Life + 50 was in much of Europe in 1886 with the Berne Convention. Germany had a copyright duration of 80 years after the death of the author at one point; blaming US corporations for this is absurd when Europe has had plenty of domestic publishers with entrenched interests in longer copyright durations.
European copyright laws have often been much stricter than in the US, in part because publishers have long been very close to the state (in countries like France and Germanu for example). If anything, Europe has been the bad influence historically, and has pionniered copyright treaties as the sibling comment mentions. It's crazy what some Europeans can blame the US for though.