History 244 - European Public Policy

In 1968, the USSR terminated the Prague Spring, and commenced a strategy of consumerist depoliticization in its European satellites. Around the same time, states on the other side of the Iron Curtain saw the postwar miracle of rapid economic growth and social consensus come to an end. This course, reaching across the revolutionary break of 1989 up to the present, raises questions of convergence and continuity in European public policy, West and East. Paired case studies from a variety of countries in fields such as energy and the environment, minority rights, and housing serve to clarify evolving rules and patterns to the policy-making game, from Cold War to European Union.