Introduction

In 1914, the French poet Charles Peguy wrote that the world had changed more since he started going to school in the 1880s than during the two previous millennia. If he had not died shortly afterwards but had lived out his full biblical allocation of three score years and ten until 1943, he would have experienced even more dramatic changes. It has been this conviction that the ground is moving beneath their feet which has characterized modern Europeans. Among other things, it has given them a strong dynamism: the world is changing, it can be changed, and so it should be changed. On the eve of the French Revolution, the German playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing identified the essence of modern man as follows: ‘he often achieves very accurate insights into the future, but he cannot wait for the future to come. He wants to see the future accelerated, and also wants to do the accelerating himself. For what is there in it for him, if what he sees to be desirable is not brought about in his lifetime?’

It is with no sense of triumph, rather the reverse, that one records that modern Europeans have transformed not only their own continent but also the world. What they could not conquer directly, they ensnared in economic, social, and cultural bonds. What is sometimes described as the ‘Americanization’ of the world has been conducted by the descendants of Europeans who conquered North America and eliminated most of its aboriginal population. The European origin of the culture which was then re-exported with such dazzling success in the twentieth century is revealed not least by the name of its most ubiquitous symbol—the hamburger.

Many explanations for Europe’s hegemony have been offered. Was it Europe’s special geography, with its deeply indented coastline, profusion of rivers, absence of flood-plains, and its relatively simple flora and fauna deriving from its peculiar

Mountain pattern? Was it the bracing competition engendered by the plurality of states and churches, saving Europe from stable but stagnant uniformity? Was it Europe’s early embrace of secularization and with it ‘the disenchantment of the world’, means-ends rationality, and the scientific revolution? Was it Europe’s adoption of the division of labour, leading to commercialization, urbanization, and industrialization? Was it the development of new social forms, in which the organic community based on kinship, neighbourhood, or religious belief (Gemeinschaft) made way for a society of atomized individuals driven by self-interest and the cash nexus (Gesellschaft)? Was it Europe’s discovery of the power of the nation-state, combining a sense of national identity with bureaucratic administration and democratic institutions? As we shall discover from this volume, all of these hypotheses —and the many others which have been offered—are more or less persuasive, but none of them is sufficient.

Something which changes is naturally more interesting than something which stays the same. That this banal observation is a truism should not blind us to its importance. A history which presents only changes is a history which tells only half the story: for every value or institution which is modified or disappears altogether, there is another which remains the same. Moreover, not all changes prove to be irreversible. Only predictions as general as ‘Europe will never return to a mainly agrarian economy’ can be made with any confidence. Such is the ‘cunning of history’ (Hegel) that the neater the scheme for understanding the past, explaining the present, and predicting the future, the quicker it is undone. ‘How many divisions has he got?’ sneered Joseph Stalin, when dismissing an initiative by Pius XII. Although he lived not a minute too long, it is sad that Stalin did not survive to witness papal authority in eastern Europe eclipsing that of the general secretary of the communist party of the USSR (dec.).

For that reason, this history of modern Europe presents both change and continuity, revolutions and stability. No attempt has been made to work out a definition of ‘modern Europe’, for that in itself would consume a good-sized volume without yielding an answer likely to command general approval. Indeed, the theory which sees monotheism as the key to modernity would have us begin with the Book of Genesis. The decision was taken to begin this volume at the end of the eighteenth century, for it was then that revolution broke out in France, that the process of industrialization in Britain became visible to the naked eye, that the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon brought change to every corner of the continent, that the formation of a society of classes rather than orders entered a new and decisive phase, and—last but not least—the great romantic revolution in European culture began.

None of these phenomena began or ended at the same time, it need hardly be said. A date such as 14 July 1789 has little or no meaning for the economic development of Europe. For the political historian, however, it does mark the beginning of a new epoch. As John Roberts shows, in his account of European politics from the French Revolution to the First World War, what happened in 1789 determined much of Europe’s history for the next century. By showing that an old regime could be destroyed and a new order created by its own people, the French supplied both the model and the inspiration for generations of revolutionaries to come. They also introduced powerful new sources of political legitimation, obliging their enemies to articulate alternative ideologies. It was during these years that much of the vocabulary of modern politics—‘conservative’, ‘liberal’, ‘democrat’, ‘left’, and ‘right’ — was established.

