(^196) › STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
✪^ North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) A military alliance, formed in
1949, uniting the Western powers against the Soviet Union.
✪^ Warsaw Pact The Soviet Union’s response, in 1949, to the formation of NATO,
which established a military alliance of the communist countries of Eastern
Europe.
✪^ Détente^ An era of warmer diplomatic relations between the United States
and the Soviet Union, for a period lasting from the 1960s into the 1980s.
It was characterized by a number of nuclear test-ban treaties and arms-
limitation talks between the two superpowers.
✪^ Prague Spring An episode in 1968 when Czechoslovakian communists,^
led by Alexander Dubcek, embarked on a process of liberalization.
Under Dubcek’s leadership, the reformers declared that they intended to
create “socialism with a human face.” Dubcek tried to proceed by balancing
reforms with reassurances to the Soviet Union, but on August 21, 1968, Soviet
and Warsaw Pact troops invaded and occupied the major cities of Czechoslo-
vakia.
✪^ Velvet Revolution The name for the nearly bloodless overthrow of Soviet
communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989.
✪ Globalization A term that refers to the increasing integration and interde-
pendence of the economic, social, cultural, and even ecological aspects of
life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The term refers not
only to the way in which the economies of the world affect one another, but
also to the way that the experience of everyday life is becoming increasingly
standardized by the spread of technologies that carry with them social and
cultural norms.
Key Individuals:
✪ Josef Stalin
✪ Nikita Khrushchev
✪ Ho Chi Minh
✪ Alexander Dubcek
✪ Alexander Solzhenitsyn
✪ Lech Walesa
✪ Václav Havel
✪ Helmut Kohl
✪ Margaret Thatcher
✪ Mikhail Gorbachev
Introduction
Following World War II, the Cold War developed between the two new superpowers: the
Soviet Union and the United States. In response, Western European nations followed a
course of economic integration that culminated in the creation of the European Union.
In the decades that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Europe experienced both a
revival of nationalism and the emergence of globalization.KEY IDEA23_Bartolini_Ch23_195-206.indd 196 27/04/18 1:56 PM