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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Barbarism and Civilisation: A History of Europe in Our Time

Best or worst?

After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century

Like Margaret MacMillan in Peacemakers and Zara Steiner in The Lights that Failed (and conspicuously unlike Keynes at the time), Wasserstein does not think the Versailles treaty was grossly unjust, but he sees the postwar settlement in central and eastern Europe as inherently unstable. On the one hand, the abstract national principle was applied in a way that created unviable (as well as undemocratic) statelets, on the other, none of them was homogenous, or could be short of mass expulsion and mass murder.

Whether democracy could have survived in Europe between the wars is an imponderable question; it didn’t, and brute force and unreason triumphed, most shockingly in Germany. There was an utter betrayal by the official and academic classes, and an open contempt for legal forms, typified by the 1935 edict that punishment should be imposed according not to due process but ‘to popular feeling’ (a principle borrowed more recently by New Labour).

With Hitler preaching the importance of ‘emotion, hatred’, the crescendo of violence increased. In the first world war the millions of dead were uniformed soldiers, but now Stalin was waging murderous war on his own people, while of the 365,000 dead in the Spanish civil war, 130,000 were executed, or just killed, behind the lines. This was a foretaste of the vaster coming war, in which the millions killed in action were easily outnumbered by the civilians who died, either incidentally to the conflict or wilfully exterminated. Even when the fighting stopped in 1945, Europe saw ethnic cleansing (as it would later be called) on a greater scale than ever known before. ‘Yesterday the “Jew”, today the “Swabians” [or Germans], tomorrow the “middle classes”,’ the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai said in his diary, as he contemplated ‘the demise of the morality of European life’.

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