IB History Regional Study 12: Europe During and After the Cold War Key Definitions

The clause in the Treaty on European Union that lets a member state withdraw from the EU. Once triggered, it starts a two-year negotiating window for a withdrawal agreement. The UK triggered it in March 2017 and formally left the EU on 31 January 2020.

A 155-kilometre barrier built by East Germany around West Berlin from 13 August 1961, initially of barbed wire and then concrete panels. The wall was constructed to stop East Germans from escaping to the West through the open Berlin border; between 1949 and 1961, approximately 3 million had done so. At least 140 people were killed attempting to cross it between 1961 and its fall on 9 November 1989.

The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, established in January 1949 to coordinate economic development within the Soviet bloc. COMECON standardised trade, technical norms, and production across member states, supplied Soviet energy to Eastern Europe at below-market prices, and integrated Eastern European economies in ways that served Soviet interests. It was dissolved in 1991.

Under Soviet-backed rule, the habit of performing loyalty to the regime in public, at work, in school, at meetings, while holding different private views at home or among trusted friends. It let people survive daily life under surveillance without genuinely believing official propaganda, and it left regimes with public compliance but little real popular belief.

The common market established by the Treaty of Rome (1957), signed by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The EEC created free movement of goods, services, labour, and capital among member states and a common external tariff. It expanded to include Britain, Ireland, and Denmark in 1973, and was transformed into the European Union by the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.

The group of European Union member states that have adopted the euro as their common currency, with monetary policy set by the European Central Bank (ECB). The Eurozone was established in 1999 (electronic) and 2002 (physical currency). By 2020 it comprised 19 of the EU's 27 member states. The structural weakness of a shared monetary policy without shared fiscal policy became apparent in the sovereign debt crisis of 2010-2015.

German for "wall in the head": the persistent psychological and cultural divide between former East and West Germans after reunification, seen in different voting patterns, trust levels, and self-identification decades after the physical Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, a military alliance founded in 1949 by 12 Western states including the USA, UK, France, and Canada. Its founding treaty committed members to collective defence under Article 5: an attack on one member was to be treated as an attack on all. NATO provided the institutional framework for American military commitment to European defence during the Cold War and remained the primary Western security organisation after 1991.

Nostalgia for aspects of everyday life in the former East Germany (GDR), such as products, television, community, and job security, that grew after reunification. It usually reflected a sense of lost status and community rather than support for the Stasi or one-party rule.

A 1985 agreement, in force from 1995, that removed routine passport checks at internal borders between participating European states, creating a passport-free travel area (the Schengen Area) that later grew to include most EU states plus Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein.

The West German trust agency that took control of roughly 8,500 East German state enterprises after reunification (1990-1994) and privatised, restructured, or closed them. It was one of the largest privatisation programmes in modern history and became a lightning rod for eastern resentment over job losses and the sale of assets to western investors.

The 1990 treaty between the two German states and the four wartime Allied powers (USA, USSR, Britain, France) that confirmed unified Germany's full sovereignty, its existing borders, and its continued NATO membership, formally ending the postwar occupation arrangements.

The Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, signed in May 1955 by the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. The Warsaw Pact created a Soviet-dominated military alliance to counter NATO, with Soviet officers commanding joint forces. It provided a legal framework for Soviet military intervention in member states, most notably in Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968).

The conference held at Yalta in Crimea in February 1945, attended by Roosevelt (USA), Churchill (Britain), and Stalin (USSR). The conference agreed on the occupation zones for post-war Germany, the establishment of the United Nations, and the holding of "free elections" in liberated European countries. The vague language on elections allowed both sides to claim the other had violated the agreements, contributing to the breakdown of the wartime alliance.