20th CENTURY — IMPORTANCE OF THELEGACY

The purport of this paper is to highlight the development tendencies and characteristics of the 20th century, which was decisive in forming the found ations of the present world. The narrative underlines the fact that it was an age of wars, ideological rivalry between democratic capitalism versus fascism and then communism, nationalisms and insurgencies for freedom and social change; time when international domination of the United States consol idated and when enormous social, economic, scientific and technological progress was made. But it was also a century of atrocities, often amounting to genocide — so alien to the twentieth-century image of the allegedly humanistic progress