A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

CHAPTER 30

GLOBAL CHALLENGES:

“FORTRESS EUROPE,”

EUROPEAN

COOPERATION, AND

THE UNCERTAINTIES

OF A NEW AGE

1 he remarkable increase in the movement of peoples from

one part of the world to another has been a dramatic dimension of global­

ization. After centuries of sending millions of European emigrants to other

continents, the trend was reversed. Beginning in the 1960s, Asians and

Africans seeking a better life began to arrive in unprecedented numbers

in Western Europe. Moreover, with the collapse of communism in Eastern

Europe and the Balkans, tens of thousands of immigrants began arriving

in Western Europe. Yet while immigrants have contributed enormously to

the economies of many European states, their presence and the cultural

differences they bring with them have generated xenophobia in many

states and an increase in the political influence of nationalist parties of

the extreme right. Immigration thus poses a challenge to the new Europe,

raising difficult issues of identity and the very question of what it means

to be European.

Globalization has brought other difficult challenges as well. For exam­

ple, the financial crisis—indeed the near collapse of the financial sector—

that began in 2008, the worst international economic crisis since the Great

Depression, itself reflected dimensions of globalization. First, the rapid

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