The end of World War I seems to seal the fate of Europe by dissolving the despotic empires. In reality, the war introduces the seeds of destabilization. Communism and fascism develop thanks to economic and political crises that shake Europe to its core, both claiming succession over the decayed liberal democracies. By the late 1930s, nothing but a Second World War seems capable of stopping the unification of the continent under the 'new order' of Nazism, where modern technology combines with a return to barbarism. After 1945, the conflict between capitalism and socialism in turn divides Europe into two blocs dominated by the powerful victors of the war, the USA and the USSR. The Cold War, with all its fluctuations, involves a continuous confrontation of economic systems, social programs, worldviews, and cultures. Western Europe transitions from the 'golden thirty years' of reconstruction, development, and prosperity—interspersed, however, with the radical questioning of '68—to the recession of the 1970s, while simultaneously taking the first steps toward unification with the establishment and gradual expansion of the EEC. Eastern Europe, which after de-Stalinization wavers between 'national roads to socialism' and the doctrine of 'limited sovereignty,' will ultimately lose the economic war to liberalism and, after '89, will lead to the collapse of its regimes. The subsequent revival of nationalism, on one hand, and the convergence that has occurred in lifestyle and values, on the other, bring back to the forefront the issue of the destiny of a continent that can once again control its future. [Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]