Transnational Moments of Change

Europe 1945, 1968, 1989

Contributions by Aldo Agosti, Anna Balzarro, Paulina Bren, Patrick Burke, Juan José Gutiérrez, Padraic Kenney, Arthur Marwick, Patrick Pasture, Kristina Schulz, Jarle Simensen, Miroslav Vanek Edited by Gerd Rainer-Horn, Padraic Kenney

Publication date:

09 February 2004

Length of book:

264 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Dimensions:

231x162mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780742523227

Transnational Moments of Change offers a broad introduction to the methodology and practice of transnational history. To demonstrate the value of this approach, the work focuses on Europe since World War II, a period whose study particularly benefits from a transnational vantage point. Twelve distinguished contributors from around the globe offer a range of transnational approaches to three continent-wide moments of change. The work begins with a look at the close of World War Two, when liberation from Nazi occupation offered the opportunity for social and political experiment. Next, essays explore the late 1960s as generational change and political dissatisfaction rocked urban centers from Paris to Prague. Finally, the book turns to the fall of communism, a moment of revolutionary change that not only spread rapidly from country to country, but even affected and interacted with protest movements in Western Europe and elsewhere. Together, the essays provide both a new perspective on postwar Europe and a range of models for the historian interested in using the transnational approach.

Chapter 1 Introduction
Part 2 1945
Chapter 3 Recasting Democracy? Communist Parties Facing Change and Reconstruction in Post-War Europe
Chapter 4 Window of Opportunities or trompe l'oeil? The Myth of Labor Unity in Western Europe after 1945
Chapter 5 Liberated Zones in Northern Italy and Southeastern France: The Cases of the Alto Tortonese and the Vercors
Chapter 6 The Influence of Socialist Realism in Italy During the Immediate Postwar Period
Part 7 1968
Chapter 8 "1968" and "The Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties (c. 1958 - c. 1974)"
Chapter 9 The Working Class Dimension Of "1968"
Chapter 10 1968 East and West: Visions of Political Change and Student Protest from Across the Iron Curtain
Chapter 11 Echoes of Provocation: "1968" and the Women's Movements in France and Germany
Part 12 1989
Chapter 13 The Global Context of 1989
Chapter 14 The Development of a Green Opposition in Czechoslovakia: The Role of International Contacts
Chapter 15 A Transcontinental Movement of Citizens? Strategic Debates in the 1980s Western Peace Movement
Chapter 16 Opposition Networks and Transnational Diffusion in the Revolutions of 1989
Chapter 17 Bibliographic Essay

It encourages us to transcend the framework of Cold War politics and assess the history of European politics in both East and West in diachronic perspective. Moreover, taken together, the essays provide snapshots into the contemporary history of notions and practices of "democracy" in Europe. . . . This stimulating volume should, therefore, serve as an incentive to explore in more detail the meanings of "democracy" in the whole of Europe since 1945.