Fifty years ago Europe was divided into two hostile blocs, locked in a cold war between east and west. In the south, millions still lived under dictatorships. Denmark, Ireland and the UK had just joined a European Union – bringing its membership to nine.
In the five decades since, authoritarian regimes have fallen and democracies been reborn. Walls have come down, federations have disintegrated and bloody wars ensued. There have been many crises: political, economic, human.
Europe has witnessed terrorist atrocities, peaceful – and less peaceful – revolutions, natural disasters, a pandemic. The EU grew to 28 members, then lost one of them. Unprecedented numbers of people have risked their lives to reach it.
The complete history of Europe over these years could fill several books – a project, perhaps, for another day. For the moment, the Guardian’s picture editor Guy Lane has selected images spanning the past half-century that, together, give an impression of this ever-changing continent.
Today, as the Guardian launches its Europe edition, it’s the years 1973 through to 1999.
1973 Students revolt at the Athens Polytechnic
At 3am on 17 November 1973, a tank smashed through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic as police and army units brutally crushed a student revolt that would herald the end of Greece’s ruling military junta. Exactly how many lost their lives is disputed. Although no one died on the campus, reports of the number of civilians – including high school students – who were killed in the subsequent crackdown outside range from 24 to almost three times that number. A key moment in Greece’s post-second world war history and a defining act of resistance against authoritarianism that turned the tide of opinion against the colonels, the polytechnic uprising eventually led to the regime’s downfall the following year.
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1974 Flower power ousts Portuguese regime
Portugal’s Carnation Revolution took less than 24 hours to overturn nearly half a century of ultra-conservative, authoritarian rule and to begin unwinding Europe’s last colonial regime in Africa. A military coup launched on 25 April 1974 by a group of idealistic and young left-leaning army officers swelled into a vast and, remarkably, almost bloodless popular uprising, named for the red and white blooms – then in season – that jubilant demonstrators stuck in soldiers’ uniforms and gun muzzles.
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1975 Carlos the Jackal takes Opec ministers hostage
Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, AKA Carlos the Jackal, was responsible for some of the highest-profile terror attacks in the 70s and 80s. On 21 December 1975, Sánchez and five other pro-Palestinian militants stormed a meeting of Opec leaders in Vienna. They killed a police office, a security officer and an economist, then took more than 60 people hostage, including the 11 oil ministers, two of whom they intended to kill. Calling themselves the Arm of the Arab Revolution, the group secured a plane and flew 42 of the captives via Tripoli to Algiers. All were eventually released – in exchange, it later emerged, for a multimillion dollar ransom.
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1976 Nadia Comăneci scores seven perfect 10s
When Nadia Comăneci dismounted from the uneven bars at Montreal’s 1976 Olympics, the scoreboard showed 1.00: it couldn’t cope with gymnastics’ first perfect 10. The 14-year-old’s grace and artistry won her six more such scores at those Games, making her the youngest gymnast – and first Romanian – to win an Olympic all-round title. A priceless propaganda asset to communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, it later emerged that she had been under near-constant surveillance by the Securitate secret police and subjected to a “brutal and sadistic” training regime until she fled a month before the regime’s collapse in December 1989.
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1977 Germany reels from autumn of terror
Germany’s autumn of terror in 1977 actually began that April, when West Germany’s then attorney general Siegfried Buback was shot dead by members of the far-left Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang. It continued with the murder of banker Jürgen Ponto in July, the kidnapping of industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer in September, and – to further pressure authorities into releasing 10 jailed RAF members – the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 in October. It concluded on 18 October with the liberation of Flight 181 in Mogadishu, the deaths in prison of three first-generation RAF members (including Andreas Baader), and Schleyer’s coldblooded murder, in revenge for those deaths and the death of Ulrike Meinhof, also in her cell, the previous year.
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1978 Oil washes into ocean from the Amoco Cadiz
At 9.46am on 16 March 1978, battling a gale off Finisterre in Brittany, the captain of oil tanker the Amoco Cadiz veered to avoid another vessel and its rudder jammed. After two failed attempts to tow the ailing tanker away from shore, it finally came to rest at 9.30pm, bow on one rock, stern on another, 2km from the small harbour of Portsall. Over the coming days it slowly broke in three, before being blown up by the French navy. A total of 220,000 tonnes of crude oil and 4,000 tonnes of fuel washed into the ocean and on to more than 300km of coastline. At the time, this was the largest spill of its kind. These days, what’s left of the rusting hulk is a diving attraction.
