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.
A 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 at least an impression of this ever-changing continent.
Today, as the Guardian’s Europe edition marks its first full week online, it is the years 2000 through to 2023. You can see years 1973 to 1999 here.
2000 Concorde crashes after takeoff
At 4.42pm on 25 July 2000, as it was taking off from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris for a charter flight to New York, an Air France Concorde supersonic jet travelling at 300km/h ran over a 44cm titanium alloy strip that had fallen from the previous plane to use the runway. Chunks of rubber from a shredded front tire hurtled into its underside, rupturing a fuel tank. The leaking fuel ignited, both left-hand engines failed, and flight AF4590 crashed into the Hôtelissimo hotel in Gonesse two minutes later, killing all 109 people onboard – mostly German cruise passengers – and four on the ground. The entire Concorde fleet was retired three years later.
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2001 Protests turn violent at G8 summit
When 200,000 anti-globalisation activists converged on Genoa for the G8 summit of 18-22 July 2001, they were met by what Amnesty International would later call the most serious suspension of democratic rights in a western country since the second world war. More than 400 were injured, 60 seriously, during savage clashes with Italian riot police, with three activists left in a coma and a 23-year-old protester, Carlo Giuliani, shot dead while attacking a Carabinieri van with a fire extinguisher. It took more than a decade but dozens of police were ultimately convicted, including for grievous bodily harm, planting evidence and wrongful arrest during two particularly brutal night-time raids on schools housing activists and journalists.
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2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen reaches presidential runoff
For months, France’s 2002 presidential race was between the incumbent, Jacques Chirac of the centre-right RPR, and Lionel Jospin, his Socialist party rival. But as first-round polls closed at 8pm on 21 April, the nation’s TV screens revealed it would be the far-right nationalist Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, for whom the gas chambers were but a “detail” of history, who would face Chirac in the runoff. France was in shock; more than 1 million demonstrated. Chirac went on to win in a landslide, 82% to 18%. But in the presidential runoff 15 years later, Le Pen’s daughter Marine scored 24% – then 41.5% in 2022. Across Europe, the far right was on the march.
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2003 Italy goes without power for 12 hours
At about 3.20am local time on 28 September 2003, an estimated 57 million people – almost Italy’s entire population – were plunged into darkness when the main power line to Italy from Switzerland tripped, causing two key supply lines from France to also give way under the increased demand. Italy’s power supplier, GRTN, said later it lost control of the national grid within four seconds. Many people were still on the streets for the country’s annual Notte Bianca (White Night) festivities, which came to an abrupt standstill. Hundreds were trapped in big-city metro carriages, and 30,000 on trains across the country. Most people had power back by the following afternoon.
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2004 Chechen rebels take 1,100 hostage at Beslan school
Soon after 9am on 1 September 2004 – the first day of the autumn term – at least 32 heavily armed Chechen rebels occupied School Number One in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, an autonomous republic in Russia’s North Caucasus region, taking more than 1,100 people hostage: teachers, parents and 777 pupils. The siege ended three days later when Russian security forces stormed the building, which had been rigged with explosives, leaving 333 hostages (186 of them children) and 31 rebels dead. The extreme violence, and the fact the attackers targeted children, rocked Russia and shook public confidence in the government, prompting Vladimir Putin to enact sweeping counter-terrorism measures and centralise control over the regions.
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2005 Angela Merkel becomes Germany’s first female chancellor
Angela Merkel, Germany’s first female chancellor, often described as the leader of Europe and world’s most powerful woman, grew up in East Germany and earned a doctorate in quantum chemistry. She became an MP after reunification in 1990, by 2000 was leader of the centre-right CDU party, and in 2005 was elected chancellor – then re-elected, in 2009, 2013 and 2017. She finally stepped down in 2021. Methodical, cautious, pragmatic, often noncommittal, Merkel was the great compromise-finder and consensus-builder of her time, “leading from behind” to negotiate grand cross-party coalitions, EU treaties, Europe’s debt and migration crises and a global pandemic. Her critics argue she lacked boldness, vision or any real ideology, leaving voters feeling deprived of real political choice, and opening the door to extremes.
