Europe in the Era of Two World Wars

[Dave Monroe]

Europe in the Era of Two World Wars:
>From Militarism and Genocide to Civil Society, 1900-1950
Volker R. Berghahn
Paper | 2008 | $24.95 / £14.95
Cloth | 2005 | $27.95 / £16.95
176 pp. | 6 x 9 | 6 halftones.


How and why did Europe spawn dictatorships and violence in the first
half of the twentieth century, and then, after 1945 in the west and
after 1989 in the east, create successful civilian societies? In this
book, Volker Berghahn explains the rise and fall of the men of
violence whose wars and civil wars twice devastated large areas of the
European continent and Russia--until, after World War II, Europe
adopted a liberal capitalist model of society that had first emerged
in the United States, and the beginnings of which the Europeans had
experienced in the mid-1920s.

Berghahn begins by looking at how the violence perpetrated in Europe's
colonial empires boomeranged into Europe, contributing to the millions
of casualties on the battlefields of World War I. Next he considers
the civil wars of the 1920s and the renewed rise of militarism and
violence in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929. The second wave of
even more massive violence crested in total war from 1939 to 1945 that
killed more civilians than soldiers, and this time included the
industrialized murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children
in the Holocaust. However, as Berghahn concludes, the alternative
vision of organizing a modern industrial society on a civilian
basis--in which people peacefully consume mass-produced goods rather
than being 'consumed' by mass-produced weapons--had never disappeared.
With the United States emerging as the hegemonic power of the West, it
was this model that finally prevailed in Western Europe after 1945 and
after the end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe as well.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8042.html

Chapter 1
EUROPE BEFORE WORLD WAR I, 1895-1914
INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY AND CIVIL SOCIETY

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8042.html
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8042.pdf