The West after the Cold War

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course explores the political, social, cultural, and intellectual transformations in the wake of the Cold War’s end, from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. The focus is on North America and Western Europe, as well as on the developments in the former Eastern bloc and the reconfiguration of the international system. We want to investigate the search for a new global order and the ways in which contemporaries tried to make sense of the post-Cold War world, the key intellectual currents, and the distinct (political, social, and pop-) culture that emerged in the 1990s – thereby examining the rise of the present after what observers at the time briefly thought was the “the end of history.”