History of Europe - World Wars and Cold War

World Wars and Cold War

See also: Twentieth century

The "short twentieth century", from 1914 to 1991, sees the First World War, the Second World War and the Cold War, including the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and of the Soviet Union. These disastrous events spell the end of the European Colonial empires and initiated widespread decolonisation. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 to 1991 leaves the United States as the world's single superpower and triggers the fall of the Iron Curtain, the reunification of Germany and an accelerated process of a European integration that is ongoing.

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Famous quotes containing the words world, wars, cold and/or war:

    “The world ‘s a bubble, and the life of man
    Less then a span:
    In his conception wretched, from the womb
    So to the tomb;
    Curst from his cradle, and brought up to years
    With cares and fears.”
    —Francis Bacon (1561–1626)

    “You fade—as if the last of days
    Were fading and all wars were done.”
    —Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)

    “If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
    —Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)

    “Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.”
    —Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)