The discipline of Contemporary History explores the major international issues related to post-World War II, the Cold War, the expansion of communism, China, decolonization and the emergence of the Third World, Islamism and geopolitics in the Middle East, Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian question, the birth and development of the EEC/EU and, finally, the end of the Cold War and the present world, emerging from the 1990s and the terrorist attacks of 2001, fostering our present-day era of global uncertainty.