[ Europa | Europe etc. ]

Gerd-Rainer Horn / Padraic Kenney (Ed.s): Transnational Moments of Change. Europe 1945, 1968, 1989. Manham: Rowman & Littlefield 2004, 243 pp.

This volume assembles papers from a conference held at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Centre in 2000. In their introduction, the editors define their mission as the examination of transnational “moments of change” understood here as “moments of opportunity and crisis”. They define such moments as characterised by “rapid and far-reaching changes” (p. XV) whose significance went beyond the nation state. Horn and Kenney single out three such moments in post-1945 European history: “1944-1945” as the years of liberation, “1968” as the events and processes connected to the student protests in the mid- to late 1960s and “1989” as the end of the Cold War in Europe. Throughout, the contributions attempt to bridge the Iron Curtain by systematically incorporating Eastern and Western Europe into their analyses.
[...] critical remarks are, however, proof to the volume’s great intellectual qualities and give rise to important questions which deserve more attention in contemporary European history.
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. In their introduction, the editors themselves admit that their exploration is only a first step into unknown territory. 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.