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1979 Pope John Paul II visits Auschwitz
Pope John Paul II was born Karol Józef Wojtyła in southern Poland in 1920, served as archbishop and then cardinal in Kraków, and was elected pontiff in 1978. His visit to Auschwitz on 7 June 1979, was the first by a sitting pope. His remarks there challenged Catholic complacency about the wartime role of Pope Pius XII, who many feel did not do enough to try to stop the Holocaust, and Soviet bloc attempts to downplay the reasons for the Holocaust by presenting Jews as random victims of murderous fascism just like everyone else, rather than the targets of a specific extermination campaign.
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1980 Lech Wałęsa leads strikes at the Gdańsk shipyard
On 14 August 1980, the firing of a popular crane operator and militant, Anna Walentynowicz, spurred the workers of the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk to strike. Led by a 37-year-old electrician called Lech Wałęsa, also recently fired, it marked the birth of Solidarność (Solidarity), which became the first independent trade union in a Soviet-bloc country and would slowly give rise to a broad, nonviolent anti-communist movement of more than 9 million members. Solidarność is seen as a key catalyst in the fall of communism in eastern Europe; within a decade, the Berlin Wall had crumbled and Wałęsa was president of Poland.
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1981 Franco’s followers attempt Spanish coup
The last major attempt to derail Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of General Francisco Franco six years earlier, the assault on Madrid’s parliament on 23 February 1981 by 200-odd of the late general’s reactionary followers was led by Lt Col Antonio Tejero, wearing the patent leather tricorn of the country’s Civil Guard paramilitary police force. Some Spaniards packed for exile, othersfeared firing squads, but after ministers and MPs had been held hostage for 18 hours and King Juan Carlos I denounced the coup in a TV address, the hostage-takers surrendered the next morning and all deputies were freed.
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1982 Leonid Brezhnev laid to rest in Moscow
Leonid Brezhnev was the leader of the USSR from 1960 to 1964 and again from 1977 until his death, of heart failure, on 10 November 1982, a month short of his 76th birthday. First secretary of the Soviet Communist party for 18 years – and, therefore, the most powerful man in the country – his pragmatic, consensual approach produced political stability at home and significant policy success abroad. But his innate conservatism and aversion to reform saw corruption flourish, inefficiency soar and growth stagnate. The reformist Mikhail Gorbachev, who arrived at the Kremlin in 1985, was the main beneficiary.
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1983 Air France hijackers demand prisoner release
Skyjackings were once astonishingly common: in the five years from 1968 to 1972, there were 305 worldwide. They declined sharply from 1973 with the introduction of passenger and luggage screening, but still averaged 20 to 40 a year until 2001, with post-9/11 security having since made them a rarity. On 27 August 1983, hijackers demanding the release of Lebanese prisoners from French jails and the withdrawal of French troops from Lebanon seized an Air France Boeing 727 aircraft with 111 passengers and crew after takeoff from Vienna, Austria, forcing it to land in Geneva, Sicily, Damascus and eventually Tehran. All hostages were released unharmed.
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1984 Kohl and Mitterrand jointly commemorate war dead
On 22 September 1984, the then French president, François Mitterrand, and then German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, jointly commemorated the dead of the first world war 70 years after its start. Together they visited a German cemetery before ending the day at Douaumont near Verdun, home to the remains of 130,000 unidentified French and Germans soldiers, where they laid a wreath. In between the playing of the German and French anthems, they exchanged looks, then words, and then took each other’s hands, in a powerful and unscripted gesture that has provided one of the defining images of postwar European reconciliation and integration.
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1985 Football fans die in Heysel Stadium disaster
The 1985 European Cup Final in 29 May 1985, between Liverpool and Juventus, turned into a slow-motion tragedy that left 39 people dead – 32 of them Italian – and up to 600 injured. A supposedly neutral section separating the fans in the crumbling Heysel stadium was quickly overrun. Juventus supporters and others in the section tried to retreat, but were blocked by a concrete wall, which ultimately collapsed. A subsequent Belgian investigation blamed Liverpool fans, but a British government report concluded the “appalling” state of the venue was largely at fault. Days later, Uefa banned English clubs indefinitely from European competition.
