ABSTRACT
The history of Europe’s postwar eras has long been a focus for scholars. Conferences have been held, monographs and whole series of volumes have been devoted to the subject, beginning from the 1990s and waxing strong in the early years of the new millennium (Biess 2010, pp. 1-12). This surge of interest in the topic may perhaps be explained by the sensitivity of a generation of post-1989 researchers and the need they felt to take another look at the second postwar period as a formative phase in the continental system which collapsed when the Wall came down. There was also interest in comparing the historical turning point marked by the end of the Cold War with other periods of radical reshuffle on the political map of the continent. The rapid change of equilibriums in international relations, political systems, and European civil society, and a sense of disorientation at the demise of the bipolar era, was bound to make historians reflect on other seasons of rapid and radical change (post 1918, post 1945), and the varying effectiveness of each epoch’s response in terms of stability and international order (Levy and Roseman 2002). As Tony Judt argued in his Postwar-a masterly survey of English history in the late twentieth century after the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Potsdam-Yalta arrangement came to an end-clearly one had to rethink the “long transition” from 1945 to 1989 in terms of one long epilogue to a still unresolved conflict (Judt 2006, p. 4).
