Twentieth-Century Europe

A Brief History, 1900 to the Present

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118651384
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Twentieth-Century Europe: A Brief History presents readers with a concise and accessible survey of the most significant themes and political events that shaped European history in the 20th and 21st centuries.

• Features updates that include a new chapter that reviews major political and economic trends since 1989 and an extensively revised chapter that emphasizes the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since World War II
• Organized into brief chapters that are suitable for traditional courses or for classes in non-traditional courses that allow for additional material selected by the professor
• Includes the addition of a variety of supplemental materials such as chronological timelines, maps, and illustrations

Part 1

Overview: 1900–1919

THE TWO DECADES FROM THE DAWN of the twentieth century to the end of World War I formed the era during which European civilization peaked. It was also the period in which the very foundations of European civilization began to crack beneath the weight of inner contradictions and new challenges.

In 1900, Europeans could have said, somewhat paradoxically, that Europe was the world and the world was Europe’s. For the first time in history, a world civilization existed, and that civilization was European. By 1914, “Europeans” controlled 84 percent of the world’s land surface. Only Japan, which since 1871 had been pursuing a self-conscious policy of Westernization, was accepted as a “civilized” although non-Western nation.

The Europeans’ sense of superiority seemed to be confirmed by history. The Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution gave to the West a scientific and technological advantage over the non-Western world. By the end of the nineteenth century, the lion’s share of the world’s wealth flowed into the Western nations.

In Europe itself, the remnants of the old aristocracy still occupied thrones and, in some countries like Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, still possessed real or potential power. But the period from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the outbreak of World War I, the Great War, in 1914, was the golden age of the middle class, or bourgeoisie. They were the self-confident children of modernity, the Enlightenment tradition. Their ideology was classical liberalism, both political and economic. Their social status and, in some countries like Great Britain and France, political power derived from their growing wealth.

This Europe of Strauss waltzes and middle-class outings captured in impressionist paintings was being transformed just as it was reaching its fulfillment. Forces that had their origins in the nineteenth century were about to topple centuries-old dynasties and with them their archaic nobility. Likewise, the middle class, the real pillar of the existing order, was under serious attack. It was being challenged politically and economically by the emergence of a working class organized in increasingly powerful labor unions and political parties.

The Great War changed the course of European history. What began as a localized crisis resulting from the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire rapidly escalated into a world war. All participants felt they would be fighting a defensive war to save their homeland from an aggressor. All felt that the war, when it came, would be a brief one of motion, concluded in time for them to be home for Christmas. All were disappointed. The enthusiasm that greeted the outbreak of war in August 1914 soon changed to morbid resignation.

Since no one had expected the outbreak of the war in 1914, none of the participants were prepared. By 1916, as the war at the front turned into one of attrition in which each side tried to bleed the enemy to death, governments began to organize their home fronts. Governments assumed a broader and more direct role in their economies and in the private lives of their people—to a level unknown before the war. Scarce economic resources vital to the war effort were carefully rationed, as were consumer goods. Government-sponsored propaganda, together with censorship, was employed to mobilize “human resources” for more than just military service. Civil liberties often received only a polite wink, as the need to combat the spirit of defeatism grew.

The year 1917 was a momentous year. In February, the German High Command persuaded the Kaiser to authorize a resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. This move, intended to bring about the defeat of Great Britain, resulted in the United States coming into the war in April, thus assuring Germany’s eventual defeat. In March, revolution broke out in Russia, where the Russian soldiers had voted against the war, as Lenin said, with their feet when they deserted in large numbers. But the Provisional Government of well-meaning liberals failed to govern effectively. In November, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, thus setting the stage for one of the dominant themes in twentieth-century European history.

The appearance of fresh American troops in large numbers tipped the scales in favor of the Allies on the Western Front. Allied armies broke through the Siegfried Line in July 1918. The Central Powers began to collapse. Revolution broke out in Germany. On November 9, the Kaiser abdicated and went into exile in Holland. Two days later, on November 11, Germany signed an armistice. The “guns of August” were finally silenced. The task of peacemaking lay ahead.

Germany had signed the armistice expecting to participate in the peace conference. It was not invited to do so. The victors who gathered in Paris to draft a treaty that they felt would be a fitting conclusion to the war fought to end all wars were divided between new world idealists and old world realists. What came out of the peace conference was a “victors’ peace,” one that was to poison the future and make a second world war almost a certainty, if not a necessity.

1

Before the Deluge

Europe, 1900–1914

Chronology

1899–1902	Boer War
1901	Death of Queen Victoria
1904–1905	Russo-Japanese War
1905	Revolution in Russia
	Tsar Nicholas II issues the October Manifesto
1906	Algeciras Conference
	Great Britain launches HMS Dreadnought
1908	Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina
1914	Assassination of Franz Ferdinand

AT 6:30 P.M. ON JANUARY 22, 1901, Queen Victoria died at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. Although her son Edward, the Prince of Wales, was present, she died in the arms of her favorite grandson, Wilhelm II. The German Kaiser had rushed from Berlin to be at her side. Deeply moved that the Kaiser conducted himself with such stately dignity at the Queen’s funeral, the new king, his “Uncle Bertie,” made him a British field marshal.

Victoria (1819–1901) was more than the queen of an empire upon which the sun never set. Many throughout the world viewed her as the beloved sovereign, at least symbolically, of the civilized world. Even those peoples who were not regarded as “civilized” by Europeans revered her. Four hundred million people spread over 12 million square miles of land were her subjects. Leaders from around the world paid homage to her memory. Even in the United States, flags flew at half-mast and newspaper editorials eulogized the late queen and the age to which she gave her name.

There was something very reassuring about Queen Victoria’s funeral. Royalty and government leaders from all over Europe, including her grandson the Kaiser and his cousin Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, gathered to say farewell. To have been present, or even to view the film footage of the funeral, was to be caught up in the solemn splendor of such a gathering of the world’s political leadership. The observer might be pardoned for equating the pomp with power and concluding that the future was safe and secure. But such a feeling would have been only an illusion. The fabric of European civilization was already tearing at the seams and coming unraveled.

Europe and the World

Europeans before the Great War divided the world into “civilized” and “uncivilized peoples,” much as we today speak of “developed” and “developing” nations. To be considered among the civilized nations meant being “Westernized,” which in turn meant accepting the world view and lifestyle of Europeans. “Westernized” peoples included more than the residents of Europe itself but also those of such nations as the United States and Canada in North America and Australia and New Zealand in the South Pacific Ocean. The words “Western,” “European,” and “civilized” were often used interchangeably.

Despite the smug arrogance of the imperialists, to a certain degree, Europe’s sense of moral superiority was justified. Europe’s moral values, fundamentally religious in origin, were taken over and secularized by the eighteenth-century intellectuals. Emerging from the Enlightenment as inalienable human rights, these values were summarized by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson as the individual’s right to life, liberty, and property (or happiness), the foundation of classical liberalism. In practice, during the nineteenth century, the enjoyment of these purportedly inalienable rights was often qualified by considerations of property and gender.

Westernization offered more than a few benefits. Europeans were better housed, better fed, and better clothed than people anywhere else in the world. They lived longer and their infant mortality rate was lower than in the non-Western world. Nearly 100 percent of the population of northwestern Europe was literate, whereas in much of the non-Westernized world, the literacy rate was barely above 0. Europeans no longer lived in fear of unseen forces. Scientific knowledge had given them mastery over nature, showering upon them a cornucopia of material blessings. They also governed themselves, while virtually the entire non-Western world was subject to the more advanced Europeans.

By 1900, the “relics of barbarism,” such as slavery, infanticide, blood sports, and torture, were expunged from the European nations. Even women, who were still denied the vote and full equality with men in employment and education, possessed the same human rights as every other human being. And where human rights clashed with cultural or religious practice, human rights were deemed superior. European women were not subjected to such barbarous practices as genital mutilation or suttee, the burning of a Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. Nor were they condemned to a lifetime of illiteracy and unquestioned submission to the arbitrary will of father or husband. This message of universal and inalienable human rights went, if not always practiced, wherever the might of European imperialism was felt.

There were, of course, other civilizations in the world whose ancestry reached further back than Europe’s. China, India, Japan, and the Middle East all possessed the characteristics associated with being civilized, for example, literacy, cities, monumental architecture, a socioeconomic class structure, and systematic philosophical and religious thought. By the mid-1800s, however, all of the great non-European civilizations were but shadows of their past glory and vulnerable to an industrialized West in need of markets and resources to fuel its rapid development. Of the ancient non-European civilizations, only Japan survived the threat of the new imperialism from the West, and it did so only by rapid Westernization.

The humanitarian impulse was often used as a justification for imperialism. Although for some it was a sincere motivation, for many others, it served as an excuse for European domination and exploitation of the non-Western world. Christian missionaries brought Christianity to non-European nations, and they and other humanitarians built hospitals, orphanages, and schools for both boys and girls. Such people often saw the native peoples as childlike and backward, souls in need of “uplifting” from the darkness in which they seemed to exist and an introduction to the benefits of civilization, whether or not they wished such. This aspect of imperialism was romanticized by such ardent imperialists as the English writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), many of whose works are set in India and relate the interactions of British colonials and subject Indians.

Kipling preached the “glories” of imperialism in his widely popular fiction and poetry. The best known of Kipling’s proimperialist poems is The White Man’s Burden (1899, pp. 290–291), composed to commemorate the United States’ victory in the Spanish–American War (1898) and America’s annexation of the Philippine Islands. In it, Kipling urged the United States to join Britain in the pursuit of empire and the spread of Western civilization:

Take up the White man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

However much one wishes to extoll the benefits of European imperialism enjoyed by subject peoples, there was a dark side, as imperialism’s primary and most influential motivations always boiled down to economic exploitation and national prestige.

The rapid industrialization in the West increased the demand for raw materials, some of which, like petroleum and rubber, were necessary for the modernization of existing industries and the creation of new ones. As the standard of living slowly increased for the working classes, the demand for items from distant parts of the world such as coffee and tea increased. As mass production and distribution of products grew, so too did the need for reliable supplies of raw materials and new and expanding markets for finished goods. The seemingly insatiable need for new markets was in part due to the unequal distribution of wealth in the industrialized nations of the West. The concentration of wealth in fewer hands, combined with the inability of the working classes to purchase ever-increasing quantities of the goods they produced, pushed the investment of excess capital abroad.

The need to protect the profits of existing industries and protect those of emerging ones led the governments of turn-of-the-century industrialized nations to abandon free trade in favor of neomercantilism. The result was the creation of colonial empires that served as large, worldwide trading communities. Tariffs on imported goods, combined with restrictions on competition within the colonial empires, served to protect the luxurious lifestyle of the upper classes while providing limited improvements in the lifestyle of the working classes of the imperial powers. With the exception of the British Empire, however, the economic model fell short, as the cost of colonies often surpassed any economic benefit they provided for the mother country. More important, therefore, was what colonies meant in terms of national prestige and national rivalry among the great powers, themselves.

By the 1840s, steam-propelled ships equipped with the new screw propellers were revolutionizing both merchant and naval vessels. So-called tramp steamers were carrying goods from port to port around the world, often not returning to their home ports for a year or more. At first, the steam-powered ships were overshadowed by the fast-sailing and graceful clipper ships. But the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the very year that the most famous clipper ship, Cutty Sark, was launched, doomed the sailing vessels. As the colonial empires expanded, sea power became increasingly important. The growth of large navies, especially the naval race between Great Bri...