For many centuries Europe was the world's most powerful, prosperous and technologically advanced continent. That period of European cultural and political dominance came to a definitive end with the second world war. In 1945 Germany was defeated and in ruins; France was half-starved and humiliated; Britain was bankrupt and on the point of losing its empire; Spain was a backward, isolated dictatorship; and the countries of central and eastern Europe had been absorbed into a Soviet empire. Nobody would have guessed that Europe was at the beginning of a new golden age.
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