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1986 Chornobyl explodes
Photograph: Shone/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
The worst disaster in the history of nuclear power happened on 26 April 1986, when reactor 4 of the Chornobyl plant in Ukraine – then part of the USSR – went out of control during a test. The incident destroyed the reactor building and released into the atmosphere several times more radioactivity than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. About 30 people died in the blast and its immediate aftermath, but the estimated long-term death toll ranges from 4,000 in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia to 16,000 across Europe, with radioactivity spreading as far west as France and Italy. A 30km-wide exclusion zone remains around the plant.
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1987 Passenger ferry capsizes off Zeebrugge
The eight-deck, roll-on/roll-off car and passenger ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsized moments after leaving the Belgian port of Zeebrugge on the night of 6 March 1987, killing 193 passengers and crew. Built with no watertight compartments that might hinder fast loading and unloading, as was then common, it left port with its bow door open and flooded immediately. While the assistant boatswain was asleep in his cabin when he should have been closing the door, an official inquiry found the vessel’s design and a poor communications culture at its owner, Townsend Thoresen, equally to blame. So-called ro-ro ferries have since been radically improved.
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1988 Gorbachev visits New York
Two years after he first adopted glasnost (“openness” or “transparency”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) as political slogans, Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR’s eighth and final leader, visited New York. Convinced sweeping reforms were essential if the state was to survive, Gorbachev’s willingness to question four decades of Soviet certainties played a key role in ending the cold war. He introduced new economic and democratic freedoms to his own country (hastening, as Russia’s current leaders like to point out, its eventual dissolution) and refused to intervene militarily in others when communist governments toppled across the eastern bloc.
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1989 The fall of the Berlin Wall
In a year of continual, dramatic and momentous political upheaval for Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall was pivotal. Since August 1961, the 43km wall – actually two floodlit, heavily guarded concrete barriers separated by a “death strip” – had seen just 5,000 successful escapes from east to west Berlin, and 136 deaths. But after mass demonstrations in September 1989, the East German leader Erich Honecker resigned and on 9 November it was decided border controls to the West, including for private journeys to west Berlin, would be lifted. The move was not intended to take immediate effect, but a confused official got that bit wrong. Just 11 months later, Germany was formally reunified.
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1990 Golden Arches rise in the Soviet Union
When McDonald’s opened its doors in Moscow’s Pushkin Square on 31 January 1990, a reported 38,000 customers – a company record – queued for hours to get served. Inside and outside the country, the arrival of the golden arches barely 30 minutes’ walk from the Kremlin was seen as a definitive sign of the end of cold war; rapidly, Russians’ embrace of western fast food, pop culture and jeans came to signify the country’s integration into the global capitalist system. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, there were 800 McDonald’s in Russia. The last nine, in stations and airports, closed last December.
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1991 Moscow says Baltic states can go it alone
In the three Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the growing campaign of civil resistance against Soviet rule was known as the Singing Revolution, a term coined by the Estonian activist and artist Heinz Valk after spontaneous mass musical demonstrations every evening at the Tallinn Song festival of June 1988. In August the following year, more than 2 million people joined hands in a human chain known as the Baltic Way, stretching 600km from Tallinn in Estonia to Vilnius in Lithuania. Moscow acknowledged the inevitable, finally recognising the independence of three states on 6 September 1991 and withdrawing its troops between August 1993 and August 1994.
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1992 Bosnia declares independence
After Croatia and Slovenia, Bosnia in 1992 also declared independence from former Yugoslavia. Backed by Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia, Bosnian Serbs, led by Radovan Karadžić, threatened violence if Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats – who outnumbered Serbs – split. War broke out rapidly. Yugoslavian army units, repurposed as the Bosnian Serb Army, drove more than 1 million Bosnian Muslims and Croats from their homes in a deadly ethnic cleansing campaign in the heart of Europe. Sarajevo was besieged, international peace efforts and UN peacekeepers were ineffective, and more than 100,000 people died. Nato bombing ended the war in 1995.
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1993 Cool Britannia rises as Naomi Campbell falls
Cool Britannia was born some time in the early to mid-1990s, the success of Britpop acts (Oasis, Blur, Suede, Pulp) – along with British designers, writers and artists – giving the UK a newfound confidence and optimism that went far from unnoticed on the continent. Vivienne Westwood, a veteran of the punk scene, was the movement’s fashion queen, and in a 1993 show in Paris put a then 23-year-old model, Naomi Campbell, in a pair of “Super Elevated Gillie” shoes with 12-in heels and 4-in front platforms. Campbell did not stay upright, but later confessed the fall boosted her career – with several designers subsequently asking her to fall over deliberately.