Roberts also shows that once the revolutionary genie was out of the bottle, all the best efforts of the established order could not cram it back in again. Even the period of apparent conservative success after 1815 was punctuated by violent outbreaks of unrest, culminating in the wave of revolutions which spread across the continent in 1848. Their advertisement of the appeal of nationalism led to a renewal of international adventurism, first by Napoleon III and then by Bismarck. When the dust settled, Italy and Germany had been unified and France had finally lost her hegemony on the continent. Another period of calm followed, but nationalism proved to be ‘the revolutionary serpent which had still not been scotched in the egg’, especially in the Balkans. Between 1871 and 1914, five new nations achieved independence, all of them former provinces of the Turkish empire. So the First World War, or the Great War, could also be called either the War of the Ottoman Succession or the Third German War, for—like its predecessors of 1866 and 1870—it was also about Germany’s position in Europe. It was to be the most terrible war Europe had ever seen. It unleashed the Russian revolution, destroyed the Austro-Hungarian and German empires, began the decline and fall of the British empire, and ended Europe’s ascendancy in the world. But it did not solve the German question, indeed it only made it worse. So, Roberts concludes, 1789 marked the beginning of an era — but 1918 did not mark its end.

The economic changes of the nineteenth century were not punctuated by precise dates such as 1789, 1815, 1848, 1870, or 1914, but they were at least as profound. In his chapter, Clive Trebilcock identifies three waves of industrialization: from the 1780s to the i8zos, from the 1840s to the 1870s, and during the last two decades before the First World War. In 1780 there was little to choose between the two great powers of western Europe, but the manifold disruption caused by the French Revolution and its wars allowed the British to establish a decisive lead. The continental ‘follower economies’ had to wait for the second phase to follow suit. It was the railways which proved the key, indeed Britain was the only country to industrialize without them. After this boom had hit the buffers with the recession beginning in the mid-i870s, and known rather grandly as the ‘Great Depression’, there was another period of rapid expansion, with high-technology electrical, chemical, optical, and automotive sectors coming to the fore. These three phases of industrialization demanded adaptability from governments and entrepreneurs alike. Handicapped by the overconfidence bred by being first in the field, the British began to fall behind. It was the Germans who exploited most successfully the institutional equivalent of steam power—the investment bank. It was also they who proved most adept at generating the science-industry connections which gave them supremacy in high-technology industries.

As Trebilcock shows, although one cannot help but discuss the progress of the European economy in terms of national units, the real context of industrialization is both more international and regional than national. Within any state, there were highly industrialized islands such as northern Britain, the Ruhr, and north-eastern France, but they were floating in agricultural oceans. By 1914 only in Britain did the scale of industrialization make agriculture’s contribution to national output seem modest. Everywhere, the social and political power of landed interests was still immense. For most people in most parts of Europe, daily life in the countryside proceeded according to a pace and rhythm that was entirely traditional.

As these first two chapters demonstrate, politics and economics constantly interact. And of the various binding agents, the most direct is war. For example, it was the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars which put the French economy in lead boots for generations; it was failure in the Crimean war which prompted the Russians to try to modernize their economy; and it was the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1 which tore from the French economy the two provinces richest in raw materials. In turn, warfare itself was also deeply influenced by industrialization. In his examination of military modernization, Hew Strachan argues that the battlefield of 1918, with its tanks, heavy artillery, machine-guns, flame-throwers, poison gas, ground-attack aircraft, and long-range bombers, was much closer to present-day experience than to the battlefield of Waterloo. The enormous technological advances in weaponry, combined with the speed of mobilization made possible by the railways, had revolutionized warfare. The result was the most intensive blood-letting in the history of mankind—to that point.

