countries with more developed economies looked upon the enlargement of the union with suspicion, fearing a wave of uncontrollable migration. These concerns led to several serious defeats: Referenda in Denmark and Sweden showed that the majority of citizens were against adopting the euro; French and Dutch voters rejected the European Constitution in 2005.

Although the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992, the idea of a united Europe dates back to the aftermath of World War II. After two world wars had divided European countries and massacred their people, statesmen such as German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi, and French foreign minister Robert Schuman agreed on the necessity of building a lasting peace between previous enemies.

European Union map

The cooperation between these countries led to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which established the European Economic Community (EEC) and the first European Commission, led by the German Christian Democrat Walter Hallstein.

Customs duties among member states were entirely removed from 1968, and common policies for trade and agriculture were also devised. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 progressively shifted eastern European countries toward the EU.

The most important EU institutions include the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, the European Central Bank, and the European Parliament. The origins of the European Parliament, which convenes in Strasbourg, date back to the 1950s.

It has been elected since 1979 directly by the European people. Elections are held every five years. The European Central Bank manages the union’s single currency, and the EU has a common policy on agriculture, fisheries, and foreign affairs and security.

Although the policies devised by the EU range across a wide variety of areas, not all have binding power for the union’s members. The EU status, therefore, varies accordingly to the matters discussed. The union has the character of a federation for monetary affairs; agricultural, trade, and environmental policy; and economic and social policy, while each member state retains wider independence for home and foreign affairs. Policy making in the EU results in an interplay of supranationalism and intergovernmentalism.

Following the Maastricht Treaty, the areas of intervention of the EU can be divided into three pillars: European Communities, Common Foreign and Security Policy, and Police and Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters. Supranational concerns are strongest in the first pillar, while the Council of Europe and thus intergovernmental opinions count the most in the second and third pillars.

The Council of the EU, together with the European Parliament, form the legislative branch of the union, while the European Commission represents its executive powers. The council is formed by ministers of all the member states.

The presidency of the council rotates between the members, and the council is made up of nine subcommissions, which meet in Brussels. The European Commission, whose president is chosen by the Council of Europe and is then confirmed by the European Parliament, has 25 members, one for each member state.

Yet, unlike the Council, the commission is completely independent from member states. Commissioners, therefore, are not supposed to take suggestions from the government of the country that appointed them. Their only goal should be to propose legislation to favor the development of the whole union.

The major setback for the EU was the rejection of the constitution by two of its founding members, France and the Netherlands. Signed in 2004, the constitution—whose elaboration was particularly difficult and thorny—aimed to make human rights uniform throughout the union as well as to make decision-making more effective in an organization that now includes as many as 25 members, each with priorities and agendas of their own.

The main challenge that the EU will have to face in years to come is, paradoxically, a direct result of its success and its capacity to attract new nations. With more member countries, the EU is threatened by increasing regional interests that endanger the deployment of shared policies.

Worldwide Feminism

Worldwide Feminism

The phenomenon of feminism worldwide in the latter part of the 20th century reflects the diversity of social and cultural theories, political movements, and moral and religious philosophies shaped by the experiences of women. There is no universally accepted form of feminism that represents all of its advocates, but its representatives share a similar vision.

Feminist theory continues to question basic assumptions about gender and sexuality, including the understanding of what it means to be a woman. Feminist scholars and activists seek clarity about feminine consciousness, the identity of women, their values, and their ambitions.

They address the issue of oppression by men as an issue of power, dominion, and hierarchy. Feminists believe this oppression exists in relation to the identity of women and the challenges they have to face in local and global contexts.


By the mid-20th century the feminist movement had brought about positive transformation and advances for women. Historically, feminism began as a women’s movement that originated at the Seneca Falls Convention (1848) held in New York State.

This first wave of feminism formally ended in 1920 with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which secured the right to vote for women. Ironically, the values of the early feminist movement have been so ingrained in Western culture that society generally accepts them, even though individuals who agree with those values may not accept being labeled “feminist.”

Second Wave Feminism

Second Wave Feminism

In the late 1960s, after 40 years consumed by economic depression, world war, and cold war fears, women again revisited issues of gender equality, launching a movement that came to be called Second Wave Feminism. Looking beyond the right to vote, many women in the industrialized world, joined by some women from developing nations, asserted new rights and demanded liberation from stereotypical female roles.

