deconstructs the contemporary widespread and well-known image of the 20th and 21st century, arguing for the continuity of the historical process covering the period 1914-2024.

Marcin Wojciech Solarz is a geographer, political scientist, and the IR researcher at the Faculty of Geography and Regional Studies of the University of Warsaw, Poland; Head of the Department of Political and Historical Geography, FGRS UW; and Head of the project 'Forest Germans (Gluchoniemcy, Walddeutsche): the past and present of forgotten local communities in the Carpathian Foothills,' 2020-2025. His previous works include: The Language of Global Development: A Misleading Geography (2014), The Global North-South Atlas: Mapping Global Change (2020), 'Geography and the world's development divides' in the Elgar Encyclopedia of Development (2023), and other works; he is also scientific editor and coauthor of the Atlas of Poland's Political Geography: Poland in the Modern World (2018; third place in the 'Atlases' category at the International Cartographic Exhibition in Japan in 2019), New Geographies of the Globalized World (2018), and the Atlas of Poland's Political Geography: Poland in the Modern World: 2022 Perspective (2022).

Chapter 1 The cogs

Chapter 2 Reading maps - framing the space

Chapter 3 The scenes

Chapter 4 Deciphering history - framing the time

Chapter 5 The milestones

Chapter 6 The first cog - European cycle of power and decay vs the new Hundred Years' War

Chapter 7 The European tides

Chapter 8 Deconstructing the 20th and 21st centuries - the new Hundred Years' War

Chapter 9 The borders

Chapter 10 The power systems and arrangements

Chapter 11 The international community voices

Conclusions