ABSTRACT
The states of Western Europe have shared many changes since the Second World War. Each experienced economic recovery and prolonged dynamism but then moved into a period of depression after 1973–74. Each underwent demographic revival and, although this decelerated after the mid-1960s, rural exodus and varying manifestations of urbanization served to alter the distribution of population profoundly. Each viewed the wider world through the apparatus of mass media and increasingly through tourists’ eyes so that West Europeans tended to become more ‘international’ with regard to dress, popular music, sport and even diet and speech. Yet Western Europe remains an intricate patchwork of national and regional identities, with eighteen countries occupying a combined area only two-fifths that of the USA and each still retaining its own currency, language (or languages) and national ‘system’ for getting things done. However, greater cohesion of the member states of the EC may reduce their financial and administrative individuality in the years ahead.