A precursor of the post-suffrage women’s movement appeared in 1949, when French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) published The Second Sex, a major analysis of women’s lives and roles. Extremely controversial—the book was forbidden to Roman Catholics—de Beauvoir’s insights had little immediate effect on Western women, many of whom had embraced child rearing and homemaking in the prosperous years following World War II.

By the 1960s a growing racial Civil Rights movement and rising opposition to Soviet and U.S. cold war policies were sparking protests in Europe and the Americas. In this climate journalist Betty Friedan’s 1963 analysis, The Feminine Mystique, was a huge best seller.

Pointing to educated, middle-class women’s dissatisfaction with their “perfect” lives, Friedan (1921–2006) not only posed a “problem that has no name” but also helped found the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 to deal with it. Canada’s National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) followed in 1971.

The movement quickly took on a life of its own, as women in many nations found new ways to understand and advance their social, economic, and political rights. Asserting that “the personal is political,” movement women discussed issues long considered private, such as motherhood, divorce, abortion, rape, lesbian relationships, prostitution, and the sexual double standard.

In 1976 de Beauvoir keynoted a huge International Women’s Day rally in Brussels that criticized the timidity of United Nations efforts for women. The same year 100,000 Italian women held the first “Take Back the Night” march to spotlight male violence against women.

First Women

Around the world, female political leaders began to emerge in far greater numbers than ever before. Legislative bodies in Scandinavia and other western European nations saw near-parity in their sex ratios.

In 1984 Geraldine Ferraro (1935– ) became the first woman chosen for vice president by a major U.S. party (the ticket lost) and in 2007 Nancy Pelosi (1940– ) of California became the United States’ first female Speaker of the House of Representatives. Nations including Britain, India, and Pakistan have been governed by women, although critics say that the feminist movement had little to do with their success.

As was true during the original suffrage movement, not all women (or men) were comfortable with Second Wave Feminism’s new issues and styles of protest. Competing efforts to define the contours of women’s equality versus women’s differences from men continue to create controversy, as does the relevance of feminism in the lives of poor women, women of color, and women living in traditional societies—especially in Africa and the Islamic world.

As an example, in the United States Alice Paul’s Equal Rights Amendment of 1923 was reclaimed by new feminist leaders and became the centerpiece of a broad spectrum of women’s rights initiatives.

In 1972 this measure, promising “equal rights under the law” for women, easily cleared Congress and was sent to the states for ratification. Religious conservatives, led by mother and lawyer Phyllis Schlafly (1924– ), were able to raise enough opposition to halt the ERA three states short of passage.

Schlafly and her supporters feared that traditional wives and mothers would be devalued and could lose legal protections. Claims by some opponents that the ERA would require that public toilets be available to both sexes helped reduce a spirited political controversy to farce.

Other feminist proposals proved more successful. Title IX, a 1972 federal program to afford equal opportunities to high school and college women—although still controversial—greatly expanded women’s college enrollments and participation in competitive sports.

Legislation and market forces combined to narrow the “pay gap” between men and women. Modern contraception—the “pill”—was approved for sale in the United States in 1960; birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger (1870–1966) helped finance its development.

In 1965 a Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut struck down a law that had prohibited contraceptive use even by married couples. By 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court’s narrow decision in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the first three months of pregnancy.

Continuing bitter controversy over Roe highlights some general problems that, depending on one’s view, have either hampered the modern women’s movement or kept it within reasonable bounds. In the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, anti-abortion protests have tended to increase restrictions and have sometimes made safe, legal abortion unavailable, especially to the poor and rural. Nations emerging from communism, including Russia, where abortion was freely allowed after 1955, have tended to tighten formerly liberal abortion and contraception alternatives.

The same middle-class women whom Friedan urged to shed the bondage of woman’s “separate sphere” have struggled with demanding full-time jobs paired with fulltime home responsibilities, although European nations have traditionally offered generous maternity and childcare benefits. Help-wanted ads no longer separate male and female opportunities.

However, women who have surged into law, medicine, science, the military, and other nontraditional jobs have experienced pay gaps, sexual harassment, and the so-called glass ceiling, which is said to limit women’s ultimate success. By the early 21st century, especially among the Second Wave’s second and third generations, a “mommy track”—giving up an unfulfilling job for motherhood—has emerged as at least a temporary alternative. Critics point out that the mommy track offers little help or economic advancement to working-class mothers.

Third-Wave Feminism

Recently Third-Wave feminists have been identified, although the Second-Wave feminists assert that the work of the Second Wave is by no means complete. Women who were born in the 1960s–1970s felt that their personal experience set them apart from older leaders of the feminist movement.

