J. Merriman – Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction. Europe Since 1914

Автор: J. Merriman
Название книги: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction. Europe Since 1914
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История Европы
Страницы: 3248
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

In 1914 most Europeans lived on the land; their families were larger and their life
spans shorter than those of early-twenty-first-century Europeans. Life expectancy
at birth was about fifty years for men, fifty-five for women. Approximately one in
ten babies born in 1914 died before reaching its first birthday. These are figures
associated with the Third World today. Over the course of the twentieth century,
massive changes took place that made Europe overwhelmingly urban. In most of
early-twenty-first-century Europe people live on average into their seventies for
men and eighties for women. Family size has never been smaller.
The variation between European countries in terms of life changes and family
size has diminished substantially. Partly because of the speed of technical change,
partly because of the spread of information, teenagers in Moscow and Manchester
dress alike; they listen to the same or similar music; they eat the same fast
food. Europe has become a commercial entity even more than a political one.
THE END OF IMPERIAL EUROPE
In 1914, about half of the European continent was ruled by emperors or by kings
with subject populations stretching around the globe. Germany was an empire;
so was Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Turkey. These emperors ruled over multinational
populations in or adjacent to Europe. Britain controlled a vast empire, as
did France, though theirs was a republican form of government with an empire
attached. Belgium held the Congo; Italy had Libya. Portugal had Angola and
Mozambique, and Spain part of Morocco. Europe was imperial through and
through.
Not so a century later. Every one of these empires disintegrated and virtually
all these imperial holdings and dependencies have struggled for and gained their
independence. One of the stories this encyclopedia tells is of the end of the
European imperial project.
Where Is Europe? If Europe is no longer imperial in character in 2006, than
what is it? Three questions may help open the way toward an answer. First, where
is Europe, and where are its boundaries? This is a vexing political question, on
which no consensus exists. There is in 2006 a European Union that spans
twenty-five nations from Ireland to the Baltic states, but it leaves out Russia,
the states that formerly made up Yugoslavia, and Turkey. So one answer is that
Europe is described by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, by the Mediterranean to
the south, and by the Arctic Ocean to the north. The eastern boundary is the
problem and is likely to remain so. Where Europe ends on its eastern border is an
issue that is likely to dominate European international affairs for the next century
or more.
What Is Europe? The second question asks about the nature of the political
association that emerged slowly from the Second World War on. One answer to
the question ‘‘What is Europe?’’ is that it is a loose federation of trading partners
joined in an evolving European Union, whose populations are represented in a
European Parliament, a Council of European states, and whose rights are
defended in a European Court of Justice and a separate European Court of
Human Rights.
Europe is a political project in the making. One way to visualize this enterprise
is to see it as a series of concentric circles. At the core of Europe was the new
Franco-German alliance, out of which the European Economic Community
emerged. These two key countries had been devastated by the Second World
War and were determined not to go back to the ugly years before and during the
1939–1945 conflict. Surrounding these two powers, central combatants in both
world wars, a second circle of states joined France and Germany in the creation of
a European union following the Treaty of Rome in 1958. Italy and the Benelux
countries were there from the start. They were joined by Ireland, Denmark and
Britain, then by Spain, Portugal, Austria, Sweden, and Finland. Norway voted to
stay out. After 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the European project
moved east to embrace Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, the
Baltic states, and Slovenia, and Cyprus. (Malta also joined the Union in 2004.)
By 2006, the European Union encompassed twenty-five states and a population
of approximately five hundred million people. Discussions on further
expansion continue, presenting the possibility of entry for other countries in
eastern and southeastern Europe, including Turkey.
What kind of union is this? With some exceptions, it is an area within which
there is a common currency, the euro, free movement of goods and capital, and
the free movement of labor. It is not a political federation, since there is no
generally recognized constitution. Attempts to write one have foundered on
popular objections. In 2005, the citizens of the Netherlands and France rejected
a draft constitution. In sum, Europe is a trading bloc with a commitment to
democratic forms of government and to the defense of human rights. The history
of the twentieth century is in part the story of how this came about.
Who Is a European? If we can venture some preliminary answers to the two
questions ‘‘Where is Europe?’’ and ‘‘What is Europe?,’’ we still have to face a
third, even thornier question: ‘‘Who is a European?’’ All people in the twentyfive
states in the European Union can use a European passport alongside their
national ones. But the definition of citizenship collides with the volatile and
unpredictable phenomenon of immigration. Europeans control entry into the
Union as a whole, but once an immigrant is admitted to one country, he or she
can move around the Union at will to find work and a place to live. There are exceptions: Britain still controls its own immigration, separate from that of its
European partners.
