Europe beyond the Cold War

Abstract

Only seven years have passed since the insightful and poised historian Konrad Jarausch reflected on present-day Europe in a rather confident key. In deliberate contrast to both Richard Vinen’s relatively upbeat account and Mark Mazower’s darker view of European modernity, Jarausch argued that Europeans had finally processed the lessons of their twentieth-century tragedies and found ‘a balance between increasing economic competitiveness and preserving social solidarity’.