Third-Wave feminists of this period, having inherited a feminist tradition from the First and Second waves, strove to form their own distinct identity as feminists, naming and seeking to correct perceived inadequacies and contradictions of their predecessors.

Hazel Carby, a representative of the Third Wave of feminism, identified a problem with the Second Wave. She believed that the Second Wave overlooked the experiences of black women by emphasizing the experiences of patriarchy and oppression endured by white women.

She concluded that theories of patriarchal oppression studied in the 1970s and early 1980s overlooked the negative influences that slavery, colonialism, and imperialism had on women, and sought to raise awareness about these issues through her writings.

Many, but not all, figures within feminism worldwide have been women. Feminists argue that men should not be leaders within feminist organizations because they have been conditioned to seek leadership aggressively.

Similarly, those critical of accepting men in the movement believe that women have been socialized to defer to men, which may hinder their asserting their own leadership when working alongside men. Even so, some feminists believe men should be accepted within the movement because the virtue of equality should serve to promote inclusion and acceptance.

The feminist movement has been influenced by and has shaped the study of culture. Since the late 1970s feminist cultural studies have expanded the study of women and established gender as an important criteria of analysis within broader cultural studies.

Feminist cultural studies serve to answer questions about the influences of present cultural systems and their oppression of women and what can be done to combat patriarchy and oppression. Feminist cultural scholars, by observing the everyday lives of women, learn about their daily experience, how they cope with it, and how they are challenged by systems of inequality and oppression.

Essentially all cultural objects, writings, and practices constitute the subject of cultural studies, and thus the subjects of feminist cultural studies are likewise as diverse. Areas that are studied within feminist cultural studies include advertising, art, being a housewife, class, colonialism, materialism, movies, pornography, postcolonialism, shopping, soap operas, and youth subcultures.

In the 1980s cultural feminists used the mass media in their analysis of culture. Feminist cultural scholars believe that an analysis of mass media gives insight into the dynamics of society and politics.

Feminists who study the influence of mass media on culture seek answers to the questions of how women may relate to and be affected by the mass media and how oppressive patriarchal ideologies may be throughout all forms of mass media. Studies argue that women who engage in watching television dramas and reading romance novels actively judge implicit patriarchal messages found within them.

After the late 1980s, the feminist movement was influenced by post-structuralism. Post-structuralist feminists seek to understand and value feminine subjectivity and the implications of the power of written discourse for women. Some writings argue that the term and meaning of woman itself results from male-dominated discourse.

Through uncritical use of the word, it loses its value in trying to shape and transform feminist thinking. These writings have caused feminists to insist that feminist cultural studies have lost track of the real material lives of women.

The feminist movement has had an effect on written and spoken language in the latter part of the 20th century. English-speaking feminists have advocated using nonsexist language, for example, Ms. instead of Mrs. or Miss and herstory for history. Many feminists advocate using gender-inclusive language, such as humanity in place of mankind or he or she or just she instead of he when the gender of a subject is unknown.

Many non-English languages do not have gendered pronouns and thus do not require gender-inclusive language. The increasing popularity, however, of using English in the world gives feminists reason to promote gender inclusivity in language.

The influence of feminism in the late-20th century created distinctive ways of developing ethics. Feminist ethics attempt to investigate and rethink traditional Western ethics that do not take into account the moral experiences of women, in order to form a critique of traditional ethical theories formed by a male-dominated culture. The aim of the different forms of feminist ethics possesses a liberating aspect, based on moral theory founded in nonsexist methodology.

Late 20th-century feminist thought has also influenced the movement toward equality in Islamic countries. Grounded in Islamic thought, Islamic feminists seek full equality of men and women in both the public and personal sphere. Among the issues addressed are the female dress code in Muslim society, sexuality, and the legal discrimination against women.

A variety of women-centered approaches to feminist ethics have been developed, including feminine, lesbian, maternal, political, and theological. These approaches seek to provide guidelines for undermining the systematic subordination of women. The different forms of feminism that exist worldwide in the late-20th and early-21st centuries are manifold.

They include African-American, Amazon, anarcha-feminism, black, cultural, ecofeminism, egalitarian, equity, existentialist, French, gender, gynocentric, individualist, lesbian and lesbian separatism, liberal, male pro-feminism, material, non-Western, postcolonial, postmodern, pro-sex, psychoanalytic, queer theory, radical, segregationalist, Socialist, spiritual, standpoint, theological, third-world, transfeminism, transnational, and womanist.