Origins of Europe's Crisis
SCHAPIRO, J. SALWYN
WRITERS and WRITING Origins of Europe's Crisis Europe Since Napoleon. Revieived by J. Salwyn Schapiro By David Thomson. Author, "The World in Crisis"Modern and Knopf. 909 pp. $9.75. Contemporary...
...The middle class was practically ruined by the inflation that followed the war...
...Social legislation was ameliorative, not curative, in purpose...
...Where it was strong, as in Britain and France, radical governments used "drastic forms of political power and control" to regulate the national economy...
...And the working class was plunged into deep misery by the Great Depression...
...War itself' is now the greatest danger to mankind...
...These are: the movement for neutrality among the Asiatic nations, as shown by the Bandung conference...
...In his preface, the author states that his book was devised chiefly for the use of university students in Britain and America...
...At times Thomson has to squeeze here and glide there in order to make his unitary pattern cohere...
...These upheavals far surpassed in extent and devastation the wars and revolutions of former times...
...On the whole, however, Thomson has achieved considerable success in presenting a synthesis of Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries...
...There also existed the unsolved problem of nationalism...
...It all ended in the Second World War that engulfed practically all mankind...
...But the advent of Germany and Italy as great powers destroyed the old balance of power...
...In Europe Since Napoleon, the British historian David Thomson reevaluates the 19th century in order to make sense of our own...
...In his opinion, the basic insecurity in the world has been removed neither by the United Nations nor by the regional agreements...
...The liberal chain of European being, fashioned in the 19th century, was broken, and has remained broken to this day...
...As the nations do not stand out, neither do the national heroes...
...Even in those that had established democracy the structure "of economic life was nowhere correlated with the structure of political life...
...Man, writes Thomson, "molded biologically by natural selection, dominated by the mysterious promptings of his unconscious, and stimulated into action by his social and material environment, seemed a puny, helpless creature, buffeted by an impersonal universe of unending change...
...The outcome of this unprecedented conflict created a world situation that no one at the beginning of the century could possibly have imagined...
...Any such intervention, however, would threaten the existence of these empires...
...Already in the 19th century Darwinism and Marxism had cast doubts on man's rational impulses...
...Then came two world wars and two social revolutions, Communism and Fascism, all within one generation...
...it was Europe itself...
...According to Thomson, a "peace of deadlock, exhaustion, and partition" may not be that of justice, but for a time at least it acts as a diversion from greater conflicts...
...That would mean world war...
...Mass poverty bred widespread discontent, as evidenced by frequent strikes, sometimes on a nation-wide scale, and by the rapid growth of socialism...
...they are "mentioned" as they appear on the scene...
...Not only the unsolved problems of 19th century Europe, but even those that had been solved, became the evil heritage of the 20th...
...Contemporary European History" and other books The problem that now faces an historian of modern Europe is to make the 20th century jibe with the 19th...
...But something does not come out of nothing...
...In this revolutionary period, not only government and society but also the nature of man underwent drastic re-examination...
...In his re-evaluation of the 19th century, which historically began in 1815 and ended in 1914, Thomson explains how Europe succeeded in solving, to a considerable degree, many serious problems confronting it...
...To become free these peoples would have to enlist the support of sympathetic great powers...
...In political matters, governments became more democratic with the advance from propertied to manhood suffrage...
...Democracy led to the abandonment of laissez faire in favor of state intervention in the interest of the workers, through factory laws and social insurance...
...The many conferences, consultations, and pacts "betrayed not confidence but feverish anxiety...
...and the partition of disputed areas between Communists and non-Communists, as in Korea and Indo-China...
...Conditions within the European nations likewise tended toward catastrophe...
...What conditions in the 19th century serve to explain this fearful aftermath...
...In the 20th century the anti-intellectualist philosophies of Berg-son, Sorel and Freud created a cult of the irrational that negated the liberal view of man as a rational creature...
