Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe From the birth of Eastern Catholicism and its towering churches dedicated to God and his saints; to the bloody hammer and sickle designed to strike fear into the enemies of the USSR; Russia and its close neighbors are a land decadent in history and culture. Eastern Europe has had a mighty place in the history of the world. It has seen the origins of the Turkish Empire, the Russian royalty of the Dark Ages, the Byzantine Empire, the United Socialist States of Russia. Its current nation-states include: Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia. The similarities in these countries are seen most clearly in their language, religion and cuisine. Russian is the most widely used language of most eastern European countries but one can also hear Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, and Serbian. These are known as the Slavic languages. Most of the peoples in the region, no matter their birth tongue, speak and understand either Russian or English to some degree.…

in the economic development of both Eastern and Western Europe in the years following the war was the establishment of government incentives/programs to counteract decline in population. Due to the devastations of the war, population had been reduced to a critical level forcing government officials to enact programs in order to increase the birthrates in their regions. These social programs were set up as incentives to financially assist couples to have more children. Medical benefits and…

Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, and Laurent Dubois' “An enslaved Enlightenment: rethinking the intellectual history of the French Atlantic." Much of this paper will focus on Wolff's text because it is the larger of the two, but there are common themes between the two texts that I wish to cover as well. Inventing Eastern Europe, explores the different kinds of ways that Easter Europe was envisioned during the Enlightenment-era: mapping,…

From 1750 CE until the present day (2015), Eastern Europe underwent numerous changes and few continuities. Some of the changes: the mini-ice age, rise of communism, spread of the potato, decline of serfdom, an ideological desire for militarism, nationalism, alliances, and imperialism, and new weapons/warfare create new avenues for political, economic, social, and intellectual reform. While the reliance on agriculture and ever-lasting ethnic conflict remained largely consistent throughout the…

Human trafficking of juveniles in Europe Human Trafficking has been a discreet worldwide issue where most have not taken a resolve. Most of the cases of Human Trafficking are about sexual exploitation due to prostitution and labor concerns. I don’t know much about the details of this problem and what goes on or how bad it is, but I have heard of it. I guess I always thought of it as an isolated thing because it wasn’t in the news all the time, but perhaps it is worse than that? I…

ending communist expansionism. Nonetheless, these wars did not have long periods of time to impact American domestic and foreign policy that the social, political, and economic battles of the Cold War had. Politically the United States and the Soviet Union were completely opposites at the end of WWII. the Americans and the Soviets sought to influence new governments in Europe and around the globe with the Americans representing democratic government, while the Soviets representing authoritarian…

During the twentieth century, Europe was the stage of an exceptional amount of violence, experiencing numerous wars. In the course of these wars and interwar periods, millions died both in battle and as a result of governmental policies. Notably, the years leading up to World War Two and the several years following the Second World War, saw a great amount of violence in Eastern Europe. While a globally dominant Western perspective usually sets Western Europe as the stage for the atrocities which…

What we tend to oversee however is that there 's no such thing as an only negative form of government. In fact, for millions of people communism was, not a good thing, but rather an okay thing. It allowed the people, of Eastern Europe in specific, to not prosper but rather to get by. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991 came the onslaught of a massive problem that is still getting worse to this day: human trafficking. Although it is hard to see at first, the collapse of the…

The Soviet Union controlled most, if not all, of the countries in eastern Europe. Soviet troops were stationed all over eastern and parts of central europe due to warfare with Germany during World War 11 . Agreements at the Yalta conference gave the Soviets dominance over these countries, in which they manipulated the people and organized communist governments. United States witnessing Soviet control over eastern countries and the violation of the Yalta agreement decided to embark a containment…

Following the World War II, the nations of Europe, whether they won or lost, were devastated and exhausted socially and economically. In addition, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the world’s top superpowers in contention with each other to prove whose ideology was superior. The fight between capitalism and communism escalated immediately following the war and each nation did all that they could do to gain the upper hand. On June 5, 1947, George Marshall gave a speech at the…