Watch our videos and review your learning with the Crash Course app.
Supplemental content is now available for these courses.
Hello and welcome to Crash Course European History and welcome to my house.
I’m filming this in the midst of a global disease pandemic, a stark reminder that we
are living in the middle of history, and subject to its forces.
In fact Stan, roll the tape of me from the past back in 2014
And as for the potential dangers of the 21st century, there are environmental disasters,
the rise of a super bug that wipes out millions upon millions of people, possible global conflict
or a rise in instability.
I’ll tell you Me From the Past, I could write a book about what you didn’t know
in 2014, but you got that one right.
So we began the series by talking about how profoundly the Black Death reshaped European
political, social, and economic life.
The world today is vastly different from the world of 500 years ago, and the human population
is vastly different.
But history continues to be what one writer called, “the relentless unforeseen.”
And microbes, or I guess in this case viruses, continue to shape human history in very, very
deep ways.
And so that’s why I’m at home.
But we can still take this opportunity to learn some history together.
INTRO But where were we in history?
Oh right, the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe, which seemed to promise a bright future
in which eastern Europe would become as healthy and as prosperous iias western Europe.
But we have to remember that in Communist countries, many large assets--from intellectual
property to collectively owned factories--were legally the property of the people.
Take, for example, the wildly popular video game Tetris.
It wasn’t owned by its creator, Alexi Pajitnov, but by the Soviet state, which had employed
him while he designed Tetris.
So, how would all these assets be divided now that the states were collapsing?
Well, terribly, as it turned out.
Pajitnov would eventually get the rights to Tetris back, but most of these assets were
taken into private control in a huge kleptocratic event that unfolded in these countries.
factory managers, former officials, and people with influence and money swept in and took
control of factories, farms, and much else in eastern Europe.
And they paid pennies on the dollar.
Or, I guess in this case, Kopecs on the Ruble.
And in the midst of this, social services such as sanitation and health care collapsed
because the governments backing them had collapsed.
Many people--primarily women--were thrown out of work.
Alcoholism surged.
One woman reported of life after the fall of the Soviet Union, men “today walk around
with fear in their eyes.
Nothing but fear.
They’re downsizing the army, the factories are at a standstill.
. . . They sit on the curb waiting for something to happen.”
Men’s life expectancy fell from an already low 62 years in the 1980s to as low as 57
and a half years in the 1990s.
In Romania, inflation was over 135 percent.
In Ukraine, it was over 800 percent.
War heroes hawked their medals, and petty theft thrived.
And many of those who could left eastern Europe.
Worst of all, Yugoslavia became a battleground of ethnicities in the 1990s, as the Serbian
government under Slobodan Milosevic used both regular and freelance troops to expand Serb
power and territory.
Most horrific was the ethnic cleansing of rival groups, including the massacre of boys
and men in Bosnia and the rape of women there to create so-called “Serb” babies.
A 1995 Croatian massacre of Serbs who had helped seize land from Croatia was answered
with the infamous Srebrenica slaughter in which Serbian armed forces murdered more than
8,000 Muslim boys and men.
“Kill the lot,” the commander of the Serb forces ordered.
Military units also sought to attack the cultural heritage of their enemies, damaging cities
rich in medieval history, such as Dubrovnik, and destroying libraries and museums.
In 1993, Croats, having taken over a part of Bosnia, blew up the Mostar Bridge, built
in 1566, which was seen as a symbol of the Ottoman heritage of ethnic pluralism.
In the West, these conflicts were often portrayed as resulting from ancient rivalries or as
the product of backward people, but to others it seemed one example among many in recent
history of politicians using ethnic rivalries to gain power for themselves.
I mean, it’s not like Milosevic invented the negative integration strategy of dehumanizing
a “them” to create a stronger sense of “us.”
Serb militias and the Yugoslav army would go on to slaughter Albanians in Kosovo between
1997 and 1999 before NATO forces finally pushed the militias back.
And Milosevic was eventually apprehended by the world court, even as in 2003 his henchman
assassinated a new reform-minded prime minister.
Still, amid all this kleptocracy, and economic suffering, and ethnic cleansing, new democratic
institutions did begin to emerge, as did private enterprise, especially in Poland.
And gradually, eastern European governments stabilized, they presented themselves as potential
new members of the European Union and of the aforementioned military alliance, NATO.
Which I guess I should have said the full name of: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
NATO expanded dramatically after the fall of communism.
Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, former members of NATO’s rival, the Warsaw Pact,
became NATO members.
And additional eastern European countries joined for a total of 28 nations.
The European Union was officially born with the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, but in some ways
it had begun in 1957 as the Common Market and then expanded--Scandinavian countries
joined the consortium, as did Spain and Britain.
For Britain, joining the European Community in 1973 was necessary to pull itself out of
economic doldrums as Common Markets countries outstripped the UK in economic growth.
The UK came to enjoy around $6 billion a year of aid that went into infrastructure and other
development.
Under the Maastrict Treaty, EU citizens held a common passport and voted for representatives
to a European parliament. and restrictions among nations in the spheres of business activity,
policing of borders, and transportation policies were reduced, eventually leading to the end
of passport controls at borders between Common Market countries.
Also governments, whether municipal or national, had to treat all member nations’ companies
the same.
Austria, Finland, and Sweden joined the EU in 1995, and in doing so, they adopted the
common policies that governed everything from the number of American soap operas aired on
television to pollution controls on automobiles to standardized health warnings on cigarette
packages.
