Abstract

In Europe since the Seventies, Jeremy Black offers a succinct and authoritative analysis of the social and economic development of Europe in recent decades.

            While providing a full treatment of environmental, demographic, and cultural issues in Europe, Black also offers delineations of broader political, economic, and social matters discussing practical, immediate subjects like migration, crime, transportation, and the environment. Europe since the Seventies reveals how European society has changed strikingly—former societal lines drawn on the basis of economics and class have given way to lines formed by identity, such as gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. Meanwhile, the European Union has created an expanded Europe and is now a testing ground for new forms of economics and politics.

            A readable, concise, and timely work, this latest book by a notable European historian will be indispensable to anyone wishing to understand the complexities of present-day Europe.

"Contending that the year 1945 as the by-now-traditional caesura is too remote for 21st-century students of contemporary history, Black reviews European environmental, social, economic, and political trends since the 1970s. . . . A liberal critic of the European Union, he convincingly reveals its 'democratic deficits,' especially its top-heavy bureaucracy, which very often sets a corporatist agenda against constituents' wishes . . . Recommended."--Choice

Jeremy Black is professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is the author of more than eighty books, including Maps and Politics, Why Wars Happen, War since 1945, Britain since the Seventies, and Altered States: America Since the Sixties.