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2006 Oulematou Niangadou shot dead by rightwing extremist in Antwerp
On the morning of 13 May 2006, Hans Van Themsche, an 18-year-old student, bought a rifle and – as the Antwerp prosecutor put it – “went hunting foreigners”. Shaven-headed, dressed in a long black coat stuffed with extremist literature, he first wounded a Turkish woman, Songul Koç, who was reading on a bench. A few streets on, he shot dead Oulematou Niangadou, a 25-year-old nanny originally from Mali, and her two-year-old European charge, Luna Drowart (“She was close to a black person,” he later explained.) Van Themsche, whose grandfather volunteered for the Waffen SS and whose father co-founded the far-right Vlaams Blok – prompting charges of a “moral responsibility” that the party denied – was sentenced to life in prison in 2008.
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2007 Heatwave hits southern Europe
Heatwaves have struck Europe with increasing frequency and intensity since 2003, when the continent’s hottest summer – probably since the 16th century – is estimated to have caused up to 70,000 deaths. Four years later, most of southern Europe and the Balkans roasted again, with temperatures in the second half of June in the Greek capital, Athens, hitting 46.2C (115.2F) and more than 100 wildfires erupting across the country. Records also tumbled in Italy, Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Romania and Turkey, with huge blazes destroying swaths of forest. In Puglia, south-east Italy, hundreds of holidaymakers were stranded on beaches and had to be rescued by boat.
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2008 US presidential hopeful Barack Obama visits Berlin
The junior senator for Illinois was just 46 when on 18 June 2008 he closed down one of the German capital’s main avenues for a campaign speech that was greeted with the kind of hysteria generally reserved for rock stars. Some of the rapturous crowd of 200,000 overwhelmingly young Berliners hung off lamp-posts to catch a glimpse of the young Democratic nominee, who told them: “No one nation, no matter how large or how powerful, can defeat [the world’s] challenges alone.” After the Iraq war and the unilateralism of George W Bush’s presidency, it was the promise of a new dawn in Europe-US relations – which, by the time Barack Obama returned to Berlin on his final foreign visit as president in 2016, had not altogether been fulfilled.
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2009 Lisbon treaty ratified after second referendum in Ireland
The Lisbon treaty was the way the EU devised to simplify and streamline its institutions after French and Dutch voters sank a draft “constitution” in successive 2005 referendums: it brought in the same reforms, but by amending previous treaties, such as Maastricht. For critics, the treaty – which eased decision-making through more majority voting, and boosted parliament’s powers – was yet more unwanted EU centralisation; backers argued it increased efficiency and introduced essential checks and balances. Ireland, the only member to put it to a referendum, threw the whole thing into jeopardy by rejecting it in June 2008, but to widespread relief it passed, at the second time of asking, in October 2009, coming into force that November.
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2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcano disrupts air traffic across Europe
After well over a month of intense if fairly low-level seismic activity, the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, an Icelandic volcano covered by an ice cap that had shown few signs of life since 1821, kicked off in earnest on 14 April, when the interaction between glacial meltwater and volcanic lava in the erupting top crater proved so spectacularly explosive that it fired a gigantic plume of volcanic ash straight into the jet stream – which promptly began transporting it into some of the world’s busiest airspace. The resulting air traffic shutdown, Europe’s largest since the second world war, caused more than 105,000 flights (almost half of total air traffic) to be cancelled in the first eight days with more than 10 million passengers affected.
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2011 Anders Behring Breivik massacres 69 on Norway island
At 3.26pm on 22 July 2011, a car bomb exploded in Oslo’s government quarter, killing eight people and injuring more than 200. Two hours later, as rescue efforts continued, reports came in of gunfire on the island of Utøya, 25 miles (40km) north-west, where nearly 600 young Labour party supporters were holding a summer camp. Armed with an automatic rifle and pistol and dressed in a homemade police uniform, Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old far-right Islamophobe, had embarked on the deadliest mass shooting by a lone individual in modern history. Over the next hour, Breivik shot dead 67 people, almost all teenagers; two more died trying to escape, and 32 were wounded. In 2012, he was convicted of both attacks, ruled sane at the time they were carried out, and handed the maximum 21-year jail sentence, to be extended by additional five-year terms if he is still considered a danger to society.