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1994 Britain and Europe joined by Channel tunnel
Plans to build a tunnel under the Channel were first proposed by a French engineer, Albert Mathieu-Favier, in 1802, complete with an artificial island mid-Channel for changing the horses. Britain didn’t fancy an unsecured link to the continent, however, and it wasn’t until 1988 that Eurotunnel began digging. On 6 May 1994 the 50.46km tunnel was officially opened, carrying Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to Paris in a Eurostar passenger train, then back to London – accompanied by President Mitterrand and his wife – on Le Shuttle. Britain was no longer an island. Last year, the tunnel was used by 2.2m cars, 1.4m vans and lorries, and 8.3 million train passengers.
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1995 Thousands die in Srebrenica massacre
In July 1995, Bosnian Serb army units commanded by Ratko Mladić, and a Serbian paramilitary unit, the Scorpions, massacred – according to Bosnia’s federal commission of missing persons – 8,372 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in and around Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia declared a UN safe area and protected by 370 Dutch troops. Up to 25,000 Bosnian Muslim women and children were also expelled and abused. About 7,000 bodies have been recovered (another 30 were buried in July), and the massacre has been declared a genocide by two international courts. While Bosnian Serb commanders have been ruled mainly responsible, the UN and Dutch state have acknowledged they failed in their duty of protection.
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1996 Yeltsin dances his way to re-election
The reformist Boris Yeltsin became Russia’s first elected president in June 1991, cemented his early immense popularity in the subsequent failed communist coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, and was instrumental in the formal dissolution of the USSR later that year. He transformed Russia into a capitalist – if chaotic – market economy and democracy, ordered troops into Chechnya and signed arms agreements with the US. He also suffered from recurring health problems, liked a drink or two (on a 1994 visit to Washington he was found on the street in his underpants, calling for pizza) and was happy to throw silly shapes on stage to get re-elected (which he was, in 1996). He resigned in 1999, naming as his successor one Vladimir Putin.
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1997 Diana dies in Pont de l’Alma tunnel
At 23 minutes past midnight on 31 August 1997, a Mercedes limousine carrying Diana, Princess of Wales, the first wife of Britain’s King Charles III – then Prince Charles – crashed in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris, killing driver Henri Paul and Diana’s partner, Dodi Fayed, instantly and seriously injuring her bodyguard. Diana died in hospital about three hours later, aged 36. Her death dominated headlines for weeks and triggered an outpouring of public grief in the UK, but also in many countries in Europe that remain fascinated by Britain’s royal family and around the world; an estimated 2.5 billion people watched her funeral. Although grossly irresponsible driving by Paul and pursuing paparazzi was found to blame, conspiracy theories around the crash persist.
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1998 France’s black-blanc-beur win home World Cup
Hosting their second World Cup, France won the competition, handsomely, for the first time on 12 July 1998, beating the holders, four-time winners and favourites Brazil 3-0, with team talisman Zinedine Zidane scoring twice in the final. In France, the victory was seen as about more than football. Here was a multiracial team, dubbed black-blanc-beur (“black, white, Arab”) by the media and including several players whose origins lay outside mainland France – Algeria, Armenia, Guadeloupe, Senegal – representing a new, modern, tolerant, racially diverse nation. The far-right were disgusted; others hailed the birth of “a new Enlightenment”. As many have since commented, it was a bit of a myth.
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1999 Total solar eclipse draws continent-wide crowds
A total solar eclipse tracked across Europe on 11 August 1999, the moon obscuring the sun and turning day into darkness. Although cloudy skies obscured visibility for some of its path, it was one of the most widely viewed total eclipses in history. A packed Cornwall was largely frustrated, but passengers on ferries in the Channel got a spectacular view. In Soissons in France, the clouds cleared minutes after the eclipse; in Amiens, less than two hours away, they cleared just before. At Hungary’s Lake Balaton, interest was so great that most people watched it from a traffic jam. Serbia’s streets were deserted, the state broadcaster having declared it dangerous.
• This article was amended on 21 September 2023 to more accurately describe Leonid Brezhnev as a former leader of the USSR, rather than a former “president”.
Fifty years of Europe in photos, part 2, will be launched on Wednesday 27 September.
