Macquarie University

Twentieth-Century Europe - MHIS321

Beginning with the First World War, this unit offers a political, social, cultural and economic overview of Europe's relations with the wider world. It traces the obsession with race and empire in Britain, France, Germany and Italy, and considers the post-colonial view that the twentieth century European civil wars were a result of European practices of colonialism turned inward. Was Europe indeed the 'dark continent' suggested by historian Mark Mazower? The crisis of European liberalism in the face of the Great Depression, Russian communism, the Spanish Civil War, fascism and Nazism, two world wars and the Holocaust support such a view, but the second half the century presents a more complicated picture. We look at the Cold War; the Americanisation of Europe and the fall of communism; the effects of decolonisation and post-colonial immigration on European societies; the breakdown of the postwar consensus and the rise of Islamist terrorism in the late twentieth century Europe.