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2012 Costa Concordia runs aground off Tuscany
At first they were told it was an electrical failure, then that it had been fixed. But the heavy crunch many of the 3,229 passengers and 1,023 crew of the Costa Concordia heard at 9.45pm on 13 January 2012 was the sound of the cruise ship hitting a rock just off the Isola del Giglio, close to the Tuscan coast, and ripping a 35-metre (115ft) gash in its hull. With the engine room flooded, the vessel drifted on to a narrow reef and rolled on its side. Thirty-two people did not survive. The court that subsequently sentenced the captain, Francesco Schettino, to 16 years in prison for manslaughter, causing a maritime accident and abandoning ship heard he had sailed so close to the island to please the Costa Concordia’s maitre d’, who had family there. Italian media speculated the additional presence on the bridge of Schettino’s lover, a 25-year-old dancer from Moldova, may also have been a factor.
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2013 Pro-EU demonstrators camp out in Kyiv
From 21 November 2013, Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) steadily transformed into a giant protest camp – kitchens, first aid posts, makeshift radio and TV studios, stages, and its own self-defence force – after President Viktor Yanukovych chose not to sign a parliament-approved EU-Ukraine association agreement, instead seeking closer ties with Russia. The so-called Euromaidan protests withstood subzero temperatures and brutal police repression to mobilise at times 800,000 people, culminating in bitter fighting the following February that left nearly 100 protesters and 13 police dead. The good news: Yanukovych was ousted and a unity government installed; the bad: shortly afterwards, Russia annexed Crimea, and began fomenting pro-Russian unrest in eastern Ukraine.
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2014 Unprecedented numbers risk lives to reach Europe
Photograph: Massimo Sestini/Eyevine
The refugee crisis that would rock Europe to its foundations the following year began building in 2014, when the bloc’s 28 member states between them recorded more than 250,000 irregular arrivals and more than 625,000 asylum applications – the most since the Yugoslav wars more than two decades earlier. A fifth of those who risked their lives to seek refuge or a better future in Europe were from war-stricken Syria; others notably from Afghanistan, Kosovo, Eritrea and Albania. Many crossed the Mediterranean from Libya on what the UN high commissioner for refugees has described as the deadliest migration route in the world: an estimated one in six people who leave north Africa on small boats die on their journey.
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2015 Alan Kurdi’s body washes up on a Turkish beach
Photograph: Nilufer Demir/DHA/Reuters
Sometime in the early hours of 2 September 2015, two-year-old Alan Kurdi and his family, Syrian Kurdish refugees trying to reach Europe, boarded a 5-metre inflatable boat in Bodrum, Turkey. Designed for eight but carrying 16, it capsized within minutes; Alan, his brother, Gabil, and their mother, Rehana, drowned. Photos of Alan’s lifeless body, washed up on a Turkish beach, are among the abiding images of Europe’s 2015 refugee crisis, when 1.3 million people came to the EU to seek safety – the most in one year since the second world war. The crisis was above all, of course, an immense human drama for those who made the dangerous journey. It also had significant political consequences in Europe, sparking popular anxiety, bitter EU infighting – and a sharp rise in support for far-right, nationalist parties.
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2016 The UK votes to leave the European Union
Few thought it would happen. Even Nigel Farage, the nationalist, Eurosceptic Ukip leader who did so much to pave the way for it, was sure, until late into that long referendum night, that the campaign for Brexit had failed. But in the end, a shaken, desperately divided Britain woke up on 24 June 2016 to find it had become, by a 52%-48% margin, the first member state to vote to leave the European Union. For leavers, it was about independence, sovereignty, the freedom to be global Britain; for remainers, international isolation, economic decline, an act of calamitous Little Englander self-harm. Seven years on, the chaotic domestic consequences of leaving – including five prime ministers in six years – have gone far from unnoticed on the continent, while in the UK, Brexit remains very much unfinished business, its impact likely to be felt for decades to come.
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2017 Catalonia declares independence from Spain
Spain was plunged into its worst political crisis in 40 years on 1 October 2017, when the autonomous region of Catalonia went ahead with an independence referendum ruled illegal by the Spanish courts. According to the Catalan government, 92% voted to break away from Spain – but turnout was only 43%, with many opposed boycotting the ballot. Catalan MPs voted to recognise the result anyway, prompting Madrid to impose direct rule, dissolve the parliament, and call new elections. The Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, fled to Belgium; nine other separatist leaders were later handed long jail sentences (and eventually pardoned). Five years on, pro-independence sentiment in Catalonia has fallen from 49% to 41% and, after a mass corporate exodus prompted by fears secession would leave Catalonia outside the EU, the region has lost its status as Spain’s economic powerhouse to Madrid.