Yet it was not the ineluctable forces of economics which determined the course of military history. As Strachan convincingly argues, it was changing ideas that mattered most. That is why he devotes a section to the importance of military theory, exemplified by its two greatest nineteenth-century practitioners, Clausewitz and Jomini. The importance of human agency is also revealed in two contrasting ways by the astonishing military success achieved by the Prussians between 1864 and 1871. On the positive side, it was their use of the general staff which gave them a decisive edge over their opponents. On the other hand, their complacent belief in the absolute superiority of their professional army paved the way for eventual disaster in 1918. This is not the only constant feature of European warfare revealed by Strachan’s analysis. He also demonstrates, for example, the continuing importance of fortifications and siege warfare. It was the construction programme launched by the French after 1871 which both created the need for the Schlieffen plan and frustrated its execution.

Human material also provides the subject-matter for Pamela Pilbeam’s examination of European society in the nineteenth century. There was a rapidly growing amount of it, the population of Europe more than doubling from—in round figures — 193 million to 423 million, despite the emigration of 45 million (of whom some 10 million eventually returned). This kind of demographic revolution was bound to put traditional institutions under severe strain. Especially during recessions such as the ‘hungry forties’, there was an acute awareness of what contemporaries called ‘the social question’, and a corresponding clamour for state intervention to answer it. Although the masses toiling in the dark satanic mills may have found it difficult to believe, conditions were in fact improving, however erratically and unequally. With more children surviving infancy and the incidence of pandemics declining, average life expectancy was increasing, as was literacy, per capita income, the ability of working people to represent their interests, and, consequently, state provision for social insurance. As a result the class war predicted so confidently by Karl Marx did not materialize.

Of the traditional elites, it was the first estate—the clergy— who suffered most, both relatively and absolutely. Their secular counterparts among the aristocracy proved much better able to adapt to changing conditions. Not only did they retain their grip on the commanding heights of government and society, many of them exploited the opportunities proffered by the industrial era to become rich beyond the dreams of their most avaricious ancestors. As Pilbeam remarks, the aristocratic elite did not perish, it diversified. But the great victors were of course the middle classes, not so much the entrepreneurs among them (despite some spectacular individual success stories) as the landowners, professional men, and state employees. It was they who combined quantity with quality to put their cultural stamp on the period. If most people got richer during the course of the century, the gap between rich and poor widened.

In my own chapter, on the culture of Europe in the nineteenth century, I also examine the impact of modernity on the traditional world. Already under way by the late eighteenth century, the transformation of the representational culture of the old regime was accelerated by the contemporary political, economic, and social changes discussed in previous chapters. In particular, the growth of a literate public eager and able to consume cultural artefacts liberated the artist from dependence on a patron. The simultaneous development of a new expressive aesthetic, which placed the artist at the centre of the creative process, greatly enhanced his self-esteem and—eventually—his status. It also opened the way for him to become the high priest of the sacralized culture which increasingly became a supplement to, or even substitute for, organized religion, as the construction of museums, theatres, opera-houses, and concert-halls in the style of classical temples demonstrated. In the space of less than a century, the artist went from liveried servant to commander of sovereigns: in 1781 Mozart had been brutally ejected from the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg with a kick to his backside; in 1876 the German emperor travelled to Bayreuth to pay homage to Richard Wagner by attending the first performance of The Ring of the Nibelung.

But liberation from the patrons of the old regime could also mean enslavement to the new commercial world of the public. All too often it turned out that what the latter wanted to buy was not what the former wished to create and that popularization meant vulgarization. For every Dickens, Delacroix, or Verdi who could satisfy market demand without compromising his — or her—integrity, there were many more who retreated to bohemian garrets, cursing the ‘Philistinism’ of bourgeois materialism. This sense of alienation from contemporary society could find expression in introspective isolation, but it could equally well erupt in angry exposes of the corruption and oppression of the modern world, as it did, for example, in the realist movement of the middle decades of the century. This abrasive relationship between art and society was the grit in the oyster which produced the pearl. Vincent Van Gogh sold only one painting during a career which was a constant struggle with poverty, lack of recognition, alcoholism, and insanity, ending in suicide; his almost exact contemporary, the immeasurably less talented Frederic Leighton, not only made a fortune from his paintings, many of which became best sellers in the form of photogravure reproductions, but was loaded with honours, including a peerage.

