Europe’s Wars in the (Very Long) Twentieth Century, 1912-2022
In 2003, the US policy analyst Robert Kagan made an interesting claim: reflecting on mainland Europe’s reluctance to militarily support the US invasion of Iraq, he noted that Americans “are from Mars”, while Europeans “are from Venus”.
Historically minded observers pointed out at the time that there was a simple explanation for European attitudes to war: over the course of the twentieth century, Europe had been at the epicentre of two world wars that killed some 100 million people while all major European powers (except Germany and Italy) had been engaged in drawn-out and extremely violent wars of decolonization in the decades after 1945.
This lecture will offer an analysis of the myriad wars that were fought in Europe (and by European states in the colonial realm) over the course of the twentieth century, broadly defined. By moving beyond the traditional emphasis on Western European experiences it will become clearer that war had a near uninterrupted presence in Europe during this period, be it in the form of actual armed conflict or debates about how to prevent the actualization of violence. The lecture will also explore the deeper historical roots of present-day conflicts – from Ukraine to other continuous hotspots of conflicts (such as the Middle East) that had long been shaped by Western meddling.
Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin where he is also Director of the UCD Centre for War Studies. Among his numerous publications on political violence in twentieth-century Europe are The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (Penguin / FSG, 2016) and most recently (with Martin Conway), Civil Wars in 20th-Century Europe: Comparative Perspectives (a special issue of the Journal of Modern European History, 4/2022)
The event is part of the BMW Center for German and European Studies’ Annual Event Series on War and Peace