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2018 Greta Thunberg begins school climate strike
On 20 August 2018, a 15-year-old Swedish schoolgirl, Greta Thunberg, began skipping school to protest for stronger action on the climate crisis, holding up a sign every day outside the parliament building in Stockholm reading Skolstrejk för klimatet (School strike for climate) and promising to stay out until the 9 September Swedish elections. She then pledged to strike every Friday until Sweden complied with the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Fridays for Future rapidly gained traction, inspiring four Dutch schoolgirls to protest outside parliament in The Hague that month and, by the end of the year, other pupils to follow suit in countries including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Japan, Switzerland, the UK and the US. By December 2018, Thunberg was addressing the UN’s Cop24 conference in Katowice, Poland, and on her way to becoming a leading world climate campaigner.
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2019 Fire rages in Notre-Dame de Paris
Shortly before 6.20pm on 15 April 2019, a fire broke out in the eaves of Notre-Dame de Paris, the most famous of Europe’s great medieval Gothic cathedrals. Caused, investigators believe, by either a cigarette or an electrical short circuit during renovation work, and watched from across the Seine by large crowds of aghast Parisians and tourists, the blaze burned fiercely until the following morning, destroying most of the cathedral’s lead-clad timber roof, severely damaging its upper walls, and toppling its spire. The vaulted stone ceiling prevented massive interior damage, holding up the burning 13th-century wood as it fell and allowing priceless Catholic relics and artworks to be rescued. Firefighters saved the main structure, including the bell towers and rose windows, and Notre Dame is due to reopen in December 2024.
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2020 Covid-19 arrives in Italy
Covid-19 reached Italy – the first western country to face the virus – on 31 January 2020, when two Chinese tourists in Rome tested positive. Person-to-person transmission was reported on 21 February; the first deaths the following day. Two weeks later, a country of almost 60 million people was in lockdown: the beginning of a trauma that would spread to the whole of Europe. For the northern province of Bergamo it was already too late: that March, some towns recorded an 850% increase in deaths, the sound of bells tolling for the dead growing so incessant priests ordered them to stop. The following year, Italy’s national statistic office reported an excess mortality of 100,526 deaths for 2020, the country’s deadliest year since 1945.
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2021 Severe wildfires break out in Greece
In what has become an annual occurrence, dozens of huge wildfires broke out in Greece in the summer of 2021, killing three, injuring at least 20 and destroying hundreds of homes amid a historic heatwave that peaked in early August when the town of Langadas, near Thessaloniki, recorded 47.1C. Fires on the mainland and islands including Rhodes and Crete were followed by a devastating blaze on Greece’s second-biggest island, Evia, that burned through nearly 50,000 hectares of pine forests and olive groves and forced the evacuation, by ferry and small boat, of more than 2,000 people. Twenty-five countries sent firefighters and equipment, including planes, and numerous international organisations highlighted the fires, once again, as an example of the extreme weather caused by global heating.
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2022 Russia invades Ukraine
On 24 February 2022, after massing troops near the border and dismissing all suggestions it was planning to attack, Russia invaded Ukraine in the biggest assault on a European country since the second world war. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, claiming the aim was to “demilitarise” and “denazify” Ukraine, calling the assault a “special military operation” to support two Russian-backed breakaway republics. Russian troops met stiff resistance and retreated in the north but took southern cities including Kherson and, after an “apocalyptic” three-month siege, Mariupol. More than 8 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced, a similar number have fled the country, and tens of thousands have died. Amid widespread global condemnation, an international investigation has been opened into possible war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sanctions imposed on Moscow.
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2023 Earthquakes bring destruction to Turkey and Syria
Central and southern Turkey and northern and western Syria were struck by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake soon after 4.15am local time on 6 February 2023. Centred about 25 miles (40km) from the town of Gaziantep, the initial quake was followed by a second, measuring 7.7, just over nine hours later. Felt as far away as Egypt, the quakes caused widespread devastation across an area roughly the size of Germany, affecting an estimated 14 million people – the equivalent of 16% of Turkey’s population – and leaving up to 1.5 million homeless. Nearly 60,000 people died: 50,783 in Turkey, and 8,476 in Syria, where years of bitter civil war meant rescue operations were severely hampered. Six months on, many survivors are still in tents.