The subjectivism of the romantic revolution enjoyed a revival at the end of the century, as part of a more general breakdown of the confident certainties of liberal Europe. With the advantage of hindsight, it is tempting to see this fin de siecle decadence as a sultry Indian summer preparing the thunderclap of 1914. In his examination of European politics between 1914 and 1945, however, Paul Preston identifies a wholly material and quite precise cause of the breakdown: the search by German elites to export the problems caused by rapid industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of the largest and best-organized socialist movement in Europe. It was a ‘flight to the front’ which ended in disaster, although it might conceivably have succeeded if the Germans had not brought the United States of America into the war. Taking the baton from John Roberts, Preston shows how the conflict begun in 1914 was not to be resolved until 1945, when the great European civil war at long last ended.

The Versailles settlement of 1919 was the peace which made matters worse, leaving Germany not only fiercely revisionist but still strong enough to try another bid for European supremacy once she had recovered. Indeed the creation of a network of feeble states on her eastern frontier made such an attempt almost inevitable. Right across Europe, the political centre fell apart in the i9zos, as the polarizing effects of the war worked themselves out. Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922 was an early example of the corrosive force of disappointed nationalism. Particularly damaging, Preston argues, was the fatal division of the left. Far from seeking an alliance with social democrats against the right, the Soviet-dominated Comintern chose to see them as the main obstacle to revolution, attacking them as ‘social fascists’. It was only when Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 showed what fascism was really capable of that the divided left began to form alliances known as ‘Popular Fronts’. They were too little too late, failing heroically in Spain and cravenly in France. They had their parallel in international politics, where for too long the western democracies saw the fascist regimes not as a threat to themselves but as a weapon to be deployed against Soviet communism.

The unhappy political history of inter-war Europe was married to her equally turbulent economic fortunes. The dynamo of the world economy before the First World War, Europe tottered away from the debris impoverished, depopulated, deeply in debt to her American saviour, and facing sharp new competition from her former dependencies. As Harold James shows in his examination of the European economy in the twentieth century, the attempt to get back to normal proved to be a recipe for disaster. Deflation and unemployment in the west, hyper-inflation and unemployment in the east fuelled the political polarization analysed by Preston. After a brief period of stability during the mid-i9zos, the depression which began in 1929 became ‘the most traumatic economic event of this century’. Indeed, James argues that the story of the subsequent fifty years can be told as a series of attempts to prevent its recurrence. Not all countries, alas, were prepared to try Keynes’s benign prescription of demand management. Both the rearmament favoured by Hitler and the forced industrialization chosen by Stalin had consequences so terrible that even the suffering inflicted by the First World War pales by comparison.

The Second World War shifted the world economic balance even more decisively than the First, leaving Europe more impoverished, more depopulated, and more in debt to her American saviour. Fortunately, the Americans had learned from past mistakes and used their power to impose a liberal economic order. The creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1945, the introduction of the

Marshall Plan in 1947, and the prevention of a punitive policy towards (West) Germany set Europe on a surprisingly rapid road to recovery. Co-operation not autarky was also on the Europeans’ own agenda, as was shown by the formation of the six-member European Coal and Steel Community in 1952 and the creation of the European Economic Community by the Treaty of Rome in 1957. The result was what James terms an ‘economic miracle’ in the 1950s, with the beginning of democratized mass consumption on the American pattern. Clouded over towards the end of the 1960s by widespread labour unrest and growing inflation, these happy days were brought to a definitive end by the oil crisis of 1973. Subsequent moves towards further European integration, liberalization of world trade, and the promotion of high technology may have ameliorated but have not prevented the continuing structural crisis of European industry and high unemployment. The collapse of the Soviet empire opens up new opportunities, but James ends with the bleak observation that Keynesian remedies can no longer work.