...The limitless expansion of Europe was at an end, and the many activities associated with imperialism were halted...
...And within the latter "a recurrent and inescapable cleavage" arose between those who upheld the democratic national state, and those, like the Marxists and syndicalists, who favored revolutionary action...
...The First World War begat Communism, which begat Fascism, which begat the Second World War...
...By 1914, the sick man of Europe was no longer Turkey...
...What of the future...
...These outlets for dynamic activity of millions of Europeans were now closed...
...What followed was a revolt against the liberal state and the liberal economy...
...If anything the stimulus to social revolution is accentuated by the coming of peace, when the restoration of the old order appears neither desirable nor even possible...
...Especially is this true of modern war, the conduct of which demands "one clear, unifying social purpose in terms of which all planning could be designed...
...Nothing, writes Thomson, "gives more stimulus to social revolution than the revolution of war...
...Socialism ceased to be revolutionary, and adopted constitutional methods to achieve its goal...
...Otherwise history would be, in Shakespearian terms, a tale told by an idiot, all sound and fury signifying nothing...
...He does, however, see signs of peace in "strong crosscurrents" that have diverted the nations from a third world war...
...At the same time, free emigration to the New World was seriously curtailed by severe immigration laws...
...In economic matters, the Industrial Revolution advanced rapidly, affecting even the backward countries of Eastern Europe...
...The idea of progress became an article of faith...
...The events, the personalities, the ideals of the secure, fairly peaceful Europe of the 19th century seem unrelated to those of the catastrophic century that followed...
...Thomson's views may be described as being cautiously pessimistic...
...The growing hostility between these two great powers was bound to lead to the "phenomenon of a general European war for indefinite objectives...
...Europe Since Napoleon makes a notable contribution both to the study of the past and to the clarification of the present...
...This concerned chiefly the subject peoples of the Russian and Hapsburg empires, who were too weak to liberate themselves...
...Furthermore, consonant with this method, little emphasis is placed on the role of the great figures of the period...
...It is not easy to treat as an integrated unit such nations as Britain, Russia, Turkey and Spain...
...For another, it was partitioned by the Iron Curtain, and was now half - free, half - Communist...
...Thomson emphasizes certain ominous aspects of the period, the great importance of which were not then fully realized...
...According to the author, the pattern of liberalism was "increasingly broken and destroyed" by the rising discontent, for different reasons, among the various sections of the population...
...the policy of "peaceful coexistence" advocated by Soviet Russia after the death of Stalin...
...The new one, created by the Triple Alliance and Triple Entente, was maintained, unlike the old one, by "armed watchfulness and anxious rearmament...
...His scholarship is exact and solid, his judgments fair and judicious, his style fluent and readable...
...In international matters, the balance of power prevented the outbreak of a general war...
...Not only these but the general public will welcome a volume that explains so well and so interestingly how the Europe of today evolved from the Europe of yesterday...
...When Germany, already the greatest land power, challenged Britain's naval supremacy, it plainly implied that it was aiming at world dominion...
...This situation arose from the strained relations between Germany, the "new colossus in Europe," and Britain...
...Where democracy was weak, as in Italy and Germany, Fascism triumphed...
...As a result, the vision of peaceful progress turned into a nightmare...
...For one thing, Europe was eliminated as the center of world power...
...The problem of nationalism was solved by those peoples, the Germans and the Italians, who had the power to do so...
...Instead of writing a conventional history, dealing largely with each individual nation, Thomson deals with the impact of movements, forces, and tendencies that affected Europe as a whole, under such headings as the Age of Revolutions, Democracy and Socialism, Imperial Rivalries, and the Texture of European Culture...
...Nationalism achieved spectacular triumphs with the unification of Germany and of Italy, and with the independence of Belgium, Norway and the Balkan states...
...What Thomson calls a "turning point in the social history of Modern Europe" came after 1870, with the establishment of national systems of popular education...
Vol. 40 • August 1957 • No. 32
