Module Outline (Lecture Themes)
The European Union

• A favoured continent? The apotheosis of nationalism.
• Redrawing the map of Europe after World War I.

• The political and economic consequences of the two World Wars.
• The evolution of the European Union.

• A balance sheet of the European Union.
• Enlarging the Union: a 'Common European Home'?

• The challenge of the world economic system.
• Overcoming Eurosclerosis.

• The regional impact of recession and change.
• A typology of European cities and regions.

• Migrants and refugees.
• A 'Europe of the Regions'?.

Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States

• The Sovietization of Eastern Europe.
• COMECON: the eastern bloc's common market.

• Czechoslovakia 1968: the 'Prague Spring'.
• Poland: the 1970s dash for growth.

• The collapse of the Soviet empire.
• The lunatic 'bus factory; problems of the centrally-planned economy.

• From planned to unplanned chaos: introducing the market economy.
• A time of troubles: nationalism in the former Soviet Union.

• Alphabet soup: restructuring the former Soviet Union.
• The command economy and environmental pollution.

• Regional examples of ecological damage in Eastern Europe and the CIS.
• The resumption of history: global repercussions of the fall of the Soviet empire.

Module objectives / Learning outcomes
This course first of all reviews the geo-political experience of Europe in the C20, leading to the formation of the European Union; it suggests ways in which the Union is likely to develop; and it analyses some major social, economic and regional issues in contemporary Western Europe.

The second part of the course is concerned with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union since the Second World War. It describes the ways in which Eastern Europe was sovietized and the reasons for the collapse of the political and economic regimes in 1989-90. It goes on to review the problems of reform and the wider spatial repercussions of the failure of the Communist system.