It was not only the economic decisions taken in 1918 which proved to be misguided. In his chapter on European warfare in the twentieth century, Richard Overy shows how what Woodrow Wilson hoped would be ‘the final war for human liberty’ only paved the way for another and even more terrible conflict. Neither the League of Nations nor the various international peace initiatives of the 1920s and 1930s could persuade the powers not to pursue what they perceived as their legitimate interests. On the contrary, post-war military thinking was transformed by the concept of total war, that blurring of distinction between civilian and combatant which had been signalled during the First World War by German unrestricted submarine warfare, the Allied blockade of German ports, and long-range bombing of German cities. So far as the battlefield of the future was concerned, however, conservatives retained the upper hand, their vested interest in the traditional army and navy blinding them to the potential of air power and massed armour. It was only the Germans and, to a lesser extent, the Russians who correctly learned some of the military lessons from the stalemate of 1914-18. So when war resumed in 1939, the western allies were caught flat-footed, intending to fight a war of attrition from behind the Maginot line. And when the Germans had conquered most of Europe, the British found themselves obliged to continue an indirect strategy, trying to contain their enemies in the Mediterranean while sapping their strength with a combination of blockade and bombing. Meanwhile, in the east, both the Germans and the Soviets fought a mobile war of combat. It was only in i943 that the British and Americans concluded that they would have to wage war directly on the continent.

Unlike the First, the Second World War did mark a watershed in the history of warfare. So total had war become that it was now doubtful whether it was safer to be a civilian or a soldier. The combination of technological efficiency with ideological absolutism produced in the holocaust what was arguably the greatest horror in human history. The discovery that there existed a weapon with the potential to eliminate life on the planet completed the sobering lesson. So when Europe froze into the rival blocs of the Cold War, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact relied on a strategy of deterrence. By the 1960s both sides had accumulated arsenals of such destructive capability that ‘Mutual Assured Destruction’ was in prospect. This stalemate prompted a return to the strategy of ‘flexible response’ with greater emphasis on conventional weapons. So far, so good, but Overy ends with the chilling conclusion: ‘The Second World War, not the First, was the war to end all wars, for the moment.’

In 1914, as Richard Bessel writes in his chapter on European society in the twentieth century, Europe provided the model for world societies seeking to modernize, so that Rio de Janeiro, for example, could look to Paris for the best way to organize a city. That status was soon lost, as the European economy was pushed from the centre by the war and its aftermath, as European civilization was tarnished by waves of fratricidal conflict, and as the emigration of Europeans slowed and then stopped. After 1945, indeed, the relationship was reversed, as the post-war labour shortage sucked in migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. So the former colonizers are now the colonized and a new English town such as Milton Keynes tries to look not like

Paris but Brasilia. As the rest of the world has caught up, European society as a separate identity has disappeared.

It is impossible to judge which of the rich variety of social changes charted and analysed by Bessel has been the most radical. Has it been the separation of sex from reproduction and the plummeting size of families; or the ever-increasing proportion of retired people; or the final emergence of the self-contained ‘nuclear family’; or the equally final victory of urbanization; or the disappearance of domestic service and the rise of service industries; or the change in the role of women; or the levelling of income differentials and the rise in the standard of living; or mass ownership of the motor car; or the phenomenal growth of international tourism; or mass literacy and the media revolution; or the increased dependence on the state for social security, housing, and education; or the demystification of the world? As this list suggests, not everything in the twentieth century has been for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds.

Always in a state of flux in the modern period, European society in the twentieth century, Bessel concludes, has become more fragmented and diverse than ever before. That is doubly true of its high culture. In Chapter io, Martin Jay presents it first in the form of an imaginary mid-century account of the triumphant progress of modernism. First employed in the 1890s, the term was adopted by artists seeking to follow Verlaine’s advice to ‘twist the neck’ of the tired rhetoric of the nineteenth century. Never a coherent movement but an umbrella covering a dozen and more different - isms, from cubism to surrealism, modernism came into its own after the collapse of the old cultural certainties in the First World War. The war may not have made the world safe for democracy, but it certainly made it safe for the avant-garde. By 1939 the modernists had survived assaults from left and right to achieve a supremacy demonstrated most convincingly by the old-master prices paid for their works. On the one hand modernists disdained any causal relationship with the material world, stressing instead their ‘absolute self-referentiality and utter disinterestedness’. On the other hand, they liked to see themselves as sacralizing agents, filling the gap left by the demystification of the world in the cause of liberty and internationalism.

This was the kind of triumphalist account which might have been written in the aftermath of the Second World War. But, as Jay explains, during the past thirty years or so a new—postmodernist—critique has challenged this heroic narrative. Modernism has come to seem commercially self-serving, politically suspect, and theoretically flawed. A distinction has been drawn between the modernists who withdrew into the alleged autonomy of art and the true avant-garde who tried to break down barriers between art and life. So once isolated figures such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray are celebrated as the true pioneers. In the place of the modernist austere emphasis on form, there has come a return to content, to natural and historical themes, even to architectural ornament. However, postmodernists have not revived the earlier avant-garde’s belief that life could and should be aestheticized. On the contrary, they have rejected the missionary impulse of the ‘universal intellectual’, preferring to operate with the modest local limits of ‘weak thought’. Much criticized for its apparent cynicism, rejection of rationalism, deliberate conflation of art and commodity, and willingness to ‘learn from Las Vegas’, it is too early to say where post-modernism will end. However, that it has disrupted the confident script of the modernists, Jay concludes, is certain.

David Reynolds begins the final chapter, on European politics since 1945, with a timely reminder that historians are poor prophets, quoting the late E. P. Thompson’s prediction of 1987 that Europe would be divided into two hostile blocs ‘for evermore’. Two years later, the iron curtain was rung down, as the Soviet empire collapsed. Reynolds shows how the Cold War was born out of a new struggle for mastery in Germany. While the Americans believed that German recovery was a precondition for the resurrection of Europe, the Soviets saw it only as a threat. So they countered its promotion by the Marshall Plan of 1947 with a declaration of ideological war, the Berlin blockade, and the formation of a separate state, the grotesquely misnamed ‘German Democratic Republic’. Concern to find an answer to the German question was also acute in the West, playing an important role in the formation of NATO (designed ‘to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down’) and the

EEC. The division of Europe was then completed in 1955 with West German rearmament and admission to NATO. The intensity of the Cold War could only diminish when Europe recovered and the two superpowers experienced problems of their own. So the Vietnamese war and the short-lived Czech rising of 1968 led to detente.

Yet the thaw of the 1970s did not melt the frontiers. On the contrary, mutual recognition only made them more rigid. It was the ending of detente in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Polish crisis of 1980-1 that precipitated the final crisis of what the new American president, Ronald Reagan, dubbed ‘the evil empire’. With their satraps now denied the western loans which had kept their archaic ‘heavy metal’ economies afloat, the Soviets had to pay the bill themselves. Struggling to keep up with American military technology and demoralized by their failure in Afghanistan, they tried a new way in 1985, with the appointment of a reformer as general secretary of the communist party, Mikhail Gorbachev. As soon as he signalled that he could not and would not supply the force which had supported the Soviet empire since the 1940s, it crumbled so quickly that within a couple of years not even the USSR remained.

This great revolution, no less momentous for being mainly peaceful, began in 1989, exactly two hundred years after our starting-point. As Reynolds observes: ‘Like the would-be reformers of the ancien regime, Gorbachev had sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind.’ Alas, the euphoria of the liberated peoples of eastern Europe was no longer lived than that of their ancestors of 1789. Few areas have escaped impoverishment, social collapse, and civil war. Predicting whether these are the birth-pangs of a new, peaceful, and integrated Europe, or whether they herald a return visit from the four horsemen of the Apocalypse is happily not the brief of the editor or indeed of any of his contributors. Whatever may happen in the future, however, we hope and believe that whoever reads this volume will be in a better position to place events in their historical context and thus achieve a better understanding of their singularity and significance.