The Great Civil War

European Politics, 1914-1945 PAUL PRESTON

The long peace from Bismarck’s triumphs to the outbreak of war in 1914 was a period of optimistic belief in progress, economic and technological. This confidence was sustained by the growing prosperity of capitalist economies and the self-adjusting mechanisms of the balance of power. However, the disproportionate growth of one of those economies would soon throw the balance of power out of kilter. This was not just because the burgeoning economic and military strength of Germany was to become increasingly difficult to contain. Rather it was a consequence of the fact that Germany’s ruling classes chose to cope with the domestic problems arising from industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of a powerful socialist movement by a process of what has come to be known as ‘negative integration’. This essentially meant that rather than adjust to domestic challenges, the German ruling classes chose to submerge, or indeed export, them by uniting the nation against the spectre of foreign enemies. To a lesser extent, other states also tried to sidestep their domestic problems by similar means. With stark differences of emphasis and with dramatically different consequences in each case, a recognizably similar story can be told for Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy, France, and Britain.

The collective consequence was that, between 1914 and 1945, the energies of Europe were to be consumed in a long intermittent

War whose economic and human costs would see world preeminence pass from the great European empires to the United States and the Soviet Union. The internal pressures of industrialization-internal migration, urbanization, the emergence of a new working class, and its creation in self-defence of societies, unions, and political parties-constituted a challenge to the existing order. Addressed flexibly, this challenge might have been resolved to the benefit of European society. In fact, only in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, France, and Britain, and then only partially, did this happen. Elsewhere, in the most restless of the advanced industrial states —Germany—and in several of the more prominent developing ones—Russia, Italy, Spain—the response was repression and a consequent intensification of class confrontation. In addition, there was an equally potent challenge to the established order arising from nationalism—both the small-scale nationalisms threatening to break up the balance of power in eastern Europe and the large-scale nationalist ambitions of Russia, Italy, and above all Germany.

In the midst of this cauldron of instability, there were, in the broadest terms, two sorts of state: those which were sufficiently flexible, open to popular pressure, more or less democratic, and with the safety-valve of colonial empires, such as Britain and France; and those with rigid, authoritarian (if apparently democratic) systems uneasily presiding over highly unstable societies, such as Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Russia, and Spain. To a large extent, the fate of Europe hinged, between 1914 and 1945, as indeed it does now, on the comportment of the state with the largest and most dynamic economy—Germany.