Underlying much of the controversy over immigration is the question of
religion. Many of those seeking to build a life in Europe come from Turkey,
North Africa, and the Middle East. Many, though not all, are Muslim. Given the
upsurge in Islamic radicalism, especially after the attacks in the United States on
11 September 2001, the position of Muslims within Europe has been questioned
time and again. Few will come out and say that Europe is a Christian project; the
Holocaust shames into silence most people who believe this. But there is a
reluctance to accept Turkey with its large Muslim population into Europe, even
though Turkey was one of the first member states joining the Council of Europe
in 1949.
Are Russians Europeans? Here too the question is yes and no. It is hard to
imagine Europe without St. Petersburg. Who could describe European literature
without Boris Pasternak or Alexander Solzhenitzyn, European music without
Igor Stravinsky, European art without Wassily Kandinsky and Marc Chagall?
Thus, outside of the sphere of international politics and international economic
affairs, there is a Europe of the mind, of the spirit, that extends all the way to
Vladivostok. In sum, Europe is at one and the same time a political project and a
cultural idea. This encyclopedia sets out the basic information any informed
person needs to have to understand both.
THE SHAPE OF EUROPEAN HISTORY SINCE 1914
It is tempting to divide twentieth-century European history into four parts:
1. The thirty years’ war: 1914–1945
2. The thirty years’ peace: 1945–1973
3. The end of the division of Europe: 1974–1991
4. The birth of the new Europe since 1992
Like any scheme, this one obscures critical dates in the middle of these
periods—for instance, the onset of the world economic depression in 1929 or
the period of revolt in 1968. But this rough four-part sketch does help us to see
the way political and economic history has unfolded over the twentieth century.
The two world wars were a coherent and catastrophic phase of European history.
So too was the thirty-year period of rebuilding that took place in both Eastern
and Western Europe. The Middle East war of 1973 and the oil crisis it left in its
wake mark a period of economic instability and mass unemployment. These
economic trends had profound implications for the Soviet bloc, which never
competed successfully with the West, and which entered into discussions on
European security in 1974 with the subject of human rights on the agenda. No
one foresaw the speed and completeness of the collapse of the Soviet empire
between 1989 and 1991, but its economic roots are now well known.
The end of the Cold War ushered in a new period in European history, in
part symbolized by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which established a single
European currency and in principle, a unified European economy. Achieving this
goal is a daunting objective, but it does lay out some of the elements of the
Europe that emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century. There are
three elements in this package. The first principle is that being a member of Europe is a support for both domestic democratic institutions and domestic
economic life. The second is that Europe is a project consistent with the sovereignty
of individual states. The French are no less French because they are
Europeans—they like to thumb their noses at European bureaucrats who know
better than they do what is in their interests. And third, Europe is not just a
project designed to promote a federation of democratic states and to facilitate the
common economic development of the continent. It is also a project to make
human rights the bedrock of civil society. To this end, countries that join Europe
have to accept that the judgment of European courts is superior to the judgment
of domestic courts. Where the two conflict, Europe wins. This is revolutionary
and presents many possibilities for the future, similar to the experience of the
emergent U. S. Supreme Court colliding with state courts in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. In the early twenty-first century Europe has two
supreme courts—one for human rights law, and one for the rest, and both
represent an achievement, a kind of unity, which was inconceivable in 1914.
The judicial construction of Europe is a precarious achievement. It is not at
all clear how this political and economic entity will develop in the coming
decades. But on one point we can reach agreement. A united or federated Europe
in the twenty-first century is here to stay; there is no going back to the ideological
or political divides of the twentieth century. Something new is in existence,
the emergence of which is described in many parts of this encyclopedia.
In the course of the twentieth century, there was a shift in the focus of social
movements. The Great War was fought to defend national boundaries and
national honor. In the midst of it, a vast social revolution seized the initiative
in Russia and gave birth to the Soviet Union. Other activists sought social justice
in different ways, but by and large social movements focused on the transformative
power of social class or nation: they were the vanguard of the future.
By the third quarter of the twentieth century, those ideas while still alive no
longer had the same motivating, at times inspiring, force. Instead, after 1968,
social movements dwelt less on nation and class than on human rights and civil
society. Green movements emerged; so did movements for gay rights and for the
rights of the homeless and the stateless. Young people were at the core of these
causes, but they were not alone. The campaign for nuclear disarmament, which
played a small, though not insignificant role, in de´tente, helped move public
discourse away from what divided Europeans to what united them, which was
overwhelmingly and primarily a hatred of war. Europeans know war in ways that
most Americans do not, and out of that distinction comes much friction and
misunderstanding of the one by the others.
