It is always tempting for contemporaries to consider their times as exceptional. Still, today’s Europe does look very different from the one only one generation ago. This is not because social change was stalled or absent in the 1960s and 1970s. On the contrary! It was, quite rightfully, regarded as the time of turbulence which saw, just to mention a few social incidences, the expansion of education, the turn downwards of marriage and fertility rates, the shift towards the service sector, the finalization of the European welfare states, the return of women into the labour market, increasing affluence and the thawing of social and political cleavages. These changes took different forms in different countries, to be sure, and Western and Eastern Europe did display comparable but not converging patterns (Therborn 2000). Nevertheless, all of Europe was affected by similar and rapid changes.