DARK CONTINENT: Europe’s Twentieth Century
By Mark Mazower
Knopf, 487 pages, $30
With all the hoopla surrounding the last moments of this millennium and the beginning of the next, we might want to keep in mind yet another transition. The 20th Century is about to go, and frankly, not a minute too soon. Despite tremendous advances in science, technology and medicine, it has been, to paraphrase Auden, a low, dishonest hundred years. Wars in the 20th Century have killed more people than all other conflicts in all other centuries combined, the famines and purges caused by political fanatics dwarf all previous madnesses, and technological advances have allowed human beings to murder each other in new and innovative ways. Even listening to Tom Brokaw blubber about “the greatest generation,” we have to remind ourselves that such heroism only emerges when something pretty rotten is going on.
Bearing the responsibility for much of the catastrophe is a rather small peninsula jutting into the Atlantic from the Eurasian land mass. Europe is ending the 20th Century much as it began it, with large empires crumbling and a form of mass murder–genocide–in full flower. Whether we speak of Turkish massacre of Armenians (1915), Nazi slaughter of Jews and others, or ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, we are speaking of Europe and Europeans in the 20th Century. Willingness to confront this grisly history is what makes historian Mark Mazower’s fine and fascinating “Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century” so gripping. Mazower uses his considerable skills to look deep into the heart of European darkness, and he does not flinch from what he finds.
Mazower’s book is not a chronicle; he assumes, reasonably, that his readers know the basic details of war, peace and revolution. Rather, he traces certain well-chosen themes to interpret the political and social life of Europe. This tactic succeeds for the most part. Instead of following the well-traveled terrain of invasions and treaties, Mazower wanders over the ways that competing ideologies affected European lives. For example, he discusses what fascist versus communist totalitarianism meant for women. Communists tended to proclaim and occasionally even allow some degree of equality in work and society, while fascists and Nazis emphasized a domestic role, encouraging and even forcing women back into the home when necessary. During World War II, when Soviet women were digging trenches outside Moscow, German women were discouraged from industrial production. Women’s industrial work would undermine the very ideology that German soldiers were dying to sustain. It would also reveal just how desperate the wartime situation was for Germany.
Mazower’s approach enables him to use individual details to support or refute larger themes–for example, in the case of women and work, the belief that all totalitarianisms are, in the end, alike. There was a great difference between communists and Nazis, and this is one of Mazower’s central points, for the conflicts of the century were not simply between democracy and totalitarianism but also between different forms of totalitarianism. Mazower reintroduces Nazism as central to the 20th Century, not an aberration separate from the history of Europe itself. This is important, because Mazower also forces us to recognize the continuities between epochs and social forces — English democrats and Italian fascists sometimes adopted similar solutions for social or economic problems. After World War II, fascism might have disappeared, but formerly fascist officials continued to work, and some of their policies remained intact for years.
All of this detail supports the central theme of the book–that even in the 20th Century, democracy and Europe have been anything but synonymous. For Mazower, the 20th Century begins in 1918 with the end of World War I and the crumbling of empires in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. For the next 70 years, democratic, fascist and communist ideologies would compete ruthlessly for power over the hearts and bodies of European peoples. Mazower does not see the 1990s as the unquestionable triumph of an ancient democratic European tradition. Instead he notes, “Before the First World War there had been just three republics in Europe; by the end of 1918 there were thirteen.” In other words, democracy and Europe were anything but synonymous: “Though we may like to think democracy’s victory in the Cold War proves its deep roots in Europe’s soil, history tells us otherwise. Triumphant in 1918, it was virtually extinct twenty years on. . . . By the 1930s the signs were that most Europeans no longer wished to fight for it; there were dynamic non-democratic alternatives to meet the challenges of modernity.” As the century progressed, it was the authoritarians right and left who heralded the future.
Mazower’s emphasis on the struggles of democracy gains extra clarity in the light of communism’s demise. Raised in a world of two competing European blocs, many readers assume the titanic political battle of the century was fought between democratic and communist systems. Fascism, however, was not simply a prelude to the Cold War but was in fact a vital and highly attractive political ideology. Indeed, in the 1930s, with democracies failing and fears of communism rising, the future seemed to belong to the fascists, particularly the Nazis: “It was thus not preordained that democracy should win out over fascism and communism, just as it remains still to be seen what kind of democracy Europe is able and willing to build,” Mazower writes. The victory of democracy in Europe is no more inevitable today than it was in the 1930s.
Mazower’s account is sobering and absorbing. He is most successful in detailing the grim times of the 1930s, and the impact of World War II and competing ideologies on daily lives. This is understandable, since the author’s earlier work concentrates on Greece during the German occupation. His description of the drive toward “normalcy” so characteristic of the 1950s is quite convincing and explains well the generational revolt of the 1960s. He also demonstrates that European federalism, which now seeks to construct a common market and currency to compete with U.S. dominance, had its roots in American insistence on a common, federal approach in the post-war era.
Mazower is less successful the closer he comes to the present. His treatment of the ’70s and ’80s is impressionistic and feels incomplete, though his assault on Thatcherism should convince any thoughtful reader of the failure of that “conservative revolution.” The very fact that he is concentrating on Europe may account for the incompleteness of his discussion. Inflation, unemployment, stagnation, disillusionment with consensus politics and the welfare state, the rise of conservatism–these problems resonate deeply with an American audience. They remind us that by the 1970s, Europe and America were too closely intertwined for European history to remain purely European. And Mazower’s account at some places seems already dated–his mention of the successful Asian economies of the 1990s should surely be revised at this juncture.
Despite these minor problems, however, Mazower’s achievement is considerable. He shows us the diversity that is a hallmark of European life and cautions against Europeans’ trying to find “a single workable definition of themselves” even today; the troubles of this century, he notes, have often resulted from this “desperate desire.” His work forces us to ponder Europe as a whole and its tragic epochs as integral to its current life. He also sees European strength in its diversity. In an age of triumphalism, he notes the fragility of democracy in Europe and points out the troubling history of the 20th Century, the specter of the past in places like Kosovo today. Even his answer to the unwelcome memory of past European horrors in Bosnia today is sobering–it matters less to the world because Europe matters less. Europe may thrive in the 21st Century because it can no longer rule the world.