In 1999 a common currency, the European Currency Unit (or euro) came into being, although Britain,
Sweden, and Denmark did not adopt it.
Wait.
Hold on Stan.
I just want to make sure I have this correct.
Economists had, like, a once in a millennium chance to name a currency, and they named
it the European Currency Unit.
I mean.
Come on!
By the way.
Stan isn’t here.
I think you should know that.
I’m alone.
I miss you, Stan!
At any rate, those who did enjoy the common currency were mostly enthusiastic.
An Italian student said that the euro provided “a sense of belonging to a European Union
and I think it’s beautiful that there’s this big European country.”
And a French nuclear scientist remarked, “People with the same money don’t go to war with
each other,” which is a nice sentiment, although, did he learn about the French Revolution?
But also, with the adoption of a common currency, the EU’s central bank gained more control
over economic policy.
Critics saw the European Union as promoting neo-liberal business policies and emphasizing
corporate profits over the well-being of workers, while defenders felt the EU did a good job
of monitoring social well-being.
But one thing that was widely agreed upon is that, at the time, the EU seemed like a
model for international cooperation:
Like, Greece urged the admission of its traditional enemy Turkey in 2002 and 2003--despite a former
French president’s propaganda that Muslim countries lacked the Christian values of EU
members.
The Greek prime minister countered that “Turkey has been a great European power since the
sixteenth century.”
Through the EU, traditional adversaries could benefit through negotiated settlements and
through the reduction of defense spending, as happened between France and Germany.
OK Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
1.
For some, there were of course also big drawbacks to European Union membership.
2.
For example, in 2002, the EU responded to a decline in the fish population by imposing
a 40 percent cut in fishing,
3. which preserved a lot of fisheries but hurt a lot of communities.
4.
A Spanish fisherman from Vigo near the Portuguese border
5.
pointed to technocrats’ lack of concern for ordinary people’s livelihoods, saying:
6.
“The bureaucrats in Brussels have signed my death warrant and that of all the other
people you see here in this port.
7.
The worst thing is that these gentlemen in their suits have never been on a boat and
know nothing about the ocean.”
8.
Rodrigo Duran had paid 2 million dollars for his boat
9. and he had a crew of 17 people with families to support.
10.
Moreover each fisherman’s livelihood produced jobs for some five other people.
11.
Workers were needed to can and freeze fish, to keep up the ports, to build ships, and
so on.
12.
So there were inevitably tradeoffs to EU regulation, and they could produce harm, like in this
case.
13.
Unless you’re fish, of course.
14.
Finding the balance between the needs of individuals like Rodrigo Duran
15. and the needs of the larger community--
16. to maintain long-term fish stocks and preserve biodiversity, for instance-
17. -is one role of government, and whether that’s best done up close
18. or at great distance has been a subject of much debate in the EU and beyond.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
Eastern Europeans also had mixed reactions to the EU, with many of them feeling like
poor cousins.
Like, on the eve of joining in the 21st century, the standard of living in Poland was 39 percent
that of EU members.
And even that statistic hides the big differences between the relative prosperity in cities
and the profound poverty in the countryside. and not everybody was enthusiastic about joining.
Like, one farmer in the Czech Republic testified, “It’s bad...the European Union is already
imposing various quotas and regulations on us.”
And for one retiree in Eastern Europe, the rising price of beer said it all: “If I
wanted to join anything in the West,” he said, “ I would have defected.”
others asked, why now that they were now free to be independent would they want to join
another huge organization that would erase their national and ethnic identity as communism
had tried to do.
Still, from some points of view, things definitely did get better: even in the least prosperous
former Communist states, ownership of freezers, and computers, and cell phones rose.
Car sales increased 10 to 12 percent a year, but again, this spending was far lower in
the countryside, where close to half of people could not afford basic necessities.
A further sign of both prosperity and regional differences: the new shopping malls that sprang
up were mostly around capital cities.
But these new customers--some 100 million of them initially--were a huge opportunity
for megastores like IKEA or Electroworld.
“When Electroworld opened in Budapest (April, 2002), it provoked a riot.
Two hundred thousand people crowded to get in the doors,” one report claimed.
Critics called the transformation “Consumania.”
Others saw the phenomenon differently: one eastern European business person called it
“a social act, indicating that one had joined consumer society.”
So Europe was integrating and “consumerizing” in the early twenty-first century but it was
also fracturing amid waves of ethnic feeling.
Despite two centuries aimed at building Slavic nationalism, in 1993 Czechoslovakia split
into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Yugoslavia also came apart into several states, including Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, all
claiming ethnic or religious distinctiveness.
The Soviet Union itself broke up into some dozen states.
There were more European countries in the twenty-first century than there had been in
1945.
Yet despite wanting ethnic sovereignty, most simultaneously aimed for membership in supra-national
organizations like the EU and NATO.
And this drive for autonomy was pervasive: In 1998 the United Kingdom gave Scotland,
Wales, and Northern Ireland independent parliamentary control of education, health, roads, tourism,
and other services.
And so even as globalism began to rise--a phenomenon we’ll discuss next time--hyper-localism
also rose in response to it.
Should a local fishery’s quotas be decided by international organizations that try to
consider the largest possible picture?
And are responses to, say, global pandemics best organized at the local, national, or
supranational level?
Those questions are, of course, especially relevant in an age where humans must confront
so many shared, global, species-wide problems.
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next time.