BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION
A HISTORY OF EUROPE IN OUR TIME
BERNARD WASSERSTEIN
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2007
Back cover
The 20th century in Europe witnessed some of the most brutish episodes in history. Yet it also saw incontestable improvements in the conditions of existence for most inhabitants of the continent. It was a century of barbarism and civilization, of cruelty and tenderness, of technological achievement and environmental spoliation, of imperial expansion and withdrawal, of authoritarian repression – and of individualism resurgent.
Covering everything from war and politics to social, cultural, and economic change, Barbarism and Civilization is by turns grim, humorous, surprising, and enlightening: a window on the century we have left behind and the earliest years of its troubled successor.
Preface
‘There is no document of civilization’, writes Walter Benjamin, ‘that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.’ During the past century Europe was the scene of some of the most savage episodes of collective violence in the recorded history of the human species. Yet the same period has also seen incontestable improvements in many aspects of the life of most inhabitants of the continent: human life has been extended, on average, by more than half; standards of living have increased dramatically; illiteracy has been all but eliminated; women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals have advanced closer to equality of respect and opportunity. These and other changes have been so rapid and convulsive that any effort to distil their essence is a quixotic undertaking. Here is one historian’s tilt at the windmill. This is a long book – necessarily so. Both the theme and the evidence are vast. Yet much has had to be omitted or boiled down: as the painter Max Liebermann put it: ‘Drawing implies leaving out.’
My primary objective has been to fashion a narrative of the main contours of the political, diplomatic, and military history of Europe in this period as well as to describe and account for the most striking features of democratic, economic, and social change. In the cultural sphere, I have had room to do no more than provide glimpses of areas that, it may be argued, affected society most broadly, such as film, broadcasting, and popular music. I also seek to furnish some basis for understanding the evolution of values in an era during which God has disappeared as a living presence for most Europeans.
Fifteen of the twenty chapters are structured along a linear, mainly political narrative. The other five (1, 5, 9, 15, and 20) seize specific moments (1914, the 1930s, the war years, the 1960s, and the dawn of the new millennium) and embark on a tour d’horizon of life in Europe at those junctures.
What are the limits of this enquiry in time and space? First, chronological: Europe in our time is understood as roughly one contemporary lifetime. That takes us back to the early 20th century. Of course, that is not the lifetime of most Europeans now living. But this is our time, the time of all of us, on the principle, enunciated by Cicero, that ‘not to know what happened before one was born is to remain always a child’. An investigation of the history of our time necessarily extends back to the origins of the institutions, the events, the ideas that shape our immediate environment. How far back we must go to attain a mature perspective is a matter of argument. The 20th century has been called the shortest on record, beginning with the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 and ending with the collapse of European communism in 1989-91. The date 1914 has been selected as a starting-point neither conventionally nor arbitrarily. It chooses itself by dint of the profound shock to the European system that was administered by the First World War – an earthquake of which Europe even today still feels the after-tremors. As for the end, although the fall of communism in eastern Europe marks a decisive turn, I have chosen to bring the narrative as close to the present as possible. This enables me to outline the emerging shape of post-Cold War Europe, to examine the violent national conflicts that have appeared since 1989, most notably the Balkan wars of the 1990s, and to discuss problems connected with the enlargement of the European Union.
As for the geographical limits, ‘Europe’ includes, for the purposes of this book, European Russia and European Turkey, as well as the islands adjacent to the European land mass to the north-west and south. To state those inclusions is to expose a nakedness and untidiness: ‘Europe’ for much of the period covered by this book is a fiction. It did not exist as a focus of loyalty or even as a meaningful category for most inhabitants of the continent. To take the cases just mentioned, the British islanders have always thought of themselves as separated from Europe not only by 21 miles of water but also by a larger sense of a distinctive identity. British history was for long heavily conditioned by a lingering extra-European imperial role. The Russians and the Turks have lived in an uneasy, ambiguous, and often antagonistic relationship with what they perceived as Europe – very different in the two cases. Russian history does not halt at the Don or the Urals. Consideration of European Turkey makes little sense without reference to Anatolia. All this means that the geographical limitations mentioned above should be taken as no more than roughly indicative.
Chapter 1: Europe at 1914
Chapter 2: Europe at War 1914-1917
Chapter 3: Revolutionary Europe 1917-1921
Chapter 4: Recovery of the Bourgeoisie 1921-1929
Chapter 5: Depression and Terror 1929-1936
Chapter 6: Europe in the 1930s
Chapter 7: Spiral into War 1936-1939
Chapter 8: Hitler Triumphant 1939-1942
Chapter 9: Life and Death in Wartime
Chapter 10: End of Hitler’s Europe 1942-1945
Chapter 11: Europe Partitioned 1945-1949
Chapter 12: West European Recovery 1949-1958
Chapter 13: Stalin and his Heirs 1949-1964
Chapter 14: Consensus and Dissent in Western Europe 1958-1973
Chapter 15: Europe in the 1960s
Chapter 16: Strife in Communist Europe 1964-1985
Chapter 17: Stress in Liberal Europe 1973-1989
Chapter 18: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe 1985-1991
Chapter 19: After the Fall 1991-2007
Chapter 20: Europe in the New Millennium
Notes
Bibliography
Index