The West and the Soviets both faced identity crises in the 1970s and 1980s. Economic difficulties in the seventies, West and East, underscored the tensions and conflicts within both capitalist and communist systems. As western European economies slowed and then contracted, discontent grew with the American-style consumer society that had emerged after World War II. Increasingly resentful of American influence on European economics, foreign policy, and culture, many Europeans came to believe that it was time to make a sharper distinction between American and European interests. In the East, workers began to grow restless, as the widening gap between communist ideals and realities became ever more difficult to disguise or ignore. In the communist world the growing tide of protest proved difficult to stop, and by the early 1990s communist regimes across eastern Europe had been toppled and the Soviet Union had collapsed. ■