CULTURAL HISTORY
One of the contrasts of Europe since 1914 with Europe 1789 to 1914 is in the space
given to cultural history. There is more on this subject in the twentieth-century
volumes than in the previous set. In part this is a function of the sources
historians need to write their books. Political history requires archives, and many
of these are either unavailable or, in 2006, are still governed by a thirty-year rule
of confidentiality. Very contemporary history is very hard to write, since the
sources are still in personal and private hands. In contrast, nineteenth-century
political history is enriched enormously by vast archives out of which stories can
be told with authority. To do the same for 1989, for example, will take decades In part the efflorescence of cultural practices in the twentieth century helps
account for the shift in balance in the two encyclopedias we have jointly edited.
The cinema, television, radio, the audio and video cassette, the Internet, have all
created images on a scale which has multiplied the sources historians use to write
their narratives of the past. Many of these media are constituent elements of our
daily lives and thus are subjects of historical study themselves. And none of this
leads to straightforward historical conclusions, just many more questions. Take
film, for example. In some ways cinema describes the world in forms with which
we can identify. But in other respects, film constructs the world we live in by
giving us images—about race, gender, marriage, crime, to cite just a few—
through which we understand where we are and who we are. And in other ways
still, cinema totally distorts the world, cleans it up, for instance, makes war and
violence thinkable, imaginable, do-able. The centrality of film for and in twentieth-
century history clearly describes one facet of the past century that distinguishes
it from earlier periods. But at the same time, it is the sheer volume of
images—many of which are reproduced in this encyclopedia—that defines the
twentieth century as a visual and visualized universe.
In the search for the cultural history of the twentieth century, we have sought
the assistance of authors on both sides of the Atlantic. This is essential, since
European history is now entirely transnational. Local and national histories
continue to be written, but scholars are more sensitive than ever before of the
ways in which Europe is a field of mass immigration and travel across national
frontiers as well as within them. In 1914, many English and French town
dwellers had never seen the sea. Now, nearly a century later, finding someone
that landlocked would be difficult, though not impossible. In 1914 a person
would have been considered mad for predicting that Indian cuisine would
become a staple of the English diet, or that Chinese restaurants would dot every
major European city, yet in 2006, both of these things are true.
Globalization is part of the reason why this is so, but it is unwise to claim
that term for the turn of the twenty-first century alone. In 1914, there was the
same volume of heavy capital flows, movements of goods and services, and
transcontinental migration as in 2006. What the early twenty-first century has
is speed, dizzying speed, but the processes are the same. In some ways, this
encyclopedia describes Europe as having been at the core of two separate phases
of globalization, divided by the convulsive violence of the two world wars.
European culture is now globalized too, as anyone wandering around the music
scene in Berlin, Paris, or London can attest.
DISRUPTION, UPHEAVAL, DISCONTINUITY
The nineteenth-century world was reconfigured by economic and social upheavals
grouped under the umbrella term industrialization. In the twentieth century
these changes accelerated, with new modes of mass production leading from the
assembly line to robotics. Computer technology makes possible an extraordinary
increase in productivity, to the extent that the service sector—what we now call
the information superhighway and those who use it—has overwhelmed the manufacturing
sector. In the twentieth century, there was thus a three-fold movement
in the organization of work and in the location of the communities
surrounding it. First came the move from the country and rural towns to cities;
then came the shift from manufacture to the service sector; then came the appearance of postindustrial society, a place where old factories and storehouses
turn into boutiques, museums, and Internet cafes.
Postindustrial Europe We must not forget that the move away from industrial
production destroyed great urban centers and made unemployed and at
times unemployable large sections of the population. In their place arrived
millions of Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans who performed low-pay and
low-skill jobs previously dominated by indigenous Europeans. In the late nineteenth
century, the direction of migration was from east to west, across Europe
and the Atlantic. In the twentieth century, the move was from south to north,
which transformed the cultural and culinary life of Europe as well as changing the
racial and ethnic composition of every European country.
Much of this movement was a result of a search for a way out of poverty, a
search for a better life in Paris, Berlin, or London, as well as in many smaller
towns. But at least as important in this migratory wave was the sheer number of
people—certainly in the tens of millions—who moved out of terror, to escape
persecution and war. Some were asylum seekers from outside Europe; others
were Europeans persecuted by their own states, like Nazi Germany, or by
successor states, like Serbia. Still others were expelled from homes in which they
had lived for a millennium—Armenians from Anatolia, Greeks from Turkey,
Turks from Greece, ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, and Jews from all
parts of Continental Europe. The end of the two world wars brought staggering
levels of social dislocation, as ethnic populations were sent packing from contested
regions or left of their own volition.
And they were the lucky ones. One million Armenians died in the genocide
perpetrated by the Turkish state from 1915 on. Here killing was individual, faceto-
face murder, or the expulsion of an entire people into the Mesopotamian
desert where they died from hunger, thirst, exposure to the elements, or at the
hands of marauding bands of Kurds and Turks. The only crime committed by
their victims was to be Armenian. Twenty-five years later, those Jews who were
trapped in wartime Europe or who chose to stay were the target of the most
staggering plan of industrial murder in history. Genocide succeeded in uprooting
an entire world of Jewish life in Poland and the former Soviet Union. The
Yiddish language lost its roots; six million people—including one million children—
were exterminated. The Nazis found the reptilian heart of man, the
English writer Martin Amis wrote, and built an Autobahn to get there. For many
people, the application of industrial production to mass murder was a rupture in
European history from which the very idea of Europe—or of humanity—could
not and did not recover. For others it was the moment when the idea of Europe
was redefined as a project based upon a commitment to universal human rights.
This was the principle announced by the French jurist Rene´ Cassin on the steps
of the Palais de Chaillot on 10 December 1948 to the United Nations assembled
in Paris. What he declaimed was a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A
year later it was translated into a European Convention on Human Rights, with a
court in Strasbourg to enforce it. Any nation wishing to adhere to the European
Union must accept this document as an integral part of its own legal system.
The Cold War and the Nuclear Threat At the same time as the human
rights project was formally launched as a foundational text of postwar Europe, the Cold War presented its diametrical opposite. In 1948 the democratic state of
Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Communist Party. In the same year, the
Soviet Union cut off supplies from the western zones of Germany occupied by
France, Britain, and the United States, and Berlin, divided into four zones itself,
but situated within Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. The U.S. airlift kept
Berlin alive. A year later the Soviet Union announced that it possessed nuclear
weapons and the Communist Party finally won its bloody thirty-year civil war for
control of China. In 1950, the United Nations, after a Soviet walk-out from the
Security Council, voted to send troops on a ‘‘police action’’ to Korea. Armed
conflict with China loomed. The Cold War was on.
What made this episode in international history so important for Europe was
that in short order, hundreds, then thousands of nuclear weapons were pointed
not only at the USSR and the United States, but also at the heart of Europe. In
the event of war, Europe would be completely destroyed. ‘‘They made a desert
and called it peace,’’ wrote the Roman historian Tacitus two thousand years ago.
By the 1950s, the image of a nuclear desert spanning the entire European
continent was no longer just a nightmare, but a real possibility, played out in
war games by military planners all over the world.
The retreat from the edge of the precipice of total destruction is one of the
dominant themes of the history of the second half of the twentieth century. It
entailed complex diplomacy on the part of both European and extra-European
powers. The most important of these were the Kennedy-Khrushchev exchanges
of October 1962, which defused the explosive situation arising from the placement
of Soviet missiles in Cuba. But for decades afterwards, millions of ordinary
people remembered how near Europe was to nuclear catastrophe and joined mass
movements to head it off. The economic costs of the nuclear arms race were
staggering, and for the Soviet Union, crippling. It took the courage of the last
major Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to break the deadlock and thereby
end the Cold War. The end of communism in Central and Eastern Europe,
the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia
followed.
By the 1990s Europe was no longer faced with the insane possibility of
mutually assured destruction. In its place came other worries—the emergence of
radical Islam, the threat of biological and chemical warfare, waged not by nations
but by groups of men and women from the Middle East and elsewhere determined
to make Europeans see that what their governments do causes suffering in
other parts of the world. Terrorism, a portmanteau for whatever anyone dislikes,
became a reality in Russia, in Spain, in France, and in Britain.
Nearly a century after the outbreak of the 1914–1918 war, which ended four
empires, took millions of lives, and unleashed some of the demons of the
twentieth century, the institutions of war are with us still and have degenerated
further. Europe is part of a world in which state-sponsored torture is commonplace.
Whatever cruelties those who fought the Great War practiced, torture of
prisoners was not one of them. The European Convention on Human Rights is a
protection for some, but not everywhere and not for all. Europe in the early
twenty-first century is a continent marked by both light and darkness. No one
should see this encyclopedia, therefore, as a cavalcade of European progress. To
be sure, Europeans today are taller, heavier, eat better, work shorter hours, and live longer than their antecedents one hundred years ago. But the same problems
of inequality, of injustice, of the powers of the state, of violence of every kind,
persist. In the year 2006, just as a century before, a Europe defined by peace and
freedom is an idea in the making. No one can be sure of the outcome of these
vast processes, but even to begin to understand them, historical knowledge is
essential. This encyclopedia is a tool to help people imagine their own future by a
thoughtful and informed reflection on the past century of European history.
Without this tool (among many others) which open a window on European
scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, there is only prejudice and
darkness