ABSTRACT
The history of Europe often is assumed to have seriously started with ancient Greece beginning some 3000 years ago. What has been happening since is a long stream of evolution, each stage always provoking the succeeding stage of development. But though events of a distant past still exert some influence on today's European dynamics, it is also evident that in general the more recent past seems to be more influential. So after 1945, only two global powers, the USA and the USSR, representing the two different systems of social organization, capitalism and Stalinism, were remaining. Europe was not the centre of global evolution anymore. It was a peninsula, which was split between the two large global powers. The breakdown of feudal regimes in World War 1 was the final result of the dynamics of the second half of the 19th century. The advantage of England with respect to technical knowledge started to diminish.
