1. Protesters from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, wanting to ‘Ban the Bomb’, march through London on their way to the nuclear research base at Aldermaston, about fifty miles away, on 7 April 1958. The march became an annual event and CND grew rapidly in popularity helping to inspire demonstrations against nuclear weapons in other parts of Western Europe.2. A crowd of onlookers in West Berlin watch Soviet Army tanks at Checkpoint Charlie on 17 June 1953. That day, Soviet military might had been deployed to suppress the popular uprising against the East German regime, which threatened to undermine Communist rule.3. The French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman (right), and the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, two of the main architects of postwar Western Europe, meet in Paris on 21 November 1951. Franco-German friendship was the basis of what would take shape as the European Economic Community (and eventually the European Union).4. Tears from women in Moscow at Stalin’s funeral on 9 March 1953. Huge numbers of citizens turned out in bitterly cold weather to mourn their former leader. For countless Soviet citizens, Stalin was a great war hero, not a cruel dictator.5. Josip Broz Tito, the President of Yugoslavia, greets the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as he arrives in Belgrade in 1963. The breach in relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, in existence since 1948, had been officially healed in 1955.6. A Soviet tank and a building in Budapest destroyed by heavy fighting during the Hungarian uprising of 1956. The brutal Soviet crushing of the uprising shocked the West and gravely damaged the image of the Soviet Union among former admirers, many of whom now ended their membership of western Communist parties.7. Algerian Harkis, whose former work for the French colonial regime forced them to flee independent Algeria, arrive at a refugee camp in Rivesaltes in southern France on 16 September 1962.8. Then France’s most prominent intellectual, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and his partner Simone de Beauvoir, who greatly influenced the early feminist movement, on 22 October 1963 during a visit to Rome.9. Little Richard, a star of the rock and roll craze that swept over Europe in the second half of the 1950s, during his European tour in 1962. On that tour, he performed on some dates alongside The Beatles, then a little-known group but which within months would become a global phenomenon.10. A symbol of mid-1960s ‘swinging London’: the mini skirt in Carnaby Street. The ladies clothes shop next to the fashionable boutique had still not quite caught up with the latest modes.11. Mid-1960s affluence in France: a line of Citroën DS cars in a showroom on the Champs Elysees in Paris.12. May 1968 in Paris. Police in riot gear face students during the huge protest demonstrations. For a short time the spread of unrest appeared to pose a threat to the stability of the government. Significant student protest took place in 1968 in many countries, not confined to Europe. Alongside France, Italy and West Germany saw its major manifestations.13. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev is greeted with smiles and flowers in Bratislava on 3 August 1968. The President of the Czech Republic, Ludvik Svoboda, clasps Brezhnev’s hand. A smiling Alexander Dubček, First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, (right) waits to offer another bouquet. In the second row are (left) Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Prime Minister, (behind Brezhnev) Nikolai Podgorny, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and (behind Dubček), Oldřich Černík, the Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia.14. Less than three weeks after the false show of friendship in Bratislava, troops from the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia during the night of 20-21 August 1968. Here, two young men wave a flag on an abandoned Soviet tank in Prague, as a car burns fiercely close by. Defiance was, however, quickly crushed by military might.15. The West German Chancellor Willy Brandt falls to his knees while in Poland on 7 December 1970 to pay tribute at the monument in Warsaw to Jewish victims killed by the Nazis during the Ghetto Uprising in 1943. Brandt sought, through a new policy towards countries of eastern Europe (Ostpolitik) to improve West Germany’s relations with the former Soviet bloc.16. A Swiss poster opposing women’s right to vote. A referendum on 7 February 1971 finally gave women the vote in federal elections, though it would be another twenty years before the last canton allowed women to vote on local issues.17. A huge workers’ demonstration in Lisbon on 1 May 1974. A few days earlier, on 25 April, the ‘Carnation Revolution’ had peacefully ended the authoritarian rule that had lasted for almost half a century in Portugal.18. Turks in 1980 in the large steel-producing city of Duisburg, in the Ruhr District of north-west Germany. Large numbers of Turkish Gastarbeiter (‘guest workers’) had started to come to West Germany in the 1960s to fill labour shortages in the booming economy. But the early expectation that they would eventually return home was misplaced. Gastarbeiter, like immigrants in other parts of Europe, faced prejudice and discrimination, especially in the early years.19. A woman anxiously treads through the rubble in the centre of Belfast, Northern Ireland, on 21 July 1972 following an IRA bomb attack. That day the IRA detonated no fewer than twenty-two bombs in the city, killing nine people and injuring a further 130.20. A vast crowd in Warsaw on 6 February 1979 attends the celebration of mass by Pope John Paul II on his homecoming to Poland. The Pope’s visit greatly strengthened the links between Polish national identity and Catholicism, substantially weakening allegiance to the Communist regime in the process.21. Lech Walęsa (centre) among workers on strike at the Gdańsk shipyard in August 1980. The action was in support of demands for free trade unions, the right to strike, and press freedom.22. The French President François Mitterrand and the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl symbolically demonstrate reconciliation and friendship as they stand on 25 September 1984 in homage before the monument at Douaumont that commemorates those who fell at the battle of Verdun in 1916.23. The Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in discussion with Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, during her visit to Moscow at the end of March 1987. Despite their ideological differences, they got on well and had enjoyed a good working relationship since their first meeting in London in 1984.24. Hundreds of thousands demonstrate against the East German regime in the rain in Leipzig on 6 November 1989, three days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig had grown massively since they began in early September and exerted increasingly irresistible pressure for radical change on the regime.25. A man holds a Romanian flag with the Communist symbol cut from its centre on a balcony in Palace Square, Bucharest, in December 1989. The tanks in the square are an indication that in Romania the revolution of 1989 was far from peaceful.26. Opposition to the Maastricht Treaty in Provence in 1992. In a referendum in September, the French voted only by a narrow margin to ratify the Treaty.27. Shells from Serbian forces hit houses in the suburbs of Sarajevo on 6 June 1992. Thousands of civilians were killed and injured during the siege of the city that had begun in April and was to last for almost four years.28. The Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, (left) hands President Boris Yeltsin a bouquet of flowers at a farewell ceremony in the Kremlin on 31 December 1999. Yeltsin had suddenly announced his immediate resignation and designated Putin to serve as acting president until elections in March 2000. Putin swiftly decreed that Yeltsin and his family would not have to face any charges of corruption.29. A huge crowd in Madrid on 13 March 2004 protests at the failure of the Spanish government to blame Al Qaida, rather than Basque separatists, for the attacks on commuter trains two days earlier that killed nearly 200 people and injured around 2,000. The placards demanding peace were directed at the conservative government that had taken Spain into the Iraq War. A general election the following day brought defeat for the government. Before the end of April the new Socialist-led government pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq.30. A violent clash between police and angry demonstrators during a one-day general strike in Athens on 24 February 2010. The strike was staged in protest at draconian austerity measures introduced by the government to try to contain the country’s crippling financial crisis and avert economic collapse.31. An estimated 200,000 Ukrainians, protesting at the government’s decision to cancel a planned Association Agreement with the European Union, light electric torches and phones during a mass demonstration on Independence Square in Kiev on 31 December 2013.32. A Turkish police officer gently lifts the body of a Syrian child, three year-old Aylan Shenu, from the sea in Bodrum, southern Turkey, on 2 September 2015 after a boat carrying migrants sank while trying to reach the Greek island of Kos. Around the world, the picture was seen to symbolise the terrible human tragedy of